Lyttelton 1978. 17-year-old Chris Simmons has quit his job as DJ at Christchurch’s Stables and Bumps nightclubs and is about to board a ship bound for Sydney. Also on board is the PA and lighting rig for Kiwi prog rockers Think. The band are hellbent on breaking into the tough Aussie rock circuit, and Chris is coming along on his first gig as a roadie.

More than 40 years later, Chris sits in his suburban Christchurch home surrounded by posters and photos from the dozens if not hundreds of tours and concerts he has helped stage both as a roadie and as one of the best lighting technicians in the business. The list of bands he has worked with is long and distinguished.

So many stories. Now Chris is getting them all down on paper and sifting through endless photos for a book that will tell his remarkable story.

Lugging gear for Think turned to lighting the band Airstrike, another bunch of young Kiwis cutting their teeth in Australia. After 18 months of relentless touring, the band christened Chris ‘Super Roadie’ and he was earning more and more attention for his lighting shows.

Chris rattles off the names and specs of the early lights he had to work with. These days there are cold LED lights and computer programs to flick the switches but back when Chris started out, he was dealing with up to 500 very hot lights and only two hands.

It was a time of experimentation too. The rules had yet to be written. Chris borrowed ideas where he found them, listened to everyone he could and in time started coming up with his own innovations. He was the first operator in Australia to start using robotic lighting and to storyboard the slide projections for a gig.

Life on the road brought risk and hardship. On tour with Tina Turner is 1982, he was involved in a truck crash. The next year, working on Midnight Oil’s 10-9-8 tour, he was setting up a stage deep in the Outback in 45deg heat. Everything was red. He knew he was part of history though.

Right in the middle of that tour, Chris got a call. How would he like to run the lighting for David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour of Australia and New Zealand the next year?

Of all the gigs he has lit, it’s clear that working on the Bowie tour is Chris’s highlight. “I was right above his head” working one of the follow spots, he says.

And Bowie? A really nice guy who looked after the crew and made sure there was always plenty of food.

These days kids do degrees in lighting and staging; Chris pretty much fell into the work. Top of his class in maths, he struggled with the rest. Labelled disruptive, he got kicked out of school at 14. Things weren’t looking too good for Chris until he decided to shape up and get his life together.

Since then, though, it’s been one hell of a ride with the rock ‘n’ roll circus. Time now to tell the story.