Steve Lillywhite's Best Albums: A Buyer's Guide

Steve Lillywhite in the recording studio

(Image credit: NK Management)

Steve Lillywhite was as synonymous with the 80s as big hair, spandex and leg warmers. Working with engineer Hugh Padgham on Peter Gabriel’s solo career-defining third album, the duo inventively used the music compression technique of gated reverb. It quickly became a trademark 80s sound.

Lillywhite had worked on it prior to Gabriel’s third, gradually honing the sonic sculpture: instead of letting a drum ‘hit’ die away naturally, he cropped its decay soon after its initial hit, creating a punchier ‘thud’ rather than a sustained ‘boom’.

That sound was most notably demonstrated on Phil Collins’s In The Air Tonight from 1981’s Face Value (which was co-produced by Collins and Padgham), following the latter’s work with Lillywhite on the Gabriel album.

Lillywhite’s formative years coincided with the advent of synth-pop as well as post-punk. While not directly involved, electronic music’s pioneering creativity of the era was an influence on Lillywhite and he co-produced Ultravox’s 1977 debut along with the band and Brian Eno. Lillywhite had previously helped the band get signed to Island Records by working on their demo.

Working as an engineer/mixer on Golden Earring’s Contraband (1976) and Live (1977), he then produced debut albums for both ex-New York Dolls/Heartbreakers guitarist Johnny Thunders and his brother’s band The Members.

That combination of producing trad rock and post-punk new wave/art-rock became Lillywhite’s modus operandi – despite his love of blues and prog, plus his admiration of pop supremo, Trevor Horn.

Banshees manager Nils Stevenson – a friend of Johnny Thunders – was impressed by Lillywhite’s drum sound on You Can’t Put Put Your Arms Around A Memory while visiting the studio during the So Alone sessions, and hired him for the Banshees. His seminal work on The Scream made him the obvious choice for the landmark postpunk palette of XTC’s Drums & Wires. Peter Gabriel then hired Lillywhite for that third – and superior – album of his initial, same-named, solo records.

A remarkable career followed. The six-time Grammy-winning Steve Lillywhite CBE produced Talking Heads, Toyah, Phish, Counting Crows, The Killers, Dave Matthews Band, The La’s, Morrissey and many more.

“It wasn’t that I was looking for the sound I wanted,” he said of his skill, “I rejected all the sounds that I didn’t like until I ended up with something I could accept.”

Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel (aka Melt) (Charisma, 1980)

Ending the 70s with production heavyweights Bob Ezrin and Robert Fripp working on his first two solo albums, Gabriel’s choice of Lillywhite showed that the ex-Genesis visionary was willing to take risks and wanted something both darker and more cutting-edge.

The unnerving noirish Low-era-Bowie-meets-Bauhaus opener of Intruder features Phil Collins’s apocalyptic gated tribal drums, ghoulish backing-vocal harmonies and vocal menace. Gabriel embraced and encouraged Lillywhite’s ambitious innovation. Reunited with his engineer Hugh Padgham, this innovative work set an incredibly high standard.

Siouxsie & The Banshees - The Scream (Polydor, 1978)

Along with Magazine’s Real Life and PiL’s Public Image: First Issue – both also released in 1978 – The Scream is one of the albums that effectively launched post-punk – in sound genrefication, not just chronology. But its Ballardian aesthetic and Kraftwerk-influenced motorik set The Scream’s avant experimentalism apart.

Building on his ambient compression of debut single Hong Kong Garden (his first hit as a producer, at the age of just 23), Lillywhite’s work was what Sioux and Severin wanted: “cold and machine-like, but passionate”, exemplified by the atmospheric Pure, disorientating Jigsaw Feeling and antagonistic Metal Postcard.

XTC - Drums & Wires (VIrgin, 1979)

XTC’s third album represented a high-water mark of post-punk’s new-wave sonic Dadaism with the band’s idiosyncratic quirk.

“If you have two guitarists, why play the same thing?” Lillywhite recently asked an interviewer. No danger of that with the angular staccato of Andy Partridge and Dave Gregory. Meanwhile, Colin Moulding told Lilywhite that he wanted his bass to sound “woolly and indistinct”. The drums are flanged to such an extreme on Making Plans For Nigel that they sound like a steel mill’s cooling turbine. Drums & Wires remains a stunning work of art that defies categorisation.

U2 - War (Island, 1983)

Having produced U2’s Boy and October, despite Lillywhite’s insistence that U2 should try someone else for their third album, they went back to him for what Bono described as Lillywhite’s clarity of vision.

