Photo Credit: Eugene Gologursky / Getty Images
Mariah Carey is being blasted for her flubbed NYE performance, but her team is adamant that it was not her fault. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mariah’s manager Stella Bulochnikov is speaking out about how it all happened – as she was right by Mariah’s side the whole time.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So first, let’s talk about the rehearsal. There are anonymous production sources quoted as saying Carey skipped it?
Stella Bulochnikov: Not true. Not only did she not ditch rehearsal, we got to Times Square at 2:30. They weren’t ready for her until 3:20. We waited around for their stage manager. We had the stage from 3:20 to 3:50. She had a dance stand-in for the musical number. She sat on the side of the stage with her ear-pack and her in-ears and her microphone to make sure she could do the sound check. The most important thing to her was the sound. The sound was coming in choppy. She was assured it would work by the evening.
She did an interview with Ryan Seacrest at about 10:35 where her in-ear was very choppy. She could barely hear Ryan. She was struggling to hear him through the noise of Times Square.
We then went to [producer] Mark Shimmel’s assigned talent executive to Mariah. And I said, “Her in-ears do not work, it’s choppy, we need new ears for the performance.” She said, “Those are not the ears she’ll be working with for the performance. The ears she will be working with are in the trailer.” We went to the trailer at 10:45. She did touch-ups because she’s supposed to go on at 11:38. We put in the ears and did the mic pack. We walked to the holding tent about 11:20. We told both stage managers — remember this is not our production team, we’re out-sourcing our team which we never do — we told them the mic pack is not working. She can’t hear it, it’s faint. They brought her a new one, and that one didn’t work either, the mic pack was dead. They changed the battery pack. She said she still couldn’t hear. The second stage manager said, “It doesn’t work here in the tent, it will work on the stage.” She said, “Great, let’s go to the stage.”
It’s now four minutes to showtime. She says, “I hear nothing in my ears, my ears are dead.” The other stage manager says, “It will work right when we go live.” Then things start to get chaotic. They start counting her down — four minutes, three minutes. Mariah: “I can’t hear.” Them: “You’re gonna hear when it goes live — two minutes!”
So, right when it goes live, she can’t hear anything. The ears are dead. They’re dead. So she pulls them out of the ear because if the artist keeps them in their ears then all she hears is silence. Once she pulled them off her ear she was hoping to hear her music, but because of the circumstances — there’s noise from Times Square and the music is reverberating from the buildings — all she hears is chaos. She can’t hear her music. It’s a madhouse. At the point, there’s no way to recover.
On the third song when she could hear her track playing it was so bad she said, “F— it, I’ve had enough.”
Read the full interview here, where she also discusse how Mariah is dealing with it and more.
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