Harry Williamson is a musician, sound engineer and inventor, with a passion for the natural environment, physics and intelligent design. He was part of the 70s progressive music scene in England, working and playing in a range of roles.
Early Years
Harry had interest in music from age 4 when he played and sang in his mother’s primary school music/dance troupe. Every child took part in the morning band practice. Harry was initially given a Bass Drum and encouraged to keep time.
On the way home from school, he’d reach up on tiptoe to find the hidden keys and let himself in to a deserted Methodist Chapel.
Safely inside, he’d play harmonium for hours until the light faded. He would pedal furiously for the Diapason stops and relax with the less demanding Vox Humana. He had no formal idea or technique but loved the sounds.
Tones and chords, spontaneous melody and drones hung in the musty air as the afternoon turned to evening. Finally, Harry wakes from his trance to realise there is still 3 miles uphill to walk in the deepening gloom. Arriving at the caravan, gas lights on indicate all is well for another day.
He spent this bohemian early childhood living in this caravan in a field overlooking the North Devon coast. His mother Christine and father Henry Williamson lived in this smallholding they called ‘the field’. Henry was well known as an author of over 50 novels, including ‘Tarka the Otter‘.
The Boy Chorister
When Harry was nine, he won a scholarship and became a choir boy at Exeter Cathedral.
He was taught by Lionel Dakers (later head of RSCM in London). There he learned to sight-read, and started piano and organ lessons. In his teens he was very fortunate to have a few crucial guitar lessons from his brother in law, virtuoso Julian Bream.
Later he played in various jazz and rock bands at Millfield School. There he met Richard McPhail who introduced him to Genesis. Later he studied Physics at Imperial College, London.
Glastonbury 1971
In 1971, Harry Williamson volunteered to return to Glastonbury, just down the road from Street in Somerset where he had been at school. Michael Eavis was planning to hold a special summer solstice festival there. Bill Harkin had designed a 1:10 model of the great Pyramid of Giza as a stage. They needed volunteers to build and manage the stage. Harry was asked to wire up the stage and as the festival dawned he accidentally performed his first crowd workshop. Stuck in the mud – Levitate the Leviathan
A succession of tractors and bulldozers strained away digging up the ground , and it seemed nothing would move the crane. Taking the initiative, Harry enrolled 600 people who were watching the drama unfold. A quick mental calculation helped him realise that ‘laying on of hands and a light push’ would create a much larger force than tyres slipping in mud. He encouraged the small crowd to lay hands on the crane and push together. Miracle of miracles, the 40 ton beast crept smoothly out of the deep ruts, and away from the front of the stage to safety. Shortly after the 1971 Glastonbury festival, developing a reputation for solving problems, Harry was recruited to help install Europe’s first major permanent Rock venue. He moved into 2 empty dressing rooms in the Legendary ‘Fillmore Far-East’, the Rainbow Theater, Finsbury Park. There he helped build a mixing and lighting desk, speaker systems and acoustic treatments, eventually became assistant stage manager of this rococo fantasy. He was able to learn a great deal from the ex NASA moonshot crew who designed and built equipment as it was needed, often from first principles. In a matter of weeks they built the speakers, mixer and lighting desk controlled with a 3.5 axis RGBW joystick, the likes of which had never been seen before. It was brilliant and worked first time. Those engineers were used to creating great products under a lot of pressure. Once the installation was complete, he helped stage and mix bands like The Who, The Byrds, Pink Floyd, Santana, Curtis Mayfield, Frank Zappa and Mountain, and a whole caravan of others. In the auditorium, there was a representative star-map in the Dome of Heaven lighting the theatre, a Greek Temple in the Foyer with working fountains and a full sized Spanish Village where crew members were allowed to sit and watch shows. The Crew learned to blend in with the scenery and move very slowly like animated silhouettes. In 1976 Revelation Staging, headed by Bill Harkin and drawn from the ’71 Glastonbury crew, won the contract to fabricate the first large acoustic tensile canopy in Europe, for the 1976 Rolling Stones European Tour. We moved into a disused fire station which had the uninterrupted floor space necessary to lay out the huge panels and sew them together. The pattern was scaled up from a 1:50 model, measured by a wheeled dial micrometer. The finished canopy weighed over a ton and when erected could house more than 15 articulated lorries. With 70 tons downward tension, a small car could easily drive over the surface, provided it didn’t rip