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LENNY KRAVITZ has to be the coolest rock star on the planet. Not only is he

a multi-Grammy-winning, multi-platinum selling artist, he’s also a multi-instrumentalist, whose musical talents extend off the stage and into the studio, where he not only engineers and produces his own records, but finds time to put pen to paper and finger to fader for the likes of Madonna, John Legend, and, posthumously, Michael Jackson. And if that’s not enough to whet the appetite, there’s his movie career: two sterling performances as Cinna in the excellent Hunger Games movies, and two supporting roles in Lee Daniels’ highly acclaimed 2009 and 2011 films, Precious, and The Butler, have proven he’s no slouch on the big screen.

I first saw Lenny perform at The Bercy in Paris in 2011, and he was electric: the ultimate showman, with an obvious love for his music, and more importantly, his fans; and now, nearly four years on, I’ve just absorbed his tenth studio album, Strut, for the second time in as many hours, and I have to say, I’m equally impressed. It’s fresh, it’s edgy, it’s bluesy, it’s riffy... It’s Lenny. Excellent. Now I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be to find out more about the man behind the music (and the sunglasses)...

Right off the bat, I decide to ask Lenny a series of questions about his 1991 release, Mama Said. Why? It was the first Kravitz record I ever heard, and it’s my favourite to date. We talk a little about the John Lennon-esque slap-back delays that he used so effectively

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on the album, especially on the brilliantly raw All I Ever Wanted, which, funnily enough, features John’s youngest son, Sean, on the piano.

“I love that track,” Lenny reflects, softly. “We didn’t necessarily have the intention of getting that sound, but it just kind of happened. Sean and I wrote it together, actually, and it was all very quick; the lead vocal was done in just one take.”

It’s a great vocal performance, too, though for me, Lenny’s voice, much like Paul Weller’s, has got even better with age. I put that to him, slightly nervously.

“I believe it has, yes. Some peoples’ voices change tone over time, but I have really tried to take care of my voice; I’ve worked on it, and by growing, you know, it’s gotten better,” he concurs. “Musically, I have never followed the trends, so I am very grateful to still be here, especially because I have stayed true to what was inside of me at the time I have made each record. I am not good at faking my creativity; if I am not feeling it, it’s not organic to me, so if it’s not authentic, I can’t really do it. I am very much a creature of the moment.”

LIFT ME OUT OF MY HEAD

And creative he is, particularly in the studio. Since he started, he’s had a passion for performance, and to this day, Lenny still plays most of the parts on all of his records.

“I made my first album without a record deal, so I couldn’t afford not to play everything myself,” he smiles, as we liken the situation to Bruce Springsteen’s struggle to keep his E Street Band afloat during the early part of his career. “But I’ve gone on doing that with all my records. On many of the tracks, I’m playing everything, and if I’m not, then Craig Ross is playing [guitar] with me. Sometimes I want to be playing the drums with the guitarist, so I can set the groove properly, and Craig is the best guitar player in the world for me to work with when I want to do stuff like that; he is a big part of me making my records, and provides an extra dynamic.”

Lenny hints that it can be a lonely place, working without any collaboration, which is one of the reasons he enjoys working on film sets. He won’t make his next movie until the end of the year, as touring comes first, but it is another means of expression, and one he clearly treasures, though he didn’t necessarily see it coming.

“When I started working on The Hunger Games, I didn’t expect it to be all that, you know? And then it turned into this monster! [laughs] But I have been so very fortunate to have made four really great movies in a row, and they’ve all done really well; it’s another medium that I am using to express myself, and I really do enjoy it because it enables me to collaborate in a way that I don’t with my music,” he explains. “Music-wise, I work a lot by myself, or with a very small group of people, and it’s about me and my expression, what I want to do, and how I feel, but when I am making a film, I am serving a director’s vision, and I am serving a character... And it’s refreshing! I really do enjoy the collaboration, and the amount of people that I am collaborating with... It takes me away from myself.”

FIELDS OF JOY

And talent clearly runs in the Kravitz family. Lenny’s daughter, Zoe, made her movie debut in 2007 in No Reservations, and starred in six episodes of the hit TV show Californication before landing the mega-role of Angel Salvadore in the X Men: First Class movie in 2011. When she’s not on a movie set, she’s touring the world with her band. Sound familiar? Proud dad springs to mind.

