Currently steering Coldplay’s record-breaking Music of the Spheres Tour around the globe, production manager Chris Kansy is helping to establish new best practices for acts trying to minimise their carbon footprint. His efforts, over a career that now dates back more than 40 years, see Kansy become the first person to collect the Arthur Award for top production guru (aka The Gaffer), twice. Adam Woods caught up with him during the band’s recent Australia leg…

In the great twisted saga of concert tours, one line plots an unusual course across the past four decades or so, joining dots you didn’t realise were connected at all – from Joan Jett and the Blackhearts through Milli Vanilli, Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, Mary J Blige, Roger Waters, all the way to Coldplay.

That line – which also takes in White Zombie, The Cult, Ozzy Osbourne, Jane’s Addiction, Mötley Crüe, Massive Attack, Janet Jackson, Tool, Muse, Beck, The Flaming Lips, and many more – is the trajectory of Chris Kansy: storied production manager, much-admired gentleman of the road, and first-ever double recipient of The Gaffer award.

Last time Kansy was Gafferised, it was 2012, and he was 14 months into The Wall Live, Waters’ arena- and stadium-sized resurrection of his 1979 Pink Floyd masterpiece – a show the production manager has nominated, in one of his many Radio Check podcasts with his brother Matt, as perhaps the greatest of all time.

This time around, however, he is behind the wheel of another show that may prove equally significant, in entirely different ways: Coldplay’s $1bn-grossing, consciously decarbonising Music of the Spheres Tour, which set out with a goal to reduce emissions from show production, freight, and band and crew travel by at least 50%, and has had great success in doing so.

“I went through this period of time where I had this reputation of being this guitar tech who could do production and everything else”

When Kansy checks in with IQ in late October, he’s on Australian time as the band prepare for eleven shows in Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland. They haven’t played live since Dublin in September, and after Australia and New Zealand, it will be six more weeks before a pocket of dates in the UAE and India in January; then a couple more months before Hong Kong and South Korea in April. At 63, Kansy has developed a fondness for this superstar touring pace, and he freely admits it.

“They’re all family men,” he says of Coldplay. “They’re in their late 40s. They’ve got kids. They’ve got this expectation of a personal life. So, we don’t go out for four or five months straight. We go out for three weeks, and then we take a break, and I’ve learned to really appreciate that.

“Coldplay’s kind of wrecked me for touring. I’m not so sure that I could go and load in, do a show, load out the same day you loaded in, get on a bus, sleep for four-and-a-half hours, get up, and do it all over, which is what I have done my entire 40-plus years of touring. We’ll see if I’m able to do that again.”

If he never does, you certainly couldn’t accuse him of not putting in the miles, across a career that nicely illuminates 40 years’ worth of musical trends, from hair metal and grunge to mainstream arena and stadium shows of all kinds.

Having started out in the late 1970s as an in-house lighting engineer, working in clubs in his native Hartford, Connecticut and then in New York City, he was drafted by Joan Jett’s LD Bryan Hartley to fill in on a tour, then persuaded to stay on as a guitar tech when a vacancy opened up.

“The guys in the crew sort of gathered around and told me, and I said, ‘Hey, I do not do guitars.’ But they said, ‘Well, the management and the band like you, so if they ask you if you know how to do guitars, just say yes, and we’ll show you how to do it. We’ll help you through.’”

“Being by [the artists’] side or over their shoulder or in front of them during this process is fascinating to me”

By Kansy’s account, the experiment was only partially successful. “I was an awful guitar tech,” he confirms – perhaps over-modestly, given that he subsequently fulfilled the role not only for Jett but for Billy Duffy of The Cult and Megadeth’s Marty Friedman. “Well, you know what, I guess I was okay. I did it on and off from, say, ‘86 to ‘95. I just never really had the passion for it. I wasn’t a guitarist; I learned just enough to play one riff, which was The Cult’s Wild Flower.” He sings the two-note riff. “How basic is that? I just never really wanted to gain any momentum with it. It’s hard, as well. Pedals are complicated things…”

But on such unpromising beginnings are careers built, and Kansy began to find a niche for himself.

“I went through this period of time where I had this reputation of being this guitar tech who could do production and everything else,” he says. “In those days, when you were a production manager, you were also the stage manager, you were also the tour accountant, head of security, you advanced all the back-of-house stuff – it was a full thing. And I suppose I was known for being able to do guitars and all that at the same time. People kind of put up with my limited guitar tech abilities because they knew what else they got out of me.

“My first production manager job without having to do guitars” was an auspicious one: Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger tour in 1991, right at the height of grunge. But it was a few years before he encountered the first in a line of uncompromising visionaries that would gradually bring an important theme to his career.

