Fact #46342

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LANDSCAPE?
Interviews conducted by Johnny Black, June 2002.

Pete Thoms (trombone/synth) : Landscape originated in a band that got together around September 1973, to play compositions by John Walters. He’d met Richard and Chris at a jazz course in Barry Island in Wales, and we became the John Walters Band.

Christopher Heaton (keyboards) : I’d been using electronics since about 1972, ring modulators, early synths, in my live electronic band Accord and, in 1975, when we started Landscape, we were a jazzy, experimental, improvising band.

Pete Thoms : About September of that year, we expanded to an eight-piece and became Landscape, because we were all writing music by now, not just John. We had Laurence Juber at that point, who joined Wings. We did our first album, a cassette called Thursday The Twelfth, in 1975. But there was a core of five of us who were the most committed, so we slimmed down. Then we won the GLAA (Greater London Arts Association) Award for young jazz musicians of 76, and part of the prize was that they subsidised our gigs for about eighteen months, which was very useful. Then we got the Vitavox Live Sound award for 76, judged by John Entwistle of The Who, and that got us a great PA system, so we were off and running.

Even then, though, everybody in the band was doing sessions. Andy was doing Barbara Dickson, Richard was on The Buggles’ records, we were all keeping busy. We had residencies at various pubs, because that was the way you got your music out then, and we were getting into the start of the punk era, but we did quite well because we were quite raw and energetic, and using a lot of new technology, which made us different to most of the other jazz bands at that time.

We formed our own label, Event Horizon, and put out a couple of EPs which sold enough to subsidise us, and help us move out of the pub scene into the clubs and colleges around 78. We hired the Music Machine in Camden on a couple of occasions to put on our own gigs.

John Walters : I remember a point in 1978 when a cub reporter called Mark Ellen interviewed us for the NME and I realised that journalism was where it's at …

Pete Thoms : We were quite entrepreneurial, and we were able to go to RCA and show them that we could sell records and get gigs, which got us a deal. We recorded the first RCA album in 79, some of it at the Virgin Manor, with Greg Walsh producing, and we did the Old Grey Whistle Test.

John and I also went down to the BBC and sort of bludgeoned our way into the Tomorrow’s World offices with a Lyricon, some Linn drums and an amplifier and demonstrated what we could do in their offices, which got us a slot on there, which enabled us to plug a number off the first RCA album.

That album didn’t sell very well, so RCA said to us, ‘Yes, very nice lads, but basically we want to sell records and you’re going to have to put vocals on your albums. So some of us took singing lessons, and we did a test track with vocals, using a good producer, Colin Thurston, who’d worked with Bowie, but the technology we were using was so advanced that it became obvious that we knew more about how it should sound than he did.

So we went back to RCA and told them we wanted to produce the next album ourselves. So we did the Tearooms album ourselves. By this time, around 1980, we’d stopped touring, because the equipment was so unstable in those days that we couldn’t do the things we were doing in the studio on a live stage.

Einstein A Go-Go was the first single off that album, and it became a hit.

Christopher Heaton : Having hits was never the main concern of anybody in Landscape. It was lovely to have the hit, but Einstein was very left-field in terms of our music. We never saw it as a permanent direction.

Richard James Burgess (vocals) : We never expected to have the level of commercial success with Landscape that we did have. We pretty much functioned outside the system so having Einstein as a big hit in many parts of the world was a major plus as far as I was concerned.

Pete Thoms : On Einstein, Richard sings the verses, John sings the bridge and I sing the Einstein A Go-Gos – we all had a go. Richard had the closest to a lead vocal quality kind of voice so that’s how we proceeded.

Richard James Burgess : Although we didn’t have the hit until 1981, we'd played live since 1973 and I think that was the glue that held us together.

Pete Thoms : At that point, we started to think about touring again but by then, Richard was getting busy as a producer. He’d met up with the Blitz crowd and got the gig as Spandau’s producer, which delayed things a bit.

Richard James Burgess : I think the fact that I produced the Spandau albums and did the computer programming on the Visage album just before Einstein came out really helped me to realise that producing was a better fit for me than being a front person in a band.

Pete Thoms : I was also in a Latin band, at the same time, called the Spiteri Brothers, so I’d sometimes finish a gig with Landscape at Dingwalls, then rush off to Ronnie Scott’s and play with them.

I think it’s also fair to say that RCA didn’t really know what to do with us, because we weren’t young teen fodder types, it was a bit of a freak hit.

Richard James Burgess : We made a very expensive video for the next single, Norman Bates, with Pamela Stephenson in the Janet Leigh a la Psycho role. The week of release we had a whole bunch of  TV shows lined up and someone at the label forgot to clear the video with the MU. The MU wouldn't budge on the issue although we were members and it was hurting us more than the label. By the time the video was cleared the single was over. Interestingly the video was shown for years on MTV in the US but the label didn't make the album available there. Their response at the time was that MTV doesn't have any impact on sales.

