PARICHAD — Stories from a Life in Music
The Night Parichad Discovered Another Use for a Microphone
Long before Sessions on the Green®, Parichad spent several years singing with an all-girl band in Thailand. It was a very different world from the mythology that sometimes surrounds bands on the road. These were fairly traditional young Thai girls, working, performing and trying to entertain an audience — not auditioning for a Thai remake of The Rolling Stones Story.
One day their manager arrived with something rather special: a new microphone.
It had cost around 20,000 baht, a considerable amount of money in Thailand more than twenty years ago, and Parichad still remembers the first time she sang through it. Until then, the band had been using inexpensive microphones. Suddenly she could hear her own voice properly.
The difference, she remembers, was extraordinary.
Unfortunately, at a festival in Nakhon Pathom, the microphone was shortly to demonstrate another of its qualities.
One of the younger girls was performing alone when a man climbed onto the stage and began grabbing at her. He wasn't simply an overenthusiastic admirer. He frightened her. By the time she got backstage she was visibly shaken.
Parichad saw what had happened.
“Don't worry,” she told her.
Then she picked up the new 20,000-baht microphone and went out for her own performance.
Sure enough, the man climbed onto the stage again.
He approached Parichad and attempted the same thing.
This proved to be a miscalculation.
Parichad was older than the other singer, rather more worldly, and considerably less inclined to tolerate him. As he came within reach, she swung the microphone and hit him over the head with it.
There was one technical detail nobody had anticipated.
The microphone was still live.
The impact went straight through the sound system.
THUMP.
Parichad remembers the resulting noise exploding through the festival speakers. Twenty thousand baht, it turned out, bought not only excellent vocal reproduction but remarkably effective amplification of a microphone connecting with a man's skull.
The gentleman's enthusiasm for joining the performers onstage diminished immediately.
There was another complication. He wasn't an anonymous nuisance. He was apparently well known locally and, according to Parichad, was the son of an important local police officer. He had the confidence of somebody accustomed to believing that ordinary rules might not apply to him.
They did that evening.
The story spread. Instead of Parichad being condemned for what she'd done, the man found himself publicly mocked and embarrassed for his behaviour. Parichad, meanwhile, acquired something approaching folk-hero status among people who knew what had happened.
And the band's manager?
He had just watched his expensive new microphone — a microphone costing an extraordinary amount of money for the time — being used as percussion equipment against somebody's head.
He wasn't angry.
Apparently, he thought the circumstances justified the unusual treatment of company property.
The microphone survived.
So did the man.
And, according to Parichad, he never bothered the girls again.
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