Punk Producer Iain Burgess R.I.P.

Helped marshall the vaunted Chicago sound including Naked Raygun, Big Black and Effigies.

By Fred Mills

Anybody who was on the indie scene during the ‘80s owns a record or two by hard-hitting postpunk bands from Chicago like Big Black, Naked Raygun, the Effigies and Pegboy. One man who had a major behind-the-scenes hand in records by those artists and more was UK-born Iain Burgess, whose engineering and production credits can be found over and over.

Word began getting out over the weekend that Burgess died last Thursday, Feb. 11, in France, where he'd relocated in 1993 to operate his own studio, Black Box. The cause of death, according to the Chicago Reader, was from a pulmonary embolism "a complication of the pancreatic and liver cancers he'd recently been diagnosed with."

Burgess also worked with the Didjits, Poser Children, Bloodsport, Ministry, the Defoliants, Heavy Manners, the Cows, Breaking Circus, Jawbox and others during his tenure here in the States.

Big Black/Shellac frontman and fellow studio maven Steve Albini posted a lengthy remembrance to the Electrical Audio message board on Saturday, writing, in part, "Iain did basically everything he wanted to. He made all the records, rocked all the houses, loved all the women and traveled everywhere until he settled down on a beautiful spot and made it more beautiful. He made records better than the bands on them for almost nothing. He drank wine and ate and laughed and talked loud and was loved. I suspect that Iain knew what an impact he had on everyone he worked with, and I hope he allowed himself to be content on the way out."

Read Albini's full post, as it's both revealing and remarkably sentimental in Albini's own unvarnished, straightforward manner; go here to read the entire Electrical Audio thread about Burgess, which includes a number of posts from people who obviously knew and cared about Burgess a lot.