Iron Maiden 1984 (Eur)

The European ground support version of the "World Slavery Tour" rig. If we could fly it we'd fly the grid from 6 x 1t motors and of course leave the legs and lifts in the truck. The USA version of the rig added a front spot truss and used the side vertical frames to make 2 more large triangles that flew back to back with the existing large triangles.

Notes on the lighting system for Iron Maidens 1984/85 World Slavery Tour.

THE PITCH

Dave Lights was the lighting designer for Maiden and took the fundamentals of the system from the 1983 Piece of Mind tour and supersized it. The brief to Dave and Ronan Willson of Meteorlites from Steve Harris (bass player with Maiden and founder of the band) and Rod Smallwood (manager) was that the show HAD to be the same for the fans if we could fly the system or if it was ground supported. The trusses were going to move a lot during the show (this was before moving lights were common) so what do we do? move the trusses instead. Steve’s reasoning was that just because the venue didn’t have flying capabilities, the fans should not have a weaker show. That ethos was baked into Maiden at an early stage and we all felt that it was a major part of why the Slavery tour and Maiden in particular were so successful. The tour started off in Poland in August ‘84 with production rehearsals in Germany before.

THE GRID HISTORY

On the Piece of Mind tour the year before in ‘83, the seeds of the Slavery tour system were sown. We travelled a 40’x15’ mother-grid from mid to upstage which held the 3 small and 1 large triangles. This was placed on 4 x Tas Stage truss legs on non-fly days effectively becoming a table, enabling us to hang motors inverted in the grid to pick up the trusses this to our knowledge was the first travelling mother grid. With the extremely fine tolerances of the flown triangle shaped lighting trusses in relation to each other this was the only way to get accurate rigging quickly hung, especially in the wide variety of venues Maiden were playing at across Europe. If we could fly the grid we could just hang the grid from 4 x motors quickly to pick up the grid and not use the Tas Stage legs. It also sped up the decay of any swinging of the lighting truss after a move as the amount of chain between lighting truss and the motor was never more than 15’.

Ground support in those days was either Superlifts/towers or Vermettes with capacities of 650lb each, definitely not up to holding up a moving truss rig. The Thomas self-climbing ground support tower we designed had only just gone into production at this time with AC/DC using them in Europe ‘84, so Dave felt we should stick with the tested pinned leg methods we’d used the year before.

On the World Slavery tour the grid was enlarged to 41’w x 34’d x 24’h. The reason we stuck with 24’ legs was that it was as high as we could get the SL24’s or any other ground cranked lift to go. It was now going to need 6 legs to hold the grid with a double mid truss to carry the weight from the centre focused loads of the nose points of the 6 x triangles hung under it. We added some pointy cantilevered trusses on the DS and US of the grid so we could hang motors off the tips to hang more stuff in front and the scenic drapes truss behind the main lighting system. When the grid was flown instead of the legs we used 6 additional motors to hang the grid from the venue, a much faster way to hang the 24 below grid show motors.

THE BUILD

The grid was assembled on the deck in the morning and then either flown up (in Europe that was only about 50% of the time) or lifted to chest height by 6 x SL24 lifts. The inverted Verlinde 1t motors (more on them later) were hung on the grid from either span sets or steel channel spreaders. We used spreaders on the dead ctr SL to SR points as the chain would drop in the 3” gap between the 2 x mid stage trusses. We laid out the cables on the grid, with slack to reach back down to the floor on the truss end (not very many Socapex as it was mainly an ACL rig) and then cranked the lifts to get the grid 5’ high so we could pin in the first Tas Stage truss leg section. We’d carry on lifting the 6 x SL24’s in very tight harmony to keep the grid dead level in 5’ increments until we got to 24’, we added the tri-leg base (called Isle of Man legs) and then set the whole assembly back down on the stage and removed the SL24’s and cranked them down to park up until load out. We put small steel plates under the jacks to prevent puncturing the house stage deck, then made sure each of the screw jacks at the end of each base leg had equal weight on them. Now that was set; we had a very sturdy and stable grid, we could climb up any of the 6 legs for scenery, cables etc. It never jiggled around even when every truss was moving during the show.

THE LIGHTING TRUSSES

The initial batch were designed in ’83 for the Piece of Mind tour exactly 8 weeks before the James Thomas Pre-Rig truss was designed for AC/DC. The Maiden trusses were known as PFT or Pre-Focus Truss, it was built by James Thomas again. For the Powerslave rig more were built to make the rig a lot bigger. The reasoning for the PFT from LD Dave Lights was that we should focus this rig just once for the entire tour, a 15 month global tour, 1 focus ever, we did that focus in Brixton Academy tech rehearsals . The truss was a 90”x 30”w x 20.5”h module with 3 x 28” square ‘cells’ inside. They could stand up on end 3 x wide in a standard height (not Hi-Cube) sea container. Hi Cubes were harder to get in the 80’s so going standard meant easier shipping options when this thing went around the world. The wheels were on full size 90” x 30” plywood wheel-boards that slid onto the bottom of truss when the rig was lowered to danger height, the each section of the rig was lowered to the floor, unbolted and wheeled off to the truck.

