54 APRIL 2020 • WWW.LSIONLINE.COMO ON TOUR
It’s a five-hour drive to Glasgow from your correspondent’s
home in Yorkshire. As a fillip, I took Capaldi’s debut album
Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent.I pretty much always buy the albums of new performers I review
for LSi. Capaldi’s album is remarkably consistent - there isn’t
a poor song on it, not least Someone You Loved, the hit single
that has catapulted his career into the stratosphere. But
listening to the record, I found a couple of problems. There was
under an hour’s worth of material on the album, hardly enough
to sustain an arena audience with the entertainment they
deserve. The second was content. While all songs are well-
crafted with the vocals beautifully rendered, they all fall under
the heading of heartache - there isn’t much light to contrast
with the prevailing shade. I am sure Capaldi would be the first to
counter that, and said as much on the first occasion he had to
address his Glasgow audience. More to the point, live on stage,
the singer and his band apply an entirely refreshing
rearrangement of the songs that doesn’t just bring them to life
with a much wider dynamic undertow - it positively enthuses
them with arena-filling energy. It’s quite the feat and underlines
the sense Capaldi radiates that he really has a clear idea of
where he wants to go and knows exactly how to get there.Regarding the issue of time, interestingly, it is his skill with
words that fills the performance gaps of a limited number of
songs. The man is an entertaining raconteur. As production
manager Nick Lawrie reveals: “For Europe and when we’re in the
US, he moderates his Scottish brogue and speaks more slowlyand clearly.” I had asked several members of the production
team about that issue before I talked with Lawrie, and they all
had said the same, adding that his wit is undiminished by such
moderation. As I said, this is a performer with great awareness
who knows what he’s doing.SHOW DESIGN
For Chris ‘Squib’ Swain and Dan Hill, better known as Cassius,
designing a concept for this show was filled with unusual
hurdles. Nick Lawrie told me that he likes to put each
department out to full tender. “Cassius were one of 16 design
houses we approached,” he tells me. Then there was the tour
itself, full production rehearsals at Fly by Nite in early February,
then a two week tour of Europe with a scaled down ‘B’
production, followed by a two week break before restarting in the
UK for a run through one theatre and eight shows in five arenas.
“The opening UK show was the ‘B’ theatre rig,” says Squib. “So
the first shows we got to present the full concept at were his two
homecoming concerts here in Glasgow.”In short order, the Cassius design comprises a bare stage, just
a riser each side with two musicians apiece. The risers, fitted
across their front face with the same Roe CV5 LED that
constitutes the back screen, come from All Access, as does a lift
out at FOH. Capaldi has the entire forestage to himself. At the
rear a large HD LED screen rigged in portrait fashion towers to
some 12m, flanked by four vertical ladders each side filled with
eight Robe BMFLs apiece. The ladders taper positionally in from
downstage edge to the screen boundary - forming a chevron.