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Paul Weller’s Got it Covered with EAW at Royal Albert Hall
Paul Weller kicked off his tour to promote his forthcoming covers album, ‘Forty Days and Forty Nights’ with three sold-out shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall in the first week of June. Weller’s long-time front-of-house engineer Andrew Jones (pictured) specified an EAW KF760 line array system as his PA of choice, along with Meyer fills and wedge monitors, all supplied by London rental company Canegreen.
Jones has been a fan of EAW for a number of years, and recently of the KF760 line array system in particular. “I first heard the system a couple of years ago at a club in the US, and straight out of the box I thought it sounded beautiful. The timing couldn’t have been better because Paul Weller was due to perform a solo acoustic concert at the Royal Albert Hall, so I specified the KF760 system straight away. Not without a certain amount of trepidation, I confess, because as an acoustic space, the RAH is a challenge at the best of times. However, Andrew Frengley at Canegreen came up with a three-hang arrangement for optimum coverage of the RAH, which we’re also using today, and the whole thing worked perfectly. We used the same system for the arena tour throughout the UK later that year and it performed impeccably across all types of venue, even when we had to ground stack. In fact, Iron Maiden’s FoH man, Doug Hall came to one of those gigs and was so impressed that he specced 760 off the back of it, so we must have been doing something right!”
The PA configuration developed by Canegreen especially for the oval-shaped performance space of the RAH comprises a front hang of twelve KF760 and four KF761 enclosures and two side hangs of eight KF760 and four KF761 cabinets each supplemented by eight SB1000s per side. The whole system was flown from a new centre grid designed by Canegreen’s project manager Pete Hughes, again especially for the Royal Albert Hall, specifically for line array systems. “The problem faced by any sound designer in the RAH is how to deal firstly with the shape of the room, and secondly all of the reflections,” explained Hughes. “It gets even worse if you want to use a line array because the rigging and motor points that exist were not designed to fly line array systems, so you’re compromised before you even start. So, Andrew [Frengley] and I decided to design our own flying frame to work with the existing motor points that would be able to fly a line array system in the 3-hang configuration that we feel is best for the space. With it we can achieve the angle required for optimum coverage and minimum reflection or slapback.”
Jones is pleased with the results. “I’ve done over thirty gigs in the Royal Albert Hall but the best sound I have ever heard is the KF760 line array system. I’ve not used anything else on Paul Weller since that first acoustic gig, and the enhancements we’ve achieved with rigging and flying configurations have just made a great system even better.”
15th June 2004
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