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; some reporters have argued that he even shaped a definitive sound of 1980s new wave. In Trouser Press, Karen Schlosberg dubbed Lillywhite “a prime mover of punk and post-punk rock”.
The producer of some of the most successful albums from such internationally acclaimed artists as U2, the Talking Heads, and the Rolling Stones, and some of the most trend-setting albums by such new wave pioneers as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ultravox, the Psychedelic Furs, and XTC, Lillywhite shaped several of the musical milestones of the 1980s.