Not many people can stake a claim to being in the lighting business for 50 years. I sat down with my friend Jonathan, who recently passed this milestone, as he explains to me how he got fired from his latest gig just last month. “I just finished designing ARW, an offshoot of Yes members playing Yes songs. This is my fourth go around of sorts with different Yes projects. Singer Jon Anderson fired me for some difference of opinion, but it took me three more weeks to finish tightening up the lighting before I could actually go home.” Make no qualms about it, Jonathan is a unique individual. He started at a time when there was no manual for his occupation.
In the Beginning
As a young man growing up in the market town of Kingston on the Thames just outside of London, life was different. “While today this is considered part of London, in my day it was a village. We used to play in old holes in the ground from WWII bomb sites.” He came from the first generation of Englanders that did not go to war at some point in their lives. He did try a short stint in the Royal Navy, but it wasn’t his cup of tea. He tried his hand at art school, albeit in a different manner. A friend of his was on a stipend from his parents to go to the art school. The friend wanted to drop out, but would lose the income from his parents if he did, so Jonathan took his place in classes for some free education. But that didn’t pay the bills.
He was out looking for a job when someone mentioned that there was a new club opening up, and he and a couple of friends went up to London to see about finding employment. Jonathan explains, “We walk in to this club (called Middle Earth) and the guys in charge, Dave Houston and Roy Guest, asked the three of us, ‘What experience do you have?’ My mate Toby says, ‘I used to run a coffee bar.’ ‘Oh, good, we need someone like that, you’re hired.’ Then my friend John rushed forward, gushing, ‘I can do anything,’ and they made him the janitor. Now I’m thinking, ‘What can be left for me?’ 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, and that was the beginning of it all, really.”
So he learned how to boil ink in projectors and stay awake all weekend. From there, he got a gig at UFO, a happening hippy club that had grown in size and hence moved to an old railroad roundhouse in Camden Town that is still a working theater today. He would work weekends from 10 at night until six in the morning. “There were quite a few light shows around town at the time. I found all these 1,000-watt projectors, which were perfect for me. We got paid by the projector.” He actually had five projectors working from the balcony simultaneously. “Unlike the Americans that used to combine oil and water to make their trippy backdrops, we used ink and plates of glass over here. 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 on the slide and we would get several colors out of the mix. A slide would last up to five minutes before a fresh one had to be inserted into the projector.
Of course they needed a material to project imagery on. So the organizers would gather up whole rolls of blank white newspaper and staple them to the rafters at the venue. That stint wrapped up at the end of 1967, and someone from the Swedish Art Council had seen his show. They wanted to present his psychedelic lights in a new kinetic art form in folk museums. So off he went to Scandinavia for a year.
Returning to the U.K. he found himself living in Notting Hill Gate in London. “It was a pretty dodgy part of the world at the time. Perfect for me,” states the designer. “There was a popular record company called Island Records that opened up literally around the corner from my house.” Jonathan walked into the office of Chris Blackwell, the owner, looking for a gig doing his light shows. Blackwell told him that “light shows were 10 a penny nowadays. Come back next week and tell me you have tour lighting, and I’ll have some work for you.” So off went Jonathan armed only with a pamphlet of Strand Electric lighting fixtures that were currently available. He designed and built his own lights on some steel pipes with nothing more than some high convergence lamps. He designed some “footlight sort of things” and went back into Blackwell’s office and said he could do the gig. Off he went on his first tour with Traffic, Mott the Hoople and Free for stupid money. “Back then, it was the perfect situation because there was really nobody doing lighting,” Smeeton states. “It’s amazing how little I knew and how well I did. All of a sudden everyone wanted lighting.”
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 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. We would rent pipe and base from Strand and make T-Pipes that had their Pattern 123 Fresnel fixtures (now considered art deco vintage lights —ed.) 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 for Stevie Winwood. “He really liked psychedelia.”
Liquid Len and the Lensmen
Jonathan 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! The old ones were 1000 watt tungsten models. These had auto changing slides.”
For a controller, they built their own using a keyboard. Jonathan explains, “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 Avo desk and a pin matrix, we had memories that remembered scenes. We called it the ‘Light Organ,’ and we built chases for the first time in my life. The console could put variable attack and delay times on halogen lamps.
