| There are some great jobs out there, but not many compare to lighting rock shows for a living. Imagine being a part of thousands of live shows, working with stars to get the look they want to achieve, and touring the world. It beats any desk job, hands down. One lucky Ottawa resident has embarked on this carreer path; Alastair Bramall-Watson is currently on tour with Nine Inch Nails as a lighting director. He's been on the road as a lighting technician, director, and guitar tech for innumerable tours over the years. Recently, Alastair was good enough to take a few minutes to answer some of our questions, and shed a bit of light on his trade. |
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INQ: How long have you been in the stage lighting business? How did you get into it? ABW: I have been into lighting since I was 17, before this time I barely even knew of it's existence, certainly not as an art form, but a lot of the concerts I went to before that time had minimal lighting anyway, a few lights just to allow you to see the bands, no special effects or anything away from the norm. I started by volunteering at the local University in the town I grew up in, Sheffield in England, I was part of a group of people called "Stage Services." We supplied technical support, (lighting, sound, DJing and humping gear) to all the bands that came to play our venue. When I first started there we would do 3 bands a week on average. I started off by hanging lights, but 3 months later I put myself up for the position of "Lighting Officer" which was the Students Union politically correct way of saying House Lighting Director. To get this post you had to be elected by simple majority of your peers in the Stage Services Committee. I got the job, and carried this on for 3 years. After about 2 years I started working as a stage hand at the local arena, which had just been built (at this time in England, there were only 3 arenas in the whole country). I eventually got myself on a training course with a company called LSD, who were an international lighting company whose head office was in Birmingham (UK, not Alabama). I started off as a moving light tech, and the first tour I went on was a seven day tour of the UK with Marc Almond. It was a night in Glasgow, when the Guitarist's volume pedal broke, and I fixed it, I was then asked to continue on the European tour as guitar tech. After a several tours as guitar tech for a few different bands (who shall be nameless because of the next comment), I decided to stick to lighting, as I could have an input into the show, and not have to deal with petulant children, a lot of whom I felt could barely play their instrument of choice. I would set up all the backline equipment, tune their really cool expensive guitars, and then hand them over to an inept twat who sounded like he was playing it with his feet! So my lighting career has lasted about 14 years so far, I have been what I would call a serious Lighting Designer now for about 8 years, I was doing "lighting design" in the years before this, and I thought I had it all worked out, but looking back I was playing at it. INQ: Have you only done music shows or have you also done theater and television? ABW: The vast majority of the work I do is live music, it's the music that brought me into this, not essentially the lighting, as I mentioned before I wasn't really that aware of Stage Lighting, I wanted to be involved in live music. I got hooked into the lighting thing, when I realized that I too could be part of the show.
I have avoided theater like the plague, I had a lot of friends who
worked, and still do to some extent in the theater, but it was not
something which appealed to me, I feel that you can look at a live
bands show and tell if the lighting designer started in theater. They
As for lighting television, it is a means to an end, it really is about providing light for the camera, and anything else is a bonus. I did do a few shows for a live music show in the UK some years ago, called TFI Friday, which had 3 bands on every week, which was filmed in a TV studio, and it sucked! But i have directed lighting for a number of film shoots, especially live band DVD's, I did Slipknot's Disaster Pieces, I did lighting for Rammstein on the opening sequence of "XXX" and more recently G3 Live In Tokyo, which was released 2 weeks ago. So I do see the Television or 'studio' lighting more than I do theater. INQ: Are you a musician yourself? If so, what do you play? ABW: I used to play the guitar, quite a bit, in fact I had 5 guitars, I even built one of them, but I stopped playing over 5 years ago, I have barely touched one since. I know I cannot drum, but a lot of people with more than 4 brain cells can't so I don't worry about it. INQ: Right now you're on tour with Nine Inch Nails. How is the show going? ABW: The show looks awesome! It's been a lot of hard work, we carry a lot of new lighting technology on this tour, so we are effectively beta testing a lot of equipment, which will then appear on other shows as time drifts by, we will then be using the next lot of lighting and more increasingly video equipment that will be invented.
A few years ago as video was being used more and more at shows it
became apparent that shows were about to change and was going to go one
of 2 ways, either video would run everything, or lighting would run
everything. Luckily lighting has taken over a lot of video, all the
video on the show is run from the lighting desk. This is because of two
reasons:- [Editor's Note: my day job is a new media video technician. I also used to do TV lighting, and I like climbing just fine :) ] On the other side of things, everybody is tired, we recently did a 5 in a row around NOLA for Voodoo Fest, and people are still recovering from that. My typical working day is about 16 hours long, some of the lighting techs, will do 2-3 hours more than that, but when we get a day off, they will get all that time off, I usually do 4-6 hours of work on a "day off" in my hotel room, either with the lighting desk, or just on my computer. INQ: Is Trent Reznor an easy guy to work for? ABW: Trent is one of a rare breed. He is involved 100% with all the aspects of the show, and of course Trent is Nine Inch Nails. The thing about him is he is very good at explaining what he wants, whereas a lot of the time musicians don't know their arse from their elbow when it comes to lighting, that's why people like me have a job. However, he does give me a free reign on new songs and will mention any good or bad points when he has seen it. We then change it appropriately. INQ: For those who haven't seen it, what kind of lighting set-up do you have on this show? ABW: There are a large number of lights on this, and a lot of video. The set up is essentially a boxed stage, with various lighting trusses holding different lighting or video equipment. Here is a list of what we physically have:
-28x Mac 2000 Profile INQ: You've also toured recently with Joe Satriani. What was that tour like? Is it much different lighting for mostly instrumental music?
