It’s not just that 2018’s Parnelli Visionary honoree has worked with a lot of acts — it’s the artistic diversity of those acts that underscores the artistic diversity of a designer who is always reinventing himself. Jonathan Smeeton pioneered the concept of visually enhancing a concert beyond throwing some lights with gel on them, and he is quite likely the first LD to take a lighting show on the road. He went on to build by hand key lighting components, and was also an early designer of one of the first big festivals in England, the Bath Festival.
Smeeton, who once worked under the moniker “Liquid Len,” was one of the minds behind “Liquid Len and the Lensman.” Along with Mike Hart, Alan Day, John Perrin and John Lee, they provided the ground-breaking light show for the band Hawkwind in the 1970s. His artistic palette was called upon over the next five decades for Frank Zappa, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, Phil Collins, Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Phil Collins, Def Leppard, Wham, Keith Urban and Taylor Swift, among many others. Recently, he’s working with Diana Ross.
“No one deserves this more than him,” says David Milly, executive VP of 4Wall Nashville, who had also worked with Smeeton as owner of Huntsville, AL-based Theatrical Lighting Systems (TLS), which 4Wall acquired in 2012. “The first time I met him, we were both working on a co-headlining concert with Lynyrd Skynyrd and Sammy Hagar, and Jonathan was the only civil person there! It was suicide to try to design a rig that both bands liked, but he made both camps happy somehow. He has always been experience-savvy. You could tell right away when somebody is full of s**t, and he was not.”
“May 7, 1967 was the first day I got paid for turning on projectors and doing liquid-y light shows,” recalls Smeeton, of the outset of his amazing career. “The club was called Middle Earth.”
The rest, as they say, is history — and in Smeeton’s case, its and unusual one, and one you could not make up.
Going His Own Way
Smeeton was born in rural England, and grew up Kingston upon Thames, across the River Thames from Hampton Court Palace, hunting grounds of King Henry VIII. “It was a really cool childhood because we spent more our time out in the woods,” he says. He was born in 1948, the youngest child of three. “I’m the only one in my family born after the war, and after the war, everything was different,” he says. “The country never really recovered having collective PTSD, which happens when your entire town/country is bombed out. There really was a generation gap, a disconnect of values. The beatniks and hippies were grateful for the hard-fought freedom, but then said, ‘Thank you very much, but we are going to go our own way.’”
Before going his own way, he did take a short detour in the Navy, where he developed mechanical skills that would come in handy down the road. Perplexing his parents, he next studied art at Kingston College. There he started in sculpture and moved into graphics before just heading out to London in 1967. With a couple of friends, looking for work, he wandered into the aforementioned all-night coffee/folk club, Middle Earth. One of the friends said he’d do any kind of work for the club, so he was made a janitor. Another said he had run a coffee bar, so he was hired to do that. “The fellow asks what I do, and I replied ‘I’m an art student.’ He said “Oh, so you must know about these psychedelic light shows?’ ‘Of course,’ I lied.”
He would work Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., and Fridays and Saturdays from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. “I found all these 1,000-watt projectors going cheap, which were perfect for me.” He had five projectors working from the balcony simultaneously. “Unlike the Americans that combined oil and water to make their trippy backdrops, I would take a glass slide and put some colored ink on it and mix it around so there were some air bubbles in it. Then I would take another glass slide and place it on top of the other with a different colored ink. As the lamp from the projector heated up the ink, it would move around (boil). A slide would last up to five minutes before a fresh one had to be inserted into the projector. Audience members would insist that I made it all move to the beat of the music, but I wasn’t able to do that. That’s why light shows succeeded — very stoned people!” Immediately his technique was being copied elsewhere, by equally-stoned people.
As for him, musicians were clamoring at his door, and a career as what we would know as a lighting designer for bands was established. “Now people wanted to pay me for this, so my light show got bigger.” The early days were primitive indeed: “We built some rather nice footlights — red, blue green in sets of three for a total of 15 lights. We ran it on a little keyboard that made them flash on and off.” This allowed the band to be illuminated as the painting with liquid lighting set the mood.
