As unpredictable and surreal as ever, the Super Furry Animals have been back on the road with their current Phantom Power tour. In the midst of their creative mayhem, the visuals for their anthemic show-stopping finale 'Man Don't Give a Fuck' were updated to include images of George Bush and Tony Blair alongside the traditional old array of former USSR communists, commanders and puppets.

The Welsh rock surrealists have always been intensely loyal to their equally talented FOH team, which includes TPi 2004 Awards visuals designer Nick Jevons on lights and Michael Brennan on sound. SFA are the sort of band that you would expect to get right in there with shaping the production and they don't disappoint. Jevons and Brennan in turn love working with SFA because experimentalism always tops the agenda.

The Phantom Power tour was no exception as a fully interactive audio-visual, multi-sensual experience featuring Brennan mixing live in true 5.1 surround sound and Jevons hooking up moving lights to be triggered via the band's keyboards. This time around, the stage has featured a more theatrical appearance. After the multi-screen look of Rings Around The World two years ago, it was time for a change. The band - Gruff Rhys in particular - wanted the volcanoes and horses from the album artwork imported to the stage.

Jevons pitched in with green Astroturf to cover the monitors, and several other elements of madness, like making the volcanoes smoulder sinisterly at the back. A cheeky pair of wide eyes also popped out from each mountain!

Seven years into his working relationship with SFA, Jevons enjoys a great creative chemistry with the band and relishes the chance to do something new and different each tour. This time, in addition to getting the band involved in what some would brand a dangerous precedent of triggering lighting cues, he took the new Martin Maxxyz console on its UK touring debut.

The visual scheme evoked by Jevons linked the band's two specific different aesthetic demands on this occasion - the need for a full-on chaos blend of lights and sound, with everything looking pretty - as well as integrating MIDI-controlled lights with the surround sound.

Blending lighting, sound and band together at certain points seemed obvious to Jevons. There was the physical capacity for placing eight Martin MAC 250s on top of all the PA stacks around the room and on the centre cluster, and the fact that certain 5.1 cues were pre-programmed into the music, so it would be relatively simple to make lights trigger simultaneously.

While Jevons retained control of the colour and movement of the fixtures on the PA, band member Cian sent the cues to turn them on and off from his keyboards. "I told him he'd be running the whole light show as well on the next tour," quipped Jevons.

Bandit UK supplied the lighting equipment to Jevons' own production company Electric Fly Productions, who then supplied it to the band, as did XL Video for the video hardware. The lighting rig was moderate in size - eight MAC 500s, 14 MAC 600s, 12 MAC 250s including the eight band-activated ones on the PA, 12 Par cans and six Pulsar ChromaBanks. The latter were on top of the front left and right PA stacks, in groups of three acting as a VU meter effect - controlled by Brennan at the FOH sound console.

The ChromaBanks themselves were activated by a sound-to-light trigger sent to a small desk at the dimmers - the specific signal sent depended on the general mood and randomness of the day; it could be a keyboard or a drum mix, and at times it was cued, for example in 'Juxtaposed With U', when the vocoder signal was the active input.

Jevons decided to use the Maxxyz desk because he wanted a challenge. He'd used one for the first time at the Radio 1 One Big Weekend in Cardiff in September and really liked it. "I wanted to be the first to stick my neck out," he says with an impish grin, adding, "wellÉ that, and because it looks cool."

And cool's the word - a streamlined, post-modern looking piece of technology. An underlit row of blue LEDs ensures the user can see what they're typing or what they're doing instead of scrabbling about down by the DVD drive, is one of several aesthetic and practical touches. Then there's the large blue knob on the right, which also looks cool, and actually acts as a mouse for programming and also for manipulation of the pan/tilt function on fixtures.

There's inbuilt speakers to listen to a CD, headphone plug-ins and most of the hardware plug-ins you'll find on a new airliner, plus you can back up shows to CD, hard drive or USB memory stick.

Jevons has relished getting his head around the Maxxyz' new programming philosophy - being a multi-fader, instant access sort of dude before, it's been a great learning curve. He soon got to grips with the layering, and with laying out the show in a logical manner, reckoning that within a couple of days he was up to the same programming speed as with a conventional desk.

