The shyest producer in music? How Fraser T Smith found his way into the spotlight

Fraser T Smith had a clear vision for his new EP. “My aim is for it feel like you’re on drugs,” the super producer tells me with a grin, “without necessarily being on drugs.” We Were We Still Are, Smith’s latest release under his solo project Future Utopia, is a hedonistic trip into a weird and wonderful realm. “A lot of it is about escapism, [so] I wanted it to feel heady,” he explains. “There’s a psychedelic element, but I wasn’t banging loads of acid while I was writing.”

The EP is Smith’s second Future Utopia release, following his 2020 debut 12 Questions, which included the Ivor Novello-winning single “Children of the Internet”. It’s the latest, assured step into the spotlight from a man who has previously been content to stay in the background. Ask someone to name the top producers in music right now and they’d probably rattle off a few obvious contenders: in pop, perhaps it’d be Swedish svengali Max Martin, Ryan Tedder, or Taylor Swift’s bestie Jack Antonoff, while in rock, Rick Rubin still holds plenty of sway. But ask the UK’s top rappers for their favourite producer and Smith’s will be the name that comes up time and again.

Over the years, his deft touch – regularly incorporating sweeping, cinematic production with rock guitars and orchestral arrangements – has been applied to music by Adele, Gorillaz, Florence and the Machine and Britney Spears, winning him two Grammys. And in UK rap, he’s helped craft hits for Stormzy, Dave, Kano, Ghetts and Avelino. Yet many still wondered who this unassuming figure was when he joined Dave to collect the Brit Award for Best Album in 2020, or earlier, in 2018, when Stormzy gave him a bear-hug on his way to collect Best Album for his debut, Gang Signs & Prayer. Far from your average super producer, Smith shows zero hunger for the spotlight himself. It’s only in the past year, with his own band Future Utopia, that he’s taking centre stage.

Smith’s modesty extends to his conversation. Many of his collaborators have compared studio time to a therapy session; today, he frequently steers questions away from himself, or brushes off compliments. But it is, after all, being a good listener that has made the 52-year-old such a revered and in-demand producer. “Honestly it’s all about listening,” he says. In the weekday lull of the east-London pub where we’re talking, he seems relaxed. Beneath his close crop of silver-grey hair, his eyes, piercing and blue, light up as he talks about his process. “If you listen and figure out where the conversation is leading and ask the right questions – care about something other than the song – I think that’s when you tap into something deeper.”

Having grown up in Buckinghamshire, Smith moved to London in the Nineties, when he began his music career as a session player in pubs and clubs. It was a chance meeting with a young artist called Craig David, in 1999, that first introduced him to garage music. “I was working in a studio next door to [DJ] Tim Deluxe, and he always used to get me in to play guitar on his records,” he recalls. “We’d hang out with MJ Cole who was just up the road, and it was around there that I met Craig. I got a cassette with ‘Walking Away’, ‘Fill Me In’, ‘Seven Days’ and ‘Rendezvous’.”

He ended up with a credit on David’s debut, 2000’s record-breaking Born to Do It. More importantly, the encounter marked the beginning of a long-term relationship with the UK’s flourishing rap scene. “If it wasn’t for Fraser, I don’t think I would have been able to realise the artist that I could truly be,” Stormzy said when presenting Smith with a Best Producer award in 2018. “He’s made me the artist I am today.” He was at Dave’s table when the rapper was announced as the winner of the 2019 Mercury Prize, for his debut Psychodrama.

As Future Utopia, Smith released his debut album in 2020. Even then, he couldn’t resist inviting his friends to share the spotlight, and so the project included collaborations with Mercury Prize-winning artist Arlo Parks, poet laureate Simon Armitage, Stormzy and Kano. “I don’t necessarily have a name for what I’m doing,” he says. “I’m always writing – it’s like a muscle – and coming out of lockdown there was all this stuff I wanted to do.”

We Were We Still Are, was recorded at his home studio near Henley-on-Thames, where he lives with his wife and co-manager, the artist Sarah Thorneycroft-Smith. Songs such as the title track, “We Were We Still Are”, demonstrate Smith’s innate ability to capture an underground sound that has mainstream potential. “I didn’t set out with this clear concept,” he says of the EP, due for release in August, “but I was drawn towards that ‘utopian’ sound.”

With British poet and artist Kae Tempest on vocals, “We Were We Still Are” takes the listener on a spaghetti western-style adventure through a dark and distorted wasteland, like the inside of Hunter S Thompson’s brain during a Las Vegas trip. A trumpet announces itself like a battle cry; electric guitar licks and blinking synths add an air of menace. “Hello disorientation my old friend / Welcome to the days of distortion,” Tempest raps. “Complex parades of illusion, charades, on course for destruction / Yawn for the horseman.”

Living out in the countryside, in his own creative space and recording under his own label, 70Hz, helped with Smith’s more abstract manner of thinking. “Artists tend to love hanging out here – we cook food, it’s all very wholesome,” he grins. He’s signed other musicians, too, including Ivor Novello-winning singer Mysie and Cosmo Pyke, who received critical acclaim with the Smith-produced debut EP, Just Cosmo, in 2017.

By now, he’s growing accustomed to being the frontman. But does he get nervous during live shows, having spent so much time working behind the scenes? If he does, there’s always someone with more experience he can seek advice from. “I said this to Serge [Pizzorno, of Kasabian] recently, and he was like, ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing,’” Smith responds. “I needed that, because it is a lot, stepping out when people aren’t familiar with my voice. It’s so terrifying that I’m actually weirdly like, ‘I’ve got to do this!’”

‘We Are We Always Were‘ is out on 18 August