Tours from the 80's

There is hardly any surviving paper documentation of the hand drawn plots, and drawings etc of these lighting systems, I decided to use the extra free time in the great lockdown of Covid 2020 during evenings and weekends to bring these amazing systems back to life. Many of these rigs had one hand drawn plot only for the entire tour, maybe the odd copy, but all of these tours were well before the use of CAD in touring.

Times in rock'n'roll touring were fast in the 70's and 80's, jumps in technology and methods were happening at an alarming rate back then. Going from old battered theatre lights and dimmers to custom built aluminium trusses, spun aluminium par cans, high density dimming, multi pin power connectors for lamps, quicker, denser trussing. The Holy Trinity for lighting was lighter, stronger, cheaper. Making efficient truck packs almost into a religion. It meant that you, as a lighting company, could stuff more of your equipment into less truck space, meaning potentially better income for you.

This was also the time that our humble little niche in entertainment lighting that we called rock and roll, - very much the new boy in town compared to TV, film and theatre lighting - started to actually drive change in all areas. We had to invent and reinvent just about every single aspect of the equipment and methods we used. Theater stuff wasn't rugged enough for in and out of trucks every day, it was too heavy and not what we needed. TV and film heads were going to arc lights then and no real use for punchy changes, TV and theater dimming was way to big, heavy and slow. Trussing we so badly needed had to be round tube and modular sections and load tested by the manufacturer. All this needed to be protected in and out of the trucks, so flight case companies sprung up to make custom cases.

Click around the various systems and enjoy, I've not put any other departments (sound, scenery, stage sets, band gear etc) into these drawings deliberately so that the focus can be on the lighting system and the truss and rigging itself.

I have also put no download restrictions on these pictures, I feel that if you want to see them in their full glory on your device that's the whole idea. All I ask is that your credit me for the drawings and renderings on this entire site.

Many new companies started up in this era who concentrated in just designing, building and selling off the shelf items for lighting rental companies, the likes of Avolites, James Thomas, Celco and a host of regular industrial suppliers started aiming products to us, such as wire ropes, multicore cables, chain hoists and bulbs. Rock and roll used massive amounts of 1kw Par bulbs and even the very odd Par64 250w 28v bulb designed by GE to put on the wings or larger jet planes to use as landing lights, hence the common term ACL or 'Aircrafts' for those units. The 8" dia bulbs were inside just about every par can used all around the world in the 70's and 80's. It didn't have a clean beam, it wasn't designed for that, but it did put out lots of light in a sealed beam envelope with a silvered reflector to force the rear facing portion of the element out of the front of the lamp.