Europe - Simple Minds are back on the road for their 2024 Global Tour, playing arenas and proving perennially popular to both old and new generations of music fans.
The production has also been growing and developing in size and dynamics with Robe iForte and BMFL moving lights assisting show and lighting designer Mark Wynn-Edwards to produce a colourful show supporting the band’s powerful up-tempo set.
The show design is new but contains some threads inspired by the 2020 arena tour which was abruptly halted due to the pandemic. Mark has been working with the band since 2018, initially coming onboard to look after media servers.
The tour features 14 x iForte in the floor package and three iForte for followspot duties plus 37 x BMFLs in the flown rig which are the main hard edge and workhorse lights of the design. All kit is supplied by Solotech, the complete lighting technical production equipment package provider for lighting, video and sound.
The 14 iFortes are deployed on the floor – also part of the floor package that will be touring festivals in the summer. Eight are positioned upstage of the band on top of seven video carts (also part of the floor package) and the other six are on the stage deck at the bottom of the video carts, also upstage of the band.
This lighting and video ‘low backdrop’ is a concept developed during the previous leg of the tour, with the idea of providing constant back-fill / back-of-shot eye-candy for video and camera recording and photos, rather than a black empty space, and bringing a nice depth of field to the stage.
This televisual approach – worked out precisely in terms of height and other dimensions – features two tiles of Roe Vanish screen per cart, and the cart numbers are scalable to fit the performance space or venue.
The iFortes create dramatic and powerful silhouettes and fill the venue ‘void’ spaces (between the ceiling and the top of the audience heads).
The other three iFortes are rigged on the front truss flown in the ‘advance’ position just above the front rows of people and run via a 3-way RoboSpot remote follow spotting system. The RoboSpot system will also be part of the festival package.
The BMFL WashBeams are all in the overhead rig, which has lighting and video ‘pods’ hung on four above-stage trusses.
Five video screens are built into the pods complete with hanging positions for lights, and on the bottom rail of these, Mark can hang two BMFL WashBeams, a strobe and a smaller LED panel light. The truss-hung BMFLs are clustered together in threes, worked extensively and are central to the show.
The general look and style of the show is a very clean, modern streamlined look with a few nods to late 20th-century touring stagecraft.
Mark didn’t receive so much input from the band but lead singer Jim Kerr’s brief was quite specific. “He wanted light to hit the furthest physical points in the venue at times and generally to make the whole experience huge,” explained Mark.
The fragmented video look is also part of Mark’s design, totalling eight surfaces including the side screens. All of these receive video content commissioned by Mark and band manager Ian Grenfell and produced by John Minton plus the camera feeds which are also directed by John, with Adam Maffatt-Seaman for the European leg.
Originally the screen surface was a ‘blow-through’ product, but a higher resolution surface was utilised for the European tour, which, Mark notes, will likely change for future legs as he really likes the way the blow-through can melt away to invisibility with well-planned lighting.
The challenge was to create a design that was adaptable and would go in and out quickly and straightforwardly, and that was also flexible enough to be able to light up to 140 different songs. Mark is working closely with his lighting crew chief Steve Percy.
For a full production report on Simple Minds’ Global Tour, see the May issue of LSi – OUT NOW!
