For the last sixteen years, Rob has been writing about the products that have shaped the entertainment industry - lighting, sound and more - in his monthly Classic Gear column for LSi magazine.
This year, Classic Gear is jumping off the page and into real life with Classic Gear Live, part of the PLASA Show which takes place this weekend (Sun 3-Tues 5 Sept) at Kensington Olympia in London.
The stand will feature some remarkable products, loosely themed around big anniversaries. There will be the pioneering, still remarkable Vari-Lite Artisan console and VL2 and VL4 moving lights from the mid-1980s. The first ever Cadac mixing console made for theatre from 1983. CCT’s Silhouette spotlights, which became the standard spotlights for a generation from 1973 onwards. Strand’s MMS memory console, launched in 1973, and their Patt 263 and Patt 264 spotlights (from 1963) and the lantern that is perhaps the ‘classic of classics’, the Patt 23, from 1953.
Alongside this will be audio equipment from some of the defining artists of the 1960s and 1970s, including th PA system used on Pink Floyd’s 1973 Dark Side of the Moon tour.
And because equipment is nothing without people, there will also be chances to meet and talk to the people who designed, made, sold, used or now preserve these remarkable products, including lighting designer and programmer Andrew Voller re-united with an Artisan console for the first time in twenty years, Dik Welland talking about looking after the Vari-Lite products over the years, Alan Luxford and John Wright talking about Strand’s products and history, Don Hindle talking about CCT Lighting and its Silhouette range, Mike Walker talking about the designing the sound for shows using Cadac mixing desks, plus Jon Primrose from the Theatrecrafts website, Paul Johnson from the Historic Stage Lighting Collective and Chris Hewitt from CH Vintage Audio.
It promises to be quite an event, quite a chance to hear the stories, to reminisce, to discover, or re-discover according to your age, these products whose influence is still felt today.