Richard Newman......

Virtuoso Guitarist

 

Richard Newman has been involved with blues music since 1967. Richard was born in 1950 in South London, near Battersea Power Station. He then moved to Richmond, Surrey at the age of seventeen, discovering Blues though his local record shop, Potters Music.

Since then, he has written and broadcast on the subject, but is mostly known as a producer and mixer of a number of albums by many of the founding members of the London Blues scene pre-Clapton, Beck, Page etc.These artists included Geoff Bradford, Brian Knight, Cliff Aungier and John Joyce.

In the early 70's Richard put together a number of seven hour live radio shows for Capital Radio in London, featuring Alexis Corner, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Long John Baldry, Geoff Bradford, Brian Knight and John Joyce.

Shortly after this, Richard produced and mixed a series of albums for the "Black Lion" jazz label.

At the end of the 70's, Richard put together an album featuring Brian Knight that included performances by Peter Green and Charlie Watts plus saxophone from Art Theman and Dick Heckstall Smith as well as Geoff Bradford on electric lead guitar.

In recent years Richard has had a major interview with Peter Green which was published in Guitarist Magazine, and also wrote a feature on the London Blues scene.

Richard wrote and presented his own television documentary "Living With the Blues" for Channel Four.

Richard wrote the book "The Making Of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells". He also wrote, along with Dave Laing, a book about the Cambridge Folk Festival.

A recent appearance at the Banbury Blues Festival was a highlight. Richard has just released a CD called "London Life" which is available on iTunes and features songs about London, some of which were originally filmed by Thames Television in the early seventies and others were part of a demo session which Richard did for Pete Townshend of The Who, who encouraged him to write songs about Battersea, where Richard grew up.

Pete Townshend was a major influence on Richard the song writer in his mid-teens, as was Peter Green who formed Fleetwood Mac and who later became a close friend to Richard when they both lived in Richmond.