The band wanted a visual departure from last year's LED wall, which featured low-resolution imagery. They favoured a less technical stage look, but also wanted to continue with digital technology: this provided the starting point for lighting designers Andy Hurst and Vince Foster and the UVA team, who came up with the concept of a super low-res horizontal wall of Pixelline - 151 pixels wide by 161 high - with gaps in between the units.
Highlighting the band in silhouette, the Pixelline wall served as a dynamic (and very bright) backdrop for largely video originated visual that were played onto it. In practical terms, the wall consisted of four custom banks of eight Pixelline fixtures each, with a Pixelline width space in between each batten. These were designed and constructed by Utopium Lighting for easy transportation and rigging, and toured to all shows on the itinerary as 'specials' for Massive Attack's powerful set.
UVA added a DMX interface to Dragonfly to link the Pixellines, via an Avolites USB-to-DMX box, to the control PC. The computer rack consisted of two custom-built machines with 2.8GHz P4 processors, 1Gb RAM, 60Gb hard drives and G Force 4 video cards, running two channels of video.
The Pixelline show ran automatically, triggered via MIDI from MD Kerry Hopwood's computer, which was time-locked to the music, and completely independent of the rest of the lighting, operated by Andy Hurst. UVA created most of the video content themselves, bringing in guest producers to work on two tracks - 'Bullet' and 'Antistar'. The sinister 'Safe From Harm' started with green text scrolling through a list of names of Iraqi children killed in the US-led war. Halfway through the track, the Pixelline wall switched to Iraq war footage - further emphasizing the potent message.
Andy Hurst came onboard at the start of the tour. His lighting design included the placement of fixtures upstage of the Pixelline wall, slicing through the gaps and adding another dimension to the event. Back light was very much the chosen oeuvre - the band like to be seen without having their actual faces illuminated - a big challenge for lighting.
Hurst's theatre and ballet background was invaluable in creating a "Bitty and beautiful", energetic, contrasting show, working closely with the Pixelline elements. His general lighting specification included 38 High End PC Beams, 10 Coemar SuperCycs, 12 Martin Atomic strobes, two High End X.Spots for key light and some 5ks with scrollers. His desk of choice was a Wholehog II.
Equipment for the Bristol show was all supplied by Utopium - also locally based. For them, the event was part of the Bristol Harbourside and Grolsch festivals, with shows running on six consecutive evenings at the attractive downtown Harbourside site. Additional architectural lighting for the Grolsch days was supplied by Halo - including illuminating the circular Lloyds-TSB building, which formed the upstage backdrop, in Grolsch green!
Sound for the Bristol show was also a collaborative effort - with the V-Dosc stacks specified by Massive Attack's FOH engineer Dave Bracey, supplied by Britannia Row, with control and racks from Oxford-based WE Audio, who were also supplying the other Harbourside Festival events.
WE Audio supplied its two new Yamaha PM 5000 consoles - one at each end of the multicore, XTA C2 and G2 inserts, Focusrite Liquid Channel and Avalon valve compressors for the main vocals, plus an XTA DS800 line system. Massive Attack use a Sennheiser IEM system, but WE Audio also supplied a Turbosound 450 monitor wedges and two Soundcraft Ser
