The Light Kings of England

In search of the fabled Fifth Floyd

by Mike McInnis

From 1966 through 1967, the Pink Floyd rose from a group of unknowns on the verge of a break-up to become the darlings of the London Underground scene. They did so almost entirely on the strength of their performances at legendary venues such as UFO and the Roundhouse, and concert events such as "Games for May" and "The 14-Hour Technicolour Dream".

Reading contemporary reviews of the shows, one fact becomes clear: the band's visuals garnered as much attention as the music. International Times, an underground newspaper, wrote of an October 1966 show, "The Pink Floyd psychedelic pop group did weird things to the feel of the event with their scary feed-back sounds, slide projections playing on their skin--drops of paint run riot on the slides to produce outer space/prehistoric textures on the skin--spotlights flashing on them in time with a drum beat." A review from November 1966 in The [Kent] Herald stated, "Without [the] psychological visual effects, the act would not be the same." In January 1967, Melody Maker's Nick Jones wrote, "The Pink Floyd have a promising sound, and some very groovy picture slides which attract far more attention than the group." The Floyd's light show became so famous that Tower Records promoted their brief 1967 American tour by calling them "The Light Kings of England".

The Floyds themselves are generally quick to point out that, musically, a lot of what they were doing at the time was quite amateurish. "It's funny when you're improvising and you're not particularly technically able," Nick Mason remembered. "It's once thing if you're Charlie Parker, it's another thing if you're us. The ratio of good stuff to bad stuff is not that great.... There was a hell of a lot of rubbish being played to get a few good ideas out."

In 1967 Mason said, "We don't call ourselves a psychedelic group or say that we play psychedelic pop music. It's just that people associate us with this and we get employed all the time at the various freak-outs and happenings in London." And Waters continued, "I think the reason is that we've been employed by so many of these freak-out merchants, I sometimes think that it's only because we have lots of equipment and lighting, and it saves the promoters from having to hire lighting for the group."

All that equipment and lighting was a popular part of the London Underground (and, as we'll soon see, lighting spectacles were among the first regular events that helped the Underground movement--and The Pink Floyd--gel in a meaningful way). Promoters sometimes advertised concert events based on the lighting (and other visual elements) as much as the musical acts.

(For example, in December 1967 the Kensington Post ran an article about the upcoming "Christmas On Earth Continued" concert. Rather than discuss the artist line-up that included Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Soft Machine, The Pink Floyd, and many others, the article goes on and on about the light show. "In all more than a hundred projectors are being used throughout the building to make up a spectacular display of various lighting effects.... Two 30-feet high light towers with three projections levels incorporating a dozen radio-controlled follow spots are the center feature of the spectacular light show.")

The Floyd worked hard to make their lighting as impressive and inventive as possible. "With us," Waters said, "lights were not, and are not, a gimmick. We believe that a good light show enhances the music." Barrett remarked, "We think that the music and the lights are part of the same scene; one enhances and adds to the other." And Mason said, "We were very disorganised then until our managers materialised and we started looking for a guy to do the lights full time. The lighting man literally has to be one of the group."

It is this kind of statement that has led many Floyd contemporaries (and some Floyd historians) to the conclusion that the Floyd's various lighting technicians were, in fact, full-fledged members of the group. A November 23, 1966 article in the Kent Herald states that the group consisted of five people, with the light man, 17-year-old Joe Gannon, being the fifth member. (Rumors have circulated that Gannon was even included in the original six-way Blackhill Enterprises partnership, though this has been refuted by the Floyds themselves. The very nature of the Blackhill organization belies this story as well: Andrew King plus Peter Jenner plus Barrett, Mason, Waters, and Wright leaves no room for anyone else in a 'six-way' partnership.)

As a succession of others took charge of the Floyd's light shows over the ensuing months, they too were variously elevated to the status of 'fifth Floyd' in many a fan's mind. So who were these legendary men (and women) who created the Floyd's famous light shows?

