Steve Lillywhite: The Talking Heads And The Rolling Stones

Steve LillyWhite

When an album creates a sensation with rock audiences and music critics, the band or musician tends to receive the credit. Quite often, however, many people behind the scenes craft the quality of the product. Steve Lillywhite has worked behind a string of great albums by various bands. The producer of some of the most successful albums from such internationally acclaimed artists as U2, the Talking Heads, and the Rolling Stones. Lillywhite shaped several of the musical milestones of the 1980s. Lilly also produced British pop music.

First, Stephan Alan LillyWhite was born in 1955, Lillywhite grew up just outside of London in Egham, England, in a very musical family. Both parents played instruments and encouraged all three of their children to do so as well. Lillywhite became involved in music himself, his younger brother Adrian would go on to play in a fairly prominent band known as the Members; Lillywhite eventually ended up producing them. His own playing, however, would drop off as he became more and more drawn into the engineering aspect of studio work.

In effect, a tape operator was a "tea boy" someone who ran to get tea and other necessities and indulgences for the musicians and engineers. Soon enough, however, he became an engineer himself. While Lillywhite had very little autonomy at Phonogram doing whatever work was required, the studio did offer a perk for its workers, on the weekends, employees could use the studios for their own projects. Lillywhite used them for his first forays into production, helping an unknown band then called Tiger Lily make demo tapes. The enterprise turned out to be a lucrative