Chris birkett

Chris Birkett is an award winning music producer, singer/songwriter, sound engineer and performer.

Collaborations with mega-talents like Buffy Sainte-Marie, Sinead O’Connor, The Talking Heads, Dexys Midnight Runners, Bob Geldof, and Quincy Jones have sold over 100 million dollars worth of music, earning a Polaris Music Prize, a Juno Award, three Juno nominations, and three AMPEX Golden Reel Awards for excellence in the music business.

Early life
Birkett Was Born on April 14,1953 also he Loved music Music has always been his passion. Chris built his first guitar at 8 years old. By age 14, he was playing regularly in London clubs.

London was Music City in those days. Genesis, The Beatles and The Stones were local heroes. Chris travelled a musical path, and in the beginning, like many musicians, he wound up homeless, sleeping on the mean streets for a while.

Career
But that didn’t keep him from playing beautiful music on London stages for enthusiastic audiences, which often included other musicians, like Lennon and McCartney, and jamming with Eric Clapton. At 21, a band called Montana Red Dog heard of Chris’s reputation as an excellent guitarist, and invited him to join them in Germany for an eighteen month tour.

This crossroad was the beginning of a new musical odyssey, leading him into  collaborations with Memphis soul artists, Ann Peebles, Jean Knight Rufus Thomas and King Floyd.

He returned to London two years later, to join the pop group Love Affair whose song “Everlasting Love” was a hit for many months in UK charts. A couple of years later, he joined a group called Omaha Sheriff, which had just signed a major contract with Tony Visconti, Manager of Good Earth Records, and music producer for David Bowie, The Moody Blues, Marc Bolan and T-Rex..

Tony Visconti introduced Chris to the world of music production, arranging music, and sound engineering. Before long, Chris was recognized as a talented producer on his own, and the phones started ringing.

Album
In 1993, he moved to France, and opened a recording studio in Bordeaux. There he collaborated with some outstanding music world artists; and also  returned to the stage to promote his first album “Men from the Sky”. A song from that album,  “Where do we go from here” was included in the humanitarian album “One Voice, One Love” on Polygram records. In 2009, he recorded his second album “Freedom” featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tony Visconti, Marc Berthoumieux and André Ceccarelli. Over time, Chris produced four albums for Canadian artist Buffy Sainte-Marie, including her Juno award-winning album “Running for the Drum” in 2009, and ‘Power In The Blood’, which was a winner of the Polaris Music prize for best Canadian album in 2015. Buffy and Chris were two of the first international artists to use the new technique of producing music long distance, by sending digital files back and forth between France and Hawaii. In 2012, Chris moved to Canada, opening a recording studio in Toronto and producing his third album “Be Creative” featuring performances from legendary Canadian artists like Rick Emmett (Triumph) and Glenn Milchem (Blue Rodeo). Chris is continually working on new projects, like the Age of Awakening musical stage show, and the latest album from his band The Free Spirits. He’s also forever gigging. You might see him onstage some night, and he’ll treat you to a lifetime of music.