“Nobody really thought about lighting the band at first. But at UFO, I would see a lot of bands on their way up. Pink Floyd was a regular there and their LD, Peter Wynne-Willson, was the first person I ever saw who lit the act themselves. He used footlights, and they cast these amazing colored large shadows mixed with their visuals all over the back wall.”
By 1971 he had hooked up with Hawkwind, a psychedelic band out of the U.K. For a while, Jonathan shared a room with Lemmy Kilmister, the bass player, before he left to start Motörhead. At the time, bands often advertised their light show along with themselves on concert posters and marquees. Hawkwind’s manager, Doug Smith, demanded a name for the upcoming US Tour. Smeeton wanted a Motown name, along the lines of “so and so and the ?’s.” Jonathan had found a book that described something called the Liquid Lens Theory. He changed the words slightly and adapted a new name for his company, Liquid Len and the Lensmen (the image on page 40 is from the first show they did in Philadelphia). The name has stood the test of time, even having a Facebook page of its own. He stuck with Hawkwind through the rest of the 70’s.
Eventually, Hawkwind signed with Arista records, opening up more doors for the young LD. In 1979, he got a call from their management asking him to meet with this singer who had just left the band Genesis to embark on his solo career. “I had the foresight to bring along a friend to this meeting with Peter Gabriel. This turned out to be a great move, as I ended up with the gig lighting Gabriel for ten years, but even better, I developed a working relationship with Mark Fisher.” Gabriel’s career took off, and he was one of the more artistically renowned singers with a remarkably theatrical stage presence.
Technology Beckons
Early in the 80’s, Jonathan relocated to Topanga Canyon outside Los Angeles and got his green card. He had gotten to know the area from working with Frank Zappa earlier. Gabriel had asked him if he had seen the new Vari-Lites yet. So off he went to a David Bowie show and saw Vari-Lites in use for the first time. Allen Branton was the LD. He was thrilled with the technology and actually became the first LD outside of a Vari*Lite employee to be allowed to run their console. Eventually, Jonathan started running the lights on a Yoko Ono tour that Branton had designed.
“Around this time (while touring with the Thompson Twins), our Vari*Lite tech, Rusty Lowery, suggested that I should run lights for a Bay Area band called Journey.” Jonathan explains. “I was in Japan and headed to the U.K. after these shows were done. 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 photos of his work. “To this day, it’s the only band that I actually ever chased after — and I got the gig.”
Jonathan designed Journey’s tour while still on the road with Yoko. He drew up a grand stage set made with super high gloss white paint for 1986’s Raised on Radio tour. For the lighting, he 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 this fray into 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 hospitals 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.”
Along his career, Jonathan did pick up some lighting education working in the U.K. shop for Electrosound for a while as well as Britannia Row, the company that supplied the audio and lights for Pink Floyd. Around 1982, someone had called the shop looking for someone to look after pyro for the Tattoo You tour the Stones were taking out. Jonathan took on the gig. “Patrick Woodroffe was the LD out there. He just did a phenomenal job. Looking after the pyro meant I had to fly with a lot of the gear each day, since they couldn’t truck it. The explosives were all sent to the gigs in advance, but we had a lot of other gear we needed to carry. I will say that the pyro crew were nice people, but the craziest folks I have ever worked with.” The Stones tour was promoted by Bill Graham, and Jonathan cemented a lot of relationships with people in the Bay Area
In the early 80’s, Smeeton got another stroke of good luck. Some band named Japan rang him up and said “Our lighting guy didn’t show up. Can you come down and run some lights?” He did, and after the show, he was contacted by a fellow that saw his work. A new band called Wham! was booking gigs, and they needed a lighting guy. They did a few pub gigs around London, but nothing much. Then the album broke and the hysteria of Wham! was unleashed around the globe. He explains, “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 brought Mark Fisher into the fold 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. The show utilized 250 Berkey Colortran 4-cell cyc lights which, according to vendor Bob See, included every one of these fixtures east of the Mississippi River at the time. Jonathan ran the lights for the Pointer Sisters and the other opening acts as well, since he was the only one on tour who could run the new Vari*Lite Artisan console. He went on to light George Michael as well.
Come 1986, Smeeton became involved with the Thompson Twins, a British new wave band. “This was one of the more interesting acts I worked with. We did a tour without any truss; all the lighting was low level on pipes and the floor with scenery draped on scaff structures. We had lots of drops. When I first met with them, it was very peculiar. They told me that they only planned to be around for three albums, maybe four, so I had better be thinking about the design for the final shows now!”
