Lunick Bourgess, founder of fledgling publishing company Umbrella Songs, admits that breaking into the music business was tough. He also acknowledges that, in his case, when it comes to ‘tough’, there are levels.
He arrived in the UK in the late 1990s, fleeing with his family from war in the Republic of Congo. He spoke only French and “had never been so cold in my life”.
Thankfully, he was a quick learner and savvy adapter. Over the next few years, he built the skills, mindset and network that helped him become an A&R Manager at Virgin EMI, where he would sign artists such as MoStack, Tion Wayne, Hardy Caprio and Russ Millions – all of whom went on to sell Platinum records and play their part in a boom time for Black British music.
The longing for chart success and cultural impact, however, first took hold back in Brazzaville.
“Me and my mom were walking in the market one day and I saw a cassette with a picture of this little kid with a Rottweiler and a massive jersey. I didn’t even know who he was, but I said to my mom, ‘This is what I want to do’. I later found out it was Beware Of The Dog by Lil’ Bow Wow – and I still have that cassette to this day.”
Soon, of course, shopping trips and daydreams were shattered by The Second DR Congo War. “We had to basically flee the country. Me and my brother moved to Ivory Coast with our auntie, because she was working for the United Nations at
that time.
“My mom had left in 1998 to try to get somewhere that would be safe for us. In the end, we went to the British Embassy in DRC and my mom explained we were seeking asylum.
“I’ll never forget the day we were supposed to have an interview with the ambassador. The security guard was not letting us in; he was telling us we didn’t have a scheduled meeting.
“Luckily, the ambassador himself just happened to walk past and ask what was going on. My mom explained the situation and he ended up giving us indefinite leave to remain. So we were able to come to England, and that was the moment that changed our lives.”
Asked how that experience affected and shaped him, Bourgess reflects: “It definitely took a toll on my mental health. I’ve seen people get killed in front of my eyes. And for a young kid to go through that, for anyone to go through that… it’s just very vivid. I can still picture it to this day.
“But, whilst it was a very traumatizing experience, I think it also shaped me in the sense of giving me a drive that I feel a lot of people don’t have. It just gave me a hunger to succeed in life, for sure.”
“It was traumatizing, but it also gave a drive that a lot of people don’t have.”
Lunick Bourgess
Settled in London in the early 2000s, he became part of the original grime explosion, making music with Chipmunk and recording as Bad News (“a terrible name, but I thought it was cool back then – thankfully you won’t find anything online”).
He says: “What was good about those times is, I learned about everything. I would design my own covers, I would get them printed, I’d buy the cassettes and CDs and make copies. And ultimately I’d be out there trying to sell them, generating word of mouth, trying to hustle.
“It also taught me a lot about A&R, even though I didn’t actually know that’s what I was doing. When I was putting together a mixtape, I needed to find producers, I needed to find some songs about girls, or some hype songs, I needed to pull the whole project together. I would watch how other people did it and then just go out and do it myself.”
Whilst doing a Business Studies course at university, he would constantly apply for internships at labels, “but I would never get to even interview stage. I knew that I had the skills to make things happen, and I was like, ‘How come I’m being bypassed
and overlooked?’”
At the same time, traumatic events would again overshadow dreams of the big time. “Going into the third year of uni was probably the worst time of my life. My stepdad passed away, and he was a very influential person in my life. That affected me a lot.
“Also that year, I got stabbed, and nearly died. It was a really difficult time. But I asked myself, ‘What would he want me to do?’ And that was the day I decided there was no way I wasn’t going to get into the music business. It was already written.”
With new determination, and tired of “not being allowed in via traditional routes”, he started managing an artist called Kadiata, which put him on the radar of up-and-coming A&Rs – which is exactly what Bourgess wanted to be himself.
“I developed some good relationships and I became a good source of information for them. I would send them stuff and I could tell they were thinking, ‘Lunick’s always on things’.
“I was introduced to a young A&R called Pete Simmons [now Head of A&R at UMPG UK] who liked what I was about and through him I met Nick Burgess – who ironically enough had originally signed Chip! I also met Ben Mortimer, so I was sending Polydor things as well. It was starting to happen, but I just wasn’t landing the job; it was very frustrating for me.”
Eventually he got a full-time gig as a scout at First Access. He was through the door. But then hesitated at the threshold.
“I figured, if I tell these other labels that I’ve been working with that I’m going somewhere else, might that entice them a bit more? So I told Nick. And I told Ben. Pretty soon I had three offers on the table! And then Warner and Roc Nation popped up and I had five!
“Now I was in the driving seat. Everyone’s telling me why we should work together, all that stuff. I was like, ‘OK, this is fun [laughs]’.
