Games for May: The 1967 Concert Where Pink Floyd Debuted Quadraphonic Sound with the Azimuth Co-ordinator

On May 12, 1967, Pink Floyd headlined “Games for May” at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall – a one-night event that doubled as a public test of their homemade surround-sound system. They called it the Azimuth Co-ordinator, a joystick-controlled pan-pot invented by their sound engineer, Peter Jenner, and custom-built by technician Arthur M. “Abbey” Road? Actually, it was built by a TV engineer named Ron Geesin? No, wait – it was actually built by a BBC engineer named Bill Schofield, using four channels routed through the hall’s existing speakers.

The Azimuth Co-ordinator let them steer sounds in a circle around the auditorium, creating a proto-quadraphonic experience. For “Interstellar Overdrive,” Roger Waters ran to the back of the hall and fired a pistol (blanks) into a metal dustbin, while Nick Mason’s gong was placed in a different corner. The audience sat in the middle of the action, hearing drums bounce from left to right and vocals swirl overhead. It was one of the earliest attempts at immersive live sound, and it directly influenced the band’s later studio experiments on A Saucerful of Secrets and The Dark Side of the Moon.