RADIOHEAD

The date: April 23 2008. The place: Bray Studios, near Windsor, Berkshire, UK. TPi has been invited to spend the day at production rehearsals for Radiohead’s 2008 Tour.

    Outside, the rare, sunny day gives us a glimpse of the UK’s (very) brief May heatwave to come. Inside, the world of concert production is quietly being revolutionised, as I privately sample several songs from Radiohead’s provisional tour set list.

    It’s a rather odd experience, particularly as the other-worldly sounds I hear through the PA don’t appear to come from the instruments I see them playing. Guitars sound like wild geese; keyboards yield signals that might have scared the living daylights out of even Alfred Hitchcock.

    And yet, this ‘anti-pop’ is all too beautiful. Over the canvas of pristine mayhem, frontman Thom Yorke’s vocals migrate from an angelic, whispered wobble to a deafening, manic, angst-driven opera. He sings like he thinks like he is. No cheery singalong, this.

    An abundance of innovation, matched by a total absence of complacency, has always run through their music and this hit a peak with In Rainbows, the album that shook the foundations of the already crumbling record industry when, last October, more than two months before it arrived as a CD in record stores, the band decided to make it available online for whatever price the customer wanted to pay.

    As Yorke explained at the time: “Every record for the last four has been leaked. So the idea was like, we'll leak it, then. It probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say ‘fuck you’ to this decaying business model.”

    With the current tour, Yorke, his band mates, and their loyal crew are paying similar attention to the live industry’s impact on global warming.

    “Cup of tea?”... on cue, production manager Richard Young snaps me back to reality with an invitation into catering, manned for this tour by a very ‘on form’ Popcorn.

    Preserving the planet is the subject for today’s sermon. One might argue that Radiohead have really put their heads on the block this time by tearing up the touring rule book and starting again with a new set of eco-sensitive approaches. Those who have kept tabs on their progression as a band, however, will not be too surprised by the strength of their conviction.

    Like so many Radiohead activities, this initiative began with Yorke who has had a long involvement with Friends of the Earth (FoE), whose campaign, The Big Ask, seeks to reduce, rather than offset, carbon emissions. The campaign calls on 17 countries and the European Union to sign on to legally binding, yearly greenhouse-gas emissions targets. More specifically, FoE is asking the E.U. to adopt a target of at least 30% reductions by 2020 and 90% by 2050.

    To see how they could play a part in this, Radiohead commissioned a report in 2006 from Oxford-based ecological footprint analysis experts Best Foot Forward, which aimed to quantify the carbon footprint of touring, using data such as how many trucks the band might normally use; how many miles are travelled, how much equipment is transported, and what the audience do to get to each gig.

    According to Young, it demonstrated that trucks moving around Europe or America didn’t have anywhere near as much of an environmental impact as the movement of audiences to venues — especially sites outside of city centres where public transport services are not so reliable. In fact, according to Best Foot Forward’s project consultant, the research found that audience travel and consumption made up 86% of Radiohead’s 2006 US theatre tour footprint and 97% on their 2003 US amphitheatre tour.

    Said Young: “Since this report, the band have given a lot of information to their fans, promoters and ticket websites, advising on things like ride-sharing. For this tour, the shows have all been booked, where possible, in city centre locations, so for the most part the audiences can travel by train, bus or on foot. That’s one of the reasons the band are returning in June to Victoria Park [they played there in 2000] which has great transport links.

    “Obviously, we can’t expect to change everybody’s attitudes, because this all takes an enormous amount effort. But certainly the majority of the true fans will ‘get it’ — they expect new, challenging things from Radiohead and I think they’ll be very receptive and supportive of what we’re trying to do.

    “If we can set up systems that the band and their fans are driving, we hope that the venues and promoters will realise that it wasn’t too difficult for Radiohead, and will then go on to develop it further themselves.

    “We’re not perfect — we’re in the business of earning money by providing high quality rock gigs for ticket buyers. If we were forced to be 100% carbon neutral, we’d all stay at home and maybe do a webcast [as they did last New Year’s Eve]. A Radiohead tour has to make money, just like any other, and we all want to work in a certain amount of comfort. Once the band have motivated the fans to do their bit, it’s time for them and the crew to question what we’re doing with the production and how we can make a difference ourselves.”

