headline their biggest show to date, the lighting design had to deliver on every front. Their newly released 2026 album Nets to Catch the Wind was produced by Grammy-nominated Tom Dalgety, known for his work with Pixies, Ghost, and Royal Blood. This raised the stakes considerably. Lighting designer John Rogers met the occasion with a rig built around a single fixture, the GLP JDC Burst 1.
Rogers, a London-based lighting designer and director with decades of touring experience, was brought onto the project through a recommendation to the band’s management. His brief was unambiguous. “This was the biggest show that Tigercub had done at this point, and they wanted to show they meant business,” states Rogers.
An early conversation centered on whether the band needed a video wall to fill the 1,500-capacity venue. Rogers was confident they did not. “I was of the opinion that they could take the budget and with the right fixtures, they could use a striking enough design to deliver the looks to help them fill the space without the cost of a video wall and content creation,” he says.
Finding the right fixture was everything, and the answer came through a lighting shootout arranged by Sam Hooper at Christie Lites. “When I fired up the JDC Burst 1, I stopped going through the other options. That was the clear winner,” says Rogers.
The final design leaned into shadow as its primary visual theme, drawing on the aesthetic of Tigercub’s album artwork. 26 JDC Burst 1 units were arranged in a tiered configuration running down the depth of the stage, with two additional columns on either side providing side-light positions. The show opened with a black gauze kabuki on the downstage edge, with the JDC Burst 1 fixtures used as a backlight against the cloth. The motorized 185-degree tilt gave Rogers the flexibility to also wash the band’s logo backdrop or backlight the performers as the songs demanded.
“I needed to find a fixture that was punchy enough to cast shadows on walls, but that was also able to do key light and eye candy stuff. I wanted to make a simple design ideally with one fixture that could do all those jobs really well. The JDC Burst 1 fit that bill perfectly,” says Rogers. A hybrid LED strobe combining a 12-segment controlled white strobe line with two RGBW LED plates, the JDC Burst 1 was run in its full 249-channel mode throughout the show. The entire rig, 26 JDC Burst 1s alongside KOKO’s house fixtures, was handled comfortably by a grandMA3 light console with no need for a dedicated processing unit.
The response from the band confirmed what Rogers had set out to achieve. “I got a message from the band’s manager the day after the London show saying that she watched the intro sequence 100 times because of the kabuki drop and the way the lights and the band and everything else came together. She said it was pure joy for her,” says Rogers.
The design has since transferred to the Gramercy Theatre in New York City, where Tigercub played a fly date on May 13, aided by Christie Lites’ presence on both sides of the Atlantic. Scaled down to suit the 650-capacity room, the configuration kept the same concept with fewer fixtures. Looking forward to a European tour running from October through to mid-November 2026, the JDC Burst 1 will remain at the heart of the rig. “Those looks will absolutely come out onto smaller stages with fewer of the same fixture,” says Rogers. “The same effects and aesthetic will be easy to match because those JDC Burst 1s are so bright.”
For Rogers, the KOKO show represents exactly the kind of result a lighting designer works towards. “It’s really fun to take a project from the first calls with the band, to drawing it out, choosing the right fixture and then seeing it come together,” states Rogers. “This time, the way I pictured it in my mind was exactly how it came out on stage. When you can make that happen, and then, crucially, when the band loves it… you can’t ask for a better result than that.”
Photo credit: Fran Parry
