Coldplay hit America this summer with its first tour since 2012, titled A Head Full of Dreams in support of their seventh album by the same name. The London based quartet celebrated its 20th year by launching a three-year long tour earlier this year in South America. The North American tour started in NYC on July 16 and will continue throughout the summer by playing arenas with a scaled down production during the week and filling stadiums on the weekend with the larger production.
The production runs under the guidance of production manager Bill Leabody, who claims, “We are back at it. Other than the fact that the first two stadium shows have been entrenched in some of the worst weather one could ever experience, morale is high. When you assemble a crew like ours, there is little complaining about things we have no control of. Everyone does whatever it takes to make the show 100 percent every night.”
Phil Harvey is the creative director for all things Coldplay. While he may not join the band onstage, he is considered a member of the band and travels with them. He’s the link between the band and the production side in addition to his other jobs that include album artwork, video shoots, promo work and overseeing the tour’s video content. He meets with design team members before the tour begins to explain his vision, then oversees everything as it comes together.
Lighting Designer Paul Normandale is once again at the helm, lighting his fourth tour with this act. “We’ve come a long way since the Viva La Vida tour I designed back in 2008. That was the start of something big for us. As the venues got larger and larger, we adjusted the scale of production to fit.”
Staging
StageCo provided the main stage and towers for the production, which is noticeably missing an overhead roof. While one may think this would limit the lighting design, Paul is quick to point out other advantages. “Chris (Martin — vocals, guitar, piano) hates being confined on festival stages. Look around. Without the roof, we gain an expansive area that looks so much bigger, without any limitations. The singer can stare at the stars if he wants. The lighting rig fits the needs of the structure we are using.”
There are large truss towers that appear to be about 60 feet high and spaced along the backside of the wide stadium stage. An additional two live on the downstage corners of the stage. Another four towers live out in the front of house. The towers are used to hang arrays of P.A. speakers from NYC-based Firehouse on one side, and spotlights on the other.
The band is located in a center stage area. Off to the sides of this are 40-foot-wide wide “bunker” platforms, which contain pyro, floor lights and lasers. They sit above 53-foot-long “Screamer decks” that band members can wander left or right from center. A 100-foot-long thrust extends out into the center of the stadium, ending with a circular B stage platform.
While the base structure of the StageCo stage is set up in advance, the touring department arrives with a custom built Brilliant Stages set that lives on top of it. Normandale explains, “Brilliant Stages’ decks go up on top of the existing StageCo frame. Our singer runs non-stop for a good part of the show. We sought a deck that would give him some play, as in cushioning, while also giving a sense of traction. Given the lack of protection from the elements, it’s imperative that the floor not get slick. They built a really cool spring mount system for the stage that has a little give to it.” The circular B Stage has a video surface built into it that has good traction on it: the band walks right on top without risk of falling, electrocution or damage to the LED displays.
“Misty Buckley is our scenic designer” says Paul. “She came up with the flower theme and the custom paintwork you see lining the ramps, stage and flower of life decking.” The center stage is rounded in a flower petal type configuration. Upstage of the band gear, the stage tilts, sitting at a 30-degree rake. It is referred to as the Flower of Life and gives the singer some more space to roam around above the band and still be seen from the floor seats.
The flower motif matches the custom screen surrounds Brilliant built to enhance the side video elements. Curved LED strips of light made of Firefly FloppyFlex LED Neon line the circumference of these LED surrounds as well as the entire set. In front of the large center LED wall is a stretched mesh drop with faux flowers sewn into it that plays for half the show before it disappears. This drop has a center cutout that matches the side surrounds.
Lastly there is a C-Stage, an oval shaped platform in the house that is sourced locally at each venue. The band shows up there to start off their encore performances.
Lighting
“The boss makes the call for continuous moving light action and constant lighting accents to the beat,” admits Normandale. Lighting Director Graham “Feastie” Feast has two fingers alternating on his Hog 4 bump buttons throughout a good part of the show. “The thing is, if Feastie stops bumping in time, our singer will look up from the stage with his hands out signaling a ‘What’s up?’ kind of motion.”
Lite Alternative, Paul’s company out of Manchester, U.K. is the lighting vendor for the tour. They work fluently with Upstaging Lighting out of Chicago on many of Paul’s U.S. projects, and Upstaging provided the bulk of gear for this American run. The lighting crew was half Lite-Alt technicians and half Upstaging for this leg. Mick Stowe is the universal crew chief for the tour, tasked with the job of making different gear work on different continents.
