An Interview with Jonathan Park
Part 1

Jonathan:

Was it that long ago? Yes, I did.

REG:

Why did you become an mechanical engineer, why did mechanical engineering interest you?

Jonathan:

Well actually I became a structural engineer. But when I was growing up... during the post war years, for some reason I was always fascinated by trains and boats and planes. Because they were the sort of... if you want... the modern future thing. But in my schooling I was also fascinated by mathematics. And math was the thing that got into my life at that particular time.

I used to ride bicycles and take them apart. So there was the small scale of mechanical engineering. But the philosophical endeavor of mathematics and actually fighting to get the solutions was something I found was a challenge and the thing that went along with being an engineer I guess. You have to be able to do math to be an engineer. But I was originally going to become an aeronautical engineer. But my step father was an architect. And I thought... well I don't really want to be hidden away in a back room designing airplane engines and wings and things. I would rather be doing something more outward, you know that could express something that you could see and feel and so forth. So that's when I became interested in architecture.

As you grow up, you get all these influences around you, and they can have a marked affect on you. And you might slough them off and move on. Anyway... that's how I started. Through mathematics and through trains and boats and planes .. and bicycles.

You see one of my hero's at the time would be Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He was the great Victorian engineer of railways and bridges, and the great eastern line, which was a huge construct. He was a very famous engineer, responsible for many of the railways... the great western railways, and bridges that are still there today. And he was in the forefront of engineering to make structures that make a difference. And in those days, architecture as we know it in modern era had not been invented. It was about making... you know, buildings that were just houses and so forth, and had great designers, but he was a greater... artificer.

And so these early influences gave me a desire to express myself. Sort of to express completeness. To have made a change that makes a difference, in what ever small way. You know, I'm sitting here in this house now, and for a number of years, for personal reasons, the extension (to the house) is sitting there half finished. But it is a personal thing. Something to do with my personal life. But I will finish it, because I didn't set off to do it without finishing it. It just has to stand there in suspended animation, with its steel beams hard against the sky, etched against the sky. But eventually those steel beams will get filled in.

REG:

It's one of those things that you can always come back to?

Jonathan:

Well I never like to come back to things. One of the reasons, one of the things about rather suddenly becoming involved in the rock and roll world, 25 years ago or slightly more, was that it was more... there was more instant gratification in it. There was less... messing about before you actually got the thing on the road. You were creating great edifices but the gestation time of them was short... I always said that the gestation time for a rock and roll project was about the same length time as a baby takes to come, from the first lovemaking to the birth.

And having got involved in major rock and roll projects, they seemed to take about that length of time to come about. Whereas the first six months... you didn't really notice what was going on, but there were lots of things happening, from the initial sort of meeting... meeting and mating. And then the last three months there was very urgent building and things grew enormously fast. And then there was the... you know... rehearsals for the birth. (Laughter) And then it happened.

And so rock and roll projects seem to be... in the end... three months long. And when I look back on them I'm always absolutely astonished at how much we could get done in three months.

REG:

And of course buildings can take many years sometimes.

Jonathan:

Yes. Well the gestation period for architecture... you might spend... you know the normal gestation... nine months just thinking about it or talking about thinking about it. I mean, both the architectural projects I'm working on now... one of them has been on the go for a year. And it's sitting here and it's been with the planning dept. of County Clare (Ireland) for the best part of four months while they think about it. And the one I'm doing in London, I've been working on that one now for about 6 months. And the planners are quicker. It initially wouldn't be released for building or further development until the end of this year. So that will be 9 months before I can get around to doing the actual working drawings. Then there will be another 9 months getting it built. That's quite quick for a big project.

But the projects are also... I mean I don't work as a straight main-line architect. My projects are got through various contacts with people who wanted a creative approach to what they were doing, but didn't want to employ an architects office.. they wanted more involvement with the process. They didn't want to hand it over to an architects office.

REG:

And that's what you do with rock and roll as well?

Jonathan:

Yes. As I always say... rock and roll has no directors in it, which is different than the theater. So when you do a theatrical set or scenario, then you're the designer, and obviously important. But the designer works through the director. And as the designer, you work with the director. But in rock and roll you work directly with the star... with the band. So you're in a one to one relationship with the creative force. And also the people who are going to perform on your stage set. And that one to one relationship has always been really important. In my own experience the stage shows that have been least successful have been the ones where there hasn't been a close relationship with the performer... you know because management or agents have put themselves in between. For me the most important conceptual thing to bring about to creation is the story. The story of what the show is about, or the story that is behind the ideas, or the story that's in the creators mind is the most important thing for me to work with. And even though the story may not be particularly evident in the stage show, that is not really the point. The point about the story is to enable me to have a construct with which to work, to make the setting, the effects and the exposition work.

REG:

Well it's perfect that you've been working with Pink Floyd and Roger Waters then because he always has some sort of concept and story.

Jonathan:

Yes, it's no accident that my relationship with Roger has been for the last 25 years. Because to a great extent, although I did lots of things before, and I've done lots of things since, he and his influence, and his creative impulse was a driving force... he was my mentor. Because he had such strong visions of what he wanted to do. And when those were expressed it was possible to interpret them and create them sometimes absolutely literally... sometimes once or twice removed I mean more abstract.

REG:

Not being in the rock and roll world myself, I have no idea how rock bands think up a stage show or pick a design before they begin a tour. Whether they always think in terms of concept or whether or not it will have something to do with their last album?

Jonathan:

Well there are stage sets which are... just to put it briefly... constructs for the band to run around on, for effects to take place and lots of lighting to happen. But most of the stage sets I've been working on have been telling a story or creating a visual environment that enhances the music of the show and gives it a bigger feel.

This started with Pink Floyd in 1976 and 1977 when I worked with Mark Fisher. That was the beginning of a long relationship... a long partnership between Mark and myself that lasted for 18 years.

REG:

In 1969 you did structures tutoring at London's Architectural Association. What is the difference between engineering and architecture, how do they relate, and how are they necessary to one another?

Jonathan:

Well I would suppose that you could say that architecture is the creative dreaming of a building and engineering is the practical application to get it built. And it's sort of similar to set designing. Where the architect has the songs and visions, you know like Roger, and I'm coming along as the engineer creating the sets and effects, which are the practical application of the songs and visions.

