Book Review: Wheels of Light: Designs for British Light Shows 1970-1990 by Kevin Foakes (Four Corners, 2022)

Ever since I first began to develop an interest in psychedelic rock as a teenager, the elusive presence of those bubbling, multi-layered liquid light shows which we’re led to believe routinely accompanied performances and ‘happenings’ during the 1960s has always fascinated me. Although I’ve only been lucky enough to witness proper, analogue light shows on a few (distant and poorly remembered) occasions, I feel that they represent an underappreciated and under-utilised DIY art form which has never really been given its due over the over the years.

As such, I was immediately on-board when I learned that Kevin Foakes (aka DJ Food) had a new book coming out via the estimable Four Corners Irregulars imprint, cataloguing his researches into the history of light shows in the UK.

The first thing to note here is that, by Foakes’ own admission, visual evidence of the development of light shows during the ‘60s is sketchy in the extreme. Over the course of a few pages, we learn that the ‘bubbling coloured oil’ type lighting effects primarily associated with the psychedelic era were first brought to these shores in 1964, when avant garde practitioners Mark Boyle and Joan Hills (aka The Boyle Family) utilised them in a series of stand-alone environmental art pieces in central London.

At some point thereafter, Boyle and Hills hooked up with the legendary UFO Club, presenting their, dangerous and occasionally explosive, lighting techniques as but one element of the full spectrum sensory overload envisioned by UFO founders Joe Boyd and John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, no doubt inspiring the eager young practitioners who in turn went on to create way-out lighting experiences for the likes of Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and Dantalian’s Chariot.

It was from this hallowed scene that the first business centred around hiring/selling liquid light show equipment - Krishna Lights, based at 13 Goodge St - emerged, but, with this important pre-history established, ‘Wheels of Light’ swiftly leaves the psychedelic splendour of the ‘60s far behind, focusing instead on the leaner years of the 1970s, when a more established commercial niche for light show projection equipment began to emerge, its focus necessarily becoming more diffuse, both geographically and aesthetically.

By the early ‘70s, specialist retailers like Optikinetics, Pluto and Orion were operating not out of the trendy West End, but from shop fronts and industrial units in such far-flung locales as Luton, Colchester and Penge. Though there was some crossover of personnel from the UFO/Floyd days, these enterprises were staffed not by acid-guzzling hippie agitators, but by nerdy blokes with backgrounds in electronics or engineering, who saw an opportunity to make a living from lenses, bulbs and moulded plastic gizmos.

And, naturally enough, as the excesses of psychedelic rock fell out of fashion, and as the scene’s surviving practitioners moved on to bigger venues and more professional/purpose-built stage shows, these firms needed to widen their remit, appealing to a broader and potentially more mainstream range of potential customers.

But, who in the hell might they be, exactly?! This is the unanswered question which lies behind much of the more curious material in ‘Patterns of Light’, as the book becomes less a celebration of the psychedelic counter-culture, and more of an exploration of a previously neglected form of suburban folk-art, very much in line with Four Corners’ earlier, excellent, volumes on CB Radio Cards and UFO drawings.

By the point at which most of the material in this book was created, projected light shows had largely abandoned the messy and dangerous business of bubbling inks and oils, and - at least in their commercial capacity - were instead largely centred around the use of customised (or custom built) slide projectors. These could be loaded up with either 3” ‘effects cassettes’, used to generate abstract, kaleidoscopic / op-art patterns such as the one seem on the book’s cover, or larger 6” ‘picture wheels’, which allowed a rolling, circular display of themed artwork to be projected in magnified form - and it is on the latter that most of Foakes’ book naturally concentrates.

Probably the most famous examples of these ‘picture wheels’ are the ones created by ‘space artist’ David A. Hardy for Hawkwind’s ‘Space Ritual’ tour in 1972, and subsequently reproduced as part of the artwork for the resulting live album and sold under license by Optikinetics.

 

‘Space Ritual’ wheel by David A. Hardy

So far, so psychedelic, and indeed, this kind of traditionally ‘way out’ imagery remained a proponent component of the lighting companies’ product over the years. At the same time though, many of the picture wheels reproduced herein date from 1977, ‘78 or ’79, by which point surely no remotely fashionable rock band or night club would countenance the idea of using a projected light show at all, let alone subject their audiences to the unhinged mixture of kid’s bedroom wallpaper designs, seaside postcard sleaze and new age kitsch being proffered at the time by Pluto or Orion.

