Stufish: Meet the architects who make U2's theatrical dreams come to life

You wouldn’t expect to find the glamour of Madonna, Mick Jagger and Harry Styles on a dingy side street near London’s St Pancras station.

But tucked away behind an off-licence is the place where the world’s most famous rock stars and performers go to have their theatrical dreams made into reality.

It is Stufish, the leading designer of the world’s biggest rock concert sets, live events and shows.

Unless you’re in showbiz, you probably won’t have heard of it, but name any live event where you’ve been transported to a higher plane by magical sets, props and lights, and the chances are Stufish was in the background.

U2, Madonna, the Rolling Stones, the London and Beijing Olympics, Pink Floyd, Cirque du Soleil – all their jawdropping extravaganzas have emerged from the small but skilled team at the Studio Fisher.

Squeezed between brainstorming about Madonna in Miami, Bear Grylls at Wembley Arena and comedian Catherine Tate’s Live tour across the UK, chief executive Ray Winkler spares me an hour to talk through the business of what he calls “entertainment architecture”.

Small, neat and precise with his words, Winkler is not the mad genius I’d expected him to be.

Could this really be the guy whose team got Bono and the U2 boys to emerge from a 40 foot, motorised lemon on the PopMart tour (occasionally getting stuck, Spinal Tap-style)?

Well, yes he is. Winkler started at Stufish in 1996, and Pop Mart was his first tour, quickly followed by the Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon feast of fireworks, famed for its telescopic cantilever bridge from one stage to another.

In those days, rock tours were there to sell records and CDs. It seemed at times money was no object in the race to promote hugely profitable music sales. But the industry’s struggle to make money in the download era changed the dynamic of big touring. Now, it’s the tours themselves that have to make the money.

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Stufish’s is a juggling act: creating the most spectacular set a rock star’s ego can imagine, while making it easy and cost effective to pack away and set up in the next city a day later.

Doing that profitably means relentless planning, not just of the up-front cost of designing and building the set, but the logistics of touring it around the world. A show requiring 100 technicians needs to sell a lot more tickets than one needing only 50.

Technology has made a huge difference to the process, Winkler says, ranging from advances in steel engineering to new LED innovations which allow beautiful imagery to be spread on vast screens for big arenas.

Anyone who caught U2’s Innocence + Experience tour at the O2 this year will remember the magical show in which the screens became like an integral fifth member of the band, featuring images and cartoons that reacted to and even played with the musicians.

That kind of lighting would have been too heavy, too expensive and too draining of the National Grid until fairly recently.

But every tour is, of course, totally different. “We don’t have a house style because every client and every problem is unique. Someone like Madonna is a single act but with a large band and even bigger entourage of dancers . She’ll want a very different approach to U2, who are four people: vocal, bass, drums and guitar.”

Stufish – short for Studio Fisher – has always had its basis in rock. Right back to when late, lamented founder Mark Fisher made his name creating the vast, inflatable menagerie accompanying Pink Floyd’s Animals tour in 1977.

But in 2000, Stufish took a new turn when it won the contract for the Millennium Show at the London Dome. Unlike its touring stage sets for the Rolling Stones and the like, this was a highly technical, sit-down affair. And, for all the Press criticism of the Dome itself, the show – with music by Peter Gabriel - was a huge success.

At the same time, in Las Vegas, casino operators such as Steve Winn were changing the city from a largely male, gambling hangout to a more family-focused destination and were looking for crowd-pullers to bring in Mom, Pop and kiddies too.

MGM hit on Cirque de Soleil, which hired the director and playright Robert Lepage to direct. He had a plan to put on one of the largest and most technically complicated sit-down shows ever, and asked his friend Peter Gabriel if he knew anyone. Gabriel recommended Fisher without hesitation.

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Thus started a lucrative and jawdropping series of sit-down, semi-permanent stage collaborations with the Cirque team. A new business stream for Stufish was born.

Says Winkler: “It’s a fascinating market, because unlike a Rolling Stones set which you take down after the gig, you’re creating a permanent installation that affects the building interior and structure. As architects, we understood the nature of buildings and the nature of space.”

