Creativity, Crowds & Expanded Cinema
A C-Words Creative Conversation with Marcus Lyall, Artist and Director
March 2021
Marcus and I first met in 1995 when we worked together on stage graphics for the Japanese band Mr Children. At that time budgets were relatively big and there was a wealth of this kind of work passing through the creative studio, 4i, where I worked. As such Marcus became an essential part of the team as we later moved on to work on developing stage graphics and video content for Oasis at Knebworth in 1996.
Having forged a great friendship over the following years it’s been incredibly satisfying to follow Marcus’s highly creative career spanning commercials direction, stage show visuals, art projects and many wonderful things in-between.
In March I caught up with him to discuss his enduring work with The Chemical Brothers, his deep-seated fascination with Surrealism and how he strives to trigger emotional connections with his public art installations.
Please give a short introduction about yourself.
I’m an artist and director. I make public artworks which often involve light, moving images, sound and interaction. I work for music performances, creating visual accompaniments. I’m one half of Smith & Lyall, show directing for The Chemical Brothers.
What was the path that led you to be doing what you’re doing now?
I started doing projection shows while studying at art college, mostly for early raves and clubs. At that point we were mainly using slides and 16mm projectors. Quite close in spirit to the psychedelic light shows of the 1960’s. After college I got involved in an early multimedia CD-ROM project called The Virtual Nightclub and learnt about digital video. That eventually led to starting up a small post-production company in Soho with some friends and doing visual effects and what became called ‘motion design’.
Adam Smith and I had worked together since college days doing projection shows. He had hooked up with The Chemical Brothers very early on, through Andy Weatherall and his club Sabresonic. We worked on animations together for their show and I started doing various projects for bands, including some sequences for Oasis’s big Knebworth shows for 4i, which is where you and I met. I did a fair amount of work on U2’s Elevation tour, which introduced me to bigger tours, and then decided to move to Australia.
There I started directing commercials and made my first fine art piece ‘Slow Service’ which got into a lot of exhibitions. I also got a lot of work in the US, working for bands like The Rolling Stones and Metallica and learnt a lot about how big tours work.
Permanent Collection of Australian Centre For The Moving Image.
I moved back to London around 2007 and started up a production company with a friend. I also started co-directing The Chemical Brothers shows with Adam, kept making artworks and kind of went from there.
Tell us about your first paid commission involving a connection with the audience?
Doing visuals at a warehouse party in South London while doing a Foundation Art course. Projecting films and slides from the roof of a caravan, while Irish punk and techno bands played below. Lots of Beamish Stout, dogs on bits of string and fun. Fred Mann, who was DJ’ing, is now my gallerist.
Describe how you work professionally. Do you prefer to work alone or in collaboration?
I have a small studio and often work by myself or with an assistant. When projects come in, I put a team together. On the Smith & Lyall projects, we have a regular team that assembles.
Pretty much all my work is collaborative in some way. Film-making and making installations has to be done collaboratively, and it’s all about harnessing different talents and capturing performances. Even if the initial idea is yours, you’re always relying on other people’s skills to bring things to life. I’ve been lucky to have met some very talented people. Adam and I have worked together forever, and that’s been a great partnership. We still bang heads, but seem to work it out.
Sometimes though, you just need some time to gather thoughts and feelings without a room full of people. I really enjoy having a potter in the studio by myself. I think the ideal is a mixture of both.
Who do you consider to be your peers in the broader design world?
It was interesting looking through the Electronic show at The Design Museum, and realising I knew quite a few of them. There’s also an East London tech-art-design crowd that I bump into a lot. We often work with the same freelancers or help on each other’s projects. In the ‘visuals’ field, Adam and I are a bit unusual, because our stuff tends to be more film-based rather than graphics.
After spending your formative years in London you moved to Australia, where you established yourself as an artist. Tell us about this change in career direction and why you eventually moved back to London again.
I was feeling rather jaded in London. My parents are Australian, and it felt like a good time to do something different. Melbourne is all about lifestyle. People ask you what you do at the weekend, not what you do as a job. There’s some time to stop and think. And swim. There’s something amazing about randomly finding yourself abalone diving on a Sunday morning. Great as it was, I couldn’t quite find the projects I wanted to do in Australia and found myself doing a lot of work in America. So I came back to London to see what was happening, and got sucked back in.
