Tony Visconti

Benji B

OK, we’re all very, very lucky to be here at this afternoon’s lecture. I know I feel very privileged and I know you do too. Please welcome Mr. Tony Visconti. (applause)

Tony Visconti

Thank you very much.

Benji B

Thank you for taking the time to be with us today. I feel that to get us in the mood we could start with a record.

Tony Visconti

Would you like a record to analyze or just a record?

Benji B

Whichever you like. Maybe you could play a record and tell us what you did to it afterwards.

Tony Visconti

OK, this is one of the most famous records I’m known for. You might have heard of it – it’s in every supermarket, every Macy’s. Here we go.

(music: T. Rex – “Get It On”/ applause)

I recorded that in 1971 at the Wally Heider studio in Los Angeles. No click tracks were used or computers because they weren’t invented yet. T. Rex had two hits in the UK. My boss back in the UK – I was in America at the time, visiting my mother and father – said, “We need an album. The current song in the charts is #1, it’s been #1 for three weeks.” We had no album in the can so I literally had to follow T. Rex across America and record them when I could. So we did three or four tracks in Manhattan and two tracks in Wally Heider’s. This song we just learned the night before in a hotel room. Marc had written it and the drummer heard it for the first time the night before. Then the next day we went to the backing singers’ house, which is Flo and Eddie from the Frank Zappa group. In a previous incarnation they were The Turtles, who sang “Happy Together.” These are very historical recordings, you might not even be aware of them.

So the rest of the band and myself, we all jammed on the song at a swimming pool in Los Angeles. You can’t get more rock & roll than this. We went in that night and recorded the backing track at Wally Heider’s – I’ve got a photo of that, but I’ll come back to that later – and Flo and Eddie sang backups that night. All the strings, the saxophone, the piano were added when the group came back to London and we went to a studio called Trident Studios, which was a real hallmark studio. It’s where Queen – not the Queen, she lives in Buckingham Palace – Queen made their records there, the Beatles, everybody.

We didn’t have any strings. There are strings on that record, but we didn’t have any strings written. But we did have strings on their two previous singles. So Marc and I got very superstitious and at the last minute we had a string section in the studio playing two other songs. All I could do on the spur of the moment was tell them all, the entire section, to play G, A and E on the chorus. I’m telling you, it made all the difference in the world. That was a slamming hit record in the United States, the UK, all over Europe. That was the first time I felt I’d done something worthwhile, that made everybody happy, that had artistic integrity and made a lot of money. (laughs)

Benji B

How would you describe your job on that record and in general?

Tony Visconti

I guess I’m an old-school producer, which defines me as the person who’s in charge of everything. The record label expected me to organize the studio time, get all the players in, rehearse the band, do pre-production. I work very closely with the band. I do what the label tells me to do but I work with the band because I’m a fellow musician and I know musicians have dreams and they want to get their stuff down on tape and that’s not an easy thing when you have to get everybody in the team on the same page. So I’m responsible for everything. But I think a record producer should know on some level – a high level, actually – all the jobs. I’m an engineer, I trained in engineering, I trained in classical composition, I used to dissect Beethoven symphonies and Mozart string quartets to figure out how they were done. That was part of my musical training.

From T. Rex days onwards I started to mix my own records too. The group and I knew what we wanted so why get a third party in who just came in from lunch? “Hey, what have we got here?” So I always wanted to make my recordings more sympathetic to the artist’s needs and desires. So I’ve been a mixer since that year, 1971.

Benji B

With that in mind do you think it’s more important to have a knowledge of music and arranging or a knowledge of the more technical, the engineering, in order to be a producer like yourself? Or is it essential to have both?

Tony Visconti

You don’t have to but I felt that I did. If I didn’t know what I was talking about, I think the other person could smell a liar, or a person who was just winging it. You speak to an engineer who’s been doing it for 15-20 years and say, “Can you make that guitar more twangy? Beef it up?” Everyone’s definition of beef is different, everyone’s definition of twang is different. But if you specifically say, “I want to boost at 3.5kHz and I want it to be wide or narrow – I just want to focus in on the plectrum hitting the strings.” It helps to talk a little bit technical to the engineer. For a start, you’ll get respect, so the engineer can’t pull any wool over your eyes either.

I made it my purpose to learn that job, the job of engineering. So when I had my own studio I did engineer, but now I don’t have a big studio with big rooms and all that, I like to hire an engineer to do my work for me. I don’t want to learn somebody’s studio in one day, to walk into a studio cold and learn how it works. So I use a freelance but I still mix my own stuff. So I thought it was very important to know the jobs.

When I wanted an arrangement, it helps a lot to put notes in front of musicians who can read notes. I know a lot of people nowadays use, say, a cellist and a violinist to play all the parts and you can get some really clever young people who can make up parts on the spot. But basically, you’re just sitting back and watching other people do their thing. If you have something in mind it’s much easier to convey it if you’re a musician yourself. Don’t necessarily have to read and write music, but if you can sit down and play a part to another musician, play it on a guitar, piano, sing it, all that helps. So I think you should get as much training as you can. It’ll make your work easier and you’ll have a longer career as a result.

Benji B

You’ve played bass on some very famous records and you’ve done some string arranging. Where is that line between producing, arranging and writing? When do you become a writer on a record?

Tony Visconti

For me, there is no line. It depends who I’m working with. Someone like David Bowie, he really appreciates musicianship in other people. He lets them shine, which is one of his gifts. He’ll control it, if it’s not going in a way that he likes, but he’ll let me do a lot of crazy stuff and he likes me to bring that out in other people as a producer. Whereas some people have very, very firm guidelines. They want to sound exactly one way; you can’t deviate if there’s a sound associated with them and they want you to improve it a little bit but not change it completely. So I’ll do less interference.

For instance, I worked with Morrissey, as a singer. He said, when it was time for his vocals, “All I want you to tell me is to sing louder or quieter.” “Fine, we’ll start out from that base.” That was just the vocals; he let me have my way with the band. I got the band to jump through hoops. But after he gained confidence in me, after a few days, I was able to give him a little more coaching than that. But if that’s all he wanted from me I was perfectly happy with that. I’m not going to dictate to a person who doesn’t want to be dictated to.

Benji B

Maybe you could talk to us about being the director when it comes to vocalists. In particular, working with stars, vocalists who might be difficult or might be a dream to work with like David was. How do you impose your view in the studio without being a dictator?

Tony Visconti

My view, first of all I take on the artist’s view. My view is that it all goes down well and sounds fantastic. With a person like Morrissey or Bowie, or anyone really, they come in with a passion, they’ve written the music – most people I work with write their own music – and they tell me what they want. I tell them ways I think we could improve that idea or elaborate. I work with them on their set of ideas. You can’t go in with a complete blank canvas, you have to have focus even before you step in the studio of how you expect the record to turn out. So you say, “I want the record to sound like this, I want it to have these elements.” That’s what you go for – you don’t go for the kitchen sink. I don’t believe in the kitchen-sink style of recording. In fact, I believe in doing the most with the least amount of instruments. That’s arranging. The exception to the rule might be Phil Spector, who did throw the kitchen sink in, but he did it well, didn’t he?

Back to singers, I know for instance some singers don’t have an operatic voice. So I won’t try to get them to go like (high voice), but I work within what a singer does have. I find immediately, within an hour or two, hopefully before the project starts, what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are. You’d be surprised. If a person doesn’t have a great voice, there’s something they have, some reason why they were signed, and you find that personality in their voice and that’s the thing you work on. You don’t tell them they’re a terrible singer if they can’t hit exceptionally high notes or if they sing out of tune a lot. Out of tune you can control actually, just by making a singer relaxed. It’s usually nerves and tightening of the neck that makes a singer sing out of tune. So I have to calm things down and that’s how I get my best results.

Benji B

We were lucky enough to have a lecture from Mr. Trevor Horn last week and when someone challenged him ask asked how you avoid lying to a vocalist, he replied, “What are you talking about? I always lie.” What’s your approach? How do you get the best out of a performance when you’re not getting it?

Tony Visconti

I wait till the nerves die down, I wait it out. I go through a few takes, just to warm them up. I can’t really describe how I do it, but I just usually have a good relationship with people, I kind of meld with them. I don’t know how you do that, except being sympathetic to their feelings. Vocalists have feelings. I will push them, however, if they give me a wimpy performance and it’s a big powerful song. They wrote it. I’ll say, “Why aren’t you singing it they way you wrote it?” But I won’t say it so directly.

Benji B

How many takes are you giving them? Are you a person that asks them to record and record infinitely or do you limit it to a number?

Tony Visconti

I like to limit it, otherwise it’s unfair. Every vocalist wants some direction, that’s why they hire me. They don’t hire me to comp their vocals, to just say, “Let’s record 30, 40, 50 vocals then you go home and I’ll tune everything.” I’m not from that school. I can do that, but I don’t like to do that. I’d rather work with a singer and have a great relationship with them, give them feedback, tell them to sing the third verse over again, maybe improvise the melody a bit. All that stuff is coaching and that’s what I’ve gained from years of experience.

I’ve asked people to go and rewrite their choruses, and you have to have balls to do that and you have to say it in a nice way, because the chorus might go nowhere. I feel like if I don’t say things like that, the buck stops with me. If I don’t say it, nobody’s going to say it. Then you’ll be riding on a crest of bullshit. (laughter) So they hire me as a producer, I’ve got to call the shots on that level, if it’s not coming off well, it’s not honest, I’m not feeling it. I have to say things like that. And I know that’s a hard thing to do, very hard thing to do.

Benji B

Talking of that, are you quite strict in that you have to have things rehearsed and ready when you walk into the studio, so it’s a question of performing them? Or are you more from the school of working things out once you’re in the studio environment?

Tony Visconti

If we’ve got a decent budget I like to do about two or three days of studio pre-production, just go over every song a few times. Before that I’ll have notes, make suggestions, and try them out in pre-production. But I love to leave about 50% of the production ideas until we get into the studio and start working. The environment in the studio is very different from a rehearsal studio, where everything’s playing loud and you might record the rehearsal on a two-track recorder.

In the studio everything’s under a microscope. Suddenly, for the first time you hear everything clearly and big, you can zoom in on detail. I’m not talking about a computer, but with your ears. You just focus in. I’ve been in a situation with two guitarists where one guitarist didn’t know that the other guitarist was playing a different chord at a certain point, because they play so loud on stage. In the studio they start adjusting to each other and understanding it. So I like to leave about 50% of those decisions to the moment in the studio.

Benji B

It’s interesting you talk about making almost destructive decisions in the process of recording. The majority of the participants involved in the Academy have experience of working alone at a computer, which is in many ways the modern term producer. But in the live environment, how important is the element of performance? The interaction between live musicians, making decisions along the way of what to keep and what to leave for good?

