The era of psychedelic lighting — between 1965-68 — is redolent with the whiff of joss sticks, patchouli oil and Acapulco Gold, copies of the I-Ching, The Dice Man, The Whole Earth Catalogue and countless existentialist novels. Also de rigueur in every bedsit was the obligatory Oriental board game ‘Go’ — which requires at least two lifetimes to master.

    Projected light had grown up alongside psychedelic music imported from the American west coast in the mid-to-late ’60s, and the concurrent home-grown British progressive rock movement.

    The means of projecting a range of psychedelic, hallucinogenic lighting, erotica and mandalas, was at the very core of epidiascopic lighting.

    The legacy of oil wheel and slide projection quickly found its way into the artillery of the mobile DJ, and pioneers of some of the great progressive rock shows of the late ’60s and early ’70s were suddenly given a new lease of life by the onset of the discotheque industry.

    Although there were many practitioners, three people stand out as bridging the psychedelic era: Peter Wynne Willson, Neil Rice and John Lethbridge.

    Across the Atlantic, however, the technique employed was somewhat different from the UK: rather than boiling liquids in slide projectors early American exponents preferred using liquids in clock face bowls, nestling on overhead projectors.

    In 1994, the two proto-techniques merged — along with the best of ’90s technology — in a celebration of the ’60s lightshows at the LDI Convention in Reno. Promoted by High End Systems as a vehicle to launch Cyberlight, this was a timely opportunity for HES co-founder Lowell Fowler to take a fond look back.

    The basic projector blueprint — a condenser optical system comprising mirror, lamp, primary condenser, heat filter, secondary condenser and focusing lens — set the design formula for a creative wave of early experimentation and customisation.

    There was an explosion of lightshows, some featuring frontiersmen who are still around today. Some of the more notable included Cyberdescence and Crab Nebula (founded by Pat Chapman — who later started Entec at the Marquee Club, and became an acknowledged, published expert on curry) — Acidica and Alpha Centauri (now better known as A.C. Entertainment Technologies Ltd).

    They were even joined by some of their American brethren. The link was made when Joe’s Lights and The Joshua Lightshow, residents at Fillmore East in New York, crossed the Atlantic in the early 1970s to perform at new rock venues, the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park and Rank Leisure’s bold new Sundown Theatre experiment — converted cinemas in heavily-populated suburban areas of London — masterminded by the seminal influence of the great entrepreneur, John Conlan, that persists to this day.

    The belt and braces art of the early pioneers created an idiom that modern industry, for all its sophistication, just cannot lose its love affair with. Welcome to the projection revolution of the ’70s.

PETER WYNNE WILLSON:
A WHEEL TURNS FULL CIRCLE
In 1994 — the same year as the High End Systems extravaganza — Peter Wynne Willson was reunited with Pink Floyd for their ground-breaking Division Bell world tour. Brought in by LD Marc Brickman, he modified the show first used to light the band nearly 30 years previously.

    “The strongest link between the two eras was the liquids,” remembers Wynne Willson. “The Floyd tour managed to bridge the gap between the 250W projections of the ’60s and 7kW Xenon projection in massive stadia in the ’90s.

    “Also, the liquid techniques used on the tour, including a version of clock glass and pumped liquid slides, were very similar. The 7kW Telejector was adapted by Wynne Willson Gottelier [WWG] to convert into an overhead during the gig, for the clock glass type effects, just as in the days of yore with the Aldis Tutors. For the operator, a female, it was like working over a hot stove!” The set also included four ‘Daleks’, specially-devised by WWG (see later).

    It is no coincidence that the Floyd’s original madcap frontman, Syd Barrett, wrote ‘Astronomy Domine’ (the subject of Wynne Willson’s lighting regeneration on that tour) while living in the latter’s flat in London’s Cambridge Circus, or that Pink Floyd’s production manager, Robbie Williams, had also flirted with the equally legendary Krishna Lights, the first organised disseminators of projected lighting and effects back in the 1960s. And so a gap spanning nearly three decades was bridged.

