Incredibly, in 2025, producer Steve Levine is celebrating 50 years in the music industry. From working with the likes The Clash and XTC back in the '70s to producing massive Culture Club hits in the '80s. From winning a Brit Award for Producer of the Year to producing The Beach Boys, it seems that Levine has done it all.
With his new venture, Baltic Jazz Recordings, he’s now collaborating with some of the most exciting new voices in jazz and R’n’B including MT Jones, Maevey and Mama Terra. Plus there’s the small matter of a gig with the Liverpool Philharmonic later this year – with host Katie Puckrick – to mark his 50 years in music.
But perhaps most famously for MusicRadar regulars, he's one of the world’s ultimate gearheads. And now he's created a plugin alongside Iconic, capturing his trademark LinnDrum sound.
Having spent decades at the cutting edge, embracing and mastering every new technology as it came and went, we couldn't wait to find out how he made the hits and what makes his current studio tick.
With 50 years in the business, let's start at the beginning. What got you into music and production?
Around ‘65, there was a documentary about Phil Spector. There's bits of it online now and there was the famous picture which has been used many times, as a still, and it says ‘Phil Spector in the studio’, with his engineer Larry Levine at the controls, and I thought, ‘Ah, that's what I want to do’.
There's a school of thought that says that every engineer or producer is essentially a failed musician.
Not in my case. Though I'm definitely a fan of musicians. When I listened to live music, I always thought ‘This is awful – why can't it sound like a record?’ So I never ever really loved live music so I never wanted to be in a band.
I did the sound for the school play and then eventually made a disco unit with two decks for the school disco. I just loved it. So yeah, I'm not a failed musician because I've never really been one.
And yet you’ve been making music for 50 years now.
Yes, I left school in July 75 at the age of 17 and started at CBS Studios in Whitford Street, so I've spent my entire life in studios. I’ve never had another job. I left school on the Friday, travelled up to London on the weekend, and started in the studio on the Monday.
CBS Studios had three studios. Studio one was the classical studio – the ‘big deal’ studio. Studio 2 was the cool studio that eventually went to 24 track, and Studio 3 was all the gear that was in the other two studios that was past its sell by date. It was just pushed upstairs. That was the demo studio where we did all the demos of all the punk bands that were coming through at the time, which is how come we got to do The Clash, The Jags, etc. Many of those were their very first sessions. The very first day we worked with The Clash we did White Riot.
In those days you couldn't tell in a pub if a band were any good because the sound was so terrible! So they would give them two or three days in the studio completely free of charge, no strings attached.
In Studio 3, everything was fairly live, but there were overdubs. Mick [Jones], although he was never credited as the producer, he really was. He used to live near Camden Town and I used to live in Hampstead, so when the sessions finished, I’d drop him off.
So what was your big break?
So Sailor had just had a big hit with Traffic Jam so we did the demos of Girls Girls, Girls and Glass of Champagne in Studio 3 with Rupert Holmes – who went on to do The Pina Colada Song – and Jeffrey Lesser.
They were huge hits so when they came to do their third album, with Bruce Johnson as producer, CBS had bought an MCI 24 track and MCI desk, and I knew how to use that, so that's how I got to work with Bruce on Sailor as a second engineer alongside Simon Humphrey and Phil Pickett on keyboards of course. That was pivotal in my crossover.
Phil had made a bit of money and bought a Prophet 5, so when we first started doing Culture Club, I would hire him. It was cheaper to hire Phil and his Prophet 5 than it was just to hire a Prophet 5! That’s how Phil got to play on Culture Club and how come he ultimately ended up getting a bit of publishing on Karma Chameleon that changed his life.
I’d been doing some writing and signed a deal with Rondor Music and I got £3,600 – which was quite a lot of money… So I spent £3,200 of it on a LinnDrum. The LM1.
Soon everyone heard that I had a Linn. It was quite a major thing for me to have one ‘cos I wasn't anybody! My serial number is something like one hundred and something.
So that drum machine was your gateway into music production?
I started getting a name for myself because my demos started sounding so good! In the early days people didn't know it was a drum machine, it was just that the drums just sounded great. And that forced people to play better because it's just so much tighter.
