Diary of a touring musician: day 12 - part one

In September & October 2023, we took to the road in the UK to introduce our new album STARLITE.ONE. Setting up for our gig at the Met. This is part 13 of the warts-and-all-account.

Apr 16, 2024

“And you know the reason I really love the stars is that we cannot hurt them.
We can't burn them or melt them or make them overflow.
We can't flood them or blow them up or turn them out.
But we are reaching for them
We are reaching for them.”
Lyrics from ‘Another Day in America’ - Laurie Anderson

If you happened upon this episode for the first time, we suggest you check out the other articles in the series by heading over to:

Diary of a touring musician: the series

Today was the BIG day. The day when our plans became a reality. All those endless hours of sculpting ideas, songs and moving pictures - all brought together to share with you in an immersive multimedia musical experience. A special moment in time.

Wakey wakey

After the long drive and getting to bed at 0230, we didn’t sleep well - still stressed with the finances and the anticipation of the day ahead.

Taking a leaf out of Ian Hunter’s excellent book, Diary of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star we should have each taken a ‘Mandy’, but we didn’t and suffered because of it. 0520, 0610, 0750, 0825. Good sleep on tour is essential.

We left our room at 1000 and decided to have lunch in the hotel carvery before we left. The food wasn’t the best but we were trying to get our energy up and set our mindset into positive mode - and you can’t do that on an empty stomach.

On a positive note, Suzy sorted our accommodation for the next week and booked a lovely cottage through Air B’n’B in a quaint village called Embsay, situated halfway between Bolton Abbey and Skipton in North Yorkshire - a beautiful part of the country.

As the rest of our gigs were up in the north of the UK it made logistical and financial sense and we got a great deal on the price. A serious bargain!

And then we were off, focused, a little quieter than usual but Bury here we come, the town of Simon’s birth and one we always treat as a homecoming.

The Met

The Met is very special to us. It’s a cool independent, award-winning live music venue which had a multi-million-pound refurbishment eight years ago. The staff are world-class and the facilities are great!

And that’s the difference - to have a great venue you need great staff who are highly skilled and experienced. The whole team at The Met cares about you, your performance and know how to deliver your event with a sense of panache. We always feel respected and supported and the audience leaves feeling they have had a meaningful and highly enjoyable experience.

STARLITE.ONE - Welcome aboard

We had an adventurous multi-media vision for our performance which would involve both a visual and sonic immersive experience - bringing the songs to life and giving the audience a truly memorable night to remember.

To explore this concept we had numerous Zoom meetings with ace Technical Manager Chris McClung and Recording Studio Manager Dan Powers to discuss our audio-visual vision and to work out how we could best deliver the experience from a technical point of view. It was the first time we had undertaken such a mammoth task but together, step by step, we worked out a plan.

The Derby Hall at The Met has a 10-metre, stage-wide cyclorama screen onto which video footage can be projected. We had to ascertain what resolution worked best for the projections (HD or 1080p) and how we were technically going to cue the videos to synchronise/start at the beginning of each song.

On top of all this, we had planned to record both the audio and visuals for a future live video release. This was no mean feat and had only done it once before, but with a less complex setup.

Starlite has been filming and editing our music videos for a few years now but for this, we had to up our game so she took a deep dive into learning Adobe Premier Pro - the industry-standard professional video editing software. It is not an intuitive process by any stretch of the imagination and the task ahead. To create 24 music videos! Blimey!!

Simon had already climbed his technical mountain of programming all the sequenced parts for live play-back by learning the Digital Audio Workstation, Ableton Live!

Welcome home

We arrived at The Met just after 1500 and parked the van outside. Before we knew it, Events Manager Nathan Berry and lots of friendly faces appeared to help us load our gear into the venue - down ramps, up steps - into lifts and wheeled into the Derby Hall - like a well-oiled machine. We didn’t have to ask - we were expected and the guys were ready.

Hallelujah - it could almost turn one religious!! This was a proper get-in.

Suzy popped into the office to collect numerous packages that had been delivered to the venue over the past week: the second half of our missing t-shirt consignment which had been reprinted, the monkey masks for dressing the stage (replacing the ones that had failed to materialise over a week ago and had been hastily reordered from a different source) and finally the STARLITE.ONE boarding cards to be given out to our audience on the night - read the saga in previous posts. Phew!! Everything was there!!