("Legendary" is perhaps the most fitting word to describe this earliest period of the Pink Floyd's history, because the facts are so heavily shrouded in tall tales and hazy, drug-stained memories. Most of the 'authoritative' sources and books on the subject are incomplete, giving histories that are convoluted and often contradictory. Piecing together the precise sequence of events some 40 years later is virtually impossible--and largely frustrating. I'll try to straighten things out as best I can, in a chronological fashion, without introducing too many new half-truths and outright errors.)

Perhaps the earliest candidate for the title of Fifth Floyd was Mike Leonard, a lecturer at the Hornsey College of Arts and Crafts (a.k.a. Hornsey Art College). He was older than the future Floyds by some fifteen years, but was interested in pop music. Mason, Waters, and Wright were living in Leonard's house in London's Highgate neighborhood in 1964, and Leonard allowed their band, The Abdabs, to rehearse there.

Mike Leonard, with one of his experimental projectors, as seen in documentary footage from the 1960s.

In 1964, Syd Barrett had moved to London to attend Camberwell Art College and had formed a band called The Spectrum Five, which included Mason, Waters, Wright, and Bob Klose. At some point that year Mason and Wright moved out of Leonard's house, and Barrett and Klose moved in. (This was, perhaps, around the time that Wright was expelled from Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture, and spent some time at the London College of Music, as well as on an extended holiday in Greece.)

With Wright gone, The Spectrum Five were forced to change their name (although I suppose 'The Spectrum Four' could have worked just as well). In honor of their landlord, they called themselves Leonard's Lodgers, and continued to rehearse in Leonard's living room. Eventually, they persuaded a few pub owners to let them perform, and Leonard even played keyboards with them at a few early shows.

"Leonard thought he was one of us, but in fact he wasn't at all," explained Mason. "He was too old, that's all. We even ended up going to our gigs in secret, without telling him." Despite being removed from onstage duties, Leonard continued to take interest in the band, even serving as a roadie for their few paying gigs.

But the most important contribution Leonard made to the fledgling Floyds was in the area of lighting. Like many of the Hornsey Art College faculty, Leonard was experimenting with combining light projection with music. (By one account, Hornsey students had been known to protest because the lecturers spent too much time fiddling around with lighting installations and not enough time actually teaching them.)

Through their connection with Leonard, the band was able to rehearse at Hornsey. There they became interested in some of the projections Leonard was doing. He would cut shapes out of pieces of colored cellophane, attach it to a rotating drum, and project light through it to create moving blobs of color. "He had projectors and things," said Waters, "and he would wrap up tubes of shiny Smelinex and shine light through it, and crinkle it, and see what it did when it hit the wall. And we would play music to it."

Documentary footage shows a cameraman filming Leonard's projection experiments at left, while the Floyd improvises a musical accompaniment.

At some point in early 1965 Rick Wright returned to the group, and that summer Bob Klose left. And after a few more abortive name changes, the band finally settled on The Pink Floyd Sound. Barrett moved out of Leonard's house and moved in with Peter Wynne Wilson (a lighting technician at the New Theater) and Wilson's girlfriend Susie Gawler-Wright.

The band was moving toward proper performances as a pop band with appearances at the Marquee Club's "Giant Mystery Happening" and "Spontaneous Underground" in early 1966, but continued to play with Mike Leonard's projection experiments on the side. In March, they had an experience that foreshadowed a lot of what they would do visually in years to come.

"In 1966 we did a gig at Essex University," said Waters, in 1972. "We'd already become interested in mixed media, as it were, and some bright spark down there had done a film with a paraplegic in London, given this paraplegic a film camera and wheeled him round London filming his view. Now they showed it up on screen as we played."

March 1966 also saw the founding of the London Free School, a kind of underground Citizen's Advice Bureau and loose-knit quasi-university started by London School of Economics lecturer Peter Jenner and freelance photographer John "Hoppy" Hopkins. An eclectic group of students, activists, poets, musicians, and would-be hippies, they met informally in the basement of 26 Powis Terrace, in Notting Hill.

