Many adjectives spring to mind when I think of Radiohead. Their shows are always an intensely immersive experience - emotional, provocative, philosophical - even from the detached perspective of being behind a camera. Everything about Radiohead's production is precise, detailed and considered - more art installation than arena tour!
Thought, sensitivity and intelligence is at the very essence of one of the most visually and sonically interesting shows on the road. There's also a highly magical element, with no reliance on production gimmicks and gags, the performance - of which band and production is completely integrated - carries itself on the power of the music, and the energy and form of the production.
This was my second Radiohead experience of the year second time this year - the first also being in France, on a sultry Bastille Day evening in Nimes Arena, where a short production tour followed a stint around selected Euro festivals. The Bercy show reinforced what I already knew: that Radiohead undoubtedly have one of the most significant production teams of the moment.
Production Manager is Richard Young. Like many of the crew, he's worked with Radiohead for some time, stepping into the production hot seat earlier this year, when vacated by Brian Ormond who's now tour managing. Battling a heavy cold, Young explained that a major scheduling move was to bring the get-ins forward to 11 hours before doors - usually 6am - this time around. This is to ensure enough time to get the lighting in place, and that all other departments can achieve what's needed in as stress-free a day as possible.
He's also instituted a strict health and safety regime on tour. A personal passion, he saw this as the ideal opportunity to put his money where his mouth has always been on this important topic, and "persuade people that it's not a huge or costly effort" to create a safe working environment. All crew are required to wear hard hats and high vis jackets whilst working in the arena. They've also increased the documentation requirement from their suppliers, which they in turn supply to the venues.
Certain companies - lighting supplier Bandit Lites UK being a good example - have always led the way in the documentation stakes, and it's interesting to see the concept now becoming more commonplace on tour. Generally the tour's health and safety practices have been well received, said Young, especially by the local crews who often take their lead. Young has 38 touring crew, six trucks and four buses to manage on the Euro leg of the tour in addition to the gruelling schedule.
Lighting designer Andi Watson continues to bring his very unique creative and mercurial talents to the Radiohead mix. Definitely in a league of his own in this specific art form, Watson is also one of the most modest and down to earth of industry legends.
He runs his shows like he's playing a musical instrument, not operating a lighting desk - with unparalleled sensitivity and feeling and perfect timing. Every change and inflection, every fusion of colours or movement is done with love and meaning. The visual power and expression of Radiohead's live performance is renowned and respected everywhere.
Watson introduced two major architectural elements to his stage definition this time around - five elegant 'fingers' low at the back, high at the front, and running upstage/downstage, and an imposing upstage 'wall' of Pixelline fixtures. Each finger is constructed from Mini-beam truss - an eight and a four foot section plus two custom curved sections per finger. They are masked with silver-grey crushed velvet covers, a dress fabric sourced by Jenny Clarke at drapes specialist Blackout, who made all the onstage drapes. The velvet takes light extremely well, adding another layer of texture to the stage.
The fingers evolved because Watson wanted to have lights everywhere but without conventional lighting trusses in sight. The upstage/downstage trajectory of each finger is a straight line, their come to a vanishing point far upstage, and are designed to make geometric sense wherever you are in the room, encouraging the energy flow from stage into the audience. Watson very much considers the audience a vital component of performance.
Attached to each finger - with gently asymmetry across the five fingers - are three Martin MAC 2000 washes and three 2K Performers, plus six egg-strobes fitted through the velvet. At the front of each finger are three high-powered fuzz lights, fitted with Par 36 lamps in special housings. The front truss - a half ellipse - is shaped from straight and angled corner blocks to give it a subtle curvature. Fixtures on this are six 2K Performers and eight MAC 2000 Washes, five Moles plus colour-changers and 12 egg strobes.
For follow spots, Watson used four operated Strand 1kW Beam Lights with scrollers and colour and intensity controlled via from the lighting desk, plus one static Beam Light for the kit.
Upstage on the floor are eight MAC 2000 washes, six ripple tanks and four half mirror balls, plus a set of triple Atomic strobes, specially adapted by Bandit and mounted in 8-lite housings on a customised frame, with colour scrollers on the front. Twenty VL2402 Washes are used for side lighting, and there are six pipe-and-base stands with ACL 8-lites and scrollers on the top, plus a B&Q halogen worklight on each.
