ROBERT PALMER : Music & Style

Sound...

The main Britannia Row front-of-house PA system at Wembley consisted of 64 Turbosound Flashlight cabinets and 64 21-inch Flashlight lows, with a combination of Floodlight cabinets for the front of stage infills and near fills. The mixing tower delay featured eight Flashlight and eight Flashlight lows, with a further four Flashlight and four Flashlight lows, left and right of the mix position. As is often the case at Wembley Stadium, the sound was also fed through the house Electro Voice system, which is designed to provide extra intelligibility at the high end for the upper balconies.

Front-of-house Engineer for the main show was Simon Honywill, who looked after the 96 channels coming from the stage with two linked Midas XL4 automated consoles, and whose experience with orchestras was considered essential. An Amek Langley Recall console for the support bands (Posh, The Mutton Birds, and The Bootleg Beatles) was controlled behind Honywill by John Garrish. On stage were four desks: firstly a support band Midas XL3, then for the main event JJ used a Yamaha PM4000M combined with a Soundcraft SM12 board which mainly sub-mixed percussion. Adjacent ro JJ was Steve Lutley who mixed the orchestra down on a PM4000 and sent sub-groups to JJ and Honywill.

Brit Row Project Manager Mike Warren was extremely pleased about his preference of monitor engineer, saying: "I think JJ is probably the best choice I could have made on this, because he has such a great adult temperament and doesn't appear to get fazed by anything. One might think that with the range of artists on this bill there would be a few personality clashes, but everyone involved has been great."

Another key choice was that of Accusound mics for the orchestra - Gregg Jackman, a big fan of the mics, insisted on fitting them with B&K capsules and inserting them directly into the string instruments' f-holes. While Hand Held Audio provided 10 Samson UHF radio mics with Shure SM58 heads for the star vocalists, Kd Lang preffered a wired 535. All the star vocal mics are Samson UHF radio mics, and Yazawa used a wired Shure SM58. The backing vocalists, meanwhile, were on Shure Beta 58s.

For the first five numbers of the show, the vocals were struggling to be heard over the band. This, a senior member of the crew explained, was "a mix thin", which surprised me, given the full rehearsal on the previous night, and the existence of full XL4 automation. Toni Braxton's problem, however, had less to do with engineering than her mic technique. As the vocal penetration improved, a most bizarre explosion sound during Winwood and Chaka Khan's version of Superstition alarmed most of us on the mix tower. This was explained later by Hand Held's Nick Bruce-Smith as the result of a bizarre case of radio interference: "The very same thing happened at the same point in the set during the dress rehearsal. We heard this big bang, and when we checked it out with a spectrum analyser, we found that an ethnic radio station was broadcasting right in the middle of Channel 69, the same channel occupied by the mics."

When asked about the integrity of the stadium sound at the event, Brit Row's Bryan Grant suggested that any failure to project the traditional Flashlight quality may have had something to do with the increasingly common 'set versus sound' battle. "There was a compromise with sound from the beginning, because we were presented with a fait accompli. The PA was oushed halfway up the stage and then they stuck (set motifs) in front of the stack but still insisted that it had to sound perfect. In reality, it's actually quite difficult to project a good sound through several inches of plywood. But that's indicative of the sibling rivalry between set design and live audio."

... and Vision

The set itself was on typical grand Mark Fisher scale, extending across almost the entire width of one end of the wembley pitch, with Edwin Shirley Staging's Tower System roof heroically taking the strain of 30 tons of Jumbo Tron video screens and around 15 tons of lighting. There were three main visual motifs: a set of gold curtains to the right made by Blackout which were loosely based on one of the rooms at Elvis's Graceland, the large Brilliant Stages-manufactured zipper at the back of the stage was representative of the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers album cover (although for practical reasons the zipper on this stage was upside down); and, the red and white striped drapes to the left (again by Blackout) were another recognisable pop motif. Added to these items  were two sets of gold torches from Brilliant Stages, which Fisher simply felt were "a good idea".

He said: "One could choose to intellectualise about the design and how it might or might not have fitted in to the pop history theme, or one might prefer to take the view that pop is not an intellectual activity and therefore the design doesn't really matter as long as it's fun and attractive."

Fisher, who has designed the sets for every Tribute show to date, said to he and Hollingsworth spent several long meetings looking at computer-simulated views of the stage before deciding on the optimum angles for television. "Just as Jagger is with the Stones and Gilmour and Mason are with the Floyd, Tony becomes a major part of the design dialogue. But the big difference is money. My discretionary budget for the Stones (current tour) is between $10-20 million which is being amortised over 150 shows. But Songs & Visions is a one-nighter, so I literally have about one-hundredth of the Stones' budget to work with. To arrive at something that looks as big in Wembley Stadium for one night as the U2 set when you're only paying for it over one night is major exercise in economics. It is a mammoth conjuring trick to make the project break even, and that is taking into account the sponsorship."

One of the most striking aspects of the set, as with U2's PopMart show, was the integration of the video material - a mixture of live camera images and historical icon imagery (eg. newsreel footage and newspaper headlines) sourced and edited by Mike Norton of 4i, and displayed on five Screenco-supplied Jumbo Trons which created an interesting 'wall' background for both camera shots and the general look of the set. 4i's images were fed to the screens by a BBC OB unit, which sent signals to each of Screenco's four ICS controllers. Screenco's Anita Page commented: "It was essentially the BBC's show; our involvement was as simple as arriving with the screens and rigging them. They ran the cameras and provided the DVEs, which dictated how the images looked on the three JTS-35 Jumbo Trons (hung upstage centre, stage left, and right, and each measuring 5.04 metres wide x 7.56 metres high)."

Adding a further two 4.22 x 3.17 metre JTS-80s to the set only two days before the event, to aid sight lines at the front of the crowd, did not present any problem to Screenco which just happened to have enough stock in its Eastleigh, Hampshire warehouse to cope with the demand. "We had 25 modules of the Arsenal Football Club screen in the warehouse, which was waiting to go out a few days later for the Prodigy's gig in Dublin. So it wasn't to much hassle; we just had to ensure that we had all the necessary cable." The extra screens faced each other at either side of the stage structure and were fed images from a variety of those relayed to the three upstage Jumbo Trons. "Because the DVEs were able to divide images, at any one time there could have been seven separate images shown on stage, although the actual maximum on the night was four," added Ms Page.

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