HSL Supplies Enter Shikari UK Tour

UK lighting and visuals rental company HSL supplied equipment and crew to the latest Enter Shikari UK tour, working with lighting designer Steve Bewley.

Bewley produced a light-show to match the band's exciting and boisterous live performances which mix metal, punk, dance, and loudness in a unique fusion.

The A Flash Flood of Color tour started in Europe where it played slightly smaller venues, so the lighting rig was designed to be flexible based on the size of venue, the largest of which was Hammersmith Apollo.

Mike Oates project managed for HSL. Bewley has worked with the Blackburn based company on several previous projects and says, "Mike is brilliant, no matter what crazy vision I have, Mike is always on hand to help put it in to practice. I must say the service, the equipment, and the people are great at HSL. They absolutely bend over backwards to provide whatever you need before and during any tour."

Enter Shikari's latest chart-topping album A Flash Flood of Color gave Bewley plenty of initial inspiration for the design.

The European leg featured a floor package from HSL, all based around five LED edged triangles. The fixtures chosen to make these were Chroma-Q Color Forces -- three Color Force 72s for the large central triangle in Europe and four sets of three Chroma-Q 48s for the four smaller ones. These were all fitted into custom flying frames fabricated by HSL from special pre-rigged trussing, and flown off the house trusses. With five of these, there was plenty of diversity.

Hung off the bottom of the two smaller triangles were eight Martin Professional MAC 101 LED wash lights, providing low-level back/side lighting.

There were six sections of three meter pre-rigged truss which became upstage towers, each containing three Clay Paky Sharpies, 14 Chroma-Q Color Block DB4s, one Atomic strobe with color scroller, and a single Lowell Omni flood. HSL made special feet for the towers, so they could be easily wheeled onto stage and flipped up in position. In addition, six Robe ROBIN 300 spots sat behind the trussing sections on flightcases.

All of this was controlled by Bewley using a grandMA2 light console. He used a Green Hippo v3 Stage media server to pixel map all the Color Forces and DB4s which was also triggered via the grandMA.

As the tour hit the UK, the rig changed again, and they collected a front and back truss from HSL together with all associated flying kit, plus six Robe ROBIN 600 spots for the back truss, and another six ROBIN 600s and four, four-lite blinders for the front truss. This together with the European rig and triangles was the UK B rig.

For the four largest shows, they added a mid truss with another six ROBIN 600 spots; one diameter circle truss of five meters, which was flanked by two half-circles of five meters each. These were picked up from the back truss and one additional satellite truss in-between the back and the mid truss.

The circle truss was steeply raked and had 12 Sharpies around its perimeter. In the center was the main triangle made up from a combination of Color Force 48 and 72 battens.

The strobes that had been on the six vertical truss towers on the floor were moved to the two half-circles -- giving four Atomic Colors per side, together with five MAC 101s on each.

Three 6W RGB Lasers and ten 1W blue beam lasers from BPM were also added for the full UK rig, and for Hammersmith, the effects department was boosted with eight bubble machines and two confetti cannons. These were utilized on some of the epic stadium sounding songs of the set -- including a hi-octane remix of Return to Energizer and for the finale. The bubble idea came from the band's early days at their local youth club.

With so many different rig configurations and a schedule very tight for time, HSL supplied Bewley with a WYSIWYG machine to take on tour, which helped with pre-programming the different rig set-ups.

"We'd been in Australia and Japan and then went almost straight in to the European shows, so it was amazing to have this with me and the ability to plot some of the structure for the UK shows while on the road," says Bewley.

Crew chief Tim Spillman has worked with Bewley for many years, "Tim is a great tech to have on-board. You need people you can trust and he deals with my requests no matter how strange!"

HSL also supplied the crew, with Neil Smith for Europe, joined by Simon "Piggy" Lynch and Andy Iliffe for the UK. "HSL's crew are always at the top of their game, I have never worked with Neil, Andy, or Piggy before but I will be in the future as they were all brilliant, Thanks Guys!" he enthuses.