The legendary master of the Psychedelic Liquid Lightshow of the 60s & 70s, Ellis D Fogg accompanied several artists at Bluesfest, making for a visual spectacular not previously seen at Bluesfest and which complemented the music of the era beautifully.
Since childhood, Roger Foley Fogg has been fascinated by the movement of clouds, particularly on a moonlit night as they move from light to darkness then light again and water as it swirled around among the rocks of the seashore and dappled sunlight filtered through the leaves of trees which when observed closely was composed of myriad overlapping circles, images of the sun.
He realised that everything we see is a reflection of light and more importantly a reflection of the countless overlapping images of all the illuminated objects nearby which led to holograms created by coherent light from lasers… images of objects that were not there.
When Roger left boarding schooling in 1959, he well and truly jumped right into the 1960s forming a group of artists named Light Artists Ellis D Fogg for the drug then legal and issued on prescription from Broughton Hall at Callan Park.
“LSD was a fast way toward expanding one’s consciousness and achieving enlightenment, which I considered was positively accelerating evolution,” said Roger.
Some 50 years later Peter Noble, the Director and Creator of Bluesfest, Australia’s largest and most successful music festival, invited Roger to lunch.
“Peter loves music and musicians with a rare knowledge, enormous passion and love,” explained Roger. “He is a product of our 60s generation and after two disastrous cancellations of his festival, was all fired up to do it again.”
Peter was keen to acknowledge the pioneers of Rock and Blues music in Australia by encouraging the reformation of our great surfing band Tamam Shud to appear with the great band from Melbourne Spectrum and with Ross Wilson’s latest musical creation the Peaceniks.
“The Shud was and is a surfing band, their music for the recently re-released surfing film Albie Falzon and David Elphick’s Morning of the Earth is an important part of our history and our future evolution,” said Roger. “The Shud, Spectrum and Ross Wilson’s Daddy Cool were some of the very first bands to appear in my Lightshow Concerts of the late 60s and early 70s with my Psychedelic Liquid Lightshows.”
So over lunch, Peter invited Roger to perform his Psychedelic Liquid Lightshow once again to accompany these great musicians, a show Roger had not performed for 50 years.
“I had, however, continued to work with ‘light’ and ‘dark’ and ‘colour’ in my art practice and I am a great believer in synchronicity – which is available to us all if you pay attention and notice it,” Roger added. “And all of a sudden, in the last few years several young people have contacted me about Liquid Lightshows. One of them was Yao Mikami, who contacted me for advice and has since developed a terrific Liquid show herself.
“I have always employed the very best Lightshow Artists to do my shows under our collective name ELLIS D FOGG and I had spent time developing a modern light show utilising my hundred or so short actuality movies and historic movies from the 60s and 70s. I had realised that improvements to data and digital projectors would eventually take over from modern LED lights. The only issue was the control. I have always been in control of all the various images and effects from the various artists, deciding which image goes with which, and solutions presented themselves very quickly – vision mixers!”
Roger’s first show using these techniques was in a very small space in Bellingen accompanying Marguerite Montes and Jex Lopes. It worked and he was on a roll with a new way of doing old stuff.
“I am amazed at the great response from the artists and audience,” declared Roger. “As an 80-year-old it is wonderful and amazing to be in demand by a new generation.”
Entitled The World is One, this modern Liquid Lightshow was hand-made live by Yao Mikami with contributions from Neil Pike, Rubin Bingham and recorded 1960s Liquid Lights all edited live by Roger through front and rear projection on a bespoke and psychedelic light show screen assisted by Francesca Emerson, Adam Sutton, Sarah Breen Lovett and Jim Anderson.
