the original idea...

The original idea was conceived in 1981.
 
In the UK, these were the days of the IRA. The war between Prime Minister margaret thatcher and the miners was brewing and riots were happening in Liverpool and Brixton; and thousands marched on the streets of London in a huge CND rally.

The punk phenomena that’d kicked off in the late 70’s when I was 15 had finally taken hold and, amid a general feeling of unrest in the UK, the ‘new wave’ bands like the Police, Blondie, Adam & The Ants, The Jam and the Specials were challenging established artists in the charts.
 
I was a frustrated 19 year old living in a small town in Devon. For the last few years the punk movement and the late, great, irreplaceable, John Peel, seemed to be the only sensible thing in a grey and depressing world. I’d taken the NME seriously when it said, “learn 3 chords and start a punk band” and was the lead singer and guitarist in a punk band I’d formed with mates.

My background in home-grown electronics and a desire to make our stage performances bigger and bolder than anyone else’s led me to experiment with home made explosives! I worked out how to make powerful explosive compounds from ‘commonly available substances’ and discovered stage pyrotechnics or “pyro” as it was known. Basically this meant using flashes and explosions on stage created by triggering explosive powders with electric charges. Nowadays there are very strict Health & Safety guidelines, I doubt you can even buy the powder without a licence now, but in 1981 it was simple, Health & Safety meant – ‘if you didn’t blow yourself up, you’d got it right’.

The punk phenomena that’d kicked off in the late 70’s when I was 15 had finally taken hold and, amid a general feeling of unrest in the UK, the ‘new wave’ bands like the Police, Blondie, Adam & The Ants, The Jam and the Specials were challenging established artists in the charts.
 
I was a frustrated 19 year old living in a small town in Devon. For the last few years the punk movement and the late, great, irreplaceable, John Peel, seemed to be the only sensible thing in a grey and depressing world. I’d taken the NME seriously when it said, “learn 3 chords and start a punk band” and was the lead singer and guitarist in a punk band I’d formed with mates.

My background in home-grown electronics and a desire to make our stage performances bigger and bolder than anyone else’s led me to experiment with home made explosives! I worked out how to make powerful explosive compounds from ‘commonly available substances’ and discovered stage pyrotechnics or “pyro” as it was known. Basically this meant using flashes and explosions on stage created by triggering explosive powders with electric charges. Nowadays there are very strict Health & Safety guidelines, I doubt you can even buy the powder without a licence now, but in 1981 it was simple, Health & Safety meant – ‘if you didn’t blow yourself up, you’d got it right’.
 
Anyway, courtesy of a then fledgling company called Stage Electrics in Exeter, (now huge) I could get loads of this magic powder. Igniting it involved switching a home made heavy duty 12V power supply into a complete short-circuit through 5 amp fuse wire buried in the pyro powder. The fuse wire heated to melting point in an instant, igniting the powder and… Boom!

It was dead cool and extremely dangerous, which is just what you need when you’re an angst ridden 19 year old punk living in a small town in Devon. So I set out in earnest to use pyro as part of our stage show. I made a number of foot switches that I triggered in time with end-of-song crescendos, each switch triggering a different coloured compound of highly explosive pyro powder.
 
Then I had the idea of triggering lots of piles of pyro from the frets of my guitar using very thin switches strategically placed at key positions along the fret board. The crazy idea being, that I could make explosions in time with certain chords… I was supposed to use a foot switch to turn on the pyro triggering system during our last song, then shape the chord, and simultaneously trigger the pyro in time with the chords I was playing: the ultimate ‘sound-to-light’. Simple eh!
 
 In a way my mad idea had a connection with the ‘micro disco lights’ I’d built years before - using switches to trigger different events in time with the music, I guess that was the driving theme behind the Rhythm Stick concept. I didn’t really get it together with the fret switches on my guitar, and instead used loads of foot switches to trigger the pyro… but... an idea was brewing! Apart from a few accidents (like seriously hurting my right hand, melting the bass drum and temporarily blinding my best mate Ross the drummer), the pyro worked really well