Games for May: The 1967 concert where Pink Floyd invented the live soundscape

On May 12, 1967, Pink Floyd played “Games for May” at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. It wasn’t just another psychedelic show—it was the first time they used a custom-built quadraphonic sound system controlled by a joystick. That joystick was the prototype of the Azimuth Coordinator, a device that let them pan sounds around the room in a way audiences had never heard. They also handed out flowers, scattered plastic bubbles, and hired a minstrel to walk through the crowd on stilts.

The concert is a milestone because it showed the band moving from being a club act into something closer to a total sensory experience. They didn’t just play songs; they created a carefully staged environment. This approach—blowing past the limits of basic amplification—became a hallmark of their later live shows, from The Dark Side of the Moon’s pristinely mixed quad to the massive The Wall productions. “Games for May” was the first time they proved that a Pink Floyd concert could be as much about the space around the music as the music itself.