Following a protracted Red Hot Summer Tour that started in 2020 and finished earlier this year after fire, flood and plague with Hunters & Collectors, Mark Seymour and his solo band The Undertow have been touring Australia.
The band has returned to playing in intimate small theatres and is enjoying the return to grassroots. With a new album out soon, it’s a transition tour between the last album and the next album.
The other main difference with these shows is that they run for two hours which has taken time to get used to after a couple of years doing 45-60 minute sets on the Red Hot Summer Tour!
“You get used to the short sets although, at the start, it’s difficult because you’re just getting going and then it’s over,” commented Robert Miles, Mark’s longtime FOH engineer. “But then you get used to it and you return to doing two-hour shows. But it’s been fun as we’ve all been operating in rooms like this for at least 40 years. We feel comfortable and we like working at this level.”
The only audio gear that Robert tours are the microphones although, at Brisbane’s The Tivoli where we caught up with him, he only deployed frontline vocal mics as the venue supplies a very good mic kit. Normally, he brings the whole Sennheiser 900 series and Neumann KMS 105 for vocals, which he has been using for decades.
During the tour, Robert has experienced quite a variety of PA systems and has thoroughly enjoyed the experience of doing so.
“I’ve been tuning PAs for 45 years so this has been fun for me,” he laughed. “I know just about every venue and every PA system! There’s this prevailing idea that you don’t need to tune a line array and I’m completely opposed to that, I always have been. You don’t tune PAs flat. I’ve never tuned a PA flat in my life. You tune it for the music that you’re playing through it and the level at which you’re playing that music. And I’ve always done that, I will always do that, and some people disagree with me, but they’re wrong.”
At FOH, Robert was presented with an Avid Venue SC48 to mix the show having not mixed a show with one since 2017. Normally, an Avid Venue SL6 is his console of choice.
“It certainly opens my eyes to the way they’ve evolved!” he commented. “The way they use plug-ins is the same but I like a lot of real estate, and this is a bit smaller. I like to have a lot of things on one surface, because I’m very actively involved in the dynamics and the performance. Everything is always changing shape, so I need fistfuls of faders.”
“In this format, it’s only a four-piece band, so it’s relatively easy. I’m doing this with only 20 inputs. We scale this up and scale it down depending on the size of the venue or the size of the event. We build it up between the four-piece and an eight-piece band.”
On this occasion, monitors were run by The Tivoli’s house guy, Dickie, who Robert says is very good. Sometimes RD has to mix monitors as well but prefers not to, especially when FOH is a fair distance away from the stage. The drummer and the bass player are both using IEMs, with the bass player also using wedges as backup, with some kick drum in a drum monitor for a bit of stage presence.
Gig photos by Robert Miles
