This was the first foray into Europe for the Japanese heavy metal band, which was founded in 1989, disbanded in 1997, then reformed in 2009. They have recorded four studio albums and sold over 30 million records and 2 million home videos.
The band’s tour director, Richard Ames who was busy with Supertramp in Canada, brought in Entec to support all aspects of the tour, including crewing and sorting all the technical production departments.
“I specifically wanted a company that was dynamic and agile, with the resources and ability to deal with finer details and some of the more esoteric requirements – like masseurs and teleprompters – as well as the bigger picture and all the more standard production requirements,” Ames said.
Entec’s Noreen O’Riordan played a key role in managing the tour, which visited venues ranging from 1,000-capacity theatres to 6,000 seated arenas – requiring a mix of flown and ground supported gear.
In addition to bringing together sound, lighting and video elements, Entec also booked the buses, trucks and catering, appointed a production manager, LD and a stage manager and also supplied the lighting system from their own rental stock.
With only a month — during a particularly busy two-week period of the UK summer festival calendar, with major events like Glastonbury and T In The Park, seeing all the regular leading industry players already at capacity — Entec booked Wembley Arena for three days of production rehearsals and brought in Simon Tutchener as the production manager, Chris Gadd (Gaddie) in as stage manager and John Ashton as production rigger, with Richard Ames flying in from the U.S. in time to take up the management reins after the first show in London, with everything set up and ready to roll.
Entec worked with Concert Sound Clair, agents for Clair Global, to supply the sound equipment. X Japan’s FOH engineer ML Procise III specs Clair PA systems for all their live work and this was the system he wanted, which was coordinated between Entec and Andy Davies.
Icarus Wilson-Wright was asked to design video playback and visuals system and run the playback, which was stored on a media server and played out to onstage Spider 30 LED surfaces supplied by CT.
Entec asked Phil White to create a lighting design for venues ranging from Shepherds Bush Empire to Paris Zenith, and they also supplied all the lighting equipment and two crew, Simon “Boff” Howarth and Stephen “Sven” Jolly. The rig included Vari*Lite 3000 and Martin MAC 700 moving heads, about 20 bars of 6 PARs and a grandMA console for control.
The backline consisted of gear from a combination of John Henry’s and Music Bank.
Eat To The Beat fed the crew, Fly By Night took care of the trucking and four crew and band buses were sourced from four different companies – since almost all vehicles in the U.K. were pre-booked during this period.
The band’s management, X Project Live, arranged an 8-camera video record by The 400 Company to collect footage of the London and Paris shows for a future DVD.
With barely a month to get everything arranged and confirmed, the email correspondence between Ames and O’Riordan hit the 500 mark on the first day.
“It was a great challenge, but that’s what we all like,” said O’Riordan “The pressure was ramped up by the band’s level of expectations having not played Europe as yet, and part of our brief was to ensure that these were met if not surpassed, so they enjoyed the same standards of production excellence that they are used to in Japan and the USA. The whole process resulted in some great teamwork and cooperation, illustrating just how much people, personalities and professionalism can really make it rock.”
After the European tour, X Japan opted to take some crew members along to support subsequent tour legs in South America and Asia later this year.
For more information, please visit www.entec-soundandlight.com.
