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In February 1967 Arthur Lilley was interviewed by the US music trade magazine "Billboard" for a Mantovani tribute. He revealed then that he had been in sound for 30 of his 50 years. He was to continue afterwards with Mantovani until 1975 and with Decca until 1979, at which point the company was on the verge of being taken over by Polygram. Being a self-effacing type of person, Arthur did not "blow his own trumpet", but we feel that much more should be known of the important part he played in the successes of Decca. Here we hope to redress the balance, to find out some more about his personality and to illustrate how well he served the company from 1932 onwards. (To see the caption, simply run your mouse over the picture.)

We know that he joined Decca in 1932 from the date on the reverse of his long-service presentation watch, still in the possession of his family. There were, however, periods when he was away from Decca: a letter from the International Broadcasting Corporation indicates that he worked for them from September 1938 to November 1939 as an "instrument mechanic" and that he had already worked as a recording engineer. Then from May 1940 until January 1946 he was on wartime RAF service, firstly in Yorkshire in the north of England and thereafter in the warmer climate of the Bahamas. There he was ostensibly a ground crew mechanic on Walrus seaplanes, but there may have been a more confidential aspect to his work, although that has never been fully clarified.

He was born Arthur Williams Leonard Lilley on 10 July 1916 in Wandsworth, south London, the eldest of five children (two sisters and two brothers following him). His father ran a hairdressing business in Westminster and used to attend to many of the Members of Parliament there. His mother was a dancer and she may have met Arthur's father at the Drury Lane Theatre where Lilley senior was a part-time saxophone player. When Arthur lost his mother in the 1930s, he had take on quite a lot of extra responsibility for the rest of the family. The Lilleys lived in various locations in the south-east of England until they became part of the "Lavender Hill mob" in 1930. Arthur worked in a record shop there and later in a Decca shop elsewhere in London.

Arthur had no formal training in music, but he played piano and double bass. While his father doodled on sax, his sister played piano and Arthur made up the family musical unit on bass. According to former Decca producer Frank Lee, Arthur used to go to the Decca studios at Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, in his lunch break to play the piano. Eventually he became an office boy/receptionist and used to caricature the stars as they came into the studios. He was very artistic and was a good watercolourist.

At some time in the 1930s (it is not exactly clear when) he became a record engineer at Decca. By now the family had moved to the Kent village of Green Street Green, near Orpington, and there he met his future wife who lived locally. They were married in 1940. Arthur and his father commuted daily to London from their new home, riding their bicycles to the local station to catch the train. One suspects that it would have been a much more pleasant experience in those days than it is now!

After the war Arthur resumed his career at Decca and soon became indispensible as a recording engineer of note. Besides Mantovani he recorded with many British "pop" stars such as pianists Winifred Atwell, Mrs Mills and Russ Conway, bandleader Billy Cotton, the vocal group The Beverley Sisters and singers Vera Lynn, Billy Fury, Anthony Newley, Joan Regan, Lita Roza, Max Bygraves, Jimmy Young, David Whitfield and many others. His daughter Susan remembers that Tommy Steele could not whistle a certain note on his smash hit "Singing The Blues" so after many attempts Arthur cut it out and filled it in later. With Winnie Atwell he took off the back of her piano to create a honky tonk effect on her hit "Black And White Rag" which later became the signature tune of the TV programme "Pot Black." In March 1951 he was present, of course, in the studios to engineer Mantovani's trademark hit "Charmaine" which helped catapult him to worldwide fame.

During the 1960s Arthur was at the sound controls for those lush stereo recordings of Ted Heath, Frank Chacksfield, Maurice Larcange, Roland Shaw, Stanley Black, Edmundo Ros, Eric Rodgers and ... of course, Mantovani. He also recorded with overseas luminaries such as Benny Goodman and Bing Crosby, contributed to Lionel Bart musicals and also "The Big Country" and "South Pacific". He did many classical recordings with the likes of Georg Solti and Leopold Stokowski; one classical session engineered in Kingsway Hall in the winter of 1962 with producer Ray Minshull (La Fille Mal Garde-Ballet) is singled out for praise in the book "Full Frequency Stereophonic Sound", written by Robert Moon and Michael Gray (1990). Another Kingsway Hall recording of special merit was the "Kismet" extravaganza of September 1963 when Mantovani came together with the likes of Kenneth McKellar, Adele Leigh, Regina Resnik, Bob Merrill, Ian Wallace and the Sammes Chorus to record a wonderful album.

On "Kismet", and throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Arthur co-operated with producer Tony D'Amato on those remarkable Mantovani stereo albums that still sound so fresh today. Arthur told "Billboard" correspondent Dick Tatham that he would turn up for a Mantovani recording three hours before anyone else. If there had been a rock session the night before Arthur would patiently rejig everything. Rock musicians needed felt carpets to produce a tight sound, but Mantovani's requirements were exactly the opposite; up would come all the carpets to get a reverberating sound which gave a degree of echo to assist the strings. Arthur would then set up the studio almost as he would for a symphony orchestra, putting as many as nine microphones on the strings and seven on the other instruments. Then he would check his controls thoroughly at the board "with enough knobs and switches to launch a moon rocket." Monty would usually arrive half-an-hour before the rest of the musicians and while he was rehearsing them Arthur would balance the sound controls. Monty would tell Arthur what he wanted, but did not interfere with sound technicalities; he had trust in Arthur's professionalism. The two men shared common ground: they were both painstakingly creative perfectionists who would go over things until they were exactly right - they would not accept second best. Arthur was a undemonstrative man, quiet and of even temperament, qualities that served him well in the Decca hot house.

When Mantovani began recording at Sofrason Studios in Paris in the 1970s, Arthur would go over to discuss the recording itinerary and to oversee the recording sessions except for the "More Mantovani Magic" album which was engineered by Arthur "Butch" Bannister. Susan Lilley also recalls him travelling abroad to make recordings. In the 1950s he taped the Black Watch Band in Germany and he also went to Zurich to capture the sound of bells for the 1812 Overture. In 1981 he came out of retirement to record a rare piece of Grieg's music in Norway. The family even has film of him recording the last run of the Golden Arrow steam train as it left London for Scotland. Such was his dedication he then flew up to Scotland to record its arrival there!

Everything he did at home, be it decorating or gardening, was addressed carefully (as befits a perfectionist). Like his father he was a good photographer and enjoyed developing his own pictures. Another interest was television - he loved the Tom and Jerry cartoons and the antics of that loveable rogue Sgt Bilko (which can still be seen on British TV some 45 years after they were filmed). Perhaps they reminded Arthur of his time as a sergeant in the Bahamas! Although he had a stereogram and a cupboard full of his recordings, he never seemed to play them at home. Maybe this was because he wanted a break from music - he worked long hours at Decca - or even frustration at not being able to recreate at home the studio music sounds he was linked with. Susan believes that he was the first recording engineer to record quadrophonic sound which, perhaps surprisingly, never really took off.

After his retirement he worked on a freelance basis, but did return to the "Mantovani Sound" in 1981 when Roland Shaw and the BBC Radio Orchestra broadcast a Mantovani tribute at the Royal Festival Hall. Mike Robinson and Tom Burtonshaw were the engineers with Arthur as sound consultant. To the end he was a much respected figure in sound engineering. Not for nothing did "The Gramophone Record" magazine of March 1953 salute Arthur "on whose sensitive, musicianly, fingers so much depends." We, too, are pleased to salute Arthur Lilley and to fully recognise the part he played in those exemplary Decca recordings we still enjoy today.

Mantovani's Engineer Arthur Lilley