Tony Visconti

I have to go on for about two minutes about that. I have to set that one up, it won’t take very long. I produced a song by David Bowie called "Heroes". Are you familiar with that? They use it for every heroic event, although it’s a song about alcoholics. Everyone loves "Heroes", you know? So I produced that and we did it on 24 tracks in Hansa studios. It’s a super production, you’ll hear backing vocals and all kinds of instruments on it.

We had one track left for the vocal. Talk about destructive recording. So he’d do a vocal and we’d listen to it and he’d say, “I think I’ve got one better.” And I’d say, “Well, you know we can’t keep that take.” It was before digital recording. So he’d pull his socks up, take a deep breath and go and do a better take than the one he did before. And that was it, it was gone, the previous vocal was gone. We kept doing that. Having experience in the studio, you had to know when to say, “I think we’ve got the take.” There’s no way of going back to take five or take two; they were gone, evaporated.

I did a lot of records that way. That’s when you work as a team, as a producer, a coach, a singer, an artist, everybody’s on the same page and everyone is just hyped up with adrenaline. This is such a good experience. I find this almost completely lacking in today’s recording styles. I lecture students at NYU in New York and I’ve been scratching my head. How do we do this? We all know that we have playlists and we can save everything that’s recorded now, from the first groan on day one to the last scream on day seven. We can save all those things. What I think is that what we did by having the destructive recording, was that we knew this was going to be an eternal recording; it was going to outlive us. This recording we were making is going to become tomorrow’s history.

Knowing that, you should really pump up your adrenaline. It’s not about doing takes, takes, takes and then just comping, comping, comping. There’s no passion in that, there’s no energy in that. So what I asked my NYU students to do is think about that before they go in front of a mic, to think, “The performance I’m going to do is going to outlive me. I want people 50 years from now to hear what I’m singing. If it’s no good it’ll be thrown away. If it’s great, people 50 years from now will hear my voice singing this song.” So it’s almost a mantra, you have to really hype yourself up to get that thing we used to get with destructive recording. So there, I’ve said my two minutes.

Benji B

Can we listen to that vocal take?

Tony Visconti

You want to hear “Heroes”?

Benji B

Yeah.

Tony Visconti

Let me just say one thing. We worked in Hansa, which was a studio where you record symphony orchestras, you can have about 150 pieces in this room, and here was David Bowie standing in this enormous auditorium. Every time he sang, he could sing very loud and his voice was echoing off the walls and the ceiling and everything. I said, “Could you give me half an hour? I want to set up two microphones.” So I set up a U-47, Neumann U-47, in front of him. And then about 15-20 feet away I set up something like a 67, then way down the hall I set up another condenser microphone. I only had one track left, so I couldn’t record these microphones on separate tracks. What I did is put a gate on microphone two and another gate on microphone three, so when he sang like this (deep voice) those microphones wouldn’t open up, you wouldn’t hear the ambience in the room. When he sang like this (loud voice), the middle microphone would open up and when he went (screams) – that’s called Bowie histrionics – all three microphones would open up and the reverb you hear on this recording is only that room. God bless him, he lets Tony do his thing. So I did my thing, he did his thing and this is the result.

Just one more thing. You’ll hear some backing vocalists and they were done by two people only. One person has a British accent the other has a Brooklyn accent, so you can figure out who’s singing what. I’m the Brooklyn guy.

(music: David Bowie – “Heroes” / applause)

It’s exciting. When you do things like that you think, “Wow! I’m glad I’m alive today.” (laughs)

Benji B

So as you say, we hear a British voice and a Brooklyn voice, originally from Brooklyn, New York. But you go on to become an honorary Londoner at one point in your life. Do you want to tell us about the transition from the early days in New York and making the move to the UK?

Tony Visconti

In New York I always wanted to be in the record business, but it’s probably the toughest city to break into. I did some forays into session work; I never really produced in New York. I met a songwriter and I met my future boss by the water cooler in my publisher’s office. He said (British accent), “Hello.” I said, “You’re English.” He said, “Yes.” “Well, you’re the first English person I’ve ever met.” He said, “What do you do here?” I said, “I’m the house record producer, I’m just doing demos for my publisher.” He said, “Well, you’re my American cousin, I’m the house producer for this company in the UK.” So his name was Denny Cordell and he said, “Shall I play you something?” I said, “Of course.”

We found a room with a turntable and he put on an acetate of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” – he’d just produced it, it wasn’t even released yet. It just blew my mind that something so beautiful and soulful could come out of the UK. I was used to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It was fantastic. So I helped him out that day with a recording session. He came totally unprepared and he recorded cats like Clark Terry on trumpet. I said, “I’ve got to see this session, I’ve got to see the music.” He said, “I have no music.” I said, “What are you going to do?” “I’m going to play the demo and they’re just going to come up with an arrangement.” I said, “This is New York, Denny. You’ll get charged triple for that.”

So I listened to his demo and it already had horn and trumpet parts on it. So I wrote out the parts very quickly, wrotevout the chord changes, and where the drums would have to stop and where they’dvcontinue again. This is for about eight pieces. He hired top session players, the top guys, who I’d only read about, never met them. So we xeroxed this one sheet of music, ran down the street, put it in front of Clark Terry, great trumpet player. They looked it over and did a few run-throughs and it was done in three takes.

I said, “Denny, by the way, how do you do this in the UK? How do you expect it to happen?” He says, “Well, everybody kind of saunters into a room, we roll a spliff, we listen…” I said, “No, no, no, not New York in the ’60s.” He expected those people to hang out eight to ten hours to do this one song. So anyway, he looks at me with great admiration in his eyes and says, “Would you fancy working with me in the UK, in London?” I said, “Oh my God.” I pinched myself because at that time pop music in New York in America basically was very bland. The only really good stuff was coming out of the UK, the Beatles and Stones and all that. So I jumped at the opportunity and I had to beg my boss to let me go to learn how the Brits do it.

I was only going to stay for six months. When I arrived I was working night and day on his sessions. He would leave me with Procol Harum while they were making their album and he’d go off and do something else. I didn’t have that much experience but I couldn’t let this man down. He believed in me so much. Production 101, on the spot, I got laughed at and ridiculed. Also, the British take the piss. Where I come from in Brooklyn those are fighting words. Someone takes the piss with a Brooklyn guy you punch him. So I didn’t understand the culture, but I made it through the first week. I didn’t meet him, but the first week I saw Jimi Hendrix jam in a nightclub about three feet from me. He got up on the stage in the dark, picked up a guitar and jammed.

Every day I had to pinch myself that this was really happening. I heard the white label pressing of Sgt. Pepper’s three months before it was released. This guy came to Denny’s apartment at midnight, took the white label out from under his coat, we rolled down the shades, made a huge joint and listened to the Beatles record three months before it came out. This all happened in the first week. So the six months was up and I stayed 22 years. (laughter) I didn’t want to go home.

Benji B

So what year was it that you moved to London?

Tony Visconti

This would be ’67. I’d just turned 22 and I stayed till ’89.

Benji B

You mentioned the Beatles a couple of times. Clearly, you had a break and a mentor production-wise, but did you have a production hero before? I can imagine the work of George Martin being quite influential.

Tony Visconti

George Martin was my hero and I’ll tell you why. Because I played in high school in a symphony orchestra. I played jazz, I played double bass, we used to go to Greenwich Village and jam. And I was a really steaming bass player, I could play very fast and very hard. I didn’t know what I was. I could play rock & roll. At church dance I’d pick up the guitar and play Chuck Berry stuff. And I didn’t know what I was. Was I a jazz guy? Should I be classical? I took lessons on the bass, I think I played Schubert’s first symphony in the bass section.

Then when I heard George Martin and the Beatles I said, “That’s what I am, I’m George Martin. Only I’m a kid from Brooklyn.” I have to work with people who need all these services. They need an arranger, an engineer, a bass player, a backup singer, a tambourine player, I’m all those people. So I kind of found myself by going to the UK and one of the greatest moments of my life was when I actually got to meet George Martin. And I worked with almost every Beatle – all except John Lennon, and with John Lennon I spent the most memorable night of my life.

Benji B

Can you tell us about it?

Tony Visconti

Sure, it’s a very funny story. It involves a lot of drug talk. (laughter) I don’t know if you guys want to hear it, don’t know if you’re ready for the big time (laughter). No, I do not condone the use of drugs, I’ve been straight edge now for 12 years. But I’ll tell you this one funny story. We’re making Young Americans and Bowie is very nervous. He phoned me up and says, “Lennon is coming to my room tonight and I wish you were there because I’m very nervous. I want you to buffer our meeting.” Those were the exact words – “could you buffer our meeting?” Like an aspirin.

So I arrive, I knock on the door and there’s a lot of shuffling behind the door. They said, “Who is it?” I said, “It’s Tony.” They thought I was the police, because when I went in there was a huge mountain of cocaine on the coffee table. This was the Himalayas, a peak in the Andes, a lot of damn cocaine. So they’re all chipping away. If the police did raid that would’ve been something you’d have read about; a very, very big bust. So Bowie is very shy, he’s still not talking to John Lennon, he’s sketching on a notepad, avoiding any eye contact with Lennon.

So I can’t believe my luck, I’ve got John Lennon all to myself. “What’s the first chord on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’? Can you show me?” That was question one. No, first of all I said, “Do you mind if I ask you some questions?” (Liverpool accent) “No, go ahead.” So I asked him about a hundred questions and we got on really great, chipping away at the mountain of cocaine. The Cognac was free flowing. Those are the two major drugs that fueled rock & roll. Anyone who tells you they didn’t do this is a complete liar, but it was a ’70s kind of thing.

So finally John said, “Hey David, do you have another one of those pads?” So David ripped it in half. John Lennon, of course, was a great artist himself, so this was amazing to see the two of them sketching each other. They were drawing sketches of each other, ripping the page off then doing another one. This went on until about 10 AM, it kind of ended with the “What’s the meaning of life?,” that kind of talk. And we were all, “I just want to go to bed. I drank too much, had too much coke.”

So that was one of the best nights I ever had. This was ten hours of conversation. I can’t get into every detail, but it was a lot of fun. He was a very open man, a very good man, he didn’t put on any airs. He was one of the biggest stars who ever lived and he could’ve been a real asshole.

Benji B

Clearly, the Beatles were a huge influence. What was it about George Martin’s production that unlocked the door for you, that made you say, “I can do that, I can be a record producer, I want to do what he does”?

