Britannia Row Productions Ltd (Brit Row) began 2019 with three arena tours and the UK’s Jorja Smith playing festivals.

‘The clue is in the word “festivals”,’ says Sales Director Lez Dwight. ‘No-one is playing festivals in the frosty Northern hemisphere right now, but along with Jorja at the festivals, Mumford & Sons and Phil Collins have all visited arenas in Australia and New Zealand.’

‘We are also supplying system and support for Cirque du Soleil’s annual visit to the Royal Albert Hall,’ he adds, ‘And for the Brit Awards, which has quite a fundamental new look this year.

‘Both of those arena tours have their own idiosyncrasies and not a little complexity,’ he says, returning to the action down under. ‘For any production manager maintaining continuity in the workflow of the show is paramount so we have shipped out more crew than you might expect to maintain that consistency.’

Josh Lloyd, who determines the principal system design for many Brit Row tours, explains the Mumford & Sons set-up: ‘The system design for the Australia/New Zealand leg was more orthodox than what they will present in North America soon afterwards: mains and sides all L-Acoustics K1 and K2 with a Sub array of SB28s and, where necessary, Kara delays. Admittedly there are not the challenges of the in-the-round show, but it still makes a lot of sense to have four core members of our UK crew travel the universal team. There is an awful lot of signal source equipment on stage, the band present as both electric and acoustic. That impacts, in turn, on monitors and unsurprisingly it then all becomes RF heavy so we have a specialist on the tour for each of those three positions. System tech’ remains critical.

‘Although I settled the overall design requirements in collusion with Mats Frankl in Op’s at JPJ in Australia, we still sent Terrence Hulkes on the universal team. Every territory has its own way of doing things; they are distinctive more than fundamental - that leads to two conclusions. There’s no point in imposing different ways of working in a territory where their own MO works perfectly well. The natural counter to that is to have someone like Terrence there because he can more easily adapt to their way of working and, with his knowledge of how Chris Pollard (FOH) likes the system to sound and respond to his mix, can tweak the basic design to each room played.’

‘In the end where the work takes place is not important,’ concluded Dwight, ‘It’s having the right infrastructure to operate professionally wherever that takes you. People are a core resource for us.’

More: www.britanniarow.com