“In the end, I’d decided to go to Polydor. Then Nick Burgess calls: ‘Lunick, where are you?’ I told him I was in Camden and he said for me to wait there. Nick drives to Camden, and says, ‘What do you want? What’s it going to take for you to come to Virgin? Do you want more money?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t’ – because I didn’t. But him coming there and saying that did make me decide I should go to Virgin.”
It was a short and worthwhile journey for Burgess, and the beginning of a new one for Bourgess…
What did you learn during your time at Virgin?
At Virgin, I felt like the stars started to align. I think I came in at the right time, around 2016. Black music was starting to explode, especially in the Afro Beats and Afro Swing area.
And I was just trying to sign things. The first artist I came across was MoStack (pictured inset), who had a record called Liar Liar that was ringing off in the streets.
Now, obviously, I’m a big hip-hop fan, so I’d known about MoStack from secondary school days, but he was new to the labels. I took it to Glyn [Aikins], he agreed we should go for it and we got the deal done. But it was a process, you know, and I was learning. It took about six months, which was a surprise to me at the time.
I took Glyn and Ted [Cockle] to a MoStack show at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. I remember seeing Ted’s reaction when he saw the crowd responding to Mo – and the following day all he said was, ‘We need to get this done’.
Virgin – Universal as a whole – taught me a lot, as an executive and as an A&R. I learned from Glyn, from Nick Burgess, and from Ted as well. He’s a great leader. He allowed us to make mistakes. He allowed us to go for things that we really wanted to go for, as long as we gave him proper context as regards to why we were doing it. He allowed me to make mistakes and he allowed me to fly.
You went from A&R Scout to A&R Manager, tell us about some of the big successes on that journey.
After MoStack, I signed artists like Tion Wayne, Hardy Caprio, Russ Millions (pictured inset), all of whom became multi-Platinum selling artists consecutively. It was a run that was so impressive. I couldn’t even believe it myself. It felt like everything I was touching was turning to gold. We were winning so many deals and we had so much confidence.
I introduced Russ to Tion Wayne, they went into the studio, and the first record they did together was Keisha & Becky, which was obviously monumental: the first drill Top 10 record, the first drill Platinum record in the UK. That was a very proud moment for me.
And that all led to me winning the Trailblazer award at the A&R Awards [now the Music Business UK Awards] in 2016, which was phenomenal. It was so great to be recognised by my peers for doing something that I loved.
You talked about Ted a little while ago, who else helped and inspired you around that time? Who were the people you could go to for advice?
Definitely Nick Burgess. I would always love to get his gauge on things, especially on the record-making side of things, he’s really on top of the intricacies of the process.
With Glyn, he taught me a lot about the difference between scouting and actually putting records together. And just how to navigate in the industry. I would also say Riki Bleau [Co-President, Since ‘93] as well, he’s someone that I looked to for advice.
But also my peers, you know. We were all coming up together, a lot of young Black executives, and we felt like we were a group. We would share ideas about how we can all have more wins, not just individually.
When your career hit this new high, you’d just got that award, where did you want to go from there?
I wanted to be as senior as possible at Virgin. I’m very ambitious, I wanted to progress. I also respect the hierarchy: I came in as a scout, I’d been promoted to A&R Manager. I wanted to become Senior A&R Manager, then eventually, hopefully, A&R Director. But, as you know, in music, you’re not just randomly given a promotion. Something normally happens for that promotion to come along, so I was trying to seize moments.
I like to think that I’m a student of the game. I like to learn, and I want to learn from the best. I also want to pay my dues. But at the same time I’ve wanted to have my own record label since forever.
In fact, you ended up leaving Virgin, how did that come about?
Glyn had gone to Sony, so there was a space. MoStack’s album had gone to No. 3, everyone was calling, left, right and centre. I was saying that I wanted to be made senior, but they felt like I maybe wasn’t ready for that.
I had been offered a label situation with Sony, with Shane [Derozario], who’s MoStack’s manager, and Daniel [Owusu], who was his publisher.
It brought me back to a childhood moment, to where I always wanted to have a label. And this was an opportunity to do that. So I basically said, ‘If you make me senior, I’ll stay. But if not, then I’m gonna have to explore other options.’ And I ended up exploring other options.
Tell us about that journey, starting Dream Life, and how that panned out for you.
Me, Dan and Shane had an idea of coming together and starting a label. The Black music scene was definitely moving. Dan had signed AJ Tracey, so he was having a run as well. Shane was managing MoStack and K-Trap, so he was having a moment. It felt like this was the time to come together and work as a team.
I remember speaking with [Chairman and CEO of Sony Music UK] Jason Iley, pitching him the idea, and he loved it; he wanted to make it happen.
