Andi Watson Design Ltd.

Andi Watson’s profession doesn’t come with a sexy title — he’s a lighting and stage director — so it’s probably best to think of his work this way: He’s the guy responsible for Radiohead’s mise-en-scène.

Courtesy of Chronicle Books

Since the mid-1990s, Watson has designed the visual component of Radiohead’s tours—outings that have become increasingly ambitious and atmospheric as the five-piece band’s sound has done roughly the same. Watson’s light creations share little in common with the neon hedonism of tours by the Rolling Stones or U2, save sometimes for the big-arena scale. Watson’s work can be ponderous and starkly minimalistic and sometimes Dadaesque — it’s stunning mood art meant to accompany and translate the music of the world’s biggest art band. Reached at his home in Brighton, England, Watson said: “My purpose is to create an environment for the band to perform in,” an additional synaptic link between Radiohead and its audience.

Now Watson is the subject of an art tome, “Bullet Proof … I Wish I Was” (Chronicle Books, $45), a handsome assemblage of critical essays and stunning concert shots that connect Watson’s cerebral live-music spectacles to the long history of light as a creative medium. (Radiohead’s frontman, Thom Yorke, contributes an introduction.) The author, Christopher Scoates, traces the form from Adolphe Appia (a fin de siècle Swiss lighting designer who is considered the modern father of the form) to the Hungarian Constructivist artist Lázló Moholy-Nagy to the mind-scrambling visuals of Ken Kesey’s acid tests.

In their discussions of Watson’s designs for Radiohead, Oasis, Vanessa Paradis and others, Scoates and his fellow essayists cite myriad unexpected influences: in straight-ahead shots of Radiohead’s 2006 tour, for example, you can see the severe, carnival-mirror angles of the classic German silent film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” as well as echoes of a famous Jean Cocteau shot — an eye peering through a keyhole, from “Le Sang d’un Poète.” The references aren’t all high art: For Radiohead’s 2008 “In Rainbows” tour, Watson created a cyber-punkish, carbon-neutral “LED forest” that, when it luminesced toxic green, suggested the hypnotic datascapes of the “Matrix” movies.

Watson, 47, occasionally dabbles in installation art but devotes the bulk of his time to concert work. “To be honest, I find there’s not a massive market for it,” he said. “Now I think almost all of the designs I do could work as standalone art projects.”

And they’re not just designs but living creations. On tour, Watson functions as the sixth member of Radiohead, reacting to changes in songs and structures from the lighting booth. This is only after months of planning — after absorbing the band’s music and having conversations with its members and concocting a vision. “I get pictures in my head of what should be going on while the band is playing — of the ideal color, and the dynamic and where light should be coming from,” he said.

He said he’s already working on the next Radiohead tour, which hasn’t been announced yet, in the sense that he’s always working on the next Radiohead tour. The difference? “This time ’round I probably didn’t get the record earlier than anyone else,” he said. (The band released last month’s “The King of Limbs” only four days after revealing its existence. Watson’s favorite tracks are the low-sizzle groove of “Lotus Flower” and the womblike ballad “Give Up the Ghost.”)

Radiohead tours tend to include large amphitheaters, big-ticket festivals and smaller, more intimate spaces, which means Watson’s designs are light and adaptable, if still wholly immersive. He hasn’t inherited the megalomaniacal bombast of, say, Pink Floyd concerts in the 1970s. “There are not a lot of rock bands going around with floating pigs these days,” he said. “Maybe someone will ask me for one. It hasn’t happened yet.”