Tony Visconti

Producer of T. Rex and David Bowie and this guy was SO good I was pinching myself throughout our conversation!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob West's podcast. My
guest today is the one and only Tony Visconti, record
producer extraordinary. So Tony, how do you produce a record?

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Well, I'm the guy in charge of everything. I found
that out very early on. If anything goes rom I'm
to blame. So I have to do a lot of
planning before the group and myself actually sets foot in
the studio, which would require pre production, which means you
visit the band in their favorite space and you rehearse

(00:45):
the songs and learn the songs. And then when I
get into the studio, I have to be both a
technician and a creative director. I think I qualify for
the latter because I studied music I was like fifteen
years old, and I play several instruments. I write orchestrations,

(01:06):
and I understand how harmony and theory works. And I
also understand rock and roll people too, because I'm one myself.
I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Okay. So generally speaking, do people find you or are
you looking for opportunities?

Speaker 2 (01:24):
It comes from all different directions. I have a really
good manager who finds people for me and people contact him,
but just recently, I was in Hamburg, Germany for the
Ripabond Festival. It's like south By Southwest over there, and
I saw a group called Daisy the Great two front
female singers, and I thought they were fantastic. They played

(01:48):
in the RIPA band and I found that they were
from New York. They live in Brooklyn, So just yesterday
I made my first record with them. So that was
a direct face used to face contact with a group.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Okay, you know, the world is totally different from when
you began your career. So if you're dealing with these
two women, A do they have a record company?

Speaker 2 (02:13):
You know, they have an indie label, which could mean anything.
It's you know, I don't know what capital that label
has or anything, but I'm always attracted to the music.
It's that's where Mahart is. I love these girls. The
music really got to me when I was in Hamburg
and we had a writing session that started two days ago.

(02:36):
The one of the girls came in with her guitar
and just played about three chords and within an hour
we had the structure of a song, the melodic and
chord structure of a song, and then we chipped away
at it for the past two days, so now I've
actually recorded an entire song with them. It's just amazing
how it works.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
So in this today's world, you can record the equipment
just to get basics down is much cheaper ie digital computer,
but it still requires a certain amount of money. So
in the old days you might have hundreds of thousands
of dollars to make a record, whereas today frequently, even
with acts that are well known, the budget's constricted relatively low.

(03:21):
So an act like this, how much is the budget
and how do you make it work?

Speaker 2 (03:26):
I would say, if I was going to make an
album with them, we have some nice studios in Brooklyn
and Manhattan where I live, where you can get them
for about five hundred dollars a day. And I would
only need, say, two weeks in a proper studio like that,
just to record the drums. In my little place I've

(03:47):
got here, I'm sitting in the twentieth Street in Manhattan.
I could record vocals, guitars, saxophones, bass guitars, but not drums.
It's just no space that big. So it really I
make these albums more economical by having my own facility.
So what do we say, like twenty grand at the minimum,

(04:09):
I would say that, Yeah, okay, So you know you
talk about getting drums right, and certainly in the pre
internet era that was a big thing. In the big
studio could certainly take days just to get the sound right.
Many people today listen via earbuds. The goal in the
seventies was to have the biggest stereo you could possibly

(04:31):
have to get closer to the music, and now it's
kind of the opposite. So how do you feel about
this making records? Well, you know, I've got the Apple
EarPods and they sound really great. They have the high
end ones. You could hear a lot of low end

(04:52):
on it. You could hear the width of a big
stereo production. But you know a lot of kids can
only afford like cheap and nasty things with on them. Still,
you know, they're not Bluetooth, so I have to listen
to what I do on everything. I've got these big
expensive speakers in my studio. I've got smaller ones at home,

(05:13):
and I've got to hear the Apple buds and somewhere
you can make a mix that's going to sound great
on everything. In fact, that's the wholemark of a good mix.
It should sound great on everything. It might not sound
the same, but it has to sound great.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
What are the speakers you listen to? What are the
brand names? I have.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
A pair of genial X. I don't know. I think
they I think they're German or Swiss or something like that.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
Actually they're Finish. I have upset myself.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
There go finish right. And I've got a pair of
a bigger pair of Monetors from Barefoot. It's a company
that I think is in Washington State and they make phenomenal,
phenomenal speakers. That's what I listen to mainly.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
And in terms of recording equipment, in terms of a board,
pro tools, how do you do it?

