Mark Fisher obituary
Set designer and architect who defined the rock'n'roll spectacular over the last 30 years
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The set for U2's 1997 PopMart tour designed by Mark Fisher. From the giant golden arch hung a bank of speakers, suspended like a basket of French fries. Photograph: Rob Verhorst/Redferns
He flew Tina Turner over her audience on a huge mechanical arm, drove U2 through their arena inside a mirror-studded lemon, and thrust the Rolling Stones between stages on a 45m-long telescopic bridge, complete with helicopter searchlights. The architect and set designer Mark Fisher, who has died aged 66 after a long illness, defined the rock'n'roll spectacular over the last 30 years, dreaming up ever more elaborate contraptions to match the wildest visions of his bands.
Vast inflatable characters were a regular feature of his shows, reaching a surreal climax when a 30m pig burst through a wall of 2,500 polystyrene blocks, for the ex-Pink Floyd member Roger Waters's 1990 performance of The Wall in Berlin. Designed with Fisher's then-partner, Jonathan Park, it was one of the most ambitious sets ever conceived outside an arena, with the wall marching 170m across the former no-man's-land of Potsdamer Platz, before tumbling down in front of an audience of half a million people. A stage version of the show, which features flying puppets based on drawings by Gerald Scarfe – including a caricature of Fisher as a schoolteacher – remains one of the most complex rock shows on tour, costing almost £40m to stage.
Fisher's designs always broke new ground in the sheer scale of their spectacle. ForU2's PopMart tour in 1997, he developed the world's largest LED screen, stretching 50m across the back of the stage. In front of this glowing cliff of pixels rose a giant golden arch, in the style of the McDonald's logo, from which a bank of speakers was suspended like a great basket of fries. Topping off this supersized satire of consumer culture, an illuminated olive shone at the end of a 30m cocktail stick.
"A rock show is a sort of tribal event in our culture," said Fisher. "It's preparing everyone for the arrival of the high priest." In this case, the priestly vehicle took the form of a 12m-high lemon-shaped mirrorball, which flipped open to reveal the band inside. "The grail," the designer would say, "is to give the audience something spectacular it really didn't expect."
Born in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, Fisher began his studies at the Architectural Association in London in 1965, where he was surrounded by the dreamy visions of floating cities and plug-in megastructures of the experimental Archigram group. Working on set designs for musicals after graduating, he was given the chance to test out his pneumatic ideas on Pink Floyd's Animals tour in 1977, producing a striking inflatable menagerie that caught the imagination of bands and audiences alike.
Fisher designed the band's lavish stage sets for the next two decades, culminating in a 40m-high tilting steel arch for the Division Bell tour in 1994. It was the biggest portable stage set of its kind; it took three days to erect the 700-tonne steel structure, three versions of which were fabricated, in order to leapfrog between venues on 53 articulated trucks. "He would push everything as far as he could," says Neil Thomas ofAtelier One engineers, who worked on Fisher's sets for 20 years. "He was always encouraging us to find new ways of doing things. To be given a chance to work like that is every engineer's dream."
Thomas describes such innovations as the high-pressure inflatable tubes, developed by the military, that were used to support the vast screens, as well as the telescopic bridge for the Rolling Stones' Bridges to Babylon tour, based on fire-engine technology. "His real breakthrough was to work closely with the stage companies to develop specific components for modular structures," says Thomas. "Before that, everything had been done with scaffolding."
One of his most elaborate bespoke designs was "the Claw" for U2's 360 tour, a 180-tonne steel arachnid that loomed over the stage, enclosing the band along with several thousand members of the audience.
"He was an architect with an extraordinary imagination," says U2's manager Paul McGuinness. "He turned everyone's wild ideas into steel and lumber and canvas reality." It was a reputation that drew a stellar client list, with Fisher crafting extravaganzas for everyone from Elton John to Janet Jackson, Lady Gaga to Take That, Madonna to Metallica.
Outside the world of rock'n'roll, he was invited to work on the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, constructing a glowing telescopic "dream sphere" around which swarms of acrobats performed. For the Commonwealth Games ceremony in Delhi in 2010, he developed an ingenious system of hanging everything off a 90m-long inflatable structure, as the suspended floor of the stadium could not take high loads.
Most recently, Fisher's studio, Stufish, has been using the theatrical tricks of the stage to design permanent buildings. Following on from theKà theatre for Cirque du Soleil, built in Las Vegas in 2004, its team has have been working on a series of buildings for a theme park in the central Chinese mega-city of Wuhan, which include indoor rides, "immersive restaurants" and a theatre to house a swimming pool and the largest moving LED screens in the world. Fisher joked that his work was "the invention of the unnecessary by the unemployable" – but his projects, temporary and permanent alike, stand as monuments to a dazzling imagination.
