I have a friend who excels at designing stuff that is totally off the hook. His forays into unbridled turf on his lighting designs is legendary. He even calls his company “Lite Alternative.” I met Paul Normandale about 15 years ago. The Beastie Boys were going on tour, and Paul was hired as their designer. Paul had designed an enormous structure that was close to 200 feet long by 200 feet wide. The band would play on a circular stage in the round. The fans at a Beastie Boys show are totally out of control. He was going to use the 20,000 fans as his set…Designing outside the box is the only way that Paul designs. I once saw a show where he used so much pyrotechnics that the light illuminating from all the flames and sparks was pretty much the only light on stage for a song or two. I’ve seen him invent crazy curved metal pieces for Coldplay that fly lights in bizarre arrays. When Paul goes for an effect, he wants the maximum response. Some people may be content to use four confetti machines at a show and douse the front 20 rows of people. Paul will settle for nothing short of 20 machines and wants every fan in the venue to be pulling streamers out of their hair. I stopped in to see a Kings of Leon show last year. Paul had amassed a giant wall of assorted old battered conventional lighting fixtures and strapped them together in flying carts. It looked like a giant pile of junked lights randomly stacked from the floor to the ceiling. But they all worked. How does one come up with ideas like this?
—Nook Schoenfeld, from “LD-at-Large,” PLSN, Sept. 2011