Speaker 2 (06:11):
I'm in pro tools almost exclusively. I have no board anymore.
There's no need for it because I don't record drums.
But I've got preamplifiers for and I've got an amazing
set of microphones and so one two three phone. I
have about ten preamps, which means I could record up

(06:34):
to about one of them's got four inputs, so about
fourteen microphones at the same time. But there's no need
for a board anymore, not for my purposes since for.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
This deep how big is your monitor and how many monitors?

Speaker 2 (06:51):
How big is my Oh? What I'm looking at you
on now?

Speaker 1 (06:54):
No, I'm talking about when you're recording, you get your
pro tools rig it's on a computer, but you're watching
a screen.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, I'm watching a screen.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
And is it one screen? Is it twenty inches thirty inches?
You know?

Speaker 2 (07:06):
No, I've got two twenty six inch screens and I
stacked them one above the other really, yes, side by side,
because it gives me more room for my speakers. And
you know a lot of studios have their screens off
to the right, and that means you spend half the
session listening in your left ear. It's a ridiculous setup.
So I put my screens on top of each other.

(07:28):
They don't take up much space, and I have my
when i'm mixing. When I'm working, I'm always in between
the two speakers, always at all times.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Okay, Now, you know, once the union era ended in
the sixties, there were record producers and engineers. Everybody was
independent except for a few people like a Warner Brothers.
Then we hit an era where the engineers became producer. Personally,
I found a lot of those people, although they had success,

(08:00):
we're not as musically evolved or trained like you. So
do you do the engineering yourself? Do have preferred engineer?
How does it work?

Speaker 2 (08:11):
When I record drums and perhaps a live band. I
do occasionally record a whole band in the studio, just
like the good old days, I need an engineer. I can't.
I have to concentrate on the music. I just can't
twiddle the knobs during those serious moments, you know, when
you're trying to get the best out of a band.
So then I'm a director in the studio, a big studio,

(08:33):
I'm a director. But when I come back to my studio,
I don't use an engineer. I do all my recording myself.
I'm always on one microphone, you know, with a singer
or maybe a stereo output from a keyboard. It's easily
manageable to do that and to give direction at the
same time, So I don't. I don't need an engineer
when I'm mixing, and I mix how they say inside

(08:54):
the box. In the box, explain to my audience what
that means. The means I do all the mixing in
the computer itself. It never leaves the computer. However, I
do have sixteen analog outputs to do that. If I
want to, if the project wants a more analog sound

(09:15):
which kind of has all the little bit of bits
of distortion and you know, overblown base, I could come
through sixteen channels of this thing called dangerous audio two bus.
It is a it's a real magic trick for anybody
who works inside the box, which is the computer, but

(09:37):
takes it out of the box just to get an
analog flavor and then it gets recorded back into the
box again. The nice thing about digital, I mean, people
say it's cold and all that, but digital is really true.
What you put in comes out, it's not It doesn't
color it in any way. So that's why we are
now after we ask for this kind of magical recording

(09:59):
all these years, now we'll finding we need all these
techniques to mess it up again, to make it sound
saturated and you know, blown out tape and all that.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Okay, So the old days of the analogy hat all
this outboard gear. So you have digital replications in the
box of those sounds and effects you might want to use.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Sure, I've got I've got some effects in analog gear still.
And next door a friend of mine has this retro
tape machine that we can I could use at anytime
to get that real bad repeat echo, that slapback echo.
But in pro tools, there are a lot of virtual

