Granby Halls, Leicester, January 25th, 1981

[Dave <dave@thewho.net>]

I trancribed this article for another Who list and thought I would do
the same this list.

Enjoy,

Dave...


International Musician and Recording World
March 1981
Review of the The Who Concert and equipment used
at the Granby Halls, Leicester on January 25th, 1981
By Ken Dibble
Part1

The Venue:

The Granby Halls at Leicester are in effect, a complex of large brick
barns with concrete galvanized steel roofs supported on hefty steel
pillars and girders. Inside, there are no fittings or fixtures
whatsoever - just a huge empty space which echoes like an underground
tube station. There are no seats and the 4,200 strong audience stood on
their feet for the whole of the four hour sojourn between the doors
opening at 7:30 and the end of The Whos set at about half eleven with
amazing good humor.
There was ample room in the hall for that number and as a consequence,
Who devotees could stand around in small groups in comfort instead of
all crushing together like the proverbial sardines in a tin can in order
to get a view of the proceedings.

There was something of a fair ground atmosphere about the whole thing,
with pop-corn vendors, soft drink stands, beefburger bars, tea urns,
memorabilia stalls, and a beer servery made from rusty scaffolding,
rough wooden planks and sheets of canvas standing about the perimeter of
the hall. The entire stage had been constructed of scaffolding specially
for the concert, as had the follow spot gantry. Various rooms and
lobbies off the hall itself had been appropriated for use as dressing
rooms, instrument tuning rooms, crew canteen, administration office and
a Leslie sound room - more of which later.

The Instruments and Backline:

The legendary Pete Townshend as wild as ever except that on this
occasion no gear was smashed up, played seven or eight guitars which
although not exactly identical were very similar indeed. These comprised
black Telecaster pattern bodies fitted with Schecter double coil pickups
and mainly Schecter fittings, but some has the new Sperzal machine
heads.

Some of these guitars were made by Schecter and some by Roger Griffin.
All were custom built for Townshend. The reason for so many instruments
is so that each guitar can be pre-tuned by Pete’s roadie, Alan Rogan,
with capos already in position on various frets to avoid the de-tuning
hassle. Alan had some of the new American Sabine capos which are
supposed not to detune the when fitted and he gave me one of these to
try out-it seems to work well but it is a fiddle to fit, so Pete
continues to use his seven or eight guitars - a nice solution if you can
afford it!

Townshend amplification set-up is fairly straightforward on stage,
although a whole multitude of effects are added out front at the PA desk
as we shall see later. His basic set-up is two Hiwatt Custom 100
amplifier heads, each driving one standard Hiwatt 4x12 fitted with JBL
K120’s. He has a third similar stack, but this is only there as a spare
in the event of a breakdown. He uses an MXR Dynacomp compressor to
provide more drive to his lead breaks and is currently experimenting
with a Roland ‘Dimension D’ flanger/phaser unit as well - and that is
all.

John Entwistle has an equally interesting set-up which includes a number
of custom built Alembic basses of various shapes and styles, some of
which are decorated with fine sterling silver tracery. The two he had at
Leicester were an ‘Explorer’ shape and a large ‘Flying V’. Both guitars
are active - ie: they have electronic circuitry built into them
including such features as LED indicators set into the neck, and are fed
to the amplifier via a special Alembic pre-amp/splitter unit so that the
mid and high frequencies are fed to one amplifier and the lows to
another. The amplifiers themselves comprised two Stramp pre-amp units
feeding four
Sunn Coliseum power amplifiers which in turn fed three Mega 1x18
cabinets fitted with Gauss drivers and three Sunn 4x12 cabinets. John
used no effects units at all on stage.

John Bundrick, otherwise known as Rabbit is The Who’s now permanent
keyboards man. His set up consisted of a Prophet 5 polyphonic
synthesizer, a Yamaha CP70 electric grand piano and a Hammond B3 organ
with two heavily modified Leslie cabinets. These have been fitted with
JBL K140 15” loudspeaker units, JBL 2482 compression drivers and 180w.
power amplifiers so as to give a little more drive to the sound. One of
these was alongside the keyboards equipment while the other had been
locked in a separate room off stage so that the Hammond B3 can be miked
up and fed to the PA without picking up all the rest of the racket going
on on-stage.

A Shure SM58 was used to mike the bottom end and a Sennheiser 421 for
the highs. Rabbit mixed his own keyboards blend on stage using a Yamaha
PM430 desk and had a few effects units as well including a Roland
Vocorder, a Roland RE301 Chorus Echo, an MXR Phase 100 and number of
Morley volume pedals. Besides the Leslie, his stage amplification
comprised an Ashley SC50 4w. active crossover and MXR 31 band graphic
feeding two Yamaha 2200 power amplifiers, a custom built 2 x 15 bass
cabinet also with ATC drivers and two JBL 2410 compression units fitted
with 2370 diaphragms.

Kenny Jones, had a large Premier kit made up of an 8”, 10”, 13”, 14” and
15” concert toms, an 18” Resonator floor tom, a 25” timpani, a 22”
Resonator kick drum which had been specially made 4” deeper than
standard, with Pearl pedal and a 5 1/2” x 14” snare drum. Most of the
cymbals were Zildjian and comprised three 17” crash/rock cymbals, an 18”
ride, a 16” brilliant splash, an 18” pang and a chinese. The Hi-hat was
a 14” Paiste ‘Sound Edge’.

