Many of Syd’s former friends and colleagues are closely involved in The City Wakes. From curating The Other Room, to designing The City Wakes’ lighting, to donating items to the exhibitions, their contributions have played a major role in creating the unique and special atmosphere surrounding the events.
Friends and colleagues of Syd involved in The City Wakes are (in alphabetical order):
Emily Young (waiting for details) - Article in The Herald
DAVID GALE Grew up in Cambridge, hung with beatniks throughout beatnik period.
David Gale writes for theatre, broadcasting and journalism.
As the co-founder of Lumiere & Son Theatre Company [1973-1993] he has written over thirty touring shows which have toured nationally and internationally attracting major Arts Council support.
Articles on a wide range of topics have been published in The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Evening Standard, Icon [USA], Time Out, GQ, New Scientist and The First Post (online). He was Contributing Editor at GQ from 1994-96.
A novel "A Diet of Holes" is published by Deutsch, the play "Slips" features in the Methuen anthology "Walks on Water" and his libretto for "The Empress", directed by Jane Thorburn, was broadcast by Channel 4 (1994).
His most recent play 'Vanity Play' (2006) opened at the Burst Festival in Battersea Arts Centre. His next performance project will involve the writing of a play per month for six months, followed by a seventh, omnibus edition. This will also open at Battersea Arts Centre.
JENNY LESMOIR-GORDON was a friend and inspiration to her artist friends in blossoming Cambridge in the 60s. She helped with organising poetry readings, concerts and events and encouraged her peer group in their creative endeavours. She acted in a variety of art house films with her husband-to-be Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon and Storm Thorgerson. Jenny is the girl in the yellow mac, who talks to trees in the film Syd Barrett’s First Trip.
In her middle years she dedicated her time to her family and trained for 10 years as a psychotherapist. She was then very involved with Mental Health.
Latterly she has worked as Production Assistant on a number of broadcast documentaries with her husband.
She has recently completed work on a broadcast documentary on the life and work of the mathematician, Benoît Mandelbrot and a small part in her first feature film Remember A Day, which is based on a fictionalised version of Syd Barrett’s latter days.
She devotes her time now to her four grandchildren and she follows a spiritual path.
NIGEL LESMOIR-GORDON began writing while still a student and subsequently published poems and short stories in the UK, the USA and in France. He toured the UK performing at poetry and poetry & jazz readings with the New Departures Group. Nigel's interest in film took him to the London School of Film Technique. During that year Nigel made the cult-movie Syd’s First Trip - a film of Syd Barrett high on magic mushrooms in the Gog Magog Hills near Cambridge. In the same year Nigel also filmed Pink Floyd sealing their first recording contract with EMI.
From film school he joined the industry as a trainee editor working on TV commercials, then moved to the BBC as an editor, cutting dramas and documentaries. Nigel formed his first production company, Green Back Films, with the record sleeve design company, Hipgnosis, as partners. They worked on music promotions for Donovan, Pink Floyd, 10cc, Squeeze, Rainbow, Joe Cocker, Big Country, Wings and Paul Young, producing ground-breaking and award-winning commercials and pop videos
He later joined the creative team at the Central Office of Information, writing and directing for the international TV documentary series This Week in Britain and Living Tomorrow.
Nigel is recognised for his ability to make difficult and technical subjects accessible through his exciting and thought-provoking films. His most outstanding work includes an acclaimed series of films for the UK’s Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, Saving the Children , a television documentary on women who work for children’s’ charities.
He also directed The Bobby Charlton Story, Reflections, Satguru, Rainbow - Live Between the Eyes and the series Whatever You Want for the UK’s Channel Four.
He then wrote and directed documentaries for Glaxo, Heinz, Ford, Schering, Diphar and Lederle; training programmes for the Inland Revenue, DHSS and the Halifax; Sales Promotions for The Electricity Council, the Waterways Board, Acrow and Peugeot Talbot; and Corporate Communications for BAA Gatwick, VCI, Lloyds of London, Black and Decker, BT, Ciba Geigy and NatWest, Midland and Barclays banks.
Gordon Films was founded in 1995.
Nigel’s television documentary The Colours of Infinity, a one-hour film presented by Sir Arthur C. Clarke on the discovery of the Mandelbrot Set and the development of Fractal Geometry, has thus far been broadcast in over thirty territories world-wide and in four languages. It is available on video in the UK, the USA, Australia and throughout Europe. Colours was broadcast on Channel Four in the UK. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd wrote and recorded the music for this production.
Following the success of Colours Nigel has since written, produced and directed the broadcast documentary Is God a Number? This science documentary looks at the mystery of consciousness and the relationship between maths, the mind and the physical, observable universe. Nigel then made Clouds are not Spheres, a biographical broadcast documentary on the life and work of the mathematician, Benoît Mandelbrot.
Recently Nigel completed directing his first feature film Remember a Day, which is currently making the rounds of the festivals. In this rock pic Nigel plays the part of the interviewer and music journalist.
Nigel’s first book, Introducing Fractal Geometry was published by Icon Books in the USA and the UK in January 2001.
In 2002 Nigel completed a film called Mandelbrot’s World of Fractals, which he directed, produced and presented for the National Science Foundation in the USA.
Nigel’s second book, The Colours of Infinity, based on the film, was published in 2004.
The short comedy The Mysterious Michael A, starring Nicholas Jones and Joanna Bowen, was written, directed and produced by Nigel in 2005. This film has been shown at over 20 film festivals worldwide thus far and has been very well received.
Nigel directed the acclaimed documentary Brixton Beach in 2006.
In 2007 a compilation of three of Nigel’s science documentaries and featuring a fractal chill-out film with David Gilmour’s music, was released on DVD.
He has just completed a pop video for Pierre Lewis’ new single Rebel with a Cause, which he wrote, produced and directed for MTV.
IAIN OWEN MOORE.
Iain is also known as Imo, pronounced “Emo”. He was born and brought up on the rough side of the tracks in Cambridge, the original street urchin, the Bash Street kid, the runt of the litter and the one who got away. With his streetwise personality, pioneering sense of humour and his ability to hold his ground in the midst of Cambridge academia, he broke down barriers and crossed the social divide.
The beat generation in Cambridge, came mostly from academic backgrounds. Although very fond of him, most of this bohemian enclave saw Imo as a clown, the fool on the hill, the one who was always good to have around at parties. We all loved him, but there were a few who didn’t take him quite so much for granted.
At age fifteen, when Imo was working in the coal yard, he became good friends with David Gilmour from chance encounters on the bus home each Saturday; it was a friendship that would last. Latterly Syd Barrett saw Imo as a confidant as well as a mate and they too became extremely close. If anyone was at the centre of the beat movement in sixties Cambridge, Imo was.
In recent years Imo has led a reclusive life, involved in his recovery from drug addiction. He has many interests, but his current passions include gardening and the science of the soul.
As an actor and model he played a pivotal part in many of the early videos and record sleeves that have become icons of the art from that era. His skills as a performer were put to use on many of the record sleeves and rock videos, for and including, Toe Fat, Edgar Broughton Band, Barry Gibb, Pink Floyd, Small Faces and George Harrison. When Roger Waters yells out in the background on The Wall “I’ve got a little black book with my poems in” the ambience and the way it was shouted is pure Imo.
WILLIAM PRYOR Freshly improvised William Pryor is served on a bed of crisp dysfunctional dynastic privilege, with roast writings and memories of heroin addiction in a cheeky velouté of entrepreneurism and a side order of tentative film-making.
He was born in 1945 in Farnborough where his landed-gentry entomologist father was sticking Mosquito aircraft together with the epoxy resin glue he invented, the better to trounce Jerry. As soon as the war was over the family moved back to Cambridge so his father could return to academe once more. William’s mother is the daughter of Gwen Raverat, the wood cut artist and author, whose grandfather was Charles Darwin.
Growing up in Cambridge in the midst of these cultural and scientific elites was ridden with uncomfortable paradox, only amplified by being sent away to Eton – as was the Pryor tradition – at the age of 12. Four dissonant years later William’s rebellion sprung him from that prison and, in 1963, already a fledgling dope-smoking beat, he went up to Trinity, his father’s college, to read Moral Sciences as philosophy was quaintly called.
It was the sixties. Beckett, Coltrane, Ferlinghetti, Ornette, Camus, Burroughs, Mingus, Ginsberg and Dada-ism were at the centre of William’s life. The bourgeois privilege, the squareness and greyness all around became the enemy, giving shape to the disquiet at his core. Town and gown fertilised each other in that Cambridge. The group of trainee beatniks of which William became a member met at El Patio, the Criterion, the Old Mill, Millers Jazz Club and in furtive college rooms. Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon got William reading his poems. Together with Andrew Rawlinson they did happenings. Syd Barrett floated about with his guitar.
When William’s disquiet was met first by opium and then heroin, he found release, he could be himself. Several months in a garret in Paris treading the coattails of Burroughs and Beckett in a mist of Morning Glory halucinogens convinced him he was a genius. Heroin addiction, satisfied by the then liberal NHS, was the result and eventually got him sacked from Trinity. It lasted 12 years. He came close to death several times and fell under the sway of professional junky and Britain’s answer to William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, before finally getting straight in 1975.
Eventually a new William began to emerge, deciding to be an entrepreneur. He founded Airlift Book Company, a £7 million turnover market leader in the distribution of US books in Europe; the Green Catalogue, Europe’s first environmental goods mail order business; Arq Web developers; Floot.com pioneered the concept of niche aggregation of music on the Web; and Clear Press, a publisher of non-fiction. After two books of poetry published in the 70s and 80s, William published a memoir of his addictions in 2003, The Survival of the Coolest, which he has adapted into a fictional screenplay, The Survival of Cool, which is in development. He edited and annotated the collection of letters between his grandparents and one of the icons of British 20th Century writing, Virginia Woolf and the Raverats, published in 2004. He has been a regular speaker at seminars and conventions, in particular at the addiction conference he established in 2006, Unhooked Thinking.
STEPHEN PYLE is an internationally renowned stage craftsman. Resident in Cambridge from 1957 to 1967, he became a close friend of Syd Barrett. After meeting Syd at Homerton College’s Saturday art classes, he went on to study with him at Cambridge School of Art, and in 1963-64 played the drums in Those Without, a band of which Syd was also a member (he was the group’s vocalist and guitarist).
Those Without - Syd Barrett, 'Smudge' and Stephen Pyle
After successfully completing his art foundation course, Stephen spent three years working for Cambridge Arts Theatre (backstage and workshop). In 1967, he moved to become Assistant Prop Maker at Scottish Opera, changing jobs again a year later to become Assistant, then Manager, then Co-Director of an independent workshop in St Albans.
In 1979, Stephen established his own workshop. The Stephen Pyle Studio’s pioneering development and expansion of glass-fibre as a scenic material made it highly successful. To-date, it has built sets for, among others, The Royal Opera House, National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Glyndebourne, English National Opera, The Phantom of the Opera, Beauty and the Beast and, recently, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Evita and Dirty Dancing.
Collaborations with Mark Fisher have included sets for two Rolling Stones and one U2 world tour, and a ten-metre bas relief portrait of Nelson Mandela for the 46664 Aids benefit concert in 2003. The Stephen Pyle Studio has also built sets for Elton John and AC/DC.
LUCY RAVERAT - Well, I was born to the same parents as Wiliam, only four years later. I had a very magical childhood, maybe because of the middle child syndrome, which meant I posed no threat to anyone. I had at one time more than 100 guinea pigs that lived free range on the lawn. I always painted pictures up in my room. The magic ended abruptly when, failing to pass the 11 plus exam, I was sent to the Friends School as a boarder (the only other option being the nuns' school which was unthinkable). Then there was growing up. I kind of tagged along behind William, and at his 21st birthday party, I met Andrew. It was love at first sight and we have had a passionate relationship ever since. Then there followed Hornsey Art School for 1 year, then failing to get into any diploma course, I joined Andrew and others in India at the Radha Soami Satsang in the Punjab. Andrew and I got married on our return, and went to live in a little cottage in the Lancashire moors (very Wuthering Heights), where we had 2 daughters, then we moved to near Hull for 2 years, a son and another daughter, then we moved back to near Lancaster, an old farm, where we lived for the next 18 years. I kept painting all the time and found a gallery in London that sold my work. Then when Andrew left Lancaster University all our children left home and we moved to the south of France where we have lived for the last 15 years. About 8 years ago Francis Kyle came across my work and I have had 3 solo exhibitions in his West End gallery. We have 4 grandchildren and another due in August.
ANDREW RAWLINSON. I was born in 1943: a war baby. My family moved house 19 times by the time I was six, when we settled in Cambridge. We lived in a terrace: no bathroom, an outside loo. I loved the government-supplied orange juice and detested the cod liver oil.
I passed the 11-plus and went to one of Cambridge’s grammar schools. The educational system suited me - a boy with a good memory and a gift for literature. Exams were easy and it meant I could muck about all year and still do well because only exams counted - no course work. I got a scholarship to read English at Pembroke College. (I would have gone to Oxford but Cambridge had its entrance exams first and once I was in I didn’t pursue Oxford.) I still remember the question I did for the General Paper: ‘The Absurd.’ I couldn’t believe my luck. Three hours to discourse on Hamlet, Ionesco and the Goons. I found out much later that it was this essay that got me in.
I then discovered that the English Faculty had a compulsory paper on The Critics - a classic case of academic displacement from the real stuff (literature) to the secondary (opinions). “Not me, matey,” I thought and switched to Moral Science (now called Philosophy). I was the only person doing it in my year and the college had no idea what to do with me. I ended up with a couple of eccentric outsiders who indulged my enthusiasm for Paracelsus and Gödel. Meanwhile, Nabokov, Beckett and Borges were publishing, free jazz was roaring, John Cage was undercutting everything, and the cinemas had a regular supply of Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni and Bergman. Experiment and discovery danced hand in hand. I attended no lectures and made it all up when the exams came along. This time I didn’t do so well - OK but it was clear I was flannelling.
It took me five years to get my degree. Drunkenness and unsuccessful drug smuggling had everything to do with it.
Then things turned around. I met Huzur Charan Singh Ji Maharaj and came under the spell of his shining majesty. I met the girl who became my wife (and still is). Ninian Smart was starting up the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster and needed some Ph.D students. I was one of the first. Lucy and I had our first two children and I read Buddhist texts in a tiny cottage on the edge of the moors.
I got my Ph.D (in Mahayana Buddhism) and a job at Hull University as Lecturer in Indian Religions. I started to learn the craft of teaching and found that I had some talent for it. In 1974, I went back to Lancaster to teach and stayed there for 19 years. In addition to a course on Indian Buddhism, I taught one on Altered States of Consciousness, which translated easily to California, where I taught at Berkeley and Santa Barbara. We had four children by this time and the whole shebang was firing on all cylinders.
Maggie Thatcher put a stop to that. I couldn’t bear all the forms and targets. So I took early retirement, aged 50, and Lucy and I went to live in the Languedoc. There I finished The Book of Enlightened Masters, which is about Westerners who have some teaching role in Eastern traditions: all the Buddhisms (Zen, Tibetan, Theravadin), and most of the Hinduisms and Sufisms. It’s a new phenomenon, one without parallel in any previous culture of the world. It took me eleven years to write it.
My current project - ten years and still going - is a book on the Hit: what it is to be hit - by love, by truth, by music, by something, anything, that you can’t deny. I’m linking it to rock’n'roll but Hamlet, Ionesco and the Goons just keep coming up.
MICK ROCK is “The Man Who Shot the 70’s” the inimitable rock photographer who launched his career with an unknown David Bowie in 1972. From the first photo shoot developed a two year relationship as Bowie’s official photographer. During this time Mick documented the rise and descent of Ziggy Stardust, and shot promotional films, album jackets, posters, artwork, videos like Life On Mars and Space Oddity and thousands of photographs. Rock’s career continued to soar with key 70’s images like Lou Reed’s Transformer, Iggy Pop’s Raw Power and Queen’s Queen II and many of the Sex Pistols infamous shots.
City Wakes poster design based on one of many of Mick Rock's iconic photographs
In 1977 he moved permanently to New York where he quickly became involved with the underground music scene pioneered by The Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie. His pictures including The Ramones’ End of the Century captured the revolutionary spirit of this groundbreaking period and made him one of the most sought after photographers in the world. Recently, Mick has worked with stars like Kate Moss, Michael Stipe, Johnny Mar, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Foo Fighters, Strokes, Paul Weller, The Raconteurs and Primal Scream.
He has produced severely acclaimed retrospectives of the Glam Rock era, including Blood and Glitter- Glam: An Eye Witness Account and a collaboration with David Bowie, Moonage Daydream; Raw Power: Iggy and the Stooges and Psychedelic Renegades/Syd Barrett. His retrospective at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2003 was hailed as ‘one of the most exciting exhibitions of pop culture imagery to ever reach these shores’ The 2005 Rock and Roll Icons show at urbis in Manchester was voted best gallery exhibition by the BBC.
Mick is currently preparing a new chronicle cataloguing his body of work to date which is to be accompanied with a feature length documentary slated for 2007/8. Mick currently hosts his own radio show on the UK’s premiere independent station XFM, beaming live from New York, commencing 1-3 GMT every Saturday.
MATTHEW SCURFIELD. Born into a prominent Cambridge family, Matthew has had a distinguished career on the English stage working for Shakespeare’s Globe, Complicite, Royal National Theatre, English National Opera, The Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, The Mermaid, The ICA, The Royal Court, Steven Berkoff’s London Theatre Group, Birmingham Repertory, Nottingham Playhouse and The Everyman Liverpool. His TV and film credits include: Kavanagh QC, A Dance to the Music of Time, Coronation Street, Casualty, Wakening the Dead, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, The Imitation Game, Tales from the Crypt, Pie in the Sky, Time after Time, Piglet Files, Blue Heaven, Amy Foster, Dakota Road, Wedekind, 1984, Dakota Road, The Jigsaw Man, Raiders of The Lost Ark and McVicar.
Today, Matthew is the author of a recently published memoir, I Could Be Anyone, which touches on a close friendship with Syd Barrett and other young poets, beats, revellers and rock 'n' rollers in Cambridge in the 60s:
“I came from the posh, scholarly, side of Cambridge. However, I was a miserable academic failure who ended up going to a tough secondary school for boys, far out, in the nether regions of the city. I believe now that the combination of my background and this education, or lack of, gave me a unique handle on the tool of knowledge and how it is so often the perpetrator of a deep and cantankerous divide.
There was a summer and there were some weeks, some glorious weeks, when the boundaries between the classes seemed to disappear into the ether. The crunch of post-war Cambridge dictated that a small number of fresh, young, agile minds cross that great divide and go where few others had ever dared to go before. There was Storm, David Gale, Fizz, David Henderson, David Gilmour, Ponji, Pete Glass, Barney, Fred the carpet, Roger Waters, Syd Barrett, Alan Styles, Imo, Pip, Jenny, Pewee, Libby, William, Ant Stern, Hank, Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, Bob Kloss and others too. They may have had their unique differences, but they all stood outside the mirror, like actors before a show, looking into the nature of our universal selves seeking truth and a revaluation of life. We were artists, poets, revellers, rock ‘n’ rollers and shooting stars, possessed by a Pan-like spirit. We were not afraid. I stood alongside my friend Syd Barrett on the cusp, juggling the mask of cool, with the best of them...”
I Could Be Anyone is a story, marked by humour and pathos, where the soul and the spirit prevail, which goes far beyond the confines of academia to explore the tragic limitations of knowledge and bring it later, much later, to a place of forgiveness and resolution.
"Absolutely fascinating, extremely sad and very funny, it struck a chord on a very personal level."
Mark Blake. Mojo magazine/author
"An amazing book; part autobiography, part exploration of the 60s, a unique journey into theatre, part spiritual, part investigation of dyslexia, part just great story."
Jim Cartwright. Playwright/author
"I love this book! I felt a real person's voice throughout."
JENNY SPIRES was born in the West Indies and moved to Cambridge in 1957. She was at the same local primary school as Lucy Raverat, then Pryor, before moving on The Girl’s Grammar in 1960. She met Syd through her brother Rod at a ‘Those Without’ gig at the CS Union Cellars in December 1964 when she was 15. He was in his first term at Camberwell School of Art and stayed in London all week returning to his mother’s house at the weekends. During that time until the spring of 1966 he wrote and sketched some wonderful letters to her about his days at College and his band The Pink Floyd. They remained in contact and later, when she herself moved to London she went along to the ‘up and coming’ band’s events from The Roundhouse to UFO and The Alexandra Palace, before she left to visit friends in California and Oregon, from where she travelled to the Woodstock Rock Festival.
On returning to England in 1969, she met and later married Jack Monck, a bass player with Delivery. They moved to a village near Huntingdon where Syd was a frequent visitor singing and strumming his way through the evenings. She and Jack restarted the blues club ‘Juniper Blossom’ at the Red Cow in Cambridge, which Jack had run with the drummer, the late Pip Pyle, when they were at The Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology. Jack and Jenny hired bands like Chicken Shack, Champion Jack Dupree, Mike Patto and Alexis Korner. Later, JB moved on to Fisher Hall as ‘The 10p Boogie’ where Hatfield and the North, Henry Cow and The Global Village Trucking Co. regularly played. The last time she had any real contact with Syd in those days, was in the spring of 1972 shortly after the birth of her daughter Jess.
After completing a BA Honours in English Literature at CCAT, now Anglia Ruskin University, she taught EFL and IT in and around Cambridge whilst bringing up her family. Over the years chance meetings with Syd occurred in the local shops and streets with nothing much to be said and, in respecting his privacy, that’s how it remained. She will always remember their fun loving youth and the extraordinariness of those times.
ANTHONY STERN. As the eldest of four children, Anthony was born into a family of Cambridge academics in 1944. His father was a Professor of German and an authority on Nietsche.
Anthony went to Kings College Choir School, followed by the Perse School and was a school friend of David Gale, Nigel Gordon, William Pryor, David Gilmour, Imo, Ponji Robinson, William Pryor etc.
Like his contemporaries he experimented with all art forms in quick succession, he played the trumpet, painted, wrote poems, took photographs and made films. These activities became synthesised in his discovery of Beatniks and the Beat movement. He discovered LSD, which he regards as a major and beneficial influence on his artistic career.
Iggy - Eskimo Girl - Directed by Anthony Stern
The full version of this film, shot in 1968, will be shown at The City Wakes concert performances
As a teenager he suffered increasingly from ‘Cambridge syndrome’ common to children of intellectuals. He failed to live up to his parent’s academic expectations and adopted the guise of lame duck.
During his second year at St John's College, where he was studying Architecture, he had his first exhibition of paintings - a joint exhibition with Syd Barrett at a pub in Milton. This launched him into a career with the visual arts and a continuing friendship with Syd with respect to the visual interpretation of (The) Pink Floyds music.
Read the Cambridge Evening News review of this exhibition here
Anthony made his first film ‘Baby Baby’ in 1965. In 1966 he met Peter Whitehead and worked with him on the first Rolling Stones documentary ‘Charlie is my Darling’. On leaving university he continued working as an assistant with Whitehead’s films for the next three years, hanging out in Soho with his old Cambridge friends, David Gale, Syd Barrett, Peter Lynne-Wilson et al.
Anthony was interested in using the camera as a musical instrument. He developed a unique style of cinematography using single and freeze frame exposures to create pulses and rhythms. This resulted in a series of film poems, one of them being the psychedelic ‘San Francisco’ in 1968. This impressionistic documentary was edited to an earlier version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’.
In 1971 he travelled overland to India with his camera and made the film ‘Noon Gun’ in Afghanistan. This film was rediscovered and completed in 2004 and has subsequently been shown at a number of film festivals.
In 1976 he abandoned film making and took an MA in Glass at the Royal College of Art. Since then he has run a successful glass blowing studio in Battersea producing one off pieces including lighting commissions and his ‘Seascape Bowls’. His work in this medium continues to reflect his fascination with translucent materials and light.
On 27 June 2008 the curator Nicole Brenez organised a ‘homage’ of his short films, which was screened at the Cinemateque in Paris.
Following a hugely positive response to these films as well the input of Chimera Arts who have also created a digital archive and restored much unseen footage, enthusiasts such as Brenez are encouraging Anthony to return to film.
Anthony’s extensive sound and picture archives of rediscovered and unseen material from the 60’s including concert footage of Blind faith, Pink Floyd etc are currently being prepared for a fictional documentary on the 60’s.
STORM THORGERSON. Born, if that's the word, in Potters Bar Middx, in 1944, schooled at Summerhill free school and then Brunswick Primary Cambridge. Secondary education at local grammar Cambs. High School for boys (no girls) and BA Hons in English and Philosophy from Leicester University (63 - 66) and finally an MA in film and TV from the Royal College of Art, London (66 - 69).
Formed Hipgnosis in 1968 with Aubrey Powell (Po), a graphic design studio specialising in creative photography and working mainly in the music business designing album covers for many rock 'n' roll bands including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, 10cc, Yes, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, Paul McCartney, Syd Barrett and Styx, amongst others. Started a series of books on album cover art with Roger Dean called Album Cover Album, and with Hipgnosis wrote and designed Walk Away Rene 1978 and The Goodbye Look 1982 about their own stuff.
In 1983 Storm, along with Po and Peter Christopherson, formed Green Back Films and embarked on producing numerous rock videos including material for Paul Young, Yes, Nik Kershaw, Robert Plant, Interferon, Nona Hendryx, Big Country and many others and also long forms for Barry Gibb (Voyager), Yumi Matsutoya (Train of Thought), and Channel Q a heavy metal compilation for Polygram Records. Green Back and its partners went up in smoke in 1985.
Storm went solo, cos he had to, and continued making videos (Learning To Fly for Pink Floyd won best director at Billboard), and tried his hand at commercials (Tennants One Great Thing won Golden Rose in Scotland). He continued designing album covers for Pink Floyd, Catherine Wheel, Alan Parsons, Anthrax, amongst others, and branched out into documentaries, making Art Of Tripping for Ch 4 in 1993, a two part exploration of the connections between drugs and artists.
In 1994 Storm directed six short films for Pink Floyd which were screened at concerts during their world tour, and also an hour long science documentary on the Hubble Constant for Equinox called The Rubber Universe. In 1997 he compiled a book of his images for Pink Floyd called Mind Over Matter published by Sanctuary Books. And in 97/98 wrote and directed an hour long documentary for Discovery Channel about the (non) existence of Aliens subtitled Are We Alone? (Or was it We Are Alone).
Storm continues to design album covers (Phish, Ian Dury, Cranberries, Pink Floyd, Catherine Wheel, Alan Parsons, Ween etc etc), to execute assorted graphics for DVDs, websites, programmes, T-shirts and so on, and to direct the occasional film. He has written and designed several books including 100 Best Album Covers (Dorling Kindersley) and Eye Of The Storm (Sanctuary Books).
Has one son Bill (29) with first partner Libby, but now lives with Barbie (who has two children Adam and Georgia of her own), 5 cats and a budgerigar!
PETER WYNNE WILLSON is an internationally renowned lighting designer and inventor. In 1962 Peter began working in the theatre, first as an electrician at Buxton Repertory Theatre, then at The Fortune Theatre Drury Lane. By 17 he was chief electrician at Harrogate Theatre, and later operated the lighting console at The Albery Theatre for the original West End production of Oliver!
He worked with Pink Floyd between 1966 and 1968 when he created light shows for their performances at UFO and the Roundhouse; he went on to design the lighting for the Floyd’s UK, European and American gigs and tours.
From 1972 to 1980, Peter worked on prismatic and colour effects, which were manufactured by his Light Machine Company. During this time, in 1980, he invented the Pancan remote-control reflector system, which launched a decade of moving mirror entertainment lighting.
In 1986, Peter set up WWG Ltd., his long running lighting partnership, with the late Tony Gottelier. He continues to design lighting devices, highlights of which include: ‘Dalek’ colour generators and projection effects for Pink Floyd’s Division Bell tour; ‘Razorhead’ high-speed searchlights for U2’s Popmart tour; liquid-light effects for Roger Waters’ world tours; and award-winning ‘Catalyst’ for digital media manipulation. The ‘Catalyst’ system is at large with George Michael, American Idol, five Eurovision Contests, Fame Academy, The Sugar Babes, Pink, Barry Manilow, Grand Central Station NY, and the Opening of the Beijing Olympics.
Other items include ‘Fantôme’ automated ecliptic framing spotlights for Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam, Kammerspieler Theatre, Munich and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; high-power overhead projectors and special effects for the Syd Barrett tributes at The Barbican and Queen Elizabeth Hall; a massive airborne searchlight for the Red Bull Air Show and liquid special effects for Scissor Sisters’ concerts.
A recent invention is a flowing colour device licensed as ‘VersaTube’, for installations, among them O2’s new Dublin HQ, the Grammy and MTV Awards, and used by numerous artists, including The Police and Sting, R.E.M., Prince at the Superbowl, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and latterly Daft Punk, Coldplay and Radiohead for their current tour.
Peter lives and has his studio on a farm in the Cotswolds dividing his time between there and Cambridge. Since working in Earlham Street, an apartment he shared with Syd and others in 1967, his focus on creating lighting effects has not reduced by a single dioptre!
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