And this was the time where we’d do demos for anybody. I mean Simon Humphrey did the fucking Birdie Song! He engineered and produced that with Henry Hadaway. We were taking any work that would pay the rent.
But Henry was such a cheapskate that we would engineer his shitty sessions and he’d give us credit in the studio for our own stuff instead. So I was owed quite a lot of time. So when Ashley Goodall at EMI said, “I've got this band, The Angelic Upstarts, but I’ve only got £5,000 to make this record”, I said, “I can make it work”.
We did the whole album in Satril Studios in Golders Green – recorded, mix and everything. It was a great success internally, but it didn't set the world alight afterwards. But Tony Gordon, their manager, came down to the studio one day and said, “This sounds great. I’ve seen this other band, and I’m not sure, but there’s something. I’m going to send Jon Moss to see you…”.
And that was your Culture Club connection?
Jon had just come out of Adam and the Ants at the time… Bands with two drummers! There’s a fucking nightmare for sound… Anyway, he showed me pictures of George – George has just come out of Bow Wow Wow – and Jon said “We love that Burundi beat but I’m sick of two drummers. How can we make this work?”
I said, “We’ll play the backbeat on the Linn and you play the other bits on drums.”
So we booked one day at Manchester Square, which was only 16 track at the time and that was the first time I met the band.
Roy didn't even have a guitar, he borrowed mine, but we programmed the track, put the track down and I thought, ‘This is it I've cracked it!’ Because if you remember what was going on at the clubs that time, the track, White Boy, was right on the fucking money. I thought ‘This is gonna be a club hit. It’s got the best of disco. It’s got the best of new romantic.’ There was all that ‘vogue disco’ coming out. I thought we were on it… But… Nothing…
Second track – I’m Afraid Of Me – the same… So EMI turned them down. We were sat with those two tapes of White Boy and I'm Afraid Of Me – the two great demos that I thought were gonna be life changing – and… Nothing.
But somehow Danny from Virgin saw them at a gig and persuaded Virgin to sign them to a publishing deal so they got a recording deal by default. So we re-recorded White Boy and I'm Afraid Of Me, and released both those singles to… Nothing… Again… But I said, “Well, we've got this other song, let's record that as well”.
And that was Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?
The first time we recorded it was actually for a radio session for Radio 1’s Peter Powell because he was a real big fan of the band. We had to go to Birmingham to record so I didn’t take the LinnDrum with me – I couldn’t travel with the LinnDrum because it was too expensive!
When we came to record it properly we’d already cut it live in one take, with George’s live vocal being the actual vocal. So that’s what we did. Which is why he can’t beat it – because it was all in one take. It was a night and day difference. So there’s no Linn. Instead – if you listen really closely – there’s a Roland CR78 as John really liked the pattern and Jon played live drums to that.
What else is on the track?
Actually it was a bit of a disaster. Roy played guitar with the track, Mike played bass, and we’d overdub the strings and the Rhodes afterwards. It’s my Korg Delta synth playing the strings at the beginning and a fake Rhodes through a chorus pedal to kind of sound like a Rhodes.
So Roy starts playing the Rhodes part and it's like SO out of tune… It's like, ‘What the fuck?’
So I looked at the tape… And it’s not cut correctly! As it’s going through the capstan it’s riding up and down, slowing down very, very slightly… And this is the master… This is the tape…
Averting disaster
So I said to Pete, the engineer, “What the fuck are we gonna do?” and he said, “I've got an idea. I'll take the tensions right down and we'll make a multi-track copy.”
So the whole multi-track is a second generation. Which is how come the drums have got that crunchy sound on it because the whole thing had to be copied. But the problem went away. Roy did the Rhodes part and then the strings are both him and me because on the Delta you’ve got the little joystick thing…
You're well known for your love of technology and constantly evolving and staying ahead. I remember that you were running an Oberheim System, a Roland Microcomposer AND a Fairlight all together at one point? That must have been a nightmare.
So in the beginning, obviously the clicks on the tape were really important. So there was SMPTE timecode on the multi-tracks to guide the two tape machines.
The LinnDrum LM1 has a socket that gives out the pulses you need for the different machines but I got them to put a special Oberheim one on there. So in the very beginning, it was SMPTE for the tapes, Linn code for the Linn, and then the Linn pulses would run the Roland Microcomposer and the Oberheim sequencer.
