- Production Co – Eclectic Sounds
- Email – colin@eclectic.tv
- Web – www.eclectic.tv/
Name – Colin Smith
Colin Smith was born in South Shields on the same day in November 1963 that Doctor Who was first broadcast. He took up music quite late by learning to play the recorder in secondary school and borrowing his elder brother’s guitar before getting one of his own. Whilst growing up in the North East, he listened to all sorts of music including lots of country and Broadway shows like South Pacific before becoming a particular fan of David Bowie, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. Once in the sixth form he got waylaid by the New Romantics just as he was starting his own band Marble Index. He left the North East at age 18 to study in London and, having worked as a musician ever since, has never quite made it back!
I attended The Guildhall School of Music as a classical saxophonist with piano as a second study. I also play guitar and bass and own a flute. Apart from my highly successful school band, I was a member of Banderas for a while who had a Top 20 single with This Is Your Life in 1991. Unfortunately they fell foul of the usual music industry mix of mismanagement. My long term writing partner Simon Elms and I then decided we should build on the bits and pieces of theatre and radio drama music we’d been doing and concentrate on writing for advertising and TV. We worked as UK-based composers for New York company Amber Music for many years until deciding to start our own music composition and sound design company Eclectic along with Cliff Wilson in 2008. Since then I have also been hired either as a musician or an arranger by a number of different acts including Feist, Madness and Jimmy Somerville as well as working with the Shapeshifters when they were doing projects with George Michael and Nile Rogers. At Eclectic we now have an Audio Post company called Greek Street Studios and have just launched a new music resource built around our own software called Syncbubble.
We have worked with many of the leading advertising agencies most notably Fallon, JWT and Mother. We have also developed a particularly good relationship with RSA Films.
I’m not sure what successful really means. Like everybody else, I guess, I’ve had some pieces of music that have run and run but aren’t necessarily my favourite while others I was really proud of didn’t!
In 2012 we wrote the music for two of the viral films for Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’ and that campaign won a gold in Cannes, which was nice.
Another RSA Film we worked on in 2010 was Johnny Hardstaff’s ‘Darkroom’ (for Phillips’ Parallel Lines project) which was a winner at the first Music and Sound Awards.
And then there’s the Smirnoff Apple Bite campaign which broke in September. I really like that but I’m not sure how successful it’s been yet.
Otherwise two favourites from the more distant past are a Boddingtons ad set on Blackpool beach called Stay and an Adidas ad featuring Ato Boldon in the Adidas Makes You Better campaign from 2000.
There are a few large and well-funded companies who are practically giving music away which ultimately doesn’t help the business at all. If people think they don’t really have to pay for music any more then the fear must be that sector will eventually implode and small independent companies simply won’t be able to survive.
