Radiohead Live Radiohead can lay claims to being the ‘biggest band in the world’, and AT’s Andy Stewart would tend to agree. He spoke to the tour’s FOH and monitor engineers to hear how it was done. verywhere I go at the moment I meet people who ‘don’t Sydney show where I spoke to Radiohead’s front of house get Radiohead anymore’. Once fans of the band, these engineer Jim Warren – who’s been mixing the band live for Epeople claim that Radiohead’s ‘gone weird’ and that their over a decade – and foldback engineer Graham Lees, who last last few albums are a bit ‘obscure’. Up until last week I was visited Australia with Massive Attack. Amid the chaos and din beginning to think that I was the only one who hadn’t ditched of soundcheck, and with tension mounting as the crowd outside Radiohead for something ‘cheerier’ or ‘more accessible’. But threatened to storm the place, I managed to chat with Jim and the lines of teenagers freezing their arses off on the pavement Graham to find out what’s involved in producing the sound for outside the Sydney Entertainment Centre recently proved that Radiohead live. Radiohead remain one of the biggest bands in the world, and for good reason. Chart Challenge Playing to packed houses in Sydney and Melbourne, Andy Stewart: So Jim, you’ve worked with Radiohead for Radiohead performed an extraordinary combination of songs years. Are they still challenging your engineering skills? from several of their recent albums with a grace and intensity Jim Warren: Yeah, they are. They’re always coming up with that is truly rare. I was lucky enough to make it to the second different and interesting sounds, some of which I can’t always 32 could possibly be what they were after. When I did, I realised that, ‘Hey, the piano sound on the album is really close to what this mad piano sound would be like if I just left it alone’, instead of thinking ‘What the f**k… who’s ruining my piano sound?’ and trying to work out how to ‘repair’ it. But one great thing about Radiohead is that they’re not just into copying the album. The philosophy is that the music should develop when you play it live to give each performance its own personality. I probably only refer back once or twice to the albums – I listen for things like particular vocal effects that I’ll mimic live – but I rarely refer to the recordings after that. AS: I s’pose in some ways that’s the whole philosophy of a band like Radiohead in the first place; the music obviously has its own life at the moment it’s recorded and if it was performed exactly the same way a year later, it’d probably feel a bit fake. JW: Yeah. And I think the idea of trying to replicate the albums would mean that you’re on really safe ground and that’s just not where Radiohead wants to be. If they’re going to play live for nine months they want it to be exciting – for their own sakes as well as their audience’s. For instance, Jonny Greenwood’s got an FM radio on stage with him that he uses during songs to import bits of random audio, which he flies in through his effects pedals and Roland Space Echo. If he wanted to reproduce what’s on the album he’d just sample it, but that's not in the spirit in which it was conceived – apart from being dead boring. As it is, sometimes the radio’s disastrous and all you get is interference or, worse, something dull and uninteresting. Yet on other nights you’ll get the most amazing random sound bites flying into the middle of the mix and everybody just gets vibed up and thinks ‘How lucky are we?’. Taking chances like that is what Radiohead is all about; live as well as in the studio. Digital FOH mixing AS: This is the first time you’ve hit the road with Radiohead armed with a digital console. Why have you made that switch and how has it performed so far? JW: We were simply running out of inputs on our old Sound- craft Series 5. I’d reached the point where I actually had to take channels away; things that were previously DI’d and miked, I’d started reducing to a single mic channel instead, just to fit every- thing on the deck. AS: How many channels was the Series 5? JW: It had 56 inputs: 48 plus four stereo. And it was either a case of getting a 16- or 24-channel sidecar for it – which would have get my head around. Certainly if I’m having trouble dealing with been very hard to source for hire – or moving over to another a sound, I’ll let them know. If they think it’s because I haven’t got console. So I thought, rather than trying to hire such an unusual it, they’ll explain what they’re after. Conversely, if I think they’ve setup in three different countries, maybe now was the time to concocted a sound that’s impossible to deal with, they’ll change it. give the Digico D5 a try. The short tour we’re on at the moment We have a good rapport like that. But sometimes I just won’t get it – although it involves gigs in Japan, Australia and America – is and they’ll say ‘No, we really want it to sound like this’. only nine shows… perfect for trying out a new system. AS: Can you give me an example of that situation? AS: Presumably you familiarised yourself with the D5 before JW: One perfect example is Sit Down, Stand Up where Thom you hit the road with it? Yorke’s piano is actually being fed to me via Graham’s monitor JW: We had a pretty decent amount of rehearsal time, and I’ve desk, back through Ed O’Brien’s effects pedals on stage, and out used other digital consoles over the years so it wasn’t an overly of his guitar amps. It’s a bloody mad sound live as well as on the daunting prospect. We had about five days with it during produc- album, and I had real problems coming to terms with it. This was tion rehearsals here in Sydney – three days before the band got one of those times when I had to refer to the album, because I just here and then two days with the band in action. couldn’t believe that the sound I was receiving at front of house AS: Has this switch been on the cards for long? 33 Front of house engineer Jim Warren (centre) with a couple of colleagues shortly before the punters arrived. JW: I had a day with it about two years ago, which is back when the seeds for this changeover were sown. I’ve been mixing Radiohead for a long time now and the mix is really intense: there’s a hell of a lot going on during the show. And for a while now I’ve known the day was fast approaching where we would have to consider the switch to a digital console. So in anticipation of that happening, I’ve been trying to analyse what I do over the last couple of years: how much I actually change things; what I do and don’t touch, that sort of thing. AS: How do you perform this self-analysis? JW: You just try and pay attention to the process, and be aware of what you don’t change as well as what you do. Realise that after the first week of a tour you haven’t touched a pan pot except for that one song where you use it to make the keyboards go backwards and forwards. Realise that, although everything is at your fingertips, not everything is required to be. Most things just get set and left, while other things are constantly being changed. AS: So has working with the new console been an easy or a frustrating experience? JW: It’s been pretty good. One of the great advantages of the D5 is that it doubles as a multitrack recording system. The 56 inputs that come from the stage-box get split: one lot serves front of house, the other feeds a hard disk recorder. What this means is that when the band finishes rehearsal, you can just change a couple of cables over and start rehearsal all over again – using the recorded version to fine tune the snapshots – which is a fantastic aspect of the digital console. When you change to a different desk, of course, you have to learn a completely different sequence of events. So for that 20 second period in the middle of a song where everything goes nuts and there’s half a dozen things to change in a particular order, accurately and quickly, the recorder can play back that part of the song over and over until the series of manoeuvres can be learnt and fine-tuned. Obviously you can’t do that with the band – ‘excuse me, could you guys just play that transition for half an hour while I work out how to do this?’ AS: Does this ‘surrogate’ band coming from the hard disk actually sound enough like the original or is there literally no difference? JW: It sounds exactly the same.