Steve Lillywhite

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Steve Lillywhite is an English record producer, born in Surrey in 1955. He began in 1972 as a tape operator at Phonogram Studios in London. A demo he made for Ultravox earned that band a contract with Island Records, and Lillywhite became its regular producer. His first success came in 1978 with Hong Kong Garden, the debut single by Siouxsie and the Banshees, followed by their album The Scream. In that year he also produced Ku Klux Klan, Steel Pulse's first single on Island. In 1979 he made the album Drums and Wires with XTC, with the single Making Plans for Nigel.

Music and breakthrough

In 1980 he produced Peter Gabriel's third solo album. Together with Gabriel and the sound engineer Hugh Padgham he came up with the gated reverb drum sound there, which later became a hallmark of Phil Collins's solo records. That same year Boy, U2's debut album, came out. With U2 he went on to make October, War and The Joshua Tree. In 1987 he produced Fairytale of New York by The Pogues, with his wife Kirsty MacColl as the female vocalist. The song just missed the top spot on the British Christmas chart and returns every year over the holidays.

Influence

In the 1990s he worked with the Dave Matthews Band, including the album Under the Table and Dreaming, and later with, among others, Counting Crows, Phish, Morrissey and The Killers. He is credited on more than five hundred records, won six Grammys and was made a CBE in 2012. His work shows how much of the sound of new wave and the big rock bands around 1980 was created in the studio.

Listening

In School of Rock

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