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PRINCE 21 NIGHTS AT THE O2

International live event design & technology

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PRINCE x 21THE PURPLE ONE MAKES HISTORY

AT LONDON’S O2AN EXCLUSIVE REPORT BY MARK CUNNINGHAM

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A theory exists that if Hendrix hadsurvived he might have eventuallymorphed into Prince... only a littletaller. Both had a penchant for purpleand, like his psychedelic ’60s mentor,Prince’s legend is steeped in his abilityto pour raw sexual tension into bothhis guitar playing and on-stagepresence. All of these attributes andso much more were showcased overthe summer in a series of shows thatmade history.

It was in May that the Artistannounced he would be playing anunprecedented 21 concerts atLondon’s 20,000-capacity O2between August 1 and September 21.The media, who can sometimes be alittle unforgiving of Prince‘s somewhateccentric behaviour, lapped it up.Record-breaking! Purple-tastic! Butthis was not the only unusual aspectof the Earth Tour.

Priced at a mere £31.21 in order to “make the concerts affordable toeverybody”, tickets also entitled the bearer to a free copy of Prince’s new CD, PlanetEarth — a ploy he pioneered on the 2004 Musicology tour with the album of thesame name. This time, he went further by allowing the CD to also be given away withThe Mail On Sunday. One imagines that the dumbfounded “computer says no”reaction of the record industry must have had the Artist in hysterical fits of self-righteousness.

At the O2, with his oh-so-tight 12-piece funk machine (featuring Maceo Parker ofJames Brown fame), the Artist Known At Birth As Prince Rogers Nelson delved deep into30 years of material to give fans a completely different set every night.

Sometimes, the obvious choices were there — ‘1999’, ‘Purple Rain’, ‘Kiss’, ‘LittleRed Corvette’ and his recent awesome single ‘Guitar’; on other nights, the 2.5 hourset list would be crawling with surprise covers, featuring even more surprising specialguest spots, such as Sir Elton’s appearance on the Fabs’ ‘The Long And Winding Road’.Every night, from the moment he hit the stage, he had the audience eating out of hishand with his consummate showmanship and musical genius — his guitar playing, inparticular, was extraordinary. You got the feeling that he was simply pleasing himself,but the fun was mightily contagious.

It was in mid-September that TPi was finally granted access to this historicproduction, despite an otherwise blanket press ban backstage. We were instructedthat no photographs of Prince or the performance could be taken — the results aretherefore drier than our normal coverage style, but considering that Prince has beenprotected from the world’s media with an iron fist, we were grateful for anything wecould get!

Upon arrival at the O2, I was greeted by production manager Chris Reynolds andhis assistant Christina Affholder. Reynolds’ history with the Artist goes back to the ’80swhen he worked for promoter Alec Leslie. Together, they did three Prince tours —Purple Rain, Parade and Sign O’ The Times. “We finished up Sign O’ The Times atWembley Stadium which was cancelled because it was raining and Prince didn’t wantpeople to get wet,” said Reynolds, resisting a wry smile.

He came close to working with Prince a few times after that but it wasn’t untilearlier this year whilst touring with Rod Stewart that the PM job on the O2 showscame his way.

Reynolds explained: “It all stemmed from when John ‘Bugzee’ Houghdahl[previously Prince’s PM for the Musicology tour] came down to look at Rod’s soundsystem. He was going to be the PM for these shows and was instrumental in the stagedesign and setting up this whole infrastructure, but he was then called away by BonJovi, and I was brought in around April, although he still carries the title of productiondirector.

“I physically came on board in early June, as soon as I finished with Rod. ThroughJune and July, we did a bunch of one-off shows in the U.S., London and at theMontreux Jazz Festival which kept us busy whilst I tried to stay on top of the O2project and Bugzee looked after Bon Jovi. It really needed the both of us to put it alltogether, and Bugzee was here at the very beginning to oversee certain elements,after which I took over.”

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A week of rehearsals took place at WembleyArena before everything transferred to the O2 for afortnight before the opening show. However, thingsslowed down when the stage arrived late from TaitTowers in New York due to the appointed airline’smechanical problems. “While we waited for thedelivery, we used tape to markout the shape of the symbolstage on the floor, and get theband rehearsing and lightingprogrammed,”

said Reynolds. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way!”Co-presented by AEG Live, Concerts West and

Marshall Arts, the in-the-round concerts werepunctuated by a number of other incoming events,such as the Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang, Elton’s RedPiano, numerous sporting events and the MOBOAwards.

