Girls Aloud are back on the road for the first time in 11 years, performing hits that helped define the sounds of the 2000s, creatively directed by Beth Honan and lit by Peter Barnes.
Lighting, video, automation and rigging equipment as well as crew are all supplied by PRG UK to Production North, whose unfazable Iain Whitehead oversaw all related technical production elements for the first leg of the tour that plays UK and Irish arenas including five sold out nights at London’s O2 arena.
PRG UK Account Manager, Yvonne Donnelly is co-ordinating everything, and one of the many advantages of working with a full visual production specialist like PRG is the simplicity of dealing with one company covering all visual departments, with all associated communication, logistical and economic benefits.
“It’s been an absolute pleasure collaborating with Iain and the creative team again on this groundbreaking tour for PRG, showcasing our newly developed RollCat tracking system alongside some of our tried and tested proprietary Icon range and with Ground Control running our newly developed VL3600 follow spots,” Donnelly said. “This was a team effort, beautifully realised, to create a show greater than the sum of its parts.”
Lighting Designer, Peter Barnes has plenty of experience in lighting pop shows and helping capture all the nuance, drama, and dynamics unique to this performance genre and getting it radiating around the venue. He first worked with Girls Aloud in 2005 and lit the group’s last Ten: The Hits tour in 2013 and has worked with Honan on other projects over several years.
Honan wanted a clean, modern space with an epic widescreen presence and a nod to fashion show aesthetics in the form of a thrust and a B-stage to get the Girls physically out among their fans. The designer envisioned the two large video screens with a bold strip of light striking through the runway area, the latter translating into two spine trusses flown above the thrust.
Barnes used the two 10.8m-wide by 7.2m-high onstage screens and the 30m-long thrust as the starting points for the production lighting design. The challenge, with this scenography in place, was in getting more overhead lighting positions.
The 25m of RollCat tracking truss – a PRG proprietary product manufactured by Moveket – rigged centrally, running the length of the thrust, and utilised for a hi-impact motorbike flying stunt at the start of the show’s second section meant that nothing apart from the two exiting spine trusses could be added here.
Upstage centre, in the gap between the two onstage screens, are four trussing towers that continue the line of lighting positions. At the offstage edges of these two onstage screens are two more trussing towers, and these six architectural elements offer some excellent lighting positions for creating effects and looks as well as for the practical purpose of lighting the stage and artists.
The towers are also newly purchased by PRG, coming in 1m and 2m sections, and pack down into dollies for travel, which is expedient on truck space in Lighting’s three fully packed artics. Above and upstage of the main screens each side Barnes persuaded Honan that a double array of standard trussing runs should be added to assist in lighting the 60ft wide stage as doing this just from a 10ft wide central spine would have been extremely challenging.
All these trusses are rigged with PRG’s proprietary Icon Edge multi-functional moving light fixtures, which are the workhorses of this design. Mirroring the thrust ‘spine’ trusses in far offstage stage positions are two (left and right) trusses, also rigged with Icon Edges together with some Robe Spiider LED wash fixtures to assist in key lighting along the runway positions and for blasting out into the audience for the interactive moments.
A short advance truss in front of the end of the runway is rigged with five Vari-Lite 3600s all running on four (+ 1 spare) PRG Ground Control remote follow spot systems. The Vari-Lite 3600 is the latest fixture now supported by the Ground Control platform. The Ground Control base stations are located stage right and operated by four of the tour’s 12 truck drivers.
Ground Control is also Lighting Director and Operator, Chris Scott’s first choice for remote follow spot control for several reasons including the physicality of the control ‘paddles’ which offer similar arm positions to operating a classical followspot. All the metalwork is black or masked in keeping with the streamlined aesthetic.
The Icon Edges are dotted all over the trusses, up the centre double towers and the outside screen framing towers, on the back array trusses, on the spine trusses above the runway and the side trusses, a total of 68 luminaires.
They are the backbone of all the big production looks and are used judiciously and smartly, enabling Peter and programmer Jake Humphries to construct a diverse range of scenes and effects that keep the pace pumping throughout the 90-minute set.
The fixture choice also included 20 Robe Spiiders for the side trusses, 22 GLP X4 LED battens on the back trusses and 16 Vari-Lite 3600s including the five follow spots.
Seventy 3m ACME PIXEL LINE LED battens are used highly effectively to create pixel-mappable vertical lines of light shooting up the back towers and along the length of the runway trusses, with a double row framing the top of the main screens and a single row running down their outer edges.
These are programmed to bring another layer of fluid and dramatic kinetic movement to the action, while 18 ROXX 4-lite blinders grace the side trusses for additional audience and runway highlighting.
While not a vast number of lights for a show of this stature and scale, used intelligently and judiciously, they go a long way as the lighting eye-popping moments keep coming until the final chords of the set.
Peter and his team spent five days of concentrated pre-vis at Zeal Live in Basingstoke followed by five days of full production rehearsals on the George Lucas Stage at Elstree, where they were joined by Chris Scott and together finessed the initial building blocks, developed the show and programmed the grandMA3 full size console which is running in full GM3 mode.
The show is a balance of perfect key lighting, lots of dramatic effects and big, sumptuous looks rich with colour and movement that blends effortlessly with the video content, show narrative and impeccable choreography. In addition to lighting the Girls and their 10 dancers, there is constantly something interesting happening back of shot for the IMAG mix.
