MDNA Tour stage designer has died

[Msig]

British architect Mark Fisher, who designed some of the most spectacular tour stages ever seen, including the stage for the MDNA Tour, has died at the age of 66, following a long illness.

Apart from the MDNA Tour stage, he designed the stages for the following tours:

• Pink Floyd's The Wall (1980-1981) and Division Bell (1994) tours
  
• Janet Jackson's All For You Tour (2001)
  
• Mylène Farmers 13-show residency at Bercy (2006)
  
• The Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle (1989-1990), Voodoo Lounge (1994-1995), Bridges to Babylon (1997-1998) and A Bigger Bang (2005-2007) tours
  
• Genesis' Turn It On Again: The Tour (2007)
  
• Muse's shows at Wembley during their Black Holes & Revelations Tour (2007)
  
• Tina Turner's 50th anniversary tour (2008-2009)
  
• Metallica's World Magnetic Tour (2008-2010)
  
• AC/DC'sBlack Ice World Tour (2008-2010)
  
• U2's ZooTV (1992-1993), PopMart (1997-1998) and 360° (2009-2011) tours
  
• Laura Pausini's Inedito World Tour (2011-2013)
  
• Lady Gaga's Born This Way Ball (2012-2013)
  
• Elton John's Million Dollar Pian show (2011-present)
  
• Robbie Williams' Take The Crown Tour (2013)
  

May he rest in peace

[joe]

Shit. Thumbs up to him for creating the best stage that Madonna ever had.

Rest in peace

[Kim]

Sad news but his stadium set-up for Madonna was below par. Also it was what was ON the (rather rudimentary) stage that mattered and made it great. The lighting design, the screens etc designed by others.

The fact his last work was that Gaga monstrosity is probably the saddest thing of all.

[ULIZOS]

Sad news but his stadium set-up for Madonna was below par. Also it was what was ON the (rather rudimentary) stage that mattered and made it great. The lighting design, the screens etc designed by others.

The fact his last work was that Gaga monstrosity is probably the saddest thing of all.

Geez, he died. Get over it.

[Kim]

Geez NEITHER of us knew him. Nothing to get over.

[Barney]

He would've taken ideas and make them come true. Obviously a very clever man. Its so sad when anybody dies.

[Guest Rachelle of London]

Ohhhh noooo RIP

[ryan]

He designed one of her all time best stages, RIP.

[VogueMusic]

So sad. He designed incredible stages. Having studied a little stage design, I referenced his work a lot. Regardless of the stage, even with Madonna's being fairly minimalistic and focused on video screens...it's not an easy job to lay it all out and plan how it will work physically and visually.

Amazing artist/designer. Saw quite a few tours with his stage designs too. All amazing.

RIP.

[VogueMusic]

Sad news but his stadium set-up for Madonna was below par. Also it was what was ON the (rather rudimentary) stage that mattered and made it great. The lighting design, the screens etc designed by others.

The fact his last work was that Gaga monstrosity is probably the saddest thing of all.

What was wrong with the stadium set-up?

[Barney]

What was wrong with the stadium set-up?

I know! also Gaga got for what she asked for. There's no need to knock down a guy the day he died. Seriously??? Talk about LOW.

[Confessions92]

Talk about LOW.

No kidding!

His work on Mylene Farmer's shows are incredible - especially her residency at Bercy. All of his designs are on his website www.stufish.com pretty amazing to look at them all!

[Kim]

I know! also Gaga got for what she asked for. There's no need to knock down a guy the day he died. Seriously??? Talk about LOW.

Go clutch your pearls somewhere else. This is a Madonna discussion board. Yes it is sad for his family and people who knew him that this guy who has an extremely tenuous (if that) link to Madonna has passsed away.

Not so sure how he would have felt about YOU and all the rest of them who were taking the complete piss out of Gaga's stage (oh, the foul terrible things you were all saying!!!!) and laughing at her when she used the same design as Madonna's on some dates. Oops. turns out is was the same person behind both all the time all the time.

What was wrong with the stadium set-up?

Madonna having those long side screens as a part of the stage (that she decided not to even use properly) set so far forward served to more or less HIDE the back screens (and the core visuals of the show) from ppl in about the first third of side seating in stadiums, ironically the most expensive seats.This was a common complaint at the stadium shows and imo a design fault.

[VogueMusic]

Madonna having those long side screens as a part of the stage (that she decided not to even use properly) set so far forward served to more or less HIDE the back screens (and the core visuals of the show) from ppl in about the first third of side seating in stadiums, ironically the most expensive seats.This was a common complaint at the stadium shows and imo a design fault.

