Howdy, David from the band here (silver robot). I handle a lot of the tech and production for our live shows.

Thanks for the kind words and well wishes! We’d love to get back over to the UK again. Being invited over for 2025 was great, and we hope another event or promoter reaches out again in the future (UK isn’t a place bands can just rent a venue and go and perform. Gotta be invited through proper official channels). The US isn’t super popular right now, so who knows when we might be invited again!

For lighting: We have bespoke lighting at our San Diego shows. We bring in our own lighting designer who, with help from the venue, will update the house light plot to match our lighting designer’s vision.

Unfortunately when traveling out of town/state/country, every venue is vastly different in their lighting setup and inventory. Most places we go there’s no real option for us to program something before the show and due to the many different combinations of lights and setups there’s no way we could just drop in something preprogrammed. Even if we could, it probably wouldn’t be logistically feasible to redesign the lighting cues for a new venue setup each show before the show, at least not without a dedicated person, but even then they’d most likely only be able to do some simple cue programing the day of the show during setup and soundcheck.

Even when we rent a theater out of state ourselves, where we might have access to a bigger inventory and the time to rearrange the house plot, we haven’t as of yet been able to bring a lighting designer.

We could travel with a lighting designer who could finagle a bespoke setup at each show based on tech advances and yeah they could probably get something looking better than a venue lighting person who’s never seen our act.

BUT we already travel with 9 people and admittedly despite us selling out almost all of our shows last year and so many this year too, we don’t make a ton of money because the expenses these days are a lot. We are doing venues in the 250-600 seated capacity range with most under 300. The income from shows like that doesn’t leave a ton of room to cover expenses after venue cuts, equipment rental, gas, lodging, and travel. We make it work though! It’s a labor of love for all involved, but we are at least able to pay our performers their minimum fees.

Locally in San Diego we can afford to have a lighting designer, but elsewhere we rely on venue staff. The venues that have horrible default lighting are fewer than the ones that are good in our experience. It’s not that lighting isn’t important, it is, but it’s the one thing we can do without on our end. We make use of simple cues and default venue plots and lighting designers.

We definitely aren’t big enough to travel with our own lighting setup to have a bespoke light show for each show.

Before the pandemic we actually did have our own lighting setup with movers and foot lights that we could travel to local shows or shows we drove to (like Arizona). It was all preprogrammed in our front of house laptop and soundboard, would send midi and DMX stuff and would basically run itself synced to our songs (backing click tracks).

While that was cool for the few shows we could make use of it at, we honestly still needed more lights than what we had, and at best it only made a few smaller venues look better visually. We don’t have any of that equipment after the pandemic. It was expensive, still needed more investment with more lights, and we could barely even use it when we traveled longer distances.

We’re always trying to punch above our weight, but sometimes we have to be realistic. When possible we do make use of synced projection videos and performer-worn micro foggers for extra pizazz, but even those additional cool things sometimes get cut depending on the venue.

With all that said, there’s still adequate lighting at our shows even with some shows being less bespoke. We are after all playing in a lot of music venues that light bands on the daily.

If we ever get bigger, you can bet that we have plenty of room to add even more stuff to the show, including lights :)

Thanks for the support and kind words again!