Peter Jenner turned up at one of the Marquee's "Spontaneous Underground" events in early 1966, and there first witnessed The Pink Floyd Sound. Some sources--such as Watkinson and Anderson's Crazy Diamond--claim he was at the Floyd's first Spontaneous Underground appearance on February 27, while others--such as Vernon Fitch's Pink Floyd Encyclopedia--place the meeting on the March 27 show. Floyd biographer Nicholas Schaffner claims it was May, though no such performance seems to have taken place. I suspect that Jenner, a leading figure on the blossoming underground scene, would have seen the Floyd early on at the Marquee, and then 'met' the band later--perhaps in May as Schaffner suggests.

At any rate, Jenner was interested in signing a pop group to his DNA record label, and approached the band at Mike Leonard's Highgate house. Unfortunately for him, the band was about to leave for summer vacation (as Mason and Waters were still enrolled at Regent Street Polytechnic). And, to make things worse, they were thinking of breaking up and quitting the music 'business' altogether, having become discouraged by their difficulty in booking gigs, their student commitments, and Barrett's continued interest in painting.

But for one reason or another, the group decided to muddle on, and continued to experiment with lighting as an integral part of their performances. Underground: The London Alternative Press 1966-1974 describes underground luminary Barry Miles' seeing a band called the Abdabs at a place called the Goings On Club that summer. The Abdabs, so the story goes, "specialised in serious experimentation in sound and light, wore white coats, and would discuss their work, post-performance, with the equally serious audience."

(And yet this seems to be yet another wildly inaccurate story, lying somewhere between complete fabrication and foggy memory. The 'Abdabs' name had been abandoned at least two years earlier, and the group--which pre-dated Barrett's involvement--had never performed anywhere, except as extras in an unidentified film. I wonder if Miles' description is of a performance by the highly experimental AMM, who were known for wearing white lab coats.)

Eventually, Jenner's London Free School began publishing a community newsletter, and needed to raise funds to support it. The vicar of the nearby All Saints' Church (in Powis Square--not Powis Gardens, as advertised) allowed community groups to use the church's meeting hall for events, so it was here the London Free School hosted a concert 'happening' called the Sound and Light Workshop. The first such event was on September 30, 1966, and featured a performance by The Pink Floyd. The mimeographed handbills also advertised the light projection slides and 'liquid movies'.

Though Hopkins admitted that the Workshops were "a way to recoup some debts and have a good time," they were also purportedly educational activities for the artistically-inclined. Miles recalled that after one such Workshop, the Floyd "took questions from the audience, while earnest young avant-gardists like myself asked about multimedia experiments and all the rest of it. It was an 'educational event,' very serious." (And this sounds similar to the purported 'Abdabs' concert described by Miles above--perhaps he just got two similarly experimental shows confused.)

The first Sound and Light Workshop was a success, and it subsequently became a regular Friday-night event, even as the London Free School faded away. The Marquee Club's "Spontaneous Underground" shows in early 1966 may have been the Floyd's first exposure to something approaching steady work, but it was at the All Saints Hall that the band really began to develop a serious following. The group had played there nearly a dozen times by the end of the year.

The IT All-Night Rave at the Roundhouse marked the first appearance of The Pink Floyd's custom lighting gear.

And as usual, it was the band's light show that garnered the most praise. Melody Maker reviewed the second All Saints' Hall show (October 14) by saying "the slides were excellent--colourful, frightening, grotesque, beautiful", but the most they could say about the band's music was that it "promised very interesting things to come. Unfortunately all fell a bit flat in the cold reality of All Saints Hall...."

Another major development in the Floyd's light show took place at one of these early Sound and Light Workshops in either September or October, depending on the source. Joel and Toni Brown, Americans from Timothy Leary's Millbrook Institute, visited London and showed up at All Saints Hall one Friday evening with a projector and some non-moving 'psychedelic' slides, which they proceeded to project on the Floyd in time to the music. Some authors credit the Browns with being the first to project slides on the Floyd.

