With headliners like The Doves, Super Furry Animals, Sigur Ros and Bloc Party, Nick Read designed a generic lighting rig for the venue's first series of summer concerts promoted by Somerset House themselves, and staged in the charismatic courtyard in central London. These will be followed by another series run by top UK promoters, Metropolis. Most band LDs used the D4, reports Read: "Because it's a great festival desk and this is essentially a festival-style set-up. It's highly 'buskable' and perfect for the job."
The main D4 programmer on Read's team was Dom Smith, himself a keen D4 advocate and currently using one for his work on Athlete. All Diamond 4s are supplied with an Avolites Visualiser simulation programmer, which Read comments was very useful during programming sessions. The D4 was controlling a wide selection of lights. The moving lights were 16 SGM Giotto 400 CYMs, 10 in the air and 6 on the floor and 18 Martin MAC 600s, 12 in the air and 6 on the floor. These were joined by 10 Atomic Strobes, four in the roof and 6 on the floor, ETC Source Four profiles, ACLs and bars of six Pars.
Read's main objective was to design a rig that was dynamic and flexible enough to satisfy the great diversity of LDs and bands, all with radically different lighting styles and requirements. He is always keen to embrace as much new technology as possible on these shows within the budget.Also available were 24 PixelLine battens - upstage - and a PixelDrive computer, which were part of LD Craig Allnut's plot for Bloc Party. These were made available to any other artists wanting to use them, with the PixelDrive hooked into the D4. For Bloc Party's show, Allnutt brought in his own Pearl 2004 to run the PixelDrive as this was already pre-programmed with funky effects from their touring show. He also added two carbon dioxide confetti cannons and four Dominator searchlights as specials.
Somerset House was only the second time that Allnutt had used a D4, but he took to it very naturally as a keen Avo user. "It's great!" he states, "very powerful, and the software has been written extremely well." He also really likes being able to customise the desk's surface to precise operational requirements.
The D4 Elite features 14 submasters and 96 assigned playbacks, with direct access to 96 fixtures or cues via its re-assignable Preset Playbacks. Read and Smith were joined by Petter Skramstad on the Somerset House lighting crew. Read's company, Studio 23, also supplied all the site mains distro, cabling and power for sound, lights, rigging, the bars, box office and house lighting.
Production rigging was undertaken by Blackout, the PA was supplied by Britannia Row and the PA Masts were two of Summit Steel's SmarTmasts.
(Lee Baldock)