(10:44):
apps that replicate the sound of a tape recorder or
any kind of reverb. I've got a reverb that emulates
Hansa Studios in Germany because I did my Bowie recordings
there and I I sent a team over there to
capture the reflections, make note of the wood panels. And

(11:06):
it's called t verb. So for all you recording enthusiasts
made by the company called Eventide and Teaset TV verb,
you know they named it. I didn't name it, but
it's called t verb in honor of me. And you
can get that Bowie's hero vocal sound with this app easily.
It's very easy to do.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Okay, a little bit slower. You sent your team over there,
then you made a deal with Eventide.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
Well, my team was even Tide. We worked together. I
did a lot. I do a lot of things for them,
and they do a lot of things for me. I've
got all their new equipment, their old equipment. We're good friends.
And I grew up ten blocks away from the guy
who owns even Tide. Now Tony Aiello. We're both both
Brooklyn boys.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Okay, so we live in an era of vinyl fetishism.
From my viewpoint, I'm eating up mature. It's one thing
if it's recorded analog, it makes no sense to me
to record at such a high res and pro tools
get it down to analog. You have all the issues
that we're aware of. What is the tracking angle, the

(12:14):
inside groove, the outside groove, all these other things. What's
your take on today's vinyl mania.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
I'm very pleased with the way vinyl sounds now. Because
we could record, we could make vinyls louder than they
ever were, which was always a problem, especially with lengthy
sides like in the prog rock days. Groups you used
to like to make forty even fifty minute albums, which
you get, that's the law of diminishing returns. You only

(12:43):
have so many grooves from the label to the you know,
beginning of the record. So now, because of computer technology,
even the cutting lathes are working at speeds that a
human brain can't work at. Because in the old days,
when you wanted to widen the groove, you had a
little wheel and the engineer did it by hand to

(13:05):
open up the groove for a very loud passage, and
when it's quiet, he would close the groove by hand.
And now the computer does this about ten times quicker,
therefore optimizing the space between the beginning of a vinyl
and the end of a vinyl. So this is a
good thing that's happened. I like new vinyls. They sound
better than ever.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
Let's say you cut something what at won ninety two
in pro tools, and then it is ultimately rendered to vinyl.
And let's see you're listening to the one ninety two version.
You haven't scaled it down. Are they just different listening
experiences or do you feel that one is superior?

Speaker 2 (13:45):
They should be the same. One ninety two has got
so many bits in it that it's it's almost a
smooth curved analog sound, you know. And if you look
at these on an acilloscope you could see digital is.
It looks like steps in a Mario game, you know,
a Nintendo game. It looks like steps that you would climb.

(14:08):
Whereas a pure analog single is a curve, it's very smooth.
So one ninety two is got so many bits jammed
into per second that it resembles a curve, very closely,
so if you transfer one ninety two to vinyl, it'll
probably be the same. But vinyl has the one artifact

(14:28):
that it's a medium. It's got that plastic sound that
you're not very aware of all the time. But analog
sounds warm because of the vinyl itself. That's one of
the reasons vinyl has a warm, kind of loose kind
of sound to it. But if you listen to the
one nine two, it would sound incredible. I think from

(14:50):
forty eight Killer Hurts Up A mix sounds pretty good
if you're doing all the right things, if you're recording
fat you know, nice pre am and nice bass sounds
and all that. From forty a K, which is I
think uh DVDs of forty AK it sounds good. It
doesn't sound horrible. You know, who's got who's got these

(15:12):
big like you said, Bob, who's got these big speakers
in the living room anymore? Who gets a shit? Really? Yeah? Well,
even the older people are listening on on headphones and
in near earbods, EarPods.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
Okay, so you know there's so many takes out there.
There are some engineers who say the sound you like
from vinyl is actually distortion you're talking about the plastic itself.
Can you go a little deeper there?

