How I Did That: Peter Gabriel Grows Up

Peter Gabriel's Growing Up Tour started in Germany and finished up in London. A slightly downsized version of the 2003 show, the main elements remained: in the round with the same stunts, revolving stage, and flown “heaven” stage. To make the tour viable, the lighting was re-worked.

Patrick Woodroffe was involved with the design this time, but most of the original designs were kept. The lighting is based on a 13m circle trimmed at 40' above the stage and four spoke trusses radiating out from the circle.

Lighting included 48 High End Systems X Spot Extremes, 24 Studio PC Beams, 20 Martin Professional Atomic 3000 Strobes, 8 Arri 5k fresnels with Wybron Color Changers, 14 nine-lite moles, and seven ETC Source Fours®. Dimmers and mains distro were, as last year, flown above stage. All lighting and rigging was supplied by London's Neg Earth Lights.

This year, we didn't use the High End Catalyst mirror heads on Barco projectors. I missed these, but we kept the media servers for playing back onto the video screens. We had a vast amount of video from Gabriel's studio.

Since we no longer had the Catalyst system, we used a number of custom gobos made for the X Spots by Projective Image in London, which included images like Peter's face, a baby's face, and a variety of abstract images.

Control was via Wholehog® III and mini wing with another Wholehog III as tracking back-up.