Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast channel about electronic music and all things synth. I'm Rob Pericelli.  Richard James Burgess is a man who wears many hats. In a career that spans over five decades, Richard was first and foremost a drummer. Born in London, his family emigrated to New Zealand when he was 10.

In his early 20s he went to study at Berkeley before returning to London to study at Guildhall.  He soon became a part of the London music scene as a session drummer as well as with the groundbreaking band Landscape. 

Richard combined his passion for music, drumming and electronics when he worked closely with Dave Simmons on the Simmons SDS V drum kit. This iconic hexagonal kit would become inexorably linked with the 80s pop scene, both for its sound and visual style.  After Landscape dissolved, he began to work more behind the desk, being one of the first to own a Fairlight CMI in the UK.

He would go on to work with the likes of Kate Bush, Spandau Ballet, Visage and Colonel Abrams.  The 1990s saw Burgess reenter the world of academia, and he would go on to write some of the most comprehensive guides on music production. In recent years, he worked on the boards of establishments such as the Smithsonian and is currently the President and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music. 

Richard was appointed an MBE in 2022  this year. Landscape released Landscape a Gogo, a comprehensive five CD anthology of their work. Covering their entire recorded output between 1977 and 1983.  How does it feel looking back on your work with Landscape after what is, like, 46 years? 

Yeah, it's, it's an amazing feeling, actually.

And I know it, sort of, the whole project kicked off when I took my live tapes that I literally had not listened to for 45 years. years and, um, had them digitized and, um, I used to work at the Smithsonian and the restoration engineer, but the Smithsonian did them for me. He sadly died during the pandemic, but this, he did an amazing job and he's a really good friend of mine.

And, uh, I'm so grateful that he, he did it for us. And then I got the rights back to our albums and, um, you know, I don't really listen to my own stuff, but when we got, we got all the multi tracks digitized and, um, When we heard the digital recordings, it was really breathtaking. So it was kind of eerie in a lot of ways, hearing everything after all that time.

Yeah. Was it you, were you the instigator of this whole reissue project, or were the rest of the band, you know, up for it? 

Uh, the rest of the band was up for it. I was definitely the instigator, but there was no reservation at all. We, we all get along. We, we pretty much always have, and um, I think the best thing about it actually has been sort of reforging those friendships and working together and watching everybody sort of fall into place and do their thing.

So like, I do this part of it, but everybody else had another part of it that was just as important and we wouldn't have been able to do it. Yeah, 

I was looking through the box set, which I have to say is, is a really good little package. Just, it's crammed full of amazing, uh, bits of content. The first thing that caught my eye on the first CD, which is your debut album, which was originally, uh, 10 instrumental tracks.

You've tacked on the end those, some of those live recordings, I guess. And, um, the first, like, four or five tracks are live in Norwich. Now, I'm a Norwich boy, born and bred, so I was really, uh, interested. Do you have any recollections of those gigs, uh, you know, when you listened to those tapes, did it bring back a whole raft of memories?

Yeah, I remember that gig particularly well, actually. And I remember most of the gigs we did. Um, if they come up. You know, I couldn't sit here and list them all for you. But when somebody mentions them, they're quite vivid in my mind. And we played a lot of shows. I mean, we were playing five to six nights a week.

So it's 200 to 300 dates a year. Wow. Um, for about three years. But yes, I do remember it. And that was recorded by Uh, I think his name's Kevin Monaghan from Norwich. He recorded it on a boombox in the audience, so you can hear glasses clinking and things like that. And he sent it to us on a minidisc, actually.

He recorded it on a cassette tape recorder. And, uh, you know, we had it mastered, and it sounds amazing, so why not use it? 

Yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, these gigs were being performed in, you know, the late 70s. And, you were using technology throughout the lifespan of the band, real cutting edge stuff.

How did you find using this, this kind of nascent technology at such an early stage, when it was, like, really brand new and, and maybe not very reliable?  

Yeah, that was always a challenge, but, um, I think when we were playing live and, um,  we, we had all that stuff on stage with us, it wasn't, it wasn't too bad.

It was when we moved to the computer period with the MC 8 microcomposer that it became problematic for us because you could only load about one song onto the MC 8 at a time, and it took 45 minutes. It came in off a cassette, and this was very, very early. Computer technology, you know, right before that computers were basically IBM mainframes and, um, you know, at that time to put it in perspective, you had very, very few personal computers.

I think it was the Altair and the Sinclair, and that was about it. I don't even think the Apple one had hit the market yet. So that really sort of took us off the road. To be honest with you, we didn't even attempt to go out and So, um, Uh, play live with the computer. I think, looking back on it now, we probably could have found workarounds for it, but, uh, it, the computer at that point became such a big part of what we did that we actually stopped touring.

Wow. 

Okay. But,  but the actual syn synthesizers on the trigger drums and everything, that was pretty good. It was a, it was a hell of a setup, I will say that.  . But um, but uh, once we got it all set up, it worked really well. 

Excellent. How did your journey, your specific personal journey with electronic music technology start?

What really. Spark that flame for you.  

So I, I left school and I, I went and I did a, um, an avionics training program with what's now Air New Zealand. It was, um, National Airways Corporation at the time. And I, I was doing, um, night classes at, uh, the Polytech, uh, studying electronics. And I bought myself a tape recorder, a Grundig tape recorder.

So that was sort of, and I'd been messing around with tape recorders for quite a few years before that. Um, and then I bought myself a Synthia, the EMS Synthia, which is, um, a British, uh, it's the briefcase version of the VCS 3. And, um, I just used to play with that a lot. I mean, I was a drummer. I was always trying to make drum sounds or percussion sounds.

And it was a constant, you know, sort of thing in my life. I never really stopped wanting to be able to make an electronic drum sound. But what happened was the actual technology hadn't really caught up with the, with the desire to do it in the sense that the rise time on the, On the envelope shapers wasn't fast enough really to make really good drum sounds.