A Head Full of Dreams
“I started working for Nine Inch Nails in 1999,” he recalls. “Trent Reznor really listened to me, and I took part in the creative process, which still doesn’t happen to me very much as a production manager. Usually, there’s a creative team, and I bring their vision to fruition. But being invited into the creative team – I really enjoyed that.

“I love working for those kinds of people,” he adds. “I love working for Trent, I love working for Roger Waters, I love working for Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack, because they’re auteurs – their fingerprints are on everything, and they want to be involved, and being by their side or over their shoulder or in front of them during this process is fascinating to me.”

“It is a true rollercoaster”

A latter-day entry in that roll of honour is Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who may not be generally known as a dark genius in the Reznor/Waters mould, but who is nonetheless a strikingly hands-on kind of star.

“Chris Martin is involved in every aspect of the show,” says Kansy. And the thing I really respect about Chris is he never leaves well enough alone. He always wants to try something new, always wants to experiment with something. He always wants to improve the show, improve the audience experience. He does not want to champion mediocrity in any way at all.”

Kansy credits Martin and fifth member Phil Harvey for constantly keeping the show vital, in the knowledge that most fans will have a pretty good idea of what they are going to see long before the show arrives in their city.

“They’re always looking for the next thing, trying to find another way to improve the show. They know everything’s on YouTube, and they know everything is being captured.”

The consequence, says Kansy, is a show that offers one knock-out punch after another and never seems to lose its freshness. “Lots of shows have that thing where you’re building up to the big moment – you know, where The Wall falls down or whatever. Coldplay kind of has lots of little big moments throughout the show. You know, we open the show like most bands want to close their show. By the second song, there’s balloons all over the audience, you know? And then the third song, everything breaks down. And then the fourth song, the band goes out to the B-stage and plays a couple songs. And then back to the main stage, and then there’s pyro, and on it goes. It is a true rollercoaster.”

“We’ve got lots of little things that hopefully build up to a big impact”

Global Citizen
The tour has grossed $1.06bn in revenue from 9.6m tickets across 164 dates, making it the most-attended tour of all time and the second highest grossing. But its real influence looks likely to be the effort it has made to pioneer more sustainable practices in large-scale touring, from its mobile rechargeable show battery made from recyclable BMW i3 batteries to its use of renewable resources such as hydrotreated vegetable oil, solar power, and kinetic energy.

Over the summer, the band delivered an update on their sustainability initiatives, revealing that, on a show-by-show comparison, the current tour has so far produced 59% less CO2e emissions than their previous stadium tour in 2016/17, exceeding their original target. On Coldplay’s initiative, more than 9m trees have already been planted around the world, with a further million to be planted before the end of the year.

Kansy himself joined Music of the Spheres when it was already off the ground, replacing Jake Berry in 2023, 50 shows in. So he carefully bats away credit for the sustainability side, whilst being fully involved in the ongoing process.

“It was all here when I got here,” he says. “Even before I knew I was going to work for Coldplay, I knew they were going to go out with an ethos of sustainability. But you know, we’re always looking for that next thing. We run the show on batteries. We’ve got solar, we’ve got energy bikes, we’ve got energy floors. We’ve got lots of little things that hopefully build up to a big impact.

“Backstage, we don’t have plastic bottles. We all have our own water bottle. We fill up at bubblers. We try to be sustainable about the way we recycle. We’re sustainable about the way we order food and go through our food. We try to limit the waste. We’ve got a company called Hope Solutions that work with us, and we are always in contact with each other. Live Nation has a sustainability officer out on the tour with us to make sure that all the things you say they’re going to do come to fruition. It’s a constant thing.”

“We’re going to start doing these residencies, starting with ten Wembleys next year and then around the world”

Forty years into his touring career, Kansy is evidently energised by the new challenge of doing it all again but this time, as cleanly as possible.

“It’s a thing that I always believed in, even before Coldplay. I eliminated plastic bottles on Roger Waters and on Tool and on Massive Attack and all these other shows that I did. But it is a continuum. There’s no, ‘Okay, we’re sustainable now. What’s next?’

“We’re going to start doing these residencies, starting with ten Wembleys next year and then around the world. And when we start doing those, we’re going to try to make an even bigger impact. We’ll get involved with how the audience gets to the show, how they are fed and watered, all these things. Maybe we can bring in more solar, since we’re there for a while, and bring in bigger impact items to help make those special events even more sustainable than we do on tour, where there’s only so much you can do before you load out again.”

