Douglas Hart was a founding member of iconic Scottish band The Jesus & Mary Chain, along with brothers Jim and William Reid. The band accumulated a cult following almost instantly, their gigs becoming notorious for crowd trouble. Perhaps most famously their show at North London Polytechnic in Spring 1985 where hundreds of fans stormed the stage – a stage that JAMC had left prematurely – and destroyed the equipment. At the centre of all this controversy stood Hart, an archetypal Rock & Roller with black sunglasses permanently fixed to his face. When asked why her only ever had two strings attached to his bass guitar Hart casually explained “That’s the two I use. I mean, what’s the f****** point in spending money on another two? Two is enough.”

Some of their earliest videos, though roughly shot and at times amateurish, have become testament to their times, capturing the feel and look of an alternative Eighties. Hart, however, was unimpressed by his earliest experiences in front of the camera, describing it as being tantamount to torture. Watch any of the early clips like ‘Never Understand’ or ‘Happy When It Rains’ and the pained look on young Hart’s face make it easy to see his words on the subject are anything but hyperbole.

Having registered his distaste for performing in front of the camera, Hart was so happy behind it that when he left JAMC in 1991 he took up filmmaking full time, putting his myriad of musical contacts to very good use. He had already made two videos for fellow Indie icons My Bloody Valentine (the colourful and chaotic collage that accompanied ‘You Made Me Realise’ and the similarly contorted ‘Feed Me With Your Kisses) but it was former JAMC band mate Bobby Gillespie who gave Hart an opportunity to establish himself as one of the new decade’s key voices in music video production. His promo for ‘Higher Than The Sun’ captured the essence of Gillespie’s band Primal Scream perfectly, but it also summed up the mood of the early Nineties; it’s bold mix of colour and blurry performance drawing the same parallels with Sixties counter culture that defined the early part of the decade.

From thereon in Hart was the first choice for some of the UK’s biggest alternative acts. The Stone Roses called on the director to film their live show at Blackpool’s Empress Ballroom, three months after their classic debut album was unleashed on to an unsuspecting world. The resulting film is still regarded as a classic, capturing the band at what was an unquestionable high point. The band would use footage from Hart’s film for the video to ‘Waterfall’.

As Brit Pop became the buzz word during 1996, Hart sided up with Paul Weller. The  video he made for ‘You Do Something To Me’ was instrumental in Weller’s transformation into  cultural icon and respected solo artist. It also saw Hart develop his signature style; a very stylised, effortlessly cool and somehow nostalgic look that uses rich colours and hand held cameras to get close to the subject without ever feeling awkward or contrived. It was this style that would pervade through all the videos Hart made with long time Weller collaborator Steve Craddock with his own band Ocean Colour Scene.

Hart’s ability to capture live performance so precisely stems from his time in JAMC, his intuition as a musician informing his eye as a filmmaker. This ability to harness the energy and incessancy of thrilling live bands made him the obvious choice to when it came to documenting The Libertines for the video to ‘You Can’t Stand Me Now’. The video sparked a relationship with Pete Doherty that has maintained throughout, Hart providing promos for many of Babyshambles singles and most recently his own solo work. ‘Broken Love Song’ was uncharacteristically monochrome, and also saw Hart introducing a narrative to the proceedings, showing that even with such a distinctive style he’s unafraid of creative growth.

Doherty isn’t the only contemporary artist to look to Hart for visual direction; The Horrors worked with him on ‘Sea Within a Sea’ and ‘Who Can Say’, the former being the first thing the band put out after taking time away to record their celebrated album ‘Primary Colours’. Hart’s striking video set out perfectly the mature outlook of their new material. More recently Fionn Regan has been working with Hart on the video for ‘Catacombs’, which features in this weeks Recommends. Shot on 8mm and featuring plenty of jumpy in-camera editing, the video shows Hart coming full circle, referencing the grainy, informal tone of some of his earliest works.

There are few interviews to be found with Hart, and for a director that’s had such an impact on music videos there’s very little in the way of informative articles. However, one page on the Internet Movie Data Base suggests that after all this time Hart may break the habit of a lifetime and appear on the other side of the camera; Los Angeles-based director Eric Green has interviewed the former bass player for the forthcoming documentary ‘Beautiful Noise’, which focuses on the Shoegazing scene of the late Eighties and early Nineties.