AUSTIN, Texas — When Capital Sound Hire sent their Business Development Manager Richard Hannan to the SXSW Festival in Austin last year to seek out new up-and-coming bands, he discovered Foals, a new band from the UK being heavily touted based on its successful debut album, Antidotes. After agreeing to provide ad hoc support to the five-piece art-rock dance band from Oxford (in the form of backline and mics), Capital has just completed the full production for a sell-out tour of the UK’s circuit venues.
With a Martin Audio W8LC Compact line array as the centerpiece of the audio system, the London-based service company was still unprepared for the fact that on the night Foals played the Carling Academy Brixton, they were also providing reinforcement for a one-off show by Canadian band The Dears at London’s Porchester Hall.
“Now those animal names was a complete coincidence,” says Capital Account Manager Paul Timmins, “the more so when you consider there was also a band called Wild Beasts supporting Foals during their northern leg.”
Although Foals’ management had changed along the way, the Capital production team was geared up for full production by the time the band played Radio 1’s Big Weekend Festival at Maidstone in May this year — the curtain raiser to the summer festival season. At that point, Foals FOH engineer Paul Fyfe, Paul Timmins, had already recognized that the band's sound was in safe hands — and, given the chance, he soon opted for a Martin Audio Compact line array.
Micky Griffiths, Capital’s system tech and FOH support, rigged 12 W8LC’s per side at Brixton and six WS218X subs per side –– at 4,700 capacity the largest venue on the tour schedule––but for he majority of the tour they have used two hangs of nine W8LC and four WS218Xs per side in order to fit everything into one truck. The image is improved by adding four W8LM center front fills while conventional W8C’s provide sidefill augmentation.
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