Chamsys MagicQ powers Paul Heaton UK tour

UK - Paul Heaton’s lighting designer on his current UK tour, Patrick Sollitt has over 70 tunes on his current song page, with new ones being added all the time. “With such a large back catalogue going back 20-plus years ago to Paul’s days with the Housemartins, onto The Beautiful South and his current hits, we draw on a wide range of music,” says Sollitt. “It’s a nice challenge to have to create unique looks for so many songs.”
Sollitt is meeting this challenge with a robust, fast-moving and very flexible six universe lightshow that features 34 wash, 24 spot and six beam fixtures run on a ChamSys MagicQ MQ500 Stadium.
“I would describe the lightshow as ‘big,’” explains Sollitt. “We put a lot of brightness out there and change things up quite a bit as the music goes from full on pop to delicate ballads. Paul conveys a range of emotions and mixes styles from various points in his career. We vary our lighting to reflect these moods.”
A ChamSys user since 2007 when he was lighting the Pigeon Detectives tour, Sollitt began working with the MagicQ MQ500 Stadium in 2017 whilst touring the UK with another legend, Russell Watson. He’s since used the console on a variety of tours and festivals.
“There is a lot to like about the MQ500,” he says. “Having two screens is really convenient, as are the greater number of faders. The build quality is impressive, and the desk is very well equipped for busking with generous screen space for executor pages and many additional executor buttons above the playbacks.”
However, Sollitt didn’t busk on the Paul Heaton tour. Instead he “delicately programmed” each song on his extensive set list, designing his show using WYSIWYG for plots and the onboard ChamSys 3D Visualiser for some off-line programming.
“The visualiser is a big help in programming, making it very easy to change up the lights,” he says. “I really liked the way I was able to get beam and gobo rendering done on the visualiser.”
(Jim Evans)

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