Bandit Lites supplies McFly Arena tour

Bandit Lites UK supplied lighting equipment and crew to Production North for the recent McFly “Greatest Hits” arena tour, which featured a striking lighting and visual design by Dan Hardiman.

Bandit has serviced McFly since 2004, and Bandit UK’s Chief Executive, Lester Cobrin comments, “We are very fortunate to get the opportunity to work with McFly and their entire production team each year. Under the direction of Prod North’s Iain Whitehead and LD Dan Hardiman you can tell that all parties involved take a good deal of pride in making sure that the final product is of the highest quality.”

McFly’s management and Iain Whitehead all have active input into the lighting design. It is important to them that each tour looks and feels completely different from the last.

For this tour, McFly’s set is essentially rocky and energetic from start to finish and the pace rarely relinquishes. “I needed it to be able to rock out and create plenty of big dynamic beam looks,” explains Hardiman.

The basic structural elements consisted of 6 principal truss fingers, raked, cranked and angled outwards from the centre, spreading right across the width of the stage, plus two further smaller fingers per side on the outside edges - in a spider like fashion.

Each of the 6 main fingers had one Syncrolite SXB/52s on its downstage end. The majority of the lighting fixtures were distributed across the 10 fingers, and also across 12 vertical truss towers sitting onstage. The fingers were all made up from A-type trussing and were toned with 54 JTE PixelPARs, which had a spectacular effect and added depth, drama and multi-colouring to the architecture.

The moving lights were all Martin Professional – 40 MAC 2K Profiles – arranged across the fingers and 32 MAC 2K Washes, a row of which made a fan along the upstage edge, backlighting the band. There was also a single MAC 2K Wash on top of each of the vertical towers. The MAC Washes were generally used for block lighting and set illuminations, leaving the profiles free to do all the more elaborate effects and texturing.

Forty Atomic Strobes with scrollers were spread across the fingers and towers, and fourteen 4-lite ACL blinders were joined by an additional twelve 4-lites with colour changers, all ensconced in the towers.

Attached to the middle four vertical truss towers were 24 7ft sections of MR16 batten. The centre 6 towers were all 16 ft high, while the outer 6 towers were arranged as 3 pairs in decreasing heights of 4m, 3m and 1m respectively towards the offstage edge. These were constructed from specially modified A-Type trussing with the cross bars removed, allowing fixtures to be easily clamped inside. There were also 12 bars of ACLs at the back, providing more eye-candy for the numerous ‘large rock’ moments.

Hardiman used more Mac 2K’s, strobes and MR16’s on the ‘B’ stage which was constructed and positioned in the round for the band to get up close and personal with the audience.

Bandit also supplied four Lycian 2K followspots and a rigging package including 40 hoists and all necessary safety equipment.

All the lights were controlled via a WholeHog 3 operated by Ben Wingrove, and supplied and programmed by Hardiman. This also ran an M-Box Xtreme digital media server with content sent to the XL Video PPU backstage for outputting to 11 columns of Barco I-12 screens, alternating along the upstage edge with the trussing towers.

Bandit supplied a crew of 4 headed by Steve “Stona” Rusling with Andy Brown on dimmers and technicians Ricky “Avo” Butler and Joe Simpson.

Dan Hardiman comments, “As usual, Bandit has done a great job and supplied an excellent crew.”

The tour was another major success for McFly, who released their “All The Greatest Hits” album in November of this year.