Tony Visconti

Two records. Up until Revolver, the Beatles pretty much made pop songs, but then on Revolver they made songs that took you into an inner world. They were using LSD, acid, and they didn’t hide that fact. If you look at the cover of Revolver it says, “Take drugs, take drugs, drop acid, listen to me.” So I did, and my God! They call it Revolver. Records used to have two sides. So it got to the second side and John Lennon would chant “In the beginning, in the beginning.” I was on acid so I would flip it over and play the beginning. I realised I had done that about 50 times until I came down in the morning and said, “I better stop listening to this damn record.” Of course I was hallucinating like mad. Those days were great, weren’t they? (laughter)

So this album, Revolver, I knew there was something going on other than the four Beatles, there is somebody else, and that is George Martin. He was the one that was translating. They must have been effed up in the studio, really crazy, and somebody kept it all together and that was George Martin. So it was that album and a single called “Strawberry Fields Forever” that, again, I said, “That can’t just be the Beatles, somebody else is involved.” And also “Eleanor Rigby.” It was probably one of the most beautiful string arrangements ever written and that’s all George Martin, it’s all down to him.

Benji B

Phones off please, that would be great.

Tony Visconti

How did they know I was here? (laughs)

Benji B

Can we listen to a little bit of “Eleanor Rigby,” maybe just a snippet?

Tony Visconti

Yeah, they must have heard all these, but...

Benji B

Of course, but when you’re listening with different ears and to the arrangement, it’s good to hear it.

(music: The Beatles – “Eleanor Rigby”)

Tony Visconti

Reee-spect! (laughs)

Benji B

Apart from the amazing songwriting of Lennon and McCartney, when you analyse that record with your early producer hat on, which part of that is the Beatles and which part is George Martin?

Tony Visconti

The Beatles are most likely responsible for the vocal arrangement and they were blessed with four lead singers in the group. You rarely find that nowadays. The arrangement was definitely the George Martin side. This is the most obvious example of who the Beatles are. And of course, the great song was written by Paul McCartney on, I believe, a piano. He’s very versatile, I’ve worked with him, extremely versatile. Never makes a mistake; that’s sickening, he never makes a mistake. I did a session with him, he played for three hours and never made a mistake, it just got better and better. Anyway, that’s an example of how I see a producer and a group working, that’s the way I modelled my own career.

Benji B

I’m still laughing about the John Lennon story. Let’s go straight to you in London and meeting arguably the two most important connections of your musical journey, Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Which came first? Do you want to tell us about that exciting period in your life as a young record producer?

Tony Visconti

Marc Bolan came first, but only by about a month. My boss, Denny Cordell, I worked with him, I assisted him on his productions and I started mixing his productions. I mixed Joe Cocker’s “A Little Help from My Friends” and most of that album. I wasn’t mixing for very long. There’s a certain advantage to being young and from another city. He said, “Now you have to find a group of your own.” And I noticed every week in Time Out, which used to be an underground newspaper, a four-sheet newspaper, and weekly there was a UFO club every Wednesday night on Tottenham Court Road in London and there was a group called Tyrannosaurus Rex. I said, “I’m going to check this group out, because who would name themselves Tyrannosaurus Rex?” Everyone was, like, Joe and The Mighty Heap or something, very common names, and Tyrannosaurus Rex was very unusual.

This was the day I was told to find a band of my own. I go down the steps of the UFO club and I hear this music coming up the stairwell and I went, “I love this already. I haven’t even seen them and I love it.” It was just acoustic guitar, clay bongo drums and Marc was singing. I don’t know if you remember his voice, but he had a wobble in his voice and he over-pronounced is words so much I actually thought he was singing in French, I didn’t even think he was English. And he was beautiful. I thought the club was empty because I didn’t hear people screaming or anything. There were about 200 kids in there, quiet as a mouse, listening to every nuance of his voice. I came to England to find the Beatles and instead I found this little folk duo.

One thing I did realize, even though he was using an acoustic guitar and bongo drums, they were playing rock & roll. And later on Marc explained to me, “I always wanted to play rock & roll but this is all I could afford. I could only afford a £12 guitar.” Steve, his partner, Steve Peregrin Took, would find all his instruments on the street, Portobello Road, just in trash bins and stuff. It was a great experience to find them. They came the next day to my offices, played to Denny and me, and he said, “OK, I like them, we’ll take them on as our token underground group.” We had to have one of everything. I didn’t see the philosophy of that at all. I thought they were more than a token underground group, I thought Marc Bolan was a star, it was so obvious he was a star.

So we made about three or four albums as Tyrannosaurus Rex. They were all hits, but minor hits, but it brought in enough money to warrant another album and the electric guitar started to appear, especially on an album called Unicorn. You could hear the rock sound of Tyrannosaurus Rex emerging, but the only thing was the name was too difficult for DJs to pronounce. Can you imagine? Well, you know how DJs can be. (laughter) They couldn’t pronounce Tyrannosaurus Rex. No pun intended. No, you’re smart. Everybody lays claim to the fact, “I changed it to T. Rex.” “No, I changed it to T. Rex.” We all did in a way. I couldn’t write Tyrannosaurus Rex in my diary every day, so I’d abbreviate it. But when we changed the name to T. Rex and we made a record called “Ride a White Swan,” we were on the map, we had a hit.

It wasn’t so easy with Bowie. A month after I met Marc Bolan, my other boss – I had two bosses – David Platts said, “You seem to be good with the stranger artists.” I don’t know how he put it – odd artists. And he played me a record by David Bowie and it was his first record, I think called The Man of Music. Every track sounded completely different. It was like Anthony Newly, stage musicals, British musicals. Then he’d have a folk tune, then a brass band song. I said, “You’re right, he’s odd, he’s all over the map.” He said, “Would you like to meet him?” I said, “Yes, I would.” The only thing I really heard on that album was his magnificent voice. Even at 19 he had one of the most powerful voices I’d ever heard.

He was in the next room, it was all a set up, I met him in the next room and we got on like a house on fire. We just couldn’t stop talking. We had similar interests, like we both loved Gerry Mulligan, we both loved Little Richard, we both loved Chuck Berry. And then weird things like a spoken word artist called Ken Nordine. You’ve gotta look this guy up, it’s like poetry in jazz, basically. And the Fugs, an underground group from America called The Fugs, who were the first group to use cuss words, like the word that John Lennon said in their music.

So instead of getting down to music, we walked in the Kings Road and saw a movie together, Knife in the Water by Roman Polanski, I’ll never forget it. Then we said goodbye to each other at about 9 PM. So I made a couple of years of disastrous demos with him and he was hard to break. He was really, really hard to break. He still couldn’t focus on one style. When the world finally caught up to him, that was a good thing. But in the beginning, we have to know if this guy’s a rock & roller, if he’s a folk singer. You had to be very specific in those days. Even now. “Well, I’m kind of all over the place.” It wouldn’t do. People want to pigeonhole you immediately. It was so then and it is so now. So that’s how I met the both of them.

Benji B

If you look at the Berlin albums, which we’ll get onto later, that proved he was able to do everything on one record. Instrumental music as well as hits. But what was the lay-up record, the one where it all came together and gave him the stardom and the notoriety to be able to have the confidence to be able to do that later down the line.

Tony Visconti:

Well, it wasn’t “Space Oddity” because he wrote “Space Oddity” and then he never wrote another song like it. It was actually released three times before the DJs picked it up. I think because of the moon, the astronauts orbited the moon. And I said, “You’re not going to write another song like that.” And he didn’t, he couldn’t and he didn’t have an immediate hit after that. We went into the studio and made one of my favorite Bowie albums.

It wasn’t all that important to have a hit single in those days. The album era had begun; people were buying albums and all albums had a theme. Unlike today, there was something running through it. So he wrote this amazing album called The Man Who Sold the World. As a bass player that’s one of my proudest moments; my bass is all over that album like a cheap suit. And very high in the mix, I might add. (laughter) His music was great.

The Man Who Sold the World, of course a lot of younger people think Kurt Cobain wrote that song because he had a famous unplugged version of it. But it’s an original Bowie song. On that record alone I played three basses – a bowed bass, a plucked bass, and I double-tracked it. I borrowed an eight-string bass from a music store, a Hagström, like a 12-string guitar. I had it for one day and I managed to get it on that track. So if you listen to that you’ll find the low-end is very strange.

Benji B

Was it the chemistry between the two of you that went onto form such a fruitful relationship or was it Scary Monsters when it really gelled?

Tony Visconti

Eventually it did. We actually split up after that. We were frustrated. I couldn’t help him and also he went with a manager I completely hated. I despised the person he went with and that was the dividing line. I knew the man to be very dishonest and I don’t mind telling you – no, I shouldn’t tell you his name, this will be on fucking Youtube (laughter) – so he went on to make Hunky Dory with the last engineer that I used, Ken Scott, which is a lovely album. Hunky Dory is one of my favorite Bowie albums that I didn’t produce; it’s just one great song after another.

But it wasn’t until we got together again on Diamond Dogs and it’s almost as if we never stopped communicating. Over the years we’d have a few phone calls together, but Diamond Dogs sounds so much like The Man Who Sold the World in concept, wildness and craziness, surreal soundscapes and all that. So that’s where we actually hooked up. In all I’ve done about ten Bowie albums.

Benji B

It’s probably relevant to listen to something from the early albums. Shall we listen to something from The Man Who Sold the World, just to get the vibe of how that sounds?

Tony Visconti

Sure. “She Shook Me Cold” – that’s where we’re doing our... (pause) What’s Eric Clapton’s band? Cream. We’re doing our Cream best.

(music: David Bowie – “She Shook Me Cold” / applause)

Thank you very much. It was the guitarist Mick Ronson, who we’d just started to work with, he got me first of all to buy a Marshall... Was it a Marshall? I don’t know. But it was a 200W head on my bass amp. I was playing through four 15-inch speakers, which was amazing in those days, and he said, “Just turn it up and play loud.” He was a kind of 11 guitarist, he would turn everything up to 11. Mick was really responsible for turning us into rock & rollers.

Benji B

If we fast-forward to Scary Monsters, which I know is a record you love.

Tony Visconti

I love it. I love it!

Benji B

Why do you love it so much? Tell us about making that record.

Tony Visconti

We had a standing joke. When David and I went to the studio we’d say, “Let’s make this our Sergeant Pepper’s.” Because Sergeant Pepper’s was the best Beatles album, or the most produced, the trickiest. Then after two or three albums we just made a joke, “OK, this’ll be our Sergeant Pepper’s.”

So we went in with Scary Monsters with the same joke and it turned out really great. The critics went nuts for it, the artists copied us, it started the new romantic movement in London. It was a breakthrough on many, many levels. The Berlin albums set it up; we learned a lot from those three Berlin albums. Every track, I just love it. I can say that I got everything done, everything that was in our heads, I got it.

