Rod Stewart European Tour
When Rod Stewart opened his latest European Tour at Newcastle’s St James Park, CT’s new MiTrix screen dominated the stage, providing a massive backdrop to the show. The monster MiTrix screen measuring 15.5m x 9.2m provided crystal clear images of one of rock’s most enduring stars.
About 20,000 people saw the two hour spectacular at the outdoor arena. Despite the wind and rain of this year’s UK summer, the audience seemed to ‘Wear it Well’ donning raincoats whilst singing along to the anthemia songs of the gravely-voiced entertainer.
The giant screen formed the centrepiece of the set, showing Rod blown up to over 9 metres high along with vintage video footage of The Faces and a selection of specially commissioned material to accompany the older classics.
Dave Crump, who has been involved with tours for Rod Stewart since 1988 commented, “This is the first time we have used the MiTrix as the main backdrop to a set. We had some concerns over both the resolution and brightness in this application, however the system performed superbly and we believe this now opens up many new potential applications and creative solutions.”
The MiTrix was conceived by Barco as a creative LED product, offering a semi transparent solution enabling products or performers to be revealed through the screen. One advantage of the see-through design is that it is extremely lightweight and this is where the system really scores on this tour. The entire 142 m2 screen weighs around 4 tonnes compared with around 14 tonnes for a conventional LED screen of similar dimensions. It would have been all but impossible to suspend a screen of that weight within a regular touring stage.
Dave continues, “Following the success of this tour we are already starting to see other artists explore new and innovative ways of using much larger screens on stage. As designers realise the creative potential of this product I have no doubt we will see an increasing use of the technology in arena environments where weight limits are often even more restrictive.”
Rod Stewart and his production manager, Lars Brogaard, are amongst our most loyal music customers using CT for video support whenever they are touring. The current tour which started in Newcastle on the 25th of June continues through to Gdansk, Poland on the 24th of July where we play the historic shipyards where the Solidarity movement was started in 1980.
The tour was project managed for CT by Stuart Young with the giant screen being installed/pulled down by 3 crew in around 2-3 hours.