Formed in the 1980s, Indochine are heroes in their home country, the first French band ever to play the Stade de France to a crowd of 80,000 back in 2010. That they have endured for so long and so successfully is testament to the drive and vision of Nicolas Sirkis, singer and leader of the band. That vision has led to one of their most elaborate stage shows to date, one that blends sound, light and video in ways not normally seen at a rock show.
The Black City Tour started in February 2013 and took Indochine across Europe and the rest of the world, culminating in two consecutive shows at the Stade de France in June this year.
PA system-tech Julien Poirot has worked on countless shows and tours in France and across the world, providing PA support to bands like Linkin Park, Metallica and events like Sonisphere, and having worked with the band before, was called upon to design the whole system for Black City Tour. With his companion, Wilfried Lasbleiz, they installed the full set-up each night, building in enough power and flexibility to cope with any venue's limitations.
"This is one of the biggest bands in France, and it was an interesting job because of all the lighting and video screens, and we had to configure the PA around that. I've used many different PAs in my career, from Meyer Sound, JBL to L-Acoustics, but nowadays, I only use Adamson PA on shows. Since we have such a good relationship with the management and tour production team for Indochine, it was really easy to propose things.
Of the proposals put forward, sound engineer Philippe Dubich selected Adamson E15 and E12 line arrays and T-21 subs, provided by French rental company Lagoona. The system was powered by dedicated monster racks per side with Lab.gruppen's PLM 20000Q and PLM 10000Q.
"What I like about the E15 is that it's a very loud, powerful box, with a nice dynamic and crisp definition. For most of the shows, we had a main PA and delay hangs. We used a line array, but in this case we wanted to hit all of the top seats and make sure the whole audience got the same sound. We could separate the delay hangs out and tune and adjust them separately from the main hangs. We used the T-21 subs, ground stacked, with ten subs each side.
"The main system was just in front of the subs, so the phase was very good because everything was in line. And powering that, we used Lab.gruppen PLM amplifiers on all the tops, 20k on the main PA, Adamson E15, and we used 10k for all the front-fills, down-fills, side-fills and delays. On subs, we used only the FP 7000, with a Lake LM26 as crossover, and of course, everything is running on Dante. The Digico SD7 mixing console fed into the Dante network through a Lake LM44, meaning the whole system has full redundancy."
(Jim Evans)
