Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg: The secret songwriting team behind countless hits
Since the first dawn of pop music, the landscape has been propped up by a litany of often uncredited, largely overlooked songwriters working behind the scenes to churn out the tracks which populate the singles charts week after week. Back in the pop golden age of the 1980s, there were few with quite as colourful a CV as Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg.
Once the soft rock sounds of the 1970s had thankfully dissipated, and the glue-sniffing abrasion of punk rock was on its way out, the musical realm of the 1980s yearned for a sense of escapism from the rather depressing reality of life under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.
When you think of the neon-hued pop euphoria of the 1980s, though, the chances are you think of the songwriting stylings of Steinberg and Kelly. First rubbing shoulders at a party back in 1981, the two quickly discovered that their songwriting sensibilities were aligned, and it didn’t take long for them to enter the writing room together as a partnership.
Steinberg, in particular, already had some experience of writing for the stars. His short-lived group, Billy Thermal, while not achieving much in the way of commercial success in their own right, had arrived on the radar of Linda Ronstadt, who recorded their track ‘How Do I Make You?’ and made it into the top ten. Unsurprisingly, then, Steinberg’s attention switched to writing songs for other people.
Alongside Kelly, though, the pair seemed to have something of a Midas touch, generating hits for a vast plethora of artists, spanning the spectrum from REO Speedwagon to the queen of pop herself, Madonna.
Starting as they meant to go on, the very first hit record the pair co-wrote together was Madonna’s legendary anthem ‘Like A Virgin’, which spent six weeks at number-one in the US, and set the standard for the songwriting duo going forward.
Four more number-one hits would follow, in the form of Cyndia Lauper’s ‘True Colors’, Whitney Houston’s ‘So Emotional’, along with ‘Eternal Flame’ by The Bangles and, finally, Heart’s ‘Alone’ – the latter of which the pair initially recorded themselves, under the name i-Ten, proving that their songwriting power did not necessarily translate to performance power or, indeed, a knack for creating good band names.
Inevitably, these iconic chart-topping tracks saw the pair occupy the epicentre of American pop back in the 1980s, and they poured a wealth of other hits into the charts, for the likes of Tina Turner, Cheap Trick, Bette Midler, and even Roy Orbison. Even if their own names aren’t known the world over, then, the pop landscape would be virtually unrecognisable without their songwriting efforts.
Once the pop heyday of the 1980s was at an end, Steinberg continued to write, crossing paths with the likes of Celine Dion and Mel C over the course of the 1990s. Meanwhile, Tom Kelly left the music industry entirely during the mid-1990s, providing an ending chapter to one of the greatest songwriting partnerships in pop history and, presumably, making a nice, peaceful life for himself with the aid of endless royalty cheques – and quite rightly, too.
