Hi all
The mighty Hawkwind ( which most will remember from the classic song Silver Machine ) played at the Hawkfest festival
in devon a couple of weeks ago, Hawkfest is a Ticket only 3 day festival for members of the Hawkwind fan club. and features Hawkwind, ex members and other bands that they have been asociated over the years, this year saw over a thousand fans and family enjoy the sunshine and music and camping
My band "Underground zero" was asked to play at the festival so i decided to take the Banthai beast there for a bit of a warm up
Neil and Marie from "Chaos Ilumination" are Hawkwinds resident Lightshow technicians ( neil frquents these forums and they will both be at the next uk meet )
they were providing the Lighting rig and Projection systems for the whole event, neil had suggested that he may even take his own laser....
Now this i was lookin forward to ...
neils laser consists of a 3.5W Coherent Purelight Star white light laser, with EyeMagic EMS4000 scanners, an 8 channel PCAOM , and a Pangolin LD2000
and a lot of pipework for water cooling etc... this was going to be a big problem for neil as the festival site had no running water and this beast needs 6 gallons a minute and 60 amps of 3 phase and as the festival site has no running water or lecky it looked like it could be an issue ....
Fortunately the site organisers provided a 1000 Litre water bowser and there where 2 large generators with ample power for the whole show and PA
so with the risk assesment and insurance etc in place and agreement of no Audience scanning.... BRING ON THE LASERS
well this bit of a warmup for the banthai beast ended up as one of highlights in my laser experience, we initialy had problems with water presure and struggled to get the airlocks out of the pump, neil had worked hard most of the friday but the water presure was just not enough and it looked like lasers just were not going to happen, then at the last moment one of the crew "did something" and the presure interlock gave us a green light ( this senario repeated itself over the 3 days, just when we thought its not happening suddenly everything fired up " thankyou laser God" )
so we ended up doing a 1 hour show for the headlineing bands friday and saturday night and a 2 hour show on sunday, My band underground zero was closing the festival on sunday night so i was pleased that everything held out for our set,
I have to also add that even though the lasers looked good and everyone compimented them ... if it was not for the rest of the visuals provided by Chaos including the solar effects, videos from marie, and the moving head stuff from John ... the lasers on there own would have been a bit boring.
big thankyou for the chaos guys a very enjoyable weekend
some photos at the bottom ... and here are some clips of the internet ( some are filmed on mobile phones so sound etc not that good )
clips
Hawkwind "spirit of the age" the lasers start at about 2:50
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385vi2nUpoM
Hawkwinds Technicians of spaceship hawkwind "Assassins of Allah"
again lasers kick in at about 2:45
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnx_HO9rsOM
quick clip of Underground Zero with both lasers posted by neil
http://flickr.com/photos/chaosillumi...n/photostream/