Burgess at the Simmons kit: “It became this gigantic thing – they were everywhere”
While still in Landscape, Richard played drums on the Buggles’ The Age Of Plastic, Trevor Horn’s 1980 concept album for the modern age, itself inspired by Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine. “Trevor and Geoff wanted everything to sound like a machine. That’s why they hired me,” he explains. “They used to come to our gigs and we had a song called Mechanical Bride where I’d play the drums to sound like a machine – I had a Moog synth drum hooked up and everything. They wanted everything perfect… every hi-hat note had to be exactly the same level as the one before. But at the end of it I thought, this is crazy. It’s the kind of thing that a machine could do very easily, but it’s very difficult for a human.”
Around this time Richard was co-developing the first operational electronic drumkit, the Simmons SDS-V. This futuristic kit, featuring black hexagonal drum pads (the photo on right shows the ‘batwing’ shaped prototype) has become a symbol of the 80s and has been used by artists as diverse as Phil Collins, Pink Floyd, LCD Soundsystem, Prince, Van Halen and The Bee Gees. “It became this gigantic thing – they were everywhere,” says Richard. “It was the house drum set on Top Of The Pops!” Originally designed to be played in the traditional sense (rather than programmed), Richard soon realised he could rig it up to sequencers and use its sounds to create the robotic drums that feature on Tea-Rooms.