Adlib's George Puttock, Sam Proctor and James Petch joined the band's engineering duo of Chris Leckie at FOH and Ilias Andriantos on monitors for a rousing three week tour where all the energy and passion of the Kaisers' renowned live performances was exceptionally well received by the public.
Working alongside Chris and Ilias are the tour's production manager James Hennin and tour manager Liam Rippon.
The sound system chosen was L-Acoustics. The venues ranged from London's 16,000 capacity O2 Arena to many well-known & loved theatres and town halls, culminating in a homecoming gig at Leeds Arena ... so the PA System needed to be very adaptable.
The largest configuration at the O2 featured 14 x L-Acoustics K1 speakers a side complete with four Kara-downs for the main hangs, with 12 x V-DOSC and six dV-DOSC downs for the two side hangs and three flown delay stacks of eight K2s.
They had nine subs a-side ground stacked in a left-centre-right format together with four ARCs a-side positioned on top of the subs for infill. All these elements were driven by L-Acoustics LA8 amps.
One of Adlib's highly respected system techs, George Puttock administered control via one of Adlib's Lake processing racks running via fibre, with three LM44s at FOH connected via fibre link to three LM 26s on stage left, and then via Cat 5 to three additional LM26s on stage right. Both sides of the stage then split out via AES to the amplifiers.
Onstage, James Petch looked after monitor world for Ilias who has worked with the band for around 10 years.
Adlib supplied 12 of its MP4 low profile wedges and L-Acoustics ARCs combined with SB28s for ground stacked sidefills, plus an Adlib MP4 dual 15 inch drum sub. These were all driven by Labgruppen PLM 10Ks
With four of the band on IEMs, the primary purpose of all these speakers onstage was to provide some air movement and low end punch ... as well as for backup, and the fact that Ricky likes to climb on and launch himself off them throughout the performance!
Ilias's console was a Soundcraft Vi6, he'd used a Vi1 for the European leg of the tour at the end of 2014, so it was very straightforward to transfer his show to the larger console for the UK section.
The band have their own Sennheiser mics package.
For this tour, as Adlib has witnessed with a select group of top end engineers, Chris Leckie returned to his roots and specified a Midas H3000 console which raised a few eyebrows.
Like most other sound engineers on the planet, Chris has used digital desks on his various clients including the Kaiser Chiefs, and explained his decision to go Old Skool on this one.
"The majority of the newer digital consoles do a pretty good job of impersonating an analogue desk ... but even after 10 years of navigating my way through the various menu and operating systems ... there is still absolutely no substitute for having everything available and visible - right there - all at once," he declares.
(Jim Evans)
