Lighting
designer Nick Gray of Renegade Design has created an exhilarating and slick
show for Brit rockers Kasbian’s major UK arena tour. Bringing power,
reliability and vibrant colour to the design Gray uses an array of Clay Paky
Sharpys and Sharpy Wash 330 fixtures, which he says these days never fail to
feature in his rig.
The tour has
so far visited major venues including Manchester Arena, Belfast Odyssey Arena
and London’s O2 Brixton Academy. Supplied by Neg Earth, the Sharpys and the
Sharpy Wash 330 fixtures are positioned high in the overhead rig to flood the
stage with intense colours and provide stunning and dynamic, audience embracing
aerial effects.
“Both the
Sharpy’s and the Sharpy Wash 330’s range of saturated colour is fantastic,”
says Gray. “They’re also really reliable. Important considering we were going
into big arenas and we didn’t have a huge budget. We had to choose our fixtures
carefully ensuring we had something that was good quality, feature rich and
robust. I also wanted to use B-EYEs but that was not to be this time, however,
I’m really looking forward to using them, and the Stormy Strobes, for the
festival season next summer.”
The design
is a multi-layered and fast paced with each fixture working hard for it’s
money. Gray has exploited every dynamic feature to deliver a light show that
complements the video, embraces the audience and punctuates each musical
nuance. Working collaboratively with programmer/operator Rob Gawler the resulting
show is extremely tight and cue-rich with every visual effect delivered in
beat-perfect synchronicity with the band.
“Kasabian’s
music is all about huge builds and drops – drawing the audience in and then
knocking them back,” continues Gray. “The guys are all fantastic performers so
I’m pretty relentless with the lights and screens. The audience experience is a
spectacular sensory overload – they love it and go mental!”
Gray says he
and The Bands main man Sergio Pizzorno have similar artistic tastes and so made
the decision to collaborate on the video content design for the tour, inspired
by psychedelic 2009 film ‘Enter The Void’. The Sharpy Wash 330’s stunning
texturising effects bring a further 3 D effect to the look, perfectly
complementing the visuals and further enthralling the audience.
\”The
Sharpy’s and the Sharpy Wash 330s are working really hard on this tour, they
give me plenty of creative variety in terms of looks and they move really
fast.” concludes Gray. “I’ve always been a fan of Clay Paky – the company is a
true innovator. Anyone can do the next stable version of someone else’s light
but it’s about having the idea first, and Clay Paky does that every time.”