“We were aware in advance that wewould have to load-in and load-out several times during the twomonths, rather than do 21consecutive shows, and of course,that presented a few difficulties,”explained Reynolds. “However,we’ve been lucky that the O2 hasenough roof height to enable us tosuck a lot of production up there onlong chains and leave it in place.

“We’ve dropped the speakerhangs quite often and we’ve had toremove some lighting to make way forincoming video screens, as we did forthe Stones, but in the main it hasn’tbeen too much of a struggle. The trailers

from [locally-based] Edwin Shirley’shave been here all the time for us touse as storage, and that’s been veryhelpful.

“We did trials for all of thiswhen we arrived in the venue and intaking everything up in the roof wemaintained a trim height of 70 feet.When the Stones came in, they wereplaying with an end-on stage, so witheverything up above the in-the-round

position, no one noticed. We’ve also done a deal withthe MOBOs production team whereby they’re usingour sound and lights to a large extent.

“The most helpful factor was that the scoreboardwasn’t used by any of the incoming events. If it had,we’d have had to take everything out and that wouldhave made load-ins impossible within our allocatedtime.”

Unless one considers the symbol-shaped stage,there wasn’t a set design in the obvious sense. Thestage itself grew from Prince’s appearance at thisFebruary’s Super Bowl XLI. Said Reynolds: “WhenPrince decided to evolve the idea for the O2, Bugzeerented a venue and projected the symbol image on tothe floor, so Prince could get an idea for the size thestage needed to be and the form it would take. Theconcept was given to Tait Towers and they built thestage in 19 days.”

Considering the very personalised nature of theshow and its design, it was surprising to discover thatPrince had invited support acts to open each show. Itwasn’t something that fazed stage manager MikeDevlin too much. “We don’t have a lot of ground towork with up there to make everything fit, but as longas we have our 15-20 minutes to get the main showready to go, then all is fine. It’s no big deal.”

Prince had already toured Musicology as an in-the-round production three years ago, so this formatalready felt familiar. Reynolds: “The only real difficulty isthat the shape of the symbol lends itself to playingdown the length of the arrow, like a thrust, and almostlike it’s an end-on configuration. As a performer, to beable to work the whole stage as 360° degrees is a littlemore problematic than when you have a symmetricaldesign.

Chris Reynolds Mike Devlin

Mark VanderWall

MILO in the roof

Bill Sheppell

Meyer Galileo systems at FOH


Top: Production office plans of the arena.Above: Garry ‘Sport’ Waldie, Leif Dixon and Stuart Hale in lighting world.

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“Also, because it’s not thatsymmetrical to the floor or the room,it throws up other issues like gettingthe right sound coverage with sub-bass, where normally you’d havesymmetrical focal points. The hang isone thing, but when you get to thefloor, you need to be able to cover allthe nooks and crannies. So we’ve hadto zone the coverage and take each ofthose zones on its own merit, andeffectively tailor it separately for thearea it covers. It took a while to getthe best results but I think we’ve nowarrived at a very good position.”

SONIC SOLUTIONSEarly on during the run of shows,there was a shift of responsibilities inthe audio department which resultedin Concert Sound partnering with LarsBrogaard’s rental company, MajorTom.

Reynolds explained: “I felt theoriginal sound design got a bitmuddled. We did the first three orfour shows with Concert Sound’sAdamson Y-Axis system, and althoughI had some long chats with Brock andJesse Adamson to find a better wayforward, we weren’t getting it right inhere, possibly because we might haveapproached it in slightly the wrong

way at the beginning.“We originally had delay points in

the design, and also brought in someV-DOSC delays from Britannia Row,as well as patching into the house JBLVerTec rig, but it all became toomuch.”

FOH engineer Bill Sheppell was alate addition to the crew who arrivedin late July. “At the point I came in,there wasn’t a sound guy making thecall for what he wanted, and that hadto be fixed,” he said. “I was told it wasan Adamson rig and I was happy withthat, having used it before, but theirpeople wanted to do a six hang mainPA while the show was designedaround an eight hang, and it wasn’tgoing to change because of screenpositions and other factors. We endedup with a configuration that wasn’tworking.”

Another problem was signal lossdue to damping of the cable length.“The amps were up in the catwalk andwe had 100m cables. We figured wewere losing about 8-9dB due todamping through the copper. Theproblem evaporates when your ampsare in the loudspeakers themselves,which is the situation we now havewith the Meyer gear.”

