The story of how Vari-Lite was conceived is shrouded in romance, if not necessarily in mystery. The idea was not so much born out of a Showco lighting department focus group as the realisation by road crews that there had to be a better way than trucking so much tonnage of steel PAR can around the world.

    This was certainly the subject for debate when the company’s inner sanctum set out for a casual lunch at their favourite haunt in Dallas, a barbecue restaurant called Salih’s (later Solly’s).

    Under president Jack Calmes, the company had prospered, having spent the 1970s establishing itself as a major sound and lighting operation on the back of tours by acts of the calibre of Three Dog Night, Led Zeppelin, James Taylor, Wings and ZZ Top.

    But by the end of the decade a wave of UK companies was producing aluminium-spun PAR cans and 1kW dimmers, and the lighting rental division of Showco was becoming redundant. So under new CEO Rusty Brutsché it decided to descale its ‘total production’ operation (sub-contracting its lighting to Eric Pearce’s independently-run company, Showlights).

    And so, in September 1980, the Showco team set off to Salih’s to consider the position. With Brutsché was his partner, Jack Maxson, as well as long-time Showco audio engineer and console designer, Jim Bornhorst, lighting technician Tom Littrell (who became Vari-Lite’s PR manager), and Tom Walsh.

    Along with engineers Brooks Taylor and John Covington, this team had already begun working on a colour-changer for PAR 64 fixtures, reasoning that if you could hang lights and change their colour fewer lights would be required.

    The first attempt, in which Vari-Lite allegedly tried pneumatic air cylinders, semaphore mediums, fluids and dyes, proved futile. But by the start of the new decade the concept of an automated colour-changing light was becoming technically viable, due to two new technologies — dichroic-coated glass filters, which delivered richer and more saturated colours than gels; and metal halide lamps, which produced higher light output than the bulkier incandescent sources of equivalent wattage.

    Jim Bornhorst eagerly set to work, combining these new concepts into one package. Brooks Taylor and Tom Walsh, who had worked on lighting control projects for Showco in the past, were simultaneously developing a controller for this fixture while John Covington was looking into the analogue power supply. The feeling in the air was one of supreme optimism.

    But the defining moment at that lunch came when Jack Maxson issued the now immortal phrase: “two more motors and the light moves”. His rapt audience were immediately enervated by the idea of a colour-changing, programmable moving light.

    Just 12 weeks later, in December 1980, having obtained parts from catalogues, hobby shops and other available sources, Bornhorst, Walsh, Taylor and Covington had both the prototype for a moving light and a controller to run it. The VL Zero or VL0, as it was now known, was born.

    Showco’s favourite long-term clients included Genesis. The English public school prog outfit were forever on the edge of performance art experimentation, and constantly on the look-out for cutting-edge technology to take on their upcoming world tour to promote their next album, Abacab.

    A meeting was arranged that month between Brutsché and Bornhorst, the band members and their manager Tony Smith in the 500 year old barn (The Farm) in Chiddingfold, Surrey, where the band rehearsed and recorded.

    Before the meeting got underway, Alan Owen, the band’s long-serving LD, wanted a field test and a VL0 rig was set up alongside some amber PAR cans for a ‘shine off’.

    The luminaire was attached to a beam in the hayloft and a console was programmed to execute two simple, rudimentary cues.

    Genesis were so impressed that they placed an order on the spot and Tony Smith coined the company’s name, Vari-Lite, at the same time allegedly presenting the two Showco men with a large cheque to underwrite the development of the 55 luminaires they would acquire. [N.B. Vari-Lite is the company name while Vari*Lite is the brand name.]

    Band members Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks finished up with equal shares while Tony Smith became the single biggest shareholder in Vari-Lite. They remain partners in the company to this day.

    Excited though the band were, Bornhorst still had reservations. He sensed that refinements would be necessary since the turning mirror,
colour-changing technology would be impossible to duplicate, accurately, reliably and in the quantities the band were looking at.

    While the product returned to the drawing board, Walsh and Taylor worked hard to develop a playback-oriented cue-storing controller.

    The lights (bearing a Mk350 arc lamp with a reflector) were rehung and the possibility of all the lights ‘choreographed’ and moving in unison was realised.

SPANISH DÉBUT
The second part of the Vari-Lite legend was now about to be played out, for the arena that witnessed the very first manifestation of the Vari*Lite system was not a sports stadium but the Plaza de Toros, a bull ring in Barcelona, on September 25 1981 — the opening date of Genesis’ Abacab world tour.

    It was here that the 40 original Vari*Lite Series 100s — effectively VL1 prototypes, as the true VL1 was built for Genesis’ 1982 tour — plus a computerised control system, made their début. The other 15 heads were retained for back-up. Alan Owen was LD and Tom Littrell acted as the programmer/operator, with Taylor maintaining it.

    Here was all this technological innovation being trucked into an amphitheatre masquerading as a slaughterhouse for bulls. TPi editor-in-chief Mark Cunningham was in the audience at that opening gig and remembers the unforgettable sight as numerous robotic luminaires moved in unison under remote control, irrevocably changing the LD’s world and his palette of colours in a way that suggested that nothing would ever be the same again.