After that I upgraded to a Friendchip which could run several things, and then Fairlight had a thing called the Conductor. It was all analogue pulses. Nothing more than that.
And when I had the original Prophet 5, it had a sequencer that was like a microdata cassette thing, and that would also just run on pulses as well. It was all just analogue pulses, so if you got stuck you could make them! Put a metronome on tape and distort it and you’d get a square wave that would work!
So you really worked out a routine for all your gear.
We used to work everything out first. The two 24 tracks had SMPTE on each. We put the code for the Linn down. Program the Linn, then put that down as a stereo mix – so we could stop and start the tape, because the Linn always had to run from the top…
Then with things like the Roland SH101, I could layer it a few times with a couple of different settings and then bounce that down and then we'd run the Linn all the way through with EQ, compressor or whatever and print that.
Also I only had one AMS reverb, so if I wanted to put conga reverb and tom tom reverb, I'd have to do them separately. So I printed everything on my multi-tracks in those days with everything pretty much as it was, with all those pulses running things. But it meant you could go back to something which was really great.
Occasionally George would say, “Oh, can you take that section out,” and that would mean cutting into the code and everything, so I tried wherever possible to get him to do guide vocals, so he couldn't change his mind afterwards!
And you were a very early embracer of all things digital.
Yeah, the B-side of the track Colour by Numbers was the very first use of the DX7 because the guy that used to sell the Oberheim stuff, Cammy from Chase, said to me, “I'm gonna get the new DX7. You can borrow it for the weekend, but I had to have it back on Tuesday.” It was a bank holiday weekend. And when you first heard the DX7 – it’s like ‘oh my god’… And it had a MIDI socket on the back of it.
I had Page R on the Fairlight which was a dream. Especially with the light pen. It was one of the best ways to sequence. And I’d been using the Roland MSQ700, with the DCB bus and the Yamaha QX1 which was painful, but then I started moving to the Atari and Steinberg Pro 24 – because it just… worked – and Gerhardt [Lengeling of C-Lab, later to become E-Magic] had given me a thing called Creator.
So one day I inserted the dongle for my Pro 24 the wrong way round and I went to make a cup of tea and I’m like, ‘I can smell burning…’ And my dongle fried… So I thought, ‘I have to try Creator now because I’ve got no other choice!’. And I much preferred it. It was like Page R on the Fairlight – you chained together a bunch of patterns rather than Pro 24 which was linear, like tape. It was unusual at the time, but of course, everyone uses that concept now.
And I can see you’ve still got your LinnDrum LM1 right there.
That’s the original. £3,200. I’ve still got the manual.
No cigarette burns? Coffee rings?
It's had a case from day one. I do try and look after my gear.
And that's the inspiration for your, your new Iconic plugin – Levine's Machines.
Yeah, I got a call from Iconics and they asked me to check out their new Simmons plugin, as I’ve got the original, to ask me what I thought and I mentioned that I still had my Linn.
They have this guy in Berkley that does this incredible impulse response stuff. So I sampled the machine at every level at 96kHz with every voice on it and they sent me a special piece of software which then goes through the equipment that I use.
When I first started with Culture Club, the signal chain was LinnDrum through [Neve] 1073 preamp, which is what was at Manchester Square and CBS Studios. Later it was on the MCI, but also very often through DI boxes of various flavours. And when I went to California to record the Beach Boys I discovered the Inovonics limiter.
I said, “What’s that?” and they said, “It’s what Quincy Jones and Bruce Swedien use on all the Michael Jackson records. That's what they use on the LinnDrum on Thriller to get that kick sound. Let’s plug in your Linn and I'll show you.”
So we plugged it in and oh my god… It's a radio limiter, from the '70s, but it does this weird thing. In the early days of sampling, of course, the samples were very short and so particularly in the kick, it sounded fake because you didn't get the sound of the snare and the stuff that you would have if it was a real drum set with all the open mics.
Levine's Machine's Thriller
What the Inovonics seems to restore is that it tricks the aliasing in the sample to make it sound like it's got that at the end, and at the front it kind of clips it in a very harmonic way.
So I'm like, wow, that sounds great. So I bought one. And that’s what the compressor is in the plugin. It looks like a Neve in the plugin skin, but that’s what’s in there. The reverbs are proprietary algorithms with one that’s similar to the AMS. I used to use the AMS reverb a lot on the snare drum. Plus I did loads of sampling with Jon, all of which I still have so we’re gonna add those to it as well, so we'll have not just the Linn, but additional samples.
Did you ever move on to what they now refer to as the LM2?
Yes. I had an LM2 and Roy had a Linn 9000, which was a piece of shit. So unreliable. I sold my LM2 and I sold my [Roland] 909 and my 808 when they were not trendy. But I kept the LM1 because of the history of it. I've got the new Roland TR8 which I actually love because that's got 909 and 808 and knobs, and it gives me back the stupid mistake I made selling them!
And what happened to your Fairlight?
So my Fairlight was part exchanged with Fairlight for a Series 3. That was the deal they were offering at the time – £55,000 plus the old one, part exchange… Which is one of those things… And then when I finally got rid of the Series 3 that went to the Pet Shop Boys because they wanted a back-up.
But in fairness, the Series 3 was never as enjoyable as the Series 2. So in hindsight, I probably should have kept the Series 2. But honestly that plug-in from Arturia is so close and it gives me the fix I need.
Kids today, they don’t know how lucky they are!
And yet these days people moan about the ease and convenience and having too many options. How do you feel about the modern studio? Is it perfect for you now?
Let’s take my Jet Phaser for example. I’ve got the Warm Audio one. Now, I've used it probably three times, but it's fantastic every time I use it. So in terms of options, I've got a ton of options, but you have to narrow the options to focus on the job that you're doing. You can't use everything on every track, and you do have to stop yourself doing that.
There are pieces of equipment in here that I have not switched on for ages and I think, ‘Well maybe I should sell them?’ but then just one moment comes and you go, ‘I'm so glad that I didn't get rid of that!’
So this is the best studio I've ever had. I don't think it's gonna be my last studio. But it's a lovely working environment, it's a very cosy place to work, very creative.
And how do you find the music business at the moment? Over your career, making music and making money has changed quite a bit.
There’s good and bad. One of the biggest problems now is that bands can’t afford to make ends meet so they consequently have to have other jobs, which impacts on their creative flow.
So in the old days, and I always remember this, when we worked with The Jags, they were all on the dole. Because you could go to the dole office and say ‘I'm in a band and I've just signed a record deal and I'm recording my record’, and they would allow that. Successive governments need to consider that being a musician is a professional job and you should be able to do that job.
In terms of access to the market, that's much better because there's less gatekeepers. There was a time you could only get your record out if you went through one route, so anyone can make music and get it out and that's good.
On the bad side, there's a lot of people making music that should keep it private and do it as a hobby. So consequently that clogs up the system. We need Dyno-Rod to flush it out! There's some great music out there that never gets discovered, which is a real shame because there's so much noise out there.
Play fair and pay fair
But on a positive level, the fact that companies are reducing the cost of equipment to allow another generation to have a voice, that can only be applauded. I believe that bringing the cost down and the quality up allows people with fantastic ideas to have a voice and perhaps they’ll make the next song that changes attitudes and changes you.
But the sad fact is that the biggest money makers in the industry at the moment are not the people that are creating it. The creators are being compensated the least and everyone up the food chain is earning an absolute fortune on the back of them. And that’s not just true in music. It's any creators. Art, literature, journalistic investigation. It's a real shame and I don't know how that’s going to change.
I mean. It's better than it was with Napster. Because with Napster, literally zero payments were going to artists. Everyone was filling their hard drive with everybody's copyrighted material, and nobody was getting paid. The entire industry almost collapsed, so we're in a better place now.
Fidelity is going up. I believe Spotify are going to up the fidelity soon. And I’ve just got a new headphone amp by iFi which has been blowing my mind in terms of quality. It’s called Valkyrie and it’s unbelievably good.
And you don’t get fatigued because you're, you're dealing with a much more sonically pure sound. And I'm very pleased to say that thank god my ears are still good. Like when I was working with The Clash I used to put toilet paper in my ears! I needed to be careful, and thank god I have!