Yes, we were fucked. But we had a job to do and were intent on giving everything we had and more.

The set-up

Ace Technical Manager - the mighty Chris McClung

(L-R) Hugo, Chris McClung and Recording Studio Manager Dan Powers

Like busy bees, the hours passed quickly with a flurry of activity setting the stage with a whole raft of instruments and hundreds of spaghetti-like sound cables connected, microphones set and tested. It was an incredible amount of work.

Do you speak Portuguese?

This was the first time we had toured with our Portuguese drummer Hugo Danin and he was definitely getting a warts and all experience of the tour but despite all the difficult times we managed to have a lot of laughs and together had hatched a comedic plan.

We have worked with The Met’s Front of House engineer Tyrion Moses for many years now. He is a top guy and a great engineer. If you know anything about live sound, the person who operates the desk and crafts/balances the sound that the audience/band hears is as crucial as us creating a great sound on stage in the first place.

A concert is a serious team effort and need each other to make it work.

Tyrion came on stage, said hello and asked Hugo a technical question about his drum set-up. Hugo replied loudly, in a friendly animated manner - in Portuguese!! Nobody understood a word of what he was saying - even us.

We explained that Hugo didn’t speak any English so Tyrion, with his big warm heart, started holding up a cable and speaking very slowly gesticulating - “Do you want… this cable… (holds up cable)… to plug in…. here??” Points to gear…

We all tried to keep a straight face - but it was so hard. Hugo was speaking very fast Portuguese and Tyrion was trying hard using big hand gestures and slow simple English… hehehe…. We had him going for about 30 seconds before Hugo crumbled and gave in, confessing he couldn’t do it any longer!!! We had got him: very, very funny!!

Recording a live album and video

In our (not so) humble opinion one of the best live concert recordings - if not the best - is Deep Purple’s Made in Japan. It set the standard many years ago and was recorded over three different nights during their tour of Japan in 1972.

We didn’t have the luxury of three nights and had just one to capture the magic of our performance for our live album. All we could do was go for it and give it our best shot.

[Note to self] We do need to record over more than one night and pick the best performances from different shows.

The Met is one of the few venues in the UK set up for a professional live sound recording to the standard we are used to releasing and not as straightforward as you may think.

In our pre-production meetings we talked all things technical. Simon and Dan chatted about the microphones, the digital format of the recording plus the logistics of making this happen.

Dario Leonetti

There’s only one guy we trust with recording live footage and that is film-maker and photographer Dario Leonetti of AltLodge / Studio1.

He is based in the Isle of Man and is an exceptional talent, having honed his skills filming the Isle of Man TT Races, producing the Dakar Rally documentary ‘Races To Places’ with adventure motorcyclist Lyndon Poskitt and other motorsport wonders across the world for many years. He’s also one of the kindest and most generous guys you will ever meet.

A concert is very much a live-action event and we knew that he was the man to work with filming our concert. We had worked with him a few years before on our first live concert recording at The Met and knew we were in safe hands. He also brought along his colleague David and together they set up a nine-camera shoot to capture the action on stage. Woohoo!!!

The sound check

Studio Manager Dan was across the live sound recording and his attention to detail is exemplary. We can’t over-emphasise how much care and thought he had put into making sure everything ran smoothly and to make sure we understood what needed to happen to make the show a success.

Adjacent to The Met is a professional recording studio at the heart of which is a Toft ATB24 recording console, featuring much of the same design and features as the legendary Trident Series 80 console. Dan recorded each instrument on a different digital track, totally separate from the live sound mix. The Met Team pulled everything out of the bag for us.

Again we learned that we need to normalize the backing volume of tracks and use iem’s (in-ear monitors) for everything.

The zone

On previous visits, we would go downstairs to eat in ‘The Automatic’ restaurant adjoining the venue but sadly it suddenly closed a few months back (another casualty of the lockdown) and there was now no time to go out to dine before the concert: we would have to run on the fuel from our adrenalin and a couple of beers. This is when a Tour Manager is worth their weight in fuckin’ gold - we needed food.

Fucked

No matter how much we tried and even though in better spirits, Simon was pretty fucked. He had spent so much time over the past week sorting out the technical demands of the tour and making sure Hugo was OK, was 200% over-tasked and sleep-deprived. All this work was put in to enable us as artists to go on the road and share our creativity and musicality - we were suffering.