REG:

So you worked with both design, in architecture and engineering, in the building of the structures for the architectural designs?

Jonathan:

Well what I was doing there was working with students who were in the final two years of their architectural course. So they were well developed in terms of their creative designs. Which was good for me. Mark was working with the first & second years in the Nice Ideas unit to help them learn to develop their minds. I was in the Diploma school... for their last two years. And these were people who had developed... you know by then they were in their early 20's and they developed ideas of the great buildings they wanted to do but they didn't know how to bring them about. And they had to learn the practical basis of what was possible and feasible. And they had all sorts of views and wild ideas about this, which they discussed with me! And some of them went off to become sort of international names.

REG:

It's been said that the combination of art and engineering in the creation of the Skylon at the Festival of Britain in 1951 was an early influence upon you. Can you describe for our readers what the Skylon was, and why was it an influence?

Jonathan:

(Laughs) Well it was an amazing structure. It was a tensegrity. Which means it stood up with pure tension and pure compression... and it floated. It was a vertical floating metal cigar. But the other thing about it was that it looked fantastically impressive. And it was something that moved you, because you looked at it and wondered what it was and what it meant. It was terrifically expressive of tension and compression, you know the cigar which was standing vertically, which was the compression member, and then the wires, the tension members, which were coming from the top down to the masts, and wires which were going from the masts up from the bottom of the cigar and it's floating above the earth. You can tell that they were... it was like a bow and arrow, if you will, with these two forces at play in it, the tension of the wires and the compression of the silver cigar. But, for me just seeing it floating there, when I was a very young kid, just stuck in my mind. And its had a subliminal effect throughout all of my life. I think it was just sort of aspirational... to create something as perfect as that. You could see how it relates to mathematics. Because it was a perfect visualization of mathematics.

REG:

Who were your main influences early on? Did people like Buckminster Fuller, or architects like Reyner Banham and Cedric Price of the Archigram group, play any part in influencing your creative juices?

Jonathan:

Well, yes. Because at the time when all of this was happening... was in the late '60s, which was a time of all sorts of turmoil as you know. And Buckminster Fuller was both fascinating for his stance, the thought that his polemic about architecture and about building and also about the extraordinarily potent vision of his domes and so forth and the fact that they were a part of a big movement for freeing up architecture, bringing architecture to groups of people in America. And out of that came the Whole Earth Catalog, which was a fascinating document. Reyner Banham... because I'd come from a very intellectual background of Cambridge, influential writers like Reyner Banham were important because they had a grasp of the history of architecture and the history of modern architecture. And lots of them were great writers and they expressed it very well. And Archigram Group was... one of the reasons I got involved with the AA was because I used to go to some of the group crits, where the students would produce their work for critical assessment during a particular term or semester. And Peter Cook, who was one of the members of Archigram, invited me along and found that my comments were... a somewhat alternative, probably because I wasn't an architect! So I wasn't forming, as it were, an opinion on the architectural concept, but rather looking at it in a practical and I suppose polemic way. Also I was simply interested in the way that people's minds work and so on. And of course being a structural engineer I had a view on the engineering aspects. And that got me involved with quite a lot of architects. The AA was a melting pot at that time of young theoretical architects. Some of whom have gone on to fame and fortune, and some who are very... what's the word... well, they were very ideological and theoretical. They were writing treatises like Rem Koolhaas and Bernhard Tchumi, and the greatest theoretician of them all Dalibor Vassily. All this mixture of people working at the AA in the 70'7 exciting!

REG:

In 1969 you began your association with Moonrock at London's Roundhouse, which was described as a radical children's workshop. What was it all about?

Jonathan:

Well, it was created by a man called John Gravelle, whose now been gone for ten or twelve years. He was a very political activist, and he wanted a stage to work on. And he organized a... it was very political what he called an alternative to the organized ghetto of children's entertainment, i.e.. getting away from middle class quiet values to, you know, liberate the creative juices! It was noisy, anarchic... but it was fun and it was fresh. And it involved stories, films, painting, acting, face painting, drumming and Rock and Roll.

REG:

What I read about it was that Moonrock was composed of many forms of art and mixed media, including painting, theater, film, and music, as well as inflatables. All the components it seems that are used in modern stage and concert production today. Is this where it all came together for you, as far as where you could see the future; mixing art with architecture, design, and engineering?

Jonathan:

The curious thing is that it was entirely what I was interested in doing, but I never looked upon it as being a future direction. And when I actually worked in rock and roll for the first time, I actually did not make the connection between what I was doing then, and what I had developed with Moonrock. Moonrock for me was an extraordinary development period, because it allowed me to be very artistic, if you want, and creative, working with my then wife Cheryll, and John Gravelle and the people around him. We created this three ring circus of activity which ranged from The Roundhouse to doing street demonstrations and so on. We were all incredibly creative and influential, because the things we did at Moonrock later became very influential in terms of what is now done with children's workshops and community activities. And of course working in The Roundhouse at that time, was a most fantastic place to be. It was the center of alternative culture in London. And the US Hog Farmers would drop in there, Pink Floyd played there, The Doors played there, and there were fantastic theatrical performances there... The Living Theater, the Ballet Rambert, The Grand Magic Circus, Hamlet featuring Marianne Faithful Mick used to call in for her Rock and Jazz concerts of every description. And then there was the Dialectics of Liberation that took place there... over a week long period. There were absolutely extraordinary people talking about the alternative world politics, liberation, psychology and new forms of action... very very political, with Stokely Carmichael, R D Laing, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Marcuse, Julian Beck etc... there was just about every voice and poet homed in on the Roundhouse for this explosion of underground culture.

REG:

During that time the whole youth movement coalesced and was born, everything came together... the yearning for new experiences and new thinking... you know around the 1970's, and band's like Hawkwind and Curved Air played at Moonrock's Roundhouse gatherings. And you said Pink Floyd played there? Were you very aware of Pink Floyd at that time?

