The First Drum & Bass DJ to Headline The O2 — Observatory's Visuals for Andy C: Alive 2.0

Good Friday 2023. The O2 Arena. Twenty thousand people. Five hours of drum and bass. And a production team that had spent months making sure this particular night of UK music history was going to look as extraordinary as it sounded.

Andy C presents Alive 2.0 was the first time a DJ-led gig had taken over the O2 Arena — and the biggest indoor drum and bass event the UK had ever seen. Observatory's Simon Harris was part of the core production team, working alongside Dan Hamill of 80six, who handled video infrastructure. Together, the two companies combined to create a visual spectacle worthy of the occasion.

Read the full production feature: https://www.tpimagazine.com/andy-c-alive-2-0-pushes-the-boundaries-of-visual-production/

How the Collaboration Came Together

The TPi Awards bar is always an interesting place to find out what shows people are working on. Before the doors had opened, we found ourselves speaking to two suppliers — Simon Harris of Observatory and Dan Hamill of 80six — who explained that they would be joining forces for Andy C's performance at The O2.

That conversation at the awards bar captures something about how Observatory finds some of its most meaningful projects — through genuine industry relationships, built over years of shared work and mutual respect. The decision to pair Observatory's content expertise with 80six's video production capability was a deliberate choice to put the best possible team around a show of this scale.

A History of Landmark Drum & Bass Shows

Observatory's relationship with Andy C stretches back through a series of landmark shows. We worked with Andy C on his Alive AllNight at Wembley Arena — at the time, his biggest ever headline show — and then again as the show evolved and grew. Each iteration has been an opportunity to push the visual language further, responding to the new stage design, new music, and Andy C's own involvement in shaping the visual experience in real time.

Alive 2.0 is a new vision of Andy's ground-breaking visual spectacle where he takes over the controls of the visual elements of his set and remixes the show live. That real-time interactivity places particular demands on content design — the material needs to be flexible enough to work in any sequence, at any moment, while still feeling coherent and intentional. It's a challenge Observatory relishes.

Setting the Standard for Electronic Music Production

What projects like Alive 2.0 demonstrate is that electronic music, when treated with the same production ambition as the biggest rock or pop tours, can create experiences that are genuinely transformative. Andy C has always understood that. Observatory is proud to have been part of the team that helped him prove it to twenty thousand people on Good Friday 2023.

Source: TPi Magazine — Andy C: Alive 2.0, May 2023.