SMALL PRINT:BURNING MAN festival is 25 years old this month and will mark its silver anniversary with the help of some Irish friends. Dubliner Diarmaid Horkan and the International Arts Megacrew he co-heads have been selected to design and construct The Temple of Transition, the largest art commission awarded by the festival.
The spiritual heart of Burning Man, the temple provides a place for people to remember friends and family that have passed on, a peaceful plot based around grieving and loss. “The idea is that when you go out to the temple you bring a painful memory with you,” says Horkan. “You write the memory on its wall and when the entire community gathers around the temple at the end of the week and watches it burn, your painful memory goes up in smoke as well.”
The very first temple, built in 2000, was meant to be an artwork with no explicit intention. But on the way to the festival, a member of the crew constructing it died in a motorcycle accident and the perspective changed. The temple became a memorial and there has been one at Burning Man every year since.
This is the first year international artists have been chosen to design the project and Horkan is planning on building the largest temple yet (pictured above).
“It’s 220 ft wide and 180 ft deep and will have five 58 ft towers surrounding a central tower, all hexagonal. The outer towers will be linked to the central tower by ramp and each tower contains large Gothic arches, pagoda-style roofs and decorative panels featuring Celtic, Maori or Paiute design.”
Construction began in May with 150 volunteers from all over the world decamping to Reno, including seven architects, three structural engineers, quantity surveyors, riggers, machinery operators and globally based fabriceers.
“The temple is a an emotional project for everybody involved. And anyone who gets a chance to work on it jumps at it. We had more than 600 applications from people wanting to give their life over to the project for three months.
“People have regular lives and in this regular life, bad things happen,” he says, “and they take this bad thing to the temple and release it. Frequently, it marks a new phase in people’s lives and they feel obliged to enable that experience for other people. That’s pretty much the common experience for every on.”
Super stars don't guarantee super groups
HOW'S THIS for a motley musical crew: Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, soul starlet Joss Stone, reggae heir Damian Marley, former Eurythmic Dave Stewart, and Slumdog Millionairecomposer AR Rahman. Get them all in a room together – as Stewart did – and you have Superheavy, a band guaranteed to get attention by virtue of its famous members.
Stewart was inspired to form Superheavy by the clashing sound systems wafting into his house above Jamaica’s St Ann’s Bay. “I said to Mick, ‘How can we make a fusion?’” Stewart says. “We wanted a convergence of different musical styles,” adds Jagger. The band has been working in secret for the past 18 months, and its debut single, Miracle Worker, has just been released, with an album to follow on September 9th.
Every now and then, pop stars feel the urge cluster in supergroups. Not content with their own bands, they seek out other stars to team up with – and with all that mega-talent in one room, sparks are bound to fly. Often, though, the resulting sound is less than super.
It all started with the “Million Dollar Quartet” of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, who gathered in Sun Studios in the 1950s for an impromptu jam. Cream and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were early supergroup successes. More recently, we’ve had Chickenfoot, featuring Sammy Hagar, Joe Satriani and Chad Smith from Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer took it to ludicrous heights with flying pianos, revolving drumkits, Persian rugs and triple live albums.
The supergroup with the most famous members must be The Traveling Wilburys (Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne).
Here are some of rock history’s more unusual supergroups:
The Dirty Mac Formed for a one-off appearance on the Rolling Stones TV special, Rock and Roll Circus, the Dirty Mac featured John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Unsurprisingly, Yoko also sat in.
The Backbeat Band To capture the sound of The Beatles in Hamburg, the makers of the 1994 film Backbeat put together Dave Grohl from Nirvana, Mike Mills from REM, Greg Dulli from Afghan Whigs and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. Amazingly, they nailed the Fab Four.
The Bens If your name’s not Ben, as in Ben Folds, Ben Kweller and Ben Lee, then you’re not in.
The Greedy Bastards Punk and rock called a Christmas truce in 1979 when Phil Lynott and Scott Gorham from Thin Lizzy recorded a festive single with Steve Jones and Paul Cook from The Sex Pistols.
NKOTBSB Boyband mash-up of New Kids on the Block and Back Street Boys
