Bradford City of Culture – Brighter Still

Overview

As Bradford rounded off an amazing year as UK City of Culture in 2025, the team from audio specialist tube uk ensured that an audience of 10,000 at spectacular closing performance, Brighter Still in Bingley’s Myrtle Park, plus the thousands more watching the event online, all enjoyed this significant event by providing an outstanding audio experience.

Manchester-based tube uk collaborated with sound designer Pete Malkin and Bradford Culture Company, the charity delivering this momentous year for the district.
Brighter Still was a mixed media show including large community choirs, solo singer performance, pre-recorded music, dancing and special effects, created and directed by Dan Canham and Emily Lim, featuring a community cast of over 200 people and nine professional performers. It was commissioned by Bradford 2025’s creative director, Shanaz Gulzar.

The project involved the supply of a custom-designed in-the-round d&b PA system, comprising almost 50 channels of RF with personal radio mics, headset mics and handhelds, an extensive fibre network and a large Green-GO comms package covering a 120-metre range.

tube uk’s work was system-designed and project-managed by Melvyn Coote and implemented on site alongside Bradford 2025’s Director of Production Ben Pugh and Production Manager Hannah Blamire.

Melvyn and his five dedicated sound crew battled the elements – including torrential rain, howling wind, super-sticky mud, and freezing temperatures – to ensure that the shows, presented over two evenings, sounded great as Bradford’s year in the cultural spotlight drew to a close.

A series of show-stopping moments from Brighter Still reflected “all the hopes and possibilities of what is still to come when we unite as humans in an explosion of joy and positive energy for the city,” stated Emily.

Audio

The performance space was a 60 x 60 metre area with a circular stage in the centre, with four runways emanating from it, each at 90-degree angles to one another, and with a small circular stage or pod at the end. The action unfolded on all of these, with the 5,000 audience per show located in the four quadrants in between the runways completely surrounding the space, a layout that ensured everyone was close to and involved in the action.

It was an extremely challenging space for which to design sound, a solution that required ingenuity and thinking outside-the-box, which Melvyn tackled based on tube’s vast experiences of working on other outdoor and special events.

A left and right array of d&b V-series with Y7P front fills and a single KSL-SUB was installed to cover each of the four quadrant areas.

The four pods then had their own smaller systems to localise the voices on each pod, comprising six d&b E8 speakers rigged on 6-metre-high single poles for visual as well as sonic continuity.

Each pod effectively used the main speaker systems – in the quadrants – as delays to support voices on the other pods that were up to 60 metres away, with the outward facing E8s of all the other pods supporting the localised sound image coming from its respective pod.

The sound emanates from the centre, and the pod speakers support it, radiating outwards. This complex and unique design was “the result of multiple strategies developed over several years to deliver the best and richest sound for this style of event,” explained Melvyn.

For control, tube utilised a large network infrastructure with most of the backbone running via NETGEAR M4250-26G4F-POE AV Line network switches. The network architects were Adam Taylor and Harry Park.

The majority of the show sound came from a playback source and was composed by Warren ‘Flamin’ Beatz’ Morgan-Humphries and Benji Bower, also the MD, with sound designed and programmed by Pete Malkin. This was all played out via QLab running on a pair of Mac Studio playback machines.

The QLab file contained around 120 audio cues for the 45-minute show, so it was pacey and frenetic – with the Mac Studios playing via Dante into a Yamaha DM7-EX console.

The console sent the audio stems to a Yamaha DME7 DSP engine, used here as a multi-point delay matrix system for crunching all the calculations needed to make the signal sound beautiful and rich, throughout this PA configuration, spitting it back into the network via fibre going to the stage.

Noise central – amp rack and radio receiver city – was located underneath the west runway, and here, the incoming fibre audio control on Dante was distributed to 3 x Yamaha RIO3224 stage boxes and 3 x d&b DS10 network bridges with the latter feeding AES3 out to 12 x d&b D80 and 6 x d&b D20 amplifiers.

The radio mic system included 42 personal mics and belt packs, of which there were a combination of Sennheiser SK6000s and SK5212s, with two SKM5200 handhelds, all chosen for their rock-solid reliability and excellent sound quality. Each of the personal radio mics was fitted with a corresponding DPA6066 jawline headset mic.
There was up to 46 channels of RF, complete with an additional pair of handhelds.

COMMS

The Green-GO comms system needed to cover 10 stage entry / exit points, all accommodating an ASM at each position, so a major challenge was to get these optimised, and in total, the system was running 16 wireless and 8 wired belt packs.

It operated over a 120-metre range using six of Green-GO’s new STRIDE antennas, across which the wireless belt packs seamlessly roamed to get the expansive coverage needed for this event. “It worked brilliantly,” noted Melvyn.

Team tube

Working alongside Melvyn, Adam, and Harry was FOH audio operator John Redfern, who was mixing in an enclosed operating space, weaving in all the rapid-fire cues in a very short timeframe, while Melvyn provided the ‘live ears’ on site.

Matt Waltho was the PA technician, and Stuart McPartland was VERY busy keeping on top of nearly 50 radio mics … the micing up process started at least two hours before each show.

“There were so many elements of this show that were non-standard, different and challenging,” comments Melvyn in summation, “The layout, the scale, the amount of radio mics involved, the location, the elements … and while our previous experience very much helped our approach and audio treatment in Myrtle Park, we still gained more knowledge in dealing with all aspects.

“We loved collaborating with an incredible production and creative team with so much like-minded passion for making a great show happen; it was inspiring to play a part in projecting the strength, diversity, vision and impact potential of the spirit of humanity.”

A year-long celebration of Bradford city and district, Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture has laid the foundations for long-term transformation through its cultural programme, welcoming audiences in excess of 3 million people, as well as training opportunities, education initiatives, artist development and capital investments.

Shanaz Gulzar summed up, “Bradford 2025 has created a powerful new narrative for our city and district. We’re grateful to tube uk for their incredible efforts, and for being part of our extended team, helping to make this remarkable year a success. Having also worked with tube uk on our opening event, Melvyn and his team have been a part of sharing Bradford’s rich cultural life with the world.”