So here’s a song we were going to throw out. We were on the last day, we were mixing actually, and he said, “I can’t finish this song.” I said, “You’re crazy. It’s such a great backing track.” I’ll play you an earlier form of it. He wrote it with his rhythm section, Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis. They jammed on this song in Jamaica. So until he wrote the lyrics, I sent him home to write the lyrics, they called this song Jamaica. So the hook was (sings) hmm, hmm, hmm Jamaica. You obviously know this as another song. Thank you. That’s more or less as it ended up except we later put on Robert Fripp, famous guitarist, on guitar on what eventually came out to be “Fashion.” And a keyboard player who you hear in there. Believe it or not, this was going to be thrown out because he couldn’t come up with a lyric. God knows where he got it, but he came back the next day with “Fashion.” Here’s what it turned into.

By the way, you’ll hear a background woop, woop, woop. The keyboard player we used had a sequencer, and believe it or not, that was his click track. I don’t know why someone programmed this to be a click track, but it was such a great sound that we started the song with it. This is one of those decisions you make on the spot in the studio. We didn’t plan this, it was just right in front of us and we used it.

(music: David Bowie – “Fashion” / applause)

Thank you. That amazing guitar solo was Fripp on three tracks and during the mix we did many, many passes at this. In those days we didn’t have computers. We would do passes and record them onto quarter-inch tape. If you look at the actual mix of “Fashion” you’ll find there’s about 16 to 20 edits in it because all those bits were done separately and then edited in. So the solo, David sat at the mute button on my console and he’d press it. Fripp would play one thing, he’d slam down and then switch over to the next track that Robert Fripp played, so even the selection of those three solos was random. It was, “Let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this.” It was quite modern for its time. I was always recording these passes on stereo-mix tape. There’s a lot of adventure on that recording, a lot of seat-of-your-pants stuff.

Also, it’s the first time Dennis Davis asked to play to a beatbox, so we got out a Roland and you can actually hear it in there. I thought it was unusual because no one can keep time like Dennis Davis. I’ve checked him out; he’ll start the song at 120 BPM and he’ll end the song at 120 BPM, he’s just so good. But he’s a lovely nutty guy and he played to the beatbox, he played around it. That’s all his kickdrum, but I reduced the beatbox to a very narrow mid-range frequency. So it’s in there for the fake maracas and the fake claves, but the bulk of it is just Dennis Davis having lots and lots of fun.

We recorded that song about four months before we did the final mix, so nobody knew what they were playing. No one knew it was gonna be “Fashion,” it was just a jam on Jamaica and a beatbox.

Benji B

The reason I thought it’d be cool to play those two examples, The Man Who Sold the World came out in 1970, right? And the record we just heard was from 1980. And in that decade, obviously there’s a very important trilogy of records that Bowie fans around the world love and are very influential, which we must talk about. But I think the way we’ll end up there is maybe by talking about the technology – I know you love to geek out about gear and tech stuff. In that decade alone it changed quite dramatically. I know you’ve got some photos, maybe we can talk through the timeline of your studio life in London and the UK.

Tony Visconti

The photos. Well, we have a problem.

Benji B

Yeah, apologies for the display.

Tony Visconti

... My first studio. The tape recorder on the left belonged to my father, I appropriated it to myself. He lost it; it was mine. Then I got a stereo Panasonic tape recorder which had this thing called Sel-sync, so you could record on, say, track one, play it back and record on track two. I went from this machine, where I’d record my basic track, and I might have a drummer in my apartment, musicians, and we’d bounce that over to track one of the Panasonic and then add a guitar as the bounce is going. So you had two or three musicians on the first pass and on the second pass I’m adding something live. Les Paul started that way until... Clever, clever man. He invented the eight-track.

Then on the second track, I’d add another instrument or a vocal, listen to the whole track on that, then I would bounce both tracks back to this mono machine and go on until it was crapped out and it was extremely lo-fi. But I tried to reach the point just before it became lo-fi. The demos that I made on these two machines got me my publishing deal and eventually I became a record producer because of this set-up. There’s this little thing you can see here: It’s a three-input mixer my friend built, just three guitar jacks stuck in there, and it was a passive mixer. But it worked, because I would put the two tracks of this machine into that mixer and the third track would be a microphone and then I’d bounce it all back to that machine. So that’s how I started out, humble beginnings.

One incredible thing was my friend Bruce, who lived around the corner, took me to Atlantic Records. This is where they made some of the great Aretha Franklin records. That’s the Atlantic Records console – you’ll notice it’s just three meters. They used to record directly to tape. In those days the tape machines had mic inputs, so you’d buy an eight-track Ampex tape recorder. They had mic inputs. So on an Aretha Franklin, which I heard recorded on that machine in that studio, Tommy Cogbill on bass, his microphone would be plugged right into one of those channels and he’d use the volumes at the front as an attenuator. Her mic was plugged directly into another track, the piano was plugged directly into another track, the drums were always recorded on one track. Tommy Dowd put a microphone up years ago, like in the ’50s, early ’60s, and you must not touch that mic. The kickdrum has to be right where he says you put it and if you listen to “Respect,” which was recorded in this studio, it sounds fantastic. The drum sound is great, the bass sound is great. So it was direct to tape, bypassing any console. They didn’t have the fancy preamps that we have now.

So I got to hang out in that studio a little bit and I actually had the balls to tell Arif Mardin… He wanted to know what was wrong with… He did the score to “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” and he came in on a playback. I was supposed to keep quiet. I was sitting at the back of the studio, and he said, “Something’s wrong with it, I can’t put my finger on it.” I whispered to my friend Bruce Turgeson, “The French horns are out of tune.” So Bruce turns around and he goes (loudly), “Hey, my friend Tony says the French horns are out of tune.” I thought I was going to be thrown out the window. But Arif, who was a lovely kind man, said, “He’s absolutely right, I’ll ask them to tune up.” So I feel in some small way I contributed to that, so every time you hear (imitates French horn part), I told them they were out of tune.

Benji B

Did you get to meet Ahmet Ertegun?

Tony Visconti

Yes, I did in later years. It was very hard not to meet Ahmet Ertegun. In New York he was the man, just like everywhere. So from those humble beginnings I had home studios that were based on tape. There’s another one of my home studios. I made a patch bay from plywood – I believe in the direct approach. (laughs) I had a four-track Teac, a two-track Revox. In the ’70s, if you were a professional you owned a Revox machine and you could bring your copy master home and listen to the analog tape at any speed, like at 59ps.

I had an eight-track Tascam, so I did some crazy demos on this, but this is my control room, this is where we mixed “Fashion.” That’s a Trident TSM console. All the EQ is on faders. This is the EQ section right here and they are overlapping frequencies. There are four bands of EQ and my friend Malcolm Toft, who taught me how to engineer, is now making this. He designed the circuits and you can buy the channels now. It’s the sound of rock & roll, all the Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust” stuff went through this kind of EQ. Queen went through that EQ. I had a desk full of this stuff, about 40 channels of it. This is a tape recorder made in Denmark, it’s called a Lyrec. It was like a cheaper version of the Studer, but it served me well. Eventually, it was replaced by other machines. I had this on my outboard gear, my 1176s and all that.

This was a nice safe haven because all my rock star musician friends had tax situations where they had to record on the sneak in the UK. They weren’t allowed to record in the UK; they would be taxed heavily if they recorded in the UK. So I did a lot of albums in this studio I couldn’t get credit for because we would blow our cover. That was one of the happiest situations of my life because this was when I was engineering full time, too. I knew my studio, I knew it well. I was like the Tommy Dowd in a way: Put the drums there, I know how to get a killer sound. Put the guitar amps there and all that. And I had a great collection of microphones. I had two valve U-47s, which I got from an auction at Shepperton studios.

Shepperton was a film studio and it closed and they auctioned off all their gear. The first bid was, “What do I hear for two Neumann U-47 microphones?” And the British being very laid back and shy, nobody was raising their hands. I said, “£100.” “OK, do I hear £150?” Nobody would outbid me. “Gone for £100.” The next pair went for £2,000! Everybody was, “I want one, I want one!” But they were afraid to... I thought I’d pay £500, I would’ve paid £1,000. But my mic arsenal was fantastic. When I sold the studio in ’89 I had to sell most of this stuff.

Benji B

You raised a great point in talking about the cost of everything. Clearly, you’re standing proud in your studio. Where was that? Dean Street?

Tony Visconti

This was in Dean Street in Soho, between Old Compton and Shaftesbury Avenue.

Benji B

Which is still a famous studio, but how do you go from having a home studio to being able to afford to buy/rent a studio like that with all the gear you need?

Tony Visconti

This studio was actually not all that expensive. I’m not bragging, you know I had hit records, so I had a bad tax year where I was going to get hit very heavily for a lot of taxes. So I went to my accountant and he said, “Spend it. Don’t give it to the Queen, spend the money.” So I built this studio, I found the premises and I always had this little home studio and I dumped a lot of money in there so I didn’t have to declare it as earnings, as income. That situation still exists. If you make a lot of money and you’re going to pay 50% of it on tax, then it’s better to spend as much as you can. You can actually make a loss, that’s even better. Then you don’t owe any tax. You can’t do it illegally, but I did it legally by buying all this equipment.

It wasn’t the most expensive studio I had. I built this studio in ’72 when “Get It On” was a hit, I had three T-Rex hits in a year and I was selling 65,000 copies of a single a day. So I had all this money I had to get rid of.

Benji B

As you do. Prior to this, am I right in thinking you were one of the first people in the UK to have a home 16-track studio?

Tony Visconti

This studio, I built it at home because I thought, “What a great idea, I can work in my own time.” I built this studio in a terraced house in Melrose Terrace in Shepherd’s Bush. I used an earlier Trident desk there. I grew a beard. It’s a shame you can’t see the reds as it’s a very colorful photo. There’s two Revoxes, there’s a Trident B range on the left. The Trident B range is in use all over the world, it’s a really valued sound. And a Moog synthesizer on the right. So that was my home studio and it’s 16 track. I had barely finished building it when I got a call from Bowie. He said, “I’m making a new album, it’s called…” – it wasn’t yet called Diamond Dogs, but it became Diamond Dogs – and he said, “I can’t get a decent mix all over town. I’ve tried every engineer, every studio.”

I said, “Well, I’m just building one. Why don’t you try mine?” He showed up in an hour and all I had instead of chairs was carpenter’s horses, where you saw wood. We did the first night’s work sitting on carpenter’s horses. It wasn’t the day when you always had a camera ready or a cell phone to take a picture. I would’ve loved to have seen a picture of David Bowie and myself sitting on a pair of wooden carpenter’s horses mixing Diamond Dogs.

He went home with the mix in his hand and called me at five in the morning. I was already asleep, but he said, “Let’s do it at your place, it’s great, a great sound.” And the next day a moving van pulled up and out came an entire dining room set, tables, chairs, glasses, corkscrew and two seats to mix at. And I wasn’t even living in the house yet, my family was yet to move in. It was a very generous gesture and every night we’d order a meal, go into the studio and eat a meal together, then go back and mix. That was my first foray. But it was after this when I needed to get a bigger place and that’s when I moved to the other place.