“Oh absolutely. I mean, I’m just proud that she’s a beautiful person, that she follows her path, and that she’s being creative at all times; it’s wonderful,” says dad, enthusiastically. “She is on a movie set right now, in fact, and in between making films, she’s on the road. She’s got off tour now, but she was playing in Australia, Europe, across the States... It really is wonderful to see.”

When Lenny takes to the stage, he is dynamite, and the ultimate showman, but none of this would be possible, he says, without a super-strong working relationship with his touring team.

“I work closely with the front-of-house engineer (Laurie Quigley) to get the character of the music where I’d like it to be. Balance is very important; you change the balance, you change the character,” he insists. “That’s the main part, and then there is the technical part and the equipment, which is equally important. I tend to experiment with different things in rehearsals with Laurie, and get it the way I want to hear it.”

I linger a little on the technology, after recalling a discussion I had with Laurie Quigley at FOH position at the Kravitz show I attended in Paris a few years back, where he said, “Lenny can never have enough speakers out front”. I ask Lenny to divulge.

“Yeah, that’s kinda true, and I do know my multicores, too,” he says, with a chuckle. I ask if he’s ever tempted to get his hands on Quigley’s DiGiCo console at FOH, considering how adept he is in the studio environment. “I could do that, but I choose to respect Laurie and his job as engi-neer, so I’ll just say what it is that I am looking for, and let him work it out. It actually took me a

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while to get used to digital consoles, as I always preferred analogue desks, but where they are now, they are sounding so much better than they were when they first came out.”

STRUT

Lenny’s new album, Strut, is the tenth of his career, and the first to come out on his own label, Roxie Records, which he named after his mother. I’m curious as to why he’s chosen to go independent after all these years working with majors, and wonder what it says about the state of the industry?

“I’ve always had the idea to do it, but this is the time; I was free from a record label, and I decided to do it on my own, and to work with a distribution company that would assist me,” Lenny explains. “I have more responsibilities, but I’m enjoying it, and it’s working well. I mean, how many majors are really doing it, you know? There are only a couple of labels left, because the way it is today, artists have so much more direct contact and can reach their audience directly, so in the years to come, you will see most people doing it this way.

“A real concern I have is to make sure that artists are paid fairly. Music is something that should be paid for when an artist puts their time, creativity, blood, sweat, tears, and money into it; and of course, people are getting paid in different ways today. It’s more a collective thing; once everyone’s streaming, they pay a fee, and each month or whatever, they can listen to this

amount of music. It doesn’t seem to add up to me properly, but this is the world we’re living in now, and it’s gone on for so long. The music industry didn’t fight this in the beginning, which is why we are now in this position.”

Lenny’s purist mindset extends to the recording studio, and the equipment he uses. To him, it’s all about the old school:

“I have a great collection of analogue gear in my studio; it’s pretty much a vintage museum! I have an incredible Helius console, wonderful compressors, three Fairchilds, a bunch of LA2As, UA compressors, different mic pres, different EQs from different boards. It’s an eclectic mix of vintage gear that gives me all the different colours that I need to play with.”

LET LOVE RULE

Conversation turns to guitars, and Lenny is particularly modest about his own musical ability, particularly with axe in hand, which I find astounding, yet humbling at the same time. Then he lands this bombshell:

“You know that famous Beatles performance on the roof? The legendary one?” I remain silent, picturing the fab four’s final public performance, blasting out Don’t Let Me Down on top of Abbey Road Studios in January 1969 (yes, I Googled the date). “Well I actually had John Lennon’s stripped down Epiphone guitar for many months. Yoko and Sean lent it to me, and they kind of forgot I had it, so I called them and had to say, ‘hey, come pick this thing up’.”

Gobsmacked, being a lifelong Lennon fan, I find myself asking myself two questions: ‘what was it like to play?’ and, ‘why the bloody hell did you tell them you still had it?!’ I only ask one out loud...

“I had it for a looooong time. I’m not sure I wrote anything on it, but I used to sit down with that thing and just feel it. I mean, it was just... [pauses] well, pretty incredible.”

After I close my mouth (with my hand), I decide to leave Lenny with a bit of a curveball: if he was starting out today, how would he go about it? He pauses for thought, and knocks it out the park with this soulful gem:

“It’s interesting... I watch my daughter, who’s doing this with no assistance from me or anybody other than her core group. These kids are just pumping music out, and being really authentic to themselves - and they know how to use social media - so I am actually really inspired by watching them. I remember last Christmas, she and her band were recording in the kitchen of her shack that she lived in – and I mean a shack, this was no house! Anyway, they worked on this music, and at the end of the holiday, we all got back, and the music was out! There was a video done, and people already knew the songs. It was amazing to me that they were doing this from their bedrooms, putting it out to the world. So I say, just be yourself, and follow your heart... Things will happen.”

