Production Credits
Jean Michel Jarre Destination Docklands London 1988
Conceived by: Jean Michel Jarre
Artistic collaborator; Michel Geiss
Executive Producer: Francis Dreyfus
Artistic Director: Mark Fisher
Production coordination: Arnaud de la Villesbrunne
Production manager: Roger Abriol
Assistant production manager: Anne Slizewicz
Stage Manager: Olivier Matabon:
Lighting Design: Jaques Rouveyrollis
Pani Images: Marie_Jeanne Gauthe, Paul Souverbie
Artistic coordinator: Franck Dancelme
Projection & effects: Christian Miquel
Pyrotechnics: Daniel Azancot
Costumes for J-M Jarre: Yohji Yamamoto
Stage Lighting director: Antonio De Carvalho
Architectural lighting director: Maurice Giraud
Production Design: Fisher Park Limited
Graphic Design; Four I Limited
Mark Fisher writes:
The Destination Docklands concert was originally planned as a single concert on 24 September 1988. The concert site was on the north side of the Royal Victoria Dock, (the western of the two Royal Docks) in Newham, East London. The dock, opened in 1855, is over 1.5Km long from east to west. The dock closed to commercial shipping in 1980, and the London Docklands Development Agency (LDDA) started a program of site clearance to prepare the site for redevelopment. The 20C multi-storey warehouses and factories lining the south side of the dock were left intact (some have subsequently been demolished). Two-storey concrete framed warehouses lined the north side of the dock. The warehouses at the eastern end were demolished by 1985, leaving a derelict landscape of concrete ground floor slabs sprouting tufts of rebar and mounds of rubble that stretched almost one kilometre along the dockside from the eastern gate. Between the warehouse pads and the dock edge were rail tracks for the travelling cranes used to transfer cargo from the ships to the warehouses; approximately 20 cranes remained on the dockside.
Jarre planned to stage the concert in front of this large open area of land, with the audience on the dockside and the band on a floating stage in the water. During 1987 he was working on his album, Revolutions. The album explores ideas about the social impact of the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent transition into the information age. The closure of London Docks in 1966 was an early warning sign of the transition of the UK economy from manufacturing into services. By 1987, the development of Canary Wharf, (now a rival financial centre to the City of London’s ‘Square Mile’), a mile to the west of the concert site, was underway. So the abandoned docklands of East London were a resonant venue for a concert that expanded the historical and futuristic themes of the album.
The LDDA was interested in bringing their redevelopment work at the Royal Docks to the attention of the public. They made the site available for the concert, and agreed to provide value-in-kind support to the project. They provided a generous amount of PR support. But on the ground, their support was limited to doing work that they would need to do anyway to facilitate the development of the site.
When the production team first visited the site, piles of concrete-crusher rubble stood between the empty floor slabs of the demolished warehouses. The slabs of the old warehouse floors were level with the dockside, but the land fell away from the dock so that on the landward side the slabs were 1.5m above grade. This meant that the audience would need to stand on the old warehouse floor slabs if they were to see anything that took place close to water level. At the back of the warehouses, roadways and rail tracks had been torn up to leave water-filled craters as deep as a man. Walking around the site in daylight was challenging, in darkness it was dangerous. Before the public could be safely admitted to the site, it would be necessary to fill holes, grade roads, cut back exposed steelwork, build staircases and barricades, and install safety lighting and public lavatories. The access to the site was by gates at the east and west ends, over one mile apart. The closest public transport, Custom House station on the North London Line, was adjacent to the site but separated from it by railway lines. The dogleg walk from the station to the concert via the east gate site was over one mile.
The local authority responsible for licensing the event was the London Borough of Newham. They made it clear to the promoter that the concert would need to comply with the ‘Code of Practice for Pop Concerts’, the document used at that time to set conditions for licensing large public events. The code defined common sense conditions for public access and escape, strength of barricades, safety lighting, lavatories etc. The scale of the project was huge, and it was obvious that the infrastructure works necessary to make the concert site comply with the code would cost a lot of money. The promoter decided to go ahead with the concert, gambling that he could pay for the works from ticket sales revenue.
Over the summer, site preparations proceeded at a desultory pace, and by early September it was clear that they would not be completed in time for the concert on the 24th. Notwithstanding the fact that 170,000 tickets had already been sold, the licensing authority (alert to the fact that any accidents due to inadequate preparation would be their responsibility) refused to grant a license until the infrastructure works were complete. The promoter had no choice but to postpone. The single concert was rescheduled as two concerts on Saturday October 8 and Sunday October 9. By presenting the concert on two nights, the promoter reduced the audience at each concert by 50%, and so reduced the land area that they had to make safe.
