Patrick Woodroffe has been collaborating with the Rolling Stones since the European tour of Tattoo You from 1982. He knows how Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and the rest of the band work on and off the stage. «The real privilege is seeing them rehearse», he says on Zoom connected from Arizona the day before a concert. «It's exciting even after all these years. Before going on a tour, they rehearse for at least three, four weeks. No stage costumes, no scenography, no smoke or special effects. And obviously no audience. Everyone arrives in their car, they greet each other, they take their instruments and in one way or another they start playing.”
And they keep playing and playing and playing rehearsing classics like Satisfaction And Gimme Shelter, but also pieces that they can decide to insert or remove from the lineup. For the tour of Hackney Diamondswhich left Houston in April, did a month of rehearsals in Los Angeles and prepared 60 to 70 songs.
“Crazy, right?” says Woodroffe, creative director and lighting designer at Woodroffe Bassett Design. “They maintained high standards of evidence even during the messiest periods of their history. When you see them like that, during rehearsals, you see a group of guitarists who just want to make music.”
What the spectators then see is obviously something completely different. In this latest tour, Jagger's figure is projected onto giant screens almost 6 meters high, the stage is 180 meters wide and 65 meters deep. In total, there are almost 2300 square meters of high-resolution LED screens.
Designed by Stufish Entertainment Architects, the stage weighs over 200 tons, the equivalent of about seventy Tesla cybertrucks. The tour requires the work of 200 people, 14 of whom are part of the video crew, including six operators who make it look like the Stones larger than life.
The idea is that of a virtual stage which is adapted during the concert. If the stage of the Steel Wheels at the end of the 80s it evoked a dystopian world and that of the tour of Voodoo Lounge of the mid-90s was a reflection of Internet culture, that of Hackney Diamonds it changes from song to song, as if it were a social profile being scrolled. And so, each song has a customized look, from the visuals to the lighting.
“We gave it a nice refresh,” says Ray Winkler, CEO and design director of Stufish Entertainment. «It's as if the stage has descended into digital media and this makes it contemporary and clean. We are not talking about a fixed scenography, but about images that are constantly changing.” Woodroffe explains it: «You see perhaps a simple and geometric building, and in a moment there is nature taking over, a second later there is the American flag like those of Jasper Johns». Everything, he adds, is designed so that there is a logic, an overall cohesion.
«In the month of rehearsals, the band prepared about half of the 12 songs of Hackney Diamonds. Four have been done live so far. The crew has prepared for a much larger number and is therefore able to not be caught off guard should the band decide to play more.”
The songs are divided into very distinct categories: the first songs of the show, the Richards songs, the home runs as Woodroffe calls the songs that close the main set, the encores. «Everything is structured in such a way that you can change a song in the set list without changing the feeling and tempo, without losing the flow or concatenation of the set». Winkler explains that this is a great collective effort: «It is a gigantic undertaking to make such a project a reality. There are many heroes who remain in the shadows and who contribute to success.”
In order to define the look and feel of the tour, Woodroffe previously worked closely with Jagger, drummer Charlie Watts, who died in 2021, and Mark Fisher, the founder of Stufish who died in 2013. They began working on it a year and a half before the debut. This time, after starting in the autumn with Jagger and Winkler, Woodroffe also illustrated the concept to Richards and Wood, and they also contributed. At that point they designed the sets, collaborated with the costume designers and commissioned videos from the Treatment studio, and then all met together again for the rehearsals and made the pieces fit together.
The design and lighting of the tour of Hackney Diamonds began to take shape with the album's launch last September in London. Some lighting ideas were tested during the October concert in New York. At that point, the tour wasn't yet confirmed, but Woodroffe and his team were convinced that it was only a matter of time, so they started working on it anyway with Winkler, Stufish and the company they entrusted with the creation of the video parts. In November, after a few months of production, the official announcement of the tour arrived. At that point they had plenty of time to perfect the project.
“We didn't want something too glossy,” explains Woodroffe. «The audience of a band like this is able to understand whether a performance is authentic or not. It's the soundtrack to everything's life, the audience and the Stones. They give us their music, it's a sort of embrace and it's something of fundamental importance.” Winkler says something similar: “At the end of the day, you want all the pieces to fit together to enhance the Stones' performance in front of those huge crowds.”
Woodroffe scheduled the tour's lighting in Chicago and reunited with the band in Houston for five days of rehearsals. «It was a thrill to see everything assembled for the first time and understand that we were on the right path. Once the first obstacles have been overcome, the fun part comes, and that is putting music and images together to create something unique.” After overseeing the first concert in Houston, Woodroffe did not immediately return home to England, but saw two more shows. As creative director, he made sure everything ran smoothly in New Orleans, where the Stones played Jazz Fest, and in Glendale, Arizona.
In case the band wants to plan another tour, Woodroffe is ready. «It is not possible to know when the Stones will give their last concert. Nobody knows. And not because it is information covered in who knows what mystery. Quite simply, this is how they do things. They finish a tour and go on vacation. Then the promoters propose new dates, they say yes and… we start again.”
From Rolling Stone US.