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Headliner descends on London’s Wembley Arena to have a chat to the guys behind the audio and visuals for rock and roll megastar, Lenny Kravitz. First up, we meet sound man, LAURIE QUIGLEY, who has been riding the faders for this New York-born showman for over a decade now, and says working for Lenny not only keeps him on his toes, but makes him a better engineer, though it’s hardly a walk in the park.

I first encountered Laurie at a Lenny show at The Bercy in Paris in 2011. With a gargantuan PA system in tow - “it’s what Lenny wants,” he assured me at the time - and his trusted DiGiCo SD7, the mix was as impressive as the artist himself. It’s not often that you hear stories of major stars speccing their own audio kit, or coming out to front-of-house to check the sound in rehearsals, but then again, Lenny Kravitz is no ordinary artist.

“I have a great relationship with him, and I have learned so much working with Lenny, but it’s very difficult at the same time - and I mean that with no disrespect,” Quigley smiles, adding that any artist that can record, engineer, produce, and mix his own records gets his vote. I concur. “He’s very particular about all of his sounds, and he wants to replicate the sound of his records, so I’ve got to be on the money all the time, which has definitely made me a better engineer, because Lenny literally is that good.”

Combined, Lenny and his trusted guitarist Craig Ross have more than 17 channels dedicated to their guitars for the live show, which calls for some seriously organised mixing at front-of-house.

“On stage, Lenny has eleven guitar amplifiers, all of which he uses. He and Craig are really switched on, and Craig actually engineers a lot of Lenny’s stuff in the studio, too,” Quigley reveals. “All of that takes a reasonable amount of time to get your head around as an engineer, and then you need to program a board to snapshot it all; these guys

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were responsible for getting the sounds in the studio in the first place, so they really do know what they’re talking about!”

And getting those sounds out front is made that little bit easier thanks to his console. An analogue man for so long, once he got his hands on a DiGiCo, he never looked back:

“When digital boards first came out, they sounded like junk, then DiGiCo came out with the D5 and it actually sounded good! At the time, I was with Aerosmith, and I had two [Midas] XL4s out front, but the guys at DiGiCo said they had a prototype board, which I went out and tried. It not only cut down my footprint, but the digital format was a lot faster. I worked with that for about five years, and then when the SD7 prototype was available, I took that out too, and that’s what I’m working on today.

According to Quigley, the SD7 does everything he wants it to do, and more:

“You can run a few hundred channels off this console, and everything at 96kHz, so you can use plugins to reproduce any of the old effects that you’ve ever wanted to; and I have all my channels right underneath my hands, so I don’t have to hunt for them! I’m still very hands-on as a mixer, and I love to mix, but having the snapshots available is a Godsend. There are so many channels on stage that aren’t being used on particular songs, so you have to write all the snapshots, but the facilities on the SD7 are fantastic for doing that; they’re very simplistic, and the only thing I snapshot are his mutes and faders, so I’m not changing the effects sends on every song. You’ve just got to make sure you don’t snapshot yourself into Hell; in other words, you have to remember sometimes that you’re still an engineer, not a programmer!”

On a Lenny show, there’s too much going on not to get hands-on, and although the bells and whistles are important, Quigley insists that the overall sound of the console is still the most important thing:

“I get very argumentative with some engineers who debate which board has the best plugins, which has the best effects, and so on. I have said for years now: plug a microphone into a board with nothing going into it, and how does it sound? And to me, my DiGiCo board sounds far, far better than any other board on the market. The other reason I go with DiGiCo is that you can page it; you don’t have to switch the whole board from page to page, you just switch sections from page to page. And it reacts far more like an analogue board than it does a digital board.”

Much in line with Lenny’s love of analogue kit, Quigley still uses a plethora of classic outboard at FOH, mainly for the lead vocal chain.

