Live Music Production

Interviews with UK Pioneers

Richard Ames

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815373728
• eBook ISBN: 9781351242950
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents the days of live music production in the UK spanning the late '60s to the mid-'80s, when rock music was enjoying a meteoric rise in popularity.

The author, Richard Ames, will take you on a true behind-the-scenes journey of discovery. You'll learn who the people were, where they came from and how they went on to pioneer the first companies that would become the lifeblood of a unique industry. The interviews contained in this book record and present the raw stories of a few of the original innovators who set the stage for their performers but also for the hundreds of technicians who would tour the world following in their footsteps. The pioneers presented in these interviews share with the reader countless candid anecdotes that convey how their curious enthusiasm, energy, dedication, and general can-do attitude was the driving force behind the creation of the many companies we know of as common place today. The book presents interviews that span varied aspects of live music production including lighting, sound, rigging, staging, trucking, bussing and catering. Live Music Production captures a piece of social history that promises to inform, entertain and delight.

Part 1
Pioneers of Lighting

Cockney Rebel soundcheck early 1975

In the late ’60s bands played more and more live concerts, and it was due to this constant touring that the bands and their crews decided they needed to indulge their audience in a visual as well as an auditory experience. Just switching the house lights on and off was no longer enough. An expertise began to evolve on the road, particularly in three London venues that spawned some great production people: the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in Pall Mall, the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm and the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, formally The Astoria Odeon.

Brian Croft spent a great deal of his working life as a director, or partner, in a succession of lighting rental companies. His early history was rooted in theatre before eventually becoming technical director of the ICA in 1967. Live music came to the ICA and, at the same time, The Rolling Stones’ American production manager, Chip Monck, came into Brian’s life, and it was the beginning of a highly successful relationship.

At around the same time that the ICA started radically changing its programming, another institution was being created up the road in Camden in a place called the Roundhouse. Jon Cadbury also came from a theatre background and was taken on as a carpenter, then later, in the heady acid days of the late ’60s, became the venue’s production manager. Jon is now one of the account directors of the UK’s largest lighting production company, PRG (Production Resource Group) and he remembers, with slightly scary accuracy, some of the detail of the early concerts at the Roundhouse and also, a little later, at the Rainbow Theatre.

The Rainbow was transformed, from a cinema, into the first rock concert venue with full production facilities, in 1970 by a bunch of Americans who used to be the technicians for the Fillmore East in New York City. Brought over by John Morris, who had been the manager at the Fillmore East, the story itself is fascinating, and over the next 3 years created many future enterprises in the live music rental market.

There came and went, in those few years, a crowd of people that, in all honesty, became the cream of music production. I haven’t spoken with them all by any measure, but ‘The Innovator’ Richard Hartman, a man who has become synonymous with innovation in structural lighting design (and was one of those original Fillmore guys), describes in great detail what transpired at the Rainbow.

The man who carried on the production responsibilities of the Rainbow in its second coming was Dick Parkinson. Dick created one of the initial lighting rental companies called Rainbow Lights, which rivalled that of Brian Croft and John Brown’s ESP (Extra Sensory Projections). Whilst he was production manager for the theatre, Annie Pocock became his business partner and John Coppen his general manager, both of whom recant their memories of early touring and production values. Annie was one of the first, if not the first, girls to work in UK live music production, starting her career as a 16-year-old ‘runaway’ and follow spot operator in the Rainbow.

1 Brian Croft

Brian Croft

© LSi magazine www.lsionline.co.uk

January 29, 2007 with Brian Croft at His Home in Ealing, London

So Brian, from the beginning, please.

I was born in London, and I went to a school in South London called Alleyn’s College, which was actually, technically, a public school but almost entirely scholarship as far as I can remember. A ‘direct grant’ grammar school, that’s what it was called. I only ever knew one boy whose parents paid a fee. It was courtesy of the Clement Atlee post-war labour government that my brother got in there; he is four years older than me. He went there immediately after the war in 1945, and I guess I went in 1949, and it was actually a very good school. I mean we had serious doubts about it then, but when you get older you realise that actually the teaching was fantastic because most of the staff had good degrees, many from Oxbridge. It was a day school; the only thing that made it a ‘public school’ was that the head went to the Headmasters Conference for historical reasons. It was a very extraordinary school, because it had all the trimmings of being a public school, but many of the kids were rough diamonds from Walworth Road, Camberwell Green and Bermondsey. They were there because they were very bright, so it was an extraordinary school, real untypical.

My housemaster there was Edward Upwood, who was quite a reasonably well-known novelist in the 1930s, a friend of Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, and because of him, there was a young guy who’d left Oxford, been in the Navy and came and got a job there as an English master. His name was Michael Croft, no relation, and he started to do really big-scale plays. Shakespeare really, really properly, massively long rehearsals, and they were of a very, very high standard. He was only in his late twenties, and he was doing these (plays) at school in the summer term. They would do large-scale Shakespeare, and he got the national press there. They would come, because he had been a journalist.

He went to Oxford late because he had already done Naval service in the final years of the war, and then he went to Oxford. He was a late student, and then he became a journalist and then a teacher. Anyway, so he was a huge, I now realise, massive influence, and changed our lives completely, and I, who had never wanted to act, but wanted to be involved, would always do ‘walk-on’ parts. I mean I was like the Regimental Sergeant Major of Macbeth’s army, and I realised I had this kind of talent for organising how things should be done backstage, and I became the stage manager really.

In 1956 Michael left and went back into journalism, a national I think, Observer maybe. He had worked for the Manchester Guardian as a theatre critic etc. Then there was such a demand from the boys that he actually formed the Youth Theatre, 50 years ago. We have just celebrated our fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Youth Theatre in 1956, The National Youth Theatre now.

It’s called The National Youth Theatre.

Yes, it changed its name about 30 years ago when it became a national organisation. Anyway, he formed this company, and it was really for kids. There were a lot of very good actors at the school; there were people who are now in the profession: Julian Glover, John Stride, David Cameron, not that David Cameron. A lot of kids of my generation who are now actors, Simon Ward, he’s a bit younger than me, David Weston, R.A. Hampton, Colin Farrell. They are all still in the profession with various degrees of success. To cut a long story short, the Youth Theatre grew out of Alleyn’s, and we put our first show on the year I left school. I was probably going to go to Art School, because all of my friends went to Camberwell Art School, I mean all my best friends who I am still friendly with went to Camberwell Art School. I was pretty good at art, I did it at ‘A’ level, and I was a bit more academic than them in terms of history of art, and Michael said to me one day, “Why don’t you go into a drama school?”. I hadn’t thought of it at all, but you know how you do things on impulse when you are young, you never weigh it up do you, so he got me a grant from the LCC to go to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

The LCC?

The London County Council, precursor of the GLA (Greater London Authority). London County Council ran all of the education in London, the inner Boroughs and then the outer Boroughs, Bromley, Croydon, Barnet… . There was a woman called Maisie Cobby, who was the ‘Inspector’, she managed to wangle me a grant to go to Bristol. Normally they would only give it to the London drama schools, for LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), for RADA (The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), but I wanted to do stage management, and the courses were terrible there according to her, so she said, “Go to Bristol because it has got the best reputation”.

So I went to Bristol and did one year.

What year was this?

1956/57. The year I was at drama school it was the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian uprising, where the Russians put down a Hungarian revolt with the tanks; anyway, I went to drama school.

What is it called?

Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, BOVTS. It’s still there, still producing good people. It was attached to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre, so once a term you got to work on a real production at the Theatre Royal, Bristol and it was a good company. Peter O’Toole was in the company and people like that; Alan Dobie, really good actors, high standard. There weren’t many notable people in my year; Brian Blessed probably is the only one that anyone’s ever heard of. Anyway, going on from there I went into the theatre as a stage manager. I went to Perth Rep, and then I went to Stratford on Avon for two years, two seasons, where I was top of the tree, as assistant stage manager.

That would be before the New Stratford Theatre.

