Rock band Angels & Airwaves continues on their 2021-2022 World Tour, with March dates in the U.K. on the calendar. Lighting Designer Lee Duck says the show’s conceptual design came from a music video they had originally shot in their studio space. “We wanted a big hot wall of PARs for an old-school feel. Once frontman Tom DeLonge saw this in person, he wanted this to be the inspiration for their live shows,” Duck explains. “Jeff Pereira, the band’s production manager, came up with a stealth B-52 bomber aesthetic production design for the staging. I then took his idea and iterated from there based on what I thought the show needed while also considering build, pack, and budget.”
DeLonge “consistently likes the show to have the big and bold moments,” Duck adds, “along with what he describes as ‘beeps and boops,’ otherwise known as visual accents on prominent synth elements of the songs.” PJ Carruth programmed the lighting, while Lighting Director Colton Sellers operates it on the road.
“Above all, we wanted the show to feel big, bright, and with a retro futuristic feel as a confident step into a Post-Covid world,” the designer says. “Our Version One of the design concept debuted at Lollapalooza 2021, and from there we reviewed the show and made some adjustments to make it road-ready.”
Tour Within a Tour
Chadrick Fellers, creative director/production designer for Jack Harlow, reports in on the hip hop artist’s recent Creme De La Creme Tour, which runs through Jan. 15. “The design features a giant cafe on stage along with video walls and lighting package,” Fellers says. Within this tour, the artist also performed a special separate stint in December in his hometown in Louisville, KY. Harlow’s team designed five different shows in a five-night run in five different venues, ranging from a 300-person bar to 6,000-capacity theaters. “It will definitely be a historic run for Louisville,” Fellers says. “The whole thing sold out in minutes, as did the tour.”
The Los Angeles-based designer named his tour management/production company WastedPotential because of a remark his grandmother made (saying he was wasting his potential) when he dropped out of college. He now has more than 100 employees in his company. Fellers was just named on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the music category. Granny may want to rethink her remark.
“Don’t Stop Me Now”
“Don’t Stop Me Now” is not only the name of a past hit for Sammy Hagar, it’s also the mantra for his current LD Jamie Fadden. Spending the majority of her career as a house LD and freelancer around Pittsburgh, PA, Fadden enjoyed a life on the road for a few years, then detoured for an important life event: to have a baby. That’s when her touring troubles started. It was not because of her child, she says, but because “there seemed to be a stigma attached to moms being out on the road. People made assumptions about commitment or questioned why I would even want to be away from home.” Her luck looking for gigs changed when she met Production Manager Alastair Watson, who works with Joe Satriani and Sammy Hagar.
Filling in for a Hagar show in 2018 led to a job for Satriani’s tour (that ultimately didn’t happen in April 2020). But October 2020 found her on Catalina Island lighting the outdoor sunset show for Sammy Hagar & The Circle’s pay-per-view special. “After that show, Alastair and I started programing over Zoom for a Satriani tour. We still have that show in the bag, ready to go.”
As touring cranked up again, she tech’d then took over for LD Matt Mills on Hagar’s tour, who left for other commitments. For the recent Texas shows, Watson spelled out several design parameters: It had to fit in a 14’ truck space; it had to be simple and fast to load in and out; and it had to give a consistent look through a wide range of flown house rigs.
“The design I came up with were six truss towers that would stand on skids rather than base plates, so they could be easily deployed on stage,” Fadden says. “This also meant that any space I was using in the truck was all lighting design footprint and not taken up by a lot of flight cases. The design added production value to smaller venues, and the floor rig did the lion’s share of the work. In bigger venues the towers complemented larger house rigs,” she adds. “I will continue to build out future shows with this concept in mind.”
Watson, who noticed Fadden’s strong work ethic from the very start in 2018, says nothing will stop her now. “Jamie has proven more than capable of dealing with all the curveballs that are thrown at her,” he says. “I’m sure a fantastic career is ahead of her.”
Reach Debi Moen at dmoen@plsn.com