    Wynne Willson started life in pure theatre, amid a sea of Strand Pattern 49s, groundrows and footlights, rheostat dimmers and twin preset desks. His first projectors were adapted from theatre lights. “After working in provincial theatre I arrived at the New Theatre (now the Albery) and anything they chucked out I rehashed.”

    Later, as The Pink Floyd’s lighting designer, he was initially using flashing spots for projection at places like the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, but this soon made way for projected patterns derived from both liquids and polarising effects.

    He remembers: “I used to use little spots with Pattern 23-style optics in four groups of four as footlights with Floyd; they had a very fast rise time and a nice focusing system.”

    His three-floor flat in Cambridge Circus became something of a cultural hub, with the tenants heavily influenced by the Oriental cults and religions so popular at the time. And when Syd Barrett moved in (remaining there for a year or so) he was the catalyst in bringing Wynne Willson on board with his band.

    Wynne Willson’s peers at the time were performance artist/photographer Mark Boyle’s Sensual Laboratory, which worked extensively with Soft Machine, and Joe Gannon, who had emerged from the cultural melting pot of W11.

    Although UFO in Tottenham Court Road was the nearest place to a residency, during 1967 Floyd gave numerous performances at leading European venues before touring America — and the UK in following year — with the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

    “UFO was undoubtedly the proving ground of the psychedelic lightshows and Mark Boyle did a lot of fabulous work there,” recalls Wynne Willson.

    Another lodger at Cambridge Circus was Jimmy Doody, who founded the seminal Krishna Lights in 1968, which commercialised psychedelic lighting. Also on board at Krishna was Keith Canadine, who later became one of the co-founders of Optikinetics.

    “Jimmy lived under the bench of my workshop for a while — he was interested in material you could sell because everything to that date had been wet, and so he started sealing slides. I remember I had done an acrylic liquid wheel at a gig at the Marquee Club but it wasn’t sealed... you put the liquid in and it was the meniscus that would stop it from running out. But I think it was Jimmy who developed the sealed liquid wheel, and took out a patent which he later licensed or sold to Optikinetics.”

    But Wynne Willson’s stint with Floyd was driven by the opportunity to produce live lightshows. He remembers: “I provided liquid projection, colour effects, flashing spots, polaroid projections, and injected liquid effects, quite different from sealed slides/wheels.”

    His contract with Floyd was £20 a week and 5% of the gross. The early gigs were all around London — Eel Pie Island in Twickenham, The Roundhouse, UFO and various art colleges. “And that’s where it started to expand,” says Wynne Willson.

    “We would travel further afield when the Brian Morrison Agency started booking the band. There was a little tour of the States that hit the West Coast, which was staggering. We played in Los Angeles and at the Winterland in San Francisco with Janis Joplin and Procol Harum. There was a resident lightshow with enough kit to cover the walls of the auditorium with projections.”
   
CLOCK-WATCHING
It was at Fillmore West that Wynne Willson first saw the clock glass type liquid rather than the three-layer liquid slides. “The effect was more wobbly; you didn’t get the detail of the liquid slides but you got a very dynamic effect complementary to the music.”

    But he was never a fan of the clock glass effect. “At that time the overhead projectors were rubbish — very watery in an optical sense,” he remembers.

    Instead, he was inspired to manufacture a high-intensity, miniature version that could be used on an upturned Rank Aldis projector for his overhead effects, using a deflecting mirror to give a sharp and relatively powerful image.

    “I used this with Cream at [Brian Epstein’s] Saville Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. There were several well-known bands appearing so I wanted to do something different — and the objective lens was far superior to that of a conventional overhead.”

    Wynne Willson’s experiences of doctoring the famous Rank Tutor 1 and Tutor 2 projectors are similar to those of his peers. The original 1kW Aldis projector had a cast base and fabricated top, and the Rank version was almost identical. Then Rank took over Aldis, producing the Tutor I, which was all die-cast, and using the same lens system — but with square, not round heat filters.

    “We would usually take these out to cook the slide,” adds Wynne Willson. The original Aldis also had two slide bars for the slide and lens carriers which Rank retained, providing long-throw lenses of 150mm, 200mm and 300mm.

