Few people in the industry can claim quite as many air miles as Paul Dodd - a man whose work, at the cutting edge of professional lighting technology, has taken him around the globe on any number of occasions. Today, in the midst of the rampant Chinese economy, Dodd is Vice President of PR Lighting and well placed to look back over his jet setting career. Jerry Gilbert tracks him down...

For nigh on 30 years Paul Dodd has quietly held his position at the vanguard of club culture, bestriding each new trend in show lighting as it has come along. This needed much dexterity during the 1980's - when his operating domain required him to 'play' more keypads and lighting synths than Keith Emerson - in stark contrast to today, when lightshows are no longer manual and visceral experiences, but pre-programmed on computer.

Always the cocoon rather than the butterfly - and unquestionably the most travelled technician on the planet - few have had such an enduring influence in shaping the industry as Paul Dodd.

I am privileged to have witnessed many of his greatest lighting moments down the years but prefer instead to recall three memorable social encounters.

The first was in 1981- in a restaurant off Kensington Church Street, when Paul pulled together the consortium that would stage the Superdisco at the unfortunately-named Light & Sound Show Discotek 82 in London. Orchestrated into one of the most unlikely product showcases of the decade, it was also the year that across the water, a Showco lunch in a Dallas diner threw up the blueprint that would become Vari-Lite.

Fast forward to the start of the new millennium, and I am sitting alone in the empty restaurant of the largely soulless Hotel Il Pioniere in Italy's Castel Goffredo - a town famed for its hosiery and automated lighting - trying to make a pizza experience fill the evening, when there is a tap on my shoulder. Paul Dodd. "What are you doing here?" I ask in stunned disbelief. "I live here!" came the answer. Paul explained that he had set up home on the top floor of the Il Pioniere since arriving to take up a technical position with FAL, in an attempt to catapult the company into the 'Serie A' of lighting.

The third occasion came with this interview. Today based in Guangzhou, in the Canton region of China, Paul was temporarily back in the UK, where he maintains a base in Bedford - less than 100km north of London. He suggested we meet in a 'beer garden' at his local pub, which sounded wonderfully idyllic until three of us found ourselves shoehorned into, at best, a backyard, filled with two bedraggled tables and chairs.

And when Paul's Japanese wife Kazumi and baby Christina joined the party we must have been in serious danger of contravening the pub's al fresco license restrictions.

Like so many founding fathers of modern kinetic lighting Paul Dodd's early adventures began with risque experiments in school Physics Labs (when he was studying Biochemistry), leading to an empirical adventure through 1960's oil wheel epidioscopic development (where much of the show was prepared in the kitchen). Speak to geniuses like Peter Wynne Willson, Tony Gottelier, Neil Rice, Lowell Fowler and the other inventors and they will tell you that it was their vision and imagination in adapting technology designed for other usage that was at the core of their success. Without that ethic there would have been no PAR 36 pinspot (originally a tractor lamp). And without the PAR 36 the environmental world of late night leisure would have become a very different place.

Paul Dodd's experimental platform was lighting concerts at the hugely influential Kingston Polytechnic where his Liquid Theatre were in competition with the Mass Spectrometer Lightshow. It was only seven years ago that he realised his biggest rival had been operated by John Lethbridge - later of Cerebrum Lighting.

"Electronics was a hobby - there were no rules in those days, and therefore no preconceived ways. If you made something out of silver foil which looked good, you used it." He was probably not alone in projecting live newts, via converted Rank Aldis projectors originally designed for educational purposes.

After leaving Grammar School in 1972 Paul spent six months in Selma, Alabama, familiarising himself with the timber trade (his father was in the lumber business). "I learnt enough while I was there to know it wasn't what I wanted to do." But the upside was a slot on the local WAMA station where his cultured English accent (and choice of records) provided a welcome break from the world of wood.

