Richard James Burgess

Richard James Burgess (2015)

Richard James Burgess (actually Richard Burgess) is a British music producer , music manager , drummer , synthesizer programmer, composer , writer and inventor. He produced the first two albums by the new romantic band Spandau Ballet and the new wave band King as well as the first album by the house musician Colonel Abrams . He coined the term New Romantic and played drums in the British bands Easy Street and Landscape and in numerous studio recordings. He is one of the pioneers in the use of samples and was one of the first users of hardware sequencers in popular music. He wrote the industry standard The Art of Record Production , which is now used in numerous conservatoires. Together with Dave Simmons, he developed the electronic drum kit in the form we know today.

childhood

Burgess was born in London and spent his childhood and youth in Christchurch after his family emigrated to New Zealand in the 1960s. At the age of 2 he was already enthusiastic about all kinds of percussive music and was given a ukulele by a musician who was friends with his family at the age of 6 . At 14 he made the decision to become a drummer and bought his first drum set. About a week later he was already performing for the first time and practicing like a man possessed, sometimes 8 to 12 hours a day. He gained his first band experience in the local bands Fred Henry, Orange, The Lordships and Barry Saunders. At that time he was mainly influenced by Mitch Mitchell and Ginger Baker . After spending about a year in Australia, he joined the New Zealand jazz-rock band Quincy Conserve in 1971 and worked on his first compositions. He also worked as a studio musician for local New Zealand artists. To broaden his musical horizons, he left New Zealand again in April 1972 to study with Alan Dawson at Berklee College of Music in Boston , Massachusetts.

education

He studied arrangement and composition there for two semesters in 1972 and took a course in percussion and the instruments timpani, xylophone and vibraphone at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London in 1973 . Burgess is Ph.D. from the University of Glamorgan . As a self-taught musician, he worked with drummers Alan Dawson, Peter Ind , Tony Oxley as well as James Blades and David Arnold . He acquired knowledge of the music industry mainly in Berklee as a student of Alan Dawson.

Musician

After his time in Boston, he moved to Great Britain in 1973, where he initially played with the Bernie Egan Trio, with the soft rock band Easy Street and briefly with Nucleus . Through Bernie Egan he met his son, Rusty Egan , who later became the drummer of the bands Rich Kids and Visage , who learned to play drums at Burgess. He was also a member of the British National Jazz Orchestra at the time. In 1973 he met John Walters and in 1975 founded the British synth-pop / jazz formation Landscape with him. Landscape established themselves as an avant-garde musician through many live performances and two EPs released under their own label Event Horizon Enterprises in several years a fan base before Burgess and Walters discovered computers for themselves and in 1980 RCA 's debut album Landscape was released without commercial success. Burgess co-produced, co-composed, programmed, sang and played drums on the second album From the Tearooms of Mars ... to the Hellholes of Uranus , which included the 1981 hits Einstein A Go Go and Norman Bates . The album Manhattan Boogie-Woogie , released in 1982 after a hiatus that Burgess needed to produce the first two albums by Spandau Ballet, marks the last album of the band, which broke up in 1984.

In his career as a studio musician he played drums for Barbara Dickson and on the albums The Age of Plastic by the Buggles and Strip by Adam Ant. As a solo artist under contract with Capitol Records , he brought a single with Breathless to the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play Charts in 1984 . He also recorded with the British National Youth Jazz Orchestra and jazz musicians Neil Ardley and Ian Carr , and played with Graham Collier . He also plays with jazz pianist Mickey Basil.

In 2002 he founded the blues band Electrofied with guitarist Tony Fazio. He composes and produces for the band and plays the drums there.

producer

In the early 1980s he became known as a producer through the New Romantic movement because he had overseen the first two albums, the first six singles and numerous maxi singles and remixes of the band Spandau Ballet and thus helped them to several gold records. The British performance troupe Shock, for which Burgess produced the first single Angel Eyes together with Rusty Egan, is also part of this fashion movement and members of this group (including Barbie Wilde, Richard Pereno) appear in the first music videos of the early new romantic bands .

In addition to Spandau Ballet, he produced for Adam Ant , King before he moved to the USA and produced New Edition , Melba Moore , Colonel Abrams and America there . Burgess has also produced for Kim Wilde , Five Star , Tony Banks from Genesis , and Fish from Marillion , Living in a Box , Princess , Virginia Astley, Errol Brown from Hot Chocolate , Heroes (a side project by Wang Chung ), When in Rome and Shriekback (Barry Andrew's Band after leaving XTC ). His production of the debut album for the British group Praise is one of the pioneering works of New Age / Ambient .