I ended up getting the ninth SSL in the world at the other place and I don’t have a picture of the SSL console, but it was an E series and it was a 48-channel SSL, I went 48 track. That was the most expensive studio I ever bought and that’s when it got scary. I finally found myself in the studio business and (whistles), no. Especially that kind of studio where I needed ten staff to help me run it. Three engineers, two assistants, administration people and I was running a record label as well. But I was mainly my own client and because I had a very rare desk in the SSL, I could charge £2,000 a day and I was getting it for a while. For a brief period, a two-year period.

Then everyone said, “You buy an SSL and it’s money in the bank.” All of a sudden, there was a glut of SSLs in London and in the beginning I was charging £2,000 a day, that went down to £500. Still, that wasn’t bad in the ’70s, but my desk was mortgaged. I had to pay the bank. I couldn’t afford a one-million-pound desk. But I made it work, it was great. If I was my own client I could fill it up full of rock stars and have a great time.

Benji B

Another piece of kit you were famously the first person to have was something called The Harmonizer.

Tony Visconti

Yes.

Benji B

Tell us about when you discovered that toy.

Tony Visconti

I was always kind of cutting-edge when it came to gear. If something came out I had to have it and it was the beginning of the digital era when they used to make slapback echo with a tape machine. Somebody was in charge of that machine, turning the reel over to get the slapback. Suddenly, this company in, I believe, California, called Eventide put out digital delays. It was incomprehensible how it worked. You put sound in there, there’s nothing moving, and it would flap out a couple of milliseconds later.

This was a miracle, so I bought it. I bought the Digidesign digital delay. You could also freeze and sample a sound momentarily. At the end of Diamond Dogs there’s a song called “Big Brother” and you could hear over and over again the word “bro, bro, bro, bro” and it fades out, that’s how the album ends. What I did was try to put the entire word “brother” in there, but because computers weren’t what they are now, and memory wasn’t what it is now, I could only get “bro” in it. But still, it was very cool. If you listen to the end of that it should’ve been “brother, brother, brother.”

So the other thing I bought which came out with this thing called the Harmonizer, but for the first time in the history of recording, or the world – let’s say recording – you could change the pitch of something without slowing or raising the speed of the tape. Of course, if you raise the speed of the tape you also raise the tempo or lower the tempo to drop the pitch. Some singers needed to do that. There were many reasons why you did that but ideally you wanted to stay in the tempo of the song. And the Harmonizer can do that without changing the tempo. You put a note C in and keep raising it until it becomes an F, it’s child’s play.

But I noticed it did other things and I had it for about a month and tested every sound I had from my mixtapes and all that. And what it did to a snare drum was just incredible. It dropped the pitch and with the feedback knob I’d feed back the dropped pitch so the pitch would continue to drop.

I got a phone call from David and Brian Eno and they say, “We’re going to do an experimental album in France, Chateau d’Herouville in France. What can you bring to the table? We want to go out far out, man, as far as we can.” “I’ve got a Harmonizer.” “Great. What does it do?” I said this spontaneously, and I knew they would love this, I said, “It fucks with the fabric of time.” (laughter) At the other end of the phone I could hear them go, “Woo-hoo!” So it was great. I’m sure this isn’t going to go on the Red Bull site, all these fucks.

Benji B

Don’t worry, we’ve heard worse.

Tony Visconti

So I got the gig and brought the Harmonizer and we did use it on the drums and it was so strange at first. I was recording the output of the Harmonizer on track 24. David said, “Let’s just keep it quiet until later.” We weren’t sure if we were going to use it, but we used it. I got more letters and phone calls from producers saying, “How did you do that?”

Benji B

Did you tell them?

Tony Visconti

No.

Benji B

This brings us neatly onto three massively influential records often known as the Berlin trilogy which you worked on with David and Brian Eno. Before we get into it, can you set the scene of what the music landscape was like at the time? Obviously, electronics featured very heavily on this record. David moved to Berlin. Was that a musical mission, he decided to go there to get inspiration, or was it a lifestyle thing, where he wanted to change his environment?

Tony Visconti

It was initially a lifestyle change. The way he tells it, he was all messed up and with the wrong people in LA. He moved to Berlin, probably one of the furthest places you can go and avoid the rock & roll scene – of course, now it’s completely different. But it’s because of David that Berlin is now a great open city for rock and music. But there were some heroes of his: Tangerine Dream, Edgar Froese, I can’t say his name too well, and Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk I think were from Cologne, they weren’t from Berlin, but we loved those two bands. Kraftwerk for their pristine, precise recordings. The Autobahn record they made I think was the first one, “Showroom Dummies,” we loved that sound.

Benji B

They’re from Berlin, right?

Tony Visconti

No, they weren’t from Berlin.

Audience Member

Düsseldorf.

Benji B

Düsseldorf. They recorded in Hansa though, right?

Tony Visconti

No, they recorded in Conny Plank’s studio, Kling Klang.

Benji B

Can are from Cologne.

Tony Visconti

But there was a big German influence, especially in “Heroes”, that’s where it really came out.

Benji B

And so the first record you made was Low, which was actually recorded in France.

Tony Visconti

Yes, but we finished it in Germany.

Benji B

We should definitely play one song from each of these records because they’re so significant.

Tony Visconti

If you want to hear that snare drum sound, play “Be My Wife.” It’s pretty stark this one. Dennis Davis, by the way, was the only person who could hear it. He had it in his headphones while he was playing drums and he actually played the Harmonizer. He realized the pitch dropped to a greater or lesser degree depending on how he hit it. So he was actually playing this machine. So here it is, “Be My Wife.”

(music: David Bowie – “Be My Wife” / applause)

Benji B

So the Harmonizer was the snare.

Tony Visconti

Yeah, the Harmonizer was the snare and on side two, which was all ambient and new age-y sounding, we used the Harmonizer on other instruments, too. But it would be hard for me to point out exactly where. It was more or less on everything, like “Moss Garden.”

Benji B

It’s worth pointing out.

Tony Visconti

Yeah, it’s beautiful music.

Benji B

Which track do you want?

Tony Visconti

Is it “Moss Garden”? (looks through computer) What have you got there? Oh, “Art Decade,” of course.

(music: David Bowie – “Art Decade” / applause)

A lot of those sounds were generated not from the Mellotron but the Chamberlin, which was a better version of the Mellotron. The cellos in there were from the keyboard Chamberlin, actually sampled cellos. And the (makes descending noise) dropping things were Brian Eno on the EMS, it’s like a synthesizer in a suitcase. If you can get your hands on one of them, it’s the best thing in the world to make sounds on.

There’s no patches, you just have to start from scratch. But you can do all sorts of things, you can put your guitar in the input and process any instrument or voice or drumkit with filters. So the beginning of all that started with this peculiar keyboard. Then a lot of those strange sounds were just David scraping an E string on a guitar with heavy echo chamber and put through The Harmonizer. The Harmonizer makes everything sound like it’s from another planet.

Benji B

Talking of your relationship with Brian Eno, obviously he’s closely associated with electronic and ambient music. Does it frustrate you though that often people associate him so closely with these three records, they mistakenly think he produced them?

Tony Visconti

Well, of course he should be associated with them. He’s a composer on a lot of the songs and he’s a great producer, but I produced it. I think it’s journalists who don’t bother to read the credits. They’re, “David Bowie, Brian Eno – OK, I’ll just put those names up.” Tony Visconti is just an afterthought. So over the years Brian Eno has gotten some credit for producing these three albums, but he’s always gone down on record saying it was me, it was Tony Visconti, and David, they were very kind about putting the record straight. Probably if you do a web search now, I think the Brian Eno references are way, way down on the list. But I loved the man, I enjoyed working with him so much, he taught me a lot.

Benji B

Paint a picture of the chemistry between the three of you, because what came out was pretty radical. Also I’ve heard you describing the making of that album as pretty miserable at the best of times. Why was that?

Tony Visconti

Well, we booked the studio at the last minute. It was in France, it was the month of August and most Europeans go on holiday in August, take the entire month off. The French were not going to stay behind for us; they were all going to go on their holiday. So they left with us an English guy, Andy, he was the studio tech they hired just for us. He was looking after us in the studio. (The Brits don’t take August off, not to my knowledge, but the rest of Europe does.) There was one woman who was looking after the food for us and the owner used to hunt rabbits and all of that.

Benji B

This is your castle in France?

Tony Visconti

It was a beautiful castle, a chateau. It was reported that the ghosts of George Sand and Frederic Chopin walked the halls, which they did – we all had a supernatural experience there. But every night at dinner we’d get about 12 cooked rabbits on the table and that was it because the whole staff was on vacation. We were pretty messed up about this. So on the third night I said, “Is it possible to get vegetables? And, by the way, I don’t eat rabbit.” So on the third night they just threw about four heads of lettuce on the table with oil and vinegar bottles. So we thought they were really, really shitty people to us. Then they brought out a lot of cheese, which they left out. We wouldn’t cover it up so it was covered in flies, so David and I came out with gastric diseases, we were pretty sick.

Until it really broke down, the first two weeks Brian was there, we were doing all the experimental stuff. The band was there too. The band left and Brian left, that’s when it really decayed. We found out the person looking after us, this lovely French lady, was actually a journalist doing a sneak preview of this album. So she went and told everybody, all our private conversations over dinner were reported in a French newspaper. When you’re David Bowie, you have special security measures. We never thought of screening people; I think we did afterwards. We fired her on the spot when we found out, but the harm was done.

Then David was going through a deposition in Paris – he and his manager were splitting up. A few days a week he had to go to Paris and he’d come back completely depressed because every day he was going to lose more money on this deal, just to get rid of his manager. So he was pretty despondent and pretty low and he’s a very honest man. All this was reflected. He was breaking up with his wife, too; that’s what “Be My Wife” is about. So this music all came from his soul.

Benji B

So it was literally low.

Tony Visconti

It was very low.

Benji B

So tell us about moving into Heroes. First of all, how was it received? It’s pretty radical. The music we played before is pretty traditional song-based rock music.

Tony Visconti

Low was first of all rejected by his label, RCA. They said there’s not enough Bowie on it. The A-side was just six songs with vocals and the B-side was all the ambient music. One cigar-chewing executive said, “I’m going to buy him a house in Philadelphia, I want him to make Young Americans 2.” That’s how it was initially received. Everyone else we played it for loved it, except Tony Defries, who was Bowie’s ex- ex-manager, who was entitled to a cut of Bowie’s future royalties. He tried to get it rejected by RCA as well, he was not on our side.

But we had this remarkable piece of music we were so proud of. The whole premise was it was going be an experiment and if we didn’t like it no one would ever have heard it, we would’ve erased the tapes, got rid of it. But we were so pleased with it in the end. So we pushed for its release and when it was released all hell broke loose. All the journalists – for a change – I think every British journalist loved it, said it was the most incredible genius record, the best thing he could’ve done. Instead of doing Young Americans again he goes and does this experimental album. We had the British press on our side and the fans absolutely loved the album too, so luckily we persevered and got the thing released.

