Sun, 02 Apr 2006

Secret Machines live at Leeds Met, 1st April 2006

I've been to many gigs where the sound technician's primary goal seems to be to render the entire audience deaf - in fact, young people today seem to measure how good a gig was by the numbmer of days they lose their hearing for. This gig was no exception, though after about 8 or 9 tracks the sound tech. did manage to achieve a rather satisfactory balance (everything was equally too loud) which I rather enjoyed through my -16dB ear protection.
This is the first gig I've attended where the lighting technician appears to have taken on the challenge of blinding the entire crowd - and doing a fair to middling job of achieving success! I've been dealing with lighting for years now, though I still consider myself to be an amateur- but along the way I've picked up a few 'rules' that were completely ignored tonight.

Light the performers, not the audience (in general) - every piece of lighting bar three LED colour changers at stage level were pointing at the audience. There was no front wash. I spent the entire evening watching some silouettes play on stage...
Blinders are to be used sparingly, if at all - entire choruses were just a wall of blinder from the stage, which meant I couldn't even look directly at the stage to see the silouettes mentioned in point 1.

Suffice it to say, I was pretty unimpressed with the lighting as a whole, though there were some inspired moments and sequences throughout the evening. You have to learn the rules of how to light a show before breaking them and I rather suspect this point has been bypassed by the designer of this show.
The Secret Machines (warning! Flash laden music playing website nonsense) themselves were largely technically good, but mostly failed to get the audience going or maintain a plateau of audience attention when they did manage to grab them. The very few sparse comments between numbers and the half-hearted aside regarding it being nice to be back in Leeds made little headway towards enrapturing the crowd. The fact that shadows rather than people appeared to be performing probably didn't help either.
I enjoyed the gig, despite it's shortcomings. The big question is whether I'd go to see them live again. After tonight's lighting show: definitely not. But what if they got a different lighting designer? I don't honestly know - though probably not. I don't feel I got anything more out of the evening than I would have had I listened to their CD.
posted at: 04:31 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry