Named after a David Bowie single, Holy Holy is a touring band that performs the works of the late superstar. But formed in 2013-2014, Holy Holy is no quick money grab. And it’s not quite your average tribute band.
The performers in this eight-piece ensemble include drummer Woody Woodmansey (original drummer in The Spiders from Mars, Bowie’s backing band) and longtime Bowie producer Tony Visconti (T. Rex, Thin Lizzy; who also often played with Bowie) on bass.
Also on the tour is a lineup of A-list players, such as Glenn Gregory (of Heaven 17) on vocals, Berenice Scott (also of Heaven 17) on keys, saxman Terry Edwards, guitarists James Stevenson (Gene Loves Jezebel, Gen X) and film/TV composer Paul Cuddeford (Bob Geldof), as well as Visconti’s daughter Jessica Lee Morgan on backing vocals.
Having previously toured in the U.K. and Japan, the band made its first U.S. appearance in January 2016 for some East Coast dates. Holy Holy kicked off a longer North American tour on March 31 at Carnegie Hall, followed by an April 1 show at Radio City Music Hall, and wraps up at the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto on May 8. The show is comprised of a first set that plays the never previously performed Bowie classic, The Man Who Sold the World album, in its entirety, followed by a second half of other DB material.
Despite its glam appeal, this is no 20-truck/eight-coach tour. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, with a minimal crew. Front of house engineer Steve McGuire is carrying his own mics and a chain of USB drives with various console setups, but relies on his rider to provide what he needs — including a monitor engineer — at each stop. So aside from backline and the band’s instruments, there’s little else toted on the road.
Fortunately, McGuire is a savvy veteran engineer who knows how to eke the absolute most out of any live audio system — even those that might stray “a bit” off the rider. In some ways, it’s kind of like mixing without a net. Yet, so far, it has worked, and worked well, with both the tour and the mixes receiving rave reviews.
That same minimalistic approach also applies to crew positions. McGuire is the tour manager and PM, in addition to mixing FOH; Clark Becker is the drum/guitar tech and stage manager; and Christian Thomas is the monitor liaison. No rest for the weary here.
Ringmaster/FOH Mixer
McGuire has led an amazing life in audio, not only in the studio, but also as FOH for a long list of past clients such as Billy Morrison, Dave Navarro, Steve Jones, Josh Freese, Billy Gibbons, Ozzy Osbourne, Donovan Leitch, MKTO, Big Time Rush, Paulina Rubio, Joss Stone, Prong, The Wallflowers, The Go-Go’s and dozens more. Like so many in the industry, he began by playing in a band and making demo recordings.
“I started playing in bands in Detroit in 1975, when I was 14 years old. In 1977, I was in a band with Don Was called The Traitors. Don had a partner, Jack Tan, who had a studio in a Westinghouse warehouse building in downtown Detroit that we had access to 24/7,” McGuire recalls.
“There was all this old gear that came out of United Sound. So I basically just lived there and could experiment and record on old TASCAM half-inch 8-tracks, some Orban parametric EQs and spring reverbs and old E-V and Shure mics. Down the hall was an industrial stadium-style bathroom — about 60 feet long, with really high ceilings and all hard tile. I didn’t like the way the Orban spring reverb sounded. Then it dawned on me — just put a speaker down there and feed anything that needed reverb on to that speaker, put a couple mics in there and bring it back into the mix. That’s pretty much how I got started.”
In 1980, McGuire set out to NYC and met Jim Toth, the FOH engineer at the legendary Peppermint Lounge, who took him under his wing and gave McGuire a job as monitor engineer on a Neotek Series II recording console.
“Back then, there were no outboard graphic EQs for monitors at the Peppermint Lounge — it was all parametric, with some four-band Audioarts parametrics for each mix. That taught me good habits in terms of not destroying your signal chain by pulling all the frequencies out of it. And I have stuck to that philosophy ever since. I look for the right mic with the right placement with as little EQ as possible, to make what I am hearing onstage come through the P.A,” McGuire explains.
“After the Peppermint Lounge, I banged around the NY clubs for a while. In the early 90’s, I moved back to Detroit. I worked for Thunder Audio in Detroit, back in 1991 to ‘94, when Thunder Audio was still in owner Tony Villarreal’s garage. That taught me a lot about versatility and how every rig is customized for its particular use. It was really good for me. I moved to L.A. in 2000, and have been an independent FOH engineer ever since. If I needed practical old school advice, I used to call [the late] ML Procise. I really loved ML — he put me in some good situations. These days, I usually call Dave Shadoan at Sound Image, Paul Newman or talk to Justin Weaver or some of the other guys at Clair Bros.”
The Holy Holy Project
McGuire’s involvement with Holy Holy began with a call from Tom Vitorino at TVT Management, who manages Holy Holy, The Cult and some other bands. “When he called, I was more than happy to get the opportunity to work with Tony Visconti. It is really cool. I’ve had some great conversations with him, on how he did this or that. And how he put together some of those great Bowie albums. I found that, on a lot of levels, we had a lot in common. It’s an honor to work with one of my all-time heroes.”
So is McGuire nervous about mixing Tony Visconti on stage? “Absolutely not! I am not nervous with anybody — ever. (Laughter) Cause if you are mixing nervous, you aren’t mixing!