Benji B

And when you went over there with Brian and David did you expect you were going to come back with all these instrumental pieces of music as well as songs?

Tony Visconti

We talked about it, we tried it out and it worked. We did have a primitive click track and we didn’t want to give the tempo away. We recorded about 500 clicks and I was on another track counting them off, “two, 56, 57.” I’d like to hear that track actually, it was very meditational. You get up to 150, you’re all spaced out. So the whole thing was very wacky, but we didn’t know we were going to use that many. We were thinking of doing one track, but it turned out to be the whole second side of the album.

Benji B

You were talking about DJs earlier. How did they react? Who was playing it?

Tony Visconti

We gave them a hit single called “Sound and Vision,” which was really a nice bouncy track. Again, it was pretty revolutionary because David doesn’t come in singing until 1:30. It’s instrumental until 1:30 when he says (sings), “Don’t you wonder sometimes.” That’s the first time you hear his voice. I think “Be My Wife” was a single, it got airplay.

Benji B

But did you get airplay on the ambient and electronic music?

Tony Visconti

Oh no, absolutely not.

Benji B

So let’s move on to possibly David Bowie’s most celebrated record, Heroes. He was living in Berlin at the time.

Tony Visconti

Yes.

Benji B

Paint a picture of Hansa studios and the recording process.

Tony Visconti

He was living in the Turkish quarter, kind of a working-class neighbourhood. Of course, the Berlin Wall was still up. It was a very bizarre situation; every day we’d see military tanks in the street – really huge tanks that were almost a story and a half, 15-20 feet high, with big gun turrets at the front. And black jeeps that weren’t the standard military green, they would be matte black. It was almost like being in an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, a future film, but this was happening then in the ’70s. The city was surrounded by wall and a moat that was mined. So if you fancied jumping in and swimming across from East to West Berlin you’d probably be either caught in barbwire or exploded, you’d just blow up.

And there were a few checkpoints, we went through Checkpoint Charlie. If you had a British or American passport you could go into East Berlin, and when you went into East Berlin you were going about 30 years into the past. Because it was a communist territory there were no brand names, but they had billboards with a picture of a fish, saying “eat fish.” And a billboard with a picture of a milk bottle – “drink milk” in German. There were no products in a communist country then. The women were dressed as if it were the ’50s; they had narrow skirts, beehive hairdos and stiletto heels, and that was when a woman went out for the night, she would dress like it was 1955. It was a most bizarre situation.

David was parked one night by the wall on the West side and he was having a cigarette with a girl in his car and a Red Army guard knocked on his window and asked him for a light. Now, this guy shouldn’t have been on the West. Wacky stuff used to happen like this. He came under the river in a passage and he asked him for a light. And he had the red star on his cap. David was so freaked out. “You guys should be over there, on the other side!” It’s a lyric from “Heroes,” actually.

Benji B

And how did all that inform the recording process? Have you got any pictures, by the way, of that era?

Tony Visconti

We were freaked out because our lovely assistant engineer Edu Meyer, he lived with this, so to him it was nothing special. But to us, the control room of Hansa faced the Berlin Wall. In the daytime you could see the red guards looking at us through binoculars; of course they knew it was a recording studio.

That window there... (shows photo) That faces the Berlin Wall. I was standing on a chair taking the picture. That’s Edu Meyer on the left, Bowie’s son – in those days he was called Zowie – in the middle and there’s Bowie on the extreme right. We’re listening to a playback. It’s funny, but in Germany they didn’t have the double-sided tape reels. It was just the bottom there. You’d put the top on like a cake, a pie. Looping is not a new thing, so here’s a tape loop or a beat or something like that with Bowie making a comical pose of being inside the loop. We got up to a lot of shenanigans.

One time we told Edu, “Doesn’t it freak you out that the guards are looking at us all the time?” Because they were about 500 feet away. He says no. He took the overhead light and flashed it in their eyes and stuck his tongue out. We said, “Don’t do that, don’t do that,” and dove under the recording desk. So all that edge was in the recording. I’ve got a picture of David. Just before I took this he asked me to leave, he was having trouble with lyric writing. Let’s see where it is, it’s worth finding. Oh damn, damn! That’s my mother feeding T. Rex. (laughter) Those are meatballs and cannelloni.

There’s David writing “Heroes,” he’s writing the song in that moment. The room we recorded in we didn’t have a glass window. If I had a better resolution there. This is actually the drumkit. We communicated via CCTV and when things got boring, which was hardly ever, Dennis Davis was on the camera and he would mime a television show. He’d have us in hysterics. This is David in a very serious moment writing “Heroes.” And now you can only see his cigarette.

Benji B

Can we play something from there? “Neuköln” or “Moss Garden”?

Tony Visconti

You know, I have to go to the men’s room so bad.

Benji B

I have to as well.

(break for Tony to go to the bathroom)

Benji B

Thanks for the break there, Tony. That was a good idea. Everyone feeling good, still up for it? Are we still here? Let’s make Mr. Visconti feel welcome. It’s been an amazing couple of hours already. Thank you so much already. (applause)

Tony Visconti

My biggest fear was that you guys wouldn’t like older music, because it’s so much about house and beats. But you’ve being such a great, attentive group of people. Thank you very much. I wouldn’t call you an audience because you’re all musicians in your own right, so it’s nice to be addressing a group of musicians. Fantastic. (applause)

Benji B

So, we left off on the second of the three Berlin albums that were so important and we just heard some excerpts from Heroes and Low. The third record was less electronic in way, it seemed to be some sort of reaction to the first two. Is that fair to say?

Tony Visconti

Yes, every place influenced the way we work and the third album, although we call it the third album in the Berlin trilogy, we actually never recorded a note of it in Berlin. We recorded it in Switzerland. David used to live in Switzerland, and there was a local radio station studio called Mountain Studios, whose whole purpose was really to broadcast the Montreux Jazz Festivals. It’s a really small studio, no ambience, the complete opposite of Berlin. I’ve always found that recording a bit dead sonically, but great songs. Some of the tracks sound really good. A lot of it, I just wish, wish, wish I could’ve redone them.

We mixed them in this really bad studio in New York. For this mix we were up against a deadline, we had to deliver the album by a certain date. I don’t know why David didn’t stop and say, “No, we’ll deliver it when it’s ready.” The mixes were good but I didn’t have a lot of gear or equipment. It was very much the opposite of a great British or European studio, which always has lots of gear. This New York studio just had the bare bones. I spoke to David just a few months ago and he said, “Do you fancy remixing this album?” I said, “Yes please, I’d love to remix the album.”

But we had one great song, which was pretty electronic. We had a beatbox. Roland made these beatboxes with the habanero, mambo, cha-cha-cha on them, and we had a great electronic technician for part of Bowie’s crew. These beatboxes traditionally had one mono output and he had nothing to do for a few days so he got in there and he put every single sound – the kick drum, the snare drum, everything – he gave them a separate output, something like 16 discrete outputs on this beatbox. Which was the first of its kind to do that; it was a custom job. And we went a bit crazy with it on one song, which started out as a jam on Dale Hawkins’ “Suzie Q...” (sings), and for some reason it turns out like this. The drum structure is based on “Suzie Q.”

This is where Brian Eno goes apeshit on the beatbox, he loved it and you’ll hear it. It’s called “African Night Flight” and it’s very modern sounding, even by today’s standards. And David’s rapping on it, for want of a better word. So here it is, “African Night Flight.”

(music: David Bowie – “African Night Flight” / applause)

If you ever wondered what Brian Eno looks like without his shirt on, here it is (points to picture). That was during the making of it. He’s recording – I think he stole that from John Cage – the treated piano, where he had tacks and tape in there. That was during the recording of this track.

Benji B

Do you want to talk us through some of the photos you were flying through there because there’s some other good ones in there?

Tony Visconti

This is the actual music for “Cosmic Dancer,” played by the string section on T. Rex, “Cosmic Dancer.” (changes photo) That’s me playing a great bass recorder. (changes pic) This is shortly after I met David – that’s him in the middle and his girlfriend, Kitty. And that’s me and my first wife Sigrid, a German lady, and my mom, my dad and my two friends, Stan and Myron. And that’s in Elgin Avenue in London, Maida Vale. (changes pic) That’s me and my gold discs, taken a year ago, would you believe? (laughter) I aged a lot in a year. For some reason we can’t get red out of the computer screen so you’re seeing everything in glorious blue and yellow.

(changes photo) That’s a gig I did with David, I was part of his backing band called the Hype. That’s me in the long underwear, I was Hypeman. We were all cartoon characters – he was Rainbow Man, the guitar player, Mick Ronson, was Gangster Man – he wore a gold lamé suit and a gangster’s hat. We did this gig at the Roundhouse in front of all these long-haired hippies and we thought we’d be different.

It was a strange reaction – some people adored us and some people jeered us. The funniest thing was after the show all our clothes were stolen from the dressing room and we had to go home wearing that stupid outfit.

(changes photo) That’s David and I in 2001 and we’re doing an album called Heathen. We’re up in the Catskill Mountains in Allaire Studios. (changes photo) My mom fed every band I had from England. They’d have to go to Brooklyn to eat my mom’s food, which was legendary at the time. That’s Marc, Bill Legend, Mickey Finn, that’s my girlfriend Liz and then Steve Currie, the bass player. All fine musicians, the whole band.

(changes photo) That’s a picture of me conducting a session in London for the group Sparks. That’s a brass section, the song called “Get in the Swing.” (changes photo) That’s actually very hard to see, but David and the band and I all lived in a house called Haddon Hall in Beckenham, Kent. That’s a little jam session we’re having, that’s the drummer John Cambridge. Mick Ronson is on the extreme right and that’s David in the middle but he’s pretty much in shadow. I don’t know who the girl is.

(changes photo) Hey, Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy. I did three Thin Lizzy albums and he was one of the most talented musicians I’ve ever worked with and a larger-than-life person. That guy was Mr. Rock & Roll and I don’t want to tell you some of the stories, I won’t tell you why. (laughs) But what a great guy, he’s from Dublin. (changes pic) That’s David and I at a gig in Beckenham, Kent at the Arts Lab. On the left, I look like I belonged in Nirvana, didn’t I? So did he. David trying to play a theremin, as we all do. And finding out it’s impossible to play. “Oh, I can play theremin.”

(changes photo) That’s Paul McCartney, I did a few records with him. He’s looking at me skeptically because I snuck a camera into the session and took a picture of him. You know nowadays everyone’s got cell phones. There was a time when you couldn’t bring a camera into a recording studio, it was forbidden, because it was like a sanctuary. “This is where I’m not gonna be a rock star. I’ll be a rock star outside the studio, in the studio I just wanna create music.” I did a very cheeky thing by snapping that picture, but what the hell? It’s Paul McCartney.