He also produced and remixed bands from the Gothic scene under the pseudonym Caleb Kadesh . As a producer, sound engineer and mixer he worked on albums for the bands Rubicon and CNN and XC-NN (founded in 1992 by Tim Bricheno, ex- The Sisters of Mercy ). Under the pseudonym Cadillac Jack he only appeared as a remixer.

The Billboard Magazine dedicated an article of several pages penned by John Tobler to him and to the production company Heisenberg International, founded by Burgess with Waters, in the August 16, 1986 issue .

Burgess won a sales award from Music Week magazine as a producer . He has created twenty-four chart singles and fourteen hit albums.

Burgess mixed and remixed parts of the soundtracks for the movies 9½ weeks and again like last night . He also worked for artists such as Thomas Dolby , Lou Reed , Youssou N'Dour and Lura.

Innovations

He defined the roles of the programmer and sampler in modern music through his work in the 1970s composing the first computer-driven hit, Landscape's Einstein A Go-Go , with the Roland MC-8 microcomposer. He was also one of the first musicians to use the Fairlight CMI samples for commercial recordings. The first samples were programmed by Burgess on the album Never Forever by Kate Bush or the single Fade to Gray by the band Visage in 1980.

Together with Dave Simmons, he conceptualized and co-designed the first independent electronic drum kit, the hexagonal Simmons SDS-V. Simmons developed the layout for the electronics and Burgess developed the drum pads. These drums can be heard for the first time on the landscape single Einstein A Go Go and shortly afterwards on the Spandau Ballet single Chant No.1 .

He met three times in the television series Tomorrow's World of BBC and demonstrated up a prototype of the electronic drum set, the use of the Roland MC-8 Micro composer in popular music and the use of the first digital sampling machine, the Fairlight CMI.

Burgess defined the term New Romantic for the fashion movement of the early 1980s, which had previously been referred to in the press as Blitz-Kids or cult with no name .

His productions for Colonel Abrams in New York and the gold record singles Trapped and I'm Not Gonna Let are widely considered to be the forerunners of house music .

Awards and Achievements

With the electronic avant-garde formation Accord, he appeared on the radio programs Music In Our Time and Improvisation Workshop on BBC Radio 3. He was selected to play with the British National Youth Jazz Orchestra, won the Greater London Arts Association's Young Jazz Musicians, Vitavox Live Sound Award and was nominated for the British Arts Council's Park Lane Group Purcell Room Concert Series. He has an entry in The A to Z of Rock Drummers .

Music manager and author

In 1978 he founded Heisenberg Ltd. in London, which he expanded with John Waters in 1981 to form Heisenberg International, based in London, and which was followed by an American branch in Los Angeles in 1984. Burgess was president of this company until 1986. Heisenberg International engineers included Phill Brown ( Spirit of Eden from Talk Talk , Trail of Stars from The Walkabouts ), Andrew Jackson ( The Wall from Pink Floyd , I Don't Like Mondays from The Boomtown Rats ), Adam Moseley ( Look Sharp from Roxette , Animal Magic and Digging Your Scene from The Blow Monkeys ) and Frank Roszak ( Living in a Box from Living in a Box , West End Girls from the Pet Shop Boys , Get Even from Brother Beyond ).

In 1986 he founded Burgess World Co. and has been President of the company ever since. The agency initially only looked after music producers and sound engineers and was expanded in 1990 to include an artist agency with an attached studio, the record label Marva Records and a booking agency and management consultancy for the music industry. The company is based in Mayo, Maryland.

His book The Art of Music Production, published by Omnibus Press , which was still called The Art of Record Production in the first edition in 1997 , is now in its third edition and represents an industry standard for production technology in the music industry. He has numerous articles authored for tech and music magazines, as well as articles and documents for the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production (ASARP) academic journal . He has lectured on record production and the music industry in the United States and Great Britain.

As a radio journalist, he hosted the BBC World Service's Let There Be Drums program . He taught drums at Annapolis Music School in Maryland and currently teaches classes in record production and the music industry at Omega Studios' School Of Applied Recording Arts And Sciences.

Burgess has been Sales and Marketing Director for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and Smithsonian Global Sound since 2001. Since 2009 he has been the director of human resource development at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. He is director of the Producers and Engineers Wing and was governor for the Washington division of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), which has been a Grammy Award winner since 1959 .