Speaker 2 (15:44):
The plastic itself adds the distortion. Uh, it's a physical process.
It it's it's gonna you're hearing something from outside the music.
It's the physical world, the groove and the vinyl. It's
a medium. Like if you just, you know, scratched a
chalk on a blackboard. It's a medium. You'll hear that

(16:06):
surface noise. That's what the word I'm looking for, which
everyone really talks about when they analyze a vinyl recording,
how much surface noise is there compared to how much
musical content is there. So that's the problem we have
with vinyl. And if you keep your sides short, you
will never hear surface noise. I recommend no more than

(16:29):
eighteen minutes per side, because beyond that you will be
losing a dB for every minute. That's actually a ratio,
it's a law in vinyl cutting.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
So if we were at your house and it was
equally EASi or difficult, and I say I'm going to
play it on either vinyl or play it at one
ninety two, which would you prefer.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
With absolutely no coloration, you would prefer the one ninety
two with the digital surface noise, et cetera. It still
sounds great. It's just slight. It will sound slightly different,
and maybe only I would Maybe if you gave me
a blind fall test, I couldn't tell the difference, except
I would. Maybe somebody putting the toe arm down on
the record might give it away. But I you know,

(17:18):
a well cut final that has an eighteen minute maximum
side and a one ninety two file, it's going to
sound pretty close to each other.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
So have you always been a technology geek? Oh?

Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yeah, from the good old days when I was a kid,
I used to take radios apart. And I had a
little radio once and it was like I took it
out of my mom's kitchen. But I bought a ten
inch speaker from Lafayette Street. Oh wow, Canal Street, Canal.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
I thought you talking about the company Lafayette, which was
the whole thing long time ago.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
It's actually Canal and Lafayette when there was all these
geeky electronic parts places. And I bought a ten inch speaker,
and I wanted to hook up my very naively, I
wanted to hook up my mother's AM radio to those
ten inge speakers and I made a little box for
it to put the speaker in. That was my first
speaker I ever built. And I was about fourteen years old.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Well, this is the dark, agers, there's no internet. How
did you know how to do this?

Speaker 2 (18:19):
I had a good friend who went to Brooklyn Tech
High School. He was my best friend. He lived around
the corner for me in bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and he
could do He was good with the soldering iron and
taught me how to do that. But what we actually
did this. He said, you know, there's not much power
in your mother's radio to power this tenange speaker. So

(18:40):
he built a little transistor circuit. At the time, they
just came out, and he built a little amplifier that
he put inside and it worked that. Actually, I was
in my room. I used to listen to the Alan
Freed Show, the Jocko Show on radio and all that,
and I could really crank that ten inch speaker. Because
of Bruce's intovention, my mom, My mom flipped out. She says,

(19:04):
you broke my radio, you know, and in those days
a home only owned one radio. My home did anyway,
you know. But she was okay, she was happy I
went into this career. So you know, I was okay
after that.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
Okay, you know computers. The Apple Tube comes out at
the end of the seventies, the Mac comes out in
the mid eighties, the Internet hits in the nineties. Were
you an early adopter? Where did you come into the
computer world.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's a good question. I got a what you call
a desktop in the seventies. You know, it looks like
a big cheese grater there the first when they first
one they brought out, and I wasn't on a laptop.
I was using this and I had a monitor which
was extremely expensive in lo fi, and you know, a
visual monitored. And a friend came around and I had

(19:59):
a rack full of gear from playing live and all that,
and that's when I began. It was a lot of fun.
I don't think I started on pro Tools. They they
had only a four track thing called digit Design or
something like that. They weren't they weren't pro Tools yet.
And then there was this German company who made Logic.

(20:21):
So Logic was the game changer from uh they went
a track when pro Tools were still four track. So
I switched over to the Logic brand and I started
to make really good, good recordings at home and what
I ended up doing was because I didn't have an
analog tape machine. I would do a lot of tricky stuff,

(20:43):
a lot of editing the in the UH in pro
tools or logic, and then I would there were some
studios that already had it too. I would bring my
files there and we'd lock them up with the twenty
four track tape or the sixteen track tape that we had,
so I could do a lot of work at home,
which was inexpensive on editing, and then go with the

(21:04):
edited files back and put it on the the tape
that had the analog drums recorded on it and all that.
So I did this really quite early in the game seventies.
I can't remember what year, but probably seventy nine around then,
seventy nine to eighty.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Okay, you have this external piece of equipment. Needless to say,
almost no one cuts on analog tape anymore, for no
other reason. You can't really even get it. Yeah, if
you use your system, will it sound to a train deer?
Will it sound just like tape?