Reynolds continued: “I alreadyOne of PRG’s MAC 2000-loaded Pantographs


knew the Meyer Sound MILO system from RodStewart’s tour and, unlike the Adamson, it was alreadytried and tested in-the-round, although I think the Y-Axis a great system. The solution was to sub-contractMajor Tom as the Meyer provider, while ConcertSound, as the main contractor, handled the monitorsystem, sidefills and all the control.

“I just felt the MILO offered a much simplersolution; the delays are now gone and we’ve endedup with a great result from two excellent rentalcompanies.”

In total, the PA system comprised 104 self-powered Meyer MILO cabinets, 20 M'elodies, 40 x700-HPs and seven UPA-1Ps. These were all aligned,processed, monitored and predicted with Galileo 616,SIM 3, RMS and MAPP Online Pro systems. The initialset-up was handled by Michael Maxson.

I joined Bill Sheppell at the FOH position just ashe was finishing off “torturing the crew” with hisregular line-check choice of a Steely Dan CD. Hischoice of console was a Digidesign Venue D-Showwhose digital recall facilities, he said, were a great assetin helping him get immediately into the mix ballparkwhen loading back into the O2 after the gaps betweenshows.

Sheppell commented: “Prince changes the set listevery night and we don’t know what he’s going to dountil just before each show, but every song has asnapshot and it’s great to just order that set list on theconsole digitally.

“The interesting thing is that there are nosignificant fader moves. Prince doesn’t want that — heprefers the dynamics to come from the band. So Ihave my faders set in fader-safe mode and all I’m really

doing is changing some reverbs and delays, which areall very good-sounding plug-ins.

“There’s no outboard here at all. The only gearyou see are the Meyer Galileo system processors, andthe Lake I/Os for EQ and grouping my matrices. Inever work without my Lakes — I love those Mesafilters.”

Sheppell described the microphone choice as a“mix of everything, stuff that I’ve used for years”.Shure KSM9s were used on all vocals, Beyer TGX45headsets with Shure wireless packs for the dancingbacking vocalists, Heil PR40 and Shure Beta91 pairedfor kick drum, PR20 on bottom snare, Beta98 on topsnare, Heil PR30 and two Shure KSM32s on Prince’sguitar.

“You don’t see too many Heil mics on the roadbut they sound great on guitar,” said Sheppell. “A friend

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Video director Skip Twitchell


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of mine, Toby Francis who mixes Velvet Revolver, knows Bob Heilwho was keen to send some stuff over to me. It’s a small companybut he sure knows how to make a great microphone.”

Monitor engineer Mark VanderWall is also a Digidesign VenueD-Show user — his desk was split into two for Prince and hepresided over 60 inputs, generating a total of 24 mixes to a mixtureof stage wedges and in-ear systems.

While the IEM side was straightforward, with Sennheiser G2wireless systems and a hard-wired Shure choice for the keyboardplayer, the monitor loudspeakers appeared to be a ‘mix’n’match’affair with Adamson M15 wedges (yes, Adamson still played a part), apair of Meyer UPAs for keyboards, JBL VerTec sidefills and EAWKF755 downfills.

LIGHTINGPRG Europe provided a full lighting package — Robin Wain, crew chief AndyMitchinson and the rest of the PRG team did “a damn fine job”, according to ChrisReynolds, who was very impressed with the company’s custom-made, concertina-like Pantographs, which each carried a Martin MAC 2000 profile and moved up anddown during the show on Kinesys Elevation 1+ motors, controlled by Vectorsoftware.

“That idea was around from the start,” said Reynolds. “It’s a big part of theshow and creates a lot of different layers and 3D looks. The main focus is on Princehimself.”

The hot seat was reserved for lighting designer/director Garry ‘Sport’ Waldiewho has been a Prince associate for the last four years and gained previous in-the-round experience with both the Purple One and Metallica.

“You always get a lot of direction from Prince,” said Waldie. “I submitted adesign for these shows in the beginning but it got changed around because he hadthe theory that he wanted everything to be pushed to the outer sides. That’s whywe have the eight pods that are hidden behind the four PA hangs.

“There’s a large number of Martin MAC 2000 washes and profiles on theshow. They form the lion’s share of the system, and I love the way they perform.Many of them are on the Pantographs and the pods, of which four also haveSyncrolites on the bottom. At first, we were thinking about having lights on pipes,staggered at different heights, but then PRG came up with the Pantographs which

are flat — not the usual four-sided types.”Also in the spec were audience Moles and ACLs “for instant gratification”,

Atomic strobes, High End F-100 and Le Maitre G300 smoke generators, Le MaitreFreezeFog Pro dry ice machines, and half mirror balls which appeared in fourplaces around the stage. “The mirror balls provide a look that appeared on the lasttour, and Prince really likes that,” said Waldie. “We don’t have a lot of gimmicks orspecials — it’s really about the man and the music.”

