In this day and age it’s very easy to play, because …’ Here came another of his unexpected pauses and changes of direction. ‘I went “Wow, I didn’t know I was playing that well,”’ said Wood.įor all the absurdity of a man yearning to be performing in a jazz club playing to a combined total on the two legs of the tour of 5.5 million people, Charlie told me soon afterwards that doing those gigantic shows was painless. At one, I distinctly remember Ronnie playing a solo and milking the applause a little more than usual – only to be told that we were cheering news of England scoring a goal in the World Cup. ‘“Grumpy old sod, don’t go to him.”’Īfter a year and 115 shows, the combined Steel Wheels/ Urban Jungle pageant bowed out with two more concerts in August 1990 at Wembley Stadium, for an awe-inducing total of five there. Thank goodness they’ve learned not to come to me,’ he laughed. Then when we get on the road I tend to leave it, but he’s very aware of a lot more.
They have a really fantastic team and the same people, and I don’t think people know quite how involved he was.’Ĭharlie downplayed it, naturally. He was involved with the lighting, all the behind-the-scenes stuff. ‘Because of his design history, he did merchandising, designing of stages. ‘He was behind the creative process, that mega-touring, those stages, before U2, before any of those guys,’ she says. I saw them in 1999, at Wembley Stadium, and they were fantastic.’Ĭharlie’s daughter Seraphina glows when she talks about her father’s huge importance in those uncredited visual decisions. Their really big, massive tours all started with Steel Wheels, really. Talking to me in 2013, during his temporary reintroduction to the fold for the Stones’ 50th-anniversary celebrations and beyond into the 14 on Fire tour, he mused: ‘I’d say the beginning of the modern-day Stones in terms of theatre presentation was … well, it was always very theatrical and musical as well, but in terms of big presentation and stage lighting, there was such a huge development between ’69 and the ’80s. Mick Taylor, as a once and future collaborator but also as an admirer, agreed wholeheartedly. This is when the modern-day touring industry was born – when architecture and music came together to create these rock spectaculars.’ The stage stretched over 300ft and was flanked by 80ft high towers on each side that Mick Jagger appeared on for “Sympathy for the Devil”. ‘The tour was, at the time, the biggest in terms of sheer volume of different elements used to construct the stage. As the company prepared for the launch of that European itinerary – sadly without Charlie’s new input – modern-day chief executive Ray Winkler told the Guardian about Steel Wheels. It won one of trade magazine Pollstar’s first awards for most creative stage production, in an itinerary that went on so long, the European leg had a different name, Urban Jungle, and a look all its own.įisher was the founder of Stufish, the set designers whose relationship with the Stones continued all the way to 2022’s SIXTY festivities. And often, it’s just you that’s been there, so it’s, “Why aren’t we doing as well as last time?” and a worry goes out.’Ĭharlie and Mick worked closely on the Steel Wheels tour with the late set designer Mark Fisher and lighting director Patrick Woodroffe. ‘You get the occasional band like U2, “How did they do in Denver?” and you think, “Blimey, we’d better do as well as them.” It’s like friendly rivalry, in a way. ‘And you’re in the world of following yourself, really,’ he went on. That’s how the world of doing what we do has gone. It’s our own fault, or pleasure, or whatever you call it. Where would you play, in a 3,000-seater hall? So it’s to accommodate that, and hopefully you can fill it up. Otherwise, he mused in a 1998 conversation, ‘You’d be playing a month in a town to play to 30,000 people. But vast sums from their empire were poured back into the business to make sure that they remained bigger, better and more spectacular than any of their largely benign competition.Ĭharlie was no stadium afficionado, but he understood the basic economics. Now reaping the dividends of their peerless fame as they never did on their first go-round, they may have been en route to the status later disdainfully described by the New York Times as ‘an organization with long off-seasons and unending profits’. The 1990s began with Charlie’s uncredited role as design consultant with the Rolling Stones becoming more significant than ever.
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