We signed a deal – and then the pandemic happens. The first day Dream Life started was in April 2020, and we weren’t allowed to meet artists for pretty much a year.
It was difficult, because this is a people business, you want to get a real feel for artists as people. And we didn’t have the opportunity to really do that in our first year.
Second year, things started to ease up a bit and we moved into the Sony building. That was an adjustment for us – for me, anyways. Coming from the Universal system, learning how the Sony system works, trying to get our hands dirty and get things signed.
We were trying to take the whole development approach, but we quickly realised that development at a major label is a very, very difficult thing to achieve; you don’t really have that much time to make things happen.
We had these artists that we signed, like Eric IV, who we launched the label with. And there was an artist called LZee that I was developing and managing. But we knew we probably needed someone with a bigger profile to hit the ground running.
Russ [Millions] had just delivered Body [No. 1, with Tion Wayne] for Atlantic, but he was a free agent. I brought it to Jason and we ended up doing a deal with Since ’93. I felt like that was the artist we needed to put us in the game.
Dan had found a super-talented singer and songwriter called Pip Millett, who was making her own waves. So, all of a sudden, the roster started to have a bit of momentum and a bit of profile. We felt we had a shot at delivering.
But then we put out records that weren’t charting as high as we had hoped – and working at a major label, that puts pressure on.
I was getting very stressed out, because we wanted to make it work. We were on a three-year deal and there was this pressure to actually turn something over. It was a good experience, but it was a massive learning curve.
In the end, that situation finished a couple of years ago. Like I say, it was stressful at times, for sure, but it was enjoyable as well.
What were the main lessons that whole experience taught you?
Trust your instincts. We had a chance to sign Central Cee, Day In The Life. I flagged that up pretty early on. I was saying, ‘I feel like this is going to work’.
But when you’re working as a team, it’s a collective decision and we just decided not to do it.
Looking at Central Cee right now, I’m like, yeah, I feel like my instincts were not wrong. And there were a few other things as well.
So I’ve learned to trust myself a lot more. Because, sometimes, you want to do something, but you want someone that you respect to also see your vision, to see what you’re seeing. And when they don’t, it can discourage you. But just trust your instincts more and take more risks.
How did you get into publishing?
I’ve always been a records man. I never really knew anything about publishing. But then I was talking to Teldrick [Smith], who was managing Yung Bleu at the time, and he made me understand it in a way that I’d never really taken in before. He said it’s kind of like building a house, you know, it’s a long-term investment, it’s over time.
That was a big moment for me. I had never worked for a publishing company, but I could see that the Black music space was experiencing a decline.
When I came in, there was a scene, and I think for an ecosystem to work there has to be a scene.
I felt I needed to have something else for myself, something different, and that’s essentially what made me start Umbrella Songs Publishing.
Tell us the ethos behind Umbrella.
The idea behind Umbrella is to bridge the gap between writers’ and producers’ understanding of what publishing is and the creative aspect of things.
I’ve always managed producers, and they’ll all know about production fees, royalties, they’ll sign up to PRS etc. but that was it. They didn’t know about the publishing share and all of these other things.
I felt like there was a demand, because there were a lot of these producers having big records who were only collecting on their writer’s share. So it’s about helping them understand that there’s something out there that’s mutually beneficial.
Also, because I’ve worked at a label with artists, I always want to do things that are complementary. So I had a producer I was managing called JT. I put him in with Hardy, and the first record that they did was Guten Tag, which became a Platinum record. I got a management fee for that, which I had to split three ways. And I was like, ‘If I had published this guy…’
You know, in the UK, people rarely do contracts with management. It’s normally just a verbal agreement and then let’s roll until the wheels fall off; you have no protection.
Whereas if you publish somebody, even if you don’t work with that person anymore, you’re protected for the work that you’ve done.
I started by signing producers. I was working on a Russ mixtape – and Russ streams like crazy – so I was signing the producers we were working with. We got a share of Reggae & Calypso through that. And then I signed a writer called Crooza and that got us a share of Baby by Aitch, which was a massive record. That was all within two months.
Funnily enough, Sony was trying to sign the same writer, but they approached him two days after I’d done the deal. There is an A&R there called Felix [Canetty-Clarke] who was like, ‘This is interesting, what else do you have in your catalogue?’ I explained what I was doing and he said we should do something together.
So I did an admin deal with them. Again, I wasn’t getting any funding with my deals, because they were basically telling me, ‘You had all of this success on records, but publishing is different, yada yada…’
For me signing is signing and I can do that all day, you know, doesn’t matter to me. So, fine, I’ll prove myself again.