Your work bridges both commercial and artistic worlds. Besides budgets what are the biggest differences between working for commercial or artistic clients? And, how do you maintain your own creative signature when working in either world?
I’m not sure if The Chemical Brothers show counts as commercial. Apart from that and the odd consultancy and collaboration, I’m really just trying to do art projects. With a commercial client, you should accept that you’re a gun for hire. You are there to give your best advice and to fight your corner, but in the end, it’s their thing. That doesn’t make it any less creative.
My rule now is to try to only work on projects that I can bring something unique to. A friend teaching illustration recently found that most of her students were much more aware of their own brands and were much more interested in collabs than commissions. I think that’s a really sensible approach, if you can do it.
Commercial work is about distillation. Eliminating elements that distract from the message. What you get with commercial projects is production value. That is, the experience of lots of people who are really good at their craft to help you exactly execute and hone an idea. Things look good and sound good. The message rings clear like a bell. But there’s less room for ambiguity, improvisation, play and exploration. I’m not really worried about having a signature. I think it just happens.
Your projects are often quite surreal or abstract. Where do you get your inspiration from?
I read a lot. Lots of inspiration from 20th Century art and early cinema. Surrealism was based largely on ideas of psychoanalysis. Chance meetings of images and thoughts. It’s good to turn off the self-censor when coming up with ideas. Some of the best things come from taking fleeting first thoughts and then working very methodically to bring them to life. There has to be a sense of play.
Often I only work out what a project really means to me about two months after I’ve shown it. I think the main thing is just trusting that what you’re interested in might be interesting to other people. If it feels worth exploring, go down the rabbit hole for a while.
Depending on how you look at it being ‘creative’ can be viewed as either a gift or a curse. Whilst creativity enables us to somehow produce the previously unimagined it isn’t always something you draw on at will.
Firstly, what are your thoughts on this statement? Secondly, as a highly prolific artist, how do you maintain your own creativity?
I don’t think of myself as prolific. The big thing for me is finding a deadline to hit. I tend to write a lot of rough ideas down and eventually an opportunity comes up where one could work. Sometimes it takes a long time, and normally the idea changes a lot.
Quite often, it’s about just trying to make something you’ve drawn work in the real world. The process of doing presents you with lots of challenges and questions. Some solutions start presenting themselves as inevitable.
Site-specific Installation
You’ve crafted a unique and powerful signature in your work without ever becoming formulaic. How do you keep your work fresh and exciting for yourself?
Very kind of you! I’m always trying to do new things and not play it too safe.
Site-specific installation for Merge Festival, London (with music by Robert Thomas)
Photo: Tommophoto
One of your recent art projects, a laser installation called ‘On your Wavelength’, could supposedly be controlled by the mind of the viewer. How is this technically possible? How did people react to experiencing it?
You can pick up changes in the brain’s activity using a simple wearable EEG sensor. Plug it into the the right software and you can use it to control things. I worked with a great composer (Rob Thomas) and various amazing technicians to put together various versions of it.The first time we did it, we used a laser in a huge tunnel. It was very immersive. People were really emotionally affected, in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Some people needed hugs afterwards. We did a version in Leeds Town Hall where you could control a huge Pipe Organ, and it turned into an impromptu brain-controlled Karaoke Session.
Site-specific installation at Leeds Town Hall for Leeds Light Night
Another recent art project, ‘Scream The House Down — A socially distanced installation’, invited participants to vocalise their inner frustrations via a Zoom call to power a large-scale light installation inside a soon-to-be-demolished office block. How did you come up with this wonderfully topical creative idea? How easy was it to get funded and built?
Site-specific Installation
This was an iteration of an earlier project called ‘House Of Pain’, where people could go into a room and scream, lighting up a building. It felt like an ‘obvious’ idea to do it during lockdown, because it was dealing with the emotion of frustration. There was no funding per se. Caroline Jones at Illuminate Productions, found the building and talked them into it. I had some lighting fixtures stored around the corner and talked PRG, a lighting supplier, into supplying the rest. Everyone did it for free. We were all sitting around bored at home and just needed to do something. The size of the building meant that we could distance, but it was great to be able to hang out and do something therapeutic together.
