Richard James BurgessMBE (born 29 June 1949) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, composer, author, manager, marketer and inventor.[citation needed]
Burgess's music career spans more than 50 years. He came to prominence in the early 1980s as co-founder and co-lead singer of the synthpop band Landscape, which released a top-5 hit in 1981 with the single "Einstein a Go-Go". Burgess is one of the main composers of Landscape's music, and made major musical and lyrical contributions to the band's songs. After the band's break-up he pursued a brief solo career releasing one mini-album, Richard James Burgess in 1984.
Richard James Burgess was born in London, England, and his family emigrated to Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1959. He showed an early interest in music, especially drums,[3] and bought his first drumkit at the age of 14. As a drummer, he gained experience in local bands including Fred Henry, Orange, The Lordships and Barry Saunders.[4] Burgess also showed an early interest in recording production, buying a portable Tandberg tape recorder when he was 16 to make amateur recordings.
In the mid-1970s, Burgess was a member of the soft rock band Easy Street, together with Ken Nicol and Peter Marsh. The trio released two albums, Easy Street (1976) and Under the Glass (1977) and several singles, one of which charted on the Billboard Hot 100 ("I've Been Lovin' You").
Burgess is a member of the academic advisory committee for The Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production (ASARP, London College of Music). He has lectured on the subject of record production and the music business in the United States and in the United Kingdom. He wrote and presented the BBC World Service radio series Let There Be Drums. He taught drums at the Annapolis Music School in Maryland,[24] and has taught classes on record production and the music business at The Omega Studios' School of Applied Recording Arts And Sciences.[25]
Author
Burgess's book The Art of Music Production: The Theory and Practice, which was in 1994 originally entitled The Art of Record Production,[26] is now in its fourth edition. In 2014 he published his second book, The History of Music Production.[27] He has written many chapters for other books and articles for technical and music magazines, as well as articles, papers and interviews for the academic Journal on the Association Art of Record Production (JARP), for which he is joint editor-in-chief.[28]
Manager and executive
In 1978, Burgess founded a management company, Heisenberg Ltd, which managed producers and engineers such as Phill Brown, Andy Jackson, Adam Moseley, and Rafe McKenna in the UK and US. The company changed its name to Burgess World Co in the mid-1980s, and relocated to Maryland from Los Angeles and New York in the mid-1990s where it managed many mid-Atlantic based artists including Jimmie's Chicken Shack.[29]
From 2001 to 2015, Burgess was employed at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings where he was the associate director of Business Strategies.[6]
Boards
Burgess has been a member of the executive board of the Music Managers Forum U.S. was on the national steering committee for the Recording Academy's Producer and Engineer Wing and has served as co-chair of the executive committee for Smithsonian Music,[30] a pan-institutional music initiative. He served as vice-president of the Washington, D.C. Chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and co-chair for both the DC Chapter of the Producer and Engineer Wing, and the national Producer Compensation Committee. He was elected to the board of the American Association of Independent Music in 2013 and then to Chair of the board in 2015.
In 2016 he received the British Council Education UK Alumni Award USA in the Professional Achievement category. As a member of the avant-garde electronic group Accord (with Christopher Heaton and Roger Cawkwell), he was featured on BBC Radio 3 programs Music in Our Time and Improvisation Workshop. With Landscape, he won the Greater London Arts Association's Young Jazz Musicians 1976 award and the Vitavox Live Sound award. Accord was also selected by the Arts Council of Great Britain for its Park Lane Group Purcell Room concert series.[4] He was featured in The A to Z of Rock Drummers.[33] In 2016, he won the British Council Education UK Alumni Award for Professional Achievement.