That said, for the majority of the show, Waldie delivered a colossal number oflighting cues and appeared to squeeze every feature out of each instrument in therig. Only occasionally did his pace relax — such as on Prince’s solo piano medley— and the occasional total blackout served to heighten the drama.

Controlling the lighting was a grandMA console. “I’ve just made the changeafter being a Hog II guy for many years,” explained Waldie. “I’m still learning thedesk and it was great to have the support of Demfis Fyssicopulos who came outfrom Florida to get me up to speed.

“I’m glad I changed and with so many shows in one place, this was the time todo it. I’ve never had any problems with the Hogs — we did a stadium tour withthree of them linked together and it was always very stable. I just need morepower and outputs for this job because I’m also running some video [e.g. fire andripple effects] to the Nocturne V-9 LED panels that run along the edge of thestage.”

Lighting integration partner Control Freak Systems — who played a starringrole in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium tour — provided assistance in

a variety of ways.Said Waldie: “Leif Dixon

of Control Freaks has given mea lot of extra programminghelp and along with StuartWhite, they devised a methodwhereby some of the drumpads trigger a MIDI signal thatcues some strobe effectsautomatically, which gives meone less job to do!”

FRONT ROW EYESAmerican video rental giantNocturne Productions washired to provide a no-frills I-Mag solution for those in the‘nosebleed’ zone. “The frontrow eyes for the top rowseats” is how video directorSkip Twitchell defined his job.“It’s always that much easier tosell tickets for the last threerows if the punters know theycan see the artist up close.”

A Nocturne employee forthe last 23 years, Twitchell’s

recent touring work has included Tim McGraw & Faith Hill, Aerosmith and PaulMcCartney. “We have a fairly typical in-the-round video system for Prince,” he said.“We have four long-lensed Ikegami 45L cameras at the four compass points of thestage and a variety of fixed, moveable POV [proprietary] cameras for tight close-upsof the band. There’s a screen hung in each of the four corners of the room, and wesend everything to them via 10kW Barco projectors.”

Other notables in the video crew included video engineer Dave Lemmink andprojectionist Noel Wyatt. Twitchell, who operated a Pinnacle i9000 switcher, added:“Other than an introductory piece of VT [an appraisal of Prince’s career by severalhigh-profile personalities], the video is all live I-Mag. It’s a pretty simple show forvideo world — nothing whizz-bang’s going on, but what we do, we aim to do itright!”

SUSTENANCEOne might be forgiven for assuming that the catering contract went automatically toLittle Red Courgette, however, it was the team from Eat Your Hearts Out, led byhead chef Justin Chambers, who provided the crew and artists (and TPi) with qualitysustenance throughout the O2 residency.

Another company worthy of mention is Summit Steel, which as the residentrigging supplier at the O2, provided services to Prince’s production team for all ofthe load-in/out movement. The crew’s head rigger was Mike Farese.

As if 21 shows weren’t enough, Prince’s residency was also notable for its after-show parties in the neighbouring IndigO2 club venue, as Chris Reynolds explained:

A beefy Syncrolite B52 stands proud.Inset: A famous guitar.


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“We’ve duplicated a lot of our band gear and weuse the house sound and lighting rigs. So whenwe’ve finished the main gig, we load a truck with afew key items, take it over to the IndigO2 and doanother show.

“It varies every night, depending on what theboss wants to do. It could be the band, Prince andthe band, maybe some special guests... any numberof variables could happen. We’ve had someincredible nights in there. It’s a separately ticketedevent and the punters just have to take theirchances, and wait to see who comes on stage!”

After two months spent mostly ensconced onthe Greenwich peninsula, in the building formerlyknown as the Millennium Dome, what wasReynolds’ verdict on the new venue? “I like it a lot.There have been a few minor issues with things notbeing ready yet but like all new buildings, there arebound to be some teething problems. But think it’sbeen a steep learning curve for them and a verygood experience.

“They’ve established a lot of procedural mattersthat weren’t strictly in place before and it’s been agreat opportunity for the staff to adjust quickly toconverting from one event to another. The O2team are very helpful and considerate people, andtechnically astute. The venue is very well equippedand there are no issues with power, which isgenerously distributed all around the building.

“Our audiences appear to enjoy coming hereand I, for one, would be more than happy toreturn.”TPi

Photography by Ian TomeySpecial thanks to Chris Reynolds,

Marshall Arts & Concerts West


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