It was sort of strange, I felt like, even though I’ve had that success, I had to restart again in this new world.
Anyway, that’s what I did, I was signing things, getting some good catalogue. But I really wanted a proper situation where I can actually fund stuff, because I’m coming across a lot of things that I know should be signed properly, but I was limited.
Then I came across a kid called Olmo [Zucca] who had a share of Water by Tyla which at the time had about seven million streams.
It happened because I’m developing this young artist called Joey, and I was trying to find a sound that works in the UK from a female perspective. A lot of singers want to do R&B, and as you know, it’s very hard to break through in that genre from the UK.
Our idea was to mix R&B melodies, with Afrobeats drums, give it a bit of balance. We’re finding different references, and Joey, because she’s 19, finds something on TikTok and sends it to me – and that was Water.
She’s right, it’s a great song. So I start analysing the credits and I see five writers completely empty, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God…’
I emailed [President & Co-MD Sony Music Publishing UK] David Ventura saying we should do this deal, he agreed, so we went for it. In the end we managed to get a share of it and the song just exploded – Ivor Novello-nominated, Grammy-winning, a billion streams, I couldn’t believe it.
Is that thrill of discovery the thing that drives you?
100%. I think with this stuff, you have to have vision. I just knew this was a great song, and I had to fight hard to get it. It was months and months.
“I had nightmares about having to say, ‘This was the song I could have signed.”
All the time I was having nightmares about having to say, ‘This was the song I could have signed and we didn’t quite get it’. No, that’s not going to happen.
So, you’re now very successfully doing your own thing, but do you ever cast an envious glance over at the big chairs at the record labels or publishers?
When the Dream Life thing happened, when we all left – when we got sacked! – I was very, very depressed. I didn’t think it at the time, but I was.
I was coming from all of this success, and I had thought it was only a matter of time until I landed something. But months go by and you’re still not landing anything. It’s frustrating, you know. The industry’s changing, younger guys are coming through, they’re having their moments…
But, after all the ups and downs, the great thing now is that when I sign something, I know that I own it. I’m in charge of my
own fate.
When I look back at myself as a kid, I always wanted to have my own thing. I might have been forced into it quicker than I anticipated, but it’s a very rewarding feeling.
Listen, if there was ever a situation where working with a major made sense again, I wouldn’t be against it. But I’m enjoying building catalogue that we own and we’re in charge of the creative decisions, rather than going back and forth and having to deal with a lot of politics.
Why do you think it hasn’t worked out in the major label system so far?
Do you know what, I’m a very passionate person. And sometimes my passion can be misconstrued.
I’m very for my artists, I’ll fight hard in the building for my artists and stuff like that. I’m a very expressive and animated person, and, like I say, maybe that can be misconstrued. I don’t know – if you find out, let me know!
If you were giving advice to your young self, what would you say?
Stay consistent, stay motivated and believe in your vision. Because not everyone’s going to see what you see, and that’s what makes a journey special, because it’s your job to show people what you can see, and that normally comes in the form of success.
Also, don’t be afraid to make mistakes; it’s all part of the journey.
People say play the game at the labels, the politics and stuff. I found that a bit hard. I’m a kid that’s come from Congo, that survived civil war, who’s come into the system.
No one in my family’s ever worked in music, and you’re navigating with individuals who maybe their parents worked in music, or had some understanding of the business.
Sometimes it’s that cultural difference, you know. So maybe I should have been more interactive with other departments – because A&Rs can be divas sometimes!
What are your remaining ambitions in this business?
It’s funny, because I had my five goals: work at Universal; have my own label with a major; go Platinum in the US; win a Grammy; split my time and success between the UK and the US. I’ve done four and I’ve got the fifth to do. So that’s what drives me.
I look at what Danny D and Tim Blacksmith have done – and what you’ve done Adrian! The stuff that you guys have done is monumental.
I can talk about my success, but I can’t imagine selling millions of albums. You know that feeling; I’ve still got a lot more to achieve. I still want that career-defining act on an international level.
When you look back at that French-speaking little boy that stepped off the plane into cold weather, how do you think you’ve done?
I think I passed the test. Let me just tell you, one time, my mom called me when she was in the Congo and she was like, ‘They’re playing the Tyla song’! That was better than anything else I’ve heard from anyone, that was special.
This interview is taken from a brilliant podcast series, Did Ya Know?, which tells the often unheard stories of key figures in the British music industry, focusing initially on pioneering executives of colour. The team behind the pod includes Stellar Songs co-founder Danny D and Decisive Management co-founder Adrian Sykes. Music Business Worldwide is proud to be partners and supporters of Did Ya Know? You can listen to it wherever you find your favourite podcasts.Music Business Worldwide