Site-specific Installation
From giant tin robots and laser shows to motion capture footage filmed at Andy Serkis’ Imaginarium, The Chemical Brothers’ latest live show ‘No Geography’ features some spectacular visuals, created by you and Adam Smith. Tell us about the project, your inspiration, and how you brought this from first concepts to the final show?
The show is an evolution that has been going on for over twenty years. We normally only make visuals for three of four songs every tour. Other visuals get remixed and reworked, a bit like the music. The inspiration comes from all over. Keep On, for instance, was inspired equally by NYC ballroom culture and Oskar Schemmer’s Bauhaus costume designs.
The costumes were designed in 3D software with Kate Tabor’s tailoring magic and experience of how to make it work for performance. In general, it’s all about responding to the feeling of each song, and trying to create a theatrical journey for the whole show.
Our big theme is capturing human performance somehow. We work a lot with actors, dancers and physical movement. Although we use a lot of CGI, we try to shoot a lot of visuals for real, mainly in a studio setting. Tom and Ed have been incredibly supportive in giving us the opportunity to work in this way.
We try to plot the show so each element gets to take its own solo. Trying not to turn everything on at once. We are lucky to work with some incredible collaborators during the shoots and also in the post-production, lighting design and rehearsal periods.
photo: Ray Baseley
Staging the show, we are often trying to merge the visuals and lighting, which means getting all the touring departments working together. We might have to re-edit a visual, because we can’t move a light fast enough to reach a position at the right time. We’re still very inspired by the emotions and communion that that early raves had. But trying to make it happen without artificial additives.
photo: Ray Baseley
Were there any major hiccups along the way and, if so, how did you overcome them?
Nothing too terrible. We’ve been doing it for a while now!
Your work with The Chemical Brothers was recently part of the major exhibition ‘Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers’ at the Design Museum in London. The exhibition, evoking the experience of being in a club, transported visitors through the people, art, design, technology and photography that have been shaping the electronic music landscape. Tell us about your work in the exhibition and how it felt to see your work presented as high culture in a museum setting?
It was interesting seeing my youth turned into something culturally significant. And seeing yourself as part of a larger continuum of work, which sometimes you were aware of and sometimes not. Because of COVID, it felt like this show marked the end of the ‘Electronic’ era as we go into something different.
The show almost didn’t open any all, and we’re really pleased we got it over the line. The Design Museum were amazing at going with our vision, which was logistically tricky. Smoke machines and museums are not natural bedfellows. The piece is very immersive. It’s very like the live show in that it has filmed characters and choreographed lighting effects. People really picked up on the smell and how evocative that was. This was actually the smell of the smoke machine fluid. It instantly transports you to a nightclub somewhere.
Although it’s a very joyful song, it has a dark moment. Disco often has that ‘bittersweet’ flavour. Joyous music while talking about a breakup. We tried to capture the intensity of the live experience. We’ve used a huge number of strobe lights, which gives a real white-out moment.
Over the course of your career you’ve created live show visuals for some of the biggest names in the music industry (Metallica, The Chemical Brothers, U2, Oasis, The Rolling Stones). How do you find dealing with rock stars? Can you tell us more about what you created for them?
The Chemical Brothers show is a bit unique, because Tom and Ed have made a deliberate creative choice to make the visuals very central, which works for the music they make. For bands with singers and guitarists, it’s a bit different. The main thing to remember is that the audience is paying to see the band, not your visuals. The screens are there to connect the people at the back (and the middle) to the performers.
So it’s often about integrating cameras and footage. You’re aiming for a theatrical experience where the visuals amplify the feeling without getting in the way of the performance. The biggest challenge is that film-making needs long lead time, and bands are often finding the feel of the show in rehearsal, where there is no time.
Telepathy is helpful, because you don’t always get a lot of time with big artists.
Ideas that work on paper doesn’t always work in the flesh. And something unexpected and simple can be the most powerful thing in the show. Most musicians who have toured a lot know that everything is work in progress. It’s about how the audience react to it.
Show direction: Dan Braun
The show evolves as it tours. You don’t get every visual right first time, like you don’t always write a hit single. So there’s some forgiveness. Working in that situation is always very fun and surreal. I can’t go into details but one of my favourite moments involved Keith Richards and sweetcorn.