There is a straight back truss of lights over the rear video wall that includes four rear Lycian M2K truss spots. More underhung truss spots on the side brings the total to eight. A separate rear truss holds an array of Martin MAC Vipers, Quantum washes, Clay Paky Sharpys and Solaris Flares. Other than that, there is no other typical light truss. Six 4K Ivanhoe spots from Robert Juliat are the sole front light for the show.
Upstaging provided a system of torm racks that travel full of lights on custom dollies. The torm racks are hoisted straight out of the carts to their various trim heights on the upright trusses with a single motor. Paul mentions that the tour has been running perfectly from a pair of High End Systems Hog 4 desks. “I don’t care which console my operators want to drive. Just as long as I never hear about any issues with it. They work great.”
Back again are the theatrical effects that Coldplay shows are known for. “We don’t seem to ever cut any of the gags we use…, we just add more every year. Hence the LED wristbands the crowd wears are back in use.” Coldplay was the first band to use this technology and now it’s a permanent part of every show. Jason Regler from Xylobands came up with the idea for them years ago, and the technology is used to its maximum potential from the opening number, when they turned the entire stadium red to the colorful upbeat chases controlled by Feastie.
Lighting the audience is a prerequisite for dealing with this artist. Normandale explains, “With this show, everyone in the entire audience gets the same show. In that I mean whether we light the crowd, blow confetti throughout, or drop bouncing balls, they are all involved from the front of stage to the back of the nosebleeds.”
One thing that Normandale is proud of is his new audience blinders. For this particular tour without a roof, Paul was in a search for 4-light vertical strips of waterproof LEDs. Unable to find the precise fixture he wanted, he approached AC-ET in the U.K. for help. They worked with Italian manufacturers Prolights to deliver the fixtures Paul wanted. The end result was the ProLights ArenaCOB4, which comes in two models. Normandale used 62 “FC” (Full Color) and 16 “Halo” (Halogen Emulation) fixtures. Lite Alt christened them the LAD-Lights, and the name has stuck on the tour. These fixtures are available now from AC-ET.
Lasers
An audible gasp was heard with the unveiling of a line of laser beams that stretched the entire width and length of the football field. Strictly FX, out of Chicago, provided an army of various lasers, which made use of every kind of scanning effect one could ask for.
David Kennedy is the overall effects designer, laser programmer and account rep for Coldplay. Mike Hartle is out operating the lasers for the tour. The lasers are mounted behind the band, with the beams focused along the top of the stadium’s bowl. At this angle, they scan over the top of the band and rise up, filling the stadium with glorious vectors of beams. Hartle explains, “The big guns you see spread out in symmetrical increments are four 30-watt Arctos RGB units. Added to that are an additional four 15-watt Arctos RGB models to make the lineup of high powered lasers that stretch the stage. We used an additional ten 6.5 watt Arctos Lasers without the diffraction units.” The Arctos units are all specially built to stringent specifications from Strictly themselves.
David also spec’d six 3-watt scanning systems from X-Laser called X-Bursts “to fill in the space. In the arenas, we use these to fill in the closer audience that we can’t hit with the other units we carry. They are a useful piece of kit for a reasonable budget.”
Strictly FX has provided 16 “Stingers”, a proprietary piece of gear that they own, which was developed by Lightline out of Germany. They are not typical scanners. These RGB fixtures have a single beam output with gradients (think lighting gobos) that can take that beam and split into a star shape or multiple beams, and so on.
Under either side of the side bunkers of the stage sits control world. The backline techs, dimmers and laser control are contained in these dens. Hartle has two active computers networked together that run Pangolin Beyond software for control. Because of the highly defined animations his show demands, they split the lasers on to the two systems to speed up the processing. He runs the bulk of the show from an AKAI APC 40, controlling the Pangolin Beyond, but a MA Lighting dot2 console is used to spit DMX signal to the Stingers.
Pyro and Effects
To say that this show contains special effects would be an understatement. Put it this way — there is a separate bus just for the nine members from Strictly FX on this tour, and they have fireworks that shoot 350 feet above the stage. Brook Blomquist is the overall crew chief dedicated to making sure all of Strictly’s gear is maintained and working every night. His gear is spread out from one end of the stadium to the other.