Back in the UK he pursued his interest in sailing, delivering a boat to the Mediterranean, stopping off in Nice and Corsica, before hitching his way back to the UK. He taught at a sailing school in Devon, and then worked for the old Inner London Education Authority, setting up the first sailing course for handicapped children at Banbury Reservoir in North London. The anger he felt when this was discontinued "because of political issues" is totally at odds with his generally placid demeanour.

If Paul was unable to pursue one of his passions professionally, he rationalised that he would need to turn to the other: music. "I had been running mobile discos and so I joined Juliana's (the international turnkey discotheque provider). "They sent me to Pizza Express in Gloucester Road where I fixed their broken turntable, mixer and projector." They were so impressed, that after a spell at the Munich Sheraton, director Thomas Vaughan felt his talents would be better served back at head office in Kensington, training their DJs.

Dodd later joined Juliana's rivals, Bacchus, and after spending time at the Paris Penta he arrived at the SAS Hotel in Oslo. "I was supposed to stay there three months but ended up staying eight years)."

His first task was to completely rewire the discotheque. One of the men impressed with his electronics prowess was Eivind Solberg of EHS AS, who asked if he had the capability to build a new club within a loft ('Loftet', at the Hotel Continental). He still has the schematic today.

"So I set off to the Discotek 77 show (the precursor of PLASA) and bought all the components from Nigel Morris at Roger Squire's, and shipped it back to Norway."

At Squire's he also met Tony Kingsley, and when the latter set up Avitec UK, Paul Dodd's custom went with him. Soon he became a co-opted member of the company, as the industry matured during the glorious period between 1978 and 1982 when Avitec held most of the aces. "I helped Tony with the BADEM Shows and also with the early advanced lightshows in Germany.

Avitec's parent company was German, and in 1981 Germany - and more specifically Tarm's Teatre de Tao in Bochum - was the place to be. It was a wonderful academy of learning and out of this came the wunderkinds, sound man Peter Ršmer and lighting artist Ralf Bergmann.

In 1981 Avitec GmbH booked a staggering 6,000 sq. ft of space on two floors at the DIFA Show - in the Halle Munsterland's Congress Centre - to showcase their own products and those from UK companies for whom they acted as distributors, namely Pulsar, Optikinetics, ICElectrics and Mode. Ralf Bergmann's frisson-inducing lightshow had been one of Paul Dodd's most memorable moments and it was the tectonic shift that this represented which urged him to set up that restaurant meeting of all the suppliers in Kensington bistro, Maggie Jones, on the last day at BADEM 81. The German experience had been so good he could see no valid reason why it should not be repeated in London.

Yet the full influence took another 12 months to register. It was immediately after the Udo Fischer-designed Bluetonium - an iconic blue triangular paneled structure, braced with 4,000 pieces of Meroform space frame, which appeared at the 1982 DIFA Show in Munster - that the momentum began in earnest in the UK.

The landmark 1982 Superdisco duly formed the central cog in the awkwardly-named BADEM 82 - Sound & Light Show (the PLASA Show today). Udo Fischer's hexagonal design across 3,000 sq ft was to incorporate seven participating companies - and from that moment on Paul Dodd became one of the hottest names on the planet, joining the ranks of Germans Ralf Bergmann and Martin Kane.

"But during the intervening year there had been enormous shenanigans," remembers Paul. "Pulsar wanted to do a breakway event at the Roundhouse and I nearly scuppered the whole thing for contravening union labour rules. The wiring that the Union sparkies were putting in would have made a Frenchman blush."

In the end the show, with Bergmann and Dodd at the helm, was played largely on a platoon of Avitec Gamma touch sensors, which the latter describes as the best touch sensors ever for playing lightshows on.

"At the time, Superdisco didn't seem such a big deal - it just seemed entirely logical. It must have worked for Avitec because it started Mecca on their programme of hi-tech discotheques." Throughout the UK installers took up the challenge, inspired by what they had seen at the Bloomsbury Crest Hotel. And indeed while Ralf Bergmann presided over the opening night of the seminal Birmingham Powerhouse, Paul Dodd was doing the same at Sweeting's in Bedford - the final wiring still being connected up as the first lighting scene zipped into action.