Jonathan:

Oh, absolutely. Pink Floyd were what was termed at the time an underground band. And they did indeed play underground down near Tottenham Court Road station, where you would go down into a basement and they would be humming away there and playing for a few hours. There was a club setting there called The Technicolor Dream. They and other bands played there. Pink Floyd were known very well as a cult band in the underground society. And my earliest experience of a psychedelic concert was of Pink Floyd playing at The Roundhouse in 1967 or 68. And, as many people were, I was mesmerized by the music. They didn't play for Moonrock, but there was many other bands who played there like Hawkwind, Curved Air, Little Free Rock, Ginger Johnson and his African drummers and many other bands and musicians who later went on to more fame and popularity.

REG:

Had you ever heard of The Bonzo Dog Band?

Jonathan:

Yes, The Bonzo Dog Do Da Band.

REG:

Because when I first got into Pink Floyd in 1968, that's what I was into, because it was so new and different and underground. In fact the first two albums I ever got were The Bonzo Dog Band Urban Spaceman, and Pink Floyd A Saucer Full of Secrets.

Jonathan:

Well the Bonzo Dog Do Da Band and Pink Floyd both had this sort of wacky approach to mad things and rock and roll. And I think it was all apart of freeing the mind as it were, a lot of those types of things were going on. And of course... you should remember... there was an enormous influx of underground American artists, film makers, painters... and psychologists and psychiatrists, came flooding over from the states... escaping as it were from the draft... to the Vietnam War. And even some of The Weathermen were there... who were the sort of underground (anarchist) organization who were very active against the war in Vietnam. And that was a very big thing. And of course then the word underground also to me had to do with film making and artists. Which included Stan Brackage... and the most famous, Andy Warhol but there were many others. Then there were other artists that I had met like Carolee Schneeman, who was a feminist performance artist who also made films and painted on the frames. And all of these were incredibly striking and they brought a new focus into London, like people who had been there and done it, and who did it and that was very good for putting all the creative community in London and the UK into action painters, sculptors, film makers became more radical and expressionistic and so on.

REG:

Because you were involved in the underground movement in London at the time, and Pink Floyd, was made up of Roger Rick and Nick who were all architectural students, and Syd who was an art student. Were you aware at the time of one another and that you had a lot in common?

Jonathan:

Not particularly really. I knew that their background... that they had.... that they were architectural students but it didn't really affect my interpretation of their music or whatever. They were what they were and we... you know all the group of artists and anarchists that I was working with... were what we were. And were all in the same groundswell of activity. But I suppose when you're young... you're so self obsessed (laughs). You all think that you're as good as each other. And there was an amazing charnel house of things going on in London. I mean I think probably these things still go on... but it was like that... then. And there was the Arts Lab... and that was a big meeting place for all of these influences. There was a whole new alternative culture evolving.

REG:

1970, was when you also first combined your engineering background with architecture in a partnership with architect Dominic Michaelis, whom you worked with while employed at Arup Associates. How and why did that come about?

Jonathan:

Whilst all of this was going on, I still had a day job. And so throughout the '60s I was working as a structural engineer with a big construction... structural engineering company. Ove Arup and partners. Ove Arup was one of the famous Danish engineers who worked in the UK, and the company is still huge today. But at that time, they were creating the Sydney Opera House amongst other things. And my first job was creating the foundations for the shells of the Sydney Opera House. Arup was a big engineering company and one part of it (Arup Associates) was an integrated practice of architects and engineers... where the idea of grouping all of these altogether in one place came up. And I was fascinated by this. I had just done a masters in Advanced Structures at Imperial College. But I decided that I wanted to become more involved with architecture. So then I moved across company into Arup Associates. Which was fantastic because then I was involved and work with a group of people that included architects, service engineers, quantity surveyors, and structural engineers. There were weekly group meetings, which were intriguing and much more interesting than plain engineering, to discuss the building. So this was my first experience of group and team working. You know, the artist, the practical, the financiers, and the engineers were all in the same grouping together. And everybody could... influence things it was a sort of democratic way of designing. But, you know, leaders came out of this. And you were always aware of who was the chief creative influence.

So, Dominic was one of the young architects there. And after we'd worked there for a few years we felt that we needed to get out from under the aegis of all the partners there, who were all older that we were, and still had an enormous grip on it. We wanted to go out and do it ourselves. We were so arrogant that we wanted to go do it ourselves. So Dominic and I left to set up our own group practice... integrated practice. Him as the architect, me as the engineer and other people that we brought in. And that existed for a few years. And we were quite involved with classic architecture because that was Dominic's influence. We built a steel and glass house, in the Oxfordshire countryside, which was one of our most progressive projects, but we were also involved in solar energy, you know in 'green' architecture, or the beginnings of it.

REG:

For the Moonrock gatherings in 1971 you began designing and building inflatables with London designer Graham Stevens. Was this the first time that you were involved in creating inflatables?

Jonathan:

Yes. The inflatable and... because of my mathematical background, when I was working in architectural association, I got to know of... in fact it was impossible not to know of the buildings and structures of Frei Otto. He created the huge tensile roofs for the Munich Olympic Games. He was a very influential... he was rather like a very practical version of Buckminster Fuller. He was working on alternative architectures made out of stretched membranes... stretched material, like giant curved tents and so forth. And he had written lots of books which about tents and inflatable structures because... it was like taking Zeppelins and thinking how can we use this technology to create buildings?

REG: So with Graham Stevens you built this inflatable. What kind of inflatable was it? What got you interested in inflatables? Jonathan: Graham built quite a lot of performance inflatables. But the one that we worked on was a sort of large long balloon which you could go both inside and outside of, which was very activating for participants.

I remember having it at Moonrock on top of Primrose Hill with lots of children and everybody pushing it around above their heads. And it very stimulating thing because it was so big. It wasn't huge by modern standards, but it seemed big and challenging, but very light. And it was very clear that you were dealing with a structure and not just a play object.

