A&R Stories : China Burton

About time I met with China Burton to discuss working together

The second release I ever worked on was a cover of China Burton’s underground disco classic You Don’t Care About Our Love.

China Burton, songwriter and artist, best known for cowriting (with Nick Straker) Do You Want It Right Now for singer Siedah Garrett from the 1985 film Fast Forward. Fast forward a decade and Do You Want It Right Now is covered, on both sides of the Atlantic, by both Degrees In Motion and Taylor Dane, resulting in minor hits. Skipping on another decade, and the vocal is sampled, again on both sides of the Atlantic, by Gat Decor first then Armand Van Helden, ramping up Burton’s songwriting credibility.

Fast forward another few years and I’m meeting with China Burton to discuss working together, licensing the master and publishing of You Don’t Care About Our Love. It turns out the master is still owned by original releasing label Logo Records but the publishing is open to discussion. Based on his songwriter status Burton was rightly expecting a sizeable advance. Based on the running of a small one person label, with a day job of working in a record store, offering sizeable advances were out of the question. We discussed, agreed more favourable terms, on the publishing, for a small indie label, and off I went to research and clear the master.

It took several months but I finally deduced Logo was acquired by Sanctuary Music and in turn Sanctuary became part of a bigger company. I approached the bigger company and again after several months of endeavours it was clear they were unaware of their ownership of the master recording in question. Being a big company with massive overheads they have already established, deals in place for licensing and these weren’t aligned with the values of small speculative releases on emerging independent labels. Having run a label for many years I now understand this to be absolutely fair - if you are investing heavily into music then you are doing so to make a return.

I proceeded to just release the cover version. And that’s another story for another day !