PLASA Show's Classic Gear Live Offers Chance to Meet the Experts

Classic Gear Live -- on Stand A78 at this year's PLASA Show, running from September 3 - 5 at London's Olympia -- offers a unique opportunity to get hands-on with some of the lighting and audio products that have shaped the industry, from the 1973 Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon PA to the pioneering Vari-Lite Artisan console and VL2 and VL4 moving lights that were featured in the band's shows a generation later; from the unique cutaway lighting fixtures that graced Strand Electric's famous West End showroom for years to the prototype and unique rep version of CCT's Silhouette spotlight, which shook up the fixture market; from the MMS memory lighting control that introduced the level wheel to the world to the custom mixing console that brought Cadac into the world of theatre.

But equipment is nothing without people, and Classic Gear Live will also offer a remarkable opportunity not just to see these remarkable products, but also to meet some of the people who made, sold, or made remarkable use of them.

Many of these experts will be available across much of the show, always happy to talk. But to help those looking to plan their days, there are a number of scheduled Meet the Expert times to guarantee you'll find people on the stand:

Sunday, September 3:

12pm: Jon Primrose, of the Theatrecrafts /Strand Archive website, on preserving the past one scanned document at a time.

1pm: Andrew Voller, lighting designer, programmer, and for many years Vari-Lite's Artisan training manager, talking about -- and winding back time by demonstrating -- the Artisan, VL2, and VL4.

2.30pm: John Wright, who built the very first prototype of the console, talking about Strand's MMS, a remarkable modular memory lighting control that is a memory control without being a computer control.

Monday, September 4:

11.30am: Don Hindle, who was managing director of CCT Lighting when it shook up lighting with the versatile Silhouette and Minuette fixtures, talking about the innovations that took CCT from being a rental company supplying small theatres in south London to a manufacturer whose products could be (and in fact, still are) found in theatres around the world.

12.15pm: Paul Johnson, from the Historic Stage Lighting Collective, talking about its work preserving and documenting generations of lighting equipment -- and attempting to re-discover such unique lighting arts as Fred Bentham's Colour Music.

1pm: Alan Luxford, who joined Strand Electric as a trainee in 1967 and only retired last year, talking about the cutaway Patt 23 and Patt 264 fixtures, which he looked after when running the company's demo theatre, and the MMS console, the first of which he helped install in 1973.

2.30pm: John Wright offers another chance to hear about his involvement in creating MMS and then making and supporting the generations of consoles that followed.

Tuesday, September 5:

11.30am: John Wright offering a repeat performance on the history of the MMS console for those not at the show on Sunday or Monday.

12pm: Dik Welland, who, as senior service engineer at Vari-Lite Europe during the 1980s, prepared and repaired Artisan consoles before they went out on some of the biggest shows in the world, talking about Vari-Lite's revolutionary products, which are still unique in many ways.

2.30pm: Don Hindle offers another chance to hear about the history of the Silhouette and CCT Lighting, for those not able to be there on Monday.

These will not be formal talks or presentations -- but rather a chance to meet, chat, and hear the stories of these remarkable products.

Also on hand throughout the show will be Chris Hewitt, of CH Vintage Audio, to talk about the audio equipment on the stand, which encompasses equipment used by Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, David Bowie, and The Beatles, and much more besides, and Rob Halliday who's been writing LSi magazine's Classic Gear column for more than 16 years and has spoken about some of these classics at previous PLASA Shows.

Others, unconfirmed because of their schedules, may turn up there as well.