Steve Lillywhite
The producer has his fingerprints all over a number of top rock, post-punk, new wave and art-rock albums of the 80s in particular.
Steve Lillywhite: gated drums a speciality.
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.