Terry Burrows

For the baseball player, see Terry Burrows (baseball).

Terence Ashley Burrows (born 18 January 1963 in Ipswich, England) is an English multi-instrumental musician and author based in London. Best known as a performer under the pseudonym Yukio Yung, Burrows is also a prolific author of books relating to music tuition, technology, business, popular psychology and history – including KISS Guide to Playing Guitar (Dorling Kindersley), Total Guitar Tutor (Barnes & Noble), and Play Electric Guitar (St Martin's Press). His books—now numbering well over fifty—have been published in fourteen different countries and translated into six different languages.[1] As a writer, his pseudonyms include Terence Ashley, Harrison Franklin, Hans-Joachim Vollmer and Yukio Yung.[2] He has also written for magazines in the UK, US, and Germany.

Burrows was born in Ipswich, Suffolk and started studying classical piano at the age of 5. (Allmusic Guide describes him as "A classically trained keyboardist with an advanced degree in computer engineering.")[3] When he was 12 he started to teach himself guitar, and as a teenager he took up bass, drums, and saxophone. The anti-establishment attitudes of punk subculture appealed to him but his musical influences included Syd Barrett, the Kinks, the Who, XTC, the Television Personalities, and the Canterbury progressive music scene. In his early twenties, Burrows started his own indie record label, Hamster Records and Tapes, releasing albums by non-commercial acts such as Loch Ness Monster, Rimarimba, R. Stevie Moore and Attrition, and his own solo material under the guise of Jung Analysts, which has been described as "post-punk industrial funk".[4] In 1986, Cordelia Records released Burrows' Tree Climbing Goats (And Other Analysing Shanties) LP, his first release under the pseudonym Yukio Yung, chosen because of his love of Japanese culture.

In 1986 Burrows met Alan Jenkins, leader of The Deep Freeze Mice, and together they formed The Chrysanthemums, with Burrows as lead singer and keyboard player until 1991. A psychedelic art pop band with a large cult following almost entirely outside of the UK, they released four albums and four EPs.[5] In 2010, German music magazine MusikExpress placed them at number 23 in their list of the most under-rated bands of all time.[6]

At this time, Burrows also recorded a series of "abstract industrial" albums with German composer Asmus Tietchens, a former collaborator with Brian Eno and Cluster. The first volume, Watching The Burning Bride formed the soundtrack to the similarly named film, by Canadian director, Mark Mushet.

In the early 1990s Burrows flirted briefly with electronic dance music releasing a pair of 12-inch singles as YooKO on the Belgian ZZB label, one of which, "Matrix", reached the Top Ten in Germany's Network Dance Chart.[7] After the Chrysanthemums disbanded, Burrows released new solo Yukio Yung material, commencing with 1993's LP Art Pop Stupidity and CD A Brainless Deconstruction of the Popular Song. Over the next four years he released a single and four EPs. In 1997, Burrows rejoined with his ex-Chrysanthemums bandmate Martin Howells to form a new version of that group, renamed with the visual pun Chrys&themums to distinguish it from the original line-up.[5]

Musically, Burrows was uncharacteristically quiet between 1998 and 2004 – a combination of ill health and an increasingly demanding publishing schedule.[7] By 2003, he'd had more than 50 titles published, and was recognised as one of the world's biggest-selling authors of music tuition titles, with sales of well over 2 million books in the US alone.[7] During this period he also embarked on an additional career as an occasional university lecturer.

In 2004, Burrows emerged again with a typically colourful selection of music projects, the most significant of which was the resumption of his collaboration with US home-recording pioneer R. Stevie Moore. The resulting album, compiled by Burrows on an Apple Macintosh computer, was released as Yung & Moore Versus The Whole Goddam Stinkin World. The sleeve amusingly depicts the duo as cartoon superheroes about to demolish the planet – a visual metaphor, perhaps, for the antipathy the world at large has shown their music over the years.[8]

2006 saw Burrows returning to the musical abstraction of his earlier career with Tonesucker, a guitar-based doom/drone project that recalls Seattle, Washington's Earth,[9] as well as performing on theremin and VCS3 at Britain's prestigious Aldeburgh Festival.[10]

Selected discography

External links

References

  1. ↑ Stevie Moore, 'Terry Burrows Recording Artisan', moorestevie.com (2006). Retrieved 25 September 2006.
  2. ↑ Terry Burrows, 'terryburrows.com', Orgone.co.uk (2006). Retrieved 25 September 2006.
  3. ↑ Retrieved March 25, 2006.
  4. ↑ Retrieved September 25 2007.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Stewart Mason, 'Yukio Yung', Allmusic (2006). Retrieved 25 September 2006.
  6. ↑ "Musikexpress.de". Musikexpress.de. 17 March 2012. Retrieved 7 November 2012.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Terry Burrows, 'terryburrows.com', Orgone.co.uk (2006)
  8. ↑ Stevie Moore, 'The Yung & Moore Show website', (2006). Retrieved 30 November 2006.
  9. ↑ Tonesucker official website, (2006). Retrieved 30 November 2006.
  10. ↑ Onoma Research, (2006). Retrieved 30 November 2006.