    The report from those in the packed coliseum were that smoke from the band’s fog machines had combined with the dust, kicked up by the fans, to create an incredible haze — and each time the lights moved the crowd’s reaction increased.

    So what exactly was the VL1? The answer is a spotlight, with pan, tilt, colour-changing, beam size and gobo-changing abilities. It was fan-cooled, although the fans and various motors were hardly silent-running.

    Board operator Tom Littrell vividly recalls: “We learned to love that noise as it meant we were getting paid that month. But the knowledge that noise would not be permissible in the musical theatre, opera and legitimate theatre led to the development of quieter products, like the VL5.”

    Littrell admitted that the system had been created as a response to the fact that some bands were touring with up to 1,000 lights, which were set up, focused, activated and torn down in one day. “The rock’n’roll workhorses would be PAR 64 cans, augmented with lekos and strip lights. We were simply looking for a way to get more bang from each light.”

    He added: “Vari-Lite Inc. and the companies that copied the concept changed the way rock, TV and theatre shows are designed and the way they look.”

    The VL1 luminaire essentially started the moving light industry. “While there were other moving lights prior to this time, Vari-Lite was the first company to take what was then current technology in electronics, optics, and colour filters and turn it into a practical, ‘tourable’ system.”

    Showco’s long history in concert touring and production, he believed, gave the developers a particularly good insight into what the system had to be to work properly in the real world.

    Newer models may drive better, quieter, and boast more features, but like a classic car, the original VL still has its place as a pioneer.

    Summing up, Littrell said: “I believe that Vari-Lite’s automated lighting was as important a development as the memory board and phase-control dimming in the advance of lighting. Artists didn’t change the way they write or perform because of Vari-Lite’s advances, but they had a huge impact on show lighting.”

ACROSS THE POND
More or less simultaneously, the Telescan Mk1 was being built by the French company Cameleon, who had set up in Montreuil in 1977. This addressable moving mirror system was shown at the Discom show in Paris in 1981. After the Mk1 was launched to an unsuspecting French market at that fair, it quickly established its place on key rock’n’roll tours (oddly Genesis themselves were later users).

    By the time the classic Telescan MkIII, with its 1200W HMI lamp, was released, Cameleon had the art pretty well defined, combining all the functions of addressable lighting with the versatility of analogue.

    Telescan became the forerunner of the touring scanner/moving mirror lights, extending the range up to the MkIV and MkV. But it may not have been the first. Over in the UK at the start of the decade other inventors were beavering away on similar projects.

    Peter Wynne-Willson had already designed the Pancan moving mirror system by 1980, forming Pancan Ltd the following year to manufacture and market the eponymous remote-controlled single mirror system. This sold by the thousand worldwide, and spawned an entire industry of moving mirror automated lighting.

    Pancan was a computerised system which became the first device to move (and store positions) of PAR 64 lamps, inexpensively and accurately, without the aggravation of a motorised yoke system.         Compatible with most PAR cans and 1kW profile spots it provided the versatility of the PAR 36 pinspot but with the intensity of the of the full 1,000W.

    Pancan was operated from a joystick control, sited by the main lighting desk, with a mirror attachment that would fit to the front of most lanterns. It was ideal for applications where manual and accurate repositioning of lanterns was a problem.

    The initial system (which later evolved considerably) comprised a hand-held controller with joystick which could power up to two mirror attachments simultaneously. Via a splitter block, up to a maximum of eight lantern heads could be attached, all slaved from the joystick and moving in phase. In addition to manual operation from the joystick, the system could be controlled automatically.

    This was followed by Autoscan, made by Birmingham-based Cause & Effects (a company that featured a young Steve Warren). The company had devised the revolutionary idea of installing a Par can into a moving XY servo-controlled fibreglass yoke — a computerised PAR 64 moving light memory system using its own design protocol and console.

    The power pack supplied power to two motors — one motor controlling pan, the other tilt — housed within the motorised yoke of the all-in-one fitting. The lantern was suspended in the yoke, and moved by a combination of the panning and the tilting action (lanterns could be added to the controller in multiples of eight).

    Around the same time Charlie Payton was developing a moving PAR can system with Belden cables — a ‘wire and string’ moving light system which eventually developed into Strand’s PALS.

    Cerebrum Lighting distributed both Pancan and Autoscan, selling the first Autoscan to a Gary Numan tour. By the time the second Autoscan package was supplied to Peter Stringfellow, during his audacious transfiguration of the Talk Of The Town into The Hippodrome, Cause & Effects was falling into demise.

    While Autoscan was short-lived, the evolution of Pancan continued. At the Light & Sound Show in 1984, Cerebrum showed the new Pancan micro-computer system. Alongside this was the System 2 Colour, which allowed the control of both colour and beam direction on up to 16 heads.

    Pancans enjoyed their glory at the new Camden Palace in 1981 — its first and highest profile outing. But by the time the Italians soon took over the moving mirror business with products like Coemar’s Robot, Pancan’s days were numbered.

    By then, as Peter Wynne-Willson admits, developing the complex and revolutionary stepper motor system had exhausted their reserves.

    In an era when irreverential soubriquets such as ‘nodding buckets’ began to seep into the live industry’s vocabulary, demand for articulated kinetic lighting had entered a new phase and the march forward quickly gathered pace.
TPi