MANCHESTER, UK – Imagine that you’re mixing monitors for what many consider the biggest band in modern rock – Foo Fighters – and they’re about to take the stage for their headlining set at a huge, 60,000-capacity outdoor venue in the UK. And suddenly you’re faced with the worst technical nightmare you’ve ever experienced while mixing a show.
“The Foo Fighters were playing Manchester Cricket Grounds,” recalls monitor engineer Ian Beveridge, who was getting ready to support frontman Dave Grohl and the band on a Yamaha PM5D console. He was working alongside RF technician Eiran Simpson, who was tasked with keeping the band’s ears happy with a setup that included Lectrosonics’ M2T dual stereo transmitters, M2Ra beltpack receivers and an M2C active antenna combiner.
In describing how the Lectrosonics M2-series monitor is deployed, Beveridge outlines a fully redundant setup. “Every band member has a tech, and every tech has a mix, fed from stereo subgroups on the monitor console,” he notes. “I send every tech a duplicate of their band member’s mix, which is Y-split from the same stereo pair but into a separate transmitter-receiver chain. If the artist has any trouble, the tech can just hand over their beltpack.”
But gremlins have a way of striking in unforeseen ways, and that’s what happened in this case. “We were headlining, the previous band finished, and we were doing set change,” Beveridge recalls. “It was typical British weather, lots of rain, and all this water had pooled in the roof above the left wing of the stage. The roof collapsed, and maybe 50 gallons of water hit the monitor console.” Beveridge describes the resulting digital noise as “the loudest, most obnoxious thing I’ve ever heard— so bad that everyone’s fight-or-flight reflex kicked in. This was 10 minutes before the band was supposed to go on.”
With no possibility of restoring the thoroughly soaked PM5D to functionality, Beveridge and his fellow crew members engaged in some quick lateral thinking. “Dave Poynter, the monitor tech, was aware that the previous band had the same console,” Beveridge says. “We borrowed their console, wired it up channel for channel, loaded a file into it, and the band went onstage.”
Instead of having the whole show grind to an excruciating halt, the crew and band were able to give the huge crowd the concert they had been waiting in the wet weather to hear.
For the full story on how Foo Fighter’s audio team use Lectrosonics’ M2-series monitor system, see “Tips & Tricks,” FRONT of HOUSE, Nov. 2023, page 38.
