Who Designed Pink Floyd's Custom Light Show for the 1971 Meddle Tour?

The light show for Pink Floyd’s 1971 Meddle tour was designed by Peter Wynne-Willson, the band’s long-time lighting director and an early innovator in psychedelic concert visuals. He built a system of oil-and-water wheels, overhead projectors, and hand-colored slides that turned the stage into a liquid, ever-shifting canvas. The oil wheels—essentially shallow pans of colored oil and water heated from below—created swirling organic patterns that were projected onto a large screen behind the band.

Synchronization with the music was entirely manual. Wynne-Willson and his assistants would watch the band’s live cues and physically rotate the wheels, swap slides, and adjust color filters in real time. For a piece like “Echoes,” which ran over 20 minutes, Wynne-Willson would follow the song’s dynamics—speeding up or slowing down the oil flow to match tempo shifts, and using darker slides for the middle section’s spooky, minimalist passage. There was no computer or pre-programmed sequence; it was pure, reactive craftsmanship that made every show slightly different.