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Niels Bjerregaard and Erich Bertti share Robe lighting system on Ghost/Volbeat tour

For Scandinavian rock bands Volbeat and Ghost’s recent double headliner tour through the U.S., lighting designers Niels “Niller” Bjerregaard (Volbeat) and Erich Bertti (Ghost) chose Robe MegaPointes, Robe Spiiders and Robe BMFL Spots as the primary moving lights, all supplied by Premier Global Productions out of Nashville.

Both designers had to create unique shows for their respective bands using this shared lighting system plus their own individual floor packages. For practical and technical reasons Volbeat played first, with a futuristic-looking set and high energy video visuals which were paired with a non-stop barrage of complementary lighting looks and cues.

Ghost then took to the stage, and blasted through a highly theatrical performance, rammed with lighting drama, changing back-cloths and epic presence. While the contrast could not have been starker, the two designers fully embraced working together.

Volbeat

Denmark-based Niels Bjerregaard has been working with Volbeat for thirteen years. He and Erich Bertti (from Brazil), together with Bjerregaard’s co-show designer Guy Sykes, went through about four interactions of the overhead design before they agreed on a model that worked well for both. Sykes is also Volbeat’s TM, has toured with metal band Pantera - among others - in the past, and is one of Bjerregaard’s mentors.

The idea was to have a universal MegaPointe look in the roof rig to set the tone for both artists. The 30 x MegaPointes and 50 x Spiiders were distributed over five slightly raked upstage/downstage orientated truss sections, each rigged with six MegaPointes. The Spiiders were dotted in between and around these, and this placement created the depth and dimension essential to fashioning the video visuality of Volbeat’s show.

The 16 x BMFL WashBeams were supplied with separate cameras to work with the four RoboSpot systems, with the luminaires rigged in banks of four. Eight - four a side - were on downstage trusses in side positions for neat and close following, non-classical follow spot style, and another four-and-four were rigged on two offstage trusses just downstage of the back wall and the ends of the five “finger” trusses.

The four RoboSpot BaseStations and their operators were located wherever they best fitted in each venue, usually somewhere behind the stage. All the parameters were running through Bjerregaard’s main ChamSys MQ500M console. All the lighting and video cues were planned together. There were no front lights at all apart from four conventional follow spots located out in the venues, and Bjerregaard says that these will be dropped for the band’s own headlining summer tour in Europe to be replaced with RoboSpots.

Bjerregaard worked closely on the show design with the video content creation team including Qprime, Katja Forup, Alex Spear and Karsten Sand as well as live camera director Shelby Cude who cut the mix with feeds from five operated cameras, four remotes plus three lipstick devices around the drums. The show’s video director was Jean Luc Williams.

Their main onstage video screen was 17 meters wide by 7 meters high, built from Roe CB8, and the riser fasciae were also clad with the same product. The left and right side screens were 4 meters wide by 3.5 meters high, and the video kit was supplied by LMG out of Las Vegas. TAIT built their custom riser setup.

Ghost

Erich Bertti is a DoP and a lighting designer/director who has been working with Ghost (Tobias Forge) since 2018, and Forge is heavily involved with every aspect of his production and live show presentation. Bertti and production manager Eddie Rocha had previously worked together on several other projects including Motörhead.

“Tobias has very specific ideas about how things should look onstage and he’s also very tech savvy, so he knows what can and can’t be achieved with which pieces of technology”, says Bertti. Ahead of the tour, he received a comprehensive brief from Forge about the style of the show and the visual treatment he was envisioning, which was the complete antithesis of Volbeat.

This was the first time that Bertti had used MegaPointes as a main fixture. He says that had there been more space in the roof, he would have requested Robe Tarrantulas as well. His original floor package also contained a quantity of MegaPointes, but he ultimately chose 12 x BMFL Spots which were deployed around Ghost’s multiple staircase and riser set.

Changes have subsequently been made to the original set design to enhance its three dimensionality, so Bertti will use MegaPointes when the tour resumes in Europe in a couple of months as a smaller fixture is now needed in these positions. Bertti programmed lighting for Ghost’s show on a GrandMA3 console running in GM2 mode.

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