Birth of the Big Screen

In the tiny village of Pott Shrigley near Macclesfield a strange event took place on July 13 1985. According to one blog site it was attended “by about 150 stoners and a bunch of sheep... the video showed the cricket most of the afternoon, I heard.”

The good people of Pott Shrigley may have been oblivious to the fact that sited in the corner was the first Starvision I-Mag big screen seen in the UK. Deployed to cover the ‘Alternative Live Aid’ it was standing by to relay the action on stage intermittently back to Wembley.

The first appearance of Starvision, manufactured by the English Electric Valve Company in Chelmsford, was ironically one of the final events staged by the company Robot TV, which had largely pioneered the use of large scale projections in UK rock concerts throughout the first half of the decade.

According to Richard Lee, who led the enterprise with Tim Davies, he had originally wanted to take Starvision to Hyde Park as a relay for Live Aid but couldn’t get the necessary permissions from the Royal Parks, while the GLC also refused to grant them Trafalgar Square site access for fear of causing traffic mayhem. And so Pott Shrigley it was.

By the time Starvision had enjoyed its inauspicious launch, Davies and Lee had notched a series of landmark events, including the Knebworth Festival, when Led Zeppelin played concerts over two weekends in August 1979.

Following the success of Knebworth, Davies’ Hijack Productions — a forerunner of Robot TV — covered the first Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington (with Rainbow headlining) and subsequently inspired a generation of artists and providers... from Bono to Screenco.

Leading the first wave of large screen projectors were the early oil film devices — notably the Eidophor, manufactured by Gretag AB, and the Talaria light valve projector from General Electric.

Weighing around 500kg (and requiring a six- to eight-man lift) the Eidophor was unconscionably heavy, but considerably brighter than the GE alternative. The standard Eidophor provided around 2,750 lumens — a massive output in those days and nearly three times brighter than the early Talarias. The PJ 5050 introduced circa 1982 was rated at around 1,000 lumens and the PJ 5055 Talaria which appeared 18 months later, 1,800-2,000 lumens.

Initially rear projecting on to screen material often rented from Harkness, this predated the later CRT all-in one daylight screens although they offered nothing like the resolution of the Eidophor, which only came into its own in low-light conditions.

Many of the CRTs were massive lumps of ironmongery, bearing huge tonnage which needed to be craned artfully into position behind the stage before later modularity and lighter aluminium chassis took over.

“By the time LED came along in 1996, with SACO and Invision, the technology had pretty much run its course,” believes Graham Burgess, who in the UK at least, single-handedly turned the word ‘JumboTron’ into the generic soubriquet for all big screen CRT displays during his time with Sony.

“Everything changed with the move from analogue to digital — by 1998 we and Mitsubishi were introducing LED. Nothing was ever the same again and instead of four or five major brands there were soon several hundred making LED.”

And so Chronicle’s Tardis finds itself landing in the world of concert video circa 1980. Although its glory days were the first half of the 1980s — and GE PJ 5055 Talaria sealed light valve projectors were even installed in the UK’s leading discotheque, The Hippodrome in 1983 — Hijack Productions had already scalped the biggest event of the 1970s at Knebworth.
   
AN EIDOPHOR EPIPHANY
This is a celebration of the early evolution in the UK; a snapshot that for practical reasons, omits several of the artists who embraced the genre. And despite the references to Starvision and DiamondVision, this month we focus largely on projection and cameras — we move on to displays in our July issue.

In reality, our Tardis might as well have landed back in 1943, as that’s the year television pictures were first projected by the Eidophor large-screen system.

The company used a principle of oil and mirror and electron beams, employing the Schlieren optical system to enable film and oil to be deformed to create a video picture.

Eidophor, and later the GE Talarias, were handled in the UK by Link Electronics, and in 1983 a young Dave Crump, who would make his name over the next 25 years with Screenco and Creative Technology, was to join the company. But that was four years after Tim Davies and Richard Lee had manhandled their first Eidophor into Knebworth Park.

