LONDON — Adlib supplied lighting equipment and crew for lighting designer Ali Pike on the latest U.K. leg of the Bat For Lashes’ Two Suns 2009 world tour, which has been ongoing most of the year following the release of Natasha Khan’s second album. Pike has been working with the alternative rock musician and singer/songwriter all year. Adlib lighting has also been supplying various “specials” packages for other sections of the tour, but for this one, it all stepped up a level on the production front, with a complete redesign of the show including a new set, look and feel.
This permutation of the design started with meetings between Pike and Natasha Khan who also has a visual arts background and wanted to contribute ideas of her own. Also, after playing a couple of shows — in Chicago and London —they came up with the concept of creating an atmospheric stage ambience based around different weather conditions.
The conventional way to do this would have been using video projection, but this time around, the budget was more limited, so Pike decided to create the desired result using some inventive, theatrical, “old-skool” lighting and effects.
John Hughes managed the project for Adlib.
“Adlib were great in helping customize certain fixtures like the animation wheels and special gobos, which were put into in the MAC 700s,” said Pike. These helped produce elements like sunsets, stormy skies, etc.
The backdrop was a printed tornado against an angry sky, merged with a separate image of a car on the road. Through the use of lighting, it could be transformed.
The production toured with a front and back truss using Martin Professional MAC 700 moving lights as the main fixtures.
On the back truss were six MAC 700 Profiles and four Washes, with six Source Four Zooms to provide individual white light “practicals” for the band positions so they weren’t left in the dark. Two MAC 700 Washes were rigged on the front truss along with 4 Source Four profiles.
On the floor were six MAC 700 Profiles including two positioned on the side fills — always handy for mid level side stage beams, with another four Washes upstage of the backline to up-light the band or the backdrop.
Four PixelLine LED battens were put behind each band member, pointing forward and providing bold bands of color coming up from the floor, with two Atomic strobes and color changers sitting at the upstage corners.
Six custom Perspex-topped light boxes printed with desert and Joshua tree images sourced by Khan were adapted by Adlib so they could be internally lit with JTE Micro-E LED fixtures.
Pike integrated eight Beadlight Super Tubes into the design to add some shimmer and glitter into the visual picture. Intended as an architectural fixture, these were customized, cabled, clamped and made tourable by the Adlib team in their Liverpool workshop. These are video-activated and were fed by one of Beadlight’s own media servers, for which Pike chose content based on cloud formations, skies and other natural and elemental forces.
The media server was triggered from the Avolites Pearl Expert console that she used to run all the show lighting.
Other spangly bits included festoons draped along the back truss and fairy lights, which were randomly slung around the keyboards, drums and center vocal mic.
Adlib’s technician Neil Holloway worked alongside Pike on the tour, and she comments that he was “Amazing!” adding, “As always the standard and level of service from Adlib has been excellent — nothing is ever too much trouble — and it’s been great working with them again.”
For more information, please visit www.adlibsolutions.co.uk.
