Robe double rocks for Ghost & Volbeat dates
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This tour also united the imaginations of two different international lighting designers - Niels ‘Niller’ Bjerregaard for Volbeat who is based in Denmark and Erich Bertti from Brazil, LD for Ghost - who combined creativity and lateral thinking to design a top rig that would work for both bands but yield totally contrasting results.
Robe moving lights - MegaPointes, Spiiders and BMFL Spots - were the primary moving lights of choice for this challenging task, all supplied by Premier Global Productions out of Nashville.
Niller has been working with Volbeat for 13 years and with new album Servant of the Mind just released, like everyone, they were ready to rock post-pandemic. He and Erich, together with Niller’s co-show designer Guy Sykes, went through about four interactions of the overhead design before they agreed on a model that worked well for both. Guy is also Volbeat’s TM, he has toured with Pantera - among others - in the past, and is one of Niller’s mentors.
“Erich and I had both utilised Robe a lot,” he stated. “The fixtures are reliable and feature-packed, the brand is big in the USA with the lights widely available, so that part of the decision-making process was very easy!”
The idea was to have a universal MegaPointe look in the roof rig that would give those unrelenting BIG epic rock looks that set the tone for both artists. “MegaPointes are one of the few fixtures versatile enough to be able to provide a completely different set looks for the two shows,” he confirmed.
The 30 MegaPointes and 50 Spiiders were distributed over five slightly raked upstage / downstage orientated truss sections, each rigged with six carefully positioned MegaPointes which had the effect of making the rig look extremely large. The Spiiders were dotted in between and around these
The 16 BMFL WashBeams were supplied with separate cameras to work with the four RoboSpot systems, with the luminaires rigged in banks of four. Eight – four a side – were on downstage trusses in ideal side positions for neat and close following, non-classical follow spot style, and another four-and-four were rigged on two offstage trusses just downstage of the back wall and the ends of the five ‘finger’ trusses.
The four RoboSpot BaseStations and their operators were located wherever they best fitted in each venue, usually somewhere behind the stage, and all they had to do was focus on pointing the lights on the relevant band members as all the parameters were running through Niller’s main ChamSys MQ500M console.
Erich Bertti is a DoP and a lighting designer / director who has been working with Ghost (Tobias Forge) since 2018, initially put forward for the ‘hot seat’ - which had consumed several of his predecessors - by production manager Eddie Rocha. Erich and Eddie had previously worked together on several other projects including the legendary Motörhead.
“Tobias has very specific ideas about how things should look onstage and he’s also very tech savvy, so he knows what can and can’t be achieved with which pieces of technology, so you really need to know your stuff and respect his knowledge,” he elucidated.
This was the first time that Erich had used MegaPointes as a main fixture - “I really liked them - they are dynamic, durable and well-engineered.” He also relished using the Spiiders. “I love them - another great fixture,” he comments.
Erich programmed lighting for Ghost’s show on a grandMA3 console running in GM2 mode. Both Volbeat and Ghost will play their own headliner tours in Europe this summer.