I moved into using tubes of all sorts of diameters from a few inches across to feet across that you could be inside of. To create structures using tubes. Because I liked the idea of this and they were also sort of instantaneous because I could take hundreds of feet of tubes to an event or concert and I would... you know, wrap the whole audience up in it. This was a mixture of both engineering and performance art! And these were all explorations. And at the same time I would be projecting films... The White Hell of Pitz Palloo and King Kong, over the band to create a whole environment. So I was in fact creating ideas for later concerts at that particular time without really knowing it. I was thinking of it as a performance art enhancing the whole activity. And when years later I came to be doing that sort of thing for Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones and U2, it was only then that it struck me that I'd had this early grounding... these workshops that I'd been engaged in the early '70s.

REG:

But weren't you also doing art for art sake. Didn't you later go on to design and build inflatable water walks and bridges, as well as domes and other strange inflatables for art events?

Jonathan:

Yeah, I did do a number of those yeah. But I was always wanting... I didn't ever want to deal with one subject only and so I didn't concentrate on just building inflatables... I wanted to develop the whole event... I wanted all the activity... I liked to make objects and things that were modular and repeatable. But it was the event that was important to me, not the objects.

REG:

So the partnership in creating inflatables with Graham Stevens was totally aside from your business partnership with Dominic Michaelis?

Jonathan:

Yes. The relationship I had with Graham Stevens was not a partnership... Graham Stevens was an Artist with a big 'A.' And again, I was working with him as an engineer in assisting him with getting these things created, since I understood the mathematics and mechanics of it. But I always had during this time the 'day' job, and the alternative job. By the time I started working with Dominic, that was when I gave up regular employment. But at the same time of course, I was a tutor at the Architectural Association. And then gradually the partnership with Dominic faded out because he had moved more into solar energy and alternative energy architecture, which was mainly theoretical. And because he had his own money, he was able to do that without earning money. I found it difficult to live without earning money. I became more and more involved with my paid tutoring at the Architectural Association. So by the mid '70s I was probably doing 3 or 4 days at the Architectural Association.

REG:

So your partnership with Dominic Michaelis lasted over 5 years, during which time you designed and built buildings of steel and glass and became involved in solar power. In fact you built a solar powered balloon during this time. Where was your creativity taking you? What was this solar balloon all about?

Jonathan: We did indeed build a solar balloon. It was simply a way of getting a large aerial balloon to fly without the necessity of having gas bottles. It was making a self powered hot air balloon... with the idea of flying this thing... It was to do with the interest of balloons, because, you know we'd seen these great festivals of hot air balloons and thought they were interesting. But we thought, well could you build a balloon that was powered entirely by solar energy? It had a black envelope inside a transparent envelope so it was like a floating flexible green house. It enshrined all the things to do with inflatable fabric structures and solar energy to create a large moving object that powered itself. It was like a large aerial jellyfish and it was a fascinating project to do. But it never went any further than the prototype. And one has to say that working with Graham Stevens and working with Dominic did come together at that moment because Graham was also working on inflatable transparent structures in the desert to create rain by capturing large expanses of moist air. Again, we were heavily involved in the exploration of solar energy, wind energy, and those sort of things.

REG:

Kind of an experimentation period?

Jonathan:

Yes indeed. Because I had these competing streams of my education and my mentation all happening at the same time I guest I was still an aspiring polymath

REG:

After your partnership with Michaelis, you became a freelance engineer, but increased your commitment to the Architectural Association School of Architecture. In fact it's then that you took over the diploma technical studies department. Mark Fisher had been a student and graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1971. By 1973, Mark was a part time tutor at the at the school, and created the 'Nice Ideas Unit' which was meant to take ideas and projects from paper to construction. Mr. Fisher then later went on to teach in your diploma school department, and at one time I believe you even shared an office. Was it at the Architectural Association School that you first met Mark Fisher? Did you become friends then and go on from there?

Jonathan:

In a word, Yes... You know, you see people around, and he had this 'Nice Ideas' unit which didn't essentially... because it was dealing with the interns it wasn't necessarily dealing with the built object, but getting people to understand about creative thought and invention. And so the Nice Ideas unit would have curious projects like... to create an object that could leap over a bar that was three of four feet off the ground using only paper and rubber bands... or something like that. I remember this one particularly because I created this very simple object that could leap like a frog. So the students were doing those types of projects which were forcing them to be inventive and lateral thinking. I liked this approach to thinking because it was also had a lot to do with a sort of mathematics and engineering. Mark is a fascinating person because not only does he also have a very mathematical and scientific background but he's also great drawer and conceptualist. And so at the same time as doing all of this, he was doing some very notable works of... drawings of... pen on paper... buildings and constructs. And he was also very involved with inflatable structures, but inflatable structures that formed buildings. Modular futuristic buildings, or buildings that could change their shape. You know, again, this was part of the theoretical movement at that time, and interrelated with the work of Frei Otto and Archigram.

REG:

Mark Fisher had been heavily involved with the creation of inflatables from as early as 1968, and in fact formed the inflatables company, 'Air Structures Design' in 1969.

Jonathan:

...with a former partner and they were involved in creating and designing structures that would solve or be a part of the Archigram concept of instant cities and moving structures, and so on. And also worked on some early rock and roll concerts, again making inflatable objects.

REG:

By 1976, Roger Waters wanted someone more competent to construct new inflatables for the Pink Floyd Animals tour in the US. Did someone from Pink Floyd or Andrew Sanders contact Mark Fisher to hire him to create the new inflatables they wanted? How did this come about, and how did you became involved?

Jonathan:

When I was running the technical studies unit, in addition to doing the Nice Idea's unit, Mark was also working with me in the Diploma department. So we shared an office, and one day a telephone call came through, from Andrew Sanders who was working with Roger at the time creating scenic figures for one of the songs in Animals, which was the song Dogs. And Roger's concept was that, in addition to the famous pig which was created for the song Pigs, he wanted an inflatable family that would be used over and around the band, which would illustrate the meaning he wanted in the song. The family was used in the last section of the song finishing, you know ...dragged down by the stone.

And Mark's name was... as the now apocryphal story goes his name was on the back stage wall in the Cambridge Theater where he had designed the inflatable bed for Pontius Pilot in Jesus Christ Superstar. Andrew went to see it and contacted Mark in relation to making the inflatables, and I got drafted in to create the engineering that would allow these things to fly. And that's precisely what we did. Mark created the inflatables and did all the art and painting. I created all the mechanics that made them move and fly over the band. And they did fly.