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Pretty much? So I have had so many people tell
me that you're an analog guy. I can hear it,
you know, And I'm mixing in the box, you know.
So that's that's good. It's a good thing that I could.
I could capture that sound again by the way I do.
When I have these clients who can afford it, we
do use twenty four and forty eight track. Going back

(22:07):
to to an analog studio. There are plenty of them
still in use, but the clients have to be quite
wealthy to use it. And at the end of maybe
two weeks of recording drums, et cetera and things like that,
then we'll have the engineer put everything into pro tools.
But we could work for an analog for like the

(22:28):
two weeks time, and then once it's in pro tools,
then I could do what I normally do.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
Okay, in the old days, if you were a big act,
you'd go through rezillion reels of tape, just if you
go into a studio when you're recording on a studo
or something. Since tape is expensive in not in volume,
just use the tapes over and over again, or do
you do at old school record it.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Once we shelve it, you could use it over and
over again. Tape has quite a long life. There's only
one brand now anyway, and thank god it's good, doesn't
shed as much. It used to be sickening to play
a tape all day long. And then you go and
take the tape off the machine and you see this
little mountain of oxide that was shedded from the tape

(23:16):
going past the heads for hours and hours on end.
And then you can actually sometimes hold the tape up
to a light and you could see through the tape.
It's a horrible medium, it really, it's archaic, But what
studios do nowadays, this is a really nice trick. And
you could do it with a machine called Stuoter. Because

(23:37):
it's got three heads instead of the traditional two heads.
You can actually record a session on tape and simultaneously
play it back into a computer. And as soon as
it comes off the record tape, it hits a playback
tape and it goes into pro Tools like within a
split second. That is quite a modern day of ing now.

(24:00):
So after you've got the drums and all that done,
you could then open up pro Tools and listen to
it and it just sounds fantastic. You can't get it
fresher than that, you know, Okay.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
Let's go back to growing up. People may not realize
that a ten inch speaker is actually pretty big. It'd
be pretty loud. So what'd your parents say when you're
playing the radio through this amplified ten inch speaker?

Speaker 2 (24:30):
Oh, everything you can think of, like shut that thing off,
turn it down, but it you know, I'd say, it
sounds so good loud mom, you know. And she was
more sympathetic. My dad. Dad just couldn't tolerate it, you know.
And he hated the music. He hated rock and roll.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
And your parents did what for a living?

Speaker 2 (24:53):
My father was many things. He was a shipwright in
the World War Two, so he built ships with the
in the navy yard, the Berkley Navy Yard. Then he
afterwards found it was like a kind of all around
handyman guy. So he became a professional, sorry, a professional carpenter,
and he was a union member and built a lot

(25:15):
of houses on Long Island in those days. He would
just go off in his car. We lived in Brooklyn.
He'd go off in his car and after the cement
work has put down the foundation, he would put the
timber and the lumber and start building the house. Quite
often he'd build a house single handedly. One day he

(25:35):
took me just he wanted me to hold up a
beam while he nailed it on the other end, you know,
and I had too. He wanted to make a man
of me, he said. So it took two weeks of
my life and my hands were full of splinters and
cuts and all that. And I said, Dad, I'm just
not going to be a carpenter. You got to get
used to it. But he was. He was a good guy.

