Drawing upon our four decades of designing shows with Johnny Marr, Lightswitch was able to create a critically acclaimed, bold, and modern retrospective of his forty-year career – not to mention a triumphant christening for the new Aviva Studios in Manchester.
Our relationship with Johnny Marr stretches all the way back to before the founding of Lightswitch! Johnny has always been an innovator and an inspiration to musicians and fans alike, renowned for his wide range of work including The Smiths, Talking Heads, Bryan Ferry, TheThe, Modest Mouse, and Hans Zimmer, as well as his acclaimed solo career, which spans a decade and four albums.
Johnny was invited to be the premiere concert at the new Aviva Studios in Manchester, which opened in December of 2023 with two sold-out nights. Aviva Studios is a major publicly funded landmark and new cultural space for Manchester, as well as the largest public arts project in the UK in nearly thirty years. Johnny took his usual thoughtful approach to this opportunity and decided not to do “just another gig.” Rather, he put together a retrospective of his forty years of beloved hits, performed by his rock-solid band and backed up by a full symphony orchestra of hand-picked musicians from across the north of Britain – a true “Northern powerhouse” conducted by Fiona Brice.
As he has for more than thirty years, Johnny enlisted Lightswitch for lighting, production, and media design. Working in lockstep with Mat Bancroft, Johnny’s acclaimed creative director, we conceived of a show that embraced the heritage of Johnny’s music, its northern roots, and the amazing architecture of Aviva Warehouse – a soaring space that holds more than 5,000 people.
Rather than using a more traditional approach like projection or a screen in a frame of LEDs, we chose to embrace the bold silver acoustic panel treatment of Aviva and project right onto the walls of the space. In front of this, we arrayed the orchestra in a functional but non-traditional layout, with Johnny front and center. A consciously asymmetrical lighting design created bold and interesting patterns of light beams. Our design also featured the world debut of the innovative Sandbox DB10 fixtures, an entirely new and groundbreaking hybrid spatial lighting device that combines transparent LCD, video, and light.
Content was curated by Lightswitch and Mat Bancroft and created by Mat, Riaz Gomez, David Proven, and Lightswitch. We used the photographic work of Nalinee Darmrong, Chris Hunt, Pat Graham, and Jon Shard.
Even for a bold celebration like this, it was critical that we practiced our core tenet of pragmatic design, creating a design that was memorable, cost-effective, and logistically efficient. With only two days to load in, program, and rehearse an entirely new show, we had to make wise decisions. Drawing upon our four decades of designing shows with Johnny, we were able to lean into a huge history of iconic aesthetics. Just as Johnny’s performance musically honored the past with bold new arrangements, we took aesthetics familiar to Johnny's audience and revisited and refreshed them with cutting-edge technology. The result was a critically acclaimed, bold, and modern retrospective of a forty-year career, not to mention a triumphant christening for an iconic new addition to the Manchester arts scene. The Guardian, The Times, NME, and many others praised not only Johnny’s amazing performance and orchestration but also our bold lighting and visual design. One could even say, “There is a light that never goes out…”
photography by Riaz Gomez & Chris Ewington