Hmmm, ok. I am wondering if that was really his doing, though. It may have been, but If I remember right, the custom proscenium that was built for the stadium-only shows may have been built and designed by a different company. Again, I'm not sure, but when I was looking at the articles/videos of the design/construction of the MDNA stage, it sounded like it was a different company that designed and built the proscenium. The stage that Mark Fisher designed is essentially built inside that.

Again, he may have designed it, but I'd swear it was some other company that did...

As for that issue, I noticed that seems to happen with a lot of stadium setups though. I've seen side views from other stadium concerts, and usually the back part of the stage (where the screens often are), tend to usually get obscured anyway. Not excusing the MDNA tour issue, just that it seems to be an issue that happens in many typical stadium setups.

[Confessions92]

In stadiums you need the giant side screens, she is an ant from the back of the venue and having arena sized screens isn't doing anybody any favours. Most of her shows are meant to be seen in arenas anyway, most of the theatrics get lost in a stadium setting.

[Guest bluejean]

Geez NEITHER of us knew him. Nothing to get over.

This is a public forum. How do you know his family or friends won't find this thread in a google search?

[Kim]

Hmmm, ok. I am wondering if that was really his doing, though. It may have been, but If I remember right, the custom proscenium that was built for the stadium-only shows may have been built and designed by a different company. Again, I'm not sure, but when I was looking at the articles/videos of the design/construction of the MDNA stage, it sounded like it was a different company that designed and built the proscenium. The stage that Mark Fisher designed is essentially built inside that.

Again, he may have designed it, but I'd swear it was some other company that did...

As for that issue, I noticed that seems to happen with a lot of stadium setups though. I've seen side views from other stadium concerts, and usually the back part of the stage (where the screens often are), tend to usually get obscured anyway. Not excusing the MDNA tour issue, just that it seems to be an issue that happens in many typical stadium setups.

If that's the case then I take it back obviously. But if he didn't do that, or the screens or the lighting rigs, then I don't really see how this thread can be used to describe it as her best stage ever by some.

I've very rarely seen those screens actually attached to the "roof" and core of the stage before. They're usually set further back and spaced further apart.

[Kim]

In stadiums you need the giant side screens, she is an ant from the back of the venue and having arena sized screens isn't doing anybody any favours. Most of her shows are meant to be seen in arenas anyway, most of the theatrics get lost in a stadium setting.

Didn't say otherwise. The screen were in fact too small, especially as Madonna decided not to use them fully horizontally.

[Kim]

This is a public forum. How do you know his family or friends won't find this thread in a google search?

This a members only forum that guests cant access. Do these threads show up on google? TBQH, What I wrote isn't that bad...compared to some of the stuff said about this guys work on other threads.

[Mensch]

It was a miraculous stage. Gorgeous design and RIP but yes, there were flaws and we can still be opinionated about it.

[joe]

Hmmm, ok. I am wondering if that was really his doing, though. It may have been, but If I remember right, the custom proscenium that was built for the stadium-only shows may have been built and designed by a different company. Again, I'm not sure, but when I was looking at the articles/videos of the design/construction of the MDNA stage, it sounded like it was a different company that designed and built the proscenium. The stage that Mark Fisher designed is essentially built inside that.

Again, he may have designed it, but I'd swear it was some other company that did...

As for that issue, I noticed that seems to happen with a lot of stadium setups though. I've seen side views from other stadium concerts, and usually the back part of the stage (where the screens often are), tend to usually get obscured anyway. Not excusing the MDNA tour issue, just that it seems to be an issue that happens in many typical stadium setups.

It was Stageco that built the custom roof structure, whether he worked for them I don't know but I loved both the roof and the actual stage. She used the full screen vertically at Hyde Park, but did she not at other shows?

[Kim]

Oh I said horizontal I meant vertical. She only used the full height of the screens during IDGA and TUTR iirc.

[Kim]

Hmmm, ok. I am wondering if that was really his doing, though. It may have been, but If I remember right, the custom proscenium that was built for the stadium-only shows may have been built and designed by a different company. Again, I'm not sure, but when I was looking at the articles/videos of the design/construction of the MDNA stage, it sounded like it was a different company that designed and built the proscenium. The stage that Mark Fisher designed is essentially built inside that.

Again, he may have designed it, but I'd swear it was some other company that did...

