Hassid Casualty

It turns out I have been telling the Hassid Casualty story wrong for the last 21 years but I am pleased to say I can now bring the REAL story, straight from the horses mouth.

pOoTer - January 2021

Hassid Casualty Lightshow was myself and Bob Dog occasionally assisted by if I remember correctly, Keith Bonney and in the early days, Alan Dien and Howard Williams and quite likely, occasional others.

It was Club Dog's in-house lightshow and consisted initially of a number of Rank Aldis Tutor 2 and eventually Optikinetics Solar 250 projectors incorporating Optikinetics oil and colour wheels, Optikinetics and Pluto rotating cassettes plus in the early days, Splodascopes (now very rare and sought after by psychedelic lightshow aficionados) and an Optikinetics Solar Crystal Pulse (also quite rare these days I think).

In the later years, we had a number of cassette auto changers which allowed us to change the projected images quite regularly and most of the projectors had rotating prisms as an option to fit onto the lenses.

We made custom built variable speed motorised stroboscope attachments to fit into the effects gates of these projectors which allowed us to apply flashing strobe effects to the projections which when used with multiple projectors, was a very trippy effect.

At its zenith, our psychedelic lightshow incorporated 24 Optikinetics Solar 250 projectors.

When Megadog finally usurped Club Dog once and for all and we were only playing bigger venues, the low powered projectors eventually became redundant except as static lighting effects and were replaced with higher powered lights designed for use on larger stages.

We also used a number of slide projectors with box magazines filled with home made slides and for many years ran numerous 8mm, Super 8 and eventually 16mm film projectors on which we played long reels of random cut up and scratched film footage which we spent weeks and weeks laboriously splicing together.

We would buy commercially produced films of all kinds of genres from market stalls, second hand shops etc and along with film that we’d shot ourselves, would splice this all together into 5-10 second sequences providing an ever-changing and random film backdrop.

As well as lighting Club Dog, we hired ourselves out to other promoters as Hassid Casualty lightshow to provide both ambient and stage lighting to psychedelic events as required.

We were the in-house lightshow at Alice in Wonderland for a fair period of time, notably lighting the first ever gig by The Cult.

We also did occasional lightshows at The Crypt, though this may well have been solely as an adjunct to when Treatment played there as we were for some period, that band's bespoke lightshow.

We were also the regular lightshow at Whirlygig for some years until they acquired their own lighting rig and we were also hired a number of times to light psychedelic gigs promoted by Richard Norris’s Bam Caruso record label.

We lit numerous squat gigs including a memorable one under Westway one New Year’s Eve that featured Webcore and most probably some combination of Ozric Tentacles/Ullulators/Oroonies.

We lit gigs at The Clarendon in Hammersmith and Canada House on Trafalgar Square and even ended up lighting early Raves at random London venues.

Our most memorable lightshow booking was to provide ambient psychedelic lighting for either Steve O’Rourke’s or Peter Jenner’s 50th birthday party ('Pink Floyd’s manager’s 50th birthday bash’ is what I remember but I can’t remember WHICH manager!!) at the roof garden on the former Derry and Tom’s (Biba) building on Kensington High Street.