Pyro designer and lead shooter for the show is Reid Nofsinger. He gives me a backstage tour. Back behind the StageCo stage are the roped off end zone seats. Strictly has eight square bunkers full of product from which they shoot various pyro effects throughout the entire show. All in all, they have 890 pieces of pyro to load every show.
“We have four custom built Isopar flame units on each side bunker that fire 35-foot-tall jets of flame. They only get used for one song during the show, but the effect is massive. We fire mines from upstage pretty frequently in time with the music. The majority of the mines are choreographed to the millisecond and fired via timecode to ensure they explode at the precise time.” Nofsinger gives us an education of the various fireworks he sets off. “We have several types of products that vary in effect. Starting out with comets, they are a single shot that goes up in the air about 300 feet and pop. Then we have the shotgun shells. These shoot up and explode into tiny particles. Some comets we have rise up and split into four beams — we call these crossettes. I actually have one cue that fires off 58 crossettes in a third of a second.”
Reid uses FireOne consoles to set off his pyro effects. He prefers to not use DMX and lighting consoles to shoot his show. The finale at the end of the show is over the top. “It’s the one part of the show that I have to hit manually. I watch Chris for a certain part where he says ‘Goodnight,’ and off we go.”
Confetti has long been a staple of this group, and nobody in the stadium is exempt. They carry 20 blowers, the kind that continually shoot confetti. They have several types and colors, depending on song, including UV treated particles. But the most impressive stunt are the 17 cannons that line the thrusting runway every five feet. They are each packed with certain colors, so when they all go off simultaneously, it resembles a giant color spectrum for a few seconds before fluttering down.
The one thing everyone loves about Strictly FX is their ability to construct new specialty products. In order to see the lights and laser beams, one requires constant smoke. While all the gunpowder and masses of DF-50 hazers are helpful, they don’t cut it in a stadium show. For this go-round, the band turned to Strictly and asked for an idea on how they can fill a stadium with smoke regardless of wind direction and location. With Soldier Field right next to Lake Michigan and a stormy night unfolding, one would think this to be impossible. Not so. They designed the “Tower Hazer” system. At the base of eight lighting towers in the stadium sits a square road box with a 50-foot industrial dryer hose sticking out the side. Inside the box is a high-powered base hazer and a powerful fan. The industrial hose climbs up 50 feet inside the tower and has single holes drilled down one side in increments. When turned off, the stadium empties of haze fairly rapidly tonight. But when reapplied, it takes less than a minute for the wind to blow the haze everywhere. I can see the lasers perfectly from one end of the stadium to the other.
The Video
I-Mag plays a big part in the show. Hence the giant LED wall upstage and two large structures flanking it for the people on the sides to view. The video products were all spec’d by the tour’s video director Ben Miles, an eight-year veteran with the band. He tells us, “I really was in search of something close to TV quality in an LED wall. All of our content is high def 4K and I wanted a screen that was designed to project that same quality. I looked around for quite a while at various products before settling down on this 5mm RS5 product from Revolution Displays. I wanted the same tiles on the sides as the back and the ability to find these everywhere we go for the next three years.” VER provided this product.
Miles and crew are using eight Avolites AI R6 servers to play back the video content. The video files are huge, averaging close to 45 gigabytes in size on this show. “Because these high res screens have so many pixels, we needed a powerful server. I worked with the Avo brands on the last tour, and they worked out great. They were definitely our preferred choice in media servers as we have two just to run the back wall, and one for the screens either side. At the larger stadiums we have two more screens offstage, and the circular B-Stage floor to feed as well.”
The director is quick to point out that the show does not contain a lot of custom content, but when it is used, it is either subtle (such as birds flying around) or just amazing, as exemplified by dancing chimpanzees that were perfectly choreographed to a song at the end of the show. Miles uses a lot of camera shots, but he’s not keen on just showing musicians on the screens, so he mixes the imagery up with content or runs the camera shots through Notch software, which can manipulate the image in a variety of ways.
Ben is cutting cameras via a Grass Valley Karrera console. The team utilizes a Barco Encore switching system. Leo Flint is his video programmer, who sits beside him at front of house running the servers from a grandMA2 console and controlling the Encore. They use one cut to the main screen and separate ones to the sides and B stage floor. His cameraman use Sony 2500s. “They shoot in 50p, giving me double the pixels for that rich image on screen. We have seven manned cameras,” he adds, noting the use of “two long lens at front of house” and “two on curved tracks with Osprey tracking dollies.” A separate manned camera “is used at the B stage” so “I can get the shots of Chris running straight down the runway at times, or have the cameraman get nice and low when all of the band works the B stage.”