    Much of what is being achieved on this tour is based on good, old-fashioned common sense. For example, regular lighting will always consume a significant amount of power, and if one doesn’t use truck space optimally, each vehicle will waste fuel.

    “Although our report suggested that trucking wasn’t as responsible for our carbon footprint as other areas, we can still trim its impact,” commented Young. “Loading a truck too tightly and heavily, or too lightly, will prove uneconomical, so we’re careful to strike a good balance.”

MARINE BOYS
Arguably the most significant move of all, encouraged by the Best Foot Forward report, was to adopt a ‘minimum air freight’ policy, said Young.

    “We looked at all the costs and implications, and decided that sea freight was the best way forward. We could have gone to the extreme and not shipped anything, and just rented in each territory, but that wouldn’t work with this band. Thom, for instance, likes to use his vintage Fender Twin amp, and there’s no guarantee he’d get something in precisely the same condition anywhere else.”

    The ‘safer’ standard elements, like PA, consoles, motors, truss and microphones, are being rented locally, but elsewhere, the answer was to source the nearest possible duplicate set of everything — backline and lights — to send in a container via sea freight to America, and then on to Japan.

    Young: “All the equipment we’re using in rehearsal will remain in the UK for our shows here. With the sea route, it’s important to make allowances for any possible delays — and believe me, delays are very likely!

    “Air freight is very much based on call and response, whereas with the sea option, your freight is just added to a list of things they need to deal with, which means it could be days before it leaves the country. Then there’s the journey itself. On average, it takes 12 days to reach New York from the UK and you also need to factor in a couple of days for customs clearance.”

    The crew weren’t taking any chances. The container was sent early enough for it to arrive in Miami on April 21.

    Young continued: “Some might argue that, other than the vintage equipment, we’re adding to our carbon footprint by manufacturing certain elements of our duplicate kit, but what they fail to appreciate is that all of this kit will be reused, time and time again.

    “On balance, I think we’re being a lot more responsible. We estimate that we’ve cut our normal air freight package of 20 tonnes down to a mere one tonne, and that’s made up of the 12 vintage guitars that the band will not go on stage without.

    “Andy Lovell at Sound Moves is our regular freight agent, and I think the whole sea freight operation for this tour has proved to be as much of a learning curve for him as it has for us, because air freight has been the tour standard for so long!

    “Hopefully, by successfully taking the risks that we have, and making sea freight a credible alternative, it could lead to good working relationships with shipping companies like Maersk, who may see fit to prioritise our needs and reduce delays.”

MORE EFFECT, LESS POWER
As anyone who has ever seen a Radiohead show will know, the band has never knowingly compromised on delivering a stunning production. However, gone are the days of unnecessarily polluting the atmosphere, merely for effect.

    When bands play outdoor green field sites, they need temporary power from generators to deliver the maximum amount of power they require at any one moment. Invariably, that moment normally occurs towards the end of a headlining appearance when the LD cues every available light in his rig for that ‘mega rock look’.

    To have all of this power available all day long for what amounts to little more than a minute of gratification. And so Young came up with an idea...

    “The problem with diesel generators is that regardless of whether you’re pulling 100% or 10% of the available power, you’re still pumping emissions. I asked [lighting, video & set designer] Andi Watson if we could run our show without dimmers because they tend to place the most demand on generators. Removing dimmers would mean that we’d be pulling a constant power supply and therefore we’d be able to scale our generator requirement appropriately.

    “Once Andi understood the importance of what we were trying to achieve, he suggested we completely base the lighting plot around LED sources. Although they don’t pull any power when they’re not on, the power that they draw when they are on is much, much less.

    “In 2003, our rider stated that our lighting power requirement was 600 Amps per phase. By going LED, our maximum draw for each show on this tour, with everything on, including video and motors [but not including audio], is 140 Amps per phase. This means we’ve cut our total lighting power consumption by two-thirds.”

    In spite of their planet-preserving attributes, LED lights are not to everyone’s taste. Some criticise them for a lack of brightness and colour definition, and will always prefer a molefay. Invariably, those people tend to be LDs of thrash metal bands who wouldn’t know subtlety if it punched them in the face.

