Fraser T Smith on singing for Rick Wakeman, producing Adele and fusing Stormzy with Simon Armitage

Long before he became the producer-collaborator of choice to the top tier of British grime and hip hop – Stormzy, Kano and Dave – Fraser T Smith was a very different kind of wingman. Some three decades ago, aged 21, the Buckinghamshire native began playing guitar with Rick Wakeman – a period he describes now as funny, daunting and exhausting.

“Funny because Rick is one of the funniest people I know. Daunting because I was touring and recording with Rick, and his creative output is on a par with Damon Albarn’s, in that he seems to rattle out records like most people rattle out emails.

“He’d leave notes in the studio for me and the engineer to interpret, and I’ve got to read these incredibly difficult pieces of music and record them.”

And the exhausting part?

“One time we were about to go on tour and he goes: ‘OK, Fraze, you know that story of me playing on Hunky Dory, don’t you?’ I’m like: ‘Yeah. That’s one of my big attractions to you, Rick – you can tell me stories about sitting in David Bowie’s house and him playing you Life on Mars for the first time.’”

Reassured, the prog-rock maestro Wakeman tells young Fraser of his idea: playing Space Oddity and Life on Mars on tour. Fraze is thrilled – as an avid young guitar player, it doesn’t get much better than that. Then Wakeman drops the key detail: “Great. And you’ll be doing the vocals.”

Smith – 49 now, greying, thoughtful but boyishly enthusiastic and Zooming in from a grand, timber-beamed room in the Buckinghamshire home where he lives and records – smiles.

“It’s important for me to say that my vocals, without sounding too self-deprecating, are like a drunk Elvis Costello. And that’s even when I haven’t had a drink. They’re so out of tune. And Rick’s telling me this two days before we got out on tour – when I’ve already got Catherine of Aragon to learn, which is so much music.

“The shortest song I think Rick has ever released is probably 13 minutes,” he laughs, “and they don’t seem to repeat. Anyway, I took this challenge, did this theatre tour and my best David Bowie impersonation for 30 nights straight, and we got through it.”

And all that, he notes, was a great set up for a career in music. “After working with Rick for a few years, I don’t think I’d ever be daunted by anything musical ever again.”

So says the man who co-wrote and co-produced Adele’s monumental Set Fire to the Rain, the live performance of which won the Best Pop Solo Performance at the 2013 Grammys (“She was in the backroom, in the kitchen, smoking a lot of cigarettes, writing the lyrics to that song. She’d come in and say: ‘What do you think of this?’”). Who already had a Grammy nomination for his work on Sam Smith’s multi-million-selling debut album In The Lonely Hour (2014). Who, before that, had spent five years performing, touring and writing with Craig David in his first flush of pop success.

And so says the man who, after co-producing Kano’s MOBO-winning Made in the Manor (2016), producing Stormzy’s Brit-winning Gang Signs & Prayer (2017), and executive producing Dave’s Brit- and Mercury-winning Psychodrama (2019), has now turned his talents to his own album. But not for Smith a straight-up song collection that’s, say, a little bit prog, a little bit garage, a little bit grime and a whole lot of epic pop. His first record as the headline artist is a concept album.

Released under the name Future Utopia, Smith’s 12 Questions is a boldly ambitious project in which the guitarist-turned-songwriter- turned-producer-turned-artist poses exactly that: a dozen enquiries about the state of the world.

To help him address the queries contained in songs like Fear or Faith?, Do We Really Care? and Why Are We So Divided, When We’re So Connected? he’s assembled quite the cast. Alongside old creative sparring partners Stormzy, Kano and Dave, he’s pulled in up-and-coming talents including Tom Grennan and Arlo Parks. He’s also sought out more left-field choices like poet laureate Simon Armitage, actor Idris Elba and set designer Es Devlin.

And, determined to rigorously interrogate questions like How Do We Find Our Truth? and What’s The Cost of Freedom?, Smith hasn’t shirked the difficulties therein. For the former, Stormzy raps alongside a spoken-word contribution from Beatrice Mushiya, a mother who lost her son to knife violence. For the latter, Smith travelled to New Orleans to record an interview with Albert Woodfox.

