RAZORLIGHT

If pop festivals are the Cook’s Matchbox of rock’n’roll then Johnny Borrell is the thinnest stick within it but, my God, he can burn bright.

    While talk of being ‘the highlight of the festival’ and ‘could top the Chili Peppers’ can be ascribed to post-show euphoria, the fact that it was stated by members of the audience at all says much about just how far Borrell and the rest of Razorlight have travelled in the short time since they first appeared on our radar.

    There was one other overriding factor that made Saturday night’s headlining performance at Leeds’ Bramham Park so successful — a hefty dollop of production that transformed just another big outdoor stage into a fully fledged headline gig.

    “We already had the blinds and Razorlight sign for the arena tour we ran through the spring,” said production manager Andy Grey, “and we supplemented these with eight panels of LED screen from PSL in an arc behind the band run on a Kinesys moving system. Eight BigLites, also on Kinesys, hung from a second curved truss behind. These are our unique pieces from the tour, but we needed to open it out for the festivals.”

    Not so many years ago, ‘unique pieces’ rarely amounted to more than the band’s logo-branded backdrop and their own monitor system; the Leeds/Reading audience were treated to a totally tailored stage. With festivals now so widespread, it’s surely the ‘uniqueness’ of presentation that makes this a valid experience for the punter. Audiences simply won’t accept top line acts playing beneath a generic rig of moving lights anymore — they expect the best.

    Look at the photos and you’d be hard pushed to separate this from one of the band’s earlier arena shows, but just how far can festival organisers push the envelope of production to accommodate such transformations?

    Grey has some interesting insights into how his production effected such a profound change upon the stage. “It’s a good question. In simple, logistical terms we run an A/B system of curved trussing that saves us up to two hours, so when we arrived from Reading at 7am we were able to rig everything and be ready for an 11am line check.”

    But isn’t there more to it than that? “Planning. All the headline bands for Reading/Leeds — the Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Razorlight — submitted plots. The plots were overlayed by Neg Earth Lights to look for common ground. We’re ambitious on production but in fact we only asked for the upstage curve to be pre-rigged, and a straight truss downstage for the band’s illuminated sign and two projectors. We looked at the time schedule and asked ourselves what could we reasonably put in without compromise.

    “We were helped in the fact that Neg Earth also service our tours. The curved truss needed to be consistent to make rigging the eight PSL LED panels with their Kinesys movement system and the DMX Venetian blinds from Specialz that mount in front of them, fast and easy. We had to drop a second curved truss upstage, from which our LD Max Conwell hung eight BigLites, but there was space to floor mount them upstage of the screens.”

    Fast and unfussy to rig, Grey admitted that he had anticipated wind problems with the blinds. “We sent them back to Specialz after the arena tour to add guy wires that we could anchor to the stage, but in truth they probably added just 20 minutes to the lighting load-in.”

    Grey also hired three trucks from Fly By Nite, “so we could just roll and tip in and out of each venue, and they virtually gave us a truck to leap frog the trussing across the three venues.” [Razorlight also headlined Meadowbank Festival on August Bank Holiday Monday].
    
SHARP SOUND
FOH sound engineer Ian Laughton was full of enthusiasm for the Leeds show. “SSE have provided the PA here and in Reading, which is V-DOSC with extra Nexo CD-18s to enhance the subs. Reading was a bit frustrating really, with the noise limits. But Leeds is a lot less restrictive, and Meadowbank is serviced by Brit Row who provide our touring system — EV X-line, my system of choice.”

    It’s the switch to using a Digidesign Venue D-Show console — and it’s use with Pro Tools — that’s really got Laughton on his toes, as he explained. “The change has been an immediate success for me. We recorded Reading and also T In The Park which we did earlier in the year, and the last arena show of the tour at the NEC. Add this and tomorrow’s show and hopefully you can expect a live album by Christmas.

    “I love absolutely everything about the desk, input to output. The first thing that turned me on was gain structure and headroom, and the gates are phenomenal. The D-Show did change the sound from my Midas, but didn’t radically alter it. With Razorlight you do get big dynamic swings, maybe 15dB, and that was a concern, but the desk handles it.”

    Laughton was as excited as a schoolboy about the compressor plug-ins. “I discovered the Smack and use it for bass, as well as the TL Aggro.” Isn’t there a danger of getting carried away and stressing the desk? “It doesn’t even touch the sides, the desk has massive DSP. In fact, having experimented on tour I’ve taken off some of the plug-ins and returned to a position where I’m using 25% on-board comps and gates.”

    He also eschews scene select... “I don’t really need to make those big reconfigurations with this material so the desk handles everything I do comfortably.”

    If nothing else, SSE appears to have found an array configuration for the CD-18s that controls dispersion horizontally as well as vertically.

