by Colin Baldwin
Circa 1972’ Roger Hind convinced me to bring my basic collection of lights and effects to his community church one Sunday evening. I very much enjoyed lighting up the band and soon after started to get serious about stage lighting. Roger came up with the name “PJF” (Purvis J Flangecrunche) I came up with “Vibe Lightshows”. We decided to call it PJF Vibe, for a while anyway. 
Jands had started manufacturing basic lighting equipment such as strobes, music-colour switchers and banks of mirror-back lights in boxes. We built our own mirrorballs, we glued each piece of mirror onto a fibreglass ball. This was very time consuming and it didn’t take long for the pieces of mirror to fall off. I started to collect Strand Pat 23’s, 123’s and colour wheels to light bands with. 
There were no lighting hire companies to speak of other than Strand Electric that only supplied fixtures suitable for theatre. As my business grew I became increasingly frustrated with the range of lighting equipment that was available for hire.
My career took a turn when Grahame (Yogi) Harrison dropped into my 2-bedroom office at Crows Nest (near North Sydney) and said, ”Hey CB do you want to come on the road with me and “Hush”. I said “What’s Hush?”, after he enlightened me that Hush is a glam-rock band, I said “Why not.”. I then spent the next 3 to 4 years touring Australia. The original Hush lighting rig consisted of four Strand Pat 23 spots and four Strand Pat 123 fresnel mounted on stands that were not telescopic. We had to bolt the lights onto the stands and then tilt them upright into position every time.
Controlling the lights was another big issue, Strand lighting only hired-out basic 2-preset Miniset consoles and dimmers. Up until then, I controlled the lights with domestic rocker switches mounted on timber boards. You can imagine how nimble one’s fingers became after months and months of switching lights in time with the music using household lighting switches!
Another big change in my career came when I met Phil Burkinshaw, he introduced me the Par 64 Can, I was immediately blow away when I first saw banks of 1000w Par Orange 64 Cans mounted on pneumatic hoists. I embraced this new equipment and set out to take on big-time stage lighting.
Frustrated with domestic rocker switches and 2-preset Strand desks as my lighting control, I approached Rob Nicholls in the Strand Lighting hire department and asked if Strand could mount flash buttons on a Strand SP30 console for me? Stand later agreed and after further discussion they also installed a 10-channel pin-matrix in my newly acquired SP30, so I could patch desk channels together to make scene-masters. This was a very exciting time in my life as I not only finally found a way to control lights properly, but I also found a way of creating multiple lighting scenes that increased the creative dimension of the shows I worked on. 
After Hush I toured the country with Marcia Hines, John Paul Young and Dragon and during this time I started to amass a large inventory of lighting equipment, which included steel Par Cans, Leko spotlights and Ceitex dimmers. Jands built me the first steel box-truss that could span an entire 40’ (12m) stage. The truss was rigged to a pair of Geni Lifters. Banks of par 64 lights were bolted onto 1” square steel tube and clamped to the truss. Up until then, front stage lighting was nearly always lit from the front corners of the stage using pneumatic towers of lights.
From here I decided to build my own lighting desks, I called them “Trogboards” (In reference to Troglodyte or lighting person) The early Trogboards were not reliable as the wiring was dodgy and good components were hard to come by. Jands had by this time started to manufacture lighting desks, not without similar problems, like the Aurora that had the unfortunate habit of outputting all channels to “full”, which could be somewhat of a problem during a live show. Jands produced the JL24 series, which became very popular. Richard White helped deliver a 60ch Trogboard that toured with Cliff Richard. After building several Trogboards I decided it was too hard and gave up on manufacturing.
I was fortunate to be the first lighting designer to use Vari*lites in Australia in 1988. As you could imagine this new moving light technology had a massive impact on me. I first saw moving lights in Los Angeles some years before, during a Steve Miller Band concert at The Greek Theatre – Pan Command by Morpheus Lights were very basic and technically challenged, however the impact of seeing 8 lights move in sequence was a milestone in creative lighting technology.
As the industry grew I invested in a variety of lighting equipment. I visited LA in 1980, saw Queen live at The Forum and brought back an Alderham 804 lighting desk to Australia.
Fortunately I had a camera handy on many occasions to record some on the milestones.