And then when, when the microchips came along, where the, the ICs, the integrated circuits with, you know, hundreds of transistors on one chip, suddenly you could get those really fast rise times. Because, you know, a drum happens really quickly. It happens in less than 0. 2 of a millisecond. So, you know, that means the envelope shaper has to open up really fast in order to give you that sharp sound of a drum.

And that, that was really the breakthrough moment. 

Yeah, so as a drumming, I, I sympathize with you because I, you know, I started out as a drummer as well, I haven't picked up a set of sticks in a little while, but  did you see electronic technology as a threat to drumming or was it an enhancement? You mentioned that you always wanted to find, you know, the electronic drum sounds.

Did you find drum machines a threat at all? 

So. I knew they were a threat, but I didn't perceive them as a threat in the sense of I wasn't worried about it. And I feel the same way about AI today. Um, it clearly is going to replace jobs that we do as humans right now. The question is, can we,  Can it make our lives better?

You know, can it actually help us do things that were more difficult? So I was a studio musician right through the 70s and into the very beginning of the 80s. Um, I think the last album I played on as a studio musician was the Buggles album, funnily enough. But I played on a lot of disco sessions and the Buggles album was another one where Everything had to be really precise, and I was good at that.

I could play with a click. Um,  you know, I could play like a machine, really. Um, but it was hard work, and it occurred to me all through this period that a computer could do it much better, or much more easily. So, When I was working on the Simmons initially, my thought was that it would just be electronic drums that we would play as drummers.

And instead of having an acoustic sound, we would get an electronic sound. But then, when John discovered the MC 8 microcomposer, and he told me about it, and we went out to Roland, and frankly, we tried it out and bought one the same day, I realized that you could trigger the, this SDS 5, we had the prototype of the SDS 5 at that point, you could trigger it from the computer.

And  This was really before drum machines. This was before the Linn drum and all those programmable drum machines. And I knew that they were coming down the pike, really, because Roland had, like, the CR 68 and the CR 78. CR 78 was kind of, sort of,  

programmable. 

I mean, Warren Penn from Ultravox was quite good at programming it.

I never found it very easy to program. But you could see where things were going. It's like AI now. You can see what's going to happen five, ten years down the line. So, yeah, I knew that. It was going to be problematic for studio musicians. That's actually when I stopped doing studio work and when I moved more into production and being an artist, because I, you know, I realized that there was probably not a long lifespan for  studio traumas at that point.

Yeah, sure. 

Um, I spoke to JJ Gainzalik, um, a while back and he mentioned to me his time working for you, being his kind of, his roadie, his engineer, setting up, Uh, a kit in one studio while you were playing in another so that you could, you know, go from job to job as you saying you're a session musician.

What are your memories of those days and working with J. J.?  

Yeah, well J. J. was great. I mean, we always used to say our crew was better qualified than we were. And, um, they were.  I think they had more degrees than we did. And J. J., you know, I loved J. J. He was amazing. And yes, they used to do that. In those days, a lot of sessions were sort of 10 to 1, 2 to 5.

Yeah. Six to nine, and all the studios, for the most part, were in central London. So it was, it was possible to move from one studio to the other. And I used to do it in the beginning on my own, but in the end I realized that this is exhausting. So I would have three drum sets that would sort of rotate around, and they'd set up the first one, I'd go do that session, I'd go to the next session, they'd come and break that one down.

These sort of the drum sets were  piggybacking across London.  It was a fun time. I mean, I love playing and so. I was playing anything from 9 to 12 hours a day, every day. Sometimes we'd finish the last session and go do a gig. And J. J., that's sort of how J. J. got into the Fairlight, because I had the Fairlight and, you know, he would come around to my house and Um, see it and mess with it.

Then, you know, I showed it to Trevor Horn and Jeff Downs, and then Trevor bought one. And, uh, and from me doing the bubble sessions, JJ met Trevor and Jeff went to work with them when they, when they were part of, yes. Mm-Hmm. . And that was the whole connection really. 

Yeah. The rest is history, as they say.

Yeah. I want to come back to electronic drums, if I may, because, you know, that's a field that I'm quite interested in as well. So, um, you mentioned the Simmons and the SDS 5, and you were, um, right in on that, in terms of its development and its inception. Can you tell us a little bit about how that all started, and  your role in that machine?

Yeah, I'd been messing around with this for a long time, and the idea came about Well, many different ways, actually. I was just fascinated by the idea of making a sound that was bigger and different than the sound you could make with an acoustic drum set,  uh, or percussion. And, you know, when you're in the studio all the time, you're playing drums.

But you're processing the drums, so what you hear coming off the record is not really the way drums sound. They're the way they sound through close mics and lots of EQ and compression and stuff like that. And I was just thinking, well wouldn't it be great if we could just generate the sound out of the machine, out of a machine.

that would sound like that, or better than that, or bigger than that, or different than that. And, um, I'd, I'd worked on the idea of an electric drum, because I looked at all the other instruments. I go, well, guitars went electric. And, you know, pianos went electric. And, uh, and, and then I realized, well, we sort of jumped over the electric phase now, because we're into synthesizers.

And, um,  that's what really got me thinking about that. And I had been, Triggering some electronics from my acoustic drums and I'd approached a bunch of drum companies all I mean I was I was endorsed by Pearl, sponsored by Pearl Drums. Um, but I talked to everybody. I talked to Ludwig and Pearl and all the, all the drum companies in town, and nobody was interested.

Somebody said to me, Well, drummers, drummers are never going to figure out how to use wires and cables and knobs. Which was, you know, one of those beautiful sort of backhanded sort of insults, right?  I'm like, well, I can figure it out, so I'm sure everybody else can. Why, how did drummers get this, um, reputation for being so dumb?

Yeah,  I know. It's terrible, right? Um, I just have to learn all the drummer jokes so that I can defend myself. That's it. Um, but, um, anyway, so I, um, I bought a whole bunch of those little carbon microphones that used to be in the handsets of, um, telephones back in the day. And I, and I taped those inside my drums and they were my triggers.

And I could trigger synthetic sounds from that. And through all that whole process, I met Dave Simmons because, uh, John had, uh, I had gotten into the Lyricon, which was being distributed by the company that Dave worked for at the time, Musicaid. And, um, I told him my idea, and, uh, I actually went home and sort of mocked it up on a bunch of, you know, sort of patch.

You know how it is, since you're into synthesizers, you patch out of one synth into another synth, and out of that into another synth, and you sort of pile up the sounds. And so I went up and I talked to him about that. We actually mocked it all up on an ARP 2600, which is an amazing machine. And, um, and then he started working on kind of putting together the circuitry. 

So we made the T Rims album and all the shock stuff I did with the original prototype, which was literally just a piece of wood. With a bunch of wires and some component boards on it when just had kind of connectors hanging off of it You always had to have a screwdriver or and a soldering iron handy in order You know to fix things when they broke which they would break all the time and I still have that That prototype but that was what we actually used for all those records and, um, because it took years to get to the production model.

I wasn't that interested in the whole production model thing or, you know, building a company or anything else. I really just wanted one for myself. I mean, I didn't mind that other people got it. I liked that other people got it. I mean, it's amazing to me that the thing took off and became this huge, huge thing and it was on top of the pops all the time and You know, America went crazy for it, but that wasn't my thinking at the time.

I just wanted to make drums electronic. 

Yeah, sure. I mean, it was a very iconic kit, both in terms of its sound, but also as you say, in terms of its visuals, because You would see it on every TV show. Even if the drums on the record that were being mimed to weren't electronic drums, the Simmons kit always looked cool.

Uh, you know, with those hexagonal, shiny, gloss pads. It was, it was always a very cool thing. Um, what are your thoughts on the world of E Drums today? Because we've come a long, long way. Now we have drums with mesh heads that have multiple sensors that can give most of the nuance of an acoustic drum through the rims and through the, the actual skins themselves.

What are your thoughts on You know, the current state of play with eDrums.  

I think they're breathtaking, actually. I have the high end, um, Roland set in my apartment here in New York. I mean, I have acoustic drums at my house, but, you know, it's an apartment, so it's a little bit difficult to play acoustic drums.

And, um, it's almost as good as acoustic drums. The drums themselves, actually, I would say are as good, really. I mean, the amount of touch sensitivity that you get on the snare drum now, and on the toms, and the fact that you can play the different areas of the drums, you can do rim shots, all that kind of thing.

Cymbals are not quite there yet, but they're pretty close. They're pretty amazing. Um, just if you're trying to play jazz or something like that, they don't quite have the sensitivity that a real cymbal has. But this, you know, my intention was always to get there. It's just, we were just Using the technology we had at the time, but that was always the thinking that we should get to a point where it would feel exactly like playing an acoustic set.

Yeah, absolutely. I have an Alesis kit with the mesh heads, which I find, you know, is incredibly good.  But I marry it up, instead of using the built in brain that it has,  I only use that for the cable connectivity. I use a piece of software. Called Superior Drummer, and I just wondered, you know, had you ever experimented with, uh, with drum sample libraries, or do you tend to favor the kind of the modeled and sampled thing that, say, Roland do? 

Well, it's interesting. That's a great question, actually. I mean, one of the reasons, at the time when we made the, the, when we were doing the STS 5, when we were working on the STS 5, digital technology was on its way. You know, it had already been invented some years before, but hadn't really kind of, uh, you know, penetrated the industry.

We hadn't gotten to the point of digital tape machines yet, and we hadn't gotten to the point of digital samplers or digital drum machines. I knew it was happening. I knew it was going to come and I knew if we waited, we could do that. But what I, the problem for me with digital samples was that they're more like sort of on off switches.

You know, it's like you at the time, not so much now because, you know, we have techniques for getting around that. But at the time, if you had a digital sample, you could. You could make it louder and you could make it quieter, but that was about it. Now, as you know, if when you play a drum, like a snare drum in particular, if you hit it softer, it's a completely different sound than if you hit it hard.

And then of course you got all the rim shots and where you hit the drum on the head and everything like that. But so I wanted something where the quality would actually change, not just the volume, but the quality would change as you hit it. It seemed to me at the time that analog was the way to go. You know, actually I started working with the Fairlight shortly after that.

The Fairlight came out as a kind of a shock. I'd been keeping tabs on what was going on with digital technology and I'd been talking to Stanford University and Aircam in Paris. I knew where they were at and I knew they were creating pretty amazing sounds, but that was on the mainframes and I was not expecting a device to come out.

There was in any way, shape, or form affordable for, um, and then the Fairlight came out. I mean, it wasn't very affordable. The first, first Fairlight cost as much as my house did in London. But, you know, you could have, it wasn't millions of dollars. It was tens of thousands of dollars.  You know, I think there's no question that digital is the way to go now.

Um, although recently I've been reading, like, a lot about, with computing, that there's an argument that blending analog with digital for computing, um, has some advantages. And I understand that because analog is a gradual process, you know, whereas digital is a discrete process. I mean, it may seem gradual, but, you know, like MIDI, there's 128 steps.

Although you don't necessarily hear those steps, they are there. Whereas analog is absolutely smooth. So, I don't know, I sort of, I'm not in that world at this point. Um, and it seems like, you know, some of the other companies have done such a good job with electronic drums that me getting back into that would be a waste of time probably.

But, um, it does still really interest me.  But I will say this, I think the thing that interested me most about the thing was the control aspect, more than the sounds. I mean, the sounds were important, of course, but the control of the musician over the instrument is what was critically important. And that was really important to all of landscape.

Yeah, that was, uh, it was a revelation to me when I moved from acoustic to electric, it was that, that degree of control because, you know, the age old, uh, drummer joke of, you know, them being too loud and you can't turn the drum kit down. Now I had control over volume, but I also had control over EQ through the amplification.

I had control over the sounds and yeah, as, as technology has moved on that, that control has just grown and grown and grown. So playing electronic drums now is, um, is a real joy in my personal opinion. 

It's amazing. I have a set,  like I say, in my apartment and I play a lot. I love, I love it. 

Yeah. 

It's an amazing experience.

Plus, you know, you can, you can have like stadium drums. You can go to like reggae drums. Yeah. You know, it'll flip. You just hit, literally hit a button and, um, and you're in, and you're in a whole different vibe. Absolutely. 

I want to come back to the Fairlight, because that's another thing that you and I, um, kind of share in common.

You know, I have a big passion for Fairlights, have a few here that, uh, in various states of repair. You are very well known for being, you know, a big proponent of the system, uh, when it launched, and, you know, you, you, you're known as being, uh, Being, I think, one of the first artists to get one into a piece of recorded music and into the charts.

Can you just tell me a little bit about your history with the Fairlight CMI and, and how you came across it and how you came into it and what difference it made to you as a musician and as a producer?  

Yeah, so I found out about it, um, actually I can't remember how I found out about it, I think I read about it, and um, and I, I grew up in New Zealand, I was born in England, but I grew up in New Zealand, and um, I, I found out that they, you know, they were based in Rushcutters Bay in Sydney, and I'd lived, I'd lived actually right there in Sydney, right near Rushcutters Bay, so I actually flew out. 

Peter Vogel and, uh, he's one of the designers and I spent, you know, several days with him, um, because I was so blown away by it. As I mentioned, I'd been talking to, uh, Stanford, uh,  I was particularly talking to a guy called Andy Mora, who's a pioneer in, um, in digital, uh, synthesis. And he was working with John Chowning, who is actually the inventor of FM synthesis, which is what the DX7 was based on.

So I, I, I knew where they were, where they're at, as I mentioned, and I, I, I just simply did not think that any kind of device was about to come out, um, that would be  anything I could get my hands on. So the Fairlight just blew my mind. Peter Gabriel had the first one in the country, um, and there were three that came in.

I think he had one, I had one. And, uh, Syco Systems, which was Peter's distribution company run by his, um,  And, um, John and I drove out to Bath and to meet with Peter and, you know, and check out the Fairlight there. But then we, we got ours and, um, It was really exciting, and suddenly I got a call from Kate Bush saying that she was making the next album, which was Never Forever. 

Could we come in? So we went to Abbey Road and did that with her. We did Babushka, Army Dreamers, and I think it was another track we worked on as well. And those were all sampled in the studio. I mean, we hadn't had the device for very long, and it was, you know, there were no YouTube videos showing you how to use these things.

You had, you had like a one, one inch thick sort of typed manual that was stapled together. And basically, if you couldn't figure it out, the thing wasn't going to work.  And it was command line, as you know, so like, If you don't know the command, you're not getting anything out of the machine. And this was early days of computing, as far as I was concerned.

Anyway, so I didn't always understand that that's not a space. It's an underscore, you know, or, um, and that the spaces are important. You know,  so, uh, stuff is very obvious to us all these days, but was not obvious at all in those days. So it was kind of fun, but it was really, um, an amazing experience working with the device.

I'm working with cape. It's just incredible. As far as we're aware, that is the first commercially released example of a fair light samples. And like I say, they wouldn't, they were not stock samples because the thing came with a box of eight inch floppy discs that had a few things on like a barking dog.

Yeah, it's funny, you know how with a sample you trim it and, but you could untrim it and you could hear this Australian handler going,  Bach, or something like that. I can't remember what he said.  And then the dog goes, woof.  Um, but, so, so, you know, we didn't use any of those. We actually went to see her. The first thing she wanted to do was babushka.

And she wanted to have the sound of breaking glasses at the end of it. So, they went to the Abbey Road kitchen and got a bunch of plates and cups and glasses. And I think we got a paving stone or something in and we put that down on the floor. And we just had a whale of a time throwing plates and glasses and cups down on the floor and recording them.

And, and it was, it was, it was life changing really because you, you were um, you know, suddenly not only did you have these sounds on, on the machine. But you could, you could play them up and down the octaves, and you could stack them up, and you could play chords on them, and those kinds of things, you know, things, we, we, we, we were used to using real sounds on recordings, but we used to fly them in from tape before that, but it's a very limited way to do it, you know, you get the sound, you can process it a bit, you can speed it up, you can slow it down, and then you fly it in, and it is what it is, but When you can map it on a keyboard, and all things that we're very used to these days, but when you can map it on a keyboard, it's a whole different, it becomes a musical instrument suddenly.

Yeah,  

I guess it's one of these things, when I do lectures and seminars on the Fairlight, I, I always start off by saying, you kind of had to be there to understand the impact of, of what you've just described. And it really was, um, a mind blowing thing to be able to play, um, Any sound that you could feed into this machine in a musical fashion, whether it was chromatic or otherwise.

And it really was, you know, a game changing, uh, time.  

It really was. I mean,  yeah, I've spoken to a lot of people about that. I'm trying to get, trying to get this into any kind of perspective now, now that we're, you know, 40 years on and the computers are, we walk around with the computer in our pockets, basically.

I mean, you know, you think, you know, they always say the cell phone. It's more powerful than all the computers on the Apollo mission. Um, there was certainly, you know, what I have, you know, an iPhone is way more powerful than, than the Fairlight. I mean, the MCA micro composer was 16 kilobytes of memory, and that was kind of huge.

I mean, we had the, that was the biggest one you could get. I can't remember what the memory was on the Fairlight, but it was pretty limited. You know, so it's a whole, it's a whole different thing. I mean, when we took the Fairlight to the, to Abbey Road, Yeah, I put it in the trunk of my car. And drove up there and it, it, it filled the trunk.

I had a BMW at the time that filled the trunk. And, um,  uh, when I got there, it didn't work, of course. And so, you know, you had to take, open it up and you had to re-seed all the boards and yeah, um, you wiggle 'em around a bit until the, until the, um, connectors, uh, connected properly. So, you know, it was very sort of, um,  it felt very cutting edge, very experimental, very. 

Yeah. Of course, the other thing that the Fairlight CMI brought in, albeit a little while after you were using it with Kate, was, of course, graphics based on screen sequencing.  How did that change things for you in terms of, you know, music production and creation? 

We used PageR. We actually made a track. Um, called Caterpillar Tracks, um, for the Landscape album, for the Two Rooms album.

But at the point that we got the Fairlight, we were pretty much at the end of the Two Rooms album. We worked on the Two Rooms album sort of in a, sort of  an occasional way over a period of a year. Um, we were writing and producing it. And because we had this  And this was another kind of revolution.

Suddenly we could do all this pre production at home that you couldn't do previously. I mean, you could do pre production, but then you'd have to go into the studio and do it all again. With the MC8, suddenly, we had that syndrome that everybody's used to now, which is you do the pre production is the actual record, you know, you're actually programming stuff into the computer, and that's what you're going to use.

And we did used to go into the studio and then dump it all onto tape. But, But we didn't have to reprogram the parts, they were all in the machine. With the Fairlight, um, we, we, we were using PageR quite extensively, and that of course is what JJ really specialized in. But I sort of moved on past that, because what, one of the things that was happening with the Fairlight was, every time you got an update, it was costing you 100, 000.

And, um, and, and if you didn't get the update, You know, everybody would kind of get sniffy with you. Oh, you don't have, you know, yeah, you don't have the 2x. I don't think so And so you really had to update and it got kind of ridiculous and at the same time  By then,  we were starting to see other technologies come out, like drum machines, which were pretty amazing.

I mean, the LinnDrum itself was the LM 1, and then the LinnDrum, and then the Linn9000. That was kind of my progression with drum machines. And then MIDI came out, of course. And once MIDI came out, that really opened the world up. So I kind of went in the other direction at that point. I went sort of like,  Much smaller devices that you could link together rather than the kind of all in one.

I was always intrigued by the Synclavia and the Fairlight, but,  you know,  I mean, you, looking behind you, obviously you, you see the value of having all these different devices, because they all, they all have a slightly different sound to them. They all have, they all offer slightly different advantages and disadvantages.

Being able to mix and match every different kind of synthesizer is incredibly valuable.  So, that's the direction I went in. I mean, and I fell in love with the Lin 9000. I got my first Lin 9000, I think in, I don't know, whenever it first came out. And, um, that, that was a game changing machine, too, because, you know, you could program all your MIDI stuff just the same way I was doing it on the MCA.

But then you had all the drums in there as well, and you could change out the chips, and you could, you could sample stuff in it. Um, again, not as sophisticated as what we have today, but the LIN 9000 is basically,  you know, the, the core of the Akai MPC. System that we that we still use and that there's been you know, it's such a core system for hip hop in particular 

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, I want to move on to your your production because that was a big significant part of your career particularly During the 80s and beyond and of course, you're famously associated with bands like Spandau Ballet I just wondered the move into production. Was that a sense of You Disillusionment with being a performer and maybe being a bit of a pop star and just wanting to be behind the scenes and being in a bit more Control maybe or in a bit more of a creative role  

Yeah, the combination of all the above actually I  I'm basically sort of a fairly shy person.

I mean, you know, most performers are I found that most of most performers are actually kind of  Fairly introverted and that's me. I'm really happy in the corner reading a book and I'm really happy in a room on a computer. Um,  you know, the pandemic was, um, was  not difficult for me personally. I mean, obviously it was a terrible thing.

It killed a lot of people, but, um, messed up a lot of things in the economy. But for me personally, staying home was a beautiful thing. So I think I naturally gravitated towards behind the scenes. I think that, um,  The production thing was just something that was in my blood, really, because I'd started in studios as a very young musician.

I was around 20 years old, I guess. And I was always fascinated by it. I started at EMI Studios, or HMB Studios, in Wellington, New Zealand. And I worked with the top producer in New Zealand at the time, called Peter Dawkins, who sadly died a few years ago. Um, and, um, And the engineer, I'm blanking on his name right now, but he was from, he was a British engineer that came in and when I was done with the session, I would just hang around in the back of the room and just watch what they were doing.

And I did that also when I moved to England and when I got into studio work in England as well. So I learned everything from watching,  frankly, the greatest engineers and producers in the history of British music from that period of time, which was an amazing experience. You know, we're. People like Tony Visconti and Trevor Horn, Pete Collins, and I mean, I'd be in the next room to George Martin and stuff like that.

You know, so you picked up a lot from, from all that kind of thing, and it just always fascinated me. We always produced our own demos, and we produced the Landscape album. And it was through that that I got into producing Spandau because I was at the Blitz and I, I, I knew Spandau Valley, but I didn't know who they were.

I didn't know they were a band. And then one night they got up and played and I realized that they were a band.  And, uh, we were, we were chatting and I, Gary, uh, Gary and I had been talking about stuff and I mentioned that we were working on this, the Tea Rooms album and he wanted to hear it. So we went outside and played.

I stuck a cassette into my car and he listened to it and then about  24 hours later I got a call from Steve Dagger, their manager, saying, would you be interested in producing their album? And, um, I couldn't believe it. I was so excited to do that. And I didn't actually think I'd get the gig because I wasn't known as a producer.

I was known as a studio musician. Um, but apparently I must have built up a reputation as a studio musician for, you know, knowing, you know, Something and um, and Crystal's agreed to it. So I did the album and I mean, I couldn't have been more lucky. Really. I've spent, I was a great band. The first single went top 10, the album went gold to second, you know, we had about five or six singles off there that charted and second album went gold.

So it was really an amazing time. 

Yeah. I've got to ask you a question. This is a personal question. So I'm going to indulge myself here now When I put on the box set the first track on the first album is japan and I listened to that And I hadn't heard that for a very long time  and I listened to it and when I finished I walked away but the song that I had in my head Was Instinction by Spandau Ballet because they are there's a huge amount of similarity there And I just wanted to know was that a coincidence or was there some kind of influence on them with your previous?

Material or did you bring something or was it just completely out of the blue? 

It's really interesting. Um, I, as far as I know, there was no influence. I certainly didn't bring that influence in there because Gary wrote that song as he wrote all the songs and, um, so I, I, I didn't really have much influence over the writing of the song.

Obviously the production side of it and the sound of the record, but I actually consciously tried not to make their records sound like our record. Sure. And, and if you, if you look at my sort of. production career and my career as an artist, I, I, I hardly ever repeated myself, really, at least not consciously.

I didn't, I never tried to make another album like a, like one I'd made before or another single like one I'd made before. Um, sometimes that hurt me professionally actually. I think, you know, a lot of producers have a really distinctive sound and I didn't want to have that. I wanted to be, I wanted to make the record for that artist.

I want to make the best record for that artist I possibly could. Um, but it's interesting because Japan was played a lot at the Blitz, so it's possible that Gary heard it. And I doubt that he would have copied it because he's an incredible musician himself. Of course, yeah. Um, but you know, you do pick up on stuff subliminally.

That definitely does happen. I know it's happened to me over the years. Yeah. So there is, it is possible. I love that track, Instinction, actually. Yes, 

yeah, me too. I mean, those first two albums were seminal in terms of That kind of New Romantic sound, which of course is a phrase that has been attributed to you, you know, coming up with the very term New Romantic.

Um, that era for you, you know, of bands like Spandau and Visage and that whole kind of blend of  music and fashion, you know, that came out of, you know, post punk. Where, you know, fashion was still a very important part of the movement. Do you have fond memories of those days? Yes. I do. 

You know, I think fashion is always a part of every movement, really, if you think about it.

I mean, you know, my sort of, I go back further than the Beatles, really, you know. I remember Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele and people like that. But it was always fashion, you know, it was rock and roll fashion, which I guess was sort of Elvis Presley and Bill Haley and people like that. But then the Beatles came along, they were obviously incredibly fashionable.

You know, even think about grunge, you know, that, that's, you know, the, you know, the flannel shirts. Punk obviously strong fashion thing, you know, but then New Romantic came along and that was a much more sort of formal kind of sense of fashion. You know, that was really where the name came from more than the sound of the music.

It was more like this is a New Romantic era. Um, thinking about the look of it and we tended to refer to ourselves more as futurist or, and that's why we came up with the term EDM because we didn't think that New Romantic really described us. But, um, We were, I've always felt like every, you're better off to be part of a movement.

You don't want to be just one band doing what you do.  Because people find it hard to identify with that. So, and there was a movement happening. You could, you could, you could feel it. It was kind of building up in the same way that punk built up. In Covent Garden too, both those movements came out of Covent Garden, which was interesting. 

Absolutely. Um, you know, looking through your production credits, um, Adam Ant, King, New Edition, Colonel Abrams, Kim Wilde, Tony Banks, Five Star, you know, this is a pretty eclectic mix of artists and bands. I just wondered what your decision process was. You know, was it always because you were looking to not repeat what you'd done before and you were looking for something new to do? 

Yeah, um, couple of things really. One, I was always looking for great material. Um, I was always looking for artists that I thought had that special thing, and I didn't want to repeat what I'd done before.  I have really eclectic taste myself, and um,  I'm always interested in the next thing. I mean, if I have one single most powerful influence in my musical life, it would be black American music, it would be the blues, um, jazz, R& B, funk, hip hop.

Those would be the things that would be the most dominant. But obviously, you know, I'm not black American. Um, so I have all the other influences as well. And I, you know, I studied classical music at Guildhall. And, you know, Landscape is an amazing band to be in as well because everybody  is really accomplished as a musician.

And everybody comes from a slightly different background. area of the business and has different tastes. And so we, you know, we sort of cross fertilized each other as it were. And, um, but yeah, I mean, as I say, I think in some ways jumping around Probably did not do me any favors career wise and in the sense that, um, you know, people can identify you as this one thing.

Um, but at the same time, it kept me happy. It made me happy and made me feel like I was, uh, doing something was very, very satisfying. Each time, you know, when I did five stuff, for instance, that was kind of a, I had an interesting conversation with Five Star actually when I first met them. They came into my house and they were very young and I said to them, who do you like?

And I was expecting them to, you know, say the Jackson Five or those kinds of things. And they said Duran Duran.  And, um, Yeah, that kind of completely changed the way I was thinking about the record and the kind of ideas I had for the record. So, um, you never know what people's influences are. I'm always surprised by people's influences.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so from your production role, um, you authored a book in 1994. Uh, called The Art of Music Production, which I believe is currently in its fourth edition. It's regarded by many as one of the bibles of music productions. I just wondered how that came about and, and how you felt about it being, you know, such a, a highly regarded tome of the industry.

Yeah, I, interestingly, I, I was off sick for about three years at one point. I had a misdiagnosed kidney problem. And I just kind of, I was just getting better. And, um, I  wanted to sort of just bone up on what was going on in the world. So I went to, I think it was Waterstones in London. I asked them what they had in terms of, uh, you know, production books.

And they didn't, there was nothing on the shelf. There was engineering books, there were a lot of good engineering books. Um, nothing on production, music production. And they looked it up in, in their database and there was nothing. So I thought, well, I'll write one.  I went home, and I just bought myself a laptop.

And, um, the internet had just turned into the World Wide Web, actually. So I wrote a one and a half page synopsis, and I sent it off to six publishers. And I think three or four of them got back to me and said yes. And I wound up going with Omnibus Press.  And the first edition was called the Art of Record Production.

That's right. 

And then the second edition they wanted me to change the name to Music Productions. They, they didn't think that records still existed. I, I argue with them sometimes. It's still a record. It doesn't matter whether it's digital or CD or what. It's a record. But they, they won the day and so I called it the Art of Music Production.

And then when I went to Oxford University Press, uh, for the fourth edition, they, uh, They wanted to maintain the art of music production, so I did. It was a great experience, actually, because, you know, when you have to sit down and write a book about it, you really think very deeply about the way you do certain things and why you do certain things.

I remember I got, I think, 25, 000 words into it, and I thought, well, I'm done.  It's gonna be a pamphlet.  And, uh, and then I got rolling, and I got to, like, I think, 250, 000 words, and they made me cut it down to 160, 000, I think, if I remember. But, you know, once you get rolling, it just blows out of you.  

And then, of course, you followed that up with, uh, 20 years later, with the history of music production.

How did that come 

about? Well, that started as a chapter at the beginning of the fourth edition of the Art of Music Production, which I call the Art of Music Production, the Theory and the Practice. And it started as a chapter, but I just, you know, in the end, the book would have been like 400 pages. So they said, why don't you spin it off as a separate book?

And I did, and that was an amazing experience, uh, to, to write because I knew a lot going back to probably the late fifties just because I'd lived it, um, but I didn't know much before that. I mean, obviously I knew about Edison and I knew about 78s and cylinders and things just by sort of osmosis over the years, but going back and doing the research on all that, And I actually go back to the Greeks.

In fact, the harmonic series that was, uh, calculated back in the time of the Greeks because that's kind of really where the, the story starts and then it kind of, the technology side of it really takes off, um, with Edison. That, and that's an interesting thing about the recorded music industry. A lot of people talk about.

Music tech, but recorded music is music tech, you 

know, it 

doesn't exist without tech. So I've never seen that big gap between music and tech. It's all tech to me. 

Yeah, so 20 years between those two publications. Uh, is there a third publication in the pipeline that we can expect maybe in 2034?  

I mean, Oxen has asked me to update the art of music production.

Music production has changed so drastically. Um, and I'm really, I'm really excited to do it. It's just, I've been buried in getting this box set out. Sure. Um, it's been hugely rewarding, but demanding process. So, yeah, I think, I think I will update it. I mean, I'm, I'm excited. Totally fascinated by the way records are made today, which is very, very different than they were made, than the way they were made when I started producing. 

But still just as valid. And by the way, I think it's about to change again. I think we're at an inflection point with AI where the whole process of recording is going to, um, be completely different. 

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because that was actually going to be my next question about your thoughts.

On AI and music, you mentioned it earlier on, um, you know, from your perspective, you know, as this eminent producer, musician, author, what do you see as the future for artificial intelligence within the music industry? I mean, for example, this very day, I got an email from a company. Who, uh, are now advertising a service where you type in a prompt that says, for example, jazzy saxophone mid paced tempo, and it will create a sample of that that is then copyright free that, you know, if you feel it's good enough, you can drop into your own record store.

production, which  it amazes me from a technology perspective, but also scares me from a musician's perspective, from a human perspective.  What are your sort of overall thoughts on AI in music tech?  

I think the potential for, you know, bad things to happen with AI are there. Obviously, there's no question about that.

At the same time, I remember in the 70s when the Musicians Union in the UK tried to ban synthesizers. 

Of course. 

Because, you know, you could create sound, in their minds, you could create sounds of a string section or a horn section, and that would put a whole bunch of musicians out of work. We made the argument to the Musicians Union that we were, we are musicians.

In fact, you know, we had horn players in our band, and in fact string players in our band,  We didn't feel like we were putting anybody out of work. What happens is it changes things.  I'm just not terrified by AI right now. I think that there are certain things I think need to happen. I mean, doing the job I do now, you know, we feel that That any training sets should be licensed if they're going to use somebody's music to train an AI on, that AI is then going to be producing music that's based on that person's music.

That person should get some sort of license fee for their, for the use of their music. But you think about like the fact that, A lot of drummers, for instance, like Billy Cobham has a sample set out there. And so anybody can kind of buy that sample set and make records with Billy Cobham's sound. And it's not, probably not putting him out of work because these, the people who are using it.

Probably wouldn't be able to afford to use them, wouldn't be able to get them in the studio to do the parts anyway. And anyway, they might not want to use the way he plays. They might just want to use the sounds that he creates and those kinds of things. So, I think it's just a new way of thinking is the way I look at it.

I mean, I'm a trained musician, all of Landscape are trained musicians. We all went to school, we studied, we read and write music and so on. But I don't think that's the only way to make music. And one of the points we made about the MCA MicroComposer was,  this was like, digital score paper. You know, normally we would write the parts out on score paper, and then we would copy out parts for each musician, and they would play the parts.

But with the MCA MicroComposer, all you had to do was program stuff into the MicroComposer, and it would play the parts for you. So we're kind of going the next step now with AI as I see it. You can describe something that you want to hear, and theoretically it'll play it for you. So  How is that any different, really?

I mean, that's how music starts. Music starts as an idea in your head. Oh, I want to do something like this. And you hear it in a sort of an amorphous way in your head, and then you, you sort of, the training comes in in trying to sort of transcribe that thing you're hearing in your head and get it down on paper or get it down onto your instrument, depending on whether you read or write or not. 

And, and so I think it's really just a progression. It's just a natural progression as I see it. 

Yeah. Do you think as an industry we've learned from the experience we had with sampling  sampling came about and it burst onto the scene and gave countless musicians a new palette of sounds, a new way of creating music.

And yet nobody thought about the legal side of things that, you know, copying people's material maybe wasn't such a great idea and that we should, you know,  Remunerating those source providers. Do you think we've learned now from that? And can you see us applying that to a I, uh, as it stands at the moment?

Or do you? Do you have a worry in the concern that that might we might go through that whole thing again? 

Well, I do worry about that. I think that we have learned To some extent, and I think we haven't learned to some extent. I think that, I think what we need is more scalable processes. I mean, right now, if you want to clear a sample for a record, Um, it's a very laborious process, and especially on the publishing side.

