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Get the Gear A Pro’s essentials
Pyro Pete
KISS, The Rolling Stones, Mötley Crüe… if anyone wants to blow things up on stage, Peter Cappadocia is their man. Here’s how the mayhem gets made
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1. Road cases We have our own 14.6 semitruck. An average tour has 10 to 20 road cases on it, most tailor made for the equipment. 2. Pyrodigital Consultants controller Typically in a show, we’d have one controller and 50 to 100 modules laid out around the stage. You put in the program, or the script, and it gives the musical cues for fire shooting.
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3. Whirlwind splitter It’s for redirecting cables. There is one cable coming in and six cables coming out. Those cables attach to the firing modules (4) from the board.
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4. Pyrodigital Consultants field module Each one of those slots is one channel, and it connects to the controller. If you want number one to go off, you write a program for it. Once you write the script for a show, you download it, and the controller communicates with module.
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words: Andreas Tzortzis. photography: mike basher
5. Fire button It’s an awesome feeling. You press that button and the whole arena goes ‘ooh … or ahh… and you’re like, ‘Thank you, thank you that was me.’ The button is all-powerful. 6. CO2 syphon tanks We get them from local compressed gas companies and they weigh about 110kg. They power the CO2 heads that shoot jets of smoke into the air. Those jets have little LED lights at their base, so you can change the colour (at the edges of the photo). 7. Honeywell burner control system 7800 Series This is what controls the pilot light and ignition system for all of our flame effects. This is the brains behind the flame bar.
8. Stage & Effects stadium flame head, or gun We use this at outdoor shows. It creates a column of flame about 25-30m high and 3m in diameter. With The Rolling Stones, we were running three stadium guns. 9. Stage & Effects 2.5m burn bar This is used wherever we need to get a wall of flame. It can shoot up to 3m. It’s powered by the accumulator (cropped out of the picture), which holds the propane gas supply. 10. McMaster-Carr safety switch/dead switch We’re always on the side of the stage and under the stage. You have to be on this switch for all of it to work. When you have your foot on that switch, you press the button. 11. Fire extinguisher We carry several different types: CO2 and dry chemical extinguishers. We use them all the time. Gene Simmons would wipe his face and throw the towel and sometimes it would land right next to the jets, and it would start smouldering. 12. Liquid CO2 tank It holds up to 900 litres, and it creates a fog effect. It works well if you’ve got some moisture in the air. 13. The wispy goatee I dye it using L’Oréal red hair colour, otherwise it’s grey and I look like an evil Santa Claus. 14. CO2 jets The CO2 units are new and made for us and these are the prototype. The LED lights at their base can be changed to a different colour. Their unveiling will be the 30 of them we use on the upcoming KISS tour. Light it up at www.stgfx.com
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