On the Road
In 1967, he moved up to lighting at the legendary UFO night club where acts like Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention and The Who, Arthur Brown, Soft Machine, played. Then he was invited to Gothenburg and Stockholm in Sweden, where his work was seen has a new kinetic art form (“their words, not mine”). He succumbed to the realm of art galleries and hippies in business suits before returning to London and the budding the world of rock ‘n’ roll. There he had a meeting with Chris Blackwell at the newly found Island Records of Portobello Road, and its sister company, Island Agency, which was starting to run tours for its artists. At this point, touring bands were at the cruel mercy of whatever lights were hanging in whatever space they were playing in. Blackwell asked him point blank if he could tour with stage lighting. As so often it goes, he said “yes” without knowing for sure he could do it, and off he went on a 10-week tour with a bill of three bands — Traffic, Free and Mott the Hoople. There is no known example of this ever having been done before, making this one of the first times if not the very first time someone with a lighting package went out on tour for a traveling show. “The equipment I took out made for a good show, and after I went out on that tour, I never looked back,” he says.
In the beginning of this phase a big part of it was acquiring the lights — and making them. Smeeton found a diagram somewhere on how to build a dimmer. He built them out of wood and a few components. He used a lot of wood to make his first fixtures, but soon switched to steel and aluminum when he found a metal company in Shepherd’s Bush to build what he designed. They made the footlights out of three 500-watt photo floods that had a six-hour life span with red, green and blue gels in front of them. “It was homemade amateur hour,” he says. “We would rent pipe and base from Strand and their Pattern 23 profile and 123 Fresnel fixtures with 500-watt bulbs. We had eight of these fixtures from the back and the footlights from the front. We never used spotlights.” From there, he ended up building a light show with friend Derek Martin for Stevie Winwood. “He really liked psychedelia.” Ultimately this became the core of Hawkwind’s rig.
Liquid Len and the Lensmen
Smeeton soon started experimenting with animation and slides for his projectors. One of his first easy ones involved a Pegasus, the flying horse. Through a series of slides and a dimmer rack that would turn the projector bulbs on and off, he was able to emulate flapping wings. “By then I had five 500-watt GAF Quartz Halogen Projectors!” For a controller, they built their own using a keyboard. “We had it set up so each white key did something different, like turn on a projector. The black keys would do something else. While Dickie Ollett was tinkering with building the revolutionary Avo desk and a pin matrix, we had memories that remembered scenes. We called it the ‘Color Organ,’ and we built chases for the first time in my life. With the console we could put variable attack and delay times on fade times.
What really allowed him to spread his wings creatively was his 1970 association with the band Hawkwind. All the elements of what he had been doing so far came together, and the early “space rock” band was a natural fit for the vision Smeeton was developing. “We built a light show that involved film loops, pictures and animations,” he tells. “We had different slides of the same image zooming in and out and five projectors were involved. We had visual gags, effects … shows started getting technically advanced — and complicated!” The band and Smeeton both got popular, and this show was one that had to be seen.
Gail Colson was a music manager, one of her clients being Peter Gabriel. But in 1978, when she was then president of Charisma Records, Hawkwind was on their label, and met Smeeton during that time. “I am sure that he was the only lighting designer who had his own billing on posters, at least in U.K.,” she says of his Liquid Len days, and a lasting relationship was formed. He called a guy name John Lee looking for a van and driver for Hawkwind. “That single phone call ended up having a profound effect on me, as he became such a staunch supporter of light shows for concerts. He and I go so far back we can read each other’s thoughts.”
Another milestone happened about this time when he was asked by promoter Freddy Bannister to work the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music in 1970. “Freddy was putting on bands including Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa Steppenwolf, Jefferson Airplane and many others,” Smeeton says. “He came to me and said they were going to build a stage and wanted me to hang lights all over it, and I said ‘Okay.’” This ended up also involving search light towers and a double chain linked fence for outdoor security. “I was like, ‘Wow! This feels like a prison!’” Three miles of festoon lights later, the festival grounds welcomed a huge, six-figure crowd for a concert that lasted three days, making it England’s Woodstock.
