Starting life as a low-budget underground TV show on SBS, RocKwiz has become a cultural icon of Aussie TV and a successful touring act.
2024 saw RocKwiz celebrate 20 years by undertaking its most extensive tour. Dubbed Never Mind The Buzzers, Here’s RocKwiz Live!, the tour comprised 35 gigs in two months.
Back in 2004, a young Brad Alcock did the lighting for the pilot show for RocKwiz, and he has been with them ever since. The last TV show may have been in 2016, but every year, they do BluesFest, a few special shows and then the tour.
The show is continuously evolving, with the fresh part being the artists. RocKwiz always has an established artist and a new artist as part of the show; notably, they don’t announce the artists on the show to the audience. This means that the shows sell out venues on the back of the abilities of host Julia Zemiro and MC Brian Nankervis, and the guests are a bonus on top of that.
Brad says that RocKwiz has a particular style. It’s more cabaret than rock and roll but has rock and roll elements.
“I am intrinsically aware of what the producers would like and want to see and how they want to see it,” he said. “It has a particular look, which is the red velvets, lavenders, and rich colours, and it’s deliberately done that way to keep it looking like a cabaret rock show. It’s a show I know well, so it’s like coming home. My job here is to ensure the lighting looks right, and that’s all I need to worry about.”
The show tours a floor package with some overhead elements. The brief from Dugald, the show’s production manager, was to keep a minimum space on a 12-ton truck. Lighting takes up two and a half rows, which is not much.
“Consequently, I’m pretty reliant on what’s available in the rooms for each venue I go into,” adds Brad. “So all the analogue, all the face lighting, and top lighting, except for the four moving head profiles for my specials, are from the house.”
The touring package is from Brad’s company, BAAC Light, and is eight lighting towers, a design they’ve been building for the last couple of years. They’re made specifically for road touring, so they’re not adjustable, and there are no bolts; nothing can get loose. They’re specifically made to be structurally strong and quick to put out. The package for lighting set up is about 45 minutes from when they unload the truck, and the pack-up is about 40 minutes.
“The pack-up is a little bit slow because we’re waiting for other departments to catch up,” said Brad. “Lighting’s quick, so I look after the truck pack and everything else because I’m the first person there. Which I’m happy to do. I don’t normally get to play in trucks!”
At the base of each tower is a Robe Pointe, then two GLP X4s in the middle, and an ACME Ginamp stobe light.
“We can map them, put patterns on them and all that sort of stuff, which I’ve done a few times, but generally, I use them as blinders and colourful elements, accents for lighting.”
The four overhead moving lights are Fine Art 600L BSWF framing lights, which are unavailable in the country as BAAC Light specifically developed them with Fine Art.
“They’re ones we’ve made to our order,” he said. “BAAC Light has had a long relationship with Fine Art. Over the years, we’ve brought in lots of different lights from there. We have an excellent communication path with them. Modifications that I want to make are easy to make. These lights are on this gig specifically because they have a 600-watt engine but only weigh 23 kilos. When dealing with regional venues, some of which only lift 150 kilos, you need to keep everything under control. They’re the workhorse fixture: you’ll see them keylight the band and do backlight specials on all sorts of stuff. When we get to the big venues, like The Enmore, we’ll pull in additional stuff from some local companies to support the rig.”
Two years ago, when Brad was about to tour with Guy Sebastian, he switched to the MA platform, describing it as a behemoth task. Still, that show was all time-coded, which is a highly different proposition to busking, which is required for RocKwiz.
“My business partner told me it’s time for you to move on!” commented Brad. “This was the perfect tool for me to cut my teeth busking on. Honestly, it’s okay; the consoles are fine, it’s a strong platform. I would have loved to have stayed on the Hog, but unfortunately, I can’t. I can’t hand it off to other operators; as an LD, that’s my biggest issue. If I get sick, no one can step in. So it was one of those choices that I just had to make. Especially since I’ve flown in and out of this show twice while it’s been running to do Guy Sebastian shows. So, I need to be able to hand it off to operators who can handle my show files easily.”
BAAC Light now own several MA consoles, including the grandMA3 compact used on the show, and Brad says they’ll probably have to get another one next year for the number of shows they’ve got coming up next year.