THE LAMPS

The Par 64 and 36 lamps were all short nose fixtures, had modified yokes and apart from the side trusses with 1k pars were all ACL 28v 250w lamps. The yoke resembled the mounting on a gyroscope, a rectangle yoke bolted at each end to a small frame with the Par itself bolted to the yoke in the other axis giving total focus-ability. Once the rig was focused, we spent a couple of hours in the Academy at Brixton cranking the 4 lock nuts tight on both the yoke and the par, they were almost welded into place. To connect the lamps, each section of truss had 7’ of 2”x2” square trunking (raceway) mounted to the top underside of the truss to protect it, and each truss was fed by 2 x socapex down to the racks at SR. Each lamp had its own short cable going from the head to the trunking through a cable gland. It was terminated inside with single pole Molex connectors so that we could series up lamps if desired inside the trunking to keep voltage drop down. If we series’d 28v ACL lamps down to the racks and back up again, we calc’d we could lose about 7v each trip down to the racks, that was a 25% drop in light output, so we did as much series wiring of the ACL’s up in the air inside the trunking wherever possible. Remember in the UK we had to series 8 x ACLS to run at 240v so there was a lot of pre-planning by Dave, Ronan and the rest of us lighting crew to give Dave the looks he needed with the limitations of technology at the time that we could work with. There was no touring soft patch back then, it was dimmer rack matrix pins or stackable banana plugs for the control patch at the rack end.

THE MOTORS

The motors used back then were Verlinde 1t 3 ph hoists, they had no electrical limit switches, contactors on the floor in the motor controller, a 5 point lift wheel, lighter weight chain, and slipping clutches set to 25% over load. This slipping clutch was integral to Maidens moving truss show as Dave could have the trusses revert back to their home position (high and flat), in the dark without jamming the trusses into the grid. CM hoists in Europe were not common in the 80’s as they were heavy and loud and spares weren’t easy to get. The Verlindes high and low limit was an analog affair, two small plates were bolted together across the links wherever you wanted them to be. This was perfect for us for the high truss trim setting and was faultless the whole tour. The motor controller to control all 24 moving hoists on the system was built by Avolites. Avo built 8 way motor controllers for Verlindes as part of their standard range of goods back then. We had 3 x 8 way controllers going into a 24 x channel motor desk that actually controlled the movements. Computers on the road didn’t exist back then, let alone computerized motor controllers, so this 24 channel desk was a 100% hand operated analog affair. There were 3 x presets (A,B, and C) of 24 x 15a toggle switches in each preset. Each preset bank was energized by a large rotary switch that powered each preset bus in turn as you went through A - C. The entire thing was then started or stopped by a large momentary GO switch. Paddy the motor op would set up the sequence of switches up or down in each preset. He’d usually start a sequence with the A preset, press go, then switch the rotary switch to the B preset while the go button was still pressed. The effect at front of house was seamless and massive for its day, especially on a ground support shows all through Europe. As hi-tech as we got was a stopwatch for a down move in the dark (Rime of the Ancient Mariner was one of them).

THE SCENICS

Alan Chesters at Hangman in the UK again painted all of the scenic truss borders, Marley flooring, backline scrims, under-grid scrim, backdrops and even scrims covering the PA in the US. The grid had a painted scrim stretched under the entire 41x34’ structure with holes that allowed for the motor and chain to go through. Each hole pocket had a painted scenic facia on the DS side to hide the motor and chain bag. Even the cables had painted socks on them to match the Egyptian theme of the production.

Maiden were very keen, even back then, on a large assortment of changing backdrops. I think we had at least 9 on that tour. Obviously hanging 9 x tab tracks would take too long, too much space and be too fiddly, so we designed and built a 5 way tab track in 5ft sections. The sections could travel in a case to prevent bending the track. The 5 x tracks were joined at each end with aluminium angle section and were bolted together at the angle piece for a seamless run, and just hung directly from the 40’ Tas stage truss with swivels. We put 2 x drapes on each track and in true Maiden style they were all walked on and offstage when needed, no string or pulleys even. Testament to this method is that even as of last year when I went to see the band in Oakland, they still use multiple painted drapes behind them for the entire show, all hung on multitrack systems as per 1984.

THE DESK

FOH control was an AVO QM500 90 channel analog desk with cassette backup for stored cues (3.5” floppies didn’t come around for a few more years) and 20 memory channels, 20 channel of matrix pin patch as the failsafe backup to get you through a show if the memory dumped. It had 10 programmable chases and 3 presets of 90 channels all fed by a triple 37 pin socapex control snake back to the racks.

THE FINALE

Once we got a couple of weeks of Poland, Hungary and Italy under our belts we were building this system as a ground support rig inside 5 hours, flying it without legs was about 30 minutes less. This was the European version of the rig. When the tour went to the USA in November, the vertical side frames became 2 more large triangles that extended out past the grid on the nose point, we didn’t use the 6 x leg ground support in the US.

Dizzy Gosnell July 2020

Iron Maiden lighting crew member for various tours.