LONDON – Thirty years after the debut album, eight years after the last tour, Squeeze have been playing their first live shows of this century in the UK. Supported by NEXO GEO tangent-array PA systems supplied by SSE Audio Group, the band has sold out mid-sized venues throughout the UK before stepping up to 5,000-seat, high-profile clubs for the final dates.
At front-of-house, Engineer Tom Wiggans and System Tech Chris Snow watch over a NEXO GEO Series inventory, which has changed its components as the band has moved into the larger venues. In the early stages of the tour, when the shows were playing in civic halls and theatres, Wiggans was working with NEXO’s newly released GEO S12 Series, one of the first engineers to do so in a sizeable live-concert application.
“SSE had already tried out the new S1230 cabinets as infill for larger GEO T rigs,” explains Wiggans, “and, in this role, they are absolutely superb. For the first part of this tour, we found them invaluable because they fly really well, and are very quick to put up, but they are also very happy to be ground-stacked. In some of the smaller venues where you can’t fly anything too heavy, we were able to split the 12-box hangs and that worked incredibly well.”
Wiggans points to another touring bonus with the new S12 Series, namely that only eight of CAMCO’s Vortex 6 amplifiers were need to run the whole system ¾ two hangs of 12 GEO S12 enclosures, plus eight CD18 subs.
For the closing shows of the tour in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Dublin, SSE has swapped the GEO S12s for NEXO’s flagship GEO T cabinets, giving Tom Wiggans his first opportunity to mix the system loaded with the new NXStream management software.
“I liked GEO T before,” says Tom, “I love it now, with NXStream. It’s much easier to time align, and the new software has delivered a massive improvement in the low end, addressing what might be called a grey area between the CD18 subs and the GEO T modules.
“A characteristic of NEXO systems is that you can make a tiny adjustment and really hear what you’ve done, immediately, even in big, boomy arenas. With GEO T, I can listen to my left and right buss through headphones, take them off and hear exactly the same thing from the arrays in front of me.”
At front-of-house, Tom Wiggans was piloting a VENUE system, incorporating the main D-Show work surface and Sidecar extender. His first experience with the desk came while looking after a Pro Tools HD system for FOH Engineer Davey Cooper on the Manic Street Preachers tour at the beginning of the year. As a result, he requested VENUE for the Squeeze tour and purchased his own Pro Tools HD system to complement the remainder of this production, which was supplied by SSE Hire.
He says that the Pro Tools TDM plug-in support was the main reason for switching to VENUE. “I wanted to reduce the amount of outboard — also if it’s a plug-in, you don’t have to worry about power supplies overheating.” Wiggans is also making extensive use of the McDSP plug-ins, especially the MC2000 multi-band compressor, which he loves.
“And the desk sounds so neutral, I can use the plug-ins to create any vintage sounds I need.”
Squeeze was one of the biggest British bands of the late 70s, early 80s, showcasing the songwriting talents of Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook. Together again to promote a Greatest Hits album release, the duo is joined on stage by John Bentley, Simon Hansen and Stephen Large.
For information, please visit www.nexo.fr.