The awesome Pixelline wall features 72 units - 24 wide and three high, behind a scrim - and is used to create a variety of effects from sine waves and oscillations to undulating fluidity as the solid Pixellines are literally transformed into a rippling water feature. It's one of those that has to be seen to be completely appreciated!
The Pixellines are controlled via a PowerBook running Richard Bleasdale's PixelMAD software - the production version of the pixel-mapping software Watson toured in the summer. It maps the RGB levels of the pixels on the computer to the RGB pixels in the lighting fixtures enabling the creation of complex patterns and chases that would otherwise take hours of programming time. The PowerBook runs Ethernet to eight DMX universes to a WholeHog II console.
UNCONVENTIONAL VIDEO
Video was an interesting conundrum. As one would expect, anything conventional - particularly I-Mag - was out the question. However, they all recognised the need for those in the far reaches of large arenas to get closer and more involved with the stage action.
Watson thought long and hard before he came up with a creatively acceptable format that was congruous with his own and the band's sensibilities.
He worked with Seattle-based Jon Dix and Scott Johnson in the summer, and decided they would be good video partners in terms of getting their heads around a bit of imaginative video subversion. Watson decided on three LED side screens in 3:1 aspect ratio per side - the approximate space for the image of a human body - which could be run with different configurations of images. The three-per-side Saco Chromatec 15mm screens are in vertical aspect ratio, so a person's body fits really neatly, and are run at their minimum intensity. The screens have all been supplied by XL Video.
There are 12 low res security cameras - very much the IT video look of 2003 - onstage. Four are on remote pan and tilt heads, and eight are fixed. The camera feeds are treated live with a variety of different elements throughout the show including a Xandar 16 channel MultiViewer unit, used for splitting then picture and creating 'picture-in-picture' effects. The feeds are also sent through a Kramer matrix switcher.
The live interaction between video images and lighting is crucial. Watson's instructions to Dix and Johnson - who mix via a Panasonic MX50 - are precise, although the live result is an organic collage of the two mediums. Images are often treated with saturated colour washes to match the lighting of the moment, and everything appearing onscreen is cued by Watson at the lighting desk, a process that varies slightly in look each night, but has a similar emotional overtone. While the video choreography sometimes takes the viewer on a completely contrasting tangent, a sense of the images being related to the band and their movement is never lost.
The video mixer output is also fed to a PowerBook running the video manipulation program Jitter - a subset of Max, the data file manipulation program. Max is used by guitar/keyboardist Jonny Greenwood to write his own pedal-activated guitar effects units. Jitter is great for effects like saturation, waveform analysis and oscillation. The guitar pedals are fed into a Metric Halo 2882 A/D converter, that takes audio signal in and squirts Firewire data out to Greenwood's Max patch effects. These pass through the amps and mics and out via the PA.
Watson's lighting team and Greenwood - who has always taken a keen interest in lighting to the extent of sometimes lighting support bands on past tours - collaborated to make the Max patches work with Jitter, via MIDI into the Jitter computer, where it can control and effect the video.
THE V-DOSC SOUND
The spiritual nature of the visual presentation is equally replicated on the sonic front, where the winning combination of Jim Warren at FOH, Graham Lees on monitors and the L-Acoustics V-DOSC system made the aural magic tick.
This leg of the tour sees Warren readjusting to the nuances of the indoor sound. In the US, they started flying the dV-DOSC subs for the first time which worked well and made it easier to get the low frequencies to the rear of the hall, so they continued the practice into Europe. At Bercy, there were six flown DV subs and nine stacks of SB218s on the floor.
The main PA hangs feature 16 V-DOSC elements per side, plus four ARCS boxes per side for side hangs. Radiohead were one of the first bands to use V-DOSC extensively, and to get embroiled in its philosophies. This summer on the festival circuit, Warren had the chance to use many of the current line array systems on offer, which reaffirmed his belief that V-DOSC is THE system for Radiohead.
At FOH is a Soundcraft Series 5 and a Spirit 324 sub mixer, used for 18 channels of effects returns. The band's musical mix is in a constant state of flux, and this time there were more samplers than in the past, so it made sense to split them into their own mix at the desk. Warren added an extra eight-channel input box to the 324 for the samplers to come up via a separate stereo mix.
