Kaiser Chiefs Tour – UK
20/10/2006
With a highly successful year behind them, the Kaisers embarked on their sell-out NME sponsored ‘Rock’n’Riot tour for which production/tour manager Mike Darling had secured the support of audio firms DBA UK and Audio Plus.
The tie-up between the two sound companies came through FOH engineer Christian Bayley’s quest for improvements for the band, with whom he’d been working for a year. “I wasn’t getting the quality of sound that I’d been looking for,” he said, “so I consulted George McKechnie at DBA UK and he came up with some good suggestions.”
McKechnie’s recommendation was that Funktion One’s Resolution systems would give the Kaisers vastly improved dynamics, and for this tour he decided to partner with Audio Plus who had experienced success on recent events and tours with its own Funktion One system.
“When I first started talking to Audio Plus about the Kaiser Chief’s tour, they were very keen to make it work for everyone and I could see the potential,” said McKechnie. “They’ve been fans of Funktion One for as long as I have, and they’re now at the point where they have around 40 pairs of boxes that can service a full arena tour. They did the Moloko tour which included dates at Brixton Academy, so their experience with that counted for a lot.”
Said Bayley: “It was great to find a PA company that could deliver exactly what we needed. I’d worked with George in the past and he introduced me to Audio Plus. He felt they’d give us exactly what we needed, and I trusted his judgement. I’d wanted an excuse to use Funktion One speakers for a long time, but the situation wasn’t right until this tour.”
Powered by QSC amplifiers, the Funktion One Resolution boxes deployed on the tour were Res5s, Res4D, Res4, Res2, F218 and F118. But what was it about them that was so attractive to Bayley? “I wanted a very well-designed box that was quite flat in response, not something where I’d have to apply a loy of EQ to get a result. I also wanted a modular system that was flexible enough to stack or array in different configurations, depending on the venue, and that’s something you can’t achieve with a line array. That was very important because as it’s turned out, the configurations on this tour have differed wildly. And the Funktion One system meets that brief totally.”
“I think that Funktion One brand has been pigeonholed as the ultimate dance system, because of it’s bass qualities, and that’s fine. The bass bins are very fast and tight. But a truly great system should be able to hold its weight regardless of the style of music going through it and it’s certainly doing fine with the Kaiser Chiefs.”
Previously, Audio Plus’s main rental system was a Turbosound rig and when it came the time to upgrade, the connection with the original Turbo engineers, Tony Andrews and John Newsham, encouraged them to turn to Funktion One.
Said Audio Plus technician Oliver Brown: “For all the right reasons, we considered Funktion One to be the next step along the path of audio evolution! It stands to reason that because we operate in both Rock’n’Roll and dance music, Funktion One’s products and their legendary bass response offered us the best solution. One of the first tours we did with the system was with Moloko, which was a perfect test for it and the results were superb.”
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