Carruthers, Dick - video director (Profile, November 2002)
by David Daviesr

Already firmly established as one of the industry’s most original video directors, the famously laconic Dick Carruthers puts down his drink, ice cubes clinking, to contemplate his decision to join M Productions, Metropolis’ recently-created production division, alongside producer Anouk Fontaine. “Anouk made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he says, “because she’s still got the polaroids of me and the chicken.”

If this new association was christened with a heavily alcohol-enriched dinner, the omens were nonethless always likely to be good - Carruthers and Fontaine had already worked together on several long-form DVD projects when Fontaine was on the staff of Done & Dusted. When, on leaving, she was approached by the Metropolis Group’s Mike Gillespie with a view to initiating a new film and TV production enterprise, it wasn’t long before her thoughts turned to bringing Carruthers on board in a permanent capacity.

As a seasoned video director for numerous live tours and events, Carruthers had already put in long years on the road with the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith and Oasis (for the latter he has worked on every major live project since their initial breakthrough). Increasingly, though, his work was leading him into music DVD projects, and thus into areas which have really only begun to be explored properly in the last few years.

Only months in, it’s clear that a gameplan has already emerged - to tackle the burgeoning music DVD market with a rounded package for artists, making them aware that Metropolis is at their disposal not only for recording and mastering, but also for filming, producing and authoring the subsequent DVD releases.

“You have a lot of bands that come in and record their albums here, then they come back and master their recordings,” explains Carruthers. “After that, they go out and play their music live, but some other production company shoots them - sometimes extremely well, sometimes extremely badly. What was missing at Metropolis was actually going out and shooting these bands - now we can say to them that we’ll shoot your live DVD, then author and remix the sound here.”

This ‘circle of services’ approach is likely to be a key emphasis of their future work, in tandem with a strong desire to push the medium of the long-form DVD forwards. “It’s still in its infancy,” says Carruthers, “and people are still learning what can be done with it.” To assist progress, Fontaine and Carruthers have already initiated weekly brainstorming sessions. “It’s like a technical creative version of Show & Tell,” he says. “People bring in undiscovered bits of music, incredibly high concept pieces of art . . . every week we’re getting more out of everybody.”

Pushing both the technological and artistic aspects of the medium, Carruthers’ main project at present is a DVD box set of archive Led Zeppelin material. Requiring him to source all types of film in all conditions, the project has involved a great deal of detective work, “then several months and a quite spectacular amount of money getting it into a modern format. We had tapes baking at a steady 55° for three-and-a-half weeks to get all this exhumed and scrubbed up.”

Carruthers is also intrigued by the potential of the DVD single. Realising that the behind-the-scenes footage he had shot during an Oasis tour earlier this year was never likely to be screened on TV (“there was swearing . . . a lot of swearing”), he suggested the idea of cutting it down into three 10-minute segments and placing them on the band’s single releases this summer. They have already become the best-selling DVD singles issued in the UK.

All this means that touring is likely to figure much less significantly in Carruthers’ future plans, although he’s likely to venture from Metropolis’ West London base for certain projects (“Oasis can’t seem to find anyone else,” he says, drily). But he is under no illusions about the significance of past live work to the entire method in which he approaches music video. “I must have shot the Stones about 150 times,” he says of the band’s tour in support of Bridges to Babylon. “It got to the stage where I was acutely aware of the way they move around the stage and how they interact, musically and physically. To try and represent that in a series of images, as it happens, is really the essence of doing live video.”

If, with several notable exceptions, he’s largely disappointed by the work of other directors in the field of music DVD to date, that only seems to act as a further incentive for Carruthers to push this new medium as far as it will go. This is borne out by a conviction that the consumption of entertainment media is still in the midst of a fundamental shift. “CD as a format is already dead,” asserts Carruthers. “A particular well-known company has already stopped making CD players. So it really couldn’t be a better time to be pushing the boundaries.”