To comply with the terms of the license, a bridge was built across the railway tracks to link Custom House station to the concert site. The mounds of rubble were spread over the roadways, graded to fill the holes and rolled flat to make pedestrian walkways. The tufts of rebar were shorn from the warehouse slabs, seating grandstands were erected, and barricades were bolted to the slabs to keep the crowds from the dock edge and from the drops at the back. Access stairs were built everywhere, and hundreds of portaloos and mobile lighting towers were installed. The entertainment license was finally granted five days before the first concert. The extensive infrastructure works meant that the concerts cost far more than the promoter expected. The limited company that he set up to produce the event went bankrupt shortly after the second show, leaving many entertainment industry suppliers in France and the UK out of pocket.
The concert design planned to utilize the north facing facades of the grain mills on the south side of the dock as projection surfaces. Spillers Millenium Mill stood at the eastern end of the site. The CWS mill stood opposite the stage and royal box. At the western end of the site, the buildings had already been demolished to make way for redevelopment. To balance the visual composition for the audience, a large scaffolding wall (35m tall, 60m wide) was built on the site and sheeted with a white rip-stop fabric projection screen. The high winds on the night of the first concert ripped some of the sheeting away from the scaffolding, but the wall held firm. The sheeting was replaced for the second night.
The graphic design for the projections expanded the themes of Revolutions and the other songs played in the show. The running order for the concert gives a good idea of the themes:
Part 1: Industrial Revolution, featured the Industrial Revolution suite from the album. The images conjoined historical references from the start of the Industrial Revolution with images from the climax of the machine age. Thus Queen Victoria found herself juxtaposed against Sputnik, and for the logo of the show, a silhouette of a dockyard crane was juxtaposed against a satellite dish.
Part 2: Swinging Sixties, included ‘Computer Weekend’ and ‘London Kid’ (with Hank Marvin live on stage). The images drew on traditional 60’s graphics like the Union Jack, juxtaposing them with images of contemporary youth.
Part 3: The Nineties, included ‘Tokyo Kid’ ‘Revolutions’ and several pieces from ‘Rendez-Vous’. In the 80’s Tokyo was a visual reference point for the future, seen in Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’ and William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels. The songs and the projections referenced these ideas.
Part 4: The Final, included ‘The Emigrant’. Jarre anticipated the fact that the final product of the information age would be social globalization, the creation of a world in which we are all emigrants, shorn of our native identities without even leaving home.
As was normal for Jarre’s concerts, the projection images were printed in black and white onto 250mm wide scrolls of mylar film and coloured by hand. This created transparencies with the high contrast and good light transmission. The transparencies were projected using Panni theatrical projectors with 12Kw lamphouses.
Numerous lasers, twelve reconditioned WW2 carbon-arc searchlights and fifty ‘Sky-Tracker’ xenon searchlights were placed on the roofs of the grain elevators, the control cabins of the grain loading hoists, and in strategic locations on the south side of the dock. A very large amount of fireworks was distributed to firing sites along the whole length of the dock.
In early discussions, the plan was for Jarre to perform the concert on a floating stage that would travel the length of the dock during the concert. This was later reduced to a crossing of the dock from south to north. In the event, the cost of motorizing the floating stage was prohibitive and plans to move it during the show were abandoned long before construction started in July. The stage was built at the CWS wharf on the south side of the dock and towed to its mooring on the north side, in front of the royal box. It remained on station throughout the rehearsals and the concerts. The stage (designed and engineered by Jonathan Park) was built on top of a raft of twelve Thames lighter barges tied together by rented Bailey bridge trusses. The scaffolding structure was approximately 30m x 40m. It accommodated a choir of 300 local schoolchildren, Jarre’s team of musicians, Hank Marvin in person, a Turkish flautist, and Sufi and Balinese dancers. In addition to the technical equipment for the concert, the structure housed green rooms for the choir and band, rooms for technicians, generators and lavatories.
What the stage conspicuously lacked was a roof. Rescheduling the concerts to late October exposed the adventure to the full force of the British weather. The Saturday night was freezing cold and windy; the Sunday night was equally cold with the added thrill of driving rain. The wind and low cloud played havoc with the fireworks, but the extreme weather added a sense of heroism to the project. As Jarre said on the night: “…we have had one or two difficulties in the past few weeks, but… you know, Frogs like water." The Saturday night concert was broadcast live by BBC Radio 1 and French NRJ radio. The Sunday night concert was filmed by Mike Mansfield and released on VHS.
Between 1976 and 1983 Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park collaborated on a number of projects. In 1984 they formalized their working relationship as the Fisher Park Partnership. Their partnership was dissolved in 1994.
