Tony Visconti: The Autobiography: Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy
A name synonymous with ground-breaking music, Tony Visconti has worked with the most dynamic and influential names in pop, from T.Rex and Iggy Pop to David Bowie and U2. This is the compelling life story of the man who helped shape music history, and gives a unique, first-hand insight into life in London during the late 1960s and '70s.This memoir takes you on a roller-coaster journey through the glory days of pop music, when men wore sequins and pop could truly rock. Featuring behind-the-scenes stories of big names such as Bowie, Visconti's unique access to the hottest talent, both on stage and off, for over five decades is complemented by unseen photographs from his own personal archive, offering a glimpse at music history that few have witnessed so intimately.Soon after abandoning his native New York to pursue his musical career in the UK, Visconti was soon in the thick of the emerging glam rock movement, launching T.Rex to commercial success and working with the then-unknown David Bowie.Since his fateful move to the land of tea and beer drunk straight from the can, Visconti has worked with such names as T.Rex, Thin Lizzy, Wings, The Boomtown Rats, Marsha Hunt, Procol Harum, and more recently Ziggy Marley, Mercury Rev, the Manic Street Preachers and Morrissey on his acclaimed new album 'Ringleader of the Tormentors'.Even Visconti's personal life betrays an existence utterly immersed in music. Married to first to Siegrid Berman, then to Mary Hopkin and later to May Pang, he counts many of the musicians and producers he has worked with as close friends and is himself a celebrated musician.
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Tony Visconti With Richard Havers
Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy the Autobiography
foreword by morrissey
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Harper
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First published by HarperCollins 2007 This edition published 2007
Copyright © 2007 Tony Visconti
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Source ISBN: 9780007229451
Ebook edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007343577
Version: 2017-01-03
To Mom, Dad, Morgan, Jessica, Sebastian and Lara
Contents
Chapter 1 Birth, Bananas, Heroin and Marriage
Chapter 2 London Makes its Marc
Chapter 3 Variety is the Spice…
Chapter 6 It’s the Same Ol’, Same Ol’
Many of the early records bearing Tony Visconti’s name made me eager to get out into the world—if only to agitate. In 1971-72 the mighty blaze of T.Rex singles were beyond price to me. They had all the immediate eager motion of pop records, but were also strangely reflective—a mad stew of Englishness and worldliness with Tony’s name on each side of the label. If you enjoyed the music of T.Rex it seemed to prove that you were someone. Here, it seemed, was Art in motion: guitar savagery chopping up the soundstage; pop with intellectual distinction, using full orchestra—if only for a mere twenty haughty seconds.
Making the T.Rex soundscape both fantastic and naturalistic was an abrasive clash of non-traditional routes to the pop conclusion. The wealth and detail and contrast of layered orchestration wrapped around the unravelled riddle of Marc Bolan’s poetry (well, let’s call it that) worked so well that Bolan stayed beside Tony almost until Bolan’s life ended with death. At its highest artistic peak, with the strange flood of ‘Telegram Sam’ and ‘Metal Guru’ we are assaulted by the musical equivalent of secret stairways and false walls, and something enters into me which I can barely fathom. I wanted pop music to be true, and it was with David Bowie’s LP The Man Who Sold the World, which enlivened 1972 as a forgotten reissue, edging up to #;26 in the British charts. It is a soft sound, with luxuriant confidence from Bowie, whose imagination was served by the Visconti methodology. Still, today, it stands as David Bowie’s best work. The first side, especially, is musical literacy delivered.
With Bowie, the tone and cadence are all there: no sentimentalism. The instrumental textures are wispy and often child-like; acoustic and recorder sounds of turn-of-the-’70s dropout London. The Bowie-Visconti vision is concentrated. A good producer gets at something in a singer (or musician) and Tony was there to nail the gift of Bowie just perfectly—making suffering sound like a superior condition—live this life or don’t live any. Listen to the album even now and you are right back there. The mavericks are those who liberate themselves, and Bowie and Visconti did so with The Man Who Sold the World… and we played our part by listening.
The Mael machinery of Sparks utilized Tony for their 1975 surgical offering, Indiscreet. The versifying of Ron Mael introduced a new style of pop poetry, and the scattershot pace of Russell Mael’s vocals sounded like someone running out of a burning house. Russell had been a T.Rex fan, and by 1975 it was Sparks themselves who were shaking public tastes
