West London based lighting and visuals specialist Colour Sound Experiment was
delighted to be asked to supply lighting, LED screen and crew for the Perry’s Stage
at the first Lollapalooza event in Europe … staged at Templehof Airfield in Berlin, a
famous and much loved landmark.

Perry’s Stage, named after Perry Farrell, Jane’s Addiction lead singer who started
the Lolla phenomena in 1991 … is now synonymous with the best of dance beats and
sounds and this year headliners included Fatboy Slim.

Colour Sound’s crew of seven was led by Kester McClure. On site, they all worked
very closely with Festival Republic production managers Spike Beecham and Kevin
Sutherland, and in fact it was their third gig this summer working with this same
production.

The stage was located just inside the main Hangar at Templehof – with the audience
on the outside of the building, and so flying was possible, and a German rigging
team installed a mother grid from which Colour Sound then sub hung their main rig,
the overhead elements of which were based on Fatboy Slim’s design by Steven
Abbiss.

This comprised 11 trusses, nine running upstage / downstage as “fingers’, with two
side trusses.

A large expanse – 10 metres wide by five high – 100 panels – of Collour Sound’s
proprietary BT 7mm pitch LED screen – was hung on another upstage truss and the
same screen was also used to clad the front of the DJ booth.

There were two diagonally hung side stage screens – hanging below the side trusses
– made up from the medium resolution BT-12 product, both in 4 metre wide by 1
metre high strips, each consuming 60 panels – so 120 in total.

Out in the arena, each of eight PA delay towers was also rigged with 16 panels of
BT-20 screen plus two Clay Paky Sharpies.

Back to the stage, and 20 x Sharpies per side and 40 active Sunstrips in total were
all rigged above and below the side screens.

The overhead rig included 20 x CP Alpha Spot 1500s, 20 x 4-lite Moles and 20
Atomic 3K strobes, all spread out across the nine fingers. There were 26 x Robe
Pointes up in the rig and on the floor and 42 Robe LEDWash 600s in both positions –
floor and overhead.

On the floor to the sides were four La Novalight Nova Flowers – the new 2.5K units
for some super-bright multi-beam effects. All of this came to life with some truly
stratospheric atmospheric conditions produced by 8 strategically placed Jem ZR44s
and a Jem Roadie heavy fogger.

To ensure that everyone’s operating styles were accommodated, Colour Sound
provided three options of lighting console – a grandMA full size, a ChamSys MQ60
with a Wing .. and an Avolites Tiger Touch requested by Abbiss to run FatBoy’s
show.

Colour Sound set up a WYSIWYG visualisation suite side-stage to allow guest LDs as
much programming time and opportunities as possible in an extremely tight
schedule.

Video control was via a Hippotizer media server and also a laptop running Resolume
that could be accessed via any of the consoles which were all running on a network.
The video playback was looked after by Justin Beardsell from Meno TV.

Also joining Kester on the Colour Sound crew were Joe Beardmore who co-ordinated
the WYSIWYG facilities and networking; Jon Curtis who looked after FOH and the
guest LDs, lighting tech Aamir Riaz and dimmer and motor tech Ed Blackwell.
Colour Sound’s Stu Barr and Simon Robertson tech’d both lighting and video.