His basic FOH rack remains constant - two Yamaha SPX 900s, two TC M1s, a TC D2 delay, "a strange box that allows you to do interesting things", a Roland SDE3000 digital delay and a Vocoder which he uses for various wild and wacky bits, including making Thom Yorke's vocal sound like an alien in 'Sit Down Stand Up'. The latter also encompassed some complex routing between the two desks and effects, and the result is a chilling reminder that the art of noise (or even of the noise boys) is very much alive on Radiohead!
There's also plenty of sonic idiosyncrasies, of course. Warren is using a SansAmp guitar pre-amp at FOH for distortion effects on the bass, and a POD guitar amplifier for vocal distortions - like dirty reverbs on Yorke's voice. With the guitars "pretty much taking care of themselves", most of his effects work concerns the vocals and drums.
Yorke's vocal, says, Warren is consistent and reasonably loud. The singer uses a Shure Beta 87 mic, and Warren sometimes edges the bass off his vocal with a high pass filter.
The PA system designer is V-DOSC guru Florent Bernard, who has helped Radiohead achieve sonic excellence for the last four years, and has worked with Warren on other shows including Peter Gabriel's Growing Up Live. Bernard approaches V-DOSC with the same near religious fervour that most Frenchmen reserve for fine wines!
He's equally as enthusiastic about the flown subs hung as Warren, particularly in the larger venues. He also has other reasons for liking subs in the air - namely the time alignment and general coverage being easier, plus not having to drive the ground subs so hard. "If you can get the low end sussed, everything will follow, especially with V-DOSC," he noted.
The system is driven with XTA DP226 processors, and they are running XTA's AudioCore software at FOH for the crossovers. He also has a Tablet PC running AudioCore, wireless linked to the FOH PC so he can easily move around the room during sound check, or even at the start of the show, to make final tweaks.
Monitor world is presided over by the unflappable Graham Lees, who mixes with a Midas H3000 console and a 16-channel stretch, using all 56 inputs. He's also sending selected bass and guitar signals to the video at strategic moments.
The wedges are all Firehouse, because they are "the best", according to Lees. Thom Yorke, Ed O'Brien (guitar) and Phil Selway (drums) are all on custom-made Firehouse IEMs, and they also use wedges, whereas Jonny and Colin Greenwood use just wedges - and ear defenders!
They all think carefully about what they want to hear, said Lees, which could potentially make his life very complicated, but it doesn't because of their audio eloquence and their ability to communicate exactly what they want to hear. Since the summer, they've used a scanning system based on ham radio technology for the IEMs, that shows a graph of all the FM radio activity in the area, so helping to avoid busy frequencies, and saving a lot of time. It proved particularly invaluable on the festival circuit.
The only effects Lees utilises are two reverbs, and that's usually only for outdoor shows. He uses a fair amount of compression on the desk to hold the relatively 'fluid' set up in place. All sound equipment is supplied by Wigwam.
Rigging equipment comes from Summit Steel, overseen on the road by Stephen 'Nipper' Fitch and Reuben Pinkney. They have 42 roof points and then 24 sub-hung motors, incorporating everything from a 1/4 tonne Prostar hoist to a 2-tonne Lodestar, with Summit supplying a total of 73 hoists. The single moving truss of the show is hung on Lodestar JJ super-fast motors which travel at approx 64 feet per minute.
Motor control is via 10 Summit 6-way controllers and three 3-ways. Summit also produced a rigging plot for the tour and worked closely with Fitch on the considerable amount of advanced planning, which made life much easier on the road.
The audio clusters are hung on three points (one at the front and two at the back) as supposed to the more conventional two, via a Delta plate so the boxes can be pointed exactly where needed. This has proved a real time saver, and far more forgiving in terms of positionability. All the sub hung motors are installed with hard fixings into dedicated motor trussing (Thomas SuperTruss), so there are 24 less motors needing to be rigged every day.
Appropriately the last number in the set that night in Paris was 'Everything In Its Right Place', which I thought was a fittingly poetic summation of one of the best productions of 2003.
Radiohead 2003 European Tour -
Key Personnel & Suppliers: