Lighting designer Kait Hall first started doing regular shows with Bernard Fanning last year on the Red Hot Summer tour, and he mentioned that he was working on a new album with Paul Dempsey. Kait has worked with Something for Kate and on Paul’s solo projects occasionally, so she was thrilled when they asked her to do this tour.
Paul and Bernard had done a Bowie/Queen cover of Under Pressure during Covid, and that 80s synth-pop sound and the nostalgia that goes with all the great music from that era has driven the aesthetic.
“They had some amazing video clips for the singles, and I tried to stick within that world of bold colours and shapes that you remember from arcade games of the 80s,” explained Kait.
When Kait was first approached about this project, she asked if there was any artwork or other visual reference they wanted to use as a springboard for the stage aesthetic.
“The first thing they sent was the album artwork with this retro, primary-coloured geometrical grid set against a black background,” she said. “My first thought was to create a three-dimensional version of the album using LED Tubes and Flex. The actual layout of the tubes and flex changed from the initial design because I had to make the layout work with the fixed dimensions of those fixtures, but it’s very similar to my first concept drawing.”
Resolution X supplied the following equipment:
LED Neon Flex Curves
Martin VDO Sceptron 10 – 320mm/1000mm
Chauvet Color Strike M Strobe
ShowPro DiamondBack LED Bar
ShowPRO R3 Beam Wash
Ayrton Diablos
MA Lighting grandMA3
Resolume Arena
Like with every tour, Kait’s biggest challenge was budget and time. Most tours at the moment are scheduled for weekend gigs, so there’s a lot more time for the gear to sit in the truck midweek. This affects the budget, but it also means that you have to overnight between capital cities, so the gear has to be quick to set up and packed down to ensure you have enough time to freight it.
“The custom dollies we’ve made for this tour took a little time to get right, but Andrew Davies and Rus Brebner from Resolution X did an incredible job engineering a new system to keep most things fully assembled in the truck,” added Kait. “I needed to make things small enough to fit in the goods lifts at the Fortitude Valley Music Hall and Hindley St but still look big enough to fill venues like The Forum and Enmore. The whole show wheeled out of the semi and then, with minimal effort, expanded to full height to fill the larger spaces.”
As soon as Kait heard the album, she naturally wanted to time code the show as there are so many layers of complex synths, beats and guitars, but Paul and Bernard were insistent that they didn’t want to be confined to playing to a track. They had used a vast array of classic vintage equipment to record the album and wanted to keep the sound fluid.
“It’s a very busy show to operate, the kind of thing that just takes months of listening to the tracks on repeat,” commented Kait. “I’m using the MA3 for this tour, and luckily, I had quite a bit of time to sit in a pre-vis suite before the first show. It was much more complex than I had planned, and my workflow evolved greatly in those first few weeks. There are over one hundred universes of fixtures that are mapped and merged in Resolume so I can control them via RGB and/or video. Although much of the twinkle is video generated, I kept it mostly grounded in solid shapes so that it didn’t start looking too much like a modern video screen. One of the early briefs was to “make it look like Countdown … but better”.
Photo credits – Darcy Goss and Rick Clifford