On October 15 the band played their first show at the Roundhouse at an All-Night Rave promoting the launch of an underground newspaper called International Times (or IT), launched by Barry Miles, John Hopkins, and others.

Peter Jenner, along with his partner/investor Andrew King, had started talking business with the band again, buying them a £1000 of equipment, and convincing them to drop the 'Sound' from their name. They also sought to augment the Floyd's usual oil slide projections, perhaps inspired by the effects created by the Browns. For the Roundhouse show, Jenner and King put together the Floyd's first custom lighting rig: common domestic light bulbs shining through pieces of colored plastic mounted on a crude wooden frame, all controlled by light switches purchased at a home-improvement store.

"On the original Pink Floyd lighting rig Andrew and myself had built," Jenner recalled, "because of the low-powered lights we set them up so they'd throw a huge shadow. It was all very unlike the stunning high-tech flash of the Fillmore. But, in a way, the Floyd's was more imaginative." Jenner admits that they were trying to reproduce what they imagined the Haight-Asbury psychedelic scene was like, without any of them having any actually experienced it.

The band had recruited Pip Carter, a friend from Cambridge, to man the light board. According to one source, at one point Carter went looking for a some wood to make repairs to the contraption, and he and Barrett tore off a piece of lumber that was supporting a giant gelatin ('jelly') mold that was supposed to be part of the evening's program.

This image from the Floyd's appearance on the BBC's Look of the Week (May 14, 1967) demonstrates both the liquid slide projection and the creative use of shadows that were part of the Floyd's lighting since 1966.

(Again, we are faced with contradictory accounts. Crazy Diamond tells the story of Barrett and Carter accidentally demolishing the jelly--though the authors mistakenly list the date as October 11. The 'official' account published in IT said that the jelly was run over by a bicycle, while Miles later claimed that the Floyd knocked it over with their van while setting up. The jelly's size has been variously described as six feet and seventeen feet, and the Sunday Times reported that the event's attendees had actually eaten the jelly, suggesting that it wasn't ruined at all.)

At any rate, the first Roundhouse event was a logistical nightmare, but upwards of two thousand people were there, and it was the Floyd's first really big concert--for which they were paid a whopping £15.

Jenner and King were eager to formalize their investment in The Pink Floyd, and on October 31, 1966, they formed Blackhill Enterprises, a six-way partnership with the band. Jenner and King would take on managerial duties, which, along with their financial backing, would entitle them to equal shares of the band's earnings. Thus, they had every reason to encourage the Floyd's lighting experiments, as this was the most unique (and marketable) aspect of their act at the moment. Much of the band's meager profits were re-invested in more expensive lighting gear and more powerful amplifiers.

An newspaper clipping advertising the London Free School Sound and Light Workshops in November 1966.

On November 5, the Floyd performed at the clubhouse of a park called Five Acres, which was managed by Jack Bracelin. Bracelin later operated a business called Five Acre Lights, which sometimes provided lighting effects for the Floyd at the All Saints' Hall workshops. The Floyd continued performing at All Saints Hall workshops through late November. Advertisements read "experimentalists welcome", thus attracting more and more like-minded lighting enthusiasts.

One such 'experimentalist' was 17-year-old Joe Gannon, who became the Floyd's de facto lighting technician and projectionist after Joel and Toni Brown returned to America. He worked extensively with the Floyd during this time, refining and redesigning their lightshow. "I design the slides, basing them on my idea of the music," Gannon told The Kent Herald in November 1966. "The lights work rhythmically. I just wave my have over the micro-switches and the different colors flash. We have only been using the lights for one month. But before that, we were concentrating on starting with the right equipment. The lighting is so much a part of the group that it had to be good before it could blend properly with the music."

In coming weeks, Gannon would also express interest in creating a direct link between the music and the visual effects, as well as in replacing the slides with moving film.