Christopher Heaton : Norman Bates only scraped into the Top 40. Having had the hit with Einstein, we felt we should do more of the same but we found that difficult because, having stopped playing together live we were no longer so musically in tune with each other. By the end of 81, I’d been producing Second Image and by the time we got back together for the second RCA album, Manhattan Boogie Woogie, we were already moving apart.

Pete Thoms : In 1983, on Manhattan Boogie Woogie, we tried to re-create the more commercial aspects of what we were doing, it was all vocals, but by then there was a new American MD at RCA who didn’t like us, and we didn’t like him either.

Richard James Burgess : We had a single that was climbing the charts but the MD of the label (who loved the band) was moved to the NY office. The incoming MD hated the single and pulled the promotion off of it.

Pete Thoms : I’d gone off touring with Marvin Gaye, the others were doing sessions and production work. So, when that third album didn’t happen we just felt it was time to call it a day.

Richard James Burgess : Pete and Chris left and we carried on as a three piece for a while. We were all pretty busy so we probably just drifted apart.

Christopher Heaton : I left after Manhattan Boogie Woogie which I felt was already moving away from my interests. We’d started doing vocals and I wasn’t comfortable with that.

John Walters (programming/synths) : We split with Chris and Peter after our RCA deal ran out in mid-1982 …

Pete Thoms : The next thing was that John and Richard went back to RCA and got a new deal, but I was already in America working with the Boomtown Rats. They did an album, Landscape 3, with a bit of help from Andy, and they bought the rights to use the name off the rest of us.

John Walters : Andy, Richard and I re-signed to RCA very briefly and recorded five tracks as Landscape III (1983). It wasn't really Landscape . . . but we made a few good tracks and got to hire Ruby Turner as a backing singer!

Richard James Burgess : We told RCA we wanted out and they let us out of the deal. Right after that I moved to NYC and signed a solo deal with Capitol. There was no point at which we said that's it.

We didn't ever have a consistent manager for any period of time and that may have been a factor. A lot of it was just the luck of the draw in my opinion.

John Walters : I suppose all creative partnerships contain the seeds of their own destruction, but Landscape never officially broke up . . . we certainly never issued a press release about it. I never actually left the band.

Shortly after leaving RCA, we recouped our publishing advance and left the publishing company, which means that we now own all our copyrights as writers . . . looking back, it was the right moment to move on to something else.

Richard James Burgess : After the band ended, I produced the Adam Ant album Strip in Sweden, Europe., moved to NYC, produced the Colonel Abrams album with Trapped and I'm Not Gonna Let, New Edition, Living In A Box, Five Star and a lot of other stuff. I really spent a lot of time in the studio through the eighties and early nineties.

I worked with some great artists such as King, Imagination, Kim Wilde, Princess, Thomas Dolby, Tony Banks (Genesis), Fish (Marillion), Melba Moore, America, Errol Brown, When In Rome, Virginia Astley, Kate Bush, Lou Reed, Yossou N'Dour, Shriekback, Praise.

Produced some music for TV shows and films such as About Last Night, 9 1/2 Hours. Published a book on Omnibus Press called The Art of Record Production which I recently updated for them and they reissued it as The Art of Music Production. Lectured at UCLA (California), NYU (NYC), MTSU (Tennessee), LIPA (Liverpool). I'm very happy that the early Spandau albums I produced have been successful again as greatest hits albums.
For a long time I lived between NYC, Los Angeles and London. Once my kids hit school age I wanted to stay put more and DC made sense for what I was up to at the time. It's a very central place to move around from.

I've had a management company, independent label and booking agency for the
past few years. I've managed a few major label artists, in particular Jimmie's Chicken Shack who've had a couple of hits in the USA. Currently I am the Director of Marketing at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings which is the label of the Smithsonian Institution. We have the original recording of This Land is Your Land by Woody Guthrie as well as many other great artists such as Leadbelly, Honey Boy Edwards and a huge world music collection. It's literally a museum of sound so it's a pretty interesting situation for me.

John Walters was just out here and stayed with me. I used to run into Chris in the supermarket in London and my son went to music lessons at Guildhall with Andy's daughter for a while. I saw Pete a couple of times just before I left London the last time. From my point of view the whole experience of Landscape was a good one. I have very fond memories of the live shows before the commercial success. They were extremely exhilarating. You don't get to play with musicians of that calibre many times in life. I'm happy that everyone has gone on to do well.