(25:56):
He taught me music. He taught me how to play
mandolin and guitar, and he played accordion too, So we
used to jam together. And thanks to him, I knew
all the songs from the thirties and the forties, you know,
the music that he grew up with, the nineteen thirties
and forties.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
Right right right, So he literally taught you. He would
get the instrument out and say this is how you do.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
It, yes, and this is I got my first ukulele
at five years old, and it came with a book.
The strings were colored strings. The book had colored the
colored strings equivalent in the book, and I would just
put my finger where the dot was on the right
colored string, and I was playing. By the end of

(26:40):
the day, I was playing a few of the songs
in the book and within a couple of weeks they
got me a proper This is a plastic ukulele with
the popeye and olive oil decops all over it. Real
Woolworth's piece of dung. But anyway, about three months later
they went out and got me a wooden ukulele and

(27:02):
I started really, you know, jamming on that thing. He
was a good man, it was really. He knew I
had talent, and he nurtured me.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
Okay, this is Brooklyn in the forties and fifties. There
were a lot of how I've had to put this,
you know, you gotta be wary of anything you say today.
There were a lot of ethnicities. There were Jews, there
were Italians. Was this well, you know, were you you
have an Italian last name? Was this something that was

(27:31):
part of your upbringing?

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yes. I lived in what is now called Bourham Hill,
which we used to just call it downtown downtown Brooklyn.
So I lived on Warren Street between Hoyt and Smith Street,
pretty close to the shopping area that was not too
far away. And our building had basically all Italians in

(27:56):
it because my grandfather owned it, So we had Italians
on We lived on the ground floor and we had
Italians in the middle floor and on the upper floor,
and next door we had a Sicilian family who owned
that house, and you know, we were Neapolitans, not that
I could speak any Italian, but there was like a
lot of love lost between Sicilians and Neapolitans, so we

(28:19):
had that little battle going on, you know. But my
mother made friends easily because on the other side of
the street around the corner was Wykoff Street, which was
all black, all black people, and my mother used to
go to the end of the garden and she had
a friend. I forget what her name was, but they
addressed each other as you know, missus Smith and Missus Visconti,

(28:41):
and they got on. They would chat for about an
hour each time and wouldn't invite each other in each
other's houses, but they became good friends. Across the street,
we had this crazy guy who had a junkyard. He
just like was dangerous if you got close to his

(29:04):
junk yard and you wanted to like peek in. And
at once I went in and sat on a tractor.
He nearly killed me, you know, chased me off the
tractor and I ran back across the street to my
home down the street. We had Irish people all on
us the same street, and we had Hispanic people, and
we all got along kids in the street, you know,

(29:26):
playing hopscotch, ring Aleivio, all these crazy street game. You
can only play it in the middle of the street.
And you needed a lot of chalk to make all
the patterns. And all that. We weren't you know, I
guess you can gather that we weren't wealthy. We were
quite working class. But I got toys at Christmas. I
got the ugulele. I got some fun stuff. And my

(29:49):
mother was a fantastic Italian cook. She would cook and
sing in the kitchen at the same time. And her
sauce or gravy with depending on your ethnic what you
want to call it started two days before Sunday because
she reduced that those jars of tomatoes to just liquid gold.

(30:10):
It was just delicious. And she would sing Italian songs
in the kitchen. She was a fluent Italian singer, and
she had a voice like an opera singer. I heard.
We had a friend who had a disc cutter in
those days, in the late fifties. He cut these little
seven inch discs. So I heard my mother sing Italian

(30:31):
songs on those discs in recent times, about twenty years ago,
and I said to her on the phone, I said, Mom,
you had an operatic voice. You are a contralto. Do
you realize you could have sung an opera? And she goes, oh,
she goes, all Italian women could sing. She was a

(30:52):
great sobering influence on me. You know, I didn't grow
up with any airs. The two of them kept me
in check and themselves in check too.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
But they were both born in America.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yes, my father was born in New Jersey and to
Italian immigrants, and my mother was born in Brooklyn to
Italian immigrants as well. They were both both born in Naples.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
So what was your upbringing like? Were you popular? Were
you good in school? Were you a loner? Were you
exterior or into her? What kind of kid were you? Uh?

