It was a short tour playing a selection of completely different venues - from Brixton Academy to Nottingham Rock City, so Bintliff's design had to be versatile.
He is one of those LD's who has the "ability and talent to make even the smallest rigs look really substantial" says HSL's MD Simon Stuart. Bintliff's style is from the more traditional school of stage lighting design that very much believes in starting with basic PAR washes and building effects and moving lights in layers on top of these - rather than the other way around.
The structural elements of his design were built around two straight trusses (front and back), onto which he packed as much gear as the budget allowed. This included eight Robe ColorSpot 575ATs and four ColorWash 575 AT Zooms, 48K of PARs, three strings of ACLs, seven banks of 4-cell blinders, four Hungaroflash strobes and a hazer. Definitely not a huge amount of lights for a venue like Brixton.
Four of the ColorSpots were stood on the band's backline and amps to give some height variation to the beams. He squeezed a miscellany of looks and states out of the rig for the band's short, powerful set - enormous colour sweeps, abundant dramatic bold primary colour looks, white outs and lots of chaos and freneticism abounded, all helping to build on the massive amounts of energy, expressional angst and emotion coming offstage.
He controlled all of this from an Avolites Diamond 4 - his desk of choice. With schedules being extremely tight, Bintliff ended up programming the show at Brixton - the first gig - during the afternoon. Although not ideal circumstances, he said the speed, intuitivity and easy programming capabilities of the D4 made this entirely possible. "It has lots of ideal features like being able to lay the desk out exactly as you wish" he comments. Being a rock 'n' roll style designer and working for many rock bands he also finds it ideal for his 'live' style of operation.
HSL supplied two crew for the tour - Joanne "Smurf" Wright and Simon "Hatty" Dyer. Bintliff has known HSL for a long time and now will always go back to them when he has an influence in choosing the lighting supplier, "The gear is top notch, so are the people and the service is outstanding" he concludes.
(Chris Henry)