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W H I C H M A K ES M E A B E T T E R E N G I N E E R , B EC AU S E L E N N Y L I T E R A L LY I S T H AT G O O D . "

“I’m using real APIs, Distressors, and 901s on the vocals, and I still have two Lexicon 960s,” he explains. “Also, there’s some specialised effects: a Leslie effect on his vocal, and a Vulture Culture, which is used for distortion on the drum kit, and on his vocal for American Woman - there’s all sorts of stuff going on, and to do!”

Although the record industry has changed, audio-wise, Quigley believes it’s got better, and more consistent. Another piece of kit that’s continued to come on leaps and bounds over the years is the in-ear monitor, and that, he says, is in many ways down to the brilliance of Jerry Harvey.

“JH Audio is a phenomenal company, and the service is outstanding; Jerry’s been looking after us for years now, and his products have always been excellent. Lenny uses JH16s, and I have a pair of Roxannes. I use mine for

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personal use when I am sitting on a plane; and in rehearsals, I’ll take one of Lenny’s belt packs out front, and listen to his mix whenever I want to, just for reference, to make sure he’s getting what he wants,” Quigley says. “He might say, ’I want it to sound like this’, and I’ll listen to what the monitor guy is doing, and I can actually hear it. If I turn a reverb on through a huge PA system in a big reverberant room, I don’t get the effect of the reverb he’s listening to in his ear, so I might use a different reverb to get the same effect, hence I use the Roxannes to listen to what he is doing.

“From Lenny’s perspective, he uses his JH16s for pitch; it’s in your head, so it’s not like you’re hearing a reflection, it’s crystal clear audio. It also means we have far less wedges on stage, and no side fills at all, and there’s not as much bleed in the vocal mics to deal with, so it’s easier to get the vocal sounding just right, too.”

A Lenny Kravitz gig isn’t just about audio, of course. The lighting show is crucial, and this one has a seriously cool edge to it, thanks to a constantly changing scenography, and a cool sphere centrepiece, masterminded by renowned creative duo, Steven Cohen and Bryan Barancik.

Cohen and Barancik have worked together for some time now; they collaborated on the famous Star Wars tour of 2010, and were responsible for illuminating Lenny’s tour the following year – but the design for Strut breaks new ground. Cohen describes the centrepiece as, ‘one of the most unique touring scening lighting elements in the world’, and he has a point. It’s redolent of the global ‘super-discos’ of the 1990s, an automated retro-style overhead sphere with unfolding petals that reveal the light sources; and to bring it to life, the complete family of GLP X4 impressions are called upon: 12 X4 XLs, 16 X4s, and 32 X4 S, supplied by US rental house, Atomic Lighting.

“I find the GLP X4 family to be my go-to LED fixture these days,” says Cohen, who along with Barancik, has become very familiar with the GLP platform over the last few years. “They have an almost organic feel to them, which is rare in an LED, and they’re as reliable as it gets. Having this variety of sizes in a single sphere gives me an almost cinematic theme of special effects in a live setting.”

Programming the show happened initially at a Paris studio before relocating to Amiens and going into ‘full

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trim’, where the possibilities of this awesome rig could be explored in much greater detail.

“It gave us the chance to see how the system really lived and breathed, creating focuses and other visual elements that provided a foundation from which to begin developing songs,” reveals Barancik, also the operator for the show. “The X4 is the ultimate work horse thanks to its superb dimming and colour, and the new X4 XL has been a great addition; this was the first time I’d worked with it, but once we had a profile built, it worked fantastically well, and it now fits in perfectly with the rest of the kit.”

During the show, the GLP fixtures are deployed in several different ways: sometimes the complete artillery goes all-out, resulting in a sublime symphony of light; and at other times, it’s broken down into any of eight individual moving petals. The cybernetic sphere has the ability to transfigure at will, which really brings the best out of the GLP fixtures, which is illustrated very nicely indeed during some of Lenny’s high-octane numbers such as New York City, Fly Away (during which, the unfolded sphere transformed into a spaceship!), and his all-time classic, Are You Gonna Go My Way?

“Yeah, all those songs certainly show the flexibility of both the sphere and the fixtures, but the song Circus is another really interesting example,” concurs Barancik, with a twist. “When he puts Circus in the set, it all gets very asymmetrical, with some very odd green and CTO combinations, while strobing at different rates.”

And when the GLP family all shine together, you could call it illuminated bliss:

“When all the X4 fixtures are working in unison, they create such a superb daylight white and tungsten; and that is totally key when you’re working on any Lenny Kravitz gig. I can honestly say, those fixtures were a cohesive aesthetic to the entire show.”

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