From Fink to Fever Ray: bands tune into stagecraft

Fin Greenall has spent more than a decade working in front of live audiences – first as a DJ for the Ninja Tune stable, latterly as singer/guitarist of a downtempo folk trio called Fink – so he knows something about getting a crowd's attention.

And the best way to do it, he maintains, is to abandon the idea that the paying public is happy simply to watch musicians playing instruments on a bare stage. Ahead of a 49-date European tour, he decided Fink needed to make their gigs feel, as he puts it, "less spit and sawdust": something extra was required to make them stand out from the hundreds of other small-to-middling bands on the live circuit.

So he and bandmates Tim Thornton and Guy Whittaker set about raising their game. When their tour starts next week, there will be nothing spit-and-sawdusty about it. Fink will still be playing the hazy songs from their current album, Perfect Darkness, but the stage will be dominated by a set made by 59 Productions, a theatre-design company whose previous commissions include the National theatre's War Horse and Damon Albarn's opera Dr Dee.

It's a sweeping steel structure with 48 lights, augmented by five gauze screens that show a different short film for every song. Seen at close quarters, in a cavernous soundstage in east London, where Fink are having their first full rehearsals with it, it's quite a thing. It's particularly impressive for a band which, even after four albums, still rely on word-of-mouth to fill venues.

"59 Productions have given us a good price," Greenall says in response to the obvious question about how much this is costing them. Though the band had to borrow money from Ninja Tune to pay for it – and for the hands-on attention of 59's director, Leo Warner, who's spent the day fussing behind the computers that run the lighting – he's confident it will open doors. "The fact that we have a stage show designed by a theatrical company means we can go to arts venues and say, 'This show has been done by the guy who did War Horse.' There are churches on the European tour, because we think the light show in an awesome church will be amazing. It's a way of standing out from the crowd."

Moreover, sections of the framework can be removed if they're playing a venue too small to accommodate the whole thing. "We didn't want a set where, if we're in a territory where the promoter [books us into a small venue], we had to give up eight grand and not play because the set is too big."