Alison Goldfrapp ... deflated interplanetary portal just out of shot. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images
There’s a saying in showbiz: never work with children or animals. I have a new rule: never work with inflatables. I had something go badly wrong on tour with Goldfrapp in 2010. Alison and Will had made an album called Head First, and the concept was that the band would wear silver and be beamed through this portal from another planet. It was all very ironic.
We built this inflatable thing that was meant to be the portal, but it deflated on stage at the Fox theater in Oakland. Alison heroically kept singing, but there were roadies running around behind her trying to get it back up. Of course, the whole thing’s on YouTube. I’ve been working for Alison for a long time, and she’s lovely. She’s become a friend, but the roasting I got in the dressing room afterwards is not something I’ll forget. The inflatable was built in a hurry and on a budget, but it didn’t work at all that night. It’s one of those things that should be funny, but it really wasn’t. I never mentioned it again, but from then on, no more inflatables!
I’m a show designer, which is slightly different to a set designer. Sometimes I might work with a set designer – with Miley Cyrus, I worked with Es Devlin – but bands generally employ a show designer when they want something that looks fantastic when they’re just basically playing.
I started off sweeping the floor in a lighting warehouse, and I’ve worked my way up from fixing lights on tour with bands to people asking me to design their shows. There are courses in show design, but there weren’t when I started, and I’ve pretty much taught myself how to do this. I was a mobile DJ when I left school, and I got more into the lighting end of that and did a course in theatrical electrics at Westminster College. That was basically an electrician’s course with a bit of theatre tacked on the end, but from there, I got the job in the warehouse, and after that learned on the job.
The first band I designed for were the Hollies, in 1999. They used a little lighting rig and they trusted me. Now I’m doing quite well. I’m on tour with Queen [and Adam Lambert] at the moment, but I try not to go on the road with the bands too much. It always takes a few shows to make sure everything works as it’s intended. Some artists insist that I come out and do it, like Peter Gabriel or Queen. Most artists get involved, but Peter is involved on a more micro level. At rehearsals, he will sit next to me with a microphone and sing each song while looking at the light and stage. Then we’ll go into a huddle, and he rips through everything we’ve done. It’s a very intense process. He’s delightful, and unfortunately he’s always right. He’s been doing this a long time, and really understands the capabilities of the equipment. If a spotlight doesn’t go off on cue, Peter will mention it.
I generally only get approached by people that think I’ll fit, and I’ve been fortunate to work for a lot of bands I am, or have become, a fan of, from Peter or Goldfrapp to the Pet Shop Boys and Pulp. When people watch a show in an arena, they won’t imagine that I’ll be sitting in a room at 4am, having been up for 18 hours, having an argument about what colour the chorus should be. I start with the lyrics and try to visually interpret the songs. When people write these songs, they’re very heartfelt, part of themselves, and I have to sit there and say: “This song that you love is going to be blue”, or whatever. It’s a strange process, talking to someone about their music, and how you see it, and what you want to do with it.
Peter Gabriel at the WOMAD festival. Photograph: Samir Hussein/Getty Images
It takes quite a while, from beginning to fruition. With Queen, we could afford either pyrotechnics or lasers, and went for lasers, which was a good choice. The band then rehearsed in London for two weeks, then we moved to LA and put the whole show up in an enormous aircraft hangar that Howard Hughes built for the Spruce Goose. The band came in and started to play, and we worked on the visual presentation. Most of the work was done in that aircraft hangar, At that point, you’re spending long hours programming computers. I can generally programme four or five songs in a day before my brain starts leaking out of my head.
It’s a lot of money and a lot of equipment, and everything has to move very quickly. The Queen show travels in 17 trucks, so the logistics of how that show moves are quite important. I guess because it’s Queen and Adam Lambert, there was a lot of pressure to pull it off. I studied what they used to do in the 80s: they had this reputation for putting on these enormous, ridiculous, bombastic, fantastic shows. Brian [May] once said to me that they never made any money out of touring until they reached the Wembley stadium era, because they used to spend it all on lights and stuff. So they have this tradition of it being huge. But that show would be nothing without their songs, so the ideal is to make a great spectacle that hopefully suits the music very well. You want people to have a really special evening.
This time, the idea was a souped-up version of their classic Live Killers show from 79. The way this tour looks fits within the heritage of Queen lighting rigs. I’m not sure anyone other than me would notice, but I feel the weight of history. I think, “I’ve got this job now, and I’ve got to match up to the people who came before me.”
I was incredibly proud of the Peter Gabriel show. We rehearsed that one in an ice hockey arena, and in the penalty box of the ice rink you’ve got a line of guys programming software, none of which worked until the final day. The mechanics of getting the cranes pushed round the stage without hitting anyone – these things weigh a tonne – was terrifying. We had an ex-naval chief petty officer who ran deck and trained groups of local people every day to push them around. It was technically very, very difficult, but it worked beautifully and was a really good show.
A tour becomes a weird self-contained town, like a little bubble. I’ll get a text off my wife asking me what the weather’s like, and I won’t know, because I haven’t been outside all day. It’s a strange life: you’re in an ice rink all day, then the bus, then the next day you do it all again. It’s quite hard to stay in contact with people: you lose track of whether you’ve got to pay the electricity bill. But I love my job. I’ve ridden motorcycles around Australia, been on the red carpet at the Oscars, and you never quite know what’s going to happen next.