    Young jumps to the defence of Watson’s choice. “I think that Andi’s incredible lighting design proves that you can harness new technology without compromising on the art, and he’s really set a fantastic example. Interestingly, we have no moving lights, which I suppose is rare these days, but Andi’s shown that they’re by no means compulsory.
    “We’re doing a lot of outdoor shows with early noise curfews, so we’ll start in daylight. As every LD will tell you, competing with the sun is futile, but with the LED sources designed in the format we have, the audience does have something engaging — and colourful — to look at.”

    Neg Earth Lights is the tour’s overall lighting contractor (Upstaging in North America), and Watson’s design has been enabled in a major way by Catalyst and PixelMAD products, and especially Richard Bleasdale who has written new versions of the software that interface brilliantly with the three-dimensional aspects of the production design’s unmissable core theme: the forest of hanging LED tubes.

    “After looking around, the Element Labs VersaTubes lent themselves very well to this format as they were were physically the lightest and most robust option available,” said Young.

    The hanging VersaTubes — 543 in total, across each touring system — are rigged vertically in 9m rods, 1.2m apart. They are static during the show, but take three hours to install during the load-in. “We needed to come up with a system to deploy the tubes into the show position quickly and efficiently. After exploring a few options, a tab track was suggested, and we arrived at the final design.”

    Radiohead’s production hired the services of Specialz, whose technical director, Keith Owen, based the design around a 2m aluminium substrate with two VersaTubes permanently affixed. The substrates were joined together into their show length with a spigot and clevis pin, and are transported in their own custom built dollies.

    Additionally, the existing VersaTube three-pin mains and four-pin data cables were designed out with a quick release seven-way adaptor, making mains and data connection between the individual substrates very quick in a show-build situation.

    The deployment consisted of six 56ft heavy duty tab tracks with 12 scenery runners per run, to which the 2m substrates were attached. The tab track was joined by aluminium ‘yokes’ in pairs and attached to three runs of general purpose trussing. Specialz designed three master track ends which travel with the production in which the tab track draw cables, the scenery hangers, the spacing cable and the VersaTube buffer boxes all travel pre-rigged.
    
THE BB FACTOR
The other main fixtures come from UK manufacturer i-Pix, whose four-cell 20° BB4 RGB clusters are amazingly bright and do a sterling job of replacing conventional audience blinders on the front truss.

    In conjunction with Watson, Chris Ewington at i-Pix has developed a narrow-beam [10°] LED spotlight with seven cells [the BB7], and this tour will be the first to use it. “There are currently 98 BB7s in the world and we’re using all of them for this tour!” smiled Young.
    

Forty-eight of the BB7s are in various positions around the rig, including 25 split into five custom five-way frames — also designed by Specialz and named ‘Quins’. These are Kinesys-controlled flying frames, designed to fly straight out of their transport dollies and retain their show focus.

    Also from i-Pix, there are 14 Satellites with holographic film mounted on the floor, in and around the backline, to up- and cross-light the band at close quarters.

    This project started when Ewington visited the U.S. last October to see a new prototype narrow optic. He then showed Watson the BB4 which was already in production this January, along with a test rig of the embryonic idea he had for the BB7, without optics. Once the new optic became available, Ewington sourced the first 12 and again met Watson in March, along with Richard Young and lighting crew chief Andy Beller, and showed the first prototype BB7 with the new narrow optic.

    Watson judged the fixture to be exactly what he wanted, after which i-Pix priced up the project and received an order to produce 206 fixtures (enough for two rigs) from scratch in just over five weeks.

    Ewington commented: “From our experience, most shows spend months in discussion and a maximum of six weeks in prep, so this timescale did not come as a surprise. The Satellite was developed under similar circumstances to coincide with Radiohead’s last tour.”

    The BB4 uses custom Lamina TitanTurbo LED light engine modules — the fixture consumes 120W at 240V, on full power — and the evolution of the BB series produced the electronic and mechanical building blocks that could be applied to the new BB7 using the narrow optic. The BB7 uses the same Lamina TitanTurbo light engine and consumes 210W at 240V. Both fixtures feature 16-bit resolution for finer control of colour choice, which is in the billions.

