London

Salman Rushdie, novelist
‘In 1997 Laurie Anderson invited me to be part of her Meltdown at the Festival Hall. She said she had some amazing film footage about fire and did I have a text that could go with it? I chose a passage about a race riot from “The Satanic Verses”, and Philip Glass wrote some loops of music, which Laurie played around with at a small stage-side mixing desk. The whole thing – the blazing images on the movie screen behind me, the swelling and fading music, my reading, the whole multimedia collage – was put together without any rehearsal at all, and seemed incredibly exciting, at least to me. It felt like jazz.’
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David Gilmour, Pink Floyd guitarist
‘In 1964, when I was 18, I managed to buy tickets for six shillings and sixpence to see Bob Dylan at the Royal Festival Hall. I got a memorably dodgy lift hitchhiking from Cambridge, but it was a brilliant concert; just voice, acoustic guitar and harmonica, not at all like the gigs that were the norm at home. From that moment I came to see the Queen Elizabeth Hall as the home of a rather more eclectic sort of music. In 1969 it was unfortunately more electric than eclectic when I played there with Pink Floyd and during an afternoon sound-check got a bolt of rogue AC from my guitar that sent me flying backwards right over the drummer’s head to land several feet away, the other side of the drum kit.’

Jude Kelly, Southbank Centre artistic director
‘In 2004 I watched Brian Wilson – the acclaimed genius of my teenage years – being reborn on the stage of the Royal Festival Hall; then I turned my head and saw my two adolescent children becoming equally devoted fans. That “Smile” concert closed the generation gap.’

Fiona Shaw, actress
‘Of the great nights in the Royal Festival Hall, and there are many, the ones that really linger are the Alfred Brendel concert nights when the air was electric with him and his piano, but also the Patti Smith concert that I took part in for Meltdown 2005. I felt like a strange interloper in another age – lots of bands backstage all sitting dripping in talent and timelessness and me moving among them like a lost sheep, and the thrill of the audience as decades came together on one night!’

Peter Greenaway, filmmaker
‘I remember when The Hayward was being built, there was a big, big tree, abandoned – poor tree – squashed in among all the concrete, next to the Royal Festival Hall, and I think the second or third film I ever made [‘Tree’, 1966] was about this tree, about organic vegetation being crushed by ubiquitous concrete.’

Joanna Lumley, actress
‘I was first there in 1964, on a dark autumn evening, a Duke Ellington concert, London at its fabbest and my girl cousin and I in black eyeliner and heavily pancake-by-Max-Factored mouths. It seemed miles from Earl’s Court and Bond Street where I had just completed my Lucie Clayton modelling course. After the show we walked across Waterloo Bridge and down the Strand to a raffish bar somewhere near Trafalgar Square. Our escorts, older and bored with our spotty faces, ignored us: but mine, the handsomest man in London, put his coat over my shoulders and told me to grow up soon. This cemented in my mind that the Royal Festival Hall was the coolest place on the planet to listen to groovy music with indisputable in-crowders. Time rips by – concerts and exhibitions and events jangling one after the other, like trying to find a station on a dial – and suddenly I am a Governor of the Southbank Centre, lost during a board meeting; I had gone out to the lavatory and taken the wrong turning. I find myself standing backstage, in the wings, with a troupe of Russian male dancers. They watch me curiously and flex their feet. “Yes, you all look fine; please go ahead.” I back off the way I came. Now I am watching my husband conducting a carol concert for Sargent Cancer Care, the familiar songs warming our hearts and loosening our purse-strings; now I am in front of a packed Gala audience headed by the Prince of Wales, fundraising for the refurbishment of this strangely exotic hall. It’s what they call a “destination”; you only have to go there once and you’ll see what I mean.’

The above recollections are taken from ‘Rankin’s Front Row’, a two-year project collecting portraits and memories of Royal Festival Hall. For more memories, visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk/frontrow