#Calair brothers used gear movie#
#Calair brothers used gear driver#
#Calair brothers used gear software#

He became a successful songwriter after the band broke up, writing hits for the likes of Lana Del Rey, Ellie Goulding, Florence + the Machine, Jake Bugg and Rod Stewart. He experienced a brief flash of fame in the 90s as the singer in Britpop band Longpigs, best known for their indie anthem 'She Said'. Our job is not to say, 'That's impossible' - our job is to say, 'Yes, of course.'Ĭrispin Hunt agrees. They saw no reason to leave Lititz, so Tait set up nearby. By 1978, the brothers were the first port of call for any band heading out on the road. In 1970, the brothers designed and built the first stage monitor, and two years later the first hanging sound system for indoor arenas. Roy and Gene's PA so impressed the band that Valli took them on the road with him. The Clair brothers - Roy and Gene - built their first speakers in 1966 when Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons played Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, near Lititz. He founded Tait Towers in 1978, naming the company after his industry-famous lighting tower, and located its headquarters out in Lititz, to be near his close collaborators, the Clair Brothers. 'Before I knew it, I was in the set business,' Tait explains. Soon, he was working with Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond. Out on the road he leveraged his childhood love of electrical circuit kits, batteries and bulbs to devise edged boards that kept wah-wah pedals and fuzzboxes safe from stomping, create the first revolving stage in rock and design one of the first self-contained lighting towers. Tait became Yes's tour manager, sound engineer and lighting designer for the next 15 years. 'I realised that I could make all this stuff work,' he explains.

He was stunned at the shoddiness of the band's equipment and lighting - guitarist Peter Banks kept stamping on his effects pedals, breaking them almost every time.

#Calair brothers used gear driver#

When the manager of a bunch of prog-rock newbies called Yes spent the evening touting for a van driver to get his boys to a gig in Leeds, Tait volunteered. The Beatles, David Bowie, Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Jimi Hendrix all graced its dingy stage. If anyone wanted a career in music, getting into - or best of all, getting to play at - The Speakeasy was the fastest route to stardom until it closed in 1978. I n 1968, a young Australian backpacker called Michael Tait took a job behind the bar at The Speakeasy Club, a late-night music industry haunt just off Oxford Street in London run by a friend of the infamous Kray twins. The technology involved often doesn't exist yet. Thousands of people are needed to design, build, assemble, market and sell the show. To get a stadium tour from notion to opening night costs tens of millions. It's always a difficult moment for designers such as Lipson and Williams when rock stars doodle their concepts for stage shows. That's what should be on the stage, he told Lipson. The four musicians were leafing through proposed designs from Stufish and Williams when Bono grabbed a Sharpie and drew a rough outline of a Joshua tree breaking out through the top of the screen.

Now, the band wanted something similar for The Joshua Tree anniversary tour in 2017.

#Calair brothers used gear movie#

In homage to the Geneva, the stage had a movie screen and little else.

#Calair brothers used gear software#

In October 2016, U2 had played software giant Salesforce's annual conference on the site of the old Geneva Drive-In Theatre in Daly City, California. Lipson is a senior associate at London-based design firm Stufish, the company that, along with U2's set designer Willie Williams, has created all of the band's tours since 1992's Zoo TV. In December 2016, designer Ric Lipson was in New York on a conference call with Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr.