Designing Radiohead’s current tour is longtime visual designer and director Andi Watson, who says the design was a response to the band’s latest album with the knowledge that they wanted a single production design that would work in all the venues they were playing.
Andi WatsonVisual Designer and Director
“That was fairly challenging, as the locations for the performances range from the Roundhouse in London (a Victorian engine turning shed) to a Roman amphitheater with 2000 year old marble columns sticking up through the stage, to beautiful early 20th century theaters. Large arenas and even larger international festival stages had to be considered. The design needed to be flexible enough to deal with the massive local infrastructure changes whilst retaining the look and feel of the tour aesthetic. The trick was to avoid the show being compromised to death by all the limitations.
“For me the main visual elements are the six custom built ‘light boxes’ which are each made up of lots of layers of fabric, lots of layers of mirror and half mirror, and a worryingly large number of springs. I made several small prototypes which allowed me to experiment a lot before the full size ones were fabricated. Above those are six screens of Roe Visual MC7 blackface video that mainly show live camera images that are manipulated, layered and combined in the Catalyst media server.
“Separating and bordering the MC7 screens are seven vertical trusses, each with six Ayrton DreamPanel Twin fixtures. Higher up, there are three trusses (front, mid, back) with some Clay Paky [A.leda B-EYE] K20 fixtures, which are used as front key, rear light and audience lighting. There are also some Clay Paky Stormy CC strobes and some Martin [MAC] 101 CT units for key lighting for camera. At the sides of the stage are four vertical trusses, each with three more K20s and two Stormy CCs. A further six DreamPanel Twins are at the side of the stage for cross lighting, along with 12 Martin 101 CTs and six Stormy CCs. There are 18 K10 fixtures on the deck for close-up band lighting and, finally, some K20 to light four half mirror balls.”
The lighting vendor for this tour is PRG, and looking after the video is PRG/XL. All the cameras and Catalyst media servers were supplied by Scenographic Ltd.
“All the vendors have been really helpful, and their crews have been great. Especially Ed Jackson, Katie Friesema and Rob Gawler, who have all thankfully returned to the Radiohead camp and who have been as amazing as ever at looking after all the cameras, Catalysts and system control that are so much a part of the Radiohead aesthetic.
“We have actually had it relatively easy on this tour so far regarding song programming. On the last one, we played 107 songs I think (but more were programmed into the desk!). This time around, we only have about 80 in the short list, although, of course that can increase at any point. The band do certainly like to change things around, which makes it quite a challenge to create a visual journey, but we try our best!
“We’re still using grandMA2 full-size consoles as we did on the last tour, so there aren’t any hugely different programming methodologies. Philip Norfolk at Ambersphere here in the U.K. was, as ever, fabulous in providing assistance and encouragement before rehearsals and throughout the tour. In addition, we had great support from Fabrice Gosnet at Luminex, setting up a very complex Art-Net merge.”
As always with Radiohead, talks are continual about possibilities and references for
current or future projects, and out of those discussions come ideas which may or may not get realized.
“Working with Radiohead is one long project as much as it is a series of discrete ones, and I am incredibly lucky to have the trust of such amazingly talented musicians. They allow me so much creative freedom and give me the ability to bring together such a fabulous team of people to realize my designs.
“Most of the ‘content’ that is presented on the screens is the product of live camera feeds that are treated in Catalyst. This can vary from being almost bare to being heavily affected and stylized. We use a lot of layering of video and have done so for a long time with this band. In addition, we use audio analysis within Catalyst to create live video ‘effects’. I am lucky that [Catalyst inventor] Richard Bleasdale writes me custom modules for Catalyst in return for cake… a collaboration that I am honored to have had continued on this tour. The pre-rendered content is almost exclusively created by Pip Rhodes who I have collaborated with for many years on many projects and who worked hard as always to create content in frames of 8 x 8 pixels up to 7200 x 1920 pixels. I also have Hugh Davies-Webb setting up the Catalysts. Lastly, Radiohead continued a wonderful collaboration with our friends at AutoDesk to create unique and bespoke video tools that have enabled us to push at a few more boundaries.
“It has been a fairly unusual tour in that we started over six months ago and haven’t spent a single night on a tour bus! I’m quite happy that the challenge of creating one show for all the variety of venues was successfully met.”
Crew
Visual Designer & Director:
Andi Watson
Lighting Co: PRG
Lighting Crew Chief: Ben Holdsworth
Lighting Techs: Dave Mathieson,
Tom James, Ben Timms, Chris Tidmarsh
PRG Rep: Yvonne Donnelly-Smith
Video Directors: Katie Friesema,
Andi Watson
Video Co: PRG/XL Video
Video Techs: Steve Grinceri,
Clarke Anderson
Cameras & Catalysts: Ed Jackson,
Katie Friesema
Cameras & Catalysts Company:
Scenographic Ltd
Video Content: Pip Rhodes
PRG/XL Reps: Paul McCauley, Phil Mercer
Production Managers: Jil Aram,
Neil McDonald
Tour Manager: Peter Yozell
Stage Manager: Brian Wares
Head Rigger: Reuben Pinkney
Trucking Companies: McGuinness
Forwarding Ltd, Upstaging
Gear
2 grandMA2 Full Size consoles
46 Clay Paky A.leda B-EYE K20s
18 Clay Paky A.leda B-EYE K10s
23 Clay Paky Stormy CC LED Strobes
20 Martin MAC 101 CT fixtures
6 Custom Radiohead Lightboxes
6 Brilliant Side LX Stands
6 Ayrton DreamPanel Twins
4 Variable speed large facet 1/2 mirror balls
4 BaseHazers
2 Le Maitre Stadium Hazer
6 Radiohead “Light’ Box” systems
6 2 x 1.25m bounce mirrors w/height & angle adjustments
5 Catalyst v5 Pro media servers
6 Roe MC7 Blackface video screens (3’ x 5’, WxH panel configuration)
6 Barco 20K Projectors (portrait, bounced from custom mirrors)
12 Sony H700 RMTZ cameras
1 Badger Cam
1 Video acquisition, distribution &
recording system
More Radiohead 2016 tour photos by Steve Jennings:
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