Lighting rigs

The Crown rig was more impressive at Earls Court than the version used on The News Of The World Tour.

The Magic Tour rig was huge but somehow had something missing. Certainly on the bigger stage used at Wembley and Knebworth the opposite was true, it was spread out to far to have the impact it was designed for.

Hot Space was ok.

The Game Rig provided some great set pieces due to it’s mobility, the the show intro was essentially the same as The Jazz/ Crazy Tour.

The Works Tour. The visual impact was huge, as was the rig and back drop.

The Jazz Tour intro was worth the entrance fee alone. What was basically 10 58 ft wide trusses with blocks of colour was a simple layout, but the choice of lighting patterns that were possible with it were huge. At the time no one had toured with a rig like it.

Budapest wasn't a small venue, it was an open air sports stadium.

The reason the lighting looked good was because the whole of that show took place in darkness, as did Paris. The indoor shows such as Leiden were just that, indoor so had the advantage of darkness.

Apart from the PA wings and roof structure, the actual stage platform used on The Magic toucr was a standard 60x40 stage. That is what the stage set and lighting were designed for. Wembley and Knebworth used a much bigger stage, much bigger than the lighting was designed for, that combined with a day light start time it would never look as Impressive as the other shows.

You can actually trace the colour affect of Queen's lighting designs all the way back to The Sheer Heart Attack tour.

The rigs have always been based around blocks of colour, the idea being to give a vivid colour wash to the stage, then pick out band members with white or coloured spots against the colour wash. There have been some exceptions to the rule where a particular song or musical passage may have used flashes of stabbing colour.

in 1974 the lights were hung in groups of two, each group being a colour repeated in the whole rig. A different colour appearing in the vertical hang but repeating across the stage.

The 76 rig used the same idea but on a bigger scale.

The 77/78 Crown used the same colour idea but hung the lights in rows on trusses, again the result was a strong vivid wash.

By The Jazz tour the blocks of colour were much more obvious and the rig had a huge impact. Green, Red and white were the colours most used so these were the one used in the main rig. The down stage truss provided blues and some pink.

All the rigs after the Jazz tour were variations of that big block format and the Jazz tour established that as a Queen live trade mark. It reached its zenith with The Works tour, size and impact wise.

For some reason, A Kind Of Magic used a big rig, in the number of lights but lost the impact of those huge banks of colour. The rig over used blues but also had a lot of small numbers of lamps dedicated to certain colours. The result was a rig that, colour wise, no longer had that Queen look. The rig wouldn't have looked out of place with AC/DC or Van Halen at the time.

The Q+PR tours used lighting that had no visual conection to classic Queen. However the Q+AL rigs have, most of the time, certainly echoed the 70's and 80's rigs Queen were famous for.

^ Love it but they could've at least got the number of 'lights' correct - 8 x 10 for the US/Japan leg.

Here is a collection of interesting pages
about their various lighting rigs from the SHA tour in 1974 up to the second QPR tour in 2008.

www.queenconcerts.com/lighting-rigs.html

To look at, I really like the Pizza Oven. That might largely be down to me being hooked on live footage from that era at the mo.

I’ve always loved the particular teal green in the video of the November ’74 Rainbow show, though I’m not sure if that comes from the lights themselves or how the cameras captured them.

I’d presume the photos on that site have been adjusted to best show the lighting rig itself, whereas the concert video is exposed/graded to show off the band.

Other than that, it’s analogue 480i NTSC video, murkiness is expected. Also, I understand it was only shot to appear on the venue’s jumbotron screens as opposed being for broadcast. Plus, we mostly only have a bootleg copy.

It’s honestly amazing it looks as good as it does, due in no small part to the talented people on this forum who’ve worked to get the best out of it.