REG:

Was it during or after the Animals tour that an unofficial partnership with Mark Fisher was formed?

Jonathan:

Yes, that's correct. That's what happened. And we realized... we both gave up our day jobs then. Because rock and roll was much more interesting. And we got to travel all over and it was very demanding. And following that we created a huge pyramid at the behest of Roger and the band.

REG:

What real part did Andrew Sanders play in the production of the Animals tour overall? I assume his role was only artistic, in doing the initial design work, and that he did not tour with the band as you and Mark had to do?

Jonathan:

Yes he did. He was essentially the art director of it and he was in the role that we later took on. He was the one who was talking directly with Roger. He had the relationship with Roger. And it was his sketches, in his sketch book that were the illustrations that were the interpretations of Rogers ideas. I don't know how Andrew and Roger met. That is something I have never known about. And we all toured, Andrew, Mark and myself and a number of assistants. And that was of course the most dramatic thing that had ever happened to us. Because apart from designing these things we got to run them and to be out on tour and find out what a Roadies life was life. Quite an experience to be suddenly working for one of the most celebrated rock bands of that day. So there was nothing like starting at the top. You know we were playing to huge audiences. In Cleveland, in a baseball stadium there (now demolished), the audience was 92,000 which was a Guinness Book World record at the time!

REG:

And you had to develop the ways and means in which those inflatables that were constructed were going to be raised and moved during the shows. How important are structural theories of tension in the overall design and construction of inflatables, or of any of the stage structures? And what kind of mathematics is involved in making it all work?

Jonathan:

Well in making the inflatables... I think I was the only person who understood the mathematics of inflatables. But it was only when we got to do The Wall in Berlin that the mathematics of inflatables became really important, where the tensions, because they were so big, became great, that they would cause the inflatables to self destruct, to blow apart. But at that time (the Animals tour), it was much more to do with how to make inflatable objects from small models and how to get the cutting patterns, you know the tailoring, done.

That was solved at that time... when another man came into the picture, Rob Harris, who was also a maker of inflatable figures. He had a very pragmatic way of doing it, while we, Mark and I, under the influence of Frei (Otto), had a very mathematical approach to it, you know, configuring geometric lines on the surfaces to work it out. Rob Harris had a much more practical way of doing it by sticking tissue paper all over the object and then cutting it off in sections, so that you could flatten them out. Because what you are basically trying to do is to make curved objects out of flat bits of material. Anyway, that and many other problems were being solved in a practical way... how do you keep them inflated during the time that they are being used, how much do they leak, and if they are always being permanently inflated with fans, what sort of fans are used, and how to lift them up invisibly, which is what I was creating.

So here I was creating a huge tensegrity, which was using two cranes, which were the compression objects, and tension wires which would go high over the band. You know, they were up to 600 feet long and in some cases they went right across the venue they went from side to side of Soldier Field in Chicago. Mostly they were closer though, and we used a couple of hydraulic construction cranes that we hired in. When they had extended and they would have these two wires stretching between the two of them, and down and fastened back to the cranes themselves. So in a sense they were like... it was like recreating the Skylon. I didn't have the vertical cigar, but the vertical downward pull from the weight of the winches and wires that were lifting up the inflatable family.

Ah, and then we were also involved in creating... way before computers and microchips had got to the state they are now... we were creating electronic control systems to allow us to operate these effects. We built all this ourselves... we made it ourselves, and we operated it... and we loaded in and out of trucks and we got thrown in the swimming pools too. (laughs)

REG:

During the Animals tour how were the inflatables inflated and how were they rigged and moved into position during each show?

Jonathan:

They were winched up on wheeled trolleys that ran on the support wires and moved across the stage by a system of ropes and pulleys

REG:

What was the sequence of events, for instance, during which songs was each inflatable inflated and hung? What was the overall arrangement of order or placement above the stage of each inflatable?

Jonathan:

The inflatables represented the typical 'Western' family, with its two and a half children plus the wife and the husband and the consumer durables... the refrigerator, the television set, and the Cadillac. The mother was depicted as rather blowzy mother on a huge sofa. But perhaps she was also a lover and a wife. A bit of a scarlet woman if you want. And if you think about it, you can see how this mother, wife, lover figure relates to Roger's later female characters in The Wall, but that's another story... and then there was the man, the father figure. So perhaps these figures carried some elements from his growing up. But Dogs, of course, and the whole animals theme, is also a reflection of... is an abstraction of George Orwell's Animal Farm. You know, where the dogs (police) are roaming around controlling the sheep (people) for their masters the pigs and... four legs good, two legs bad all of that. Yes, all of that is contained in the song Dogs, if you read the lyrics... but not directly a good place to start a career as Rock and Roll designers!

It concentrates on this family, the nuclear family as it was called. And so the sequence that these things would rise up would be the... if I remember the sequence correctly, the children would rise up first. There was a boy, and then a girl with half a boy. These were just two separate objects. They would go up, and they would be followed by the television, the refrigerator, the Cadillac and then would come the wife on the sofa, and also simultaneously rising would be the father... the man, both climbing the highest. And then they would all be rising up together and this was quite difficult to achieve, because what I discovered... you know we were working right on the limits of what the electric motors could do... the electric winches could do... with these special grooved drums that I had drawn up... and we actually made them all.

Once they started they couldn't stop until they got to the right height. If they stopped they would not be able to restart because they had to start from the bottom when the winches were not carrying any load, if you see what I mean. And so, I would normally have to have put eight fingers on the control buttons in sequence, and keep my fingers on the buttons, and not let go of them until each figure reached its correct height crude and nerve wracking. Nowadays, of course, that would all be done by microprocessor control that had been pre-programmed to do it. But (back then) it was just me and my fingers.

REG:

How did you get the refrigerator to pop open with the food and stuff?