On November 18, the Floyd's fascination with creative lighting effects came full circle, as they played a show at Hornsey College of Art, where it all began (sort of). Like so many concerts at the time, this show was given a strange title: "Philadelic Music for Simian Hominids". But the real attraction was that the college's Advanced Studies Group (of which Gannon was a part) was presenting lighting effects with equipment they had designed and built as part of their course work, all set to the Floyd's music.

Hornsey Art College, as it was in the 1960s. In 1973 Hornsey merged with Enfield and Hendon Colleges to form Middlesex Polytechnic. The original building was demolished in the early 1980s.

But for all their experimentation, the Floyd's light show didn't always impress. After the Floyd's final All Saints' Hall show, on November 29, International Times' Norman Evans wrote "Since I last saw the Pink Floyd they've got hold of bigger amplifiers, new light gear and a rave from Paul McCartney.... Visually the show was less adventurous. Three projectors bathed the group, the walls and sometimes the audience in vivid colour. But the colour was fairly static and there was no searching for the brain alpha rhythms by chopping the focus of the images. The equipment that the group is using now is infant electronics: let's see what they will do with the grownup electronics that a colour television industry will make available."

Gannon continued to experiment and refine his techniques, aided by a bookshop clerk named John Marsh, as well as Barrett's roommates Peter Wynne Wilson (who had also become the Floyd's infamous non-driving roadie) and Susie Gawler-Wright. Wilson built more custom lighting equipment, using gear discarded by West End theaters, as well as a lightboard that could be played like a keyboard to control the spotlights.

Wilson also helped create the liquid slides during performances. "Peter got into slapping Doctor Martin's inks on slides--very bright colors," Susie Gawler-Wright recalled. "We'd drop in different chemicals: it was very messy and very good fun. We'd get a blowtorch to heat it and a hair dryer to cool it. I used to watch the bubbles moving and thought it was really wonderful."

The Pink Floyd performs at Hornsey Art College, November 18, 1966.

Joe Gannon would soon leave the Floyd and emigrate to America, though he continued to do a lot of lighting and other technical production work for a wide variety of musicians, from Alice Cooper and Frank Zappa to Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow. But his departure cleared the way for Peter Wynne Wilson to become the Floyd's lighting specialist. And subsequently, Wilson became one of the leading lightshow designers for London's premiere underground venue--UFO.

An ad for UFO's first two nights.

If the Marquee Club was where the fledgling Floyd first got any serious exposure, and All Saints' Hall that they first developed a following, it was UFO that helped make them stars. From the very first "Night Tripper" event in December 1966, through September 1967, the Pink Floyd was such a fixture at the all-night underground 'club' known as UFO (which played host to artists such as Arthur Brown, The Soft Machine, The Move, and Eric Burdon and the Animals) that they were considered the 'house band'.

Just as the London Free School first started sponsoring the Sound and Light Workshops in order to fund its community newsletter, UFO was first started to help fund the International Times, which was losing money rapidly. It was the idea of Joe Boyd, a representative of Elektra Records and yet another prominent underground figure, to move the Light and Sound Workshop from All Saints' Hall to a larger downtown space to accommodate the crowds. Boyd and John Hopkins rented a dance hall on Tottenham Court Road called the Blarney for two successive Fridays. "If it works, it works; if it doesn't, its just two gigs," Hopkins told Nicholas Schaffner years later.

The first night, December 23, 1966, was billed as "UFO presents Night Tripper". (Boyd preferred the "UFO" name, while Hopkins preferred "Night Tripper", and ultimately Boyd won out.) In addition to bands, poets, and experimental performance artists, several different lighting designers were given space to create lighting displays. Peter Wynne Wilson and Russell Page did one area, while Five Acres' Jack Bracelin did another, and Mark Boyle did still another.

The Pink Floyd performs at the opening night of UFO, December 23, 1966.