Dylan Jones takes care of the SFA video and visuals, and was also involved in producing the content, along with animator Pete Fowler and other video artists who also contributed material to the Phantom Power DVD. The band also has input and ideas into the visuals. Jones edits the footage himself using Avid Express DV on his laptop. He's constantly tweaking stuff on tour, so having a mobile edit facility is crucial to his modus operandi.

The surface was a 16 x 9 soft screen - encased in a scenic picture frame to incorporate it into the set, and the projector a 10,000 lumen Barco G10. Video runs throughout most of the set - some are triggered by MIDI and other elements are cued by Jones, using tape and the VJam software with which he also likes to mix and cut live. He also used his own customised effects box for scrambling the sources with weird psychedelic feedback effects, and Arkaos, which is great for '80s style TV effects and wipes and superimpositions of effects over each other.

On-stage, they had a single lipstick camera attached to a mic stand next to the drummer, and there was a video feed from the dressing rooms where SFA like to DJ and get in the mood during the changeover.

Michael Brennan's sound mixing in 5.1 made a big difference to the special dimensional quality of the mix, making it hugely alive, vibrant and kicking (far more so than a straight stereo mix), even in a relatively dead space like Southampton Guildhall.

With the band - and Cian in particular - now routinely mixing backing tracks and sequences in 5.1, Brennan was chomping at the bit to do the same live. Having mixed them in quad before, it was the next step, then it was just a case of finding the right console for the job. The Yamaha DM2000 console came out last year, with enough power to process both the 5.1 and mix the band, and oodles of advanced production facilities... all on a tiny footprint! Small can be so beautiful. He also used a 16-channel Midas XL3 stretch section to get the analogue drum sounds as good as he possibly could before it went digital.

On the vocals he used dbx Pro series pre-amps and compressors, again extracting full warmth before they went digital. "It's not better or worse in terms of sound," he says on a quick D to A comparison. "It's just digital."

They'd taken the DM2000 to the US for the preceding leg of the tour where they were hooking in to house racks and stacks systems. There and again once back in the UK, he used all the onboard processing - compressors, gates, and 5.1 effects The only outboard effects being XTA EQ and processing across the main system.

Brennan loves the recall-ability of the desk, and the fact that it allows him to easily engage in several mixes within one song - a standard SFA prerequisite! The PA, supplied by Concert Sound, consisted of a combination of EAW 750 and 755s. They're essentially the same box, but the 755s have a tilt on the horn that can throw the image down to the floor. EAW SP1000 subs were underneath all the stacks, and there were four stacks - front left and right and back left and right, with a centre cluster of EAW KF850s making up the fifth stack, complete with SB850 subs. For the longer rooms he added a pair of mid stacks either side of the room, fed from the rears. Each night the system was configured slightly differently, proving highly adaptable.

Cian was trigger-master for most of the 5.1 sounds, and also generated MIDI timecode from his computer that was split three ways and sent to lights, sound and video, triggering whichever effects happened to be programmed to coincide with that specific signal. Not surprisingly, this was not always the same each night!

Monitor engineer Craig Donaldson's neat on-stage footprint was also made possible by using another Yamaha DM2000 and a rack of BSS graphics - and that was about it! He also processed everything via the desk. The band used a mix of stage monitors and a Sennheiser IEM system plus a selection of Sennheiser mics. The wedges were Concert Sound's own series - a mix of 15/2s and 18/2s and EAW 850 side fills.

The on-stage DM-2000 was rammed, using all 12 auxes and four matrices to deal with the 10 speaker mixes and six IEM mixes, including three alone for the drummer! Donaldson's most hectic period, as with all those using digital desks, was during the manic programming sessions at rehearsals. The tour's production manager was Chris Taplin and tour manager was Andy Reynolds. Apart from being one of the most visually and sonically interesting, and one of the most stimulating, exciting and thought-provoking, SFA proved again that you can be totally professional, engagingly mental and friendly and happy enough to be a definite contender for 'production of the year'. We'll see what happens when it comes to voting for TPi's 2005 Awards!