Lee’s early career had taken him through conventional light projection. Falling under the influence of Fillmore East’s famed Joshua Lightshow — a protégé of legendary promoter Bill Graham (see The American Influence) — Lee’s own wildly experimental early projection three-screen ‘TV Fetish’, operated in conjunction with the late technical genius John Goodman, was a natural consequence.

“We had a bunch of synchronised televisions so that images moved from one screen to another,” says Lee.

Having built his first two-camera PPU at college based around a video synthesiser, the breakthrough came from Lee’s friend, organist Peter Bardens of Camel.

“He wanted me to use video for the 1977 Rain Dances tour but there was no video projection that would cut it; it needed something with the power of a Carousel or Bell & Howell 16mm.

“I read a review of the first colour GE Talaria with a decent output. It had a range of lenses and could be flown from a truss but was very expensive. Their principle clients were people like NASA — they had certainly never been used with a band.

“So we paid them a visit in Syracuse, New York, and explained that video support for live bands was becoming a considerable growth area and would they give us one for Camel’s tour. But they showed us the door, stating it would be like advertising in Readers Digest! Only after Link Electronics had taken on distribution did it become easier.”

Despite the onerous cost of projection, the Rain Dances tour did go ahead with video, with the images transferred on to 16mm. For this tour, Lee also built his first concert PPU with two robot cameras (now known as hotheads) and U-matic pre-recorded play-in, incorporating the prototype Murraypro Digital Synthesiser manufactured by Tony Drummond-Murray. This provided endless video feedback and effects triggered by live sound signals.

Lee’s video experimentation continued on OMD’s Architecture & Morality tour and with The Clash and Kate Bush, using slides and 16mm created from the synth.

Also boasting an impressive background, Davies had been pulled into the first proper Glastonbury Fayre (in 1979) by the legendary Bill Harkin, who had constructed the first Pyramid stage in 1971, and was now handling production alongside Arabella Churchill.

An unqualified production success if not a commercial one, Harkin consequently offered Davies the Knebworth gig later that summer but suggested he form a staging and production company. Thus between the two summer events Davies set up Hijack Productions — a company which morphed into Tecta Staging two years later, and developed the pilot Orbit stage.

At Knebworth, SGB Scaffolding constructed the main base and Hijack rigged the roof and other structures. “There was an inflatable roof originally made for Wings and a huge tower behind the stage to accommodate a thing called an Eidophor!” states Davies.

A number of people who worked on that first rigging job are now well known in the industry — such as Summit Steel’s Jon ‘Happy’ Bray — while Nick Levitt was another familiar name who was a partner with Tim at Hijack Productions.

“Hijack had built a complicated projection tower for the Eidophor,” remembers Lee. “I took my Murraypro video synthesiser with me, which was an add-on to an OB, and put my two robot cameras on the truss.” The show was rear projected behind the stage.

If the weight of the projectors provided image stability, the screens themselves were flimsy — and hardly designed for outdoor use and so the staging company soon evolved an aluminium truss frame.

It should be noted that Led Zep’s Knebworth show by no means marked the birth of big screen projection in the UK. The band had been using Eidophors as far back as 1975 (Earls Court) for their stage reinforcement.

Many other bands had also been using film loops prior to this — e.g., Pink Floyd projected on to their trademark circular screen from 1974 when they commissioned films to run alongside their Dark Side Of The Moon set — but this is not the province of this article.

For promoter Paul Loasby’s inaugural Monsters Of Rock at Donington Park in 1980, Tim Davies was contacted by Tasco’s Joe Browne, who had been booked to handle show production. Loasby wanted to buy into the Eidophor revolution when setting production standards and Link Electronics was on hand again to lend its support with the Eidophor.

“Neither of us thought this possible as bands couldn’t afford these machines, which were around £250,000 each,” Davies recalls.

Donington had been planned as a TV shoot and video projection, using broadcast TV truck with high quality gear — lighting all the camera levels, with vision mixer and appropriate personnel, remembers Davies, who knew little about broadcast video at that time. “It proved to be an expensive exercise.”

There were also the practicalities to consider. Resembling a slightly shorter version of an old red telephone box, they were mainly craned into position. “But the end result was wonderful once the light went down,” reports Davies.