Lighting for instrumental music can be different, however, not that different, if you imagine a piece of Joe's music now in your head, or just listen to it, you will soon hear a very familiar structure, verse, chorus, verse bridge, etc. It's the same without the words, that's all, However I have had some very long conversations with Joe about which bit is the verse and which bit is the chorus. INQ: What was your toughest gig? ABW: Hmm.. Tricky one, I survived them all, it always seems to happen, I must have done about 250 shows a year for the last 10 years, so I've seen 2,500 concerts. Apart from the ones I have been to as a spectator. And I have probably witnessed the canceling of maybe 25 concerts, and about 20 of those have been made up later, so only 5 permanent cancellations. I went to India this summer with Joe Satriani, that was tough. 45? in the shade, and a stage made out of offcuts of wood with no roof, that really sucked. Some of the Rammstein shows were pretty tough, just getting that much stuff to happen at the right time is hard going, but if the effect looks good then it is worth it. I honestly couldn't put it down to any one show, you carry on and put the bad ones behind you, but we are bringing literally hundreds of tonnes of equipment with us and expecting it to work all the time, it's a wonder more shows don't happen to be honest. INQ: What software do you use to drive your shows? ABW: A mix of different software, for the running of the show itself, we use the software which is installed in the control boards, (lighting desks, video drivers etc). To build a show, we use QuickTime a lot, and Motion. There are also a few lighting emulation programs around which you can put your design into and then control it with a lighting desk, to see what you get, one of them is called WYSIWYG. Design wise I use Vectorworks, or macprolux. INQ: What kind of lights do you typically use? Do you own them or are they usually rented? ABW: All the lights I use are rented by the artist from a lighting company, it costs a lot of money to rent the lighting, but would be completely prohibitive to buy them all. A single Martin Washlight costs $10,000, and that is one of the cheaper ones. That is before you get into the video stuff, which is ridiculously expensive. The lights I use depend on what I need to do with them, part of the job of a designer is to be able to spec the equipment they need to do the job which they have visualized. the other constraint is budget, that does not really seem to be that much of an issue here, if I voice a concern that we need an extra light to do a specific task it suddenly appears the next day by Fed Ex, which is rather amusing. We had a light built for Trent, which was a multi-ended creepy arm type thing, with a light on each arm, and it was drawn on Vectorworks. 2 days later it appeared at the show, and I forgot to tell the lighting crew it was coming, so they got a little stressed about something else to plug in. A week later I was playing around with Vectorworks on the bus, and one of the lighting crew came up behind me, and said "Is that a light?" and I said 'No, it's a vase, why?' to which he replied, "Oh, only cos the last time I saw you drawing something on that program it turned up on the loading dock 2 days later!" INQ: How much labour goes into designing and building a show?
The actual build takes about 5-7 hours depending on the venue, and about 3-4 hours to take down again, that is just lighting, lighting is first in and last out. INQ: What's the craziest thing you've seen on the road? ABW: Some of the things fans do to get into a concert that they don't have a ticket for. When I was 23 I was in Honduras doing a concert for a band, and we played one end of a football stadium (proper football, none of that picking it up bullshit). One fan climbed up the side of the stadium to get over the wall, he fell into the stadium and then broke both his legs when he landed. As he was carried away on a stretcher, he was begging to be left to see the concert. Is that crazy enough for you? INQ: What's the wildest thing you've ever seen a crew/artist do with a groupie? ABW: You know, it's time to smash the myth, very little happens. It may have done in the 70's 80's I don't know, I wasn't there then, now it really is a career, it's a job, we have too much to do now to give us the time off to get up to no good. I've heard stories, and when I worked for Page and Plant, I asked Robert about the fish, and he said it was probably true. But there are starfuckers out there, and you know what, nobody likes them, and the bands don't get it! A band comes into town once a year, maybe every 2 years, and they see these girls who are, shall we say 'hot to trot' and they think these girls have come to see them! It doesn't even occur to them that the crew has been through the town with 3 bands in the last 8 months, and guess what? the same sluts are hanging around outside the gig waiting for those guys too. Does the term riddled with it spring to mind? INQ: What's the most difficult part of being on the road for long periods of time? ABW: The most obvious things really, missing my girl, my family, not being able to book a holiday because you don't know when you will be touring. Living out of a suitcase all the time, not being able to cook for myself, (I love cooking) lots of things really. --- Much thanks to Alastair for being Inquisition's first interview-ee, and good luck on the rest of the tour! Interviewed Nov. 7, 2005, by Victor Couwenbergh. Have a comment on this article? Send us your feedback! |
tend to do things by the book, which is great, but you get a different
look. Theater is much more disciplined and fairly inflexible, and I
think it's a different breed of person who can do that successfully and
not get bored.
ABW: Joe Satriani's tour was completely different from this, it had a lot
lower budget for lighting, and my remit was completely different. I was
expected to carry a few lights on this tour, and use whatever else the
venue already had, and to bring that in line with our system. The whole
vibe of the tour was different too, it was a mixed band and crew tour,
everybody felt they were equal, we all got along as friends, and there
were no real barriers, we all went out to eat together on days off,
(which were few and far between, as if you don't sing you don't have to
rest your voice, which means you can do more show days in a row).
But all the crew felt looked after on this, and once on every leg of
the tour, we would have crew appreciation night, where the band took us
out and it was all about the crew. Touring with Joe was a lot of
fun, and I look forward to working with him again.
ABW: A lot. More than a lot of people realize, by the time people walk into
a concert a lot of the work is done, if you go to an arena concert with
a good production, design work started at least 2 months before the
first concert, and programming about 10 days to 2 weeks before. This
show took 2 weeks to program, and is still being adjusted on a daily
basis. There is a lot of back and forth between production managers and
lighting designers and equipment suppliers before you can settle on a
final design.