Staging
There were many problems surrounding the tour for the album, including having little room on stage due to it being decorated with Stonehenge replicas. In a 2005 interview, Geezer Butler states that it was an error in the dimensions (feet vs. meters) that resulted in stones that were three times bigger:
| “ | It had nothing to do with me. In fact, I was the one who thought it was really corny. We had Sharon Osbourne’s dad, Don Arden, managing us. He came up with the idea of having the stage set be Stonehenge. He wrote the dimensions down and gave it to our tour manager. He wrote it down in meters but he meant to write it down in feet. The people who made it saw fifteen meters instead of fifteen feet. It was 45 feet high and it wouldn’t fit on any stage anywhere so we just had to leave it the storage area. It cost a fortune to make but there was not a building on earth that you could fit it into. | ” |
Ian Gillan recounted in interview that Stonehenge was indeed Geezer's idea, and that when asked for details by set buildings Light and Sound Design, Geezer simply said: "Lifesize". Filling three containers, it was too big for any stage, so only a small part of it was used at a time, but still the band and crew had problems edging between the monoliths.
Photos of the Born Again tour show that at least some of the stones were present on stage.
Early in the tour, there was also a dwarf that was dressed to look like the demon-infant from the album cover. The dimension problems and use of dwarfs bear strong similarities to the infamous Stonehenge scene in the movie This Is Spinal Tap, which was released a year after Sabbath's tour. This is undoubtedly a coincidence, however, because the "Stonehenge scene" was already in a 20-minute early demo of the film from 1982.
Read more about this topic: Born Again Tour 1983
Famous quotes containing the word staging:
“Such were the first rude beginnings of a town. They spoke of the practicability of a winter road to the Moosehead Carry, which would not cost much, and would connect them with steam and staging and all the busy world. I almost doubted if the lake would be there,—the self-same lake,—preserve its form and identity, when the shores should be cleared and settled; as if these lakes and streams which explorers report never awaited the advent of the citizen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)