By 1982, Hijack Productions and Tecta Staging had made way for Robot TV Network — formed by Davies and Lee initially to exploit the new (if short-lived) boom in video jukebox technology.

The operation sensed it needed a highly-qualified technician, and their focus returned to John Goodman who had artfully synched the three U-matic CRTs back in those days of Fetish TV.
   
BOYS ON FILM
So began a relationship which would survive for the next four years and take them via pioneering excursions into the New Romantic idiom with Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, and Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Live X-Travaganza at the Royal Albert Hall in 1986.

Legend has it that Bono was in the audience that night and what he saw provided the core inspiration for Zoo TV. U2 show designer Willie Williams, however, dismisses this as a ludicrous notion!

Meanwhile, Robot TV had returned to Donington in 1984, this time with AC/DC with whom the company was touring in Europe. Projecting a 40’ x 30’ image on to a craned-in 10m Harkness screen, they nearly tripped up a flight coming into East Midlands Airport.

“After a lot of phone calls from Air Traffic Control we lowered the projection screen assembly and placed the screen to the side of the stage,” says Davies.

“Two Eidophors were projected on to the same screen and we framed and focused it to make one picture. The people from Link Electronics were magnificent, as we not only got one standard power Eidophor from them but we also had a higher power (7000 lumens) projector flown in from Switzerland. The picture was superb.”

In the same year they fielded the first Mitsubishi DiamondVision in the UK for Elton John’s Summer of ’84 show at Wembley Stadium — possibly the first instance of a a daylight screen at a European rock concert.

It was certainly the first use of a three-tier Diamond Vision, with 17 tons of ironmongery split into three containers standing behind and above the stage (two sections already in situ at Twickenham for the rugby were shipped in).

By the early ’80s the New Romantic movement was taking over the concert stages, and Eidophors were still dominating the projection gantries (the GEs were neither sufficiently bright or sharp for Robot TV).

However, with the introduction of the Twin Light Valve Version (TLV) in 1985, the output was raised to around 3,000 lumens, and the later Multiple Light Valve (MLV) had taken this to 5000 lumens by 1986-87.

Davies: “The GEs certainly improved while we were doing a number of big screen shows — which was important because suddenly projection became more affordable and smaller — and therefore more tourable. But they still lacked the brightness of the Eidophors.”

Suddenly large format projection became a ‘must have’ for band management and record labels, and simple economics dictated that this would be GE. “They just wanted the big screen to literally make the band ‘bigger’.

The lighting community resented this incursion from the new breed of technicians they branded ‘vidiots’ but they were powerless to prevent video from going into overdrive during Duran Duran’s five sold-out shows at Wembley Arena in December 1983 (and the following year with Spandau Ballet at both the NEC and Wembley) — largely because Richard Lee again worked painstakingly with the artists rather than setting out to produce a broadcast show.

During the three weeks before the tour he would run through every song, making detailed notes, cuts, camera positions. “The cut had to be on the beat which we had not seen with other video reinforcement companies.”

Robot TV were supported by four- or five-camera trucks from Bowen Broadcast Hire (BBH). “Their vision mixer had non-additive mixing and the faders you could split and get both images up at full intensity.”

Using a frame store time base corrector as an FX generator they were able to treat and split the feeds, incorporating really tight shots of the artists for the first time.

“The power of one big screen — projected just outside the scope of the stage lighting — was immense,” recalls Davies. “We realised that the audience’s eyes were glued to the screen and we’d never seen this before. Depending on what we put on the screen we could affect the audience’s entire reaction to the show. For instance, we could cause girls to scream by putting a tight shot of Duran’s Nick Rhodes up at certain points.”

Using so many tight shots which were turned into video effects would not have meant anything on a TV screen at home, believes Davies. “This was not for a TV audience but for those who had the stage show live in front of them.”

This previously-unseen technique became a highly political issue within the band, and soon Duran’s shows had to be ‘cleared’ by their management. But it helped the band win the coveted Melody Maker Band of the Year award in 1983 — receiving a special citation for their creative video: “Their pioneering use of live video... brought their shows vividly to life”

With Spandau Ballet in 1984 they went a step further, adding a fourth camera and mimicking the band’s Parade album cover by having little cut-out soldiers emerging from the mouth of Steve Norman’s sax.