Starlite tried to get him to stay in the dressing room and take a half hour of quiet time to restring his guitars and focus on his job of being an artist, but after a week of stress, driving thousands of miles on top of very little sleep, with the greatest will in the world it was tough for him to get into the zone.

Don’t get us wrong - when it comes to stage time you give everything, but sometimes you lose the ability to enjoy the gig as much as you had hoped. Yes, there are high moments but we also had high hopes and a lot of pressure as this would be the first time we would be presenting the multimedia performance of STARLITE.ONE.

Award-winning photographer

To our great delight, our wonderful friend and award-winning professional photographer Stuart Bebb of Oxford Camera appeared, along with Simon’s ex-brother-in-law David Casson. It was great to see them both - it had been over twelve years since Simon had seen David and the first time meeting Starlite. There was a lot of love and smiles in the room.

Stuart has a wealth of commercial photography experience and expertise. With a creative eye and professional approach his client list include: Waddesdon Manor, Mouton Cadet, Burberry, Rothschild Foundation, Said Business School, Blenheim Palace, Cherwell Innovation and many Oxford University departments and Colleges. He has also won UK wedding photographer of the year countless times.

We had spent some time with Stuart and his wife Jan a few years ago and had stayed with them at their home near Oxford. Stuart took the album cover photograph for our second studio album ‘The Language of Curiosity’ which featured people celebrating and dancing in the street in Oxford, the day after the second lockdown had ended in the UK.

He had brought his trusty professional camera(s) with him and reminded us that he wanted to photograph the concert. We were very fortunate to have him there!

Check out part two for all the amazing photos.

The all-important merchandise

Starlite had arranged for an old friend to help us out on the night greeting our audience members and looking after the Merch but sadly she couldn’t make it after all so we were stuck as we had no one to look after the ‘sales’ element of the evening.

Well, we thought we were stuck until we were given a brilliant surprise because unbeknown to us, Chris McClung had arranged for two volunteers to help us out on the night, one looking after our merchandise sales and the other greeting our audience members as they arrived, handing out our exclusive bespoke STARLITE.ONE boarding cards with the spoken greeting…

“Welcome aboard STARLITE.ONE. We hope you enjoy the ride.”

This meant so much to us and made such a difference - you can lose a lot of sales income if you don’t have someone looking after your Merch stand. It’s crucial!!!

We really did feel loved, supported and very much at home.

NASA

And then there is the stuff that dreams are made of.

STARLITE.ONE is a concept album telling stories about our shared humanity. Suzy realised it was in essence a spacecraft and we needed some high-definition (HD) footage of rockets, the Earth and space.

It’s not as easy as you may think to find royalty-free high-quality footage. I know, she thought, I’ll write to NASA.

“Dear NASA…“ and so the email was written. Starlite introduced us, explained our artistic work and creative vision and politely enquired if it would be possible for them to send us some footage to use for our special multi-media performance?

It was a long shot and we did not expect a reply whatsoever.

A couple of days later, an email appeared in Starlite’s inbox - from NASA! WTF?? Get in there!!!! They replied??? That’s crazy and wonderful and amazing!! Double brilliant!!!

Hello and ‘yes, this is possible’ - Maureen cc’d Bert who cc’d Sheva and the next thing we were sent links to download some incredible footage of rocket launches, space, a journey around planet Earth from space and the moon - all free and courtesy of NASA!

We promised to credit their work and their only stipulation was that we couldn’t show their logo or any of the astronauts. That was OK because we were the actual astronauts for this particular journey - along with a merry band of chimps and of course our audience members.

Multimedia

Chris McClung was running the video playback/lighting for the event and over the past few weeks he had taken every care, testing the projections to make sure all our videos played back ok with no latency or freezing frames.

Words can’t express what it felt like to see all our visual work on such a massive screen. Amazing!!

Here is a short video excerpt of the screentest during set-up. The sound was included on all the files for reference but during the concert, this of course was us playing live. We can’t wait for you to see the live video when it is released in late 2024.

The next edition features the gig itself, a late-night dirty kebab and nearly falling asleep whilst driving back to our accommodation. There’s always some kind of drama when you’re on tour.

Saving Me…