    The design period was condensed from six months to four days, the components were produced in two weeks and the units built over two weeks. “It was not a case of penalties for late delivery — we just had to do it,” elucidated Ewington.

    “Andi put his trust in us before when he integrated PixelLines into his groundbreaking show for Radiohead back in 2003. He relied on us again in 2005 and in 2008 he’s really upped the ante! We all appreciated Andi taking a massive leap of faith in having the courage to dispense completely with conventional lighting in his show. Not having a single discharge or incandescent lamp in the design, sets a new benchmark at least a couple of years from what we had anticipated.”

    Other light sources making an appearance in Watson’s design are Color Kinetics iW Blasts — “they provide what is probably the most natural-looking white light from any LED fixture,” said Young — and Pulsar RGB ChromaFloods.

    The scenic design is completed by Blackout’s provision of black velvet velour truss borders and backdrops, plus a 48' x 18' black trevira kabuki reveal drape.

    Watson controls the entire lighting rig from his favoured grandMA console, and works alongside lighting crew chief Andy Beller and technicians Nick Barton, Blaine Dracup, Tommy Green, Ian Lomas and Ed Jackson, as well as carpenter Johannes Soelter and head rigger Seth Cook.

VIDEO
Due to the amount of outdoor shows in the schedule, the team elected to use a low-res, ‘blow-through’ video screen and considered Element Labs’ Stealth and Barco’s MiTrix as possible solutions.

    “We soon realised that both would be too low-res for what Andi had in mind,” explained Young. “Andi likes to use security cameras and affect them with different colours. But when you have a low-res picture as your source material and then send it to a low-res screen, it doesn’t look too great.”

    The alternative was to contact Nocturne and hire the U.S. company’s modular V9 LED screen, as recently seen on the Spice Girls’ reunion tour, configured as a long horizontal strip.  

    “The V9 has a very low power consumption, high quality output and is very light in weight, so it ticks all our boxes,” continued Young. “The only disadvantage is that these screens are American-based, so although that’s fine for the tour over there, we’ve had to sea freight a screen over for the European shows... in fact, it’s setting off any time now! This all costs a lot of money, of course, but it’s all budgeted for.”

    Ted Cognata is the crew member responsible for looking after the video technology, while Andi Watson’s own operation, Scenographic, is providing the video control kit.
 
AUDIO
Curiously absent in the rehearsal room was any sign of front-of-house audio control. Instead, long-time FOH engineer Jim Warren was in a small room halfway down the adjacent corridor, with his Digidesign Venue D-Show and Profile consoles sharing the space with a pair of resident washing machines.

    Despite being tipped off that Warren isn’t the greatest fan of trade magazines (not our fault, surely?), he did allow me to snap away as he set up a new mix.

    Wigwam is the tour’s main audio vendor, with Firehouse Productions taking the reins for the American shows. The audio team also includes system designer Sherif el Barbari, FOH techs Paulo Rodrigues, Todd Tiedemann, Sid Rogerson and Nick Moony, monitor engineer Graham Lees and monitor tech Ross Anderson, while the band’s backline is looked after by Pete Clements, Duncan Swift, Adam Cummings, Alan Russell and Chris ‘Bean’ Switzer.

    The FOH system designed by Sherif el Barbari is based around L-Acoustics line array and d&b elements, including 58 V-DOSC cabinets, 12 dV-DOSCs, 32 SB28 subs, and eight pairs of d&b 702 tops and 402 subs. LA-48a amplifiers power the main PA, LA8s drive the subs and d&b D12s run the d&b infills.

    Graham Lees also uses a Digidesign Venue for mixing monitors and on stage there are 14 Firehouse wedges, a pair of L-Acoustics 115FM wedges and a d&b Q-sub, complementing an IEM system. Wigwam has also supplied Yamaha M7CL consoles for support artists.

GREEN WORLD: TAKE TWO
McGuinness is Radiohead’s chosen trucking contractor, and the company’s forward-thinking has encouraged Richard Young, as he explained: “As well as getting extremely dull about sea freight, I’m now a world expert on the European Emissions Regulations. New trucks now have to conform to the Euro 4 governing standard. In 2009, the EU will issue Euro 5 which, as it suggests, will be even harder on emission level acceptance of newly-purchased vehicles.

    “I approached McGuinness and asked if they could provide Euro 5 trucks. Although they couldn’t immediately, they did contact Volvo, who promised delivery in time for this tour — so in the trucking world, at least, both McGuinness and Radiohead are future-compliant, which is another positive result.

    There is even more to Radiohead’s green effort. On the American tour, to avoid trucks having to idle their engines to power air conditioning and convenience outlets, Upstaging have installed Auxiliary Power Units (APUs) — ‘mini’ generators that are sized correctly to deliver just the right amount of power. “We have gone one step further, and partnered with Upstaging to have mains power connections installed, enabling the trucks to have land lines, like the buses,” said Young.

    Meanwhile, crew member Katie Friesema is liaising with the management at each venue with the aim of encouraging good practice. Young commented: “Katie was hired to deal with our green initiatives on a day-to-day basis. She looks after recycling in the backstage area, car pooling co-ordination, and weekly reporting to our www.waste-central.com website.”

    To help push the message internally, Radiohead have issued all the crew with aluminium water bottles to reduce the amount of plastic bottles used. “Going green is a full-time job if you want to do it correctly. It’s very easy to say that you are greening your operation without actually making a difference,” added Young.

    On the IT front, TourTech Support has provided the tour with a four-line VOIP and Internet access system, enabling the crew to have the same phone numbers around the world whilst vastly cutting the cost of telephone calls. This mirrors the vision Young had eight years ago whilst operating with Ballista. “The difference is,” informed Young, “this system really works!”

LUNCH IS SERVED...
At this point, the band and crew have downed tools, and joined us in catering. Popcorn’s team have laid on a superb lunchtime spread. Thom Yorke sits next to me with a bowl of soup. For someone who has been variously labelled ‘difficult’ or ‘nerdy’, I find him surprisingly down-to-earth and friendly. “It’s really important that we tell people what we’re doing on this tour, and why,” he told me, effectively validating my presence.

    Between Yorke, Young and I, we talk a little about the band-crew relationship. Back in 2002, Young was part of the TPi Awards production team, through his company Ballista, but even before then he was deeply involved with Radiohead — firstly through Tiger Hire as an audio system technician in 1997, then as the band’s stage manager, before climbing to the dizzy heights of his current production manager role in 2003.

    “The band has a history of promoting from within and encourage people they like working with to develop their own skills, rather than outsource,” explained Young. “With the exception of a few people, the core team — including Andi Watson, Jim Warren and Pete ‘Plank’ Clements — has remained intact since 1993. In the main, we’ve only added to the team as the organisation has grown.

    “There’s an awful lot of loyalty shown by the band to the crew, and vice versa. Radiohead don’t tour often so from an economic perspective it’s difficult to secure crew, because we all have mortgages, but every time the call goes out for a new tour, everyone rearranges their work schedules to be available.”

    Our discussion is interrupted by a barrage of heckling. “You don’t half go on, Richard,” utters guitarist Ed O’Brien. No problem, enough has been said.

    Three days later, the team loaded out of Bray and headed for West Palm Beach, Miami where the first show of a three-week North American leg took place on May 5 at the Cruzan Amphitheatre. These dates were due to be followed by six weeks in Europe and further legs in the U.S. and Japan where the tour is set to end on October 8.

    The tour is managed by Brian Ormond and the crew also includes stage manager Brad Child, production co-ordinator Gavin McComb and security manager Colin Lish. Other key vendors are Beat The Street and Senators Coaches (buses), ET Travel, Tzell Travel, AAA Communications and Headline Security.

    There’s a rumour circulating that Radiohead’s people are looking into greening their touring PA system by powering it with batteries and/or solar powered invertors — thus keeping up with the Joneses in lighting world. It’s only a rumour, mind you, but nothing would surprise me with these guys.
TPi

Bray Studios photography by Mark Cunningham
Band portraits by Kevin Westenburg • Big Ask conference image by Lode Saidane • Live show photography by Margarita Gonzalez & Katie Friesema

Thanks to Stanley Donwood for tour graphics