    Phil McDaniel at the other end of the snake has the classic simple response to festival monitors — a small digital desk and everyone on in-ears — but he, too, is smiling more than he might. “Since the tour in ’06, Johnny has made the change to in-ears. With that I was able to contemplate making the whole system consistent by carrying our own console and microphones. But I needed to find that middle ground, they’re a new band, in some territories we’re playing small gigs, even a PM5D can seem big in a club.

    “I was given a budget and by selecting the Yamaha M7CL was able to build up a collection of mics. It’s really quite standard: Shure Beta87, SM58s and 57s, and some Audio-Technica AT and AE series — Ian likes the AE3000s for ambient mics.

    “I’ve had the M7 for six months and have never found it lacking, and we’ve been in lots of different situations; obviously the pre-amp on the PM5D sounds better, but it’s consistency I want. It works, it’s rock solid, you can get one anywhere in the world. No disrespect to other brands — I’m quite happy with several of the other digital desks available — but the Yamaha stable has that reputation for reliability.”

    The band uses Ultimate Ears moulds with a Sennheiser 300 radio system, and for a four-piece band McDaniel stretches the desk. “I’m using matrices as outputs, it’s a 16-buss desk but I’m sending a total 24 mixes including things like the but kicker under the drum riser.”

STARRY-EYED
This all takes us nicely to Max Conwell’s lighting and stage set. “The drum riser was at the suggestion of drummer Andy Burrows who sent us a picture of Ringo Starr on a circular riser from the early Beatles era. I did an initial draft of how it might look integrated to the existing stage, and once Dave Smith at Specialz had added the curved steps at the front it was our tour manager, Kumar Kamalagharan, who suggested adding lights to match those in the sign above stage.”

    Kamalagharan takes a very active role in the band’s presentation. He said: “I’ve always liked to be involved with all the bands I’ve worked with. We’d never really considered a big riser before; Andy has a fear of heights and had struggled in the past to deal with even an 18” high riser. I’d always thought we were missing that ‘factor X’ to complete the set so when he suggested the riser [it’s four foot high] we were delighted.

    “I must admit I got carried away, even suggesting hydraulics, but the band like to get close to Andy at times. The curved steps Specialz designed in at the front were ideal; the addition of lights [fittings from Cabuchon] to the fascias were a given.

    “Between ourselves and Dave Smith we went a long way towards disguising the height of the riser from Andy. There’s big rear stairs with a substantial handrail for him to mount the riser, and all the sub-structure is completely concealed from any angle, so it appears as a solid platform.”

    Lights are also fitted to the noseings of the two step risers that flank the drums and support the backline, giving Conwell a ready source of gentle back-light when the camera closes in on Borrell — the Cabuchons being a 15W thumb-sized bulb with a prismatic lens cap, not unlike fairground fittings.

    All the physical elements of blinds, LED screens, sign and riser conspire to create a high impact visual environment, the blinds especially, producing a moiré effect when opened in front of the LED screens, or when closed, where Conwell uses them variously for video projection or as cyclorama.

    Said Conwell: “Dave had the front surface coated with RAL#7035 — a white projection surface which makes them excellent for taking image or colour.”

    How did that idea emerge? “We’d been playing around in Europe at some of the smaller gigs and I’d wanted to integrate LED into the show so we put sections of pre-rig truss on end and mounted some PixelLines, and then got Venetian blinds from Ikea to hang in front of them.

    The band like playing in front of a cyc and this proved to me that we could use the blinds as a cyc, and then open them for the LEDs behind. Dave had a very short lead time from those experiments in Germany to producing the big DMX blinds for the arena tour. They’re 2m wide with a 8m drop — eight of them, and he really pulled it out the bag for us, they’ve toured really well.”
    
INTEGRATION
With all his major elements in place, and just the BigLites switched to a ground position, did Conwell need to apply much Whole Hog III re-programming to the show? “Less than you might think really. It was just a matter of adding what was there by default in the festival systems. But we did make some important changes; a lot more camera work had to be integrated into the show, and the Kinesys system that moves the screens had to be re-done. The screens’ positional cues needed to be plotted much higher, so the majority of the punters down on the ground in front of a typically high festival stage could see them.”

    I-Mag was plentiful on the stage screens, as well as the festival’s own large scale LED screens beyond the PA wings, but Conwell applied some severe solarisation and exposure effects from his Catalyst to marry stage screen imagery to the character of lighting at any given time.

    “There’s a bit of pressure from both elements,” explained Conwell. “We didn’t go into this making it video or lighting heavy. I was conscious of the fact that people come to see and hear the band, so making the screens visible to as many people as possible was essential.”

    Conwell has been successful in his quest for letting neither medium predominate. Arguably, the most prevailing flavour of the show is it’s homogeneity as nothing appears imposed upon an existing stage rig — all is in its right place and serves a proper function. In that respect Grey and his production planning has proved effective.

    Truth be told, Razorlight need it. Beyond Borrell’s unquestioned charisma and stage presence, the band could do with a few more good songs. But they looked and sounded great... unique even.