The microphones used on the kit were the new Shure SM77/Tan on all rack
tom-toms and snare, ElectroVoice RE20 and Sennheiser 455 on kick drum,
Sennheiser 421 on the 25” timp, an AKG D224 on the ride cymbal and a
pair of Neuman N47’s overhead.  The hit-hat was double miked with
another SM77 feeding the monitors and one of the little Sony lapen
microphones you often see on Television interviewers, taped to the Shure
and feeding the PA. A most unusual practice - especially as the Sony
ECM-50 is omnidirectional and was sitting in front of the drum monitors!

Whilst on microphones, Pete, John, and ‘Rabbit’ were all using the
familiar SM58 for vocals while Roger Daltrey has one of new  SM78/Tan
models to try out, and had its lead securely taped to the body of the
microphone so that it did not fly off its lead when swung through the
air by its cable - which, if it happened once, it happened a dozen times
during the show. What a shame to hide all that nice tan ‘suedecoat’
finish (which is the main feature of these new mikes) so that it was
indistinguishable from a standard SM58 - especially when Shure had given
the band the mike to promote sales! The bass stack was miked using
Sennheiser 421 and the lead stack with a Shure SM58. 
Monitors

There were three monitor systems in use. One was a normal system of
sidefills and floor wedges fed from a Midas 24 into 8 PR series monitor
desk, one was specifically a drum monitor system fed from another Midas
24/8 desk and the third was to replay backing tracks off tape onto the
stage. The main stage monitoring system has an impressive array of
‘outboard effects’ equipment whose sole purpose was to provide special
effects over the monitors for the benefit of the band themselves. The
effects as heard by the audience were added seperatley at the PA desk as
we shall see shortly.
These goodies included an MXR Pitch Transposer used on vocals and
guitar, a Delta Lab DDL used to provide phasing for Pete Townshend’s
guitar, a Kemo Stage Echo used on Rogers vocals, a Dynacord DRS-78
digital reverb system used on Pete T’s guitar and an MXR modular phaser
and flanger rack also used on Townshend’s guitar. In order to
accommodate all this lot, the two normal auxiliary send/returns provided
on the desk had been modified so that each aux. channel can be routed to
any one of four effects units. All the monitor speaker systems were
actively crossed over, all were driven by Amcron DC300A’s and all had
Klark Tekniks DN27 graphic equalizers.
The monitors themselves were either Showco 3-way, Tasco/Harwell 2-way or
Martin LE200’s and the side-fills were the usual 4560 type bins with JBL
acoustic lenses on top.
Backing tracks for the three of the numbers, ‘Who Are You’, ‘Baba O’
Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ were provided by two Sculley 4 track
(1/2”) tape machines located on stage by the monitor desk instead of out
front. These were on a remote varipitch control so that Pete Townshend
could ‘tune’ the tapes to the band from onstage. The backing tracks were
played onto the stage via two Martin stacks while being simultaneously
sent to the PA desk out front. Two of the four tracks on the Sculleys
carried the actual music in stereo while a third track was used click
tracks to Kenny Jones over Koss headphones driven by a BGW 100w power
amplifier!!!
The drum monitors were comparativley straightforward and their prime
purpose seem to be to re-amplify the drums themselves and blast this
into the back on Kenny Jones’s head via a pair of 4560 type bins fitted
with Gauss 400 watt drivers and a pile of JBL accoustic lenses!
What, with a 100w. amp driving his headphones and something approaching
120 decibels of monitoring, this guy must either have the constitution
of an ox, or else be deaf!

P.A.

This, considering all the gadgets and complexities of the stage set-up
was fairly straightforward - if somewhat large. The main mixing was
performed by Dick Hayes of ML Executives on two beautiful Neve 20
channel 4 group desks. These were fed to the main loudspeaker system via
a pair of Klark Teknik DN27 graphic equalizers and a Brook Siren Systems
5 way modular crossover system going over 250HZ, 1.5kHz, 3.5kHz and
6kHz. with limiters on all channels except below 250Hz.
The power amplifiers were the new Amcron PSA/2’s and an Amcron RTA/2
real-time analyser was used to provide a visual display of the spectrum
shape throughout the concert and as a guide to setting the graphics.
A whole rack of outboard effects were in use including one of the new
Roland RE-555 rack mounting Chorus Echo machines used for front-of-house
effects on Pete’s guitar, and AMS Stereo Harmoniser used on all vocals,
a rack of Kepex Noise Gates used on all rack tom-toms, a Urei limiter on
an insert jack on John’s bass guitar channel, an Ashley SC55 stereo
limiter and stereo parametric equalizer - both on Pete T’s guitar and
another Ashley limiter on the vocal sub-group. An interesting variation
to most rigs of this type was that all the incoming and outgoing lines
were terminated at jack field and assigned to their various destinations
by patchcords. This arrangement is so much more flexible than hardwired
multiways going direct into the equipment however neat and tidy this may
be.

The loudspeaker stacks - as with the rest of the rig, employed
components of the very best quality, although these has been stacked in
a most incoherent fashion with lows, mids and HF sections all jumbled up
together with little or no attention to distribution patterns. Each
stack comprised of seven Martin Audio 215 bins with two of the earlier
Martin bins with the larger flare openings, all fitted with Gauss 400w.
drivers at the bottom end; eight Martin Audio ‘Philishave’ midrange
cabinets fitted with RCF L12P/24 12” drivers; nine JBL 2350 radial horns
and a single JBL 2396 slant plate lens to provide near field coverage -
all fitted  with JBL 2350 and five JBL 2355 radials, along with a single
JBL 2390 crinkle plate lens - fitted with a mixture of JBL 2440 and 2441
drivers covered the HF while the ultra highs were catered for by means
of three boxes of four JBL 2402 ‘bullets’. As  I said, a huge stack with
lots of goodies there.
-- 
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http://www.petetownshend.net
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