BY LARRY
CRANE, GEOFFREY
KNOOP
Starting at Trident Studios in the late '60s, and hitting his stride at Island Studios in the early '70s, engineer/producer Tony Platt has built up an impressive resume. He worked his way up as an assistant engineer on sessions with Traffic, The Who, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, and later as an engineer with Free, Paul McCartney, John Martyn, Sparks and Mott the Hoople. As one of the engineers on Bob Marley and The Wailers' Catch a Fire and Burnin', he helped bring reggae to a wider audience, and went on to work with Toots & the Maytals on Funky Kingston as well as records for The Harry J All Stars, Aswad and The Cimarons. In his early days as a freelancer, he recorded demos and singles for seminal punk groups The Stranglers and The Adverts, and similarly for Thin Lizzy. Becoming an engineer for Robert John "Mutt" Lange, Tony worked on AC/DC's classic albums Highway to Hell and Back in Black, as well as Foreigner's 4 and The Boomtown Rats' The Fine Art of Surfacing. He joined the Zomba Management producer roster in 1980, producing artists like Samson, Iron Maiden, Krokus, Motörhead, Gary Moore, Cheap Trick, Billy Squier, The Cult and Marillion. During the '90s he engineered and co-produced sessions for Buddy Guy's Damn Right, I Got the Blues and Feels Like Rain. More recently, jazz-related sessions have popped up with Jazz Jamaica All Stars, Soweto Kinch, Abram Wilson and Juliet Roberts. Tony still keeps working full time and maintains a small studio in the Strongroom Studios complex in Shoreditch, London, which he shares with Haydn Bendall (a former engineer for Abbey Road Studios). Current and recent projects include Ellie Williams, The Razzle, singer/songwriter Natalia Dusso, slide player J.D. Smith and Tom Mansi & The Icebreakers.
