Billy Butt

Swedish music producer and record company director, born December 29, 1945 in Kenya. He is a well-known composer and producer in Sweden whose works have topped the Scandinavian charts for almost three decades. He was born in East Africa of Indian parents and grew up in Ireland where he attained a diploma at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. He also studied Music Production in the United States where he was a pupil of Les Paul junior in New York. His credits include the famous American Christmas song entitled It’s Christmas in New York. He moved to Sweden in 1983 where he has participated in the Swedish Melodifestivalen on several occasions as a writer and producer and won in 1988 with the song Stad i ljus that the international well-known artist Tommy Körberg sang. He was the producer of Swedish pop duo Katz. Billy has also discovered and launched the career of one of Sweden's major female artists Lisa Nilsson. About the same time he produced one of the biggest selling Swedish albums of the 1980's "Vingar" with Mikael Rickfors. In the mid 1980's Billy was chosen by the former Soviet Culture Department in Moscow to be the very first producer from a western country to jointly produce an album with a Soviet group. He worked with the Russian producer and composer Vladimir Matetsky and together they formed and produced the successful Russian group "Bazykina".