'Guerilla Architecture': The Stones Set
By Particia Leigh Brown
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE
FOXBORO, Massachusetts -"Most architects design a building and then leave it," said the 42-year-old London architect Mark Fisher. "We take a barren jock-style stadium and transform it into a fantasy environment." The environment in question, which is put up and taken down 34 times in 15 weeks, is Fisher's techno-baroque stage set for the Rolling Stones, the largest and possibly most ambitious transportable rock 'n' roll structure ever constructed. It is currently touring 36 cities.
The set is a towering amalgam of chutes, pipes, chain mail balustrades and other steely portents of urban decay. In Fisher's words, it must reflect "magic and tribal identity." Most people will never see this structure more than once," Fisher explained recently. "So you have to build in a range of intense emotions. It's like designing a building as if it could be seen from dawn till sunset in two and a half hours."
"This set is very hard and tough, and very urban," Jagger observed. " It evoked to me a bit of 'Bladerunner.' You see such things from an aeroplane or on a freeway. It's very much an urban mess, sort of glamourized."
With its corrugated orange girders, silver fishnet drapery, chutes and ladders and lithe swan-necked metal canopies, Fisher's design is vaguely reminiscent of both Frank Gehry and the Pompidou Centre. It draws on images from futuristic movie sets and contemporary science fiction novels. It also borrows from the Rolling Stones. The wittiest (albeit campiest) case in point is a pair of 60-foot tall inflatable Honky Tonk women, who pop out at an opportune moment and bob enticingly to the music.
In many ways, Fisher's set is the manifestation of an approach to rock concert design that began, in 1965 when the Beatles played their first concert at Shea Stadium here, ushering in the era of huge outdoor rock extravaganzas attended by tens of thousands of people. The sheer size of the operation demanded a new style, and a new technology, particularly since many fans can barely see the stage. Many young rock fans have come to expect visual hoopla.
"I call it guerrilla architecture," Fisher said. "In a sense, ifs a matter of transforming a football stadium into a temple for a night. This is an instant popular opera enacted on a huge scale."
The set for the current tour, of which there are two complete ones that leap frog from location to location, takes 80 to 120 people anywhere from three to five days to set up. It houses (to name a few items) 300 bulk headlights, 22 man-operated spotlights, two gigantic aluminium chutes (which dutifully spit smoke and fire), two 18-by-24-foot video screens and two 70-foot tall columns of speakers. It literally creates an independent piece of architecture within the stadium.
The band would not reveal the cost of the set, though one previously published estimate put it at around $18 million (the Rolling Stones are reportedly going to receive $65 million to $70 million from the tour). According to Bonnie Schwartz, the managing editor of the magazine Lighting Dimensions, the set is a break from rock concert tradition in its "total integration" of light, sound and architecture.
The visual style was born six months ago, when Fisher and Woodroffe, 35, visited the band in Montserrat while they were recording their new album, "Steel Wheels."
"The last tour we did was all pastels and bright early '80s squiggles," Jagger said. "It was a bit Memphis-y. I wanted something much harder that would get away from all that completely!" Because this was the Rolling Stone's first tour in eight years, the visual identity was considered extremely important, particularly given some scepticism about the band's age (Jagger is now 46) and its long sabbatical. "It had to reflect the Rolling Stones in 1989," said Woodroffe. "It had to have dignity. It had to be tough, hard and current, rather than nostalgic and beautiful!"
"I tell people it's Postmodernist-Deconstructivist," mused Jagger. "But does anyone really know what deconstructivist means?"
Jagger has been fascinated by "theatrical surroundings" ever since he was a teenager, he said, professing admiration for architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright as well as Cecil Beaton's stage designs and John Beard's film set for the movie "Brazil." "The 1960s was a rather boring period of rock history as far as sets were concerned," he said, "but by the '70s they started to get more elaborate!' During the Stones 1975 "Lotus" tour - "that was a good one" Jagger said with a grin -the set featured a mechanical lotus flower that opened up on stage to reveal Jagger. Parts of the Lotus flower have been recycled in Jagger's backyard garden in France.
In some respects, Fisher, who also moonlights as a professor at the Architectural Association in London and is currently designing a pavilion for the 1992 expo in Seville, was looking for a metaphor for the Stones music. "I wanted to express a tough urban attitude as well as a celebration of the beauty you can find in cities," he said.
Fisher initially showed Jagger and drummer Charlie Watts renderings of the shuttle launching gantry at Cape Kennedy - an expression, he said, of "redundant technology. It reminds me of a Victorian railway bridge." If the set is meant to look derelict (and at times downright sinister, especially during "Miss You," when it is transformed into a seedy urban streetscape bathed in poison green) it is also -consciously or not - a monument, one that looks permanent.
For the Rolling Stones, a look of permanence in aluminium and steel may be symbolic.
"You don't separate the parts do you?" said Jagger, referring to the set and the music, "I would hate to come out with something that's not sort of startling, somehow."
© Patricia Leigh Brown 1989
STEEL WHEELS 1989 - 90
Performed by the Rolling Stones
Production design: Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Patrick Woodroffe, Mark Fisher
Stage Design: Mark Fisher, Jonathan Park
Lighting Design: Patrick Woodroffe
Graphic Design: 4I Limited
Production Manager: Michael Ahern