Wilson called UFO a "responsive situation", where the band could develop its music and he could develop the lighting, both working together. He developed "a group of four lights for each member of the band. I made a thing that went round the corner of Rick's organ to get his head and shoulders. There was one in front of the drums, one each in front of Syd and Roger. Apart from illuminating them they would cast shadows up on the screen behind. Where you've got a shadow of one spot, if you've got another playing on the screen, then you'd get a colored shadow. So you'd get these colored shadows of the band dancing on the screen--that was always great, especially because you had instant control of it, so you could react to the music very nicely."

Some sources credit Mark Boyle as being UFO's standard, in-house lighting guru, while others give this title to Wilson. Both may have been instrumental in creating the club's atmosphere, but it was Boyle who managed to market his lighting as Art, and then spin it into a career. Wilson may have been connected with UFO in people's minds due to his role as the Floyd's main lighting designer at the time. Since the Floyd became synonymous with UFO, perhaps so did Wilson. It certainly seems that the popular notion that the Floyd's lighting man was so integral to the Floyd's show that he was a member of the group came about during this period.

Whatever the case, the first two UFO events (December 23 and 30) were successful enough to warrant continuing into the next month. The Floyd appeared there on four consecutive Fridays in January--thus cementing their reputation as UFO's 'house band'--before settling into a routine of playing there once a month or so until the club folded in the autumn.

When German television program Die Jungen Nachwandler filmed the Floyd at UFO (presumably on January 20, 1967), they showed a few brief glimpses of this lighting technician (possibly Peter Wynne Wilson) at work.

January 1967 also brought Chet Helms (who ran the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco) to London for a visit, hoping to try to start up a club in London. Miles and Hopkins showed him around, and though he quickly abandoned plans to start his own club, he was well received by London's underground. Helms, in turn, was impressed with the London scene. "UFO was pretty parallel to what was happening in the Haight, in the sense that your traditional rock 'n' roll was run by a pretty hoody kind of criminal element, while the young rebellious politicos such as Hoppy and myself were creating their own alternative venue.... At least from my outside perception, there seemed to be little distinction between UFO and Pink Floyd, and IT magazine for that matter. It was all the same circle of people who hung out together and smoked dope together."

While the Floyds saw the light shows as important to what they were doing, they were perhaps a little tired of so much attention being given to what was happening visually. In January, Mason told the Record Mirror, "The trouble with the projected slides is that everybody tends to ignore the music.... To us the sound is at least as important as the visual aspect."

But the music was really only beginning to come into its own. The fact is that many contemporary independent observers wrote that the music was loud and experimental, but it was the light shows that were most interesting, and which really set the Pink Floyd apart. As Helms put it, "The Pink Floyd were pretty much the house band, the way Big Brother and the Holding Company were for me. I remember feeling that our music was much more musical, probably because it had its roots in American R&B.... My experience of the Floyd was that it was amelodic and atonal.... What was unique about them was they worked invariably with the light show; they were the only act in England at that time where that was part of the act."

Games For May, May 12, 1967

Eventually, however, the band's music did take center stage, though visual experiments remained an important part of the group's act. At the famous "Games for May" event on May 12, 1967, Wilson projected an artificial sunrise on the screen and a liquid light show augmented by 35mm films. He also created thousands of cascading soap bubbles that filled the hall--and left soap rings on the leather seats. (The Floyd was subsequently banned from ever playing at the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Hall again).

The Financial Times (which, I'll admit, seems a strange publication to be reviewing a Pink Floyd concert) said this of the Games For May show: "Pink Floyd have successfully grafted vision onto sound in their performance by the skilful use of projected colours.... On a backcloth shapes like amoeba under a microscope ebbed and flowed with the glimpse of an occasional human form." But even after all this time, the lights still get better reviews. "Musically the Floyd are not outstanding.... In the more strident songs the words were completely lost, and the sound became just an accompaniment to the colours rather than a partnership."

