Rick Springfield in Concert Through the Years: Photo Gallery

Rick Springfield’s been playing gig after gig for decades and while it’s unlikely that you’ll ever find him on a critic’s rundown of best concert performers, the reality is that he deserves a slot on that list.

Burning Film: Rick Springfield Through the Lens, is a new book that takes visual stock of the Aussie ’80s rocker’s concert adventures of the past 20 years. All of the shots were taken by photographer Jay Gilbert, who first got to know the singer-songwriter during his time working at Universal Music, Springfield’s label at the time. But he’d been a fan long before that.

“I’m a big power pop guy, you know, I grew up on the Beatles,  Badfinger, Jellyfish [as well as artists like] Will Owsley, just anything that has melody,” he remembers during a conversation with the UCR Podcast. “My favorite band growing up was Cheap Trick. They were heavy, yet they were super melodic. And Rick, you know, those albums were like that for me. I remember I worked in record stores, first at an indie, then I worked at Tower Records. So I was always listening to all these records that came in. So I was working in a record store when Working Class Dog came in, I remember putting it on and going,  ‘Wow, these are really good musicians.’ Number one, the backing vocals for Rick, were just stellar and I love the the songs. Then he [released] Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet and I was hooked.”

READ MORE: How Rick Springfield Broke Through With ‘Working Class Dog’

As Springfield prepared his recent collection, Big Hits: Rick Springfield’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, it offered an opportunity to finally make the idea for the book a reality, something which the rocker and Gilbert had been discussing for the past five years. The photographer dug through his archive of more than 60,000 photos that he’d captured in the past two decades and narrowed it down to 200 shots that appear in Burning Film, which is available as part of a special box set edition of Big Hits.

Gilbert shared a selection of pictures that appear in the book, which you can view below. “I loved shooting him live because, you know, it’s just such an energetic show with great lighting,” he explains. “I think I’ve done seven albums with him, and that’s the fun part, right? That’s when you get in the studio and you’re like a mad scientist, and you’re like, ‘Okay, what are we going to try to do here?'”

This summer, Rick Springfield will be back out on the road, anchoring the latest installment of his I Want My ’80s tour with a slew of special guests, including John Waite and Wang Chung.

Listen to Rick Springfield and Jay Gilbert on the ‘UCR Podcast’