A Million Volt Light & Sound Rave

In December of 1966, Paul McCartney received his Knight piano that had been decorated in psychedelic colors by the pop-art collective BEV (the initials of Douglas Binder, Dudley Edwards, and David Vaughan). David Vaughan delivered it and then asked Paul to create a piece of music for an upcoming electronic music festival called “A Million Volt Light & Sound Rave,” that BEV organized.

Paul agreed and, on January 5, 1967, along with The Beatles, created a track called “Carnival Of Light.” At one point, and recorded on the tape, he plays a version of “Fixing a Hole“, from the upcoming “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album, on piano.

The posters for the event advertised “music composed by Paul McCartney and Unit Delta Plus.” The latter was an electronic music group that included composers Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as synthesizer pioneer Peter Zinovieff. The festival also featured Tonics, Soft Machine, Electric Poets (consisting of Soft Machine’s Daevid Allen and Robert Wyatt with Gilli Smyth and Early Fuggle on welding kit), New Vaudeville Band, and Jimi Hendrix (although he wasn’t mentioned on the event posters).

To prepare for the event, Dudley Edwards took Paul McCartney to meet Peter Zinovieff at his home in Putney, southwest London. Zinovieff played an experimental composition for them “at such intense decibel frequencies,” according to Edwards, “that many parts of my anatomy (including internal organs) began to perform an involuntary dance. I can only describe it as ‘ecstatic twitching’.“

“A Million Volt Light & Sound Rave” was held on January 28, 1967, at the Roundhouse Theatre in Chalk Farm, North London. On this night, Paul McCartney and George Harrison went to see the Four Tops perform at the Royal Albert Hall. It’s likely Paul then went to the Roundhouse after the show; no other Beatles attended.

Paul was upset with the organizers when he found out that the tape of “Carnival of Light” was allowed to play past the agreed point, giving the crowd a preview of “Fixing a Hole.” Dudley Edwards said this was not intentional, but he and Douglas Binder had been busy with the rave’s light show.

[David Vaughan] landed in San Francisco in the middle of the Haight Ashbury scene and he brought back a full report. He talked about the light shows he saw there and was keen to promote shows in London. So at David’s behest we decided to do a big light show extravaganza, but didn’t know how to go about it. In San Francisco David had met Ray Anderson who had a few light show companies and picked up some ideas. So we paid for Ray to come over and do his show with us. We booked the Roundhouse for two consecutive weeks in January 1967 – and called it the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave. I asked Paul McCartney to do a piece for the show. He gave us this tape, which was the longest piece The Beatles ever did – 15 minutes or so. I don’t think the other Beatles thought much of it: it was very experimental. On the night of the first show I remember Paul standing up suddenly: He’d left his demo of “Fixing A Hole” on the tape, and was shocked to hear it playing… We’d met Paul through Tara Browne. And out of that came painting his piano , which I designed with Doug and painted with Gary.

Did you do other shows?

We did that one, and one the following week. We brought in other people to do experimental tape music people like Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who also did the Dr. Who music. We went to Tito Burns at the Harold Davidson agency to get some acts. and he said, “I can let you have so-and-so if you take this other lad for 50 pound,” which sounded dubious. But we said fine. It was Jimi Hendrix! About 2000 people showed up just to see him. This guy just didn’t know what he had. Amazingly. Dave gave the franchise for the hot dog stands at the Roundhouse to the Kray Brothers’ hit men. He then took up the offer for one of them to be our chauffeur. Things just got more and more embroiled with gangsters. Doug and I were shitting ourselves!

Dudley Edwards – From Electrical Banana: Masters of Psychedelic Art”, February 2012

Was it Dudley who asked you to create a musical piece for the ‘A Million Volt Light – Show and RaveI’?

I thought I remember Barry Miles asking me to do that, but we could have all been in the same room, and we all said, “Yeah that’s a good idea”. You didn’t really apportion credit back then. You were just hanging – and it was probably just whoever had the joint at the time.

Paul McCartney – From Electrical Banana: Masters of Psychedelic Art”, February 2012

I said “all I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn’t need to make any sense. Hit a drum then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around.” So that’s what we did and then put a bit of an echo on it. It’s very free. […] I like it because it’s The Beatles free, going off piste.

Paul McCartney – recalling his suggestions for “Carnival of Light”, from BBC Interview, 2008

We booked Jimi Hendrix for fifty pounds. That was his first gig in the British Isles. And of course we were dead chuffed about this. And then we got The Pink Floyd on the bill, and The Soft Machine. So all the music was live, apart from these f***ing awful tapes that Paul McCartney did. You know, where he thought he’d do something without words, that was very mysterious. He just proffered his services and that’s what we got. I can’t remember but I don’t think it was up to much. It didn’t last with me. It was more or less how he came to turn himself on, and everybody else on, to this new abstract music without words.

David Vaughan – From “The Unknown Paul McCartney: McCartney and the Avant-Garde” by Ian Peel, 2002

I can’t remember much [about The Beatles’ ‘Carnival of Light’ collage] but it paled into insignificance when you heard this guy, this Hendrix on the stage. What happened there with Hendrix was also very comical, because at the end of the night somebody pissed off with his guitar!

David Vaughan – From “The Unknown Paul McCartney: McCartney and the Avant-Garde” by Ian Peel, 2002

Later, after working with quite a lot of composers, two people from the Radiophonic Workshop, Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire, asked me whether we would like to form a company to make commercial electronic music, and we formed Unit Delta Plus. Unit Delta Plus was a sort of part-time activity as part of my music studio. The trouble was that neither Brian nor Delia could understand the studio. In fact, nobody could. I was the only person who could control it, and I didn’t like the idea of making commercial music. It was extremely boring to me. It wasn’t the sort of thing that I hoped the studio would be used for. We did make one jingle for Philips and I don’t know if we made – well, we must have made some money from that, but we never made anything else.

Although it’s mentioned quite a lot, this Unit Delta Plus, it was actually nothing. Then we did do a thing with Paul McCartney at the Roundhouse. That was a pity, in a way: the Beatles have – or the Beatles Society, or whatever – refused to release the music. There is something that Paul McCartney was involved in. I still want to contact him and say, “Come on, what did we actually do together there?” It would be interesting because he came to the Putney studio once or twice. I also gave Ringo Starr some lessons with the VCS 3, too.

Peter Zinovieff – From Early Electronic Pioneer Peter Zinovieff, In His Own Words | Red Bull Music Academy Daily

BEATLE Paul McCartney has prepared a tape of electronic noises – known as music in some circles – for use at a “carnival of light” at Centre 42’s Round House next month.

Carnival of light? This is a new art form combining sound with light coming mostly from 15 automatic projectors playing onto 60ft-high screens, which changes colour according to the sound.

There will be another five projectors developed from a Russian invention, which create patterns, blending and blurring vividly coloured shapes. They will be hand-operated by artists and designers David Vaughan, Douglas Binder and Dudley Edwards, the three men behind this form of entertainment.

The occasion threatens to be one of those eye-dazzling ear-splitting affairs that the trendy have already dubbed “psychedelic son et lumiere.”

Unknown source – From WikiDelia: Delia Derbyshire’s papers include a clipping from an unknown newspaper of an article entitles Trendy Beatle about Paul McCartney’s tape experiments for the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave.

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