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An article appeared on “The Bulletin”, Friday, August 22, 1980, the day Queen were going to play at the Philadelphia’s Spectrum<\/p>\nAn article appeared on “The Bulletin”, Friday, August 22, 1980, the day Queen were going to play at the Philadelphia’s Spectrum<\/p>\n
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Approximately 18,000 fans will pack the Spectrum tonight to see the British rock band Queen strut its stuff. Most of them will take for granted the regal array of lights, rigging, stage and sound equipment that illumine, frame and otherwise\u00a0project the quartet’s elaborate aura.<\/p>\n
But at a time when only a handful of pop acts can afford to mount major concert tours, the logistics of moving, staging and re-moving these extravaganzas fall to such fire-tried experts as Gerry Stickells, without whom the Queen fans might have nothing to cheer about.<\/p>\n
While Stickells is one of those behind-the-scenes rock people who’ll probably never make the cover of Rolling Stone, this soft-spoken 38-year-old Englishman is widely recognized as the top tour and produc\u00adtion manager in the business.<\/p>\n
In addition to shepherding the last few Queen tours \u2014- which have employed everything from a 5,000-pound electric crown to new lighting systems of truly awesome intensity \u2014 Stickells’ company has done the same for acts diverse as Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and Abba. He’s in steady demand, but can now afford the selectivity that comes with a peerless reputation.<\/p>\n
“You do this sort of thing for the money as much as anything, but if it\u2019s a tour that’s going to make life particularly difficult, I’d rather not,” said Stickells by phone the other day from New York City. He’d reached the mid-point of Queen’s 44-city American tour, and he sounded tired but in good humor. The tour was progressing “pretty smoothly,” or at least as smoothly as any operation that runs almost daily on four 44-foot trailers, two buses, private aircraft, and with 22 technicians and enough lighting and sound equip\u00adment to suck up “several million watts” of electricity. The ultimate cost of the entire production will probably exceed $1 million, and it’s not likely that Queen will do much more than break even financially,\u00a0\u00a0 although major rock tours more than anything else are designed to generate album sales \u2013 in this case, for Queen’s latest <\/i>Elektra disc, “The Game\u201d. With recession forcing virtually everybody’s hands these days, did Queen and Stickells have to cut back on the sort of lavish show their audiences expect?<\/p>\n