THE ALIEN, THE ARTIST, THE ACTOR,
Tony Visconti’s first date with David Bowie was a set up. The young American producer, who had gained a reputation for working well with ‘strange’ artists such as Marc Bolan, was asked to come in for a quick meeting with Bowie’s management to help out their erratic client. Little did he know, Bowie, 19 with a ginger helmet and head full of dreams, was sitting in the next room awaiting his new charge.
“We were supposed to have a business meeting for half an hour and we ended up spending about eight hours that day,” Visconti, now 71, recalls. The pair ended the meeting by taking in a screening of Roman Polanki’s A Knife in Water. “That’s how it’s always been,” he says. “I didn’t have any commercial success with him until about two years after I met him. That didn’t matter, we were good mates.”
Visconti and Bowie, who died of cancer at 69 early Monday morning, went on to create 14 albums together, an unmatched and remarkable run of era- defining creative milestones from 1969’s Space Oddity to Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, released just this past Friday. Through this body of work, Visconti says Bowie “elevated himself to the status of a rock god.”
“He’s got to be the most famous, i conic rock star in the world. I don’t think there’s anyone more famous than him,” he offers. “He’s a one man phenomenon. On many levels he’s outdone The Beatles.”
Currently on tour as part of the group Holy Holy, playing the entirety of Bowie’s 1970 album, Man Who Sold The World, Visconti credits Bowie’s work ethic for his longevity. “Bowie albums are statements unto themselves,” he says. “I don’t think we’d make a record if we didn’t feel like breaking boundaries. It’s our personal mandate.
“The way we approached recording is different than other people. He was much more open than any artist I’ve ever worked with. He hardly worried. He had this inner confidence that everything’s going to be fine. That everything is going to be an experiment. And you don’t say it’s finished until it’s finished. He doesn’t put any pressure on himself. I made 14 albums with him and he was the same guy.”
Towards the end of his life, Bowie retreated from public life. Following a 10year break, he released the rock album The Next Day in 2013, leaving Visconti to explain his motivations and intentions, including his decision not to tour, to the press. “He’d just had enough,” Vis- conti, who as recently as last week says he tried to convince Bowie to do a one- off simulcast show, recalls.
He says, despite reports of short recording bursts and in studio improvisation, Blackstar, Bowie’s final album, was typical of his recording style. Written six months before they entered the studio, Visconti says Bowie always loved jazz and was very keen to “just go there.”
Visconti also contradicts the theory that Bowie was inspired to write the album after listening to rapper Kendrick Lamar’s jazz- infused To Pimp a Butterfly. “During the making of the album we were playing a lot of the stuff that was out there. I think it’s normal, every time you make an album you want to briefly listen to your competition; what’s in the air, what’s the word on the street?” he says. “Lamar was one of t he people we listened to, and we were blown away by the production value of the album and the way he’s known as a hip hop artist but this was no ordinary hip hop album. It was cinematographic; it was almost a movie done in sound. So we were inspired by the way he broke his boundaries. But if you listen to Blackstar it’s nothing like Kendrick Lamar, but we did the equivalent in our genre. We’re making a rock/pop album and, like we always do, we really broke boundaries on this.”
Visconti says in the days leading up to Blackstar’s release, Bowie told him he’d been writing more “and that might mean there’s a new album.”
“He was unique in all the artists I work with. He wanted to be personally satisfied and he wanted to do something different all the time,” Victoni says. “And I went there with him. He led the way but I knew where he’s at. Almost on a telepathic level.”