We are the champions

Dubai was treated to a night of royalty when Queen and Paul Rogers hauled their heavy throne of equipment into town last month as part of their European Tour. Kelly Lewis of S&S reports.

While there is no guessing that a rock band of this stature does not survive in the music business for more than 35 years without acquiring some ‘baggage', in this case it was a reinforcement of no less than 32 tonnes of equipment that came along for the ride.

UK-based logistics experts, Rock-it Cargo, with support from GAC Logistics for the Middle East leg of the tour, co-ordinated a specialist charter solution using a McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 to airfreight the production equipment from London to Dubai for the rockers debut performance in the emirate, which took place in Festival City's "lovely car park" as Brian May described it.

While many bands born out of Queen's era have come and gone, only to be remembered as being part of the big hair metal genre, Queen have survived the hairspray heavy years and have grown to embrace the visionary insight shown by the band's late frontman Freddie Mercury.

As a performer, Mercury was known for his illustrious vocal capacity and onstage theatricality, so to him naming the band Queen, for all its visual interpretations, was a virtual licence for creative freedom.

Seventeen years on from Mercury's death and the retirement of bassist John Deacon in 1997, Brian May and Roger Taylor have transcended the realm of Queen into the next century with the vocal support of fellow rocker Paul Rogers (former lead singer of Free and Bad Company).

To visually juxtapose the band's 1970s rock-born roots, while highlighting their avant-garde approach to creative technology, it called for the skills of creative mastermind Baz Halpin.

Halpin, a UK-based lighting designer, may be less weathered than some lighting designers in the industry, but he is by no way lacking in experience.

Having already created a bevy of vivid designs for some of the industry's biggest productions, Halpin again employed his imaginative foresight to design a lighting rig that built on the archetypes of the band's signature style.

"The concept behind my lighting design was to recapture the old Queen style of massive, rock-heavy lighting rigs, while also using the most modern technology available. Additionally it was very important to work-in the lighting design to complement the video elements as designed by Mark Fisher of Mark Fisher Studio," says Halpin.

A 48-way Kinesys automation system with Vector control is being used on the tour, with equipment featuring moving lighting trusses and Fisher's 85 square metre horizontal-splitting video screen.

Fisher's natural aptitude for creating attention-grabbing displays is ever present throughout this tour, and particularly in the Barco OLite screen that he designed and had custom-built by Brilliant Stages.

Specified by Halpin, the screen is operated by Barry Branford and is supplied through Bandit Lites UK for the UK and European sections of the tour.

The screen, that takes pride of place on the centre upstage, is no mean feat weighing-in at seven tones, measuring 17 metres wide and five metres tall.

It is constructed from a combination of Barco OLite frames with a fully populated section in the centre and asymmetrically Par 64 aircraft landing lights populate the frames radiating outwards, along with 304 ACL bulbs fluidly dispersed, but symmetrically patched at the dimmers.

On the road, 24 half-tonne Lodestar motors suspend the screen with Kinesys Elevation 1+ drive units.

Twelve motors lift the top half of the screen and a further 12 are attached to steel stingers passing through the centres of the bottom panels, picking up from the bases of the frames.

The main lighting trusses are seven upstage/downstage fingers, all of which move and are rigged on a total of 18, one tonne Lodestars with Kinesys drive units.

Halpin says to give the onstage performance the varying dimensions (height and depth) and expand theatrical values that it requires, he designed the lighting and trussing in a manner that would allow for this.

"To make the stage flexible in it's visual element each of the finger trusses were hung on Kinesys motors," Halpin states.

"The three centre fingers had articulating hinge truss pieces, which allowed the fingers to change shape. They acted like knuckles on a digit with the added bonus of being able to bend both ways."

He says the trusses grew longer as they got towards the centre and spanned past the confines of the stage, which gave the lighting rig a vast appearance.

At the end of each finger a 5k Syncrolite was positioned with a 10k special on the centre finger.

Halpin says the LED screen was framed on either side by a series of vertical trusses and there were also two trusses upstage of the LED wall, which moved up and down to shoot over, under and through the LED wall depending on the song.

"As the LED wall moved during the show I needed the ability to position the trusses where I wanted them at any given point during the show," says Halpin.

"These trusses were populated with a combination of 5k Syncrolites, 3000W Xenon Space Flowers and Martin Atomic Strobes. On the floor we had a range of Clay Paky Alpha 300 Beam, Mac 2k Performance, Pixelines and Molephay."

To compete with the screens brightness and supplement light fill, four Lycian M2 follow spots were top mounted on another truss positioned in front of the OLite located at the rear of the upstage.

For large aerial effects, Halpin uses six Space Flowers positioned on the floor in two clusters of three; either side of the stage, while a four foot diameter facet mirror-ball is flown directly above the B-stage at the end of the thrust.

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