Some of the most dynamic and influential music in mid-60s British pop was brought to fruition by the US producer Shel Talmy, who has died aged 87. Among the hits that benefited from his innovative and dynamic approach to the recording studio were the Kinks’ chart-topping songs You Really Got Me, Sunny Afternoon and Tired of Waiting For You. There is some dispute over whether Talmy also produced the classic Waterloo Sunset – its composer, Ray Davies, says he produced it himself, while Talmy begged to differ.
In any event, Talmy’s work impressed the Who, with whom he recorded their definitive hits I Can’t Explain, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere and My Generation. His partnership with the group ended in a tortuous legal struggle, but his work with them has comfortably stood the test of time.
Sheldon Talmy was born in Chicago, one of two sons of Isaac Talmy, a dentist, and his wife, Esther (nee Gutes). The family moved to Los Angeles when he was a teenager, where he attended Fairfax high school (as did other future showbiz luminaries including Phil Spector, Herb Alpert and Michael Jackson).
After graduating in 1955 he worked for a time at ABC Television, before taking a job as an engineer at a recording studio on Melrose Avenue, Conway Recorders. This gave him experience of working with artists including the Castells and surf band the Marketts, and with the group of session musicians who would become known as the Wrecking Crew. Talmy recalled how “I used to work out miking techniques for how to make drums sound better or guitars sound better … it was all totally new.”
In 1962 he travelled to Britain, initially planning to stay for five weeks. He also had the idea of seeing if he could find work in the London record business. His friend Nick Venet, an A&R man at Capitol Records in LA who had signed the Beach Boys to the label, gave him a batch of acetates (or test pressings) of songs by various artists and told Talmy he could claim that he had produced them. He played songs by the Beach Boys and the soulman Lou Rawls to Dick Rowe at Decca Records in London, telling Rowe that he was “the greatest thing since oxygen was invented, in terms of producers”, and was promptly offered a job. One of his first projects was producing Charmaine, a Top 10 hit by Irish trio The Bachelors.
He felt energised by the creative energy he found in London, describing how “nobody got a lot of sleep, but nobody gave a damn. We all worked long into the night, and then we’d go out to parties.”
In 1964 he went solo as an independent producer, and one of his earliest signings was the Kinks. He first began working with them in late 1963 when they were still called the Ravens, and he gave them their first hit in 1964 with the UK chart-topper You Really Got Me. Talmy’s innovative microphone placings, using a dozen of them where other producers might only use three or four, helped to capture the power and resonance of the group’s sound, and would become a Talmy trademark. His relationship with the group would continue into 1967, bringing them two more No 1 hits with Sunny Afternoon and Tired of Waiting for You and half a dozen more Top 10 placings. They also scored three Top 10 hits in the US during this period.
The jagged guitar riff of You Really Got Me was an inspiration to the Who’s Pete Townshend, prompting him to write I Can’t Explain. It was the Who’s production manager Mike Shaw who played a demo of the song to Talmy down the telephone, who immediately loved it. “They were loud, raw, but they had balls,” Talmy recalled. “I said ‘let’s do it’.”
I Can’t Explain was a Top 10 hit in 1964, and the following year the band’s Talmy-produced singles Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere and My Generation reached No 10 and No 2 respectively. However, the partnership was scuppered by the fact that Talmy and one of the Who’s managers, Kit Lambert, loathed each other. Also, the Who’s deal with Talmy’s production company gave them a very poor royalty rate, and Townshend disliked the way Talmy made the Who part of “a pop-record-churning-out type machine, a big package”.
This all prompted a legal dispute eventually settled out of court (Talmy had hired Quintin Hogg – Lord Hailsham – to represent him), giving Talmy a share of the group’s royalties for the next six years. That meant he would earn from the Who’s classic album Tommy (1969), but he regretted that he was not able to work on it – “I honestly think I could have contributed a lot that it doesn’t have.”
The Kinks and the Who were Talmy’s most prestigious clients, but he applied his skills to a broad variety of artists. In 1965 he produced two singles featuring singer David Jones, soon to be reborn as David Bowie. These were I Pity the Fool, credited to the Manish Boys, and You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving, by Davy Jones & the Lower Third. He also produced the single A Summer Song and the 1964 album Yesterday’s Gone for the duo Chad & Jeremy.
He enjoyed a notable success with the Australian group the Easybeats, whose anthemic Friday on My Mind (1966) was a hit around the world, reaching No 6 in Britain and 16 in the US. He also produced Manfred Mann’s version of Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman, which reached 10 in the UK. He produced the album We Are Paintermen for the Creation, on his own label, Planet Records. It sold poorly in 1966 but enjoyed a cultish revival when the group reformed in the 1990s.
Talmy also worked with a variety of folk musicians, including Roy Harper (whom Talmy described as “truculent”), Pentangle and Ralph McTell, and in 1977 did production work on the album Playmates by the reformed Small Faces. A brief liaison with the Damned resulted in the single Stretcher Case Baby.
Talmy moved back to Los Angeles in the late 1970s. He continued to work in music, and also co-founded a document-scanning company, Superscan.
He is survived by his wife, Jan, daughter, Jonna, and granddaughter, Shay, and by his brother, Leonard.
• Sheldon “Shel” Talmy, record producer, born 11 August 1937; died 13 November 2024
