Morrissey Morrissey - Tony Visconti - The Autobiography - Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy

foreword by morrissey

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First published by HarperCollins 2007 This edition published 2007

Copyright © 2007 Tony Visconti

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Source ISBN: 9780007229451

Ebook edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007343577

Version: 2017-01-03

To Mom, Dad, Morgan, Jessica, Sebastian and Lara

Title Page Tony Visconti With Richard Havers Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy the Autobiography foreword by morrissey

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword, by Morrissey

Introduction

Prologues

Chapter 1 Birth, Bananas, Heroin and Marriage

Chapter 2 London Makes its Marc

Chapter 3 Variety is the Spice…

Chapter 4 It’s All Hype, Man

Chapter 5 Myths and Legends

Chapter 6 It’s the Same Ol’, Same Ol’

Chapter 7 Abroad and at Home

Chapter 8 The Low Down

Chapter 9 Ich Bin Ein Berliner

Chapter 10 All Change

Chapter 11 Modern Life

Chapter 12 Back to Basics

Chapter 13 Full Circle

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Many of the early records bearing Tony Visconti’s name made me eager to get out into the world—if only to agitate. In 1971-72 the mighty blaze of T.Rex singles were beyond price to me. They had all the immediate eager motion of pop records, but were also strangely reflective—a mad stew of Englishness and worldliness with Tony’s name on each side of the label. If you enjoyed the music of T.Rex it seemed to prove that you were someone. Here, it seemed, was Art in motion: guitar savagery chopping up the soundstage; pop with intellectual distinction, using full orchestra—if only for a mere twenty haughty seconds.

Making the T.Rex soundscape both fantastic and naturalistic was an abrasive clash of non-traditional routes to the pop conclusion. The wealth and detail and contrast of layered orchestration wrapped around the unravelled riddle of Marc Bolan’s poetry (well, let’s call it that) worked so well that Bolan stayed beside Tony almost until Bolan’s life ended with death. At its highest artistic peak, with the strange flood of ‘Telegram Sam’ and ‘Metal Guru’ we are assaulted by the musical equivalent of secret stairways and false walls, and something enters into me which I can barely fathom. I wanted pop music to be true, and it was with David Bowie’s LP The Man Who Sold the World, which enlivened 1972 as a forgotten reissue, edging up to #;26 in the British charts. It is a soft sound, with luxuriant confidence from Bowie, whose imagination was served by the Visconti methodology. Still, today, it stands as David Bowie’s best work. The first side, especially, is musical literacy delivered.

With Bowie, the tone and cadence are all there: no sentimentalism. The instrumental textures are wispy and often child-like; acoustic and recorder sounds of turn-of-the-’70s dropout London. The Bowie-Visconti vision is concentrated. A good producer gets at something in a singer (or musician) and Tony was there to nail the gift of Bowie just perfectly—making suffering sound like a superior condition—live this life or don’t live any. Listen to the album even now and you are right back there. The mavericks are those who liberate themselves, and Bowie and Visconti did so with The Man Who Sold the World… and we played our part by listening.

The Mael machinery of Sparks utilized Tony for their 1975 surgical offering, Indiscreet. The versifying of Ron Mael introduced a new style of pop poetry, and the scattershot pace of Russell Mael’s vocals sounded like someone running out of a burning house. Russell had been a T.Rex fan, and by 1975 it was Sparks themselves who were shaking public tastes . Indiscreet was their fifth album of great resonance, lunging to #18 in the chart. The sound of this album is so chaotic that it often seems to play for laughs. Either the Maels, or Tony Visconti, were asking : What can we show them that is new? From a tipsy teatime waltz to unstoppable violins, the pace pulverized the listener, and Russell’s mouth seemed unable to close. There are so many latitude and longitude instrumental textures that the masterstroke was just almost overcooked. Since Ron and Russell Mael were obviously insane, Tony could only have walked into this session armed with a swirl of guesswork. The disorder lay in the electronic savagery of the Maels, who had spent their early lives strapped to an iron bed. Pulling them back from the edge, Indiscreet (somehow a commercial venture) produced two riotously diverse hit singles.