Photo above: Kevin Glendinning at the tour’s DiGiCo Quantum852 monitor console
It’s taken some time, but Kylie Minogue may finally be ready to conquer the United States, as she recently capped her first Las Vegas residency at the Venetian Resort’s new Voltaire venue. Tension, her 16th studio album released late last year, reached the number-one slot—her ninth LP to do so—on the heels of sell-out shows in London, Rabat, and Athens this year. The Australian singer/actress/presenter is a two-time Grammy Awards and four-time Brit Awards winner, a holder of the UK’s Order of the British Empire (and its Australian counterpart), just this year was named one of Time magazine’s “most influential people in the world,” and has toured 19 times since 1989, selling out arenas and stadiums globally. For much of that run she’s been accompanied on the road by DiGiCo, most recently with a Quantum852 console in her monitor world. That desk, piloted by IEM engineer Kevin Glendinning, was supplied by Solotech UK for her recent run of shows in Europe.
Glendinning, whose live-mix portfolio includes work with Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, and Mumford & Sons, among others, first encountered Minogue mixing her stage sound for broadcast fly dates, including her 2009 appearance on American Idol. It was a role he’d reprise occasionally with her over the next 15 years as other television opportunities arose, such as in May 2023 for Idol once again, and then later that year to mix monitors for her Las Vegas residency.
“Her main engineer and dear friend of mine, Matt Napier, was busy with other things at the time in 2009; both Kylie and Matt were based in London and I was in L.A. at the time, so I became kind of her West Coast engineer,” Glendinning recalls. “If she had to fly over and do one song at the CBS film set or something, it didn’t make sense to fly Matt over, so I helped out years ago. Then, when they needed a monitor engineer for the Las Vegas shows, I got a call from management. It was like hearing from old friends.”
It turns out that both Minogue and Glendinning are also old friends with DiGiCo consoles. He’s been using them almost exclusively since he toured on Lenny Kravitz’s Love Revolution tour in 2008. “Kylie has been mixed on a DiGiCo going back years, and I wanted to keep it in the family,” he says. For the Vegas residency, an SD12-96 was chosen, based on its compact footprint for the intimate venue, but the Quantum852 for the European shows came about in a somewhat more dramatic fashion (and very apropos for Minogue, whose stage shows include elaborate costumes and sets inspired by sci-fi films). “I wasn’t able to make DiGiCo’s 21st birthday party in London last year, so instead I had a friend who’s great with film and video technology create a hologram of me from my Los Angeles office to them for the celebration!” he says. “They were introducing the Q8 and that was my introduction to it. I asked James Gordon if he could get me one for Kylie’s next shows and he moved heaven and earth to do it.”
Glendinning was glad he did; the desk was everything he expected, and more. “What I really, really enjoyed, and the first thing that stood out to me, was the accessibility of whatever you’d like, wherever you’d like it,” he says. “I can keep Kylie’s things balanced over here and keep them in the up bank the entire time, and then have the band, and the guest artists we have come up, in their own sections. I can lay things out and structure the board in a way with excellent accessibility that is totally intuitive. The Q8 is a big console, but it feels like less of a computer and more of a classic mixing desk, which I think is the ultimate goal. Yes, they’re a terrific technology company, and I have always appreciated the sonics and the support from DiGiCo, but they also really deliver when it comes to what a desk should feel like.”
Glendinning has been using Quantum852’s onboard Mustard and Spice Rack processing liberally, literally replacing all of what was once outboard gear with it. “Everything is on the console, everything is onboard, and it has all been outstanding,” he says. “They’re in love with the ’verbs on the acoustic guitars and on the vocals. I don’t want to mention any names, but she had a very exotic, very high-end reverb unit that I simply just replaced with the stock vocal plate on the console. The processing has been terrific.”
On the other end of the Optocore loop, Kevin Pruce has mixed Kylie Minogue’s vocals from front of house for 15 years, in a career that’s also spanned FOH stints with Björk, Madonna, Duran Duran, Lana Del Rey, and Tears For Fears. He’s been a Quantum338 fan ever since the desk was introduced, at the 2020 NAMM Show. Since then, he says, “I love it, it is my favorite DiGiCo console. For me, it is about the ergonomics of working quickly and efficiently on the surface. The screens are a great improvement and make working in bright light much easier. That the layout is similar to the SD7 is also a bonus: three screens and a master section, while Mustard and Spice Rack are great additions as well.”
Minogue occupies a unique niche in entertainment though, oddly, not in the U.S. In fact, Minogue has only toured North America once—nine shows in the United States and Canada in 2009. Even Billboard scratched its head back in 2002 as to why her worldwide success wasn’t matched in America, the world’s largest music market. But that hasn’t stopped Minogue, who has sold 80 million records worldwide, from reaching new generations of fans year after year.
It’s the same thing that DiGiCo has been doing. But for every new step and star in the DiGiCo lineup, Glendinning says the underlying narrative has been about the technology’s consistency from each generation of consoles to the next. “DiGiCo has been part of the Kylie ‘sound’ for years, for decades, now,” he says. “From SD to Quantum, I can plug a show file in and be ready to work anywhere, and the artist will have a familiar sound signature and relevant mix balance. That’s the real accomplishment.”
For details on Kylie Minogue’s upcoming performance itinerary, visit www.kylie.com. Solotech can be found online at www.solotech.com.
