When not working with Muse, Colliva is often active with Afterhours, one of Italy’s foremost rock acts, and his other credits include Mark Lanegan, Twilight Singers, Franz Ferdinand and a whole swathe of Italian acts. Colliva is now the band’s main tracking engineer and sometimes mixes their work too. This culminated in him setting up the band’s top–of–the–range studio near Lake Como, featuring an SSL 4048 G+ desk and tons of outboard, where most of The Resistance was recorded. Since going freelance, the Italian has spent a lot of his time with Muse, initially as the band’s chief equipment tech. It was a session that changed Colliva’s life. Colliva first met Muse and Costey in 2005, when they visited the studio to record overdubs for Black Holes And Revelations. In fact, his very first session as an assistant involved assisting Mutt Lange recording guitars for Twain’s 2002 album Up!. During this time he worked with acts like Erykah Badu, Shania Twain, Manu Chao and Muse. Starting as an assistant in 2002, he had graduated to Chief Engineer by the time he went freelance in 2006. Tommaso Colliva cut his engineering teeth at Officine Meccaniche, one of Italy’s most prominent recording studios. Although the guitars are more prominent than on previous albums, Drones still has plenty of keyboards and classical influences, and sounds very much like, well, Muse, not least because the band were assisted in the recording and mixing by two long–standing collaborators: engineer Tommaso Colliva, who has been the trio’s right–hand man for the last 10 years, and engineer, mixer and producer Rich Costey, who played a central role in the making of the band’s best–selling albums Absolution (2003) and Black Holes And Revelations (2005), and also mixed three songs on 2012’s The 2nd Law. Whether his involvement will elevate Drones to all–time classic album status remains to be seen, but it gave the band their fifth UK number one and first US chart–topper. Not only does Lange never give interviews, but such is his love of privacy that there are very photos of him in the public domain.
To get the best out of their power–trio approach, the band had enlisted producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, who has achieved living legend status through his work on classic albums by Def Leppard, AC/DC, Foreigner, Bryan Adams, Shania Twain and more. A concept album, apparently protesting about the immorality of drone warfare, it was presented by the band as a return to the guitar–bass–drums rock trio format of their early days.
Working on Muse’s hit album Drones gave Tommaso Colliva and Rich Costey unique insight into the extraordinary methods of hitmaking producer ‘Mutt’ Lange.įew releases in recent years have been as hyped as Muse’s seventh studio album Drones. Tommaso Colliva at his own Toomi Labs studio in London.
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