Clearly, Music of the Spheres is being watched carefully by other tours, and its innovations will inevitably trickle down across the business. This is meaningful work. But the important question is: How cross was Roger Waters when Kansy told him he was leaving him for Coldplay after 18 years?

Wish You Were Here
“Yeah,” says Kansy. “I remember the first time I saw him after he knew. I came in and he’s like, ‘Ah, so you finally got a real job.’ But I tried replacing myself, and they wouldn’t let me. I said, ‘I’m gonna find somebody to come in and take over.’ They’re like, ‘What do you mean, take over? No, no, no, we want you here when you can be here. Just make sure it’s covered when you’re not.’ And I was honoured to be considered in that way.”

As a result, Kansy remains the go-to man for both Coldplay and Waters, and, as he mentioned on his podcast, still touts Waters’ revived The Wall Live production as a high-watermark of arena entertainment.

“Coldplay is more of an extravaganza – it hits you in the face.”

“Well, that show was absolutely unique,” he says. “The technology was great, though there was not a lot of whiz-bang. It was rock & roll, performance, art, theatre – every angle of the entertainment world was there, you know. Drama. You know, it just had it all.

“There’s a story. You follow it all and it gets dark. It might have been different if The Wall record had just come out and we did a tour for it. But, you know, it had all this lore to it, all this reputation and expectation. We did 219 performances of that show, and I watched probably 85% of all of it. And I would only get called away to do other things. It was just a kinetic show in every way. Coldplay is more of an extravaganza. You walk in and it’s just smiles and eye candy and then bam – it hits you in the face.”

In the years between his two historic Gaffer Awards, Kansy has continued to finesse a remarkably high-end career, and it is safe to say he has continued to add plenty of tricks to his arsenal.

“I did a couple of campaigns with Muse, which were really, really interesting,” he says. “There was a lot of good high technology on the Drones Tour [in 2015-16], where we were flying helium-inflated objects around the arena – that was an incredible experience in the round. I’ve done two more Roger tours in the past decade, including the Us + Them Tour [in 2017-18], where we recreated the Battersea Power Station over the audience, which was absolutely fascinating.”

In 2019, heading into the pandemic unawares, Kansy was focused on an array of shorter jaunts. “I started the year with Massive Attack, and then went through the Smashing Pumpkins, and ended it with the Black Keys and then into Tool. I think [Tool guitarist] Adam Jones might be in that same category I discussed, with Trent and Roger and Robert. He’s got a huge vision for how Tool should be presented. One of my favourite bands to work for – I really, really like those guys.”

“I’m part of that overlapping generation… who kind of showed the industry how the future could be”

If Kansy’s career seems increasingly focused, that’s partly a function of big clients and an indication of not needing to grab any job going. “I guess I’m at the point in time now where, if I get a call about something I don’t want to do or I’m not interested in – and I get them – my response is always, you know, ‘Hey, thank you very much, it would have been an honour to work for you, unfortunately, I’m busy.’ Some of it is bullshit, some maybe not, but I’m too old and too far along to trudge across the country on something I’m not interested in doing. And there will be somebody else who would be interested in doing that.”

Kansy remains passionate about the business and a keen student of its evolution. A question about whether today’s regimented concert circuit is as fun as the crazy old one is met with an entertaining digression that charts the progression of touring productions – from Jimi Hendrix playing under a single spotlight, via Bill Graham’s decision to transport sound and lights for the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street tour, to today’s eye-popping spectacles.

“Bill Graham is the godfather of production managers – the first one to really do what we do,” he says. “After that, guys like Michael Ahern and Joe Baptiste and these other production managers started figuring things out in a different way and developing how we tour, and then it really got ramped up when guys like Jake Berry got involved and really showed the industry how to tour properly.

“And then I’m part of that overlapping generation, with Jake and Opie [Dale Skjerseth] and Mark Spring, and that list just goes on and on, who kind of showed the industry how the future could be.”

Anyone you ask will tell you what makes Kansy a great production manager.

“Instead of looking for the next gig, he had this very Zen approach”

John Wiseman, nowadays PRG’s executive vice president for worldwide sales, has known Kansy since a Mötley Crüe tour back in the 1980s.

“I’ve found Chris to be one of the more interesting production managers that I’ve worked with, because he approaches it not just from an operational and straight-up production manager thing but really as an artist,” says Wiseman. “He has that artistic temperament, combined with the necessary ability to be pragmatic.

“I remember once, probably two decades ago, when a tour we were both working on was coming to an end, I said, ‘What are you doing next?’ And he had the most interesting answer. He said, ‘You know, John, I’m not exactly sure. I’ve got a couple of offers, but I’m going to look around until I find something that’s artistically rewarding and interesting.’

