HSL walks between worlds with Simple Minds
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Released in February as part of a celebration of the band’s 40-year career, the album is a blend of the introspective yet optimistic elements of their music with some huge electronic and stadium rock moments that kept them on the ‘alternative’ side of cool. The performance features the entire new album, bookended by a careful selection of Simple Minds early material and classics.
This was a showcase tour for the new album. As such the show paused for two Q&A sessions between Jim Kerr, guitarist Charlie Burchill and journalist / radio presenter Billy Sloan. The Q&A sessions included chatting about the new album and how the band’s music has changed and evolved over the years.
HSL has been the band’s lighting supplier since 2011, when Stephen first met MD Simon Stuart at HSL’s Blackburn UK headquarters, and has taken his business there ever since.
“They always do a fantastic job and are a pleasure to work with,” he affirms. The account is project managed at HSL by Andy Chatburn.
This first leg of the UK tour played to a selection of intimate venues around the UK and Europe. As a proving ground, the new material consistently went down well every night with the fans singing every word of the new songs even though the album had only been out a few days.
Stephen’s Simple Minds shows in the past have a reputation for being beamy, blindingly bright to dark and moody, but this time the brief was to do something radical and new - so he did.
The visual essence started with a new hybrid lighting fixture invented by Stephen combining URC’s GoldPix 77 – an LED warm-white halogen look-alike 7x7 pixel-mappable panel - with eight Martin Sceptron VDO 10s mounted on the front. These were then rigged on custom stands.
This gave the combination of two very different mappable lightsources through which he could potentially play video as well as programming traditional lights, one outputting in the tungsten CT range and the Sceptrons in full colour and cooler, crisper whites.
HSL’s Andy Chatburn engineered and fabricated all the Sceptopix fixtures. Andy comments: “Stephen usually comes up with something off-beat and wacky, and we really love challenges like this and making his ideas into tourable solutions”.
Upstage, the design included two rows – one above the other - of Martin LC2140 plus semi-transparent 2m x 1m LED video panels.
12 Martin Axiom hybrid moving lights were mounted in stands positioned at different heights upstage, and 14 MAC Aura XB were positioned around the floor and set risers.
Stephen has worked with Simple Minds for 38 years, “most definitely the longest relationship I’ve ever had,” he quips.
(Jim Evans)
