ANDY JONES
After completing the prestigious Tonmeister course at Surrey University – one that has delivered many a top record producer – Ben Hillier landed a job with the production duo of Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osbourne. With them he soon learned the arts of engineering and remixing and spent the rest of the 1990s working with the greats of the production world (Flood, Steven Street, Alan Moulder among many others) before being promoted to the role of producer on Elbow’s debut album. “Yeah, my first proper album was Asleep In The Back,” he says. “It was a little weird as Steve Osbourne had already produced the album with Elbow when they were with EMI, but the record company didn’t release the album and eventually dropped the band.
“Then Elbow were picked up by V2 and had to make the record again, but by this point they’d moved on and wanted to do something different so only half the songs that were on the original were on the new version.” Ben helped the band re-record some songs and produced the rest of the tracks with critically-acclaimed results, and even though it would be some years for the band to really find their feet, Ben could tell they eventually would…