Richard James Burgess is a studio drummer, music-computer programmer, recording artist, record producer, composer, published author, manager, marketer and inventor. He was the producer for
Spandau Ballet's first two albums.
Education
He was educated at
Berklee College of Music in Boston and the
Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He also had private lessons with such teachers as
Alan Dawson,
Peter Ind,
Tony Oxley,
James Blades, and
David Arnold. He also studied movement with
Bruno Tonioli and drama with
Uta Hagen.
Producer
In the early eighties he emerged as a pre-eminent producer of the
New Romantic movement, producing Spandau Ballet’s first two gold albums and first six hit singles. He won a
Music Week sales award as a producer and has created 24 charted singles and 14 hit albums.
Other productions include Adam Ant, King, New Edition, Melba Moore, Colonel Abrams, America, Kim Wilde, Five Star, Tony Banks of Genesis, and Fish of Marillion), Living in a Box, Princess, Virginia Astley, Errol Brown of Hot Chocolate, When In Rome, Shriekback, Shock, Barbie Wilde. He was also an ambient pioneer in producing the British group Praise. He produced, engineered and mixed albums by Rubicon and X-CNN under the pseudonym Caleb Kadesh and did several mixes using the pseudonym Cadillac Jack.
Musician
Burgess co-produced, co-wrote, programmed, sang and played drums for the European
electronica group
Landscape, whose album
From The Tearooms Of Mars To The Hellholes Of Uranus yielded the international hits "Einstein A Go Go" and "Norman Bates". His studio-drumming career includes albums such as
Adam Ant’s
Strip and The
Buggles’
The Age of Plastic. As a Capitol Records solo artist he charted singles on the Billboard dance charts reaching No. 1 on the New York Dance Music Report charts. He also recorded with the British
National Youth Jazz Orchestra and jazz musicians
Neil Ardley,
Ian Carr and
Nucleus and played with
Graham Collier OBE.
Mixes and compositions
Burgess’s mixes and remixes include tracks for the movies
9½ Weeks,
About Last Night and artists
Thomas Dolby,
Lou Reed,
Youssou N'Dour,
Luba and many others.
Innovations
He defined the computer programmers’ and samplers’ role in modern music via his work in the seventies with the
Roland MC-8 Microcomposer and with
Fairlight CMI firsts such as
Kate Bush’s
Never Forever album and
Visage’s
Fade To Grey. He conceptualized and co-designed the first standalone electronic drum-set, the ground-breaking hexagonal shaped
SDS5. He appeared three times on the BBC TV program
Tomorrow's World demonstrating his prototype of this invention; use of the
Roland MC-8 Microcomposer computer in pop music; and the world's first digital sampling machine the
Fairlight CMI. He coined the name for the
New Romantic movement of the early nineteen-eighties. His NYC production of
Colonel Abrams' which yielded the gold singles "Trapped" and "I'm Not Gonna Let" are widely considered to have been the precursor to the
House Music phenomenon.
Awards and schievements
With the avant-garde electronic group
Accord he was featured on
BBC Radio 3 programs "Music In Our Time" and "Improvisation Workshop". He played in the British
National Youth Jazz Orchestra, won the Greater London Arts Association’s Young Jazz Musicians award, the Vitavox Live Sound award and was chosen for the British Arts Council’s prestigious Park Lane Group Purcell Room concert series. He is featured in
The A to Z of Rock Drummers.
Educator and marketer
His book
The Art of Music Production is in its third edition. He has written many articles for technical and music magazines. He has lectured on the subject of record production and the music business in the United States and England. He wrote and presented the
BBC World Service radio series "Let There Be Drums". He currently teaches drums at the Annapolis Music School in Maryland.
Burgess is also Director of Marketing and Sales for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and Smithsonian Global Sound, runs his own artist management company, Burgess Worldco in the Washington DC area. He is a member of the Board of Governors for the Washington DC Chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He also produces and plays drums for the blues band Electrofied.
References
External links