“Instead of looking for the next gig and thinking how he was going to make his house payment, he had this very Zen approach. There aren’t many production managers like that.”

eps managing director Sebastian Tobie first worked with Kansy on The Wall Live’s 2013 run through European stadiums.

“I experienced Chris as always approachable and supportive,” says Tobie. “And he was always ready to crack a joke when we met inside the last production truck to be loaded after every loadout, where he would personally push his production cases in position.

“My respect and joy working with him just grew over the years up to the current Coldplay tour and hopefully for many more years to come.”

“There’s no hierarchy with him at all; he’s one of the crew, and I think that wins other people’s respect on tour”

Brian Levine, TAIT’s president of projects, sums up Kansy as “a total legend in our industry” and suggests his second Gaffer Award is no surprise. “Chris has been a longtime client at TAIT and across all of the projects we’ve had the pleasure to work with Chris on, he’s made everyone involved feel like they belong,” he says. “Most of all, he’s created an environment where we can also have a little fun.”

Coldplay tour manager Marguerite Nguyen, meanwhile, has a personal reason for being glad Kansy didn’t come to his current role sooner.

“Chris and have known each other for nearly 20 years and have had many amazing meals around the world,” she says. “Funny story: he was up for Coldplay PM in 2008 and didn’t get the job, thank god. It went to Craig ‘Fin’ Finley, who subsequently hired me as his production coordinator. I would have to say, if that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be here today, celebrating my 16th year with the band,” she laughs. “And here we are today, TM and PM.”

Rock & roll caterer Eat to the Beat is the only original vendor remaining in the Coldplay camp, having catered every tour since Parachutes in 2000, and newcomer Kansy meets with their approval. “He’s very approachable, very charming, he’s a good communicator,” says Global Infusion Group director Mary Shelley-Smith.

“It’s a very grown-up tour; everyone knows what they’re doing,” adds the company’s head of events, Kim Joyce. “He’s got respect throughout the whole production team. He’s always eating in main crew catering with everyone else – there’s no hierarchy with him at all; he’s one of the crew, and I think that wins other people’s respect on tour.”

“I’d say I’m a guy that values communication, that trusts people to do their job properly”

Parachute
What does Kansy himself think he brings?

“Well, I’m myself,” he says. “I’m myself. I have a style, you know? I mean, shows are always a little the same: you unload trucks, you set a bunch of stuff up, a band comes in and plays, and you break it down and put it in trucks. But there are myriad ways to do that, and every production manager is different.

“I guess I don’t really know what other production managers do, other than what I hear. I can’t go and watch them do their job. But I’d say I’m a guy that values communication, that trusts people to do their job properly. We have the best of the best on this crew, so I let all my department heads, my stage managers, everybody, do their job, but we talk every day; we sit down, and we regroup.

“I mean, there’s a small aspect of me being kind of the emergency parachute. I’m there to guide, I’m there to watch, I’m there to ensure communication. But I’m also there to make the big decisions. That’s what I’m getting paid for, and I’m comfortable there. I really think that I know what the right decision is. I’m pretty sure that I am the right person to guide that scenario when things are on the line.”

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The first-ever US edition of Primavera Sound will take place next year in Los Angeles, California, with headliners Arctic Monkeys, Nine Inch Nails and Lorde.

The California debut, co-produced with Live Nation, is scheduled from 16 to 18 September 2022 at the Los Angeles Historic Park.

The long-awaited event was first announced in 2019, pre-pandemic, shortly after a minority investment in Primavera Sound by American private equity firm, the Yucaipa Companies, in June 2018.

The Los Angeles event coincides with the 20th-anniversary edition of Primavera Sound’s flagship event in Barcelona.

The bumper edition will take place at the Parc del Fórum complex across two weekends with acts including Lorde, Dua Lipa, Megan Thee Stallion.

“Today, at last, we finally begin to cross the bridge that will take us to a new destination Primavera”

The LA event is the latest addition to the Primavera Sound family, following the creation of sister conference Primavera Pro in 2010 and the Portuguese outing of the festival, Primavera Sound Porto, in 2012.

“Today, at last, we finally begin to cross the bridge that will take us to a new destination Primavera without renouncing to all those values that, after 19 editions, the Barcelona festival champions,” reads a statement from Primavera, regarding the LA edition.

“Sustainability, gender equality, social commitment and urban integration will guarantee an impact that goes beyond the strictly musical one.”

All previously purchased tickets will be valid for Primavera Sound Los Angeles 2022. Pre-sale for remaining tickets begins on Friday 10 December at 10:00 PT. More information can be found on the Primavera website.

See the first batch of confirmed artists for Primavera LA below.

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