The next strategic move for Stufish came when it worked on the Beijing Olympics ceremony in 2008. As well as being predictably jawdropping, it won Stufish new contacts in China, where it has since been working with big clients including the property and cinema group Dalian Wanda to do touring shows, sit-down spectaculars and a third new string to the Stufish bow – designing actual theatre buildings.

Stufish has now designed several stunning entertainment complexes in vast new developments springing up for China’s burgeoning middle class. Whether shaped like vast Chinese porcelain cups or clusters of curved beesnests, they’re whacky, futuristic and fun.

“Again, it’s a completely different business model from our origins building rock'n'roll sets, with the huge liabilities, timeframes and responsibilities involved. But we like to think we’re bringing rock'n'roll into architecture, so what we’re doing is sexy and relevant to popular culture,” says Winkler.

The Chinese move has also seen it get into making entire productions, completing the one-stop-shop from architecture and set design to the end-to-end business of putting on a show.

The greatest challenge to Stufish was the sudden and early death of Fisher himself in 2013. Cancer took him so suddenly that there was no succession plan.

As well as chucking a bomb into the company structure, it affected Winkler “massively”.

Fisher had been the then-20-something Winkler’s external examiner when the young protégée was at Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Winkler chuckles that he thought the test went badly, but Fisher hired him straight afterwards. For years, the pair were Stufish’s only two designers. “He was a friend and he was a mentor,” says Winkler. ”Everything I know about the industry I learned from him.”

A large portrait of Fisher looks down benignly on the team of architects sitting at rows of desks in the airy studio today. Stufish survived his passing, and has actually grown since.

Says Winkler: “Stufish exists in spite of his death because he instilled an ethic into our studio’s design mentality that would survive the single point failure of a man passing away prematurely.

“For Mark, it was not just about a design made out of steel and glass and wood, it was ‘why was it there, what purpose does it serve, what is the story it tells?’ It was about the big picture, the cultural significance of what we were doing.”

U2’s long-time manager Paul McGuinness knew Fisher since the pair of them first worked together on the set of Zardoz, a sexy 1973 sci-fi movie with Sean Connery.

He says: “Mark was so clever, a unique guy. But Stufish should have a great future. As a team, they’ve executed some very crazy things over the years. They can take a rock star’s fantasy and turn it into a reality made of steel and fibreglass, then transport it around the world in trunks and trucks. They have an enormous wealth of experience.”

I wonder what are Winkler’s design influences. He answers in a beat: Peter Cook. Professor both to Winkler at the Bartlett and Fisher at the Architectural Association, Cook was one of the most famous avant garde architects of his generation, and a founder of the 1960s pop-meets-architecture movement Archigram. Themes included inflatable houses (remember Fisher’s Pink Floyd pigs?), bold sci-fi structures, and whacky, top heavy shapes, all of which have featured in Stufish’s sets and buildings.

Most of all, Archigram had a sense of anarchic fun, which Stufish aims to deliver in spades. “The idea is ‘anything goes, but you have to be intelligent about it,” says Winkler.

Ask Winkler his favourite creation so far and he flounders. “Oh my god, that’s like choosing your favourite candy from the box. I love all of them.” He thinks. “I guess there are some highlights – the Millennium show in Giza where we projected a 220m frog onto a pyramid, with the Egyptian army dressed as giant penguins. That was memorable. Or moments like Peter Gabriel and Yussuf Islam playing an ad hoc soundcheck in Cape Town for the Nelson Mandela Foundation. There was nobody in the stadium except a handful of people. That was just wonderful, very beautiful.”

The new gallery at the Science Museum designed by another late student of Peter Cook – Zaha Hadid - is causing a level of excitement that proves futuristic design isn’t going out of style. But what is the future for live entertainment?

Winkler, born and raised “like a native” by his German parents in Indonesia, takes the long view: “You can’t take it for granted, but we’ve grown pretty solidly whatever has happened. You see, bread and circuses have always existed – they seem to be human requirements. We’ll certainly keep catering for the circus part of it, whatever that may be.”