SSE has supported the Arctic Monkeys since their early days, although, with the phenomenal speed of this band's success, that is not long ago. Barely three years after playing their first gigs, the Monkeys have a sell-out tour, a BRIT Award for Best New Act, and hold the UK music industry record for the fastest-selling debut album - ever. All this success has been built via the internet, where the band made their demos available for download, and in doing so, created a huge fanbase.
The tour has played 13 dates around the UK, before dropping production and heading off to take over Europe, Australasia and America. Front-of-house sound is in the hands of John Ashton, who first met the band when he was the resident engineer at the Leadmill, the renowed venue in Sheffield, home of the Monkeys. At London's Brixton Academy, he is using a NEXO GEO T system in a venue for the very first time.
"We've used NEXO's Alpha system throughout the tour," explains Ashton. "We need a system that was malleable, that we could just point and go. Alpha suits this band, because it's kind of brutal! It just says 'I'm a rock P.A.'! I've heard the GEO T in festival situations, and would have liked to use it for the whole tour, but it just didn't suit the smaller venues which can't take line arrays. The Brixton Academy is finally a venue we can put it in."
Ashton also used the Brixton gig as something of a dry run for the Arctic Monkeys festival appearances this summer, he says: "It gives me a chance to use the same PA that I'll use at Reading and Leeds, but in a more controlled environment."
With the excellent systems techs Craig Pryde and Jasen Hattams (SSE) to help set up the GEO T and tune the system, Ashton used left and right arrays of 14x GEO T4805 plus 3x T2815s, with 8x CD18s ground-stacked either side of the stage. The system used NX242 processors, and CAMCO Vortex 6 amps on the GEO T cabinets, and Vortex 4 on the stage monitors, all SSE MB4 wedges.
Arctic Monkeys' tour manager Timm Cleasby praised SSE for providing flexible systems which have enabled the band to handle a rich variety of shows, festivals, clubs, academies, and theatres. As Rich Rowley of SSE says, "Alpha delivered all the benefit of a combi-box, and their 24-stack system enabled them to shine in small venues which don't lend themselves to line array, even though they would have loved to use GEO T right from the start of the tour."
(Chris Henry)