With a phenomenal work ethic, he mixed classic and timeless U2 debut hit single New Year’s Day in just 15 minutes. Sunday Bloody Sunday, with its militaristic tattoo, is more definitive early U2, and Two Hearts Beat As One combines Edge’s XTC-ish jagged chop with melodic harmonies. But the underrated acoustic Drowning Man with its proto-Unforgettable Fire Eno/Lanois-style ambience is a Lillywhite favourite.

Big Country - The Crossing (Mercury, 1983)

Steve Lillywhite and Big Country influenced each other equally on Big Country’s debut; frontman Stuart Adamson wrote the band’s signature hit In A Big Country after being influenced by the sounds being created in the studio at the time of the album sessions.

It’s a huge sound but one that’s still spacious and with the ability to perfectly convey anthemic Celtic rock despite the absence of any traditional instruments (Smash Hits made much of Adamson’s “swirlesque bagpipe guitar” sound), but with the thunderous Brezezicki/Butler rhythm section. Wonderful stuff that somehow evokes expansive panoramic landscapes. Shout!

The Pogues - If I Should Fall From Grace With God (Warners, 1988)

A band whose members Lillywhite maintained that he “had to record early”, without any real need to elaborate on his meaning. Rum, Sodomy & The Lash was a masterpiece, but Grace was the enormous commercial breakthrough.

Despite the back-and-forth of Lillywhite’s wife Kirsty MacColl duetting with Shane MacGowan on Fairytale Of New York, their vocals were recorded separately. But deep cuts like Thousands Are Sailing and The Broad Majestic Shannon are the real gems here. As the band’s sound matured, they worked with Lillywhite at the ideal point in their career.

Psychedelic Furs - Talk Talk Talk (CBS, 1981)

Their self-titled debut album featured no less than four producers – including Martin Hannett – but, crucially, Lillywhite owned its outstanding tracks, including Sister Europe, which once again featured that recognisable drum sound. The popularity of Sister Europe’s moody slow-burn meant Lillywhite was top choice as sole producer for the Furs’ Television-influenced follow-up.

A long 80s lifespan, Talk Talk Talk was retroactively celebrated for Pretty In Pink, which inspired the 1986 brat pack film of the same name. The album broke the London band in the US with its abrasive yet polished and poppy new wave melancholic melodies.

Joan Armatrading - Walk Under Ladders (A&M, 1981)

Evolving her blues folk origin, Armatrading embraced rock in the early 80s with her sixth album Me Myself I. For its follow-up, Lillywhite brought in new wave heroes like synth maestro Thomas Dolby and XTC’s Andy Partridge (guitars) for a thoroughly new Armatrading sound on I’m Lucky, while Sly & Robbie did the business on dub number I Can’t Lie To Myself.

Lillywhite’s combination of his twin loves of blues and prog filtered through new wave wasn’t to everyone’s tastes – specifically the US – but it demonstrates his desire for innovation and pushing the aesthetic envelope.

Simple Minds - Sparkle In The Rain (Virgin, 1984)

Having provoked the ire of Lee, Lifeson and Peart by tacitly agreeing to produce Rush’s Grace Under Pressure but then backing out, Lillywhite instead headed to Rockfield for the sixth Minds album. His job was to capture the huge stadium sound that the band had recently been afforded thanks to their increasingly mammoth live shows as a result of New Gold Dream’s success. Translating that live vibe in the studio bore the colossal sonic intensity of Waterfront and Up On The Catwalk.

While Sparkle In The Rain didn’t measure up to the glory of New Gold Dream or the sales of Once Upon A Time, it was enormous in sound. Job done.

...and one to avoid

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Rolling Stones - Dirty Work (Columbia, 1986)

Listen to Charlie Watts’s wonderfully loose samba shuffle on the live version of Sympathy For The Devil on 1970’s Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! Compare it to the frigid diabolical cover of Harlem Shuffle here. The drums might as well be a Roland TR-808 machine. It simply doesn’t work.

With Charlie, Ronnie and Bill all studio absentees and Jagger and Richards at the career peak of their feuding, Lillywhite met the Stones at the worst possible time. But specific personnel foibles aside, his techniques are out of place for a band best left under-produced and unpolished. Even the style-bereft Day-Glo worn morosely in the sleeve photo is an incongruous misstep

Artists

A regular contributor to Louder/Classic Rock and The Quietus, Burrows began his career in 1979 with a joke published in Whizzer & Chips. In the early 1990s he self-published a punk/comics zine, then later worked for Cycling Plus, Redline, MXUK, MP3, Computer Music, Metal Hammer and Classic Rock magazines. He co-wrote Anarchy In the UK: The Stories Behind the Anthems of Punk with the late, great Steven Wells and adapted gothic era literature into graphic novels. He also had a joke published in Viz. He currently works in creative solutions, lives in rural Oxfordshire and plays the drums badly.