Electric Orgasm,
Eos

Also see Moonglum

Delighted to find your website, an important part of the ephemeral history of the sixties and seventies.

May I tell you more about Electric Orgasm, listed by you but without any history.

In 1968 at the Brixton School of Building, Andrew Rose and I, both architectural students, started experimenting with Light Show techniques like the ones we'd seen on films of Jefferson Airplane at the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco.

One of our tutors, the artist Bridget Jackson, encouraged us to construct a projection space from stacked studio benches enclosed in black plastic.

Everyone, including the head of school, came and saw what we were doing and loved it.

Like so many Light Shows in London at the time we started doing Light Shows for concerts at art schools and colleges.

Initially we called ourselves Electric Orgasm. One concert that we lit at Borough Polytechnic, featured Fanny, Steamhammer and Electric Orgasm.

The poster, which I silk screen printed, was semi-pornographic and many places wouldn’t display it.

The late sixties were not as liberated as we might now remember, and the name Electric Orgasm was subject to frequent censorship.

We shortened the name to Eos (Greek for dawn), but it wasn’t prominent enough on posters, so we adopted the name Moonglum from a character in Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer novels.

Terry Garland, who joined us about that time, has written an excellent history of Moonglum elsewhere on the site.

It’s a cruel irony that when we were the subject of a spelling error on a poster, no one thought to censor Moonbum.

Tim Seaman (of Ultramarine one of our principal competitors) has written about the importance of friends and girlfriends in helping to set up Light Shows.

Our then girlfriends, Jan and Jane, now still our wives, used to spend evenings in the Ladies washing French Enamel Varnish, liquid soap and ether, off glass slides, getting coloured cuts on their fingers into the bargain.

And then they had to put sticking plaster over the burns on our forearms from the Projector lamps...

When we lit David Bowie at the Purcell Room, he split his skin-tight green loons from zip to crotch, moments before he was due on stage.

There was no time for him to change (nor, I think, any spare trousers). Angie couldn’t sew, so Jan had to sew him in, moments before he went on stage.

I hope this is of interest.

Stephen Gray - November 2023