As the former Black Panther, who spent over 40 years in solitary confinement, puts it on the album: “Freedom for me is the physical ability to bring philosophical views, theoretical views, subjective views, objective views, you know… To the shape and form and bring that into a reality, you know… To move it from the heart, the mind, the soul, to actual I guess, material force, either for good or bad, or anything in between.”

The result is a soulful, occasionally lushly orchestrated album that roams far and wide. The 21 tracks comprise songs and poems of pain and loss, hope and encouragement, spoken-word thoughtfulness and urgent raps – of big ideas and, at judicious moments, big tunes.

Before he arrived at the point where he wanted to ask his 12 questions, this super-producer hit another one: what am I doing with my life?

“The concept arose 18 months ago. I’d hit a wall, not creatively but I think in my career,” he begins. Working with Kano, Stormzy and Dave, he’d felt “privileged” and learned a lot “musically, culturally, philosophically from these three artists. I’d say all three records were wildly different in their ambitions and their targets and their art. But I did feel that sometimes good luck comes in threes, so I wanted to make sure I wasn’t repeating myself.”

The “simple answer” was actually a complicated one: address planet-wide issues like global warming, lack of diversity and opportunity, the wealth gap, artificial intelligence, the scourge of social media and the atomisation of society.

Never a man to shirk a challenge, Smith looked beyond the A-listers he had on speed-dial. As he researched the various costs of freedom, he came across Woodfox’s story. He’d been imprisoned alongside two other inmates since the early 1970s, and was finally freed in 2016. Smith eventually tracked down Woodfox via his book publisher, a contact in Hawaii and the late Anita Roddick’s former husband Gordon, who continued his wife’s campaign on behalf of the prisoners known as the Angola Three.

Interviewing Woodfox for two hours at home in New Orleans in early autumn 2019, Smith found the insight he was looking for, ultimately marrying his spoken word passages to verses from Kano. All the album’s contributions from the “luminaries”, as he calls them, arose similarly, “from human interaction and conversation”.

Another luminary is Mushiya. The route to her was also mazy. It began with Smith and Stormzy writing a song called Blinded by Your Grace. “It was about how Stormzy’s past could have led him in radically different directions. He had a religious epiphany which stopped him from going left and down an avenue which would have resulted in some pretty dire consequences. Instead he turned right and became the national treasure that he’s become.”

Smith had also been working on the music for Terms and Conditions, a YouTube Originals documentary about drill rappers. He wrote songs with Skengdo x AM, Drillminster, Kidavelly, “guys that were heavily part of the drill scene in London, and I got to know their stories, which are often very dark and harrowing.”

The process also involved writing a song, “or hymn”, for a group of mothers in a support group, united by the tragedy of losing their sons in knife attacks.

“That was probably the most daunting task I’d ever been asked to complete. I tried to get into their heads and write this hymn, which was very, very difficult, and I was terrified to present it to them because I just wasn’t sure how it would go down. And Beatrice was quite vocal in telling me her story and how moved she was by the song, which was called These Tears Could Fill a River.”

He thought it would then be “incredibly powerful” to juxtapose the testimony from a grieving mother against Stormzy’s lyrics detailing how things can easily go wrong for young men. As Mushiya says, in a passage that grabs you by the heart: “My son Duran Kajiama, known as Dee. He was a very smart and intelligent boy. He was doing very well in school. He liked to dance and to sing. He never liked violence, but violence met him. I miss him, his friends miss him, aunty, uncle, grandma… They miss him so much. Dee world… we love you.”

In many ways this approach is of a piece with the thoroughness and commitment Smith has demonstrated on previous projects. During the making of Psychodrama, he and Dave visited the rapper’s brother in prison.

“I could see how important his brother is to him,” Smith recalls. “And I try and take a holistic approach to creation. So to have that empathy for something that’s broader than music [is important] – especially when Dave was talking about his environment, domestic abuse, his brother. I would have found it very shallow to have tried to create music with him without putting myself in a position where I could try and understand his pain.

“It’s obviously impossible for me to experience that,” he adds, “but you can only do what you can do. And sometimes that means venturing outside of the studio, a cool chord progression or a clever drumbeat.”

Despite his closeness with Dave, even Smith was in the dark about the specifics of the star’s planned new verse during his performance of his song Black at this year’s Brit Awards. Lines demanding more support for Grenfell victims and the Windrush generation, calling out media depictions of Meghan Markle, and stating “the truth is our prime minister’s a real racist” were only some of the reasons it was “an unforgettable performance”.

