FOH Engineer Ange Jones Supports Paul Weller's Return to The Royal Albert Hall
In May, Paul Weller returned to London's Royal Albert Hall to play five dates promoting his new album, Wake Up The Nation.
To Brits, especially, the 52-year-old Modfather needs no introduction. His career has spanned four decades, each of which has been layered with critical and commercial success: The Jam from 1976 to 1982; The Style Council from 1983 to 1989; and by the mid-1990s with records such as Wild Wood and Stanley Road under his belt, he'd established himself as one of Britain's most talented songwriters.
This year, shortly after receiving the Godlike Genius Award at London's NME Awards ceremonies, Weller released Wake Up the Nation, his 10th studio album.
Back to Basics
Weller's longtime FOH engineer, Ange Jones, recently ditched his Avid Venue console, opting to go back to analog technology in the shape of a Midas XL4. He explained that when you're working with Weller, you never quite know what to expect, which was one of the reasons for the change.
"I had the Venue for five years and I enjoyed it, but I found myself getting lost on a couple of things. Paul doesn't tend to stick to the set very much; he'll often throw in an extra song and it might require, say, an echo repeat or some dubbing. The instant access just wasn't there on the digital board, so I've come back to the XL4 to try and get back to basics."
For the RAH performances, Jones used an Avid VENUE D-Show as a sidecar to the bigger XL4 at FOH.
Jones always carries his trusty "box of tricks" with him while on the road, which includes his favorite stereo echo: the TC-Electronics 2290. There's also a TC-Electronics D2 digital delay and a Yamaha SPX990, which he uses for panning effects and symphonic work. A pair of DBX 162SL compressors were used on the vocals – units that Jones finds more reliable than the Tubetech models he used to carry.
Jones is a big fan of RAH and knows the venue very well; being Weller's engineer for two decades, he's had plenty of practice at combating its challenging acoustics. A big help in his opinion was the inclusion of his favored Meyer Sound PA system (which he describes as "a known beast"), which was supplied by his longstanding friend Yan Stile, who heads up rental company Canegreen, based in Redditch, England. Canegreen has provided Weller's PA systems for over 20 years.
The PA was configured L-R-C: 16 MILOs hung in the center with two MILO 120s at the very bottom of the hang, and 18 MICAs were hung on each side; M'elodies were used for the frontfills and sidefills. Five 700-HP subs were under the stage and another two were positioned each side; Jones revealed that a few EAW SB1000 subs were also brought in to "big it up a little." The whole system was being run using Galileo, providing independent control of the zones from the top to the bottom; there were three zones on the front and three zones on each of the side sections.
"Can You Turn Up the Wedges?"
Very much set in his ways, Weller is a wedge man through and through; an astonishing 22 EAW wedges were used on the stage, which didn't help Jones when it came to mixing the show.
"We've talked about the onstage volume, but Paul's enjoying it up there; a lot of the new songs have a sort of spoken word vocal with a rock ‘n' roll band behind it, so the monitors need to be loud. It worked well in the warmup shows we did in the smaller clubs in Europe, but in here it's a struggle; we get the vocals up and the drums up and the rest of it is like an ash cloud coming in your direction…!"
Weller won't touch any vocal mic except his trusty Shure SM58; Jones used SM58s for all of the backing vocalists also. On the band, however, he opted for an array of different mics: A Shure BETA 52 and BETA 91 on the kick drum, two Shure SM57s on the snare (a BETA57 on the bottom and a regular 57 on top), Sennheiser 604s on the toms and a Sennheiser capsule mic on the hi-hats, and a pair of AKG 414s for overheads. Shure KSM32s were used on the guitars and a beyerdynamic M88 and an Avalon DI were used on the bass.
Jones ran 64 channels in total; 48 inputs through the XL4 and another 16 from an Avid D-Show Profile console, which was brought in to accommodate an eight-piece string section. Due to the loud stage sound, Jones "doubled up"' using a contact mic system and a live mic system to try and get some body into the sound. The strings were loosely grouped so that monitors engineer Annette Guilfoyle could get a feed sent to her Yamaha PM5D console from FOH.
Screaming Guitars
When I stepped into the photo pit for the opening numbers, I immediately related to Jones' comments about the stage sound. The guitars were screaming at me – and naturally I was getting hit pretty hard by the line of sub under the stage. For the rest of the show, I took my seat in the auditorium, and the sound was really solid; not overpowering, just bang on the money. The band was great and the string section certainly added another dimension to the sound. Weller's set was unpredictable yet sensational; his voice was on top form – it seems to get better with age – and he got through nine of the 14 songs off of Wake Up The Nation, highlights being the title track itself and "Find The Torch, Burn The Plans." There were a few numbers from The Jam era including "Fast Car/Slow Traffic" and, towards the end of the night; he also did an acoustic set, which featured a well-received rendition of "Brand New Start."
To mark Weller's residency at RAH, his penultimate show was broadcast to the U.K., U.S., Australia and much of Europe over the internet via web cast on a pay-per-view basis by Tim Summerhayes, who heads up Red TX in the U.K.