Jonathan:

The sausages that came out... well we had solenoid actuated catches. So that you'd send them an electric signal and it would cause them to activate and electromagnetically pull the locking pin out of the catch and allow it to open. This method was also used in The Wall where the Mother would fly up and then she would open up and... you know a wall would deploy across her front. We were very inventive and we used every possible widget and technical device we could find in all the hardware stores. One of the things that I absolutely remember when we toured around the States was going to Sears Roebucks in the various cities, and going to their tool department and buying and buying... every place we went to we'd buy tools. Because American tools were so much more diverse and interesting and better than we could get in the UK. So we created this huge arsenal of all the sorts of tools that you could possibly need to deal with all the objects and effects that we had to control, build and keep going. You have to realize that on the Animals tour, there were to hydraulic arms, cherry pickers, that would come up from the side of the stage with gun turrets on top with spot lights in them. And all these things needed constant maintenance, because they would spring leaks and oil would be spurting all over... you know it was the early days for Rock and Roll effects...

REG:

During the Animals tour there were also some pyrotechnics, which I believe were done by Wilf Scott. At many of the outdoor shows he had created pyrotechnic sheep. Rockets were shot from mortar like cannons thousands of feet into the air and exploded, after which sheep like parachutes floated down upon the crowd below. Did you have any influence in creating the design of these sheep?

Jonathan: No, but we worked quite closely with Wilf, who became a great friend and associate and I've worked with him on many projects since. But it was sort of a mysterious world. But we would contribute ideas on what sort of fabrics or materials that might be used. I'm not sure who designed the sheep, but they were very sheep like, with cardboard tubes as legs. And in fact I think I have the only photograph of them. And for all the world they looked like two of a flock of flying sheep. And the strange thing is that at the beginning of the last tour in in 2002, I recreated... with Wilf's help, and a German pyrotechnics company I recreated the sheep, which were shot out of shells, went up 3 or 4 hundred feet, and then they floated down, and I got them perfected.

But unfortunately in this day and age, you can't use anything like that because; a). After September 11th, you couldn't transport any pyrotechnics easily around the world, and b) The risk assessment officials at Glastonbury, which is where we were finally going to use them, didn't permit even tried and tested pyrotechnics or aerial objects... they wouldn't even allow people to fly kites! And so the idea of this flock of sheep floating slowly down over the crowd at Glastonbury, which would have been like it was at Soldier Field 25 years before, never took place. It was such a shame.

REG:

Because all the special effects had to happen at just the right time, were you in charge of the pyrotechnics as well? How were the pyrotechnics coordinated with your inflatables and other special effects?

Jonathan:

.Well... with an intercom system. Which often broke down. And so there was a lot of rushing around and frantic signaling to make sure that the cues took place on time, because you couldn't hear the music. What people don't realize is that when you're back stage, you can't hear the music with the same clarity as you can out front. And if you have to do a cue on a particular beat or word or particular guitar solo, then you need to be cued by the people out on the desk (the sound board usually located in the center of the audience) who can see and hear these things. So we eventually solved this by the time we did The Wall and would have a play back system in our control desk so we could hear everything, and also a television monitor so we could also have a complete picture of what was going on. So that we could keep... so we could cue things accurately. With Pink Floyd, and with Roger in particular, EXACT cueing was absolutely required. There was nothing that would make Roger more upset than if the cues didn't take place in the right place... if they just became just an effect that didn't relate to precisely to the song. There was a moment in dogs... I can't remember the line at the moment... but if I listen to Dogs... I know... suddenly my body goes into GO mode... you know, and it's counting out 20 seconds to go... 10 seconds to go... and Go... and my fingers operate, you know my eight fingers, would go into this array which would press all the buttons one by one. And so they would all go up. And then at the end of it... just to remember... what happened then was that the family would deflate and just hang there and then expand again, with their internal lights. And in the last verse the where the man is dragged down by the stone and found dead on the end of the phone, the family would descend and he would fly across to the far side of the stage and descend over the head and behind Dave Gilmour. And in the last dying moments of the song he would crumple in a heap behind the stage.

Well, you see we were involved in story telling, but not a literal story, you know... dragged down and found dead on the end of the phone... he was actually moving down, but the family and the visuals were only relating in an abstract way to the song in creating a mood and atmosphere. And we never... and I think that may have been the beginning of it... that's why I say Roger was a mentor... we were never portraying precisely what was happening in the lyrics or doing something that was absolutely replication of the ideas like you might do in the theater. They were always illusions, enhancements. And the other thing was that they had to have an emotional content, a meaning they were never just gratuitous special effects. But the most important thing of all of these things was the look. You know, the emotional content, and the awesome quality... what eventually came to be called the 'Cor Fuck' factor!

REG:

During many of the Animals shows specially made discardable inflatable Pigs were filled with propane and helium and would be blown up. What was the reason for this? I would think that even a cheaply made inflatable pig would be costly?

Jonathan:

Yes, but the Floyd were one of the biggest bands in the world, they could afford them. And I think this was an idea that was cooked up, probably by Roger and Mark Fisher.

REG:

Did this happen only at outdoor stadiums, or also at indoor venues?

Jonathan: Only at outdoor stadiums.. The thing with the exploding pig was interesting, because it started off with propane, which would go pffffft and it would burn. And then there was this time in Milwaukee... when Mark Fisher and winch boss Richard Hartman experimented with a mixture of acetylene and oxygen instead of propane, and it EXPLODED. And I was holding one of the wires up to the head... with a snap hook on it and I just watched my wire come down with the snap on it. And the rest of it had disintegrated. And it went off with the most enormous bang... it was out in the car park, and it affected... it damaged a number of cars. It was extremely loud, and flaming bits of the inflatable even flew on to stage inside the stadium and the band jumped out of their skins. And there were definite orders to not repeat this after the concert. after being told off by the head master. It might look good... Roger was always very... it was very instructive working with him in this respect... because he might well decide that however interesting an affect was, it may become excessive and inappropriate he was a good judge.

REG:

So the exploding Pigs were never used again after that?

Jonathan:

They were not used after that, no no.... we reverted to the pig flying on a wire over the audience which reminds me that we had already had a pig destroyed... during the original... the first show we did in Miami baseball stadium where the winds got up and the pig was never able to be deployed from the lighting mast because the wind blew it apart. And I remember the crowd running off with the head... they jumped over the fences and grabbed the head.