Smeeton first met Frank Zappa at the Bath festival, and then again on the set of his 200 Motels film, and went out with him on the accompanying tour. Of course, you can’t work with Zappa without coming away with some stories: While performing in Montreux, Switzerland, right in the middle of his set at the concert hall that doubled as a community center on the shore of Lake Geneva, Zappa had to stop the show. “He points to me and sure enough there was a fire in the roof, and I had to jump out a window.” Gratefully, no one was hurt, though all the equipment was lost. (And yes, the band Deep Purple was recording Machine Head and witnessing the event inspired the song “Smoke on the Water.”)
His touring with Zappa brought him to these shores, where he continued to work with other bands including Captain Beefheart. But an opportunity for a “steady paycheck” then let him to a “nice niche job” at the U.K. shop for Rikki Farr’s TFA/Electrosound for a while as well as Britannia Row, the Pink Floyd-owned company that supplied the band with the gear it needed for its shows on the road. After Robbie Williams and Bryan Grant bought Brit Row from Pink Floyd in 1984, the production company branded out to support other projects. “We had a huge stock of theatrical gear, including those inflatable pigs,” Smeeton says. One of his tasks there was providing pyro for the Rolling Stones Tattoo You shows in Europe in 1982, where he leveraged the demolition and explosive training he had picked up while in the Navy. “I was working with Mark Fisher, who designed it, and I got a pyro company involved,” Smeeton recalls. “It was nice, but crazy! Every country had its own set of rules on fireworks and explosives and the transportation of them. Every [concert] the big fireworks were made by hand. My job was getting to the site the day of and figuring out the positions to shoot them off, plus figure out where they were going to come down. There was a couple of thousand feet in play as what goes up must come down, and then I had to study the weather and anticipate the wind. It was nerve-wracking!”
One of his favorite clients during this period were the Thompson Twins. Smeeton began work for this act when they were just “a little pop band.” Once he started touring with them, they took off, and Smeeton was able to stretch creatively with moving lights, scenery and backgrounds. “They had no money, though, and we couldn’t afford truss, so we would build scaffolds and hung lights on that,” he noted. They would go to the Hollywood Bowl together where they had installed some sound spheres to held with the notoriously challenging acoustics. These would be an inspiration to Smeeton: “This is so fantastic, let’s make some giant inflatable spheres.”
Don’t Stop Believing
This was followed by running lights for a Bay Area band called Journey. “I was in Japan and headed to the U.K. after some Thompson Twins shows were done,” Smeeton says. “So I cold-called their manager, Herbie Herbert, and asked him if I could fly into San Francisco just to have a meeting with him. He was impressed that some LD was willing to fly half way around the world to show him his portfolio. “To this day, it’s the only band that I actually ever chased after — of course, I got the gig.”
Tom Strahan, the set designer, drew up a grand stage set made with super high gloss white paint for Journey’s 1986 Raised on Radio tour. For the lighting, Smeeton designed three triangular truss pods and stretched a white fabric between all of them. These triangles were lined with Vari-Lites. Other flown pods were full of par 64 fixtures. He then made use of the latest technology just released, the Skjonberg motion control system. This allowed the show to start with the three triangular pods to be right over the band’s heads at the top of the show and raise up to wow the crowd as the music started.
“We were at the beginning of moving technology. The Skjonberg controller was really a prototype, the first motor controller that actually timed the movement of the lifts. The Vari-Lites were so secret. We had ‘triage’ set up in closed rooms to work on them, as they were always breaking. The console had so many functions that didn’t work, like the time and speed buttons. The chases didn’t function when I started. Worst of all, you couldn’t save your show file to any outboard device. I had to carry this memory rack all around the world. If they updated the software, I often had to rewrite the entire show from scratch.”