If you could pick any client or artist in the world for a new collaboration, who would it be?
Too many to name. I’ve always wanted to make a video synthesiser thing for Herbie Hancock though.
On tour with live shows do you have your own rider, and if so, what’s on it?
Riders are way less silly than you might think. My feeling is that if a band wants something, they are paying for it out of their own pocket. If they believe it helps them play a better show, then go get it. I have the utmost respect for people who tour regularly– musicians and crew. Everyone is trying to do the best show they can for the audience. It’s very mentally draining, with shifts in time-zone, lack of sleep and lots of tension. You can’t always pop down to the shops to pick up a toothbrush or get a clean t-shirt.
Using technology in highly creative way seems to inform the majority of your work. As such let’s talk about one of your more technologically challenging projects. For the ‘Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark’ concept for the Deadmau5 / Nokia Lumia launch, you illuminated a whole square in London. How did you go about realising this? From the footage we’ve seen it seems like everybody living on the square must have been involved. That must have been a massive logistical challenge?
Nokia had done a previous launch as a projection on Millbank Tower. They had a good relationship with Southwark, so I got asked to look around and see what could work there. Almost the first place I found was Flatiron Square. I devised this concept where the square looked completely normal until things started lighting up. So using all the existing things in the square as we found it.
Deadmau5 sent us a soundtrack to work from and we worked out a journey for him, so that we started DJ’ing on the rooftops and then appeared on a specially constructed mobile DJ booth built around a scissor lift. Another guy owned a couple of the buildings in the square. We cast him as an angry neighbour, complaining about the show. It was great fun, and I learned a lot about immersive performances.
One local, Caroline Jones, came out to complain as we did the build. It turned out we’d covered over an artwork by Fiona Banner for an arts festival she was producing. We got talking, and I’ve now done five art projects with her.
Are there new technologies which you are currently exploring in your work?
I’m very interested in digital culture, especially around how our data is collected. This is a fairly central part of my artwork. Most of them involve getting visitors to feel themselves amplified in some way, while being recorded for posterity. I’ve used data including heart rates, brain activity and voices. I’ve done some collaboration with Prof James Kilner at UCL, using EEG recording.
I haven’t really been a gamer since the days of Super Nintendo, but games technology is basically driving everything these days. VR, games-based previsualisation, interaction and real-time graphics.
Does your work always require huge budgets or can you also think in creative solutions around financial restrictions?
If you are defining your own outcome, things are much easier. Art practice is very different from commercial practice in this respect. The media I work in are intrinsically expensive and require skilled collaborators, so it can be hard to make things on tiny budgets. From my arena tour days, I have a tendency to go a bit big. I’m gradually learning how to scale it down.
Covid 19 has had a catastrophic effect on the entertainment industry, stopping virtually all public performances, festivals and live events. As a creative operating at the heart of this sector how has this affected you? Looking forwards, and with the prospect of an affective vaccine on the horizon, how do you see the future for touring shows and the performing arts in general? How do you think we can use creativity to help the sector in the short and long term?
I want to be honest about this, because a lot of people are putting on a brave face. It has been shit. Not just personally, but in terms of watching the struggle of all the people you’ve worked with for years. These are people with unique world-class skills. But the whole industry is freelance or small businesses, and in the UK, they’ve essentially been thrown under the bus. It’s beginning to come back, but it’s difficult to know how the true extent of what’s happened until we start back up again.
Having said that, I’ve really begun to reassess how I work and it’s impacts. Touring has a huge carbon footprint. Public art less so, but it’s still an issue. There are no experts about what happens next, so new ideas are being listened to.
What advice can you give to a young creative wanting to follow in your footsteps?
Make things that make you feel something. People, especially clients and funders, may find it hard to imagine you doing something you haven’t done before. So if you want to do something new, you might have to do it off your own bat. Do the small version first. Also, find a good mentor and listen to them.
And finally: What’s next for you creatively?
A long-term project I can’t talk about and a series of new artworks.
About the author:
Graham Sturt is Creative Director / Partner at strategic design and branding agency, D8.
Originally from England, he lived and worked in London for more than a decade before relocating to Amsterdam to follow his passion for Dutch design.