I mean, can you even imagine what kind of terminally naff event would make use of Orion’s ‘punk rock’ picture wheel (featuring Beano-esque figures of mohawked thugs stomping around vibrating amplifiers), never mind their ‘wild west’, ‘smurf’ and ‘torture’ lines?

‘Daffy Disco’ wheel by Steve Maher (Orion Lighting, 1974)

Some semblance of an answer can be found in a passage of the text in which Pluto founder Micky Thompson notes that, by the dawn of the 1980s, the customers of his rivals at Optikinetics were largely proprietors of mobile discos, whilst his own company catered instead to what he calls, “the domestic Saturday night party projector”.

Regarding the former, I certainly went to a school disco or two in my time, and I don’t specifically recall any pirates or cowboys being projected across the assembly hall walls, but yes - mobile discos. That makes sense.

As to the “domestic Saturday night” crowd meanwhile…. well, the mind fairly boggles. At this point, it’s probably worth noting that another thing which stands out about the artwork reproduced in ‘Wheels of Light’ is just how damn smutty (in a distinctly British, 1970s kind of way) much of it is. Drawings of ladies with their boobs out are a frequent presence, as are photo-collages assembled from porno mags, spread across a range of picture wheels which includes such provocative titles as ‘glamour’, ‘stripper’, ‘flesh’, ‘naughty girls’, and the ever-popular ‘roman orgy’.

Clearly these risqué picture wheels must have sold well, as each of the companies featured in the book seems to have offered their own variations on the theme. How many man-caves, private dungeons and swingers’ parties hid behind the pebble-dashed façade of ‘70s suburbia, with lights dimmed and projectors cranked up to create just the right atmosphere for an evening’s indulgences…? Mercifully perhaps, we will probably never know.

As with the aforementioned Four Corners’ books however, the kitsch/cringe factor and analogue-era nostalgia inherent in such material is only a small part of ‘Wheels of Light’s overall appeal. As aesthetically questionable as some of the picture wheels proffered by Optikinetics, Pluto and Orion may have been, many of the other wheels gathered by Foakes are genuinely remarkable, highlighting a wealth of awesome, hyper-detailed and (dare I say it) even somewhat mind-blowing artwork from artists such as Maggie Gould, Roy Wilkinson and Connie Jude (whose 1978 ‘gay’ picture wheel is a particularly fascinating inclusion), as well as impressive later work from Jennie Caldwell (who graduated from designing picture wheels to masterminding Hawkwind’s light show for a period in the 1990s). 

Comprising an exemplary cross-section of the era’s more imaginative popular/pulp illustration, the work of these artists (and numerous others who remain uncredited) is eminently worthy of preservation between hard covers, and it is fair to assume that the opportunity to produce these wheels gave jobbing commercial illustrators a chance to ‘go wild’ in a way which would never have been allowed in more straight-down-the-line magazine/book gigs.

Meanwhile, reproductions of the more more abstract, mandala-like patterns created by the smaller ‘effects cassettes’ are also fascinating and hugely appealing (to me, at least), as is the wealth of technical detail concerning equipment and projection techniques covered in Foakes’ text. In fact, as much as I may have poked fun at the “domestic Saturday night” crowd earlier, I’d dare any reader to get through ‘Wheels of Light’ without at some point feeling an irresistible urge to start tracking down some of this old gear and giving it a whirl.

I mean, who knows? Chances are there’s a music venue down the road from you somewhere with a white sheet, an open mind and a few spare plug sockets. Optikenetics are - miraculously - still in business. So long as we’re all still burning through electricity like irresponsible goons, we might as well channel some of it into light shows, and that pixelated video shit just don’t cut it. So long as we all remember to leave the ‘roman orgy’ wheel at home, a bright future surely awaits.

‘Wheels of Light’ can be purchased direct from Four Corners.  

‘Liquid Lady Wheel’, Light Fantastic Limited (1976)