Welcome back to Queen The Greatest – Live.
This week we take a look at one of the most visually exciting aspects of any Queen show
and discover the importance of Lighting.
From the very outset, Queen didn’t just want to sound amazing,
but insisted the look of their shows was every bit as spectacular.
For that to happen, the impact of the lighting could not be underestimated…
For that two and a half hours that we're on stage,
we are in complete control of the environment,
that means the sound, the lights, the temperature, everything.
How much smoke there is in the air, all that sort of stuff.
So the lights are a big part of it,
as are the actual physical pieces of the stage production
and the lights are part of that.”
“So we've always thought the lights are not just objects to illuminate,
they’re objects in themselves and they're part of the environment.
And that's a kind of rock and roll thing, I think.
I think we imbibed that from seeing stuff
that we enjoyed when we were kids.”
“Oh, yeah. I mean a visual spectacular
like, for instance, Pink Floyd with wonderful visual spectacular
and they don't even move.
So it's so important, the visual side.
And we were always very involved.
We had a big thing in our heads
and Freddie, Brian and myself especially.
There were so many acts going around
that had hundreds of lights, all different colours,
and it just just made white.”
“So we, we had this idea of just having
red, green, red, green and white.
And it was very effective.
I think, you know, if you want red light,
you want all the lights to be red,
or if you want white light if you can make them all white
it's really incredible.
But soon as you start mixing them,
you start, you get grey, you know,
and just things like that.
We had very strong ideas about lighting.”
Very quickly Queen established themselves as masters of lighting,
which led to some incredibly innovative
and iconic lighting rigs.
We used to do lots of things. We had the first moving light show,
and that was our crown, we called it a Crown.
It was a big lighting, circular lighting rig with all the lights. Right.
And it used to rise and nobody had ever done that before.”
“I suppose the one that comes to mind is the pizza oven,
because we were just getting more and more and more lights.
But in those days they were hot,
they were incandescent, all of them, they were all tungsten.
And we actually filled the whole of the top of the stage with lights.
It was solid lights and it moved like this.”
“And when it came down, it was pretty much like a pizza oven.
And Rog used to get frightened.
There's smoke coming off his stool when he went off for the encore
um, I don't quite how we survived that.
These days lights are different. They're LEDs, and they don't give you heat.
They just give you light.”
“You can still get that effect,
and we actually still use some tungsten on stage, just to get certain effects,
because there's nothing quite like it.
It is hot, steamy and real,
but yeah the pizza oven was a great, great stage to work on.”
“And sometimes the most effective light is one single
powerful spotlight on a on the performer,
you know, to focus the entire arena,
whatever it is, theatre, on that performer.”
“Ever since the days of variety, you know,
I think they've known that, since they had the carbon arc lights in, you know,
the London Palladium and they had the big spotlight at the back.
You know.”
“And then we had the dancing Bic razorblades.
We used to call them bic razors.
There was there was a sort of bank of lights suspended.
They used to move all and they had a spotlight operator under them.
And there was seven of those that used to sort of dance all over the stage,
and that was really ground-breaking at the time.
And much copied since.”
“We also had a different set up where we had lights in pods,
and in each pod there was a man running it
and operating it so you could actually interact with these pods.
And there's some footage of me doing the guitar solo
and playing to the pod and sort of moving it.
It would sort of interact with me
and talk to me when I'm playing. “
“That was a lot of fun.
Michael Jackson saw that and said, I want that. And he did.”