Metallica recently completed the Australian leg of their M72 World Tour in November 2025, playing stadiums in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney.
Lighting designer Rob Koenig began with Metallica as lighting director in 2008, while John Broderick served as lighting designer. Around 2014, he stepped up to the role of designer while remaining the touring director.
When lighting Metallica, the band always comes first, as people come far and wide to see them and connect with them.
“We always light the band first and then paint the picture,” said Rob. “From there, it’s an aggressive show; however, I would hate to pigeonhole the aesthetic as an all-encompassing ethos, as we try to challenge that from tour to tour.”
Rob’s lighting design always starts with a conversation with Dan Braun, the creative director and designer, and the band. Then he takes all of that, they sit together, and they start to build.
“We wanted to bring a rad show to Australia,” Rob expanded. “High art was not the directive. Reuniting Metallica with their Australian fans was the main achievement.”
A massive video wall dominates the stage because if the audience can’t see the band all the way to the top of the nosebleeds, they aren’t connecting. And that’s the most important thing on the show.
The plot features eight different fixture models, with Rob specifying a variety of possible fixtures for each primary purpose.
“We were utilising PRG Australia for the run, so I gave our vendors a wide selection to choose from,” he adds. “The plots that we send out have a wish list of fixtures for a category of lights. For example, a Large Format Hybrid Fixture will be the request. Then the vendor will let me know what they have in stock. In Australia, it happened to be a pretty large selection of Ayrton. I most certainly come from a very pragmatic approach to design. Given my history of small tours working my way up through the ranks, I don’t like spending money unnecessarily.”
Rob handled the programming duties on this one and says he’s having a blast figuring out the workflow and the arsenal of assets he has at his disposal on the MA3!
“Also, as this tour was a familiar design that was part of the Hardwired tour that never made it to Australia, it was a great revisit and rebuild it from the ground up and merging a bit of our design from the current M72 tour,” Rob commented.
