HIGH WYCOMBE, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, UK – Lighting rental company Siyan supplied equipment and crew to the first UK leg of indie rockers The Courteeners tour. LD Dan Hill was challenged with designing a show that would expand from the tour’s smaller venues to the larger festival season stages.
More details from Siyan (http://www.siyan.co.uk):
HIGH WYCOMBE, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, UK – Lighting rental company Siyan supplied equipment and crew to the first UK leg of indie rockers The Courteeners ‘Anna’ tour working with LD Dan Hill.
The tour incorporated a string of sold out Academy and Student Union venues culminating at Brixton Academy as ‘The Big London Show’ and was the band’s first proper production tour on this scale.
Siyan’s Project Manager Jez Johnstone says, “This is the first time we’ve worked with Dan on a full tour and it’s been a pleasure. He knows exactly what he wants to see and is proactive and flexible when it comes to making things work during the prep stages. In terms of the show – the design is solid, his programming is tight and his timing is spot on! I’m looking forward to the next one!”
Hill has designed The Courteeners lighting for three years, and he worked closely with lead singer Liam Fray on the overall aesthetic for the live show.
Previous designs have tended to be tungsten-based and embraced a large, epic theatrical look using lots of fresnels and sumptuous swooshes of red velvet drapes.
The brief for this album campaign was to modernize the onstage image while keeping an edge and a sense of grandness.
A neon ‘Anna’ sign was built and flown upstage, and Hill integrated different sizes of mirror balls to reinforce the classic stage presentation element.
The touring package supplied by Siyan comprised three upstage trussing pods, each one made up of four Jarag fixtures, in 2×2 configuration and five Robe Robin 600 LEDWashes moving lights – three fixed above the Jarag 2×2 and two below.
These fixtures were built and travelled on bespoke brackets devised by Siyan that enabled the fixtures to be quickly and easily deployed during the load-ins and removed for the load-outs.
Three additional Robin 600 LEDWashes attached to the upstage truss lit the drapage and the neon sign.
Six Robe Robin MMX Spots sat on the floor at the back pointing forward for beam and aerial effects, which Hill describes as “a great fixture with plenty of punch for the venues we played and some excellent gobo effects.”
The rig was upscaled for the larger shows, moving to five pods and a complimentary ‘in air’ rig of 10 additional MMX Spots and another 10 LEDWash 600s.
The band was also keen to keep an element of tungsten tied in with the design, and in combination with the LEDWash 600s, satisfied the desire to ‘modernize’ the lighting concept.
Hill used the LEDWashes as solid overall stage washes adding colour and dynamics, and also made the most of their individual LED ring control, which brought a different energy to the stage.
Guitarist Conan suffers from photosensitive epilepsy (PSE) so Hill also found that he could use these additional LEDWash effects features to bring a complete visual change to the performance space without resorting to intense strobing or dimmer effects which would affect his performance.
Hill controlled the lighting with Siyan’s Chamsys MagicQ 100 console and a playback wing; sections were preprogrammed with Martin’s MSD 5 visualizer.
One overall challenge was devising a lighting design that would work equally well in all venue sizes and for the upcoming festival season. The scalability of the finished design added this real continuity.
For the larger shows, Siyan also provided some tungsten festoon-bulb chandeliers, which completely changed the atmosphere, shape and definition of the stage.
Siyan’s technician Phil ‘Pip’ Shaw worked with Dan Hill on the three-week UK tour.
Hill says, “I was really happy with Siyan, from the attention paid to detail with the custom fabrications through the tour to the support in scaling the show up and down. The service has been excellent throughout. I hope to do a lot more work with them in the future.”