When it comes to challenges, Barnes and Scott echo an often-heard comment for lighting popular artists in the 2020s – as well as lighting for enthusiastic fans in a big venue, it also must be lit so images snapped on mobile phones and posted on SoMe can also look amazing, which is a constant pressure! It also reinforces the importance of good key lighting.
Scott has been running in all grandMA3 mode for a couple of years now and loves the flexibility and power of features like Recipes, which are used extensively on this show. They are very straightforward to edit, change and update. The lighting control network is made up of PRG SuperNodes and Limicore LumiNodes.
He is enjoying the calm and friendly tour vibes and working with “a brilliant team” including PRG crew chief Alex Peters, Colm Robinson who is looking after dimmers and lighting techs Dominic White and Stuart Wright.
Like Scott, Peters is also now freelancing after working full time for PRG for 12 years, and for him the most galvanising task is coordinating the daily logistics of getting the show in and ensuring the build runs smoothly and efficiently.
The length of the central spine means trusses must be constructed in a specific order which consumes all floorspace in an average sized arena, putting lighting ‘in front’ of the automation and video departments, requiring serious coordination so everyone can work simultaneously and without encroachment.
A few shows into the tour, and the process was down to a fine art, allowing the stage to be rolled in at around midday. The central spine trusses also must line up perfectly to be picked up and flown on the Mothergrid, which facilitates 112 hanging points across all departments for the largest shows on the itinerary. Head rigger is Zack Wade.
Automation is still on-trend for live shows and a key is not to over-use it as a vehicle for theatrical performance, and The Girls Aloud Show is a great example. Another recent PRG investment has been into substantial amounts of new Moveket automation equipment, some of which was out on this tour, including the Rollcat tracking truss, all overseen on the road by Peter MacDonald.
PRG’s Mark Wade dealt with the tour’s original automation requirements and specified the system which is based around Moveket i-Motion winches – the VMS-S 125-3-30 – which is rated for up to 125kg, fits into standard 52cm trussing and is SIL3 certified for people flying.
The main motorbike flying stunt happens as the Girls go into “Wake Me Up”, carefully masked by lighting and smoke, they suddenly pop up at the back of the stage on the bikes, each one picked up by three winches.
Positioned 5m apart, the four bikes are tracked 25 metres down to the end of the runway where they soft-land on the stage and the girls alight, with audiences going crazy for this WOW moment.
The 12 Moveket winches are positioned in trussing in the roof with their drive units all upstage on the floor. As the travel distances allowed this to happen, it made sense to have the brains of the system fully accessible.
All the automation cues are run via a Moveket i-Motion Expert III console, with Barnes commenting that the front end is “very practical and user-friendly,” particularly regarding safety, where different levels of safety can be programmed into each cue stack as required, e.g. a cue for dropping in wires will not require the same levels of safety as a cue for people flying.
To ensure that nothing is left to chance, as the Girls are getting into position on the bikes, two spotters onstage have eyes on everything, while others are involved with clipping them securely into their harnesses.
Synchronous safety is also inbuilt into the winch drives, so they all must track as one object which keeps everything moving together. Some show cues are run manually, and others are timecode triggered from the audio track.
The biggest challenge for Peter and his team – comprising Will Gallegos and Thijs Verplaetse who came from PRG Belgium with the Moveket system – is making sure that everything is rigged and ready in the available time.
The video department is headed up by Stevie Marr and includes the only female member of the tech team, Izzie Everatt, who has been working full time at PRG for the last 5 years and in the video department – which she loves – for two and a half of those.
The screens are all made up from new INFiLED products, part of another recent larger purchase of LED screen assets by PRG. The two centre ones are made up from TITAN-X 8.3mm product, and they are flanked by the two portrait IMAG screens at 7m-tall by 4m-wide, built from INFiLED AR P4. The screens are crucial to both the physical scenography and the show narrative with a mix of playback content – stored on two new Pixera media servers – and IMAG footage.
The eye-catching content brings a true 3D reality to the performance and helps maintain the pace and excitement. It was created by Neil Harris, Caspar Wain and Jos Taylor from motion design specialists, SHOP, working closely with Beth. Everatt programmed the servers during rehearsals together with PRG’s James Hancock, and now she is tech’ing them on the road.
All the playback content is timecode cued from the audio backing track. It includes extensive footage of fifth Girls Aloud member, the late Sarah Harding, who sadly passed away in 2021, leaving a lasting impact on the band and fans and triggering several emotional moments during the set.
A four-camera package of Sony HXC 300s were utilised for a fast cool-styled mix cut by Ivan Youlden using a BMD (Black Magic Design) ATEM Constellation 4 M/E switcher. Two of the cameras were positioned in the pit, fitted with wide angle lenses, and two at FOH for long shots.
During the encore, a Hologauze drops in across the stage. Girls Aloud stand behind this with projections beamed onto the front from a Barco UDM 4K30 projector fitted with a UDX 9.38 90° (periscope) lens which nicely covers the 4m ultra-wide throw to the surface. The projector – tech’d by Mike Dorrie – pops up from a trap door to the side of one of the B stage walkways, helping to bring the spectacular show to a memorable theatrical close.
