Tony Visconti
Music producer Tony Visconti recalls the caring and insecure sides of his greatest collaborator, David Bowie. By Craig McLean
‘David Bowie told me he couldn’t wait to get back in the studio’
For the past 50 years, Tony Visconti has produced some of the world’s greatest albums. He’s worked with Marc Bolan, Thin Lizzy and Morrissey, but it is his enduring partnership with David Bowie that made his name. Over five decades, they worked on 13 albums together, including Low and Heroes (both 1977), and Bowie’s last album
Blackstar, which was released days before his death in January.
Visconti continues to nurture talent, and he is now working on Guitar
Star, a Sky Arts talent show on which he is the chief judge. When we meet in London, he’s in raptures about the performers he’s seen, including a 15-year-old who is both a classical guitarist and an arranger.
Was Bowie himself a good guitarist, I ask.
“He was great,” says the 72-yearold New Yorker. “He plays some of the rhythm guitar on a lot of the tracks on Blackstar. And a little lead guitar, but he did it at home. He felt intimidated about playing the guitar in the studio. One of the reasons why he worked with me was because I was an old friend and he could just take all the time he wanted in the studio. But if there were too many professionals in the room, he felt like he wouldn’t play well.”
But it surely wasn’t just the well-worn friendship that made Bowie trust Visconti. The producer is known for his softly-softly approach and says he rarely had to go toe-to-toe with even his more characterful clients, and there were certainly a lot of those. He describes Bob Geldof as “having a little more edge on him than other people. But I’m from Brooklyn; nobody pushes me around.”
There was also Iggy Pop, who lived with Bowie in Berlin and whose antics, allegedly fuelled by amphetamines, have long been the stuff of legend. It sounds like a producer’s nightmare, but Visconti insists that it was a career highlight, that Iggy and Bowie “were doing nothing stronger than beer”.
Still, his relationship with Bowie wasn’t always plain sailing. “David and I had some words occasionally,” he says. One such occasion was the first day of the recording sessions for 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). “He came to the studio with nothing written. And at the time I was having trouble with my marriage to [Sixties pop star] Mary Hopkin. I just thought, ‘Oh, am I gonna waste all this time waiting for him to write a song in the studio?’ “So I called him out and he said: ‘Look, Tony, I can see you’re in a bad mood. Just go back to the hotel and I’ll come and see you later.’ And David came round, and said [tenderly]: ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said: ‘My marriage is breaking down!’ And he threw his arms around me and we had the greatest talk.”
Was his marriage to Hopkin a victim of his insane recording schedules?
“I was in bad shape,” he nods. “1977 or 1978 was one of the most successful years of my life, and I was never home. All my big stars had to record overseas for tax reasons. I wasn’t seeing my family, and I had a serious drinking problem. I was not addicted to cocaine, but the combination is horrible. I wasn’t much of a father, and certainly was a very, very bad husband. So, yeah, success led to the break-up.”
He got over the booze and the coke, though. Today he looks lean and fit and exudes a youthful energy.
Visconti and Bowie’s relationship deepened as the years progressed. In the last months of the singer’s life, the producer was one of the few in his inner circle who knew of the state of Bowie’s health. Even then, no one was prepared for the shock of his death from cancer. “He told me on the phone that he couldn’t wait to get back in the studio again. I said: ‘I’m on tour with [Bowie tribute act] Holy Holy, but wait till I’m off tour.’ David said: ‘Rightyho!’ That would have been happening in February.”
Bowie died in January, but not before telling his producer he’d recorded home demos of five new songs. Visconti hasn’t heard them, and isn’t even sure if they have vocals. “If they would give me access to his little portable recorder at home, I could find them. But I think everyone in the camp, including me, we’re in too much a state of grief now. There’s no immediate need to find these things.”
However, the offcuts from the album are very much in existence. They were all reassigned to Lazarus, the 2015 off-Broadway musical for which Bowie wrote the music and lyrics. But there are versions featuring Bowie’s vocals in existence and Visconti moots a Christmas release.
Yet in general he has no appetite for digging through the vaults and trying to pull together posthumous albums in the graverobbing manner that has blighted the legacies of Amy Winehouse, Jeff Buckley and Tupac Shakur.
“With Marc Bolan, they release everything they find, and I know for a fact that he was paranoid about that. And to some extent I think David would be very upset if people were just going through his stuff.
“The thing Jeff Lynne did with John Lennon,” he says, referring to Free as a
Bird, the 1995 reboot of a 1977 Lennon demo that was used as a trailblazer for The Beatles’ Anthology, “I’m very dubious about that. You could tell it was a Frankenstein thing, and that’s really what this would be – taking bits of a dead person and trying to make something alive out of it. I’m against it.”
Ask Tony Visconti what he gets from working on Guitar Star, and his answer is equally unequivocal: “It’s my legacy. I’ve got to leave something behind.”
You might think he’s given the world enough, but finding and nurturing talent is Visconti’s lifelong mission.
“I’ve got to get these people launched into the world,” he says of those he’s currently mentoring on the TV series. “I’ve got to make the record business a better place. We have to get very talented people making records again, and have the industry spend the same marketing money they would put on a piece of fluff. This is the future of our culture. You can’t degrade music to this extent and feel good about yourself. The Top 10 is just awful these days, apart from Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar, maybe.”
If David Bowie or Marc Bolan launched in 2016 as an 18-year-old hopeful, would they make it?
“Yes, they would,” says Visconti without hesitation. “Marc could be on Guitar Star, but you’d have to have a special show for David – he wasn’t that good a guitarist.” (This is a mischievous contradiction to what Visconti told me earlier.) “So you’d have to have Britain’s
Got Exceptional Talent – that’s the show David would be on!” he laughs. “And he had a good gimmick – he had different colour eyes. That would get him into the semi-finals.”