I’ve been interested in lasers since I attended a show with my Mother at Canberra ANU in 1972 named Synchronos 72. Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski was a multi-media artist using lasers with musicians Don Burrows and Don Banks, where one could "hear the colours and see the sounds". It was also the first time I heard a Mini Moog being played live, an instrument Rick Wright used to great effect in Pink Floyd’s music.

​

Pink Floyd had pioneered early concert lighting effects in the late 60’s with psychedelic oil slides, and later using arrays of strobe lights. But the first band to feature a laser was actually Led Zeppelin in 1975 - just a single laser beam directed at a strategic point at the climax of the show. The Who followed a few months later with a much more spectacular laser show using a diffraction lens to produce “fans” of coherent light. 

​​

One has to remember, those early concert laser devices were powerful and adapted from scientific lab instruments! They were somewhat dangerous and very crude by today’s standards. The first safety standards governing laser use in the entertainment industry were not even drafted until the early 1980’s!

​

But back onto my love of Pink Floyd and lasers. Pink Floyd started using lasers on a large scale in the Momentary Lapse tours in 1987-89 and their tech staff were pioneering the use of multiple Argon and Krypton lasers with mirrors for tremendous static "beam" shows. For the Division Bell (Pulse) tour in 1994, in addition to all the smaller lasers they’d collected, they had two enormous Copper Vapour lasers that weighed hundreds of kilograms each and had the power to cause real damage if the massive 42mm beams were misdirected!

​

Creating an audiovisual and laser light show for the music of Pink Floyd has been a dream come true for me as a lifelong Pink Floyd fan. The lasers I use can reproduce every colour in the spectrum and are capable of some amazing effects. Thankfully they’re also very safe - in no small part thanks to those pioneering renegades from the 1970s and 80s! I think of the lasers and video as another instrument, adding light and images to the music to create a concert experience worthy of Pink Floyd.”​​