Russell Emanuel
| Russell Emanuel | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | London, England |
| Residence | Los Angeles, CA |
| Citizenship | English |
| Occupation | CEO, Extreme Music |
| Years active | 1980 - present |
| Website | extrememusic |
Russell Emanuel is a British entrepreneur, musician, and producer. He is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Extreme Music, which creates and licenses music for use in television, film, advertising, and online media, and the president and CEO of Bleeding Fingers Custom Music Shop, a scoring, composition,and music production company co-founded with Hans Zimmer and Steve Kofsky.
Emanuel was born in London to Maureen Emanuel and Edward Potok, a Polish survivor of World War II. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in North London, and began to play the guitar when he was a child. As a teenager, Emanuel played in bands and bought his first electric guitar with money earned from a paper route. He left high school at 15 and remained in London, where he became involved in the English punk scene of the late 1970s.
After leaving secondary school, Emanuel got a job in the mailroom at the BBC. Later, he was a studio assistant at MCA Music Publishing as well as a tape operator and eventually a sound engineer at studios including Abbey Road. During the same time period, he played bass in a punk band, Class Ties, who released an album on EMI in 1981. In the mid-80s, he began to manage bands including The Jam and Stiff Little Fingers, with whom he co-wrote several songs, produced and engineered.
Emanuel was introduced to production music when he was hired by Bruton Music, a production music library. Although he worked in the mailroom, he and a friend, Warren Bennett, were asked to record an album for the library. Bennett's father, Brian Bennett who had played with The Shadows and Cliff Richard, served as the album's producer. Commenting on the aesthetic of production music of the time, Emanuel said: "Bruton was one of the first production music libraries, and it was all on vinyl back then, and with a few exceptions tended to be full of people knocking out soundalikes of current hits. They'd change the chord structure round a bit and that would be it." Over the next fifteen years, Emanuel and Bennett received royalty payments for the Bruton soundalike album.
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