Intro Photo: Daniel Boud

It hadn’t been the smoothest day on the Laneway Festival tour, and the sweltering heat at Sydney’s College of the Arts wasn’t helping. Out back of the main Park and Garden stages, production manager Haydn Johnston and the local Gigpiglet and JPJ crew were sweating it out waiting for the last wave of trucks to rock up. On those trucks, which had been delayed on their way out of Melbourne, was Tame Impala’s entire production.

When we found out the Laneway Festival stint would be Tame Impala’s last tour dates for the Currents album cycle — other than an appearance at Panorama Festival in New York — we thought it would be fascinating to see how Tame Impala translates their records to the stage. As it turns out, the answer is they try to mimic the record’s sound as closely as possible — just bigger and amplified — which requires more than your average rock band’s backline.

I’d arranged to meet up with Tame’s FOH engineer Adam Round before the show. When I spy Adam, he’s looking remarkably calm despite his gear still not having arrived at 5pm, and the band due to kick off at nine. Having interviewed frontman Kevin Parker twice before, I know how focused he is on getting sounds exactly ‘just so’. He even won both the ARIA Producer and Engineer of the Year Awards for Tame Impala’s last album Currents in 2015.

As the time ticks towards 6pm, I’m getting a little worried for Adam. After all, this is a tour that’s included festivals like Coachella, a string of Lollapalooza dates, Pukkelpop, Bestival, Electric Picnic, Lowlands, Rock in Roma, Bonnaroo, as well as iconic landmarks like Radio City Music Hall and Rocks. In other words, it’s bound to be an impressive show with an equally elaborate setup that’s surely going to require more than a couple of hours to hook up.

RACKED & READY

When Adam unpacks his rig I start to understand his calm. He rolls two identical rack cases up to the FOH tent, sets them side by side and lifts the lids. Inside are two perfectly racked DiGiCo SD11i consoles, a Lake LM44 processor, two Waves Server One DSP units, a UPS and drawers for days. Out of the drawers he pulls out an octopus array of arms and screen attachments and begins to assemble the extremities. A redundant set of stage rack inputs plug into the back, a pair of outputs go to the system, he pulls out neatly-bound red and blue XLR cables, plugs in two Shure SM58s as his shout and talkback mics and he’s all set to go. As a final touch, he adjusts the colour of his rack LEDs to a warmish purple and checks to see how things are coming along onstage.

It took all of a few minutes, leaving me plenty of time to marvel at how well-engineered this front of house setup is. I check the side of the case, and it’s not some external rental house-devised piece, the stencil says AP Engineering, Adam’s own Perth-based company.

As it turns out, Adam is a stickler for efficiency. Ever since joining the Tame Impala crew three years ago, he’s helped reinvent their entire backline rig. His philosophy is that you can do a gig with less personnel if they’re the right people and you supply them with the most efficient package.

Similar to Adam’s FOH rig, the onstage rigs have been rationalised into a handful of rack cases. “It started off modular, with everything in its own little case,” said Adam, who estimates they used to freight 70 Pelican cases from stage to stage. “You’d set up on an empty road case or table and it would take a few hours to plug it all in and run it all up.”

These days, Adam said that “out of the full set of inputs, 75-80% of it is already plugged in. All we need to do is plug two multi-pins into each side of the stage with a PowerCon.”

The benefits weren’t just in drastically reducing setup time, continued Adam, “It also improved the consistency and reliability show to show. It’s easier to load in and out, and saved the band a lot of money on freight. We don’t have to charter our own planes to make some of the crazy routing we have; it can just get on the next available plane.”