Works

Discography (selection)

• with Easy Street
  • Easy Street (LP, Capricorn Records, 1976)
  • Under the Glass (LP, Polydor, 1977)
• with landscape
  • U2XME1X2MUCH (EP, Event Horizon Enterprises, 1977)
  • Workers Playtime (EP, Event Horizon Enterprises, 1978)
  • Landscape (LP, RCA, 1980)
  • From the tea Rooms of Mars ... to the Hell Holes of Uranus (LP, RCA, 1981)
  • Manhattan Boogie-Woogie (LP, RCA, 1982)
• solo
  • Breathless (LP, Capitol Records, 1984)
• with Electrofied
  • Sunday Morning Blues (CD, 2006)
  • Live performances (CD, 2007)
  • Bad Case of the Blues (CD, Marva Records, 2009)

As a producer (selection)

• Shock - Angel Face / RERB (maxi single, RCA Records, 1980)
• Shock - Dynamo Beat / Dream Games (maxi single, RCA Records, 1981)
• Spandau Ballet - Journeys to Glory (LP, Chrysalis Records, 1981)
• Spandau Ballet - Diamond (LP, Chrysalis Records, 1982)
• Adam Ant - Strip (LP, CBS Records, 1983)
• New Edition - New Edition (LP, RCA Records, 1984)
• America - Perspective (LP, Capitol Records, 1984)
• King - Steps in Time (LP, CBS Records, 1984)
• King - Bitter Sweet (LP, CBS Records, 1985)
• Colonel Abrams - Colonel Abrams (LP, MCA Records, 1985)
• Melba Moore - Read my Lips (LP, Capitol Records, 1985)
• Kim Wilde - Another Step (LP, MCA Records, 1986)
• Five Star - Silk & Steel (LP, RCA Records, 1986)
• Five Star - Between the Lines (LP, RCA Records, 1987)
• Living in a Box - Living in a Box (LP, Chrysalis Records, 1987)
• Eighth Wonder - Fearless (LP, CBS Records, 1988)
• Shriekback - Go Bang! (LP, Island Records, 1988)
• When in Rome - When in Rome (LP, Ten Records, 1988)
• When in Rome - More Than 12 Inch (LP, Ten Records, 1989)
• Heroes - Here we are (LP, RCA Records, 1990)
• Praise - Dream on (LP, WEA Records, 1992)
• Manfred Mann's Earth Band - Soft Vengeance (LP, Virgin Records, 1996)

literature

• Richard James Burgess: The Art of Record Production . Omnibus Press, London 1997, ISBN 0-7119-5552-2 .
• Richard James Burgess: The History of Music Production. Oxford University Press, New York 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-935717-8

Web links

• Richard James Burgess

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Keith Newman: A Different Drummer Part One. In: Radio New Zealand. July 4, 2009, archived from the original on May 25, 2010 ; accessed on October 9, 2010 (English). 
2. ↑ Steve Huey: Landscape. In: allmusic.com. Retrieved October 9, 2010 . 
3. ^ Richie Unterberger: A From the Tea Rooms… In: allmusic.com. Retrieved October 9, 2010 . 
4. ^ Electrofied Blues Band. In: electrofied.us. Retrieved October 9, 2010 . 
5. ↑ Shock. In: barbiewilde.com. Retrieved October 10, 2010 . 
6. ↑ Richard James Burgess. In: books.google.de. August 16, 1986, accessed October 10, 2010 . 
7. ↑ Richard James Burgess. In: Discogs.com. Retrieved October 2, 2010 . 
8. ^ Culture in Action - How culture can promote development. In: luracriola.com. December 11, 2009, archived from the original on October 10, 2010 ; accessed on October 2, 2010 (English). 
9. ↑ Happy Birthday MC! In: soundonsound.com. March 1, 2009, accessed October 2, 2010 . 
10. ↑ Fairlight Computer Keyboard. In: tripod.com. Retrieved October 2, 2010 . 
11. ↑ ^{a b} Adventures in Synth. In: guardian.co.uk. Retrieved October 2, 2010 . 
12. ^ Simmons SDS 5. In: hollowsun.com. Archived from the original on January 25, 2013 ; accessed on October 2, 2010 (English). 
13. ↑ Colonel Abrams. In: deepershades.net. February 17, 2008, accessed October 2, 2010 . 
14. ^ The Art of Music Production. In: theartofmusicproduction.com. Retrieved October 2, 2010 . 
15. ^ Smithsonian Folkways Staff. In: folkways.si.edu. Retrieved October 11, 2010 . 
16. ↑ Staff. In: folklife.si.edu. Retrieved October 11, 2010 .