During ‘80s legends Tears for Fears recent concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Show Designer Alex Reardon and Production Manager, JB Blot, successfully transplanted a full-scale US arena production into this most enigmatic of venues.
“It was an unusual day,” commented Reardon. “Normally when you do one offs it’s the tiny things that get missed and then they snowball into chaos. But not this day, Neg Earth were great, Video Design were great. The band was happy. Their management were happy and the show went very well. In fact, it looks like we will be coming back to the UK for an Arena tour in May.”
Reardon chose the term ‘negative space’ to encapsulate his premise for applying LED video technology in an entirely counter intuitive fashion. “As with all my work, I stick to the holy trinity of production: aesthetics, logistics and finance. Does it look good? Is it practical to tour? And can we afford it? The premise for the LED was a response to my boredom with the ‘where are we going to put the big telly’ question. I wanted something sculptural that could contribute musically.”
“We turn the processors up higher than normal to have LED video as a source of light; and critically, as shadow. There are those darker moments in Tears’ music: a dark rectangle can interplay with the lighting and have a deeper impact but it has got to be done right. We had played one one-off situations like the Albert Hall before and pretty much everyone had terrible problems rigging it. To their enormous credit, the team from Video Design cracked it with barely a sweat. I was expecting a lot more chin scratching, instead it was painless,” Reardon concluded.