While promoting its latest album, Slipway Fires, Razorlight took in some surprisingly modest venues during its intimate UK tour, given the calibre of festivals that they headlined over the summer. Establishments such as London’s Brixton Academy, however, can attract some hardcore and demanding rock fans, but with this and four over gigs already nailed, Ian Laughton is relaxed enough to indulge in a little nostalgia.

 “I started engineering in the 80s with various bands – Elkie Brooks and people like that,” says Laughton. “I worked for what was then a little PA company called Star Hire (now staging specialists Star Events Group) as staging crew chief on weekdays and PA man at weekends. We had a Turbosound festival system, the one with the long throw horns. This is what I really cut my teeth on. After that we used Floodlight and Flashlight rigs, but then, of course, the industry went head first into line array, which in my view is fine for bigger venues, but when you’re playing theatres and clubs, really isn’t suitable.”

Provided by Entertainment Sound Specialists (ESS), the sound hire company run by Razorlight monitor engineer Phil McDaniel and his business partner, Richard John, the system comprised 18 TA-890H and 18 TA-890L cabinets with eight TSW-218 subs and four TQ-445s used across the front four fills. The system was powered by Britannia Row’s recently acquired Yamaha T5n amplifiers, with Dolby Lake units for system control. Two of the Aspect stacks were configured in B-mode with their horns rotated for infills or outfills as needed. Britannia Row system tech Mikey Gibbard and monitor tech and system rigger Darren Connor, were on hand to ensure all went to plan.

The venues on the tour varied considerably in size and shape, from theatre-style venues such as Brixton Academy, Manchester Apollo and Portsmouth Guildhall to more unusual designs such as Lincoln Engine Shed and Edinburgh Corn Exchange. The latter, for example, is effectively three long rectangular rooms – a central high-roofed main room with small VIP balcony at the rear, flanked each side by spaces with much lower ceilings.

The tour PA therefore, had to be extremely adaptable. At Brixton, for example, the flying limits meant that only a restricted number of cabinets could be hoisted, whereas the restricted room for the lighting rig at Edinburgh meant the entire audio system had to be ground stacked. Nevertheless, after having to sacrifice a couple of the TSW-218s to achieve this, the crew found that TA-890Ls were quite capable of providing the low end in their absence.

“Razorlight is a great band to mix – you need real punch and clarity from the live sound,” says Laughton. “It’s really hard to find both in live audio systems, but this one achieves it without even trying. There are a lot of dynamics in the band’s new album, so it’s a great test of its live sound. I honestly believe there’s nothing better than this system to do it justice. When it comes to live sound I’m quite old-fashioned – I like to hear the air moving and Aspect provides the best of both worlds. It’s a modern day system but it’s not line array.

“We’re only on day five of the tour now, but we nailed it from day one. I think it’s fantastic.

“After the Brixton show, people said it was the best sound they’d ever heard on the balcony. We had just four boxes per side facing up there,” he continues. “I thought it was nowhere near enough, that nobody would feel it, but Mikey said it would be fine and he was spot on. Apparently they had loads of people ring in and ask who the hell put that system in because they’d never heard anything like it.”

“There were 2,100 people on that balcony, with just eight cabinets covering them all. Afterwards, Bob Angus of Metropolis and the stage manger came out to us and said ‘people have been complaining about the sound in here for years, yet you come in and just get it right’.

“Well of course we’ve been doing shows in here for a few years but the aspect rig made a huge difference. I told them that if they want to know how to make Brixton Academy sound good, just call Britannia Row and ask for Mikey Gibbard. He’ll tell you what we put where and that’s the problems at the Academy sorted.”

“For me, one of the pleasures of this tour is being able to go back a few years. We’re in venues where you can point the boxes to where you want them to go and know the sound will be good without being reliant on prediction software. It’s amazing how important that is.”

“If you’re in arenas or stadiums you obviously have to make more use of the predictor software regarding where you position the boxes,” adds Gibbard. “But in venues like these, you can just look around and know the angles they’ve got to be at. To be honest it annoys me when you get to small venues like these and there’s a line array in there, because it causes more problems than it solves. But it’s often because that’s what the front of house engineer is used to nowadays.

“The Aspect system goes together in a very straightforward way. We go to each venue with a standard plan and then add or subtract to get what we’re trying to achieve. For example, at Edinburgh we put the big left and right ground stacks in, then realised we needed a bit more on the outside. So we put a couple of speakers in B-mode and a sub to cover the outfill. The TQ-445s really work for the front fills as well, they’re great little boxes and blend seamlessly with the Aspect.

“You can push the Aspect system as hard as you like and it just will not distort,” Gibbard continues. “I turned to Ian at the Brixton show and pointed out that we were pretty much averaging between 110dB and 115dB at front of house during the whole show. But it didn’t sound that loud because there is so much headroom and the system doesn’t colour the sound. It’s so smooth, there is absolutely no distortion.”

Phil McDaniel comments: “If you’re doing a very dynamic kind of show, most systems change character according to how hard they are being driven, whereas the Aspect doesn’t and, because it’s so smooth and clean, the audience’s ears don’t get as tired when you’re running a show at 110dB to 115dB. That makes it a more pleasant experience for them. Indeed, sometimes we have to say to FOH engineers: ‘Do you realise you’re running at 112dB?’ because they’re not hearing that telltale sound of high/mid distortion. The polyhorn doesn’t introduce any harmonic distortion at all, which makes the high mids extremely clean. We’d much rather have a neutral system like Aspect, where if you want it you have to introduce that high mid crunch by using external processing, than a system where you can’t avoid it.

“For starters we never have to push the box to anywhere near its limit. There is plenty of headroom, which is really good for the longevity of the speakers,” he adds. “The power efficiency means that we can use perhaps half the number of boxes that were required with older systems. This is great for the flying limits in some venues, it also saves on trucking costs and means we have to hold less stock.”

“With a line array you need different format boxes for small, medium and large gigs, whereas we can put a bunch of Aspect cabinets on a truck and do any size of gig. This tour is a prime example of that. We’ve also got a John Martyn tour out at the moment with Aspect Wide. You can use one stack per side for a small venue or with four stacks per side you can do much bigger spaces. Furthermore, while we know Aspect works really well in smaller venues, it also sounds amazing in arenas or even outdoors.

“With Aspect we split the hangs up to miss the balcony front, and as a monitor engineer, that was really noticeable,” McDaniel concludes. “At some stages, Ian was running up to 120dB, and normally the sheer energy of that coming back from the room would crush the band on stage. But since we could just crack the hang open to miss the flat front of the balcony, we could avoid that.”
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