Then I remember Steve O'Rourke, the Manager, racing after them trying to get the head back, and capturing it, and we stitched it all back together to use again. That's when we realized that we needed more than one pig on the road. And we then had a whole fleet of them made because we realized we needed spares of everything life on the road.

REG:

Because you toured with the band, did you witness the infamous Roger Waters fan spitting incident in Montreal?

Jonathan:

Absolutely.

REG:

And from your perspective, what happened?

Jonathan:

I was on the PA... I was trying to take photographs of the band we had very small PA stacks by todays standards, and I was actually climbing on the back of the PA stands to get a good view of what was going on on the stage.

What happened was that the band had reached the end of its set and the crowd would not let the band leave the stage. And it was quite a delicate situation. It was the last gig of the whole tour, and there had been quite a lot of pyrotechnics and thunderflashes in the audience earlier on, one of which had landed on the stage, and it had unsettled Roger and also the rest of the band.

But Roger had actually said in the microphone, you know, Hey don't let those things off!. And he was obviously deeply unsettled. And as the concert went on the crowd became more and more enthusiastic, but at the end, they wouldn't let the band leave the stage and kept demanding more encores. And when the band finally didn't come back on... I think there was pressure at the front of the stage, simply because the crowd was surging forward and the barrier at the front of the stage was getting wrecked. And then the security guards at the front of the stage were unmerciful in hurling people back. And there was a general feeling of anger... it wasn't like Altamont... but it was sort of similar it came from nowhere. So the band had come back on stage, and they played Echoes... they played an improvised version of Echoes that went on for... I don't know, 20 minutes or so... they hadn't rehearsed any more songs. You know many people didn't realize that most bands didn't extemporize, that they had to rehearse songs, especially Pink Floyd with all the sound effects and so on. Anyway, they decided to play a long unrehearsed version of Echoes.

And as they were doing this, the crowd was surging forward, and this guy leaped over the security barrier and managed to evade the guards and leapt onto the stage, and Roger spat at him. I can't remember whether he actually got onto the stage, but Roger was at the front of the stage and he spat at him. He was so horrified by what was going on... if you read the recent In the Flesh tour book you can see precisely what was going through his head at the time.

And so I saw all this taking place from this extraordinary vantage point. I did not get a photograph of the actual spit, but I did get photographs of the front of the stage with all the mayhem going on there. You know, I was so amazed at what was going on... I only had a little camera. I was not set up in those days to take major photographs. I was like a tourist on the PA stack.

Then what happened was quite extraordinary, I don't know who had the idea, but the stage crew came on one by one and took off all the instruments and on stage speakers and amplifiers one by one. I remember them coming on and carrying Rick Wright off still sitting on his stool! And then they carried his grand piano off. And then they carried Roger's amplifiers off. Roger left, until eventually all that was left on stage was David Gilmour playing guitar and Nick Mason with a snare drum the whole of the stage had been cleared. Probably because what was happening, back in roadie land... they said look, you know, fuck this, this tour is over, we've got to get all this stuff off and packed into the trucks because we've got to be out of here by the morning. So I think that's how it came about, and they started to load out before the concert had ended. It was a classic act, but even then the load out wasn't complete by sunrise. The audience got the message... but it was poignant. And then what I remember is when they had finally played the last note, there was this huge screen, you know this huge message board, at the back of the stadium, because it was the Olympic stadium and it had all the most advanced technology, and it said in French and in English; Le Spectacle est Termine.... The Concert is Over, Go Home I remember this particularly, the Spectacle was over, the last great tour had ended.

REG:

As far as transporting and setting up giant stage designs for a tour, how did the American traveling Circus's influence you, and what were the differences as far as the level of technical difficulties?

Jonathan:

Well, Mark Fisher had been in America and had been very entranced by the methods the circuses used to travel huge distances and put on shows, and he picked up on the ideas. And, of course, the similar methods had been used by Colonel Parker when he took on Elvis Presley on the road and used a truck to form the stage. The idea of using Railway trucks or trucks to transport stuff and then using the trucks as part of the performance was something that we liked. And it was all part of the instant and moving city, you know, the Archigram idea... the enshrinement of those ideas, so they all fitted together as a piece. And it was some years before we actually created staging equipment and sets that you could take read made off the back of trucks. So that's where that aspect lead. So from the beginning we were very aware that we had to create things that could be easily packed and transported.

Around this time, Road Boxes with wheels on them were being invented. You have to realize, that up to this time ways of transporting Rock and Roll equipment were very rudimentary. And it was quite novel to have purpose built equipment for touring... you know, companies were springing up in the States making boxes with wheels on them. In London, we had a company, who I now know and as great friends, called Foxy Boxes who created road boxes to fit all these strange bits of equipment in perfectly. And they had wheels on them so you could move them about easily. They were also conveniently spaced off the ground so that a forklift truck could lift them up. Mostly the forklift trucks were called Roadies, because you feed roadies on very little and they would work all day and night, and they weren't unionized. But for instance, when we were in Soldiers Field in Chicago, the live roadies were not allowed to move the boxes around. We had to use forklift trucks. The forklift trucks that came to pick them would have to have an operator and somebody who would walk in front and somebody to guide it. It was quite instructive. And it took a lot longer.

REG:

Now, previously, you had mentioned the pyramid. The original pyramid that Pink Floyd had had constructed in 1975, was a 66 ft. square, 66 foot high inflatable that was to be used during their tour of the US. The top, looking like the pyramid on a US bank note, was to detach and float away, however the first time it was used the balloon in the top half escaped, and the pyramid crashed in the venue parking lot, destroying several cars in the process. Who was it that had originally created this inflatable for Pink Floyd?

Jonathan:

That was in Atlanta, yeah, I think. That was created by Jeffery Shaw (of the Amsterdam based Evenstructure Research Group) who had designed the first Pig (that had escaped over the Battersea Power Station). He's still around, he works in Holland but he's British, and he was also an inflatable creator. And it was made with limited technical experience... again, with inflatables, and things that fly in the air, you have to be very aware of the effects of the wind, which they were not. They made no real analysis of the wind or taken sufficient account of it. The wind drag causes tethered balloons to fly at an angle to the ground. That's why hot air balloons always start at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning when it's very very calm so they go straight up rather than get dragged along by a wind before they can get off the ground. It was actually built by a regular company who made inflatable structures, like inflatable hangers for airplanes. Because a lot of the inflatables, I realize now, came from the war time creation of instant buildings, and decoy tanks etc. like inflatable hangers that you could move around to house airplanes and keep them out of sight.