Translating the Onstage Sound
McGuire has a pretty Spartan gear complement. “All I am really carrying is my favorite dynamic mic package in the world, that I got from Bob Heil. Everything else, I am just advancing locally for consoles. I am a big Avid D-Show guy, so my rider has Avid D-Show consoles and Profiles; and PM5Ds and Soundcraft Vi6s when Avids aren’t available. But I love Bob Heil’s mics. When you are doing rock ‘n’ roll, with live wedges onstage, the Heil PR35 is unsurpassed. The back side rejection and gain before feedback is phenomenal. I haven’t found another mic that works as good as the PR35 vocal in that situation.”
McGuire did reveal his secret for dealing with a different P.A. every night. “When I walk in the door, the first thing I do is get the P.A. flat. I have been using [Rational Acoustics] SMAART as an RTA, to try to get a visual image of what’s happening with the room. I’ve been using Dire Straits’ “Brothers In Arms” as my P.A. tuning song for about 30 years. That song has everything you need to tune a P.A. It was recorded and mixed on a Neve 8048 at Air Studios in Montserrat. I know exactly what that record is supposed to sound like. Using pink noise, SMAART and Brothers In Arms, I can pretty quickly hear things like components of the system that are out of phase or not properly time-aligned. When you aren’t carrying everything, you have got to deal with whatever is in the room. When that’s the case, don’t give up. Take what you got, make it sound as good as it can sound, and keep going!”
McGuire also related one effective technique that has served him well over the years. “If you have a good sonic pocket going onstage, mixing FOH is not as difficult. One thing that I really believe in — and is probably the number-one thing I do, when you have a loud band in a smaller venue is, if possible, delay the FOH P.A. to the loudest thing on stage. And then, instead of fighting the loudest thing onstage, it just becomes part of your mix. Then you are literally sound reinforcing around it.”
So essentially if the stage is 15 feet deep, would he be delaying the P.A. about 15 milliseconds to align it with the backline? “That would be the starting point, then I ‘move’ the P.A. forward or back to find the sweet spot,” McGuire notes.
Tony Visconti has a distinctive bass sound. “Tony plays an EB3 with customized pickups and some active circuitry. He uses an Ashdown ABM1200 with an Ashdown 4×10 cabinet. I mic the upper right 4×10 speaker with a single Heil PR48, and I also run a DI. I should add that the Heil PR40 is the best sax mic since the Sennheiser MD421 and EV RE20 that I have used in years. The best thing about it is its backside rejection, considering there’s a 15-inch wedge about 24-inches in front of it. Plus, it looks really cool!”
A little guitar trickery is also in the mix. “For Paul Cuddeford’s Blackstar Artisan Combo guitar rig, I use a Heil PR31 on the front, directly on-axis an inch or so in front of the cabinet. Then I put another PR31 on the back of the combo, pointed straight up inside the box so it’s off-axis, and then I throw that out of phase at FOH. On James Stevenson’s 4×12 Marshall cab, I use a pair of 31s on-axis, and a pair of 31s off-axis on a second speaker. The on-axis mic for each guy is panned to one side, and the off-axis mic is panned 180 degrees to the other side, causing them to criss-cross in the stereo image. Gives a nice full sound, without adding delay.”
Daily sound checks are a must. “We sound check every day, because we are not carrying a P.A. If we were carrying processing as well as mics, with a console package, I would do virtual sound check everyday, and they could stop in if they felt like it.”
The rider system usually works, but then again, sometimes… “My rider asks for Avid D-Shows and Profiles with an SC48 at minimum. We haven’t really run into too many venues that were too small that they wouldn’t bring it in. But there were a couple on the last tour that had older analog desks and a mishmash of outboard gear — SPX90s, Alesis 3630 compressors, combinations of dbx 150s, 166s, 168s, 160XPs — and one place that had four channels of the old Kepex gates. I hadn’t seen those since the Peppermint Lounge days back in the early ‘80’s!” McGuire adds with a laugh.
“As far as plug-ins go, I use Waves Live 9.2 and I really like the Avid Revibe for its EMT simulations. I use the Avid Revibe for all my reverbs, and just set them up differently. All this Bowie stuff was all EMT plate reverb and chambers back then. I always build my own pitch effects, to try to emulate the old Eventide 910, which Tony is a big fan of. I am also a big fan of the Waves NLS (Non Linear Summer) bus — I used NLS bus across my groups to give me that vintage Neve sound. Everything goes to groups, and then the groups are controlled by VCAs. That way, the threshold on my bus compressors isn’t affected, and the
compression ratios on my groups stays consistent.”
Tight Team Equals Success
Yet even with a minimal crew, doing a successful tour is definitely a team effort. “When you are not carrying a full crew, you’ve got to have somebody who is experienced, can think on their feet, knows how to work with people and get the job done. For this tour, it’s a guy named Clark Becker. The first tour I did with him was a world tour with Joss Stone back in 2005 or 2006. I’ve taken him out on a few tours with me. He’s a great guy, an excellent drum tech and he has a great attitude. Whatever needs to be done gets done, and he’s not picky about it. The thing is staying positive. That’s important, when everybody’s working as hard as they are and everybody’s as tired as they are. Stay positive.”
Holy Holy North American Tour
Crew
Soundco: None (supplied by venue)
FOH Engineer/Tour Manager/PM: Steve McGuire
Drum-Guitar Tech/Stage Mgr: Clark Becker
Monitor Liaison/Assistant Stage/Tour Manager: Chris Thomas
Merchandise: June Woodmansey
Haljoe Coach: Doug Shay
Coach Driver: John Glas
