Listview Item / Subitem Background Colour

Looking for a way to set the colour of listview item and subitem colours.

looking through the forum it seems to be a terribly convoluted task.

I found this topic which looked promising, but it simply does not change the colour of any items or sub items at all.

Is that code very old or something?

EDIT:

Just to clarify, it is not enough for me to set the colour of the whole index item (row) I need to set sub item colours individually, and after the list view has been populated.