Face to Face with... Adam Smith

Adam Smith created the visuals for The Chemical Brothers’ first gig in 1994. Since then he’s continued to work with the band, developing his art and pioneering the medium. He’s also forged a career as a live action director, with episodes of hit TV shows like Skins and Doctor Who under his belt, as well as umpteen critically acclaimed promos for the likes of The Streets, Jamie T, Lady Sovereign and of course The Chemical Brothers, not to mention numerous documentaries and shorts.

Smith will be hosting a session at Fallon London’s Vision Sound Music, a new festival that will demonstrate how music, film, advertising and games can come together to great effect, which runs from 2 – 4 September at the Southbank Centre. Here, Smith tells us about the festival and his glittering career in live visuals.

How did you get into your line of work?

I was doing a film and photography course and projecting our work at raves seemed like a good idea at the time. I was young.

How did you get involved with VSM and what will your session at the festival cover?

I was asked by Chris, John and Lisa at Fallon. The idea is a discussion of the relationship between music and moving images in relation to work I have done with visuals, music videos and drama.

Why are events like VSM important?

They’re a great way of hearing about peoples’ working methods and ideas in an interesting way.

How have visuals at concerts, like yours for the Chemical Brothers, changed live music?

I think people expect a certain level of visual stimulation at a concert, especially if it’s not a traditional-type band and sometimes even if it is a traditional band. It's great that you can go and have an immersive audio visual experience as part of a show and the levels that bands and artists go to really putting on a show, but it’s still great to just go and watch someone perform as well.

You don’t actually ‘perform’ the visuals live like a VJ, do you?

I used to go on tour with the band armed with an arsenal of 16 mm projectors and 35 mm slide projectors, switching and changing them ‘live’, adjusting the speed of homemade ‘strobe’ adapters (controlled by a Hornby Railways device) to go with the song and then frantically changing 16 mm film loops between songs whilst balancing on the top of a scaffold tower (usually a little worse for wear).

Some of the arguments that Vegetable Vision (which is what we were called at the time. A "state of mind not a plate of food" as I explained to a German promoter who said our behaviour warranted us being called “pig meat vision", but anyway...) used to have in these conditions were almost worthy of performance art in themselves. But that was a long time ago.

Nowadays we make the visual material, programme the lights with the lighting designer and then rehearse it. Ricardo, who I have worked with for years, mixes the programmed lights and edited visuals live in relation and reaction to what Ed and Tom are doing on stage.

What do you think the future holds for live music visuals?

Projection mapping is very exciting and [so are] 3D possibilities. Something totally immersive would be exciting to do but needs a big budget.

What’s best; directing live music visuals or promos/films/TV?

I enjoy it all and am lucky to get to explore different mediums. They all cross over into each other really. I’m currently working on a Chemical Brothers live film which is out later this year. It will be the first time we’ve filmed it properly so it’s all very exciting.

You’ve been involved with the Chemical Brothers since their first gig. Do you like being referred to as their ‘third member’ and how has the relationship developed over the years?

It's been great working with them over the years. A lot’s developed but essentially the same level of trust and belief of letting me (and Marcus Lyall, who I now co-direct the visuals with) get on with expressing their music visually. ‘Third member’ seems a bit of an overstatement, albeit very flattering. At the end of the day we just make the visuals and creatively direct the show.

Tell us about your new feature projects, Dope Girls and Pigeon English...

Dope Girls is being written by an amazing young writer called Polly Stenham. It's based on stories of the book of the same name and being developed with Film Four. It’s about a girl involved in the hedonistic, drug-fuelled nightclub scene of the early 1920's, where chorus girls, artists and the  aristocracy partied with gangsters, drug dealers and ‘dance hostesses’, and the first plain clothes policemen raided the clubs.

Pigeon English is an adaptation of the brilliant book for the BBC by Scott Free and written by the incredible Jack Thorne. It's a rites of passage story about an 11-year-old Ghanaian boy who comes to live in London with his sister and mother. Development is a slow process though so it has been great to get out (to Japan) and film the Chemical Brothers do a gig on the top of a mountain.

Tickets for Vision Sound Music are on sale here. For more information about the festival, visit the website here.

Check out some visuals from The Chemical Brothers' tour in the gallery below.