It was on Christmas day in 1987 when Jonathan answered the phone, and someone on the other end said “Hi, I’m Paul Simon.” He immediately thought someone was joking when the singer said,” I saw your show with Peter Gabriel at Madison Square Garden, and I have this new project I have been working on. This project called Graceland.” Smeeton designed the show for this huge tour and embarked on the tour for a couple of years. “What was remarkable was that the touring shows for Graceland never overlapped with the shows from Peter Gabriel’s So tour, so I was able to do every show for both bands over a two-year period.”
The 90’s
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.”
During the early 90’s, Smeeton got a call from his friend Simon Austin at Light & Sound Design. Def Leppard was proposing their triumphant return to stage by going out in the round, and they needed a designer. Jonathan designed it and agreed to run it for a while, eventually handing the directing duties off to a young lighting guy named Butch Allen. “That was a tough show to run, as we called 16 followspots. There were over 2,000 cues in the show. I quite enjoyed working with Butch. I later hired him to run one of my Yes tours.”
By 1992, Jonathan had come to Los Angeles to do some work with Billy Idol through his manager Tony Dimitriades. Smeeton had known Billy since the 70’s punk days, but the timing had never been right; now he was able to design a tour for the British rocker. His friend Tony also managed Yes at the time, so Smeeton ended up doing several projects with them over the years.
Come 1995, Smeeton had relocated north, buying a cottage by the Russian River in Sonoma County, CA. He spent the next seven years in what he calls “semi-retirement mode.” He worked with Jim Brickman, a contemporary songwriter and pianist with a popular radio show on NPR, for seven years. “We did shows on weekends and Christmas tours. I did everything out there, with the possible exception of mixing sound.” A local musician kept him busy as well in between all of this, as Sammy Hagar called upon his services.
“After Sammy had been fired from Van Halen, he set out again on his solo career. I designed his show, and we had a rear Venetian blind wall of sorts for a backdrop. The blades were white on one side and black on another. Depending on which way you pulled the rigging, the drop changed colors. Now Sammy never threw anything away. We would just refurbish it for the next tour.”
One day Hagar told Jonathan that he wished he could just keep his tour down in Cabo San Lucas (where Hagar founded the club Cabo Wabo) and have the roadies come to town, and they could play to a different audience every weekend. Jonathan had another idea. “Why don’t we bring Cabo on the road to the people?” And so they did, bringing the e aforementioned Venetian blinds back out on the road. They had a great scene of the Cabo nightclub’s interior painted on one side and a beach sunset scene on the other. “I took it a step further. I designed a ramp upstage where 75 people could stand on stage and watch the show. Of course, we gave these tickets to radio stations to advertise the show, and it was a great gimmick.”
By 2005, Smeeton’s young son, Callan, was taking up more space, and they needed a larger house. “The California housing bubble was out of control. It didn’t make sense to spend a fortune on a larger house there, so we took off for Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee. I had no contacts in country music outside of some work I did with Dwight Yoakam in ‘96. I had some friends recommend it to me.” But that didn’t mean he was opposed to it. On the contrary, he found himself employed by Keith Urban for a tour in 2006. “We built this set out of polystyro shapes. We had blocks of this material that we molded into shapes with chainsaws. Then we threw some hardening compound on it and painted them. We made big rocks and bridges.” In 2009, he was called upon to light Taylor Swift’s coming out tour in theaters. “We packed a lot of gear into some tiny places, but it was fun. The one thing I did learn out there was to be wary of parental management.”
Jonathan 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 John Lee. His friend was one of the original “Lensmen” from the Hawkwind days, and now an account rep at a lighting company. 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 dress in a color that accents it 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 white balance 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.”
Wrapping Up
“I’ve always had backdrops on my shows — it works. Even when I lit Def Leppard in the round, the audience was my backdrop. My theory is that lighting is about illuminating objects. You don’t see the light until something attracts it. Smoke is an object. But if you don’t have haze, you don’t see the light. If you don’t have something for it to strike at the other end, it’s invisible. When there’s something at the other end of the beam and it strikes it, we have reflective light. The eye is meant to see the reflective light source. Except nowadays, as everyone seems to point it in the audience’s face. That’s a habit people should get out of.”
Jonathan can often be found happily walking his dogs in the countryside or mowing his five-acre lawn. You can reach him through his website, robotsforpeace.com, or go to Facebook and search for Liquid Len and the Lensmen.
