8 CONCERTS & TOURING
here’s undoubtedly a particular kind of electricity that runs through a crowd when Dave walks on stage. It’s not just that initial starstruck, sharp inhale of breath when he first appears (though there’s plenty of those as well). It’s something more anticipatory. If you have followed his meteoric rise from Six Paths, through Psychodrama and into We’re All Alone in This Together , you already know Dave doesn’t shy away from putting on quite the show. His past performances have formed a narrative experience beyond the standard usually expected from live music. Known for his socially conscious lyricism and wordplay, Dave is a British rapper and actor that has seen explosive success throughout his still-early career. From winning the Mercury Prize to album of the year at the BRIT Awards with Psychodrama , his music is praised for its raw but powerful challenge to the British political system and society as a
Expectations were high for Dave’s first UK tour in four years (pictured), and the production team delivered
whole. In 2018, his song Question Time , which criticises the British government, won the Ivor Novello Award for best contemporary song. Even if you aren’t a fan, a quick Google search will turf up one of his most iconic live performances to date: when he played Black – a compelling song that dissects his experience of black identity, excellence and explores what it is like to live in the UK as a black person – at the 2020 BRITs. It totals 12 million views on YouTube at time of writing. During the viral video, you see Dave use a piano as a narrative tool. He plays it, but he also uses it as a digital canvas on which to cleverly project 3D visuals. So, when he decided to return for his first UK tour in four years, following the 2025 release of his latest album, The Boy Who Played the Harp , expectations were high. As a fan myself, having spent years watching him evolve into one of Britain’s best live storytellers, the idea of how he would translate his next album, after a fairly long break, into a scalable arena show seemed like both a challenge and an opportunity. RECONFIGURING THE FORMULA To understand how this particular show came together, you have to start by abandoning the traditional rulebook. Arena tours tend to rely on a familiar formula: fixed LED walls, cue-based playback and a clear separation between content creation and physical staging. This production, however, which was of course driven by Dave’s own narrative style, needed something more elastic. Ben Annibal,
Universal Pixels’ project manager, tells us about it. “The design was more challenging than usual arena shows that require an upstage screen and I-Mag package,” he explains. “The involvement of tracking screens and real-time content meant we had to look at the overall workflow.” The phrase ‘overall workflow’ is important. Once you introduce moving LED surfaces into a show (especially eight of them!), everything drastically changes. Content can no longer be pre-rendered to fixed coordinates, and lighting cannot assume static reflections. Even camera shots have to adapt to constantly shifting sightlines. This meant the solution had to involve a system that didn’t just play back content to the crowd, but actively understands the space it’s operating in. What this led to was a workflow that connected the dots between automation, tracking and rendering. Positional data from the moving screens fed directly into Disguise GX 3 media servers,
How he would translate his next
album into a scalable arena show seemed like both a challenge and an opportunity
Powered by FlippingBook