The gig celebrated the band's forthcoming album Keep Calm & Carry On, and Routledge was asked to light this and a warm-up gig at the Electric Ballroom in London following a TV special he designed for them last year at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium, for which he won a Welsh BAFTA Award.
Blackburn-based HSL has supplied a number of Routledge's recent projects, and he was keen for them to also do this one. "The variety of kit that HSL has available is really impressive, as is their attention to detail and willingness to customise gear and accommodate non-standard requirements," he says. The project was managed for HSL by Mike Oates.
It was a daylight show, with the band onstage at 4.30pm, so Routledge's design was based on bright, high-impact light sources that would register enough to make it look and feel like an evening show. He also needed to transport and project the massive energy coming from the band onstage right out into the audience. The other major technical challenge was that the saddlespan stage was tight on space and limited in weight loading capacities, so it had to be a floor based rig.
Upstage right at the back was a row of six A&O Falcon Beam 3K searchlights, which produced powerful beamwork.
The Robe Robin 300 Beams were rigged on seven vertical trussing towers positioned around the stage. Routledge comments: "Their beams are incredibly well defined and bright, and they had no problem being visible in daylight."
The vertical trussing towers were interconnected with 48 horizontal scaffolding bars, with 250 ChromaQ ColorBlock LED units attached, mostly configured as four-call colour-changing blinders, all pixel mapped through the grandMA console. At certain points in the ColorBlock matrix, fixtures were removed to make a diamond shape that was infilled with Atomic strobes and two-lite blinders.
For general lighting, 14 Robe ColorWash 700E ATs were added to the towers. The only luminaires attached to the roof structure were two ETC Source Fours for key lighting lead singer Kelly Jones.
(Jim Evans)