    “I used the very long ones to create a mirror effect, comprising a perforated strip [like a gobo strip]. The projector would be set sideways and to the end I would clamp a frame with a suspended mirror — you could strum the mirror in order to get Lissajous patterns from the effect you put into the gate.

    “Using various slots, you could create a wonderful 3D effect, and the beauty of having mirrors suspended is that they would act as an
unbelievably fast followspot, quite different from the open carbon arc ‘Sunspots’ I’d handled at the Royal Albert Hall with a slew of bands.”

    Neither was Wynne Willson a lover of stroboscopic lighting — that stridently disorienting effect that came to prominence at the same time. Xenon tubes had been around from early on but his first strobe was neon, an ex-military Westinghouse device.

    Evidence of this is in the aforementioned four Daleks, devised by WWG, producing disorientating, visible beat oscillations from 4kW HMI sources, with a special giant colour generator produced by WWG using High End Systems’ dichroic coated borosilicate. It was a far cry from the 150W and 250W projectors which had marked the beginning of the idiom.

    “This was huge,” says Wynne Willson. “Since essentially I didn’t like the aggressive nature of the strobe, I developed a high-speed colour mixing system, with twin colour wheels which could be rotated at speeds far beyond the persistence of vision.

    “The initial illusion was of white light which produced rainbow trails behind any movement, because your eyes couldn’t resolve the coloured light fast enough. In the brain, however, all sorts of colours and form would appear — thus you could have some really good hallucinations without experiencing the violent nature of strobes.”

    Wynne Willson had stopped touring with The Pink Floyd by the time he was asked to light a special, one-off show for them at The Roundhouse in 1968. “We had six projectors with long lenses [one person could operate two] and did the whole show with mirrors [as described above]. My eyes were popping.

    “We combined this movement with high-speed colour wheels which, because of the speed in that situation would produce spectrum colours. Integrated with that we used high-speed flicker wheels which would chop the beam, so you would get two or four little sequences, spectrum painted, which looked like little spectral worms.

    “With a simple lens I could project a badly-aberrated filament on the screen that could be manipulated to produce convoluted folded images — which needed careful handling — but without objective lens.”
   
MOONLIGHTING
By 1968, Wynne Willson had formed his first company, Moonlight and Son, who provided the lighting for a Pink Floyd film on Barnes Common — part of BBC2’s ‘The Sound of Change’ broadcast — where he had to conform to something other than rock’n’roll sensibilities.

    “I was using Mole Richardson followspots, which were extremely hot, and all our effects were frying.” His solution was to build water tanks into the gates, and suspend the gobos and rotating wheels in the tanks.

    In order to conform with Granada Television’s standards when asked to do a live TV spectacular for The Move, they also had to rewire all their spots with modern cannon connectors (kindly donated by the studio).

    Wynne Willson started to get into commercial design in a big way and by 1972-73 was making attachments for Optikinetics. “By 1974, I was producing acrylic lighting devices in earnest, such as prisms, prism rotators, mirrors, splodascopes... and the Total Eclipse.”

    This effect was based on a child’s spinning top and was purpose-designed for companies such as Optikinetics, Illusion and Meteor Lighting. It was a device with four wheels in the gate to create a dynamic bullseye, and they were made by the thousand.

    Later, Wynne Willson was equally prolific after forming the Light Machine Company, subsequently joined by John Richards, where they made all manner of frame attachments and their own fabled Light Machine Gun, a narrow, hard-edged beam projector.

    There was also the stand-alone Rainbow; a high-speed colour unit, the effect is described above but it was now generated from dichroics
obtained from Thorn Electric — “a by-product of their ‘Cool-Ray’ PAR 38 production”.

    Today, WWG — which Wynne Willson formed with the late Tony Gottelier — remains in the forefront of invention to this day. But as far as projection is concerned, back in 1994, in an aircraft hangar in LA, and in one of the largest productions of all-time (The Division Bell), the wheel literally turned full circle.

TPi
Photography courtesy of
Neil Rice, David Fowler.
Peter Wynne Willson and Andrew Whittuck

NEXT MONTH: More psychedelic happenings with John Lethbridge and co.