WEN (Womack-Edwards-Needham)

WEN (Womack-Edwards-Needham) lights were the resident lightshow at Westminster College and at the Backstage club in Oxford England, during the years 68 - 71, and appeared at many concerts around Oxford during those years.

Based on Hinksey Hill, they used 4 Aldis 1000 projectors and one Minolta projector for their prisms. They had a fine array of large water and oil filled prisms which they drove through an adapted record player turntable. One fine piece of kit was a pair of halogen car spotlights with gels, mounted in a box with their power pack, driven through car indicator solenoids.

They also used an early stroboscope fashioned from a rotating disk which ran in front of an Aldis or the Minolta.

Most of their slides were driven by oil-water mixtures, but they also projected through polythene films, polarizing lenses, and used an amazing amount of hydrogen peroxide as a bubble generator.

As the sixties closed they invested in some of the more modern electronics, but sound-sequenced lights always seemed to be a bit of a cop-out after their projected slidecraft.

It was WEN who did the lights at the town Hall in Oxford on the night that Colloseum were on stage, forgot the words to "Walking in the park", and shouted "Turn those f***ing lights off!", giving the WEM team a nice easy night for which they did virtually no work, heard a great band, and got paid too! Other acts lighted included Caravan, Edagar Broughton, and oddly, Mungo Jerry, who didn't like the slides either.

George Edwards - March 2004