Pete Thoms : The Rats was my regular job for the three years after Landscape ended, certainly up until Live Aid and Self Aid, which led to me doing a lot of those big charity shows. I played on some Tom Dolby things like Hyperactive and I Scare Myself,

I do a lot of stuff on the gospel scene. As a result of playing on the Inspirational Choir album, I started working with them on the Rock Gospel Show on the BBC, and I stayed with that show for about five years doing arrangements, playing, fixing musicians and so on, and then moved on to be the MD for the band on Channel 4’s People Get Ready show, right up til the early 90s. I still do the occasional Songs Of Praise because some of the Channel Four people moved on to Songs Of Praise. And I have a gospel library CD to do later this year.

I played in the house band on the Jonathan Ross Show, backing The Temptations, Tom Jones and great people like that. I spent a lot of time in Japan with a band called Dreams Come True who are huge out there, and I toured America with them as well. They’d come over here and record in Air and Abbey Road, so I’m on about eight of their albums.

I’ve just been working on the new Aswad album, and I was out in Sri Lanka with Boney-M last month. I also write songs with Phil Smith who was the sax player in Haircut 100, and he and I are doing a piece of tv music right now. We did a smooth jazz album recently which will be out later this year.

I also do quite a few tv adverts. I’m the trombone player on the Lurpak butter ad, and I was re-making Mambo No5 for a DFS ad a couple of weeks back.

I got married just as the band split up, nineteen years ago. We have two teenage daughters and we live in Clapham.

Christopher Heaton : I was busy as a producer right into the start of the 90s, working with Rod Temperton, Gwen Dickey, Diamondhead and others, and then I was asked to do some classical productions which I enjoyed so much that I’ve never stopped. I’ve also found time to write a book, Changing Platforms, about the contemporary music scene, did some research work for Quincy Jones and, in 2000 I joined the MCPS (Mechanical Copyright Protection Society) doing classical and jazz music research.

John Walters (programming/synths) : After we left RCA I immediately started working with Swans Way, producing and arranging strings for tracks such as Soul Train, which was a top 20 hit in 1984 . . . I also wrote a bunch of songs with Richard, which came out on his Capitol solo album in 1985. RJB and I ran a production company called Heisenberg for a while, working with Barbie Wilde from Shock. I worked as a record producer for the rest of the 1980s (Kissing The Pink, Theresa Russell, Rent Party, Twelfth Night), and became a journalist in the 1990s.

In 1988 I produced the album Big Music by the Mike Gibbs Orchestra (Virgin/ACT) Mike was a boyhood hero - this was a dream album - Bitches Brew meets Out Of The Cool.
And I formed the quartet Zyklus with Ian Carr, Neil Ardley and Warren Greveson - from 1987 to 1997 we played occasional gigs and made an album - Virtual Realities (AMP) 1991. (Live, asynchronous sequenced and sampled beats and electronics with improvisation, and a version of Terry Riley's In C.)

I currently have three jobs! In the late 1980s I dreamed up Unknown Public (UP) with Laurence Aston. UP launched late 1992 and won a 1995 Prudential Award for the Arts (Music). I joined Eye (the international review of graphic design) as managing editor in 1997, and was appointed editor in chief in 1999. I've always written about music and visual culture, with stuff published in Sound International, the TLS, The Wire, Jazzwise, Eye, Frieze and the Independent (1998-2000), etc. I've written a regular column (On The Edge) and live reviews (mainly jazz, classical and world music) for The Guardian since June (2000). The next issue of Unknown Public, Bloody Amateurs (UP14) comes out this summer.

Chris Heaton lives nearby. He edited, compiled and wrote most of Changing Platforms, Unknown Public no. 13 (2001). He's a contemporary music expert, and a great writer . . . he's helped out on previous issues of UP, too, and we featured a great track by him (Ornettte with Peanuts) on UP04. I saw RJB and his family in Washington in March (I was there covering the AIGA conference for Eye) and we keep in touch by email. With Andy and Peter it's Christmas cards, phone calls and emails . . . Guardian readers may have spotted my deliberate bias towards trombonists and fretless bass players.

I learnt a huge amount from the other four: we were together for the best part of a decade, and on the road pretty solidly for half that time – a fantastic band to play with and write for . . .

I’ve been happily married since 1978 to Clare Walters, a children's writer and editor. We have two daughters and live in Camberwell, London, England, UK, Europe.

Andy Pask (bass) : I’m now doing what I always intended to do when I left music college in the 70s - Einstein A Go-Go was an aberration as far as our music was concerned. I split my time between composing and playing. I write a lot of library music CDs in various styles, but my best-known composition is the theme for the tv series The Bill, which I co-wrote with Charlie Morgan. Most of my bass-playing is media-related. I was in the house band on the Wogan tv show from 1987 until 1991, I did Generation Game, all the Barrymore shows, Stars In Their Eyes and, more recently, Pop Idol. You’ll also hear me on lots of film soundtracks, from The Full Monty to Gosford Park. I’m just back from three weeks in Bermuda, backing Des O’Connor. I’m just doing my job, and I love it.