Behind the scenes of Progress

“The success of this tour is amazing, more than any of us thought we could do,” Gary Barlow told the Daily Star. “I always think, ‘It can’t get any bigger than this’. And maybe it won’t. Maybe this will be our biggest tour ever.”

There has been painstaking choreography behind just about every element of Take That. Perhaps the whole Robbie/Gary saga, the acrimony and the split, was part of the plan. They weren’t doing badly without him of course. The sell out Circus tour wowed all who saw it in 2009, but the take up for the Progress outing set new records. Racing heartbeats, crashing websites and 1,340,000 tickets sold in 24 hours.

“The album is very much about machine to man. It’s less pop, and more of a concept piece,” production director Chris Vaughan told this magazine on the afternoon of the show. “So the ideas that spawned the songs were followed through into the live production. Circus was a nice show, and it had the big technical gag with the circus tent, but beyond that, it was really about the performance and the art within it. Most of this one has to do with big bits of engineering.” And at 73 trucks a system, compared with 50 for the phenomenal Muse tour in 2010, another Vaughan production, it’s a massive undertaking.

Time Out Of Mind

While the stellar design team, that’s Kim Gavin, Patrick Woodroffe, Es Devlin, Malcolm Birkett, Misty Buckley, Vaughan, and his colleague at The Production Office (TPO), Keely Myers, were devising the show more than 12 months out, Take That model economics are intrinsically old school. Their target audience, by and large women 35 plus, responds to a marketing push and physical product. That meant the famous five were on the promo trail before and after the Progress album’s November release. It went on to become the fastest selling CD this century, and the focus wasn’t fully on the tour until Christmas. So by the time it was all signed off, there were 16 weeks or so left before rehearsals had to begin.

“Most of the artistic creation is done between Kim and the members of the band,” Vaughan, who’s looked after Take That shows since 1993, said, sitting in a City seat behind the stage, as the musicians ran through their soundcheck. “Then it comes to me. I get quite a detailed show script very early on, the set list, what they want to happen in each song, all the ideas. Then, a little bit like a film producer, I break it down into components, cost it, and start to work the logistics out.

“Kim is unrealistic enough for the shows always to be superb. Their success, and the reasons why they are so much on the edge, is because of the point of conflict between Kim and myself. We’ve been friends for nearly 20 years, but it’s his job to push the boundary, and it’s my job to make sure it’s deliverable. If he didn’t push hard enough, and I didn’t have anything to do, we’d end up with something like every other show.

“You can’t start off productions from ‘How much money have we got to spend?’ You have to let the creative elements do what they’re going to do. We’ve got so much new technology with this one,” he added. “There are a number of elements that are quite ‘Wallace & Gromit’, mad inventor stuff, which fits in with the album.” That meant, alongside everything else, that Vaughan had to keep the tour away from prying press/blogs/ social media during rehearsals.

“We couldn’t afford to be on a greenfield site, because there would be helicopters overhead taking photos, so we built the set under cover at Cardington Hangers. They were used for the R100/R101 airships, so you get 47m clearance, and it’s wide enough. We were there for the best part of a month. Then we went to the Stadium of Light for four more days of dress rehearsals before the first show.” The choppers were there to meet them, but by then the pictures couldn’t spoil the surprise.

Action

The four piece Take That are up first, sedately, via a lift at the back of the main stage playing a handful of post Robbie hits. It takes them down to the Tait Towers B stage, where the story goes a bit Alice In Wonderland, culminating in their departure through a window at the bottom of the Nocturne screen on the main platform, before Williams, the white rabbit, crashes through the top on a zip wire to sing Let Me Entertain You.

All the burdens of his stuttering solo career are cast aside as he focuses on the hits that took him to stadium status well ahead of the band he left behind in 1995. There’s confetti and dancers, and Williams is airborne again, flying out above their/his adoring public on the Brilliant Stages C platform for Feel, ‘He sweat on me’ among the repeatable shrieks from below, grammar surrendered to emotion. But the big gags are saved for the five reunited.

“It’s three shows under one umbrella, a very nice, complete evening’s entertainment for the fans,” Vaughan explained. “I like the way it’s structured. Rob had to have his particular bit for it to make sense, and the guys did too, because they’ve had a number of hits without him.”

Rather than lumping the platform dynamics onto a single supplier, Vaughan split the contract, conscious of its complexity, and the clock. Total Fabrications gamely took on the ‘Big Man’ who stands behind the stage, arms spanning its breadth, head squeezing just underneath the stadium roof. Brilliant Stages did the main performance area, and Om, and built the catwalk that joins the two, which also provides a route for the robot.

Vaughan said. “On Circus, we had a fairly agricultural method of building decks and rolling them out, and it was a bit of a race to get that done, but this is Mark II, and it’s far smarter.” Tait Towers was the new name among Vaughan’s famously loyal list. The Philadelphia based company designed and manufactured the bridge, the flying gags, the water gags and the B stage, replete with five lifts.