(changes photo) This is Phil Collins. He went through a brief period before he was in Genesis, and after he was fired from the band, when he was a session drummer. There he is working with me on an album by... I forget the name of the group, but that’s Phil Collins, the session man, with hair and a beard. That’s my studio in Shepherd’s Bush. Klein + Hummel speakers are on the wall there. That was a Trident B-range desk and that’s the remote control for the MCI 16-track.

(changes photo) That’s David in the basement in Beckenham and we’re down there practicing. I like this photo. It’s like an old coal bin. They used to put coal down there. I was always an amateur photographer and I especially liked to shoot on transparency film.

(changes photo) That’s a party in my studio, Siouxsie Sioux, Bob Geldof and Phil Lynott. I used to have these parties at my studio; any reason I’d have a celebratory party and things would go missing. I was playing a party tape on my machine, a big reel- to-reel tape, and Siouxsie admitted ten years later that she stole it, because I had unreleased Bowie material on there. I thought I’d give everyone a treat. Luckily no one stole microphones or guitars. We had a great time.

(changes pic) That’s in recent years and that’s Pete Townshend on the left and that’s David Bowie on the right. We were doing an album called Heathen and Pete was gonna play some guitar. It’s a cute story, he heard this track called “Slow Burn” and it’s quite an emotional song. At the end he wiped his eyes and I said, “Gosh, were you crying?” He said, “No, it’s just a physiological thing.” (laughter) So cool. Physiological thing, my ass.

(changes pic) That’s very hard to see, but that’s at the making of Scary Monsters at the Power Station in New York, which is now called Avatar Studios. And it’s like one big sauna. There was a trend when building studios in the ’70s, it had to have that wood. All they needed was to make it hot and you could take your clothes off, take a sauna.

(changes pic) I went through a period where, if you get a good drum sound, take a picture of it. I had a small drum booth. Anything to make it bigger. I found this corrugated sheet of metal, it’s an alloy. I put it up against the wall and it livened up the room so much and the microphones would pick it up. I got it even bigger by putting microphones behind it as well. So it was like a very cheap reverb that worked incredibly well. I was just leaning them against the wall, but after this I installed hooks where I hung them, so they really did move with the sonic energy in the room. I got great drum sounds in that place; too many albums to mention right now. (changes pic)

Benji B

What’s the craziest contraption you’ve ever built in the studio for the purposes of sound?

Tony Visconti

I’m coming up to that. (laughs)

Benji B

Do you have a photo of it?

Tony Visconti

(flicks though pics) There. Do you know the sum and difference microphone technique for classical music? It’s a very strange microphone technique. You have two microphones, one is on figure eight and one is on cardioid. You put them out of phase and you bring their sum up on a third channel. When you get the sum of those two out-of-phase microphones at a certain point, you get an extremely wide stereo that also works in mono. When you put it in mono you don’t get any drop in the sides.

It’s a beautiful technique; it comes from classical music and a lot of great classical recordings, the early stereo recordings were done with just these two microphones set up. It’s a spectacular sound; when you convert it to mono there’s just no loss of left and right. There’s no center channel, it’s very strange. Usually, you use this technique for big, wide, open spaces but I made a tunnel out of this corrugated metal and I did the microphone sum and difference, so in that small space I created a wide stereo sound of that guitar amp. That’s what you do, you have to do things like that. This is before boxes were invented with presets, so you just had to do crazy stuff.

I can’t tell you how many bathrooms I’ve recorded in, too. You’d be in a bathroom. Like, Trident Studios in St. Anne’s Court, London had the best sound for handclaps. So we’d just put an expensive microphone in the men’s room and we’d sit around clapping hands. Then eventually, the guitar amps would creep into the men’s room, then the people who had shops on the street would complain we were making too much noise, so you’d have to do the recording in there. But they had this one-million-pound studio and here we are putting the microphones in the men’s room.

Also, at Avatar/Power Station, we found the best reverb was in the hallway. We were on the fourth floor, we’d put a microphone on the second floor and on the sixth floor and just open the door and put a guitar amp on the fourth floor. That sound is all over Scary Monsters. So you record where you find the best sound. This is a lovely Neve console at Allaire Studios in the Catskill Mountains where we made Heathen. It has a unique control room in that there was no glass window. The control room and the studio were all open and I would get my sounds on very well-fitting headphones and then just play it back and see if it sounded good. So we’d get some incredible drum sounds with Matt Chamberlain playing drums.

(changes pic) I don’t know if you know Scary Monsters well, but there’s a track called “It’s No Game,” and we had it translated into Japanese and this lovely Japanese lady, who was playing in The King and I down the road in a theatre, she came over to help David pronounce the Japanese and she found out it didn’t scan. She said, “This is a literal translation of your lyrics, it’s not poetry, it’s not gonna fit.” (to Benji, the interviewer) You should really play this track. So David said, “Say it to me.” So she started reciting it and this was a brilliant idea of his. He said, “Could you go in front of the mic and say this song? Instead of like a woman, say it like a samurai (growls), like a man.” She said, “Wow! What a great idea.”

She was all up for it because she’s an actress and I was told that this was released in Japan as a single. But she was quite amazing. She did verse one, then he would did it in English, but again he could not sing it in Japanese because there were too many syllables. Could you play this one, “It’s No Game”? Do you have it? Part one. That’s the sound of my 24-track machine starting.

(music: David Bowie – “It’s No Game (Part 1)” / applause)

When you do a mix you don’t know how high you’re supposed to put the voice. I was hoping Japanese people everywhere were going to understand that. I didn’t.

Benji B

Clearly, we’ve spent a long time talking about your work with Bowie and with T. Rex, but your discography is mind-blowing. Are there some really special collaborations outside of those two big relationships that you’d like to mention?

Tony Visconti

I’ve produced almost 400 albums, including two with a group called Gentle Giant.

Benji B

I’m glad you mentioned them.

Tony Visconti

You have their music. In the middle of recording all these pop records I had to do something that challenged me musically and Gentle Giant were all really fantastic musicians. Everything nowadays is 4/4 or 6/8. There was one they did that was 15/16ths, was the key signature. I had to punch in on certain phrases, I was counting (counts very fast), hit the button. They had very sophisticated arrangements and I embellished some of them by playing recorders and making them maybe a little clearer. But I’m so proud of this record and nothing pleases me more than when someone stops me in the street and says, “Hey, you produced Gentle Giant.” I put so much work in it and we sold probably 50 copies. But here’s Gentle Giant.

Benji B

It’s a classic anyway.

(music: Gentle Giant – “Why Not”)

Tony Visconti

This is them being rock stars, it’s not typical Gentle Giant. Play this other one. After all that build-up you’re hearing... (makes rock star noise)

Benji B

It’s good. This is the one with the lutes and the...

(music: Gentle Giant – “Edge of Twilight” / applause)

Tony Visconti

Quite a few tricks on there. If you want me to explain them I will. I remember what we did.

Benji B

Yeah, please. That’s an unfadeable record. There’s so many different things to talk about and I’m glad we got a moment to talk about Gentle Giant because I love that piece of music. How much of that is Tony Visconti? Who says, “Let’s get in some military drums and some timpani and some recorder?”

Tony Visconti

I think a lot of that was my idea. Of course, they wrote the songs. But we didn’t have enough timpani, so the person who played them wasn’t the drummer, I think it was the organist. We actually had to write it out because we did one half of it with the timpani tuned to certain pitches – it’s a chromatic instrument – and the other half at other pitches. That was two tracks of timpani. He’d play… (imitates timpani) Then the next part until we got the first part turned up.

The drum fill slowing down at the end, I mixed all the drums to stereo tape and did this as an insert. I flew it into the multitrack and just slowed the machine down as the drum fill ended. That was no harmonizer, that was my left hand. And then, of course, backwards echo. You could do it on analog tape pretty easily. You flip the tape over, then you add the echo to the backward snare drum so the snare drum will go like… (imitates the noise), and then the echo will go ahhhhhh and the reverb will go afterwards. When you flip the tape over and the reverb comes first. So on that one, the backwards sound was only the reverb backwards. The drums would come forward. There are so many tricks on that, I remember them well.

The overdubs, there were six people. Those are all real instruments, no samples. The violinist also played cello and one of the brothers played clarinet and I think we hired a bass clarinet for that session which he played, so it’s a bass clarinet and a normal clarinet. It was an amazing experience.

Benji B

It must have been a lot of fun.

Tony Visconti

It was fun. It put a few grey hairs on my head too. It was a great challenge to make music like that.

Benji B

That’s from a record called Acquiring the Taste and also the self-titled Gentle Giant album as well. Both of which you should check out if you’re not familiar. Are there any artists that you didn’t get to work with that you felt you really wanted to or should’ve done? Alive or dead or otherwise?

Tony Visconti

Good question. I always loved Bob Dylan and it would’ve been great to work with him. I won’t say who, but I’ve sometimes been disillusioned if it was someone I idolized and I didn’t want to work with them. I didn’t want to know them as human beings, I prefer to know them as idols, as icons. I never worked with Bob Dylan although I did at one point. Same with the Rolling Stones, I did work with them briefly at one point. If you’ve read Keith Richards’ autobiography you’ll know that they were hard work. They led many engineers and producers into early graves. I was enough of a bad boy, I didn’t need the Rolling Stones to contribute to that. But I did love their music.

One of my big dreams was to work with the Beatles and I did Band on the Run with Paul McCartney and I worked on this Marc Bolan/T. Rex film called Born to Boogie with Ringo and George Harrison I jammed with. I worked at Apple when they had their headquarters on Savile Row. I went down in the basement when George and Paul were jamming and I picked up a bass and jammed with both of them, so that was like a dream come true. But I could never make a Beatles album. I couldn’t step into George Martin’s shoes. But at least I met them and did some stuff with them.

To my generation the Beatles were just gods. I don’t know if your generation has anyone like that, I’m sure you do. For me to meet the Beatles was like meeting Bootsy back there, too, it was the same thing. (laughs) Bootsy’s gone now, but I couldn’t stop smiling when he walked in. I turned to Benji and said (very high voice), “Who just walked in?” “Bootsy.” “Oh God, I’m gonna die.” And what a nice guy too. But I’d love to have worked with him and I might in the future. We’re still around, we survived the ’70s. (laughs) That was some achievement. “I’m Rick James.”

Benji B

Talking about people putting grey hairs on your head and the stress of the studio, is there a particular studio etiquette that you lay down? Are you quite strict about particular rules within a studio environment?

