LondonEngland

At the tail end of four in a row at Brixton Academy. Things are pretty easy so far on this tour. I have a solid week in a nice hotel in Kensington opposite Hyde Park. I have four shows in a big, old theatre with space for days and not too many problems otherwise. Load in on the first day was really early. 7am for no good reason other than it was just me and the new tech on lights. Everything went up pretty quickly. The crew there are really great. In Manchester the band had some serious issues with the rounded proscenium of the stage. With the barricade in place the crowd was 10 to 12 feet away from them. For a band the gets off on diving into the crowd and dragging kids onstage, this was a nightmare. To alleviate this problem we pushed the band as far downstage as possible putting them about six feet from the first row. The only problem was the position of the downstage truss ended up being directly overhead the mic line. There were two possible positions for the truss, one overhead and one 20 feet out into the crowd, both were less than ideal. I went for the overhead option. It makes it really hard to front light a band. Even with moving lights and cross-focusing and such, it's hard to keep the faces from looking shadowy. I have a row of footlights out on this, with helps a bit with filling in the unlit parts, but the band hates them, so I use them sparingly. The other main issue the last few shows was the band not being able to see the crowd. Brixton Academy has a general admission floor that packs about 3,000 kids into it. It gets pretty hectic during a good show. I went in to the venue a day early the first time I did a show there, just to check out the space. System of a Down and Dillenger Escape Plan were playing the night before. It was one of the most insane things that I have ever seen. The floor looked like liquid; a sea of people swaying back and forth. It really is a shame for the band to miss out on seeing a crowd in mutual appreciation of their music. It is also a real shame to blind the crowd and light up the room like a circus ever 2 minutes. I think it completely kills the atmosphere. Obviously I have been out-voted. When I was doing Belle and Sebastian last year, they seemed to have the same problems. Generally complaining about not seeing the crowd and feeling uninspired. This escalated into doing shows with the house lights on at 50%. It was miserable. This time around I've gotten by with flashing some blinders here and there and turning them at full whenever the band talks to the crowd. Let's hope it can stay that way.