May 12, 1967: Pink Floyd Astounds With ‘Sound in the Round’

1967: Pink Floyd performs the first-ever surround sound concert at “Games for May,” a lavish affair at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall where the band debuts its custom-made quadraphonic speaker system. The technological breakthrough not only amazes and confuses the mass of stoned concert-goers, but it goes on to raise the standard of what audiences would come to expect from a live rock performance.

Only a year previous, the nascent Floyd had just solidified their first professional lineup and were still anchoring their sets with party standards like “Louie Louie.”

But by May of ‘67, the band had grown to become one of the defining voices of Britain’s psychedelic pop movement. Pink Floyd’s throbbing and incredibly loud live sets — now made up largely of skewed, improv-heavy originals penned by guitarist and primary songwriter Syd Barrett — were the soundtrack to the drug-fueled, all-night “happenings” taking place throughout London.

The Floyd were in the middle of recording sessions for their debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, when their management team was approached by Christopher Hunt, a music promoter with a taste for avant-garde theater. Pink Floyd had been assaulting their audiences with both sound and light, incorporating rudimentary light shows, complete with abstract films and bubbling, psychedelic oil slide projections, into their live sets, so Hunt figured they were the perfect band to break new ground by offering a true multimedia event.

The show was given the name “Games for May” and set for May 12. Hunt described it in press materials as “Space age relaxation for the climax of spring — electronic compositions, colour and image projections, girls and THE PINK FLOYD.” The chosen venue, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London’s upscale South Bank performing-arts district, complete with suited ushers and upholstered seats, was usually only used for classical concerts, so the whole affair took on a peculiar whiff of high art.

With the appropriate hype in place, Pink Floyd knew they had to produce something special to rise to the occasion.

The group returned to an idea it had first experimented with at EMI’s Abbey Road studios a few weeks earlier. An engineer had hooked up an additional set of speakers to the usual stereo pair and set them at the back of the room, creating a surround-sound effect. The band was eager to test how this four-speaker setup would work in a live context — most concert clubs in London were only rigged for mono — so they asked one of Abbey Road’s techies, Bernard Speight, to pull together a system they could throttle up to full gig volume.

Speight also designed a unique device for controlling how the sound was to be distributed among all the speakers in the proto-quadraphonic rig. He built a box with four separate 90-degree potentiometers, one for each speaker, all controlled by a single joystick. This invention was given the fittingly futuristic name of the Azimuth Coordinator.

In his 2005 memoir, Inside Out, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason described how it worked once it was placed on top of keyboardist Richard Wright’s organ.

“If the joystick was upright, the sound was centered, but moving it diagonally would dispatch the sound to the speaker in the equivalent corner of the hall,” Mason writes. “Rick could send his keyboard sounds swirling around the auditorium, or make footsteps — supplied from a Revox tape recorder — apparently march across from one side to the other.”

Those footsteps, among other effects, were supplied by the band, who prepped special four-track tapes to feed through the Azimuth Coordinator. The various members recorded passages filled with electronic blips and backwards cymbal crashes. Bassist Roger Waters supplied maniacal laughter and synthetic bird sounds.

Extra speaker stacks were set up at the back of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Floyd’s lighting rig was installed and the show was deemed ready to go.

The band played for a full two hours that night — an exceedingly generous amount of time for a musical act in those days. The show began with an artificial sunrise created by the Floyd’s lighting crew, who bathed the stage in red. The set was mostly made up of originals from the “Piper” album including the stretched-out jam vehicles “Interstellar Overdrive” and “POW R TOC H.” Barrett even wrote a new original for the gig titled “Games for May” — it would soon be renamed “See Emily Play” and go on to become the band’s next hit single.

The proper songs were intercut with bursts of taped sounds and organ swells, all fed through the quad system and sent bouncing around by the Azimuth Coordinator.

“The sounds traveled around the hall in a sort of circle, giving the audience an eerie effect of being absolutely surrounded by this music,” Roger Waters later remembered.

There was also a theatrical element to the show. Mason sawed through a log with a microphone attached to it, Waters threw potatoes at a large gong and arranged bouquets of flowers in various vases, and Barrett went to town with a plastic ruler, feverishly sliding it up and down the neck of his guitar with his amplifier cranked all the way up. Organist Wright operated a bubble machine that complimented the pulsating lights and projections with gigantic soap bubbles. The band’s roadies tossed daffodils into the crowd.

“We always felt right from the beginning that there could be more to rock and roll than standing on stage playing ‘Johnny B. Goode,’” Waters pointed out years later.

The International Times, the main chronicler of London’s psychedelic counterculture, hailed Games for May as “a genuine 20th century chamber music concert.”

Financial Times called it, “The noisiest and prettiest display ever seen on the South Bank.”

The administrators of the Queen Elizabeth Hall were less impressed. The bubble machine and the flower petals had made a mess of the seats and carpet, and the venue banned Pink Floyd from ever playing there again. Worse yet, the Azimuth Coordinator was stolen after the show.

Nevertheless, everyone involved recognized a bar had been raised.

“In the future, bands are going to have to offer more than a pop show. They are going to have to an offer a well presented theater show,” Syd Barrett said after the fact.

A year later, much had changed for Pink Floyd. Barrett had fallen into a spiral of worsening mental illness brought on partly by overuse of LSD and was voted out of the band. He was replaced with guitarist David Gilmour. For its 1969 tour, the band commissioned a second Azimuth Coordinator, this one with two joysticks; one for Wright’s Farfisa organ, and one for sound effects. The group experimented with four and six-speaker setups for its next few tours, and the dual-channel control unit would remain in the stage setup even after the success of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon brought the band into larger theaters and arenas.

The Azimuth Coordinator was recently put on display at both Paris’ Porte de La Villette and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and it now remains in the V&A’s theater and perfomance collection. The fact the object itself — just a crude set of controls — is held in such high regard is a testament to the technology’s impact on the increasingly theatrical presentation rock ‘n’ roll shows have taken on in the intervening decades. Total sensory immersion is de rigeur at stadium rock shows today, and we have Pink Floyd and their cohorts to thank for it.

At least Mason thinks his band deserves a little bit of credit.

“I think Games for May was one of the most significant shows we ever performed,” he said.

Sources: Various

Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis