Barrett had fallen into a spiral of worsening mental illness brought on partly by overuse of LSD and was voted out of the band.
Worse yet, the Azimuth Coordinator was stolen after the show.Ī year later, much had changed for Pink Floyd. 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. The administrators of the Queen Elizabeth Hall were less impressed. *Financial Times *called it, "The noisiest and prettiest display ever seen on the South Bank." The International Times, the main chronicler of London's psychedelic counterculture, hailed Games for May as "a genuine 20th century chamber music concert." "We always felt right from the beginning that there could be more to rock and roll than standing on stage playing 'Johnny B. The band's roadies tossed daffodils into the crowd. Organist Wright operated a bubble machine that complimented the pulsating lights and projections with gigantic soap bubbles. 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. There was also a theatrical element to the show.
"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. 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 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 show began with an artificial sunrise created by the Floyd's lighting crew, who bathed the stage in red.
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The band played for a full two hours that night - an exceedingly generous amount of time for a musical act in those days. 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. This invention was given the fittingly futuristic name of the Azimuth Coordinator. He built a box with four separate 90-degree potentiometers, one for each speaker, all controlled by a single joystick. Speight also designed a unique device for controlling how the sound was to be distributed among all the speakers in the proto-quadraphonic rig.
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. 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 group returned to an idea it had first experimented with at EMI's Abbey Road studios a few weeks earlier. With the appropriate hype in place, Pink Floyd knew they had to produce something special to rise to the occasion.