As for that issue, I noticed that seems to happen with a lot of stadium setups though. I've seen side views from other stadium concerts, and usually the back part of the stage (where the screens often are), tend to usually get obscured anyway. Not excusing the MDNA tour issue, just that it seems to be an issue that happens in many typical stadium setups.

I didn't have time to read this properly this morning. Some good info thanks I'd continue discussing it but while the usual wailing vocal minority (who've just about succeeded in their quest to kill the forum off for good) are prowling around, I won't bother.

[ULIZOS]

WTF is your problem?

[Kim]

^ Either leave your condolences or contribute to the stage discussion. Anything else to say, say it elsewhere.

[Tonina]

R.i.p.

[Guest Rachelle of London]

Great legacy

Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher, who has died aged 66, was an acclaimed creator of live rock shows, designing spectacular, complex and often startling stage sets for the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, a multimedia show to inaugurate the Millennium Dome in 1999, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Mark Fisher Photo: GAVIN SMITH

6:53PM BST 26 Jun 2013

As a rock tour design specialist, Fisher swept away the clichéd pyrotechnics achieved by a few lasers and buckets of dry ice. A typically dazzling Fisher extravaganza for Pink Floyd, for example, would feature an almost life-size fibreglass dive bomber zooming over the crowd during the first number and exploding on the stage in a ball of flame. Another staple were 30ft-high inflatables operated by wires from the stadium roof.

Mark Fisher's set for Pink Floyd's 'the Wall' concert in Berlin, 1991

For “Pop Mart”, U2’s epic world tour launched in Las Vegas in front of 40,000 fans in 1997, he designed the kind of preposterous spectacle that defines the desert gambling city. The set was dominated by a 100ft golden arch supporting the group’s enormous PA rig. Stage-right was a cocktail stick of equally monstrous proportions, on the tip of which sat an illuminated olive, 12ft in circumference. The world’s largest video screen, 150ft wide and 50ft high, served as a backdrop, conjuring images of consumer culture by means of one million separate LED fittings.

But the biggest surprise was a rotating mirror-ball lemon, 35ft in diameter, that shimmered out along a track into the audience and opened to reveal the group. “It’s the carnival, the circus,” Fisher explained. “The grail is to give the audience something spectacular it really didn’t expect.”

Fisher’s talents were not confined to rock venues. For the Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, he could conjure a forest of 80ft trees made out of corrugated steel, or a huge, sinister “wheel of death” torture machine. Back in London he also designed the sets for the West End stage production of the Queen tribute musical We Will Rock You.

Whatever the gig, Fisher never stinted on his spectaculars. One of his shows might consume 3,000 amps of power, running through almost 20 miles of cable. As well as his signature inflatables, there might be up to 100 moving lights, some zipping overhead like UFOs on racks in the roof, all at the fingertips of a video controller seated at a bank of computers. It would take three hard drives of two terabytes just to deliver the visuals, beamed in high-definition from more than 20 projectors.

A graduate of the avant-garde Architectural Association, Fisher eschewed a conventional design career when he left college in the early 1970s, working instead on the set design for the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar. His break came when he was asked to make an inflatable menagerie for Pink Floyd’s “Animals” tour of 1977, which confirmed the band as the masters of stadium rock.

But it was Fisher’s design for the ex-Floyd member Roger Waters’s one-off concert in Berlin in 1990 that catapulted him to fame. Waters gave a performance of the group’s 1979 album The Wall at the site of the Berlin Wall in the Potsdamer Platz. To mark the occasion, Fisher (with his then partner, Jonathan Park) built the largest set in the world from 2,500 styrofoam bricks stretching 550ft across what had been No-man’s-land.

The concert featured the demolition of a monumental 60ft wall by a 100ft helium-filled inflatable pig and cost $16 million. “All in all it’s just another hole in the wall” assailed the eardrums of 200,000 watching fans as Fisher blew up his set. After the show he recycled the styrofoam bricks as cavity wall insulation.

Fisher acknowledged learning much about stagecraft from that gig. “It’s to do with having a series of big visual spectacles that, taken sequentially, make up a narrative,” he explained. Perhaps the most successful application of his formula was in the case of the Rolling Stones, all of whose touring concerts he designed after 1989, lacing them with such startling surprises as an 80ft fire-spitting cobra and a giant inflatable pastiche of Elvis’s mantelpiece.