“I was performing [with him] for the first time on piano,” recalls Smith of his minor starring role in a joltingly powerful performance beamed into the nation’s living room. “I felt a responsibility to be this rock for Dave, even though I felt the rock was at times potentially crumbling to sand! And I also didn’t know how he’d approach the verse, how it would go down, and whether the TV programmers would actually pull the plug.

“That’s the vital side of rap and hip hop, isn’t it? You can be part of living on that edge.”

I was in The O2 that night in February, part of the live audience, and I felt the arena lift like it was electrified. Smith agrees. “When Dave went into that verse, I felt this wave of energy hit me, from the 8–10,000 people who were in that room. It was an incredible feeling.”

Smith's album 12 Questions was the first time roles in his studio were reversed: he would brief the lyricists with his concepts and questions. Then they’d set to the writing – or, in the case of Idris Elba, the reading of a passage about fear from 2018 book The Secret DJ, an anonymous insider’s account of the excesses of Nineties rave and dance culture.

Initially, Smith wanted the author himself to read the passage, but couldn’t work out how to do that while preserving his anonymity.

Then, an act of serendipity. One of Idris Elba’s managers contacted him. Would Smith be interested in working with the perennially multi-tasking Elba on some music? He agreed, but he needed a favour.

“And at the time, Idris was in Albuquerque, with Covid, trying to get out of the country, which he couldn’t. I contacted him, we talked and left each other lots of messages. And ultimately he was very generous in agreeing to record that for me, and it became the section at the end of that song. The combination of The Secret DJ’s words and Idris’s voice are a very powerful 30 seconds.”

Helping 12 Questions double-down on its Covid-era relevance is the contribution from Simon Armitage. Smith and Armitage had first met in Paddington, west London, and enjoyed a long coffee shop discussion “mainly about Prefab Sprout and The Smiths, two of our shared great loves,” laughs Smith.

Armitage then wrote his “answer” during what he calls “old lockdown”, and sent Smith a voice-note of him reciting the verse.

“I was a bit rocked back on my heels,” Armitage tells me, recalling that meeting, with a dry chuckle. “It’s a big, blunt question that, for me, requires some fairly deep thinking. I’m not the kind of writer who tends to answer questions – I don’t really think that’s the job of a poet. I’m sort of in the business of reframing questions, or trying to look at the nuances of situations.”

But, intrigued, Armitage agreed to be involved, writing a poem that begins: “I’m curious, because to show mercy once in a blue moon only makes the unforgiving more furious, as if kindness and grace were ethereal rare gifts in the realm of the luxurious…”

“I investigated the position that we do care, and there are aspects of us which care deeply,” he explains. “But there is also something in us which compromises that ability to care… an ungenerous streak in us that surfaces from time to time… So I’m afraid there’s a shade of pessimism in there. But I wasn’t just going to tip up some fluffy bit of positivity.”

For Armitage, though, this is all to the good, and entirely in keeping with Smith’s vaulting vision.

“This is a record that can accommodate some quite powerful feelings and ideas. They’re definitely there across the range of this album. It’s almost operatic in its progressions,” the poet expands. “and I haven’t finished listening to it enough yet to get all the way through its narratives.” Equally, referencing Smith’s work on those groundbreaking grime albums, too, “what he’s done is sort of sociological as much as musical. And with this album, you can tell Fraser’s deeply committed to these issues.”

For all that, despite the very obvious points of relevance to les événements of 2020, Smith points out that “85 per cent” of the album was written and recorded pre-pandemic and before the outpouring of Black Lives Matter-related protest.

But still. Here’s an epic, multi-level, multi-voice concept album, about the philosophical past, crushing present and metaphysical future. Smith’s old boss, the long-haired keyboard wizard who made albums like The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Journey to the Centre of the Earth, would undoubtedly approve.

“Yeah,” Smith smiles. “I think there’s a wildness to the tracklisting that I really, really feel proud of. People could hate this record, but at least I can go down in flames, saying I put the Poet Laureate on a record with Ghetts,” he says of the revered east London grime MC. “No one’s done that!”

12 Questions by Future Utopia is out on Friday via Platoon