Yes, that was before, it wasn’t even called the Royal Shakespeare Company; it was called the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company, and it was run by a really nice old guy called Glen Byam Shaw. I did the last year of Glen Byam Shaw and the first year of Peter Hall. It was real high-class stuff. I went to Russia for a month with them, first ever cultural exchange—not exchange but we visited. We took three plays to Russia with Michael Redgrave, Dorothy Tutin, Richard Johnson and Geraldine McEwan.

Stage managing?

I was the assistant stage manager. I never wanted to act. I have acted, it’s where everyone starts, it’s where you have to start; doing props; being on the prompt copy; doing sound in its infancy. I did that and after two years I left, I went to Canterbury Rep where I met my wife, she was an actress, and then, all the time I kept going back to the National Youth Theatre because they always did a big production in the summer and Easter holidays.

At the school still?

No, the first production in 1956 was at Toynbee Hall in Aldgate; by 1960 we were getting quite big and playing seasons in the West End, and I was getting paid to go back and be their production manager.

Did they have a home theatre?

No, they didn’t have a home, they had offices. Nice offices in Eccleston Square paid for by a grant from Gulbenkian,¹ Arts Council money, Department of Education money; they were reasonably well funded and they had a small staff. Michael was the Director, he had a full-time secretary, male secretary, Dave Fournel, who I still see and we all used to go back and do the big shows. They were actually on Shaftesbury Avenue at that time. We did the Queens for two years, did a modern dress version of Julius Caesar, which he had originally done at Alleyn’s in the open air outside the cricket pavilion; it was really revolutionary, with huge armies, swirling armies and real guns, real blanks, because we had a very strong cadet force at Alleyn’s and no health and safety!

Anyway, in between, I would go back and do professional jobs, and then I would work with the Youth Theatre whenever possible, and we did lots of tours. Toured Holland, Germany, Italy. Half the year I was working as a paid employee of the Youth Theatre being a production manager, which meant overseeing building of sets, overseeing the lighting, putting all the ingredients together, and we were on Shaftesbury Avenue and doing big tours. We represented England at the Berlin Festival in 1961, so that was like the ’60s, and then in the middle of the ’60s I got to actually work for them full time for three years because Michael got a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation and had three employees for three years. I had just got married, so that was like l963/’64/’65, so I had a permanent job working in Eccleston Square all the time, and then going on tour and doing lots of big, big things in the ’60s.

At the end of the ’60s when that fund ran out, this is the key turning point in my life. I was very friendly with a guy called Michael Kustow, who was a theatre director I had known from Oxford. He and a good, good friend of mine, who was in the Youth Theatre, Geoffrey Reeves, they both did good English or History degrees, and then they both did post-graduate degrees at Bristol University to become theatre dramaturges, the academic side, the intellectual side of theatre. Anyway, Michael Kustow, quite out of the blue, got offered the job of running the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which was a little private kind of very exclusive group of art collectors, based in Dover Street in Mayfair. A drinking club, and the chairman was Sir Roland Penrose, who was a wonderful, wonderful man, who was Picasso’s biographer. He was a friend of Picasso and was married to Lee Miller, who was an American black-and-white war photographer, and all part of that 1930s Surrealism movement: Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Dada, Max Ernst and so on—Roland founded the ICA with Herbert Reid.

Anyway, Roland was smart enough to realise that they had to grow up, so they were offered this building in The Mall where it still is, a huge building, government building I think, and they got Michael Kustow in. The ICA had always been fine art and poetry basically, and he had the foresight to bring in a theatre director to be the artistic director of the ICA, which was very frightening for them and for Michael. Well he asked me to go and be his tech guy, and so I was the technical manager of the ICA from when it opened, in 1967, through to 1971. It was this fantastic time, this wonderful, wonderful time; we had these hugely successful exhibitions where people were queuing halfway down The Mall to get in....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Harvey Goldsmith, CBE
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Pioneers of Lighting
• Part 2 Pioneers of Sound
• Part 3 Pioneers of Stage Design
• Part 4 Pioneers of Full Production Services
• Part 5 Pioneers of Rigging
• Part 6 Pioneers of Trucking/Outdoor Staging
• Part 7 Pioneers of Bussing
• Part 8 Pioneers of Catering
• Part 9 Pioneers of Travel Agency
• Appendix: Richard Ames’ Early CV