“Om has a very clever mechanism that [comes] out of each deck, so we can raise it and drop it down,”

Chris Vaughan, Production Director

“I went to each of the three companies, laid out the whole brief to see how they would react, and it fell quite naturally,” Vaughan explained. “Tait is incredible. The approach to building sets and developing them is very artistically focused. They’re interested in the end result to make sure what they’re manufacturing is totally user friendly. Their gear came from the States by sea freight, it turned up on time, working perfectly, and their back up’s very good as well. So that’s a nice new relationship.”

Originally simply a structure to hold up lighting and other effects, the bridge ended up as a focal point. It’s there that the audience sees the band as a five piece for the first time. So, alongside a weight of technical provision on the underside, it incorporates four lifts to lower the Take That mainstays through the water during The Flood, and a telescopic arm in the middle to divert Williams’ flight cables as he takes a synchronised swan dive between them.

“There are 12 gushing water nozzles up there, capable of delivering 385 gallons a minute,” Tait’s project manager, James Erwin, said. “In response to the brief, our initial design involved three 7,000 gallon water trucks for a six minute song. That simply wasn’t practical, so we scaled back to a single truck, enough for four nozzles out over the audience, eight down at the elevator pods, and the rain curtains.”

Hanging above the bridge, five Venetian carts, named after their net-bearing retractable ladders, are the other part of the water effects. Each has a rain bar, delivering 160 gallons per minute onto the aerialists as they perform in the interval after Williams’ solo turn. A lot of water to deal with when you’re hanging upside down.

“It’s quite a moment,” Vaughan said. “Thirty aerial performers whizzing about, going up and down on Cyberhoists, which is probably the most expensive five minutes in pop. It’s very effective though, and it looks great. But having elements like that, and Rob’s dive, makes this tour more challenging. It means a whole number of safety checks every night, which is further pressure because we can’t do the gigs until it’s all been approved.”

Roboteers

Om is just about the same size as Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North. For all the pyro, the water, the interactive screens and the aerialists, it’s the show’s ultimate effect. And with gags like the 150ft bridge for the Stones’ 1997 Bridges To Babylon tour, and the giant lemon for U2’s PopMart outing in the canon, Brilliant Stages was the logical candidate for the design and build.

“We like things to be a bit of a challenge,” general manager Tony Bowern told this magazine with a chuckle. “We looked at the whole set, but by the time the designs were fi nalised we wouldn’t have been able to get it done, so we concentrated on building the main stage, building Om, the track that takes him to the B Stage, and the arm that swings Robbie Williams out over the crowd.”

Controlled by a Kinesys system, the robot has a hydraulic drive mechanism, the hand, the wrist, the elbow and the shoulder and head moving via a slew ring bearing and a pivot. Om itself is lifted by another telescopic arm, like you see on a recovery truck, but inverted, with the torso attached to the bottom end. “It’s a standard piece of kit, the only bit we did that you can buy off the shelf,” Bowern added.

The Delays

From the beginning of the planning procedure, Vaughan had stressed his want for a ‘radical new delay sound concept’, to prevent the traditional towers from restricting sightlines. And Capital Sound came up with a ‘ring’ system in response, designed by Ian Colville and Al Woods. Typically, eight hangs of between six and eight W8LC elements form the perimeter, fl own from the stadium roof. They complement the main, standard configuration W8L Longbow stage system, boosted by side hangs of 16 W8Ls, two W8LD down fills per side, 32 WS218X ground subs and a further 16 Martin Audio W8LM mini line arrays for lip fill and out fill. And while foregoing the delay towers means the PA has to work harder, the Longbow system has proved itself to be up to the task. Walking through the quenched masses, from in front of the stage to the seats on the third tier in Manchester, the sound was truly good.

“We’re very good at making shows that people think we spend untold millions on, while still making sure the band does well out of it.”

Chris Vaughan, Production Director

“It’s able to project rich and clear sound at a greater distance than any other system I have used,” Take That sound engineer, Gary Bradshaw, said. “There are no peaks for me to smooth out, which means that apart from high-pass filtering, the vocal channels have remained virtually flat, even with five mics out in front of the PA on the B Stage.” Cost Efficient “In terms of budget, we’re pretty much along the same lines as Circus,” Vaughan said, dispelling some excitable media myths. “Ultimately the band are touring because they want to make a profit, and at TPO we make sure we deliver value for money. We don’t have an open chequebook, we get set strict parameters and we have to deliver the show for that.

“We’ve done three tours prior to this one with the four of them,” he concluded, the radio starting to call his name. “And having Robbie back completes the circle.”

 

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Contact the editor: olivia.vanstraten@oceanmedia.co.uk