The B-stage has an NX7 IP65 rated LED floor built into it. Miles admits, “I chose this product because you can walk right on top of the pixels and they are waterproof. More important is the fact that they are not slippery, even when wet.” The I-Mag team has a new toy this year for the stadiums. They’ve replaced their jib cameras with a Spider Cam. The robotic camera, widely used in football games, is attached to wires stretched across the stadium. It requires a camera operator, a ground man and a pilot. “We get great aerial shots of Chris lying down on the B stage, especially since we have lots of rotating video clips,” Miles says. “The Spider Cam also follows him running on the thrust. We have robocams mounted high as well — the band quite likes to see themselves from the overhead views.”
In Closing
With 163 names listed in the touring credits, it certainly takes a small army to put on a Coldplay show. They wrap up their American leg with a show at the Levi Stadium outside San Francisco before taking a short break and heading down under to Australia. The tour is expected to continue beyond those dates, covering a three-year span.
Crew
- Creative Director: Phil Harvey
- Production Manager: Bill Leabody
- Production Stage Manager: Craig Finley
- Production Coordinator: Nicole Erin Massey
- Production Assistant: Liza Avramidou
- Tour Manager: Marguerite Nguyen
- Lighting Designer: Paul Normandale
- Lighting Director: Graham Feast
- Lighting Cos: Lite Alternative (U.K.), Upstaging (U.S.)
- Lighting Crew Chief: Mick Stowe
- Lighting Crew: Phil Sharp, Ricky Butler, Gareth Horridge, Paul Burke, Adam “Kong” Morrison, Kenny Rutkowski, Colleen Wittenberg, Tony Quinn, Pip Schulte, Matt Helmick
- Video Director: Ben Miles Video Co: VER
- Video Crew Chief: Phil Johnston Video Engineer: Oli Derynck Video Programmer: Leo Flint-Shipman
- Video Crew: Pieter Laleman, Saria Ofogba, Chris Farrants, Ed Prescott, Graham Lambkin, Marcus Wareham, Jeroen Mahieu, Mark Cruikshank, Mike Cordier,
- Hamanashu “Hammy” Patel, Niall Ogilvy
- Set Designer: Misty Buckley
- Staging Cos: StageCo, Brilliant Stages
- Head Carpenter: Jack Deitering
- Lead Stage Carpenter: Shawn Saucier
- Carpenter: Pat Boyd, Andrew “Hobson” Pearson, Dale Bryant, Kevin “Mo” Hale, Andy, Lennie Watson, Ryan Floyd, Jeroen Padberg
- Stage Co Crew Chief: Paul Van Belle, Mark Van Gorp
- Head Rigger: Russell Glen
- Rigger: Bjorn Melchert, Matt Rynes, Jerry Ritter
- Special Effects: Strictly FX
- Laser/Pyro Designer: David Kennedy
- Pyro Designer/Lead SFX: Reid Nofsinger SFX Crew Chief: Brook Blomquist SFX Crew: Scott Allen, Alan Grant, Jeremy Fox, Justin Seedle, Joey Atkinson, Jeff Jowdy
- Laser Operator: Mike Hartle
- Lead Electrician: Paul Traynor
- Wristbands: Xylobands/Jason Regler
- Wristbands Tech: Antony Burry
- Wristbands Coordinator: Arman Chaparyan
Gear
- 2 HES Whole Hog 4 consoles
- 16 Martin MAC Vipers
- 18 Martin MAC Viper AirFX
- 12 Martin MAC Axioms
- 18 Vari*Lite VL3500 FX
- 45 Martin MAC Auras
- 14 Martin MAC Quantum Washes
- 74 Clay Paky Sharpys
- 52 Ayrton MagicDot-Rs
- 18 Color Kinetics iW Blasts
- 62 LadLED RGBW Washes
- 16 LadLED DWE Washes
- 64 4-lite linear mole feys
- 8 8-lite mole feys
- 29 Solaris Flares
- 12 Prolights Lumipix battens
- 6 Novalite Super Novas
- 49 Prolights StudioCOB UV
- 6 4K Robert Juliat spots
- 8 1.8K truss spots
- 4 DF-50 hazers
- 6 Kinesys motors
- 62 Custom torm racks
- 85’ HUD truss
- 165’ Tomcat 20” box truss
More tour photos by Steve Jennings:
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