During the early 80’s, the English band Japan rang him up and said their lighting guy didn’t show up, could he come down to their show? He did, and after the show, Japan’s manager, Simon Napier-Bell, turned to Smeeton to light another new band he was managing Wham!. A few modest pub gigs ensued, and then the album broke, and the hysteria of Wham was unleashed around the globe.
“The management knew there was a huge demand for the band in America. We booked nine club shows when we could have done arenas at the time. The next year we came over, and the promoters demanded we book arenas. The management said, ‘No, we are going to play stadiums,’ and they did.” Smeeton worked with Fisher again, and they designed a stage set with these massive white sails that surrounded the scaffold stage. The sails were even spread out across the roof, making the structure one of the most massive stages ever assembled as of 1985. See Factor supplied the 250 Berkey Colortran 4-cell cyc lights for that show, and the late Bob See would note that this included every one of those fixtures east of the Mississippi at the time.
1990s and 2000s
By 1990, Jonathan found himself designing a unique stage and lighting setup for Phil Collins. “I had been tinkering for quite some time on an idea where a structure could open up and evolve into a light rig. I had done some drawings for an ELO television show that depicted a stage set like a spaceship opening to form another grand structure. As I was designing the concept, I was at a loss for what the object would look like when my daughter Sarah Jane simply said, ‘It looks like a carousel.’” As the audience walked into the empty arena for the “Seriously Live” tour, they saw a carousel sitting there. When the music started, the sides of the merry-go-round lifted to form lighting trusses. “This was the biggest engineering project I ever got involved with. It took three engineering firms to figure out how we could build it.”
Another landmark tour he was involved in was Def Leppard’s 1993 Adrenalizer tour, including one-armed drummer Rick Allen’s custom-designed electronic drum set that rotated and a visual and pyrotechnic smorgasbord that really raised the theatrical bar in concerts. “It was quite mind-boggling at the time, because the stage was in the round, so it had to be designed and lit to be equally effective in all four directions. That was a tough show to run, as we were calling 16 followspots. There were over 2,000 cues in the show.”
In 1994, he was working on a Yes tour and met Eric Loader, then running Martin’s Los Angeles branch. (Today, Loader is director of Elation). “Right away I could tell he was a really innovative guy, and he did a lot with whatever lighting products he was working with at the time,” Loader says. “On this tour, it was the first with Martin RoboScans, and he made the lights look amazing. His design skills impressed me, and he has always been a trend setting, always pushing the envelope.”
Echoing what others have noted, Loader points to Smeeton’s ability to “make beautiful designs” whether the budgets are big or small. Along with a diversity of production budgets, Smeeton also has a knack for enhancing the visuals for a diverse array of music. “I have had the fortune to be considered theatrical,” Smeeton explains. “I’m about illuminating objects and areas on the stage, and I particularly enjoy painting with light.”
Helping to ensure that the visual design will be uniquely suited to any artist’s music, Smeeton makes a point of goes into any working arrangement with an open mind. A case in point: When Hagar mentioned that he liked the club feel so much he wanted to take the club vibe on tour. “We built the club Cabo Wabo on the road – to the point of putting 75 people from the audience on stage. It made for an especially successful tour.”
Smeeton also provided visuals for Paul Simon’s music influenced by the musical traditions of South Africa’s Ndebele and Zulu tribes, creating a performance space that visually reinforced the music. Then, for George Michael’s 1988 Faith tour, Mark Fisher and his team built a mechanical cage that opened up opened up like a flower blossoming. “That was a big challenge, though keeping the cost down wasn’t a problem, as I was instructed to ‘just go crazy.’”
Although all of the top artists have equally high standards for their shows, the challenges vary. The set design concepts can range from workable to wildly unrealistic, and while some artists are relatively hands-off, others micromanage the design process. “Paul Simon suggested a general South African theme, but then left me to it,” he recalls. “Peter Gabriel was a different kettle of fish. We’ve had a long relationship — too long for anybody,” he laughs. “But I actually prefer to work with an artist once, and only once, because I always believe your best ideas come first.”