Tony Visconti

Well, you’ve heard me talk about drugs a lot and I have to tell you that being head of the team, which was me, I never did drugs in the studio. I’d be a liar if I said I never did, a few times, but I’ve been with bands when they’re wrecked and I’m the last person standing because I have to be. I don’t mind bands drinking and smoking a little bit. If it’s gonna get them in the mood, that’s fine.

I can’t afford to do it. First of all, if you smoke weed and listen to sound, you hear different things from what are really there. You’re adding a lot to it. Alcohol cuts down your high frequencies. If you drink and work you’re hearing less and less high frequencies. I think two beers cuts your high-frequency response by up to 15dB. It’s been proven. I don’t know where the papers are but it’s been proven. I try to keep my bands sober and minimally drug free. In the last two years it hasn’t been much of a problem. I’ve rarely seen stoners in the studios in the last decade – that was very much a ’70s thing. So that’s one thing I like. I like a drug-free zone now when I work.

Benji B

Talking about the pressure of the studio, talk to us about the pressure of hits. Once you’ve had a hit – and obviously you’ve had loads – as a record producer when you walk into the studio is there this sort of invisible weight on your shoulders, having to come out the other side with a hit?

Tony Visconti

I must have had an easier time in the ’70s than you have now. In the ’70s being different really counted. The labels expected you to come up with something radically different. That was the name of the game and the artists themselves were defining that. Bowie was at the forefront, Roxy Music, every time they brought out a record it was amazing. You were, “Wow! Why didn’t I think of that?” Every record and every artist’s output was a quantum leap from their last one. We were expected to do that.

I got paid for having crazy ideas and that’s a great job. I can go all wacky; I don’t have to imitate anybody, I can just be as freaky as we want. Bootsy and I were talking about how adventurous those times were, how you could really get away with murder and do the most outrageous things. So there was a pressure. It was simply an economical thing. If you get hits you’ll be invited back into the studio. Right now the economic pressure isn’t so great because we all make music, including myself, at home or on planes. Computers have really dropped the cost of making a record dramatically.

So that was the name of the game. I had to get hits. We worked very hard. Apart from Low, which we really didn’t think we had any singles and for us it was a statement. It was like a wise thing, “No singles on this album,” when everyone else was putting out singles. In spite of that we had a decent hit single off it. Nowadays though, it’s probably even harder because the record labels want you to be different but not too different. There are so many, many, many more people making records now than there were in the ’70s.

To get signed in those days you had to go through so many gatekeepers. Just to get in the door, you had to pass so many tests. Now with self-made records, the competition for everybody here is fierce. There’s all kinds of factors that didn’t exist when I was making hit records in the ‘70s. Does that answer your question? Is that depressing enough? I’m sorry, but I really feel for what you’re going through.

Benji B

One thing I was interested in talking about the pressure of making records and what it’s like now is having lived through some classic eras of record production, what do you think of the trend at the moment for doing throwback styles of production? A lot of people wish to emulate the classic sound, whether it’s Motown or a classic rock & roll sound. Do you think that’s looking backwards too much? Do you see the reasoning in that?

Tony Visconti

There’s so much history of music, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t borrow from the past and bring something back. Why does it have to live just two years and then die? It’s great to bring things back, it’s very healthy. You’ll never do it the same way we did it because we did it on analog tape. As I told you before, it was scary when you had one track left. There were more contributing factors than the tape or the equipment. I never believed the equipment does it, I think your ears do it.

I was trained in an age when engineers were very secretive. If I went up to an engineer and said, “How did you get that kick drum sound?” – he’d laugh at me. “You don’t think I’d actually tell you?” People were less sharing in those days. You couldn’t go on YouTube and see a seminar on how to mic up a drumkit. I honestly only had one or two engineers who were generous with me. One was Glyn Johns, who taught me how to flange and phase tape. I pounded him for it, I asked him about five times and he told to eff off five times until he finally taught me how to do it. And Malcolm Toft, the guy who designed my desk, sat down and showed me a few skills. And my boss Denny Cordell taught me a lesson, he said, “Be unreasonable. Don’t ever let an engineer say, ‘I’m not gonna do any more.’” I like that – a producer has to push everyone.

But then I realized if they’re not gonna tell me their secrets I might have to figure them out. I might not have the microphones and the drumkit but I like that sound, I’m gonna figure out how it’s done. And I did, so I worked a lot of my education by myself.

Benji B

If you could summarize what the primary role of a record producer is, what would you say?

Tony Visconti

You’re the big boss. (laughs) There’s all kinds of record producers. There’s Phil Spector, you had to do everything he told you to. You had no say in it, whether you were the star of the record or the tambourine player. You did it Phil’s way or the highway.

But I think George Martin was the one who said, “Let’s cooperate. We have different jobs to do. You have to be the stars. My job is to get your sound on tape and make you sound as good as possible.” That’s the school I come from and the buck stops here – if it sounds bad the label’s gonna blame me, not the group. So that’s what I mean by the fact that you’re the boss. You have to bring it in, you have to bring it home.

Benji B

Before we open it up to questions I’d like to ask you a favor. If you’ve got time and you wouldn’t mind, we’d love to have you in the main control studio later. Is that something you’d be up for?

Tony Visconti

Sure. I spoke to you about it yesterday and I was thinking, you wanna make a rock record, anybody? Just rock & roll? One or two. We need a drummer, we need as many guitar players, we can always use more than one. A bass player, keyboards, singers. I have a structure in my head, I haven’t even heard it yet. The basic structure is, we can do this rock & roll song together and the lyrics can come from you.

Benji B

A pretty famous bass player just walked in as well.

Tony Visconti

Oh no, he’s back. (laughs) He scares me, he’s so good.

Benji B

No, he’s not here.

Tony Visconti

Give it two hours and I think we’ll have a jolly good time. All live, no tricks, look at each other while you’re playing, have fun, jump up and down, get in the groove. So yeah, we can try that.

(applause)

Benji B

That would be most generous, thank you. We look forward to that. I know there’s gonna be loads so we’re gonna have to keep it moving. I’ve been told five questions. OK, we’ve got a little bit of time. Who’s first?

Audience Member

I remember you saying earlier when you moved to London in ’67 or so, you found a lot of American music bland and all the good music was coming from London. I was curious, as a producer, whether you found Brian Wilson an inspiration at all?

Tony Visconti

Exceptionally. I love the Beach Boys, and Brian Wilson and the Beatles got into some very healthy competition. They’d try to outdo each other and leave little signatures, little messages to each other. When you’re a young guy in those days you picked up on this stuff, all the little sounds and messages. I thought Brian Wilson was incredible. But when I left, I’m not sure he’d done “Good Vibrations” yet, I think that happened when I was in London. It was still the surfing Beach Boys.

I was raised in a barbershop quartet situation. My dad was a barbershop quarteter and I loved four-part harmony. And the Beach Boys were the best barbershop quartet that ever lived. So yeah, respect for him.

Benji B

Who’s next? Come one, don’t be shy.

Tony Visconti

I don’t bite.

Audience Member

How you doing? You were talking a lot about the ’70s but what about the ’80s?

Tony Visconti

It’s a bit of a fog, my friend. The ’80s were great, but you got into those huge bombastic sounds by then. Prince was having his heyday, so many great things came out of the ’80s. I didn’t make many great albums in the ’80s. My golden decade was the ’70s, for sure. But it was a great decade.

In Britain we had Adam Ant and to this day I love that man. I saw him as recently as July and he’s now a full-fledged pirate. He’s a buccaneer now, he’s got the bandana and a little moustache. He does concerts and all that. I made one Adam Ant album and that was my big contribution to the ’80s, I guess. There were probably more but I’m being forgetful. Great decade.

In the ’80s there was still permission to be who you wanted to be and do what you wanted to do. It wasn’t so industrial yet. The ’90s was the end of the music business. It began in the ’90s.

Audience Member

I read that Marc Bolan never drove a car in his life, and a lot of his lyrics were about them. Did you guys crack up, was it funny?

Tony Visconti

He couldn’t drive a car. He owned a scooter when he was 16 and he was a model. He only rode it once and he crashed on it. But he used to pose. His friend would drive down Carnaby Street and he’d just stand next to the scooter all day, a Lambretta. He never trusted himself driving and ironically he died in a car crash, too. But he wrote about cars being a metaphor for women. All his cars had female names and females had car names. When he called a woman his Cadillac, it was his luxury car. He was a cool lyric writer, one of the best rock & roll poets who ever lived, Marc Bolan. He had an eight-track in his car, too. That was terrific.

Benji B

Any more questions?

Audience Member

In the picture with Phil Collins, in the background there’s a sitar against the wall. Did you have something to do with Indian music?

Tony Visconti

No, it was my sitar. Across the road from me there was a lovely family by the name of Sadri, that was their surname. The husband was a pilot with British Airways and he used to go back to India a lot. I said, “Please bring me back a sitar.” He used to bring me back mangos and one day he arrived and said, “Here’s your sitar.” I tried to play it, I think everybody tried. It’s like the theremin, everyone thinks they can play the sitar too.

But I’m a big fan. I’ve got a lovely picture of an Indian musician I want to show you. His name is Anil Bhagwat and he was the tabla player on Sgt. Pepper’s and on Revolver. He came to work dressed in a suit and a tie and you know that George Harrison song (sings) “Within You or Without You”? The wild tabla playing is that wonderful, wonderful man. So I became aware of Indian music through the Beatles and I’ve got a large record collection. I forget what record he played on, but it was an honor to meet him, as it was to meet the Beatles. This guy was the bomb, he was great.

Audience Member

I’ve always just played drums, usually very loudly and crazily, and I’m just starting to get into software and drum machines. What’s your favorite drum machine or non-acoustic...?

Tony Visconti

I have one: Drumcore. I forget who makes it. I have my dongle with me but I don’t think I have it installed. It’s some company in California. They sampled the greatest session musicians. Like Alan White, they sampled his whole kit and he put down some loops too. You can put the whole drumkit through 12 discrete different outputs if you want and rebalance them. They’re recorded in pristine audio quality. Stereo microphones, every sample is a stereo sample. I use that writing but I ended up doing a whole album using various drummers.

They have, I forget his name, Lonnie something, a Motown drummer, so you have all his grooves as well as his drumkit. If you wanna do some Motown tracks use Lonnie. It’s very low in the Latin American department. I wish they’d use more samples like the cuica, the congas and timbales. There’s not enough of that, but Drumcore it’s called and it’s not an expensive program and they keep releasing. Every year they might add another drummer so you buy the drummer pack and right now it’s up to about 20 different drummers, including some slamming people from Seattle. You have those smashing, very big drum sounds from there. Some very lightweight sounds with jazz with brushes. I highly recommend this program.

Audience Member

Wow. There couldn’t have been a better answer for that, I don’t think. Thank you.

Benji B

Any more questions?

... Please join me in showing your big gratitude and thanks to Mr. Tony Visconti.