But the Floyd's popularity and continued to grow with the release of singles and the Piper at the Gates of Dawn album. They toured Britain, Europe, and even (briefly) America. Upon returning to England, they embarked upon a 3-week British tour supporting The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Peter Wynne Wilson remembers a special lighting effect that he unveiled on the first night of the tour, November 14, 1967, at the Royal Albert Hall. "I would run the two units up to speed, then fade the lights in them, and you'd get a slightly shimmery white light. But as I then brought the speed down, any rapid movement would trail rainbows behind it. So the first thing you'd see was that Nick's hands would become a bit colored, given that he was moving faster than the others. And then as the speed came further down, the rainbows would broaden out--until the whole stage area was pulsing with color. But you couldn't actually figure out what color, because it was changing so fast. That was a wonderful effect. It could give all the entrancing qualities of strobe, but without that heavy jerking that sets people off into unpleasant situations. I very rarely used strobes on the Floyd because I always felt it was a bit violent for the music we were into."

Wilson apparently stopped working with Pink Floyd in December 1967, and his assistant John Marsh assumed the lighting duties. Although Wilson was at one time Barrett's roommate, and was very much one of his acid buddies and a fellow firm believer in the underground ideals, it is perhaps only coincidental that Wilson ended his association with the group at about the same time that Barrett did.

But Wilson takes a much more conspiratorial view. He had been earning a percentage of the band's nightly gross in addition of a weekly salary. With Blackhill always seeming to teeter on the brink of financial ruin, his five percent was highly coveted--especially since he often took home more than the musicians! Wilson claims that his removal from the lighting board was orchestrated by the band itself, with Marsh (who just happened to be King and Jenner's tenant) happy to step in.

Marsh had started out as a volunteer lighting assistant, and had lost his day job as a bookstore clerk for taking too many days off. He was put on the Blackhill payroll at a weekly salary lower than Wilson's had been, and without any percentage. Marsh stayed on as the Floyd's light man even after the band formally dissolved its association with Blackhill and moved on to the greener pastures of the Bryan Morrison Agency in April 1968.

Nearly 30 years later, the Floyd called upon Wilson to design the liquid slide effects used during performances of Barrett's "Astronomy Domine" during the 1994 tour.

So who deserves the title of being the 'fifth Floyd' lighting man? Mike Leonard, whose projection experiments was the group's first exposure to combining light and sound? Joel and Toni Brown, who first brought West Coast slide projection techniques to a Floyd performance? Peter Jenner and Andrew King, who funded and built the band's first lighting rig, or Pip Carter, who first operated it? Joe Gannon, who refined the rig, and apparently claimed the title for himself? Peter Wynne Wilson, who ran the lights and slides for most of 1967, including the band's reputation-making appearances at UFO?

In retrospect, it seems that most Floyd biographers tend to portray different people as being 'the main Floyd light man' based on who they are able to interview. Watkinson and Anderson seem to have interviewed Pip Carter, so his role is played up in Crazy Diamond. Nicholas Schaffner had extensive interviews with Wilson, so he plays up Wilson's role with the band. Others focus on Joe Gannon's early role. The truth seems to be that many people played instrumental roles in creating the Floyd's legendary light shows, and that each was, in his own way, indispensable.

Mason's remark that "The lighting man literally has to be one of the group" has been spun by many misguided authors to suggest that the band considered the lighting men to be full-fledged members of the group, but this does not seem to have been the case. The distinction Mason was probably making was that while many groups simply use the lighting at whatever venue they were playing, the Pink Floyd was unique in that they brought their own light show, operated by employees who knew the Floyd's music and how best to enhance it.

As Waters put it, "We take all the lighting equipment and get it set up before the show starts. Then our lighting manager takes over while we're playing and it's up to him to choose light sequences which strike him as being harmonious with the sounds being produced by us." He never claims that the light man was a member of the group--he doesn't even give him a name! Regardless of which nameless 'lighting manager' filled this role, the Floyds seem to have considered each of their lighting designers to be an important creative associate.

Mike McInnis is a staff writer for Spare Bricks. Special thanks to Scott Frank, Vernon Fitch, and Colin Turner for their input and insights.