Dave Lamb describes himself as “a front of house sound engineer and sometimes a tour manager and monitors guy - possibly the laziest ‘Carling’ sound engineer ever...”
His CV, however, obliterates the ‘lazy’ theory, scanning like a who’s who of venue-filling artists from the past three decades, and indicating someone whose services are more in demand than ever. In the past few months alone he has worked his sonic magic for Circa Waves, You Me At Six, Magic Gang, Peter, Bjorn and John, Josh Rouse and Maximo Park. However, he claims sound engineering was initially just another way of funding his exploits as a musician.
“I used to be a chef to earn money to be in bands, it’s exactly the same thing.” Dave told us.
“I played in bands for a few years, mostly s***, but I met a lot of good songwriters and eventually found my feet dropped in the deep end of being someone’s sound engineer.”
The deep-end in question was his first live assignment, in 1990 at the Borderline club in the heart of London’s West End:
“I don’t remember the artist, I worked there depping for a friend Mike Crossley who was the house engineer, I’m still grateful.”
There followed a stint recording a comic opera, Paul Sands' ‘Mad and her Dad’, for the Liverpool Playhouse, two years as house engineer for Ezee Studios in London and from 1990 to 2002 he was a house engineer for London venues the Astoria, the Hackney Ocean and the scene of his first gig, the Bordeline, mixing for Bingo Hand Job (REM’s moniker for smaller venue gigs), Black Francis and Crowded House amongst others.