"It was those Superdiscos in Munster and Dusseldorf that made us realise what we could do. These were emotional times. At the opening of Twiilight Zone in Redruth our lightshow had people crying with emotion. I really hope that inspired the generation that followed us - people like Carl Dodds."

But the industry would soon change. The physical emotion of 'playing' electro-mechanical lighting would soon become a thing of the past. Dodd had learnt his art with Eiving Solberg in Norway and taught a generation of light jocks how to manually 'play' the lighting. With a good audio partner the emotion of conducting one of these expansively opulent lightshows in the early 80s - trying to create a state of synaethesia with your audio partner - was kind of up there with sex, and Paul Dodd is among many who laments its passing. "The problem today is that while the lightshow is perfect every time it doesn't have the same emotion.

"Suddenly everybody wanted movement of the lights ... and then Pancan came along and that was another way to move the beam around."

And so when mondo*dr asked Paul Dodd to nominate some of his more memorable pieces from that era he alighted on the classic Kremesa CR4VV waver, the Kremesa Jota (a 'Harvester' effect) - both cornerstones in any lightshow - and the Kremesa Krypton, "which took the concept of centrepieces to the extreme".

He also nominates Pancan "because of what it did. It was the first servo pan and tilt system and where the scanner came from," he assesses. Although one of Peter Wynne Willson's most unsung pieces, he believes, was the Light Machine Gun, which kick-started a generation of laser simulators.

Paul Dodd returned to the UK in 1985 after plans to set up Avitec Norway were scuppered by NEMKO certification laws, but seemed fairly uneasy about his new role as technical engineer with Avitec UK in Hitchin. "I simply wasn't an electronics engineer," he declares matter-of-factly - and so after a couple of years, having learnt the new art of Autocad, he went to Germany "to learn design professionally" from his mentor Peter Danne.

Danne, a partner in Avitec GmbH, had picked up the design mantle from Udo Fischer, and was responsible for creating some of the most dynamically interactive interiors in Germany. "I learnt from Peter how to realise different effects that I had visualised in my head, and how to make the most effective use of the lighting."

The highlight came when he and Danne entered a design competition in 1986 - and won first prize, beating every other design team in Germany.

But almost inevitably, Avitec met its Waterloo during the conversion of Hammersmith Palais into 'Le Palais' - a project blighted from the start. The lightshow was to have been built round the new Avitec Lite Movers but they weren't ready in time and at the last minute had to be replaced with Coemar Robots. "It was an immense project and the time constraints were terrible," Paul remembers. "The roof had needed structural strengthening which hadn't shown on the survey."

And to add insult to injury Paul was also denied the chance to orchestrate the lightshow for Charles and Diana, the opening night guests.

For Avitec, who had depended for so much of its business on Mecca, the strained relationship marked the beginning of the end.

Paul remained with the beleaguered company until just before its collapse - but his parting shot had been to persuade Tony Kingsley to let him specify the first High End Color Pro's in the UK (48 fixtures at La Parisienne in Folkestone) - having been impressed by the richness of colour produced by the dichroics.

"By then everyone was hailing scanners as the new thing. I was never fully convinced these should replace motorised lighting - scanners were never the same, and certainly weren't a valid substitute for motorised lighting. But it's all fashion ...".

Clay Paky were the first to hit mass market, and along with their channel-hungry scanners came the birth of integrated control - and the OSKA (marketed by Pulsar). It was a great invention, believes Paul, "but you were limited by the number of sensor pads you could view at any one time. People hadn't got used to 'page through' - they still had a mechanical touch sensor mentality, although I remember two guys in the north doing really well with OSKA (probably Zhivago's in Darlington - ed)." Needing a MIDI interface, he was also concerned about the speed of address.

