Designer was rock ’n’ roll spectacle specialist
MARK F ISHER ( 1947 – 201 3)
Mark Fisher, who died aged 66, was a 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 London’s Millennium Dome in 1999, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
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 nine-metre high inflatables operated by wires from the stadium roof.
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 30-metre 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, 3.5 metres in circumference. The world’s largest video screen, 45 metres wide and 15 metres high, served as a backdrop, conjuring images of consumer culture with one million separate LED fittings.
But the biggest surprise was a rotating mirror-ball lemon, 10.5 metres in diameter, that shimmered out along a track into the audience and opened to reveal the group. “It’s the carnival, the circus,” Fisher said. “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 25-metre 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.
Fisher recognized that technology had revolutionized the live music experience, and that fans spent much more on tickets. 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 $150, production and touring costs of $80 million were far outstripped by potential ticket sales of $320 million.
“It’s all about economics,” Fisher explained.