Lighting designer Abigail Rosen Holmes had a collaborator, of sorts, on her latest tour design for The Cure’s 4 Tour. Her collaborator had lots of insight to the material, since he wrote most of it himself.
Front man Robert Smith “is very involved in the design of the show,” Holmes said. She and Smith exchanged sketches of the lighting system, projection, and stage layout before arriving at the final design. Then they tossed around ideas for the individual songs. “The show currently has 76 programmed songs,” Holmes said. “I’m careful to give my full attention and detail to each song, and to find unique and individual looks.” One of the biggest concerns when she is designing the show is to create a system that can provide that variety. “The great dynamics and mood range of the Cure’s music really help to make that easier,” she said. This tour crossed the U.S. and the U.K. with rigs that were identical, although additional songs and video were programmed for the U.S .leg.
Fixture This, Color That
Like most designers, Holmes has her favorite instruments with which she likes to work. One of her current favorites comes from Italy. “The Alpha HPE1200 from Clay Paky is my preferred hard edged fixture for music now,” Holmes said, “and I wish it was more widely available. It’s very bright, with a nice looking beam, wonderfully rich color, fast, it’s able to bump many effects and it’s very reliable.” Another of her favorites hails from Dallas. “The Vari*Lite VL3500 beam looks different in the air than the other fixtures. With the rig so compressed I wanted some big beams to cut through everything else. The VL2500 wash has good punch for its size and a fast-snapping color wheel.”
Lighting director Graeme Nicol is not one to argue. “I’m really liking the Clay Paky Alphas,” he said. “We had them on Shakira and they never failed us. The VL3500s are awesome as well. I love the two color wheels, and the lensing system is great. You can get a lot of different looks from them.”
Nicol, longtime lighting director for Sarah McLachlan, among others, was working on a Terry Gilliam film in Vancouver. A friend of his brought him into that project, saying it was “a big moving light rig.” The rig turned out to be four Vari*Lite VL3000s. Nevertheless, Nicol was onboard and on the fourth day of the gig, the project came to a screeching halt. The star of the film, Heath Ledger, died tragically in New York, so Nicol was free when Holmes was hired to light the Cure, and she placed a call to him.
“Abbey and I had spoken about the tour last year when the Cure postponed the North American run,” Nicol said. “I’d just finished operating on Shakira for Abbey, and she mentioned that she might not be able to do the whole run.”
Felix Peralta, Tim Routledge and Matthew Buttons programmed the show on an MA Lighting grandMA console, which Nicol is happy to have. He has been using the console for over six years. “I think the first time Abbey and I met was in Vancouver where I was the lighting company guy with a new console I’d just gone to school for — the grandMA.” A lot of his pre-show time is spent focusing, he says. “It takes a couple of hours, and then some minor tweaks, or requests from the band.”
Structural Design
The Cure is unique in their presentation and Holmes’ design turns it into an advantage. “The band stands quite close together on stage, and the curved rig is designed to emphasize this,” she said. “It wraps around them and encircles them. The underhung lighting places the fixtures to light through the band rather than down on them. The hanging structure and the lighting positions are intended to provide a visual architecture in a design which has no scenery and the lighting focuses are intended to give a sense of extending the stage into the house. The open structure of the frames and trapezes was designed to allow this architecture to exist while at the same time making it possible to use full stage projection behind a lighting rig which extends all the way down to the floor.” The video plays a large part in the design, especially since the hard scenery is minimal. Most of the video content was created by Darren Butler working directly with Smith.
Kudos for the Krew
Holmes describes Nicol as “wonderful,” and heaps praise on her crew on the tour. “I am very, very lucky to have Graeme Nicol looking after the show,” she said. “This show is also lucky to have a great production manager, Tony Gittins, and a great crew throughout. The lighting crew are one of the best I’ve ever had — Oli James especially. He is a really fabulous crew chief.”
Nichol echoes the sentiment. “It’s a good bunch out here. We always have a good laugh, and we even got a day’s skiing in Austria. The lighting crew is fantastic. They managed to squeeze the rig in to the Austin Music Hall, and that’s not an easy feat! For a three-hour show, when you’re enjoying yourself you don’t really notice it’s that long.”
But for Holmes, it all comes back to the driving force of the band. “I really love designing for The Cure. It is a privilege and also lots of fun to work with Robert Smith. He is one of the smartest, most articulate artists I know.”