through. We allowed motorcycle stunt riders to ride over the canopy occasionally – with great care. Erecting the canopy took about 2-3 hours once all the earth anchors were in place. When we couldn’t drive the large stakes into the ground we used one tonne water bags in cages instead-water ballast. Stories from that legendary era are many and varied, but maybe neatly summed up by Charlie Watts’ reply to the question “What is it like being the drummer?” posed at a urinal in Paris before a show, to which he replied “I used to be an electrician and its pretty much the same, only the pay is better” The canopy was so well made, it was sold to the the Danish Festival at Roskilde. There it stands still, having delighted millions of fans with its beauty. Now renamed as Roskilde Festival ‘Orange Stage‘, it has wonderful acoustics, which Mick Jagger told us were “the best sound I’ve ever heard, anywhere“ The reason is because all the surfaces are convex, and so have no focal points within the structure. This creates a precise uncolored audio field. Roskilde replaced the plastic canopy in 2001, with – a new Orange Canopy, slightly larger which now allows better rain protection. It has become a Danish national icon. This principle of convex reflecting surfaces forms the basis for the design of our Modular Sound Booths. In Booths the curves are replaced with solid complex linear elements – walls, windows and doors – but the overall benefit of staggered planes creates a three dimensional enclosure with a far more even distribution of nodes than a simple rectangular box allows. In 1977 Harry and Nik Turner built a mobile stage covered by a green pyramid tent, and set off for Glastonbury Festival. Together they staged Nick Turner’s production of the ‘Egyptian Book of the Dead’ to a bewildered crowd. The festival was actually ‘not happening’ officially that year but many people turned up and Michael Eavis decided to let us entertain those stalwarts anyway. A particular high light was the culmination of a set when the sound got louder and louder until it was impossibly loud and everything turned blue. The metal pyramid in which band and audience were dancing in the storm had been struck by lightning as witnessed by concerned watchers from outside – no-one was hurt but we were a little shocked… I was relived to witness the accuracy of the observation that lightning does not affect those within a conductive enclosure, something that I had previously only read about in textbooks. The band Sphinx played at Stonehenge, Deeply Vale, Kagyu Samye Ling, Edinburgh Festival and the wonderful spiritual community of Findhorn ! Lightning struck the pyramid during performances no less than four times that year, and this began to make us rather nervous. Fortunately the lightning didn’t kill anyone. One time, the discharge inside the wet tent illuminated a roadie clasping one of the metal poles. A halo surrounded him, producing a blue green aura of ionised nitrogen. The drummer’s solo grew louder and louder, until it was impossibly deafening, and the small crowd of about 200 people danced on, sheltering from the absolutely torrential rain. Within a few months Harry met Gilli Smyth at a science fiction literary festival. He already knew Daevid after several apparently chance encounters in London, but this time he travelled to Deya, Majorca to write and produce an album for Gilli Smyth – ‘Fairytales‘ They wrote furiously and soon completed the album, recorded in a memorable snow storm in mid Wales, and the opportunity arose to tour the USA. Gilli and Harry toured coast to coast as part of the Zu Manifestival promoted by Georgio Gomelski. They all lived in a school bus which was at times quite confronting after many hours on the interstate highways. They had to cope with a coincident gas shortage, crooked promoters and 18 musicians. These included Daevid Allen, the young Bill Laswell, Yoshco Seffer, Stu Martin ( who had played with Charlie Parker) and others from the New York scene. They played 36 cities in 40 days and Harry also co-drove the bus across the states and back, without mishap, but with many a raised eyebrow. MATERIAL wrote the daily story of the tour in black texta, like a developing cartoon, on the outside of the bus so prospective visitors would be warned or possibly amused. The first gig was at CBGB‘s, then Baltimore, and westwards through Kentucky, Kent State University, Denver, Albuquerque and across the painted desert at dawn to Flagstaff, and then LA. All this was during a major fuel crisis in the Middle East. The bus did 5 miles per gallon and ran out on the outskirts of LA. The bus waited for hours with helicopters hovering overhead, like a dystopian novel, the queue for the single gas pump around the block. We were continually bargaining for fuel to make the next gig. The three bands finally arrived in LA for a festival where we were headlining, and had a falling out with the promoter. The issue was related to non-payment and a mysterious dead cat. The bus broke down on