Sunnyboys’ national tour of Australia, called The Last Dance was their last. According to a press release, the band’s end does not come acrimoniously – as it did when they first split in 1984 – assuring fans that its members have “no animosity, musical differences, just the satisfaction of a job well done and knowing that it’s time”.
The Last Dance began in the New South Wales border town of Tweed Heads in mid-January and continued for a month around various cities and towns across the east coast as well as Adelaide.
At FOH audio was Derek Bovill of Brisbane’s Production Dungeon who says he mixes the band to sound as close as possible to their recordings.
“Also, as it’s an older crowd we don’t want it blaring loud as to deafen everyone,” he added. “However, you still need volume to keep it exciting and pumping and judging by the crowd reaction, I think that is what I achieved.”
ALIA visited the show at Newcastle’s NEX Wests City, a venue that doesn’t regularly host live bands and Derek admits it sounded awful when it was empty. Fortunately, it sounded good on the night once it was packed out with flesh.
“I don’t think any acoustic consultants were involved in the renovation of that room!” said Derek. “I had a similar, even more extreme, situation at Melbourne’s Northcote Theatre. It’s a lovely heritage building with a state of the art d&b XSL / KSL system installed, but at sound check, I thought there’d be a line-up of angry punters ready to throttle me after the show. It sounded terrible but the room filled up and the temperature went up and it ended up probably being my favourite show of the entire tour!”
The tour utilised in-house PAs with Derek commenting on how good the L-Acoustics K3 system in Twin Towns sounded and that he didn’t have any problems with any of them.
“All the major PA systems these days sound pretty good as long as they’re deployed properly,” he remarked. “The rest is the room, the band and how you run the PA.”
Derek toured his own FOH package including his AVID SC48 console however if the venue already had an AVID console, he’d use that simply by plugging his show file in.
“The main thing when mixing Sunnyboys is to make sure the vocals sit right in the mix because the band is all about the songs and people identify with the lyrics,” he said. “The vocals need to be clear and sitting in the right spot with the overall volume comfortable. A couple of songs have the signature delays from the records that I aim to replicate and there is some gated snare reverb, and some big drum reverbs in a couple of songs. There’s subtle pitch shifting on the bass player’s backing vocals – nothing too out of the ordinary.”
Derek also tours his microphones to ensure consistency. They are fairly standard models including Shure SM58s for vocals and a Beta 91 / 52 on kick, however, a dual-element condenser and dynamic Audio Technica AE2500 microphone is used on Jeremy’s guitar amp.
“Initially I purchased it as a kick drum microphone but I didn’t like how it sounded on that so I tried it on the guitar and it works well as you’ve got a full phase-coherent signal but two different ‘flavours’ from the same microphone,” explained Derek. “You can pan it a bit left and right to get a bigger impact, especially for solos which helps it jump out of the mix.”
If there was no in-house person to run the venue’s monitors, Derek mixed them from FOH saying it’s a relatively static monitor mix that, once it’s all set up at sound check, there are rarely any changes during the show. A variety of wedge monitors were found in the various venues, including Nexo PS15s, d&b M4 and Quest QM12MP.
“There isn’t really a need for a monitor console on this show,” said Derek. “It’s just as good if they are run from FOH by me with an iPad set up with V-remote software so I can quickly tune and dial in the monitors during sound check from the stage.”
While Derek may have lost a valued client to retirement, he is kept busy with his production company and various other clients.