The point at which he dived headlong into the brave new world of digital control came with the arrival of ShowCAD. "ShowCAD was absolutely wonderful, and gave the immediacy of access I had been used to with keypads."

After Avitec Paul decided to freelance. At the LDI Show in 1990 his design for Elektralite won the Light Show Of The Year - an accolade created on the fly as the adjuducators were so impressed by what Paul had achieved with a Trilite truss and products from Light Processor, Clay Paky and Lynx Lighting.

He had also designed lightshows for an Avitec-distributed brand, FAL - and after seeing one of his SIB shows owner Primo Bertani invited Paul out to Castel Goffredo on a short-term contract to help design some new fixtures. This time he stayed nearly ten years! "I had an extremely comprehensive overview of what the market in general was doing, and most of it was being generated in Castel Goffredo or nearby," he says. "FAL had been making not terribly good beam effects and my task was to help them develop new products to a level where they would gain international respect.

"But I ended up performing an enormous number of different tasks, including designing their exhibition stands, and since I was a native English speaker, also producing their catalogues.

"I never wanted us to be the number one company - it's too expensive; but my task at FAL was to find a nice position just under that ... where the quality was good but the value for money was even better. And I believe we managed to do that." However, the best legacy, he believes, was giving FAL the self-belief and an appreciation of how effectively their products could function in a carefully designed lightshow.

By the time he left in 2001 he had successfully closed another chapter - and had another language under his belt (adding Italian to Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German and French).

At this stage it is unlikely whether he expected to be adding Mandarin and Cantonese to the roster - but he was suddenly made an offer by Pearl River in China which he couldn't refuse.

Paul Dodd could see a vast opportunity opening up. "China was a country that was ready to explode in the same way Japan was in the 1960's, when they were making electronics, but had a poor reputation for quality.

"I understood China could manufacture at a price Europe couldn't match, but the only thing that was stopping them was the quality. I knew that if I was to bring Pearl River up to an international standard I would have to touch a lot of departments in the company - but it remains frustrating until I learn the language."

He had already met his future wife, Kazumi Nakayama while in Italy, when she was working for Martin Lighting distributors, Media Face Company of Tokyo. They had come to Italy in 1997 with a view to importing some Italian manufacturers - and Ivano Burato jokingly said 'Paul's still single.' Playing along, Kazumi replied, 'We should get married then.' But pranks have a way of biting you in the bum - and on May 17 last year that's precisely what happened.

Kazumi was soon pregnant, and nine months ago their daughter Christina was born.

If parenthood was Paul Dodd's "biggest step ever" his biggest achievement in Guangzhou has been to rebrand Pearl River - pulling them away from OEM manufacturing and the culture of product emulation and establishing them in their own right as 'PR Lighting'. To help accomplish that he has brought in High End Systems' experienced Steve Tulk, who had been instrumental in the Color Pro and Intellabeam product development teams.

He has also helped condition them for the Western markets - a move expedited by the expertise of their export manager Lin Hong.

And in 2004, with his wife and baby alongside, Paul Dodd appears the model of contentment - despite the monsoon-like conditions in which we are conducting the interview. "I don't see anywhere in Europe where there is the possibility for growth such as this. Europe seems in crisis and yet there's no stopping China. It will march and conquer the manufacturing world."

Where, if not China, would he be happy working? "I'd be quite happy working back in England," he deliberates, before adding: "But in all this time I have never planned what the next move might be."

He feels the industry today has become bogged down and is "carrying too much baggage". But he remains optimistic about recapturing the excitement of the '80s.

His greatest hope for the future is that the industry embarks on a more empirical and pioneering path once again - allowing the imagination to run free. His motto: "Use anything that works well, whatever it was developed for, and remember, if technology doesn't seem like magic, it's probably obsolete."

And with that, he swears me to secrecy as he divulges a wonderful new effect he has stumbled on by accident, and which if it follows a logical development course could become a patented invention for PR Lighting...