The band released their fifth studio album, Death of a Batchelor in January 2016 and have had a mega busy year.
Lighting designer Alex Specht took a floor package for the European dates, which was supplemented by a full overhead rig and video for the high-profile UK gigs in Manchester, Cardiff and two sold out nights at London's Alexandra Palace where this leg of the tour came to an exhilarating end.
The high-impact floor package comprised two grids of 3 x 5 Ayrton Magicdots which were built into special roll-on-roll-off dollies designed by Adlib and streamlined for quick deployment of the 30 Magicdots upstage. There were also two Atomic strobes attached to the dollies, with four more dotted around the risers.
In front of the dollies on flight cases were four Claypaky Mythos plus two more either side downstage, giving a total of 10 Mythos, which offered many options due to their great flexibility.
Six Sharpy Washes were joined by six Chauvet STRIKE 4 LED blinders - a fixture in which Adlib has invested in this year due to rising popularity. These were all dotted around the three-tiered band riser with the piano upstage centre, drums in front of that, trumpets either side and two levels of steps at the front descending to stage level. A grandMA2 light was supplied as Alex's console of choice.
Two Green Hippo Hippotizer Karst media servers were used to store and play back all the video content which was timecode triggered. The content was supplied by Panic!'s production and had been created ahead of their summer shows in the US.
Tom Webber looked after the lighting package on the European dates and was then joined by Adlib's Mike Summerfield, Jon Priest and Peter Lea.
For audio, Adlib supplied a complete control and monitor package for the European leg of the tour, tech'd by Julien Helme in Europe, adding a full L-Acoustics K1 / K2 racks-and-stacks system for the four UK dates and joined by Tony Szabo and Gavin Murray
The Control rack utilises two Mac Mini's in a Sonnet rackmount. These computers are configured for redundancy and run everything to do with the system - L-Acoustics Network Manager, Smaart v8, Dante Controller, iTunes for wav playback, Focusrite RedNet. The Lake system is controlled using a Motion Computing tablet on 5G wifi. Finished off with a Lectrosonics HM/R400A RF system and Earthworks measurement mic.
Spud's console for the monitor mix was an Avid Profile supplied with Venue DSP local and stage racks
A DiGiCo SD10 was specified by Spencer for FOH complete with SD rack and Madi interface, with an SD9 in the loop for the opening acts. The band supplied their own full set of Shure IEMs which were run with a set of Shure UHF-R wireless radio mics and control from Adlib who also provided a standard mics-and-stands package.
(Jim Evans)
