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Elvis Leaves the Building with Bandit
The phenomenal success of this concept – the brainchild of producer Stig Edgren – started as a celebration of The King’s amazing penchant for live performance on the 20th anniversary of his death in 1996. It’s been touring the world ever since, with Elvis appearing on a giant video screen centre stage, flanked by members of his original TCB band and two backing vocal groups - the Sweet Inspirations (female) and The Stamps (male).
Cape Cod based lighting director Greg Hamm has been with the show since the very start of its touring career (the original design was by Marilyn Lowey) in 1997. For European ventures, he’s always called on Lester Cobrin to sort everything out, and once again approached him to supply equipment for this leg of the tour. This is the first time that Bandit has supplied lighting production for the show.
Cobrin says: “Greg and I started communicating towards the end of last year and since then I couldn’t wait to get involved and witness the show again. It’s one heck of a concept and how it merges together is just fantastic. The timing and synchronising between Elvis on screen, the band and backing vocalists on stage, coupled with sound and lighting, is truly jaw dropping. Greg works the lighting system very hard but with such smoothness. I’ve never seen so many different looks from a PAR rig. I’m extremely proud to be involved with such a dynamic team of people like Greg, Stig and Peter Edmonds. I take my hat off to those guys.”
Hamm states: “I always ask Lester to co-ordinate the lighting supply as the service is just the best and he hand picks the crew – I like to have familiar faces if they are available!”
Lighting for ‘Elvis The Concert’ evolves as the tours continue. This time - unusually - it’s a fully generic rig. They’ve used moving lights in the past, but after recently performing a show in the US without them, Edgren decided that they should revert back to a retro look. This naturally would have been truer to the lighting technology available in Elvis’s day.
There are approximately 300 PARs and ACLs arranged across four double-hung pre-rigged trusses. The second truss has vertical ladder beam at the ends for some lower level cross-stage lighting.
The PARs are indeed worked hard as they have to make up for the moving lights, so Hamm has split the six-colour washes between three saturated colours and a set of three pastels, and the ACLs are bumped in for a bit of additional jazziness in the up-tempo numbers. Lighting is also a fine balance of illuminating all the people onstage - In addition to the band and two sets of backing vocalists, there’s a 16 piece orchestra – and ensuring the levels are correct for the video to look its best. This is achieved with plenty of very tightly focussed 10K and 12K washes.
The Bandit crew of Steve Rusling, Nigel Julian, Craig MacDonald and Dennis Brown – have the focus down to a fine art, and it’s completed in little over an hour every day – with each of them doing a truss each.
On this tour they have also added a trussing surround to the centre screen, which is toned with Pulsar Chroma PARs, P36 sized LED fixtures.
Hamm controls everything using an Avolites Diamond 3 – his control console of choice for large generic shows. His first experience with Bandit supplying the lights has been an entirely positive one and he says they’ve been “absolutely brilliant” as a supplier.
The main Elvis video screen is flanked by two smaller ones used for band IMAG, directed by Kevin Williams. All video production for the European leg of the tour was supplied by XL Video. FOH sound is mixed by Howard Lindeman with Seamus Fenton on monitors, and the system was supplied by Canegreen. The tour production manager is Peter Edmonds.
12th May 2005
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