Kylie, Kevins and Quantums: Minogue on the Road

London (September 11, 2024)—In support of last year’s well-received Tension album, perennial popstar Kylie Minogue played a sold-out Las Vegas residency earlier this year followed a string of high-profile European festival dates this past summer. Throughout the festival shows, the Grammy winner’s monitors were handled by engineer Kevin Glendinning, looking after a Solotech-supplied DiGiCo Quantum852 console. Meanwhile, out in the crowd, Minogue’s FOH engineer of the last 15 years, Kevin Pruce, tackled the shows on a DiGiCo Quantum338 desk.

Having sold 80 million albums globally, Minogue makes TV appearances everywhere, and over the years, Glendinning has stepped in periodically to handle monitors for them as needed. “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.”

Mixing IEMs for the artist meant picking gear to match the gig. “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 a Quantum852 was put to use for the European shows.

For the festival dates, Glendinning used 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.”

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Out front, Kevin Pruce has mixed 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. Throughout this year’s shows, he opted for a Quantum338 desk, noting, “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.”

With multiple press reports suggesting the singer will launch a 15-date North American tour in March, 2025, the DiGiCo desks may well be pressed into service again soon.