If you were among the few to catch David Gilmour’s first U.S. solo theatre tour, you can count yourself among the very lucky, given he would normally be seen in an arena or stadium setting. We have seen some great performances from him of late; his show at the Royal Festival Hall in 2002 that was recorded for a DVD and that rare performance that only Bob Geldolf could pull off, the reformation of Pink Floyd with Roger Waters at the Live 8 spectacular in London last year. It’s been twelve years since we’ve seen a Pink Floyd tour, so Gilmour’s outing has been long anticipated. In support of his third solo album On An Island, he plays it in its entirety for the first half of the show, then all Pink Floyd songs in the second half, some of which have never before been played live. We spoke with lighting designer Marc Brickman about covering the show and he graciously wanted to turn the spotlight over to his colleagues on the tour.
Production manager Roger Searle has been in the business since he apprenticed with The Who in 1967. He’s subsequently worked with “everyone from Cliff Richard to Judas Priest.” Phil Taylor, Gilmour’s long standing guitar tech got him involved in this tour.
“This is a four-truck production,” he says. “I’m technically just the production manager though with this whole team of people, everyone is conversant with the needs of others and therefore everyone looks out for everybody else, which works well.
“I’ve worked with a lot of the crew we have here over the years. Marc Brickman and I have done a few ‘Brits Awards’ shows in England. Colin Norfield, the FOH engineer, and most of the stage crew and I have all done various tours together over the years. There are actually only six of us in the business; we just move around a lot,” he jokes.
One of the challenges of a theatre tour is dealing with different sized venues. Searle and company had a unique way of dealing with that from the start. “We conspired from day one that we would stage the same show everywhere,” he said. “Because we are ending the tour with three nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall and they had another non-music production the afternoon of our third show day, the only way that we could do that was to have them use our sound system and fly our lighting rig out of the way. The Albert Hall has fixed trusses, so I said to Marc, you’re not going to like it, but we have to have three straight trusses. We had to make the lighting rig narrower than maybe we would, but again we wanted the same show and stage configuration for each show we played so the stage footprint of some fifty feet wide by about twenty-six feet deep will fit everywhere. We actually had carpet cut that size and I said to all the venue people who sent me a stage plan, if it doesn’t fit on the carpet, we can’t do it. But it’s worked everywhere. We put the same show in NY’s Radio City Music Hall as went in to the Grand Rex in Paris, give or take a laser or two!”
Mark “Sparky” Risk is the lighting programmer and he has worked with Marc Brickman on several projects, including Paul McCartney’s tour in 1989. The “carpet” restriction works for Searle, but how did it affect the lighting design and programming? “The starting basis of the show was the size of the venues we’d be playing, which restricted what Marc could do design-wise. From that point on, the idea was that we were not going to program something to deliberately look like a Pink Floyd show. Floyd shows happen on such a huge scale, that to try and emulate a show of stadium scale in a theatre show with three straight trusses would have been madness; you have to approach it as a David Gilmour show. On this tour we have about thirty songs programmed. The whole first half of the show is David’s new On An Island CD, which we’ve lit to hopefully compliment the subtle nuances of the music. The second half is all Pink Floyd songs, some of the regular favorites and some that the casual fan may not be quite so familiar with. It’s a wonderful blend of material that you never tire of listening to, some extremely subtle and others where we like to blitz the senses. It’s all about ebb and flow.”
Except for the strobes (Martin Atomic 3Ks) and the lasers, the entire lighting system is automated. The majority are Vari-Lites, with some Syncrolites thrown in for good measure. “The Vari*Lite VL500s are new to me,” says Risk. “They were straight out of the factory in Europe and onto this tour. I hadn’t used the new 1K Syncrolites before either. The Vari*Lite 3000s I’ve used extensively— it’s the best profile moving lamp I’ve come across by a country mile.”
Though he seems to be enjoying his new toys, Risk cautions that this particular rig requires some extra head work. “In many ways you have to put more thought into it if you’re working with a smaller number of instruments. We only have twenty-two moving lights in the air, a large number of strobes on the floor, and VL2500 Washes and the VL500s on torms for side wash. Smoke, of course, is of paramount importance to us. It’s essentially our set, with a great deal of thought and effort going into making it work for us.”
Mark Grega is the laser operator. After working with Brickman on the Momentary Lapse of Reason and the Delicate Sound of Thunder tours, he was asked to join Gilmour’s tour. His Pangolin computer system drives the laser graphics and scanning effects, while an NSI console controls the beam stops. Two lasers, one 8-watt and one 50-watt, provide the coherent light effects for the tour. Grega explains why these particular lasers are effective. “One of the laser systems is a copper vapor,” he says. “It has a copper core that is heated up 477 degrees Celsius and that turns it into a gas. It actually puts out a gold beam. Most lasers are monochromatic so usually they only have one wavelength. A copper vapor laser has about three usable wavelengths (colors) to work with: a whitish beam, a forest green beam and a gold beam. The other laser system is a YAG. It puts out a beam at 532 nanometers, which is that emerald green colored beam which we use specifically for entertainment purposes because of the sensitivity of your eye. On one end of the spectrum is red and on the other is blue and in the middle is green and 532 is the most sensitive wave length for your eye.”
How do these lasers differ from Gilmour’s other shows? “On past Floyd tours we used ion lasers. We had argon and krypton lasers that we would blend together to create a white beam which had the entire spectrum so you could make purples, blues, yellows, etc. After their shows in Europe—they did fourteen shows there— Marc and David Gilmour wanted to add a little something extra to the U.S. dates. So lasers were added to ‘Echoes’ and some of the old ‘laser songs’ from past tours—‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Comfortably Numb.’ It’s funny; on the ride back to the hotel last night, one of the backline techs described ‘Echoes’ as ‘biblical.’ ”
Given the nature of the beast, it’s not surprising that the production might transport you to a different time and place, perhaps even one with historical significance. But in this case the song alludes to a place under the sea where “everything is green and submarine.” Maybe it’s a sign of the times, or maybe it’s just that Gilmour is poised, relaxed and having fun.
“David’s doing these shows because he wants to,” says Searle. “He’s having a great time. The reaction of the fans as well as the general press has been great. If David decides to do more shows, I know we’ll all be there.”
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