For the central arena of the Millennium Dome at Greenwich in 1999, Fisher had at his disposal an area the size of Trafalgar Square, high enough to accommodate Nelson’s Column. Attracted by something so huge spatially but physically ethereal he devised a 20-minute show in which he completely filled the space with constructions of lightweight materials.

Fisher worked with the musician Peter Gabriel and the choreographer Micha Bergese, Mick Jagger’s one-time personal dance trainer, to create a show in which aerial performers worked at heights many times greater than any usually encountered by circus acrobats, inviting comparisons with the traditional Big Top, but on an altogether more spectacular scale.

Until the 1990s, rock concert sets were built entirely from scaffolding, requiring gangs of roadies hired at every venue. By the end of the century almost every set was assembled from a kit of prefabricated parts rented from specialist suppliers, halving the requirement for casual labour. In the case of U2’s “Pop Mart”, three sets of the giant jigsaw leapfrogged the concert venues in 11 trucks, each crewed by its own 12-man team which built it in 36 hours with the help of a few casual workers. The elements Fisher conceived and custom-built, like the video screen, would arrive at the stadium to be assembled on the day of the concert.

He recognised that technology had revolutionised the live music experience, and that fans spent much more on tickets than they had in the past. A band like Pink Floyd, for example, might play 110 gigs in venues each holding around 20,000 people. With the average cost of a ticket set at £75, production and touring costs of £37 million were far outstripped by potential ticket sales of £165 million.

“It’s all about economics,” Fisher explained. “For the sums to add up on a major tour, an artist needs to play three to four concerts a week, and to keep the price of the set below $1 million per gig. We spent $4 million on the specials for 'Pop Mart’ and the expenses added up to between $50 and $60 million.”

With the Rolling Stones, Fisher worked most closely with drummer Charlie Watts — himself a former graphic designer — as well as with Mick Jagger, who considered set design crucial to how the Stones maintained their provocative, contemporary edge. It was not always an easy relationship: for the band’s “Bridges To Babylon” tour in 1997, for example, Fisher proposed a telescopic bridge linking two parts of the set, only for Keith Richards to respond: “What the f*** do we want that for?” But when Fisher returned 10 months later with an animation illustrating the same idea, Richards said: “That’s fantastic; we gotta have one of those.”

With the bespectacled look of a mad professor, Fisher admitted to thinking of himself a rock star manqué but never took his work too seriously. After all, he would joke, rock set design is no more than “the invention of the unnecessary by the unemployable”.

The son of a schoolteacher, Mark Eliott Fisher was born on April 20 1947 in Warwickshire. After Pocklington School in Yorkshire, he graduated from the Architectural Association in London in 1971.

He moved swiftly into showbusiness, reviving an architectural tradition dating back to the 18th century, when Inigo Jones and John Nash designed theatrical sets. “In Britain, modern architects became involved in the seedy world of office blocks,” he explained, “while the entertainment business ran showbiz. They took away all the fun from architects. That’s why I moved back.”

In 1984 he established the Fisher Park Partnership with Jonathan Park. The partnership was dissolved 10 years later when Fisher established Stufish, the Mark Fisher Studio.

Although best known as a rock venue designer, Fisher also designed the Queen Victoria Memorial stage at Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s diamond jubilee in 2012; the opening ceremony for the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou; and the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. He was an executive producer for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic opening and closing ceremonies.

Fisher’s other rock tour commissions included Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” (1985), George Michael’s “Faith” (1988), Jean Michel Jarre’s “Concerts In China” (1981) and U2’s “ZooTV” (1992-93). His more recent shows included “The Immortal Michael Jackson” for Cirque du Soleil and Elton John’s “Million Dollar Piano” at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. In 2012 he designed Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way Ball” and Madonna’s “MDNA” tour.

For his work on the Millennium celebrations Fisher was appointed OBE in 2000. In 2002 he was appointed MVO for his contribution to the Queen’s golden jubilee celebrations.

His wife, Cristina Garcia, survives him.

[lasky]

[Barney]

Oh lord we will end up with Janets power point in 2 years.

[VogueMusic]

Oh lord we will end up with Janets power point in 2 years.

Or you mean J.LO's powerpoint...or Mariah's powerpoint...or Bieber's powerpoint. LOL!!! They all use cheap video except for Madonna (and maybe Britney).

I wouldn't worry. The video is shot by independent directors and companies (like Moment Factory and Veneno). I don't think M's visual quality will change.

As for her stages (and the stages of every other huge act), who knows. The industry lost their 'go to' guy. I'm sure Mark Fisher had a team under him that will carry on his style/work.