Harry’s birthday, so he took a deep breath and changed the transmission – all night long. We had a garden benefit where people pressed $100 bills in our hands to help, and we finally escaped the LA madness. Returning from the US Gilli and Harry played Glastonbury in 1979 on the main stage as Mother Gong. This was with the band that had recorded Fairytales earlier that year. A repeat performance with a more settled line-up occurred in 1981. That band recorded much of ‘Robot Woman 1‘ at this CND festival thanks to help from John Newsham of Funktion-One. After the death of his father and the eventual sale of his home, Harry & Gilli & their extended family moved to Australia. The year was 1982, and Harry continued recording, touring and living with them until 1992. When they settled in Melbourne, he set up his own facility – Spring Studio – in 1983. There he helped many emerging artists with affordable recordings. Visiting artists included Wedding Parties Anything, Big Pig, the Wolfram Sisters and many others. Harry also worked at the Princess Theater as sound engineer in 1983-4 and became a partner at Richmond Recorders. There he set up a vinyl record plant and taught himself to cut, process and press records. Together with various commercial partners he taught several engineers the black art of Vinyl mastering and pressing. Making molds, and matrices ( the metal negatives) from 99.9% pure nickel. He maintaining hydraulic, steam and air systems, and cutting great sounding records was a passion for many years. With the onset of ubiquitous streaming and the increasing age of the equipment, the art is in danger of becoming lost. Gilli and Harry parted in 1992 after fifteen years of creativity, and many deep changes in their worlds. This allowed Gill to move to Byron Bay. Harry remained in Melbourne and set up yet another studio in Prahran, concentrating more on production , mastering and video. In the 1990’s Harry spent several years with the exceptional Australian born vocalist Liz Van Dort. They worked under the name of ‘Faraway’. With the studio they were able to release an eponymous album. The Thomas Hardy novel ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ was the inspiration for the name. Harry now lives in Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, with his partner Maribel Steel. They write, arrange record and produce music with a wide range of friends. Harry has diversified into video production and editing and so has enjoyed gaining new skills. Daevid Allen enjoyed Harry’s production ideas, so he invited Harry to direct the filming of the UNCON. Harry recorded this series of concerts over three days in Amsterdam in November 2006. This event also celebrated 15 acts from the Gong family playing in an iconic venue, which led to the release of seven full length DVDs. These enjoyed international distribution. The occasion was the 40 year reunion of the fist appearance legendary Gong band at the Melkweg in Amsterdam in 1966! Harry returned to Melbourne with a trove of professional video and multi track audio for the whole event. Daevid came down and stayed in the studio for weeks, and together they created a set of DVDs for Gong, Hadouk, Acid Mothers Temple, University of Errors with representative vignettes from all the other acts performing. In 2009 the Victorian Women’s Trust kindly offered to stage the world Premiere of Tarka as part of their Precious Music, Precious Water concert. With his long time partner Maribel Steel, Harry produced the world premier performance of Tarka. This seemed appropriate considering the importance of Water in this, the driest land on earth. The concerts took place on Feb 27th 2010 at Melbourne Town Hall. In 2011 Harry won the contract with the City of Melbourne to refurbish the Federation Bells at Birrung Marr. This led to the development of original software and responsive mechanisms that he designed and built, He continues to monitor and maintain this fascinating world class instrument on a daily basis. He uses custom software developed in collaboration with Considered Solutions. The Bells have earned recognition by the BBC and Lonely Planet as being one of the top 10 interactive art installations in the World. Turning hand to timber and steel, he designed and now builds Modular Sound Booths. These are unique and quick to install and are in use daily by the Army, the ABC , studios and broadcast facilities all over Australia. The team installs these booths in half a day. They are proving popular with a varied client base. has not changed. ‘If its worth doing, its worth doing well’ has served it’s purpose for over 45 years. Just dont encourage him to talk about Atlantis or UFOs. at The Rainbow Theatre
The Rolling Stones Tour 1976
The Orange Canopy 48 years later!
The Green Pyramid – and Sphynx
Lightning Struck Pyramid
Mother Gong
Living in a school bus
Birthday in LA
Let’s all move to Australia
Vinyl Record Pressing and Mastering
A new beginning
World Premiere of Tarka
Federation Bells
Harry’s Mission Statement