Psychedelic projection & the age of enlightenment

JOHN LETHBRIDGE:
Reliving The Technicolour Dream

In March 1969, two land survey draughtsmen working at County Hall in Kingston, with a shared interest in underground music, decided to form a light show.

    Equipped with a converted Hanimex slide projector, a few bottles of ink and a strobe — essentially, a cardboard disk tied to a food mixer — which could be held in front of the projector, John Lethbridge and Pete Samuel went into business as The Mass Spectrometer Light Show.

    After earning a total of £6 from the first five gigs — their debut was with Van Der Graaf Generator at a school in Crawley — things gradually improved, and by October they had a twice-a-week residency at the legendary Eel Pie Island in Twickenham.

    By the end of their first year they had produced 51 light shows, working with such bands as Genesis, Mott The Hoople, Hawkwind and Small Faces. They had also met up with Mark Hancock, a DJ specialising in society parties, and before long were travelling up and down the country at weekends turning on debs to the novelty of ‘psychedelic lighting’.

    In the following May, having become disillusioned with office work and given up his job, Lethbridge decided to haul himself off the dole by advertising a strobe in Melody Maker which he had built from a kit offered in an electronics magazine. The response was amazing — he quickly cashed in his savings of £40, bought two more strobe kits and realised he had the potential to start a business.

    On July 4 1970, Cerebrum Lights made its first appearance at an open-air pop festival at Portsmouth Stadium. The strobes started selling at a regular rate and Lethbridge decided to market a couple of custom-built projection effects, which he had designed for the light show.

    Among his early customers were Paul Woodhouse (later to become a director of ICElectrics), Todd Wells and Dave Street of Soundout (now DiGiCo/Soundtracs), and Tony Gottelier.

    Lethbridge remembers: “Meeting Tony proved to be one of the big breaks, as one of the guys in Tony’s disco had designed a sound-to-light unit that he wanted to sell via Cerebrum.

    “Also, Tony had recently met a young light artist called Phil Brunker, who was making 6” liquid wheels which he fitted to converted slide projectors. Phil, apparently, was also without a marketing outlet, and as Tony had a full-time job he offered to put a proper display ad in the music press if I was prepared to deal with all the enquiries for these new effects.”

    Meanwhile, the light show was becoming better equipped and now had several projectors, including an old Aldis 500W Tutor, some brand new Tutor 2s, an overhead projector, in which they projected live insects and newts, as well as oils, 8mm cine, strobes, UV, a home-made flashing footlight system for onstage use and over 1,000 special slides.

    The main effect was still created by boiling special inks in the projector gate, but new ideas were essential as competition was hotting up.
   
COMPETITION
Several rival lightshows were operating in the Surrey area, including Crystalleum Lights, run by a blonde-haired, bespectacled hippy called Martin Blake, and Infusoria Five Acre Light Show, run by Neil Rice.

    Fortunately, four of John’s friends had become social secretaries at various colleges and Mark Hancock was now a director of Juliana’s Discotheques. “So it was not unusual to be working with Pink Floyd at a Midlands university one night and the next at Lord Somebody-or-other’s country mansion, lighting a debs’ coming out party.”

    By now, Lethbridge was besieged with enquiries. One was for an entire club installation at a new disco called Bumpers, which led to the setting up of Meteor Illusion by Tony Gottelier and John Jeffcote, while Phil Brunker teamed up with Neil Rice and Keith Canadine from Krishna Lights to form Optikinetics.

    Meteor Illusion was soon doing good business and became the first company to offer Cerebrum a monthly account. It had just acquired exclusive worldwide distribution rights for a new controller called a ‘Soundlite’, built by two Cambridge University graduates, Ken Sewell and Paul Mardon, calling themselves Pulsar Light.

    Cerebrum started offering the new Pulsar range in its price list, together with some new projection effects from Optikinetics. These included the very first set of 3” effect cassettes, which had a recommended retail price of £20 each (without projector or attachments), while a Tutor 2 with liquid wheel was priced around £125.

    With mobile discotheques starting to take a real interest in lighting as well as sound equipment, the early companies (including John Jeffcoat’s Son et Lumiere, formed after he split from Tony Gottelier) were now reporting good business, while Optikinetics’ response was to move from its Hatfield farmhouse commune to business premises in Luton.

    There have been opportunities for Lethbridge to dust off his effects subsequently: the famed High End bash in 1994 and a light show for a ’60s disco at his daughter’s school, when he scavenged half a dozen Tutors from people in the industry, placing four in a square and using glass liquids — sequential slides to create the illusion, for instance, of a bird flying back and forwards.

    In addition, 30 years after the original (and defining) 14 Hour Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace, there was a reunion at the ICA called The Recurring Technicolour Dream, with John’s Children and Arthur Brown, in which John Lethbridge was involved.

    He remembers that having kept his old original inks and slides, at the ICA he gave them away, figuring he’d have no further use for them.
    The evening was a defining moment in other ways, since the second ever Technicolour Dream  — also held at Ally Pally and called the Love-In Festival — was the first time John Lethbridge had ever witnessed the spectacle of a light show.

TPi
Photography courtesy of John Lethbridge
Thanks to Pooter’s Psychedelic Shack
(www.pooterland.com)

NEXT MONTH:
Neil Rice & the 1994 High End spectacular