“We used rostrum cameras which were put on video and triggered from 1” studio tape in the OB truck, and the crowd went absolutely potty,” remembers Davies. “Combining live with pre-recorded FX could work exceptionally well.”

They started using the relatively new hotheads and devised a remote control post on a camera control, similar to operating a pedestal-mounted camera.
   
FLAUNTING THE LAB COAT
Dave Crump vividly remembers this period as breaking new ground in its use of fastidiously-produced home-made effects, using the technique known as non-additive mixing.

His interest in an industry with which he has become synonymous began in 16mm cine projection. After learning the ropes during his apprenticeship in the creative presentation hotbed of Covent Garden, the recognition of an emerging niche in the industry for large-format projection led to a job offer with Link Electronics in Hampshire.

By 1986 he would be working as a GE projectionist on that barrier-breaking Sigue Sigue Sputnik show. The culmination of a European tour designed to promote their debut album Flaunt It, saw the band interacting with live TV for the first time. Built around a heavy techno vibe, everyone in the video team wore a white lab coat.

This was also the year when everyone was wearing Cyrillic slogans on their T-shirts and SSS decided to take live Russian news feeds, which were back projected from the organ position on to multiple monitors; this included live satellite link to the Reykjavik summit, with Gorbachev and Reagan, as well as world championship boxing.

Robot TV was now using the new Fairlight CVI computer video processor from Syco (operated by Richard Lee’s wife).

Says Davies, anecdotally: “As the white coated technicians came onstage Dave Crump said urgently that the menu image from the Fairlight was showing up on the screen. And we said, ‘You’d better get used to it Dave — it’s what this show is about’.”

Needing to be creative to compensate for a shortened live set, Robot TV fielded a Kreon video wall, hotheads and Talarias. “It was only after Link Electronics bought a Talaria and Dave learned to operate it that I was able to get back to my basic idea of working with a band,” notes Lee.

Video artists, The Duvet Brothers (Rik Lander and Peter Boyd McLean), whose Live Multiscreen Scratch Show had worked with SSS, also lay claim to this show — having produced some play-in video art.

“But there was a bunch of people all throwing in ideas,” reports Davies. “It was a real mish-mash which is exactly what they wanted... degraded images in non-time based corrected stuff, with roll bars on the screen.”

EXIT THE ROBOT
Working with Sputnik was to be one of Robot TV’s final exploits. Why did the company die? Tim Davies believes that despite the acclaim they were receiving from creative quarters, artist managers were looking for the cheapest big screen offers, often from the US.

“We simply ran out of steam... and money. With hindsight we were a few years too early — later the creative aspects of live video were being taken seriously, with U2’s Zoo TV being a milestone in the coming-of-age of video at rock concerts. By this time we had both moved on to other things.”

For Davies this would lead to the formation of Robodevco with John Goodman and later XYLO, while Lee has been providing cricket test match coverage for the past 20 years, leaving his home in Portugal to work the summer cricket season.

FOOTNOTE
Although the remit of this article is early large scale projection, reference must be made to Barco’s original BarcoVision and BarcoData CRT projectors, which were starting to find their way into the ‘superdiscos’ around 1985, distributed by Cameron Communications, for whom Graham Burgess also worked.

A touring breakthrough for the company came when its Barco 5000 single lens LCD projector, rated at 2000 ANSI lumens, was used on Depeche Mode’s 1993 Devotional tour. Video support company PSL considered this to be the first stable LCD projector — easy to truck and it could be flown upside down.

Devotional featured two large screens and nine smaller ones, and with Peter Gabriel’s Secret World tour out the same year, PSL’s belief that Barco, who would follow this with the successful 8000 and 9000 Series, had made video reinforcement more economical and tour-friendly was firmly entrenched.
TPi

Photography by Barry Plummer, Robert Ellis, Mark Cunningham,
Peter Still/Redferns, James Cumpsty and courtesy of Tim Davies.