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PRG supplies full production package for “Busted vs McFly” tour

McFly and Busted took their “Busted vs McFly” tour of UK and Ireland on the road for 35 dates this year. The stage was set for a good natured but highly competitive showdown as the bands battled for their fans’ adulation on stage, following an audacious challenge by Busted during McFly’s 2024 birthday show.

For this tour, McFly burst onto stage to open the evening before Busted took over for the second half, the bands finally coming together to battle it out before a grand finale with both bands playing together. At 23,000 capacity, Manchester Coop Live is the largest venue in the UK, but all venues on the tour have been in excess of 15,000. PRG UK supplied a full production package of lighting, video, automation and rigging along with four lighting and eight video crew.

The tour’s design brief centred around a monolithic structure with a kinetic ceiling of lighting pods, a 16 m x 8 m LED back wall, two 5 m x 7 m IMAG screens and a 4-sided 13 m x 2 m automated banner screen that dropped into stage level to aid the transition between sets. The result was a dynamic space, with the forestage set in a diamond orientation, that enabled Lighting Designer Sam Parry and Video Programmer/Operator Thomas Hunter to create two distinct styles for the bands within a cohesive whole.

PRG supplied 52 Ayrton Veloce Profiles with Parry rigging twelve on the upstage walkway, sixteen on the front-of-house V-truss and six each on four of PRG’s new ladder systems that flanked the central LED wall. Twenty ACME Pixel Line LED strips were also rigged vertically on the upstage ladders between the Veloce Profiles.

“My introduction to Veloce more or less sealed the deal”, says Parry who began his design before Veloce Profile even rolled off the production line. “I’ve been a big fan of Ayrton for a very long time and as soon as I saw the Veloce I knew it was what I wanted for the tour.” Complementing the Veloce Profiles were fourteen Ayrton Perseo Profiles and fourteen GLP JDC Burst 1 strobes located on the pyro shelf outlining the stage edge.

Fourteen GLP Impression X5 were rigged on the front-of-house V-shaped truss covering the stage wash, with 34 Roxx Cluster fixtures acting as audience blinders. PRG also brought together the 100 Ayrton Zonda 9 FX fixtures that populated the four kinetic lighting pods in a 5x5 matrix. Parry used these to sculpt the stage space into innumerable shapes that expanded and contracted the performance area.

The whole ceiling structure comprised four independent square lighting pods, set at a diamond offset to mirror the stage. Each pod was on a 4-way Moveket hoist, supplied by PRG with Moveket’s own main and backup consoles. The sections were pre-rigged on PRG dollies. “We just bolted them together, attached them to the hoists and flew them out”, says Parry. “It made a huge difference to the speed and expedience of getting in and out.”

The tour’s followspot provision came from seven Robe iForte LTX rigged front-of-house with PRG Ground Control remote operation. Haze was provided by four Hazebase BaseHazerPro machines with Martin AF1 fans to aid distribution. Control was from two GrandMA3 Full Size and one GrandMA3 Light control consoles supplied from PRG stock.

PRG employed Thomas Hunter for the tour’s video programming and operation. “I enjoyed the repetition and refining possibilities that a tour gives and it was important to me to deliver a consistent show so the audience got same experience at every venue,” he says. To help him achieve this, PRG supplied 256 Infiled AR5.9 video tiles for the 16 m wide by 8 m tall upstage LED wall, 140 Infiled AR5.9 video tiles for the two flanking 5 m wide x 7 m tall IMAG screens (seventy per screen), all of which were running on Novastar MX40 processors.

The automated LED banner screen, also hung from a 4-way Moveket hoist, formed a four-sided 13 m x 2 m box surrounding the automated ceiling, and was faced with 104 ROE Vanish V8T LED tiles running on ROE EV4 processors. “We wanted the flexibility of a transparent screen which was useful for some of the venues with a low ceiling height and also allowed us to play with the lighting when the banner was in”, says Hunter.

PRG supplied two Disguise GX3 media servers functioning as Director (main) and Understudy (backup), with both being fed two camera mixes cut via a BlackMagic Atem switcher and manipulating the feed with live effects created in the Notch framework. “We used Notch running as separate blocks for some fun augmentation of the background on several songs”, says Hunter.  “We were able to change the screens to give the bands two very different looks and emphasise the competitive element between them. Busted leaned into it a lot more: McFly’s effects were more subtle, whereas for Busted we were able to create some nice punky block colour graphics that fitted nicely with their style.”

PRG also supplied the full camera system including four Sony camera heads (two on long lens front of house, and two pit cameras on track at the front of the stage), plus four Sony CCU channels and all necessary monitors and time code equipment to run them.

This tour’s crew also included David Spearing (Creative Director), Iain Whitehead (Production Manager), Aidan McCabe (LX HOD), Adam Hodgson (LX Systems), Tom Begley and George Wilson (LX Techs), Ameer El Elryan (Automation Op), Toby Bale (Automation Assist), Steve Jones (Video HOD), Gavin Brunton (Camera Engineer), Chris Keating (Camera Director), and LED Techs Brad Baker, Chris Hobson, Matt Heitman and JJ Mikinzi, as well as Steve Major (PRG Account Handler) and Yvonne Donnelly Smith (PRG Sales Director for music).

(Photos: Anthony Smith/Robyn Sully/Dylan Swann)

www.prg.com

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