Sometimes, first off, identifying who the publishers are is one thing, and then trying to get them to respond to you by email. I personally think it should be a scalable process. You should be able to use, you Samples and it should all be able to be done online and, um, be digital and not take forever and not cost a fortune.

And I do think people should be compensated. I think people should be able to put a value on their music for samples. I mean, I think anybody should be able to say, well, I think if you want to sample this track, it's going to cost you this much. Uh, I think what I really worry about is the, the Napster experience, because that was the industry being asleep at the wheel.

Yeah. And, like, you know, as I always point out, pointing this out in the art of music, in the history of music production, that  MP3s were invented in 88. Um, the MP, the first MP3 players came out in 97.  There were some labels, like Sub Pop, were putting out stuff on MP3 in that period, around 97, 98, 99, something like that.

And, and, and we didn't do anything. We didn't do anything about it. And then Napster launches in 99, and we still didn't do anything about it. We waited until Apple started iTunes in 2003 or 2004, I think it was 2003. So, there was like a six year gap between when  it was viable to sell MP3s. And when we actually did start selling MP3s, and then the music industry basically gave its distribution processes over to a tech company.

Um, when we really should have,  we should have solved that problem in house. And it was really because, you know, all the infighting that goes on in the music industry, in the recorded music industry. Which I find very frustrating. I think we're getting better at that. I think, you know, I deal with  Almost all sides of the industry at this point doing this job.

And, um, certainly everybody pays lip service to not wanting to repeat that mistake with Napster. But as you know, the next time something comes around, it's always a bit different. So, we won't make the exact same mistake we made with Napster, like trying to sue people out of existence and suing grandmas and, you know, 14 year old girls.

But what we, I think there's a real risk that we will make a similar type of mistake in  not allowing the technology to, to blossom in the way that it can and should.  And then what will happen is it'll, it'll find its own way because it's, it's, you, you cannot stop technological progress. Exactly.  

Um, you mentioned the work that you do today.

What, what is the work? What does Richard James Burgess get up to in 2023?  

So I, I, I run, uh, a trade association called A2AM, the American Association of Independent Music. And we  Independent labels, independent copyright owners, so it could be an artist who owns their own music. We actually have a division called A2AM Artist, but basically people who own recorded music are members of ours, and we really are here to So make sure that the value of recorded music is as optimized as possible.

I mean, I think that it's pretty clear to all of us that it is not optimized right now. I mean, when you look at in America, for instance, in 1999, I think we hit a peak of 14. 6 billion.  That year, which today would be more like 24 billion, um, by dollar equivalency, but we're actually only at about 16 billion in the US.

So we've gone backwards. And as you know, I mean, you can get,  you know, an all you can eat, um, subscription for around 10 bucks. Whereas back in 1999, a CD in America cost somewhere between, you know, 14 and 20. We've lost control of our pricing. It's a bit worrying because not enough money flows back down to the musicians for them to stay alive and keep making music.

And I think the one thing we can never forget is that the music industry does not exist without somebody making the music. 

Yeah, 

very true. 

So I want to come back to Landscape. Could Landscape as a band exist in 2023? Or was that band banned very much of its time? 

I think it could. And I've heard some pretty interesting stuff out there.

Um, we were a DIY band. We were a self releasing band. We had our own label.  We're very much into doing everything ourselves. We built a huge following. I mean, we used to play the music machine, which is now Cocos in Camden. We used to rent our own halls, like Hampstead Town Hall and Fulham Town Hall, and we would tour all around the country.

And we pressed up our own 7 inch EPs on vinyl, and we sold them. We sold tens of thousands of those. And, uh, I don't think anything's that much different about that. I think that it's a different world, you know, with streaming. Everything's available. But, you know, you only get paid 347 a penny or whatever it is, um, for every stream.

But there's nothing preventing people from making a vinyl album or a CD or some other, you know, hardware. version of it and selling it at gigs or even, you know, limiting, just selling them as downloads even and pricing them yourselves. I mean, you can do that. Yeah. So I think that, I think that, um,  the same potential exists for a band.

We always knew we were not the mainstream. We always knew we were outside of the mainstream and we knew we'd have to go about it in a different way. The problem for us was that we became incredibly popular. And then the record labels wanted to sign us, uh, which was very tempting. And to be honest with you, if we hadn't have signed with RCA, we wouldn't have had hits like Einstein and Gogo and Norma Bates.

But at the same time, we probably would have still been playing live. Probably would have kept going for a lot longer, or maybe even still been playing together. It's hard to say. So I, I, I think that whilst everything's different, everything's kind of the same. We're in a very different place, but I think you can create your own reality if you want to.

Yeah. You mentioned that you, uh, had been in touch with all the members of the band and they were all very enthusiastic about this project. I guess the, the question that I, I have to ask, could a reunion ever happen even if, even if it was just a one off? 

I think some of us are really keen to do that, and, but unless everybody wants to do it, then we won't do it.

You know, we're really committed to that. But, you know, maybe, I think so. I mean, I, I, I would be really excited to do it. I think it would be, it would be really fun, and I think there's also potentially another chapter in Landscape's career. And we have a bunch more material that we can put out, but we also have a lot of stuff like in our heads that could be new material completely.

Excellent. Well, that's, that's very positive to hear. Landscape A Go Go, the story of Landscape 77 83 is out now on Cooking Vinyl. It is a fantastic box of five CDs and this wonderful booklet as well, with loads of great pictures and stories. Congratulations on the release. And thank you for putting this out in the world.

I think that more people need to hear this. So I hope it's very successful for you. And thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me today. 

Rob, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. for the kind words on the set, really appreciate that.  

Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes.

Before you go, make sure you visit the Sound on Sound podcast page at soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts.  Where you can explore all the other great content playing across the other channels. I'm Rob Pericelli, and this has been a failed Muzo production for Sound On Sound.