In the 2000s, he continued to serve a wildly diverse set of clients from across the music spectrum including ELO, Keith Urban, Joe Satriani, Chris Isaak and even Marilyn Manson. “I had 28 days to do what Manson wanted, which in this case wasn’t particularly gruesome and was good money. He’s intelligent and well-read, though not all his ideas matched reality. But he was very theatrical and we came up with a good look.” Halfway into that decade, in 2005, he moved to Nashville.
Smeeton had been out looking after the lighting for Ken “Babyface” Edmonds a few years ago when he got a call from an old friend named production manager/FOH engineer Mike Droke. It seems Diana Ross was returning to the stage and looking for a person to work weekends lighting her. He took the gig and has been with her since.
“This show is all about Miss Ross and what she’s wearing. I set an intro look, then a final look for each song, keeping it simple. I use one front spot for her face in a skin tone and then light her gowns in a color that accents them that evening. I light the show strictly for camera. So many artists these days leave the stage and go right to YouTube to see how they looked, as the fans post videos. I have a trick. I keep a pair of binoculars with me. I learned to balance intensities by looking at someone’s iPad during a scene while they are recoding her performance and I adjust the levels until it looks good on their camera/phone.” Crazy, but it seems to work. He adds: “It’s the perfect gig as I like all the music and she has a really great attitude. We just want to have fun and put on a great show.”
Perspectives
On the personal side, Smeeton has made many friends. After Milly lost his wife, he met a woman and, to impress her, he took her to the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville for a Diana Ross concert that Smeeton was working. “We sat in the lighting booth, and those two didn’t stop talking to each other, completely ignoring me,” Milly laughs. It must’ve worked because Milly and DeAnn married, and Smeeton was there at the ceremony.
“He changed lighting design, and is still changing it,” Milly says. “He was one of the first to build models — many don’t know he’s an able modeler. Now this was before CAD, and he would walk around it and think about how the entire stage was going to be lit from every perspective. Recently, he told me that he now approaches it thinking of it as going through the video screen in your pocket [a smart phone]. He’s approaching how he lights a concert now with that medium in mind, influencing how he backlights something.”
Milly says he witnessed someone ask Smeeton if he was an artist or a technician, and Smeeton confirmed that he was definitely an artist. “He’s an artist, and lights are his palette,” Milly recalls, but adds that what he most admires is Smeeton’s desire to give back. “His lectures to young designers are great, and it’s something he believes in doing.”
Gail Colson tells of how, as music manager for both Hawkwind and Peter Gabriel, she helped forge a link between Smeeton and Gabriel. “I introduced them, and needless to say it was a match made in heaven,” she says. “I used to joke to Jonathan that I brought him out of the ‘60s and into the ‘80s!”
During the beginning of that relationship, Colson says there was not a lot of money, she says, and the first design he did was built so only two people were needed to carry it. “It was brilliant,” she says. “He always brought everything in on budget and I always thought he was the one of the best LD’s around. He’s always very creative and original in everything he does.”
Colson does feel compelled to add, however, that “although I really like him, he can also be a ‘royal pain in the arse,’” she says with a laugh. In 1987, they were in Athens filming a Martin Scorsese-directed live concert with Gabriel over three nights in a Greek amphitheater. “There was the film crew and band crew, and Jonathan found out that the film crew were being paid more per diems than the band crew and tried to lead a mutiny. Somehow, I sorted it out, but I could have killed him at the time! But,” she’s quick to add, “he always has been, and still is, a genius.”
“He’s absolutely one of the most influential designers in the business, but more than that, he’s an educator,” Eric Loader says. “He loves educating people on lighting techniques and passing on his knowledge. We’ve hired him to do a few lectures for us, and he is eager to encourage young programmers.”
Jonathan Smeeton will receive the Parnelli Visionary Award at the Parnelli Awards on Jan. 26 at the Anaheim Hilton in Anaheim, CA. For more information (and to reserve your seat or table) go to www.parnelliawards.com.