REG:

After the tour in 1977, Pink Floyd's production company, Britannia Row, hired Mark Fisher and you to resurrect this pyramid. I understand you redesigned and built the bottom, and Mark Fisher redesigned and built the top. Can you explain the details and how it was to be used?

Jonathan:

What we did was that we created something which would work. This consisted of a base structure of a cube, which had a ring beam and four columns made from lattice girders. Inclined wires came down to make the lower part, and the upper half was an inflatable that would sit on top. And the whole thing would combine to make a great pyramid which would allow the top to float away from it. And it would be anchored at four corners so it would not move off station. And it would go up as far as it could with whatever the weather conditions were. And then it could be brought back down. In any event, it never got further than the drawings that Mark made of it.

REG:

Why did Pink Floyd abandon the pyramid inflatable project before it was ever built and used?

Jonathan:

I suppose... to paraphrase Roger... that moment had passed. He and they were involved in other things. And what we did was... this is where a whole lot of our ideas about instant and mobile staging came to fruition.

Having used cranes on tours and being used to steelwork construction sites, I made the lower structure... something that you could erect... put together on the ground and then lift into position by crane and then pull the stabilizing wires out into position. So you could create this structure... which became a roofing structure, a staging structure... in a few hours, rather than use the slow and labor intensive method of scaffolding. It made an instant mobile staging roof. It had lattice columns on each corner that you could climb up to rig lighting. It also had arms that would stick out on each side that would support the PA. So we were way ahead of the game at that time. And it was ten... fifteen years before these kinds of structures became used in Rock 'n' Roll.

REG: In 1978, Mark Fisher worked on plans for The Slug, a proposed massive inflatable and transportable venue... Jonathan: That's absolutely right, it was a low pressure free form inflatable slug shaped domed structure with high pressure arched tubes to make it rigid and safe..

REG:

Did you help in its design?

Jonathan:

No, Mark created that himself. That was his expertise. whilst this was going on, I was creating other things.

REG:

Why was the Slug never created or implemented back then, or anything like it by anyone to this day?

Jonathan:

I think probably because it was possibly too expensive. And again, we had idea's which came from our theoretical architectural background, but they didn't fit into the touring ethos and the promotional aspects of putting on shows. Typically on the Continent, small shows go around and play tents in the various French cities, but the idea of this giant tent touring with a show in it, was just too much to contemplate. And the promoters who were promoting the tours... like Harvey Goldsmith in Europe and Bill Graham in the USA (who is sadly dead now and who created the great San Francisco concerts of the late '60s and '70s) were used to using existing football stadia, baseball stadia, big indoor arenas, because America had all these big indoor arenas, which we didn't have in the UK. Although we had some big venues in London, you know, Earls Court and Wembley Arena and Stadium and a few others around the country and in Europe. And I think what happened was that the emphasis and expense of building the slug got in the way of creating the most important aspect which was the performance of The Wall. Ultimately, The Wall won, and was put on in existing venues, as the promoters wished and understood,.

REG:

I understand that Roger originally worked with Mark Fisher and Gerald Scarfe to do the original designs for The Wall shows. But to make his designs come to life, he needed your engineering and creative input. Was this how your partnership worked?

Jonathan:

Well after the Animals tour, we did lots of work for other shows... other bands. You know this was after we had developed the substructure for the pyramid we talked about earlier. This mobile structure became the Britania Row Staging Gantry. And we did a big tour in Germany with it, transporting it around on a couple of trucks we did concerts with Queen in Saarbrucken and with The Who in Nuremburg and others... all used this mobile staging structure. By then we were building huge wings for the PA (which had grown in size since the Animals tour) and because I was an engineer, I created lightweight stress skin floor decks, which people didn't know about, to minimize the volume of steel scaffolding needed for the PA wings.. We did a whole lot of shows... we also did shows at Knebworth with it, where it created the stage for the big festival concerts there. While Mark and I were creating these outdoor stages we were also creating the sets for the shows . So (for instance) when we did the Jazz shows at Knebworth we also created the sets. We did a whole lot of these things together.

We produced sets for other shows such as Stevie Wonder and Tina Turner, and when we came to do The Wall, we collaborated again, it was... OK, we've got the idea, we've got the architecture. How do we put the architecture together. How do we make it work live in front of an audience, etc. And again there were inflatables to be created and operated the Mother, the Teacher and The Wife.

REG: ...and the Pig again! Jonathan: ...because the characterization was very strong from Gerald Scarfe. Mark really got into creating these inflatable characters, while I was working on how to build this gigantic wall in a concert environment in the short space of time that the music would allow. And so, I created all the lifting structures behind the stage which would enable the wall to be built invisibly by a group of roadie bricklayers. And so the engineering and construction all this equipment was what I mainly did.

But by then we were swapping creative concepts about all aspects of the show ,and Mark and I worked together on the creation of the bricks. Eventually they became, after much discussion, drawing and prototypes, similar to large cardboard boxes that you could fold flat. That was the big insight about making it transportable. REG: How were the inflatables created for The Wall inflated and manipulated during the show?

Jonathan:

They were lifted by chain hoists rigged in the roof from metal plates in their backs that housed the built-in fans that kept them inflated. They had internal lights and the Mother had a Wall that grew from her arms (activated by the electrically activated solenoid catches I mentioned previously). The Teacher who walked and moved was much more complicated with a separate fan for his oversized head and an overhead track for him to walk up onto the stage. He was animated and moved by ropes and pulleys operated by Mark and myself!.

REG:

Roger stated in the interview for Is There Anybody Out There, the live Wall CD, that initially he had been extremely worried about the show, because during rehearsals these lifts made excruciating noise, but that it had been overcome by greasing and greasing and greasing these lifts again and again while bringing them up and down. Why did this occur? Was this caused by a factory defect, in that they incorrectly set the electric motors for the pumps?

Jonathan: