DARREN HAYES: THE TIME MACHINE TOUR

When Willie Williams tells you he’s involved in a new, interesting touring project, you tend to take it very seriously. The man’s never been a slouch when it comes to designing shows, and even after 25 years of involvement with U2 — not to mention George Michael, the Rolling Stones, Bryan Adams, R.E.M., David Bowie, the We Will Rock You musical, Little Britain Live and his work with Laurie Anderson and The Kronos Quartet — he continues to raise the bar in ever more imaginative ways.

    Earlier this year, Williams resumed his seven-year working partnership with Darren Hayes, the former frontman of hit Aussie duo Savage Garden, who recently released his third solo album, a brave, 25-track, double CD magnum opus, titled This Delicate Thing We’ve Made. Together, they cooked up plans for his current Time Machine tour which played seven UK dates in September/October before heading for Australia.

    A very theatrical production, the Time Machine show is run by TM Beth Duncan and PMs Andy Gibbs (UK) and Martin Rutter (Australia), and features rich pickings from an effects palette comprising pyro, lasers, moving set pieces and mechanical objects d’art. With Hayes’ four-piece band and monitor engineer Will King snugly accommodated at stage left, Williams has had a vast area of the stage to play with and along with his long-time touring companion, lighting designer Bruce Ramus, he’s created a show worthy of mass acclaim.

    It was over a lunch break at the final dress rehearsal at Bray Film Studios on September 23 that we joined Williams (and the affable Hayes) to discuss his design of Hayes’ fourth solo tour.

    “Darren is quite unusual for a pop performer because his grasp of rock show design is outstanding — he’s essentially studied the history of how rock productions have developed,” said Williams.

    “He‘s a great student of U2 and it was a huge awakening for him when he saw Zoo TV in Brisbane as a 21 year old. He then had a phenomenally successful career with Savage Garden and through that he’s formed an appreciation of the bigger picture of how these shows work. Most importantly though, he understands the limitations of the modern pop show.”

    Artistic differences recently led to Hayes parting ways with his previous record company, Sony. For the new album, he formed his own label, Powdered Sugar and is now enjoying the creative freedom that goes with it. Of course, this also applies to his touring ethos.

    His last tour, Big Night In, was an interactive affair for which Hayes took on the character of a game show host and invited members of the audience to have dinner on stage as he performed. “But this is a new world,” says Williams. “Darren has put so much of himself into this monster album and this show was always going to be much more of a theatrical production than the last.

    “Darren’s partner Richard Cullen turns out to be an absolute force in creating animation and visuals in general, and we also have Damian Hale and Luke Halls on board from onedotzero, with whom I’ve worked many times before. Between us, we’ve put the whole thing together.

    “Originally I wanted to use Pani projection because I’m really drawn to still images, but touring Panis around theatres wouldn’t be practical, so we’ve chosen double-stacked Barco FLM HD18 projectors from XL Video instead, with Alistair McDermot at the controls of a Folsom Image Pro switcher. The Hi-Def quality makes a massive difference.

    “Our mantra with the video is that we’re only allowing ourselves to produce things that could be done with slide projectors. There’s a certain power you get from having a particularly resonant image that stays there, and there’s a parallel to the way I tend to light things in that most of my shows usually have few cues. I like to find a strong look, put it up and leave it to ‘cook’ for a while.”
    
ACTS 1-4
Unusual for a touring rock show is that a finite set list was available to Hayes’ production team, including choreographer Claire Marshall, at the very beginning of the design phase. Said Williams: “Every set designer will probably sympathise that you’re often designing for something you haven’t even heard yet, let alone knowing the order in which the songs will be. So to be able to start with a script meant that we were well armed to plan a theatrical production.”

    Time Machine’s well-structured four-act show opens with an intense burst of new material which Williams anticipated would be greeted by what he calls the ‘PopMart Stare’. “It’s a fitting description for when the audience are loving it but don’t quite know what to do — as was the case when U2 debuted that incredible ’97 production in Las Vegas,” laughed Williams.

    It’s Act 1 which features the majority of the projected visuals, including a startling, 21st century rendering of the Great Fire of London. “Darren loved a painting that Richard found of the Great Fire. That kind of conflagration is unthinkable today but we attempted to visually reproduce that catastrophe using modern London buildings and icons, like the London Eye, BT Tower and the Gherkin.”

    In the same section, there’s an H.G. Wells-meets-Brunel reference to Victorian technology with the appearance of a bridge that was engineered by Charlie Kail and built by Total Fabrications.

    “I felt Darren’s audience needed a break at that point in the proceedings, so he plays a hit and it turns into a pop concert for three or four numbers, where we have some tongue-in-cheek fun with gobos and moving lights — all the stuff that normally appalls me. Then in Act 3, we sink into the emotional abyss which is a place we always have to go with Darren. The crew then manually re-position the bridge upon which he performs a couple of the more intimate numbers, before we rise up once again for the glorious finale.”

THERAPEUTIC
Although humour is never far away, Time Machine is a completely different beast which dwells to some extent on Hayes’ time in therapy.

    Williams explained: “The time travel theme of the show is really a metaphor. Darren would be the first to admit he went nuts for a while after Savage Garden but he went through therapy and came out the other side a very sorted-out person. He regards therapy as a form of time travel, in that you can go back and fix things in your mind about your past life so that you can deal with them better emotionally in the present. For one so young, it’s very profound. 

   A repetitive image that appears in different forms throughout the show is that of the origami bird from the new album cover, which Williams claimed was key to the entire concept. “It’s a reference to the album title, although in a deeper sense it’s really about relationships. The beauty is that it’s one piece of paper that’s become this complex thing and the only way you can see how it’s done is by destroying it. The message being that sometimes it’s better not to analyse things too deeply and just appreciate them for what they are.”

The bird — a crane, to be precise — makes one of its first appearances as what appears to be a laser projection, when in fact it’s a video trick. “There were limits to what we could spend, so we cheated and instead we created footage, but it’s still very effective,” said Williams.

For most of the early part of the performance, the audience is aware of a triangular hole in the middle of the framed cyc screen. At the start of the show, the centre triangle is positioned upstage with the bridge in front to enable Hayes to make his “God-like” entrance along with backing singers Anna Maria La Spina and Iain James.

    Later in the show, a larger-than-life manifestation of the crane dominates the stage when the biggest design ‘gag’ of the show takes it bow, emerging from the back projection wall. On the song ‘Casey’, the centre triangle is manually moved by the crew (like the bridge) through this void and majestically opens to reveal itself as a rather Heath Robinson-looking crane.

    Four songs later, for a new version of Savage Garden’s ‘Affirmation’ — now retitled ‘Public Affirmation Ltd’ as a nod to John Lydon — the crane is ‘undressed’ to expose a skeletal form, extravagantly laden with 60 50cm Element Labs VersaTUBEs.

    Like the rest of the set pieces, the crane was the result of the Charlie Kail/Total Fabrications partnership, but also included some basic automated features, care of Bristol firm, Fineline. Said Williams: “I work with Charlie quite a lot on projects where there isn’t a separate set designer and I’m doing everything. As well as being an engineer, he’ll also kind of take on a set designer’s role and have input on how these things are built, and see the project through with the manufacturer. The great Total Fabs have done a stunning job as usual and been very helpful in keeping our costs as reasonable as possible.”

LIGHTING HARDWARE
PRG supplied all the lighting equipment with the exception of specialised Stage Blitz lasers from Laser Systems Europe of Belgium. These are compact, DMX 512-controllable projectors housed in a custom-designed X/Y moving yokes, each containing a green 5W DPSS high power laser with a beam shaping facility.

    Williams commented: “I think these will really catch on. Our budget only ran to two of them but I can see that if someone gets a bunch of those they’ll do something outrageous. You have all the convenience of a moving head in that it’s easily controllable from most lighting desks, so you have laser effects on tap.

    “They only come in green but because there’s an ’80s influence on much of what Darren’s currently doing, it’s perfect. We’ve even tried to recreate the classic VL1 ‘drain’ gobo which was on everything back in the ’80s, although there’s probably about three people in the world who might find it funny!”

    The Bruce Ramus-designed lighting rig includes Clay Paky’s new Alpha HPEs along with Martin MAC 2000 Washes and Performances. “On paper it looked really good,” said Williams, “but having three types of moving light on the same truss may not have been too helpful for programming!”

    Ramus operates the lighting from his Wholehog III desk and other equipment includes Martin Atomic strobes, Egg strobes, Molefay clusters, Source Fours, MR16 birdies, DF-50 hazers, F-100 foggers, Lycian 1200 follow spots, a 36" mirror ball... and Habitat ‘pebble’ lamps — just the kind of oddball lighting elements that Williams is famous for including in his spec. “We did have my wonderful Beacons in there [the John Lobel creations from the last U2 tour] but we sent them home as they weren’t really adding much.”

    The pyro element is provided by Wiltshire-based BPM SFX, whose technician Ross Colledge fires 16 Wells medium flashes in four hits of four at the start of the show, as well as a hit of confetti cannons firing white confetti over the stage during the finale.

    Said Williams: “We have a reasonable arsenal at our fingertips but what’s kept it from being an effects fest is the discipline of only using one thing at a time, and there’s a certain amount of gestural narrative that keeps it in check.”

ALSO TOURING...
Britannia Row Productions supplied an Outline Butterfly line array for the tour, which at Bray Studios sounded like the perfect PA system. The clarity, power and punch was unlike anything I’d heard in a long time, although it has to be said that this was not a real-life gig situation. As I mentioned on the phone that day to Brit Row’s Bryan Grant, if only all shows sounded like this!

    As well as having expert technicians (Jono Dunlop & Paul Gardner) on board, loudspeakers are only as good as the engineer feeding them, and Dave Rudder was doing a splendid job at the FOH position, driving his Digidesign D-Show Profile console.

    When quizzed about the choice of the Butterfly system, Rudder told me: “I originally specified a V-DOSC rig but Brit Row asked if I’d fancy trying the Outline instead and I’ve been really impressed. I like it a lot. It sounds very real and not like an array of small boxes trying to sound bigger than they are. It's been very enjoyable to mix through them over the past week.”

    Over in monitor corner, Will King mixes on a DiGiCo D5 and although a pair of L-Acoustics 115XT wedges are in place to give Hayes a vocal-only boost, the remainder of the stage mix is all in-ear based, with Hayes and all band members using Sennheiser G2 systems and Ultimate Ears UE10 ear moulds. As King said: “The aim was to achieve a silent stage and in reality, Darren’s wedges hardly have any effect on that.”

    Other key members of the touring crew include Hayes’ very pleasant and helpful assistant Tracey Turner, LX crew chief Simon Carus Wilson, dimmer tech Mark Hitchcock, moving light tech Jason Dixon, Pro Tools engineer Neil Douglas, backline techs Andy Corns and Ray Williams, and carpenter Simon Rackham.

    On this tour, Hayes appears to have come of age and is performing with greater sense of purpose than at any time in his career. I went to Bray with no cynical pre-conceptions of what I might experience and was rewarded with a truly breathtaking couple of hours.
    The executive, ‘grown-up pop star’ club occupied by George Michael, Justin Timberlake and Robbie Williams has a new member. Watch him fly.