Speaker 2 (31:30):
I don't know. I remember the first day of kindergarten
well because I cried my eyes out. My mother left
me and went walked out the door. And that was
the most traumatic day of my life up until that
period to do without my mother, because I was by
her side all the time until I went to kindergarten.
And then I remember within an hour, we were supposed
to sit down and clap hands and sing a song.

(31:53):
And I didn't like the girl to the left of me,
so I clapped. I opened up my hands so wide
that I hit her in the head. I don't know
what I was taking my anger out on, but you
know why I was doing this. But I really did
not like being separated from my mother. And after that year,
which I don't remember anything more about it, it was just kindergarten.
We just played on the floor and drew, you know,

(32:15):
pictures and all that. But the first grade was quite interesting.
I was very interested in learning how to read and write,
and I was already my parents started me off. I
could read basic words, I knew how the alphabet worked,
and until I was about up until the third grade,
I was a good scholar. I paid attention and it

(32:37):
was good and kind of after that I lost interest.
When I got up to fifth grade, I or sixth grade,
I got a great teacher. He pulled me out of
the doldrums of like, you know, just going to school
and all that. His name was James Flanagan, and he
was in World War maybe the Korean War. Probably maybe

(32:59):
the Korean War could have been World War Two. I
don't know, but he told me like lots of stories
and he took me aside. He so that I was like,
like after class, we'd chat for about fifteen minutes and
he was really good to me. And one day he said,
when I was in Japan, I saw men who could
break wood with their bare hands, and I said, that's it.

(33:22):
I got to learn how to break with with my bands.
He got me like going. And there was early karate
schools in New York City at the time, which I
was too young to go to. But I bought a
book and I did my own training in my backyard.
And I have James Flanagan or Jim, you know, we
could call him. He was cool. We could call him

(33:43):
by his first name in the sixth grade, whereas before
that you had to call the teachers by their surnames.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
You know, well for people who weren't around. You were
really early on the karate thing that did not really
go mainstream to like mid to late sixties. But you're
an only child, correct, Yes, I am so any viewpoints
on that.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
Oh, I love being an only child. I don't know
how to be any other way. Like I look at
brothers and sisters, and I see how they get along.
And what I witnessed most of the time when I
was growing up was that they were often fighting with
each other over something like there's one toy to be
shared between two kids, and all that. I didn't share
anything with anybody. They were all my toys, and that's

(34:28):
how I thought it was great. It was great being
an only child. I had a cousin, a close cousin
who used to come over to my house and we
play for a while, and like around I guess twelve
years old thirteen, we just kind of He became very religious.
He became a religious Catholic and went to a parochial school,

(34:48):
which I just couldn't handle it. I already knew something
was wrong. I didn't want to learn any more religion.
I didn't like it. I didn't like the nuns. I
didn't like the priests. The masses were nice if they
had a nice organ playing, and some of the hymns,
you know that. I like the musical part, but it

(35:10):
just wasn't for me. And when I was fifteen, I
totally left the church. I had a chiropractor who was
a very modern thinker, and he was again like a
father figure, like mister Flanagan was, and we were talking
about religion one day. He goes, how do you feel
about it? And I go, I don't know. I said,
it's kind of simple, and yet there's nothing there that

(35:33):
entices me, like wants me to go to church. He goes,
I stopped going to church too, and yah, he made
me the atheist that I am today. I'm actually in
touch with his sons now, who are like in their forties.
You know, he's still alive, that guy.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
Okay, you learn how to play the ukulele. That is
pre rock and roll. You know, there's so many definitions.
What the first rock and roll wreck was? Was it
Rocket eighty eight? Rock around the clock? When did you
hear rock and roll? When did you become infected?

Speaker 2 (36:08):
That would be about ten or eleven. I heard these
early radio shows that Alan Freed did in New York.
He was on once a week, and that's the main
reason why I wanted to build this Frankenstein Radio was
to hear it a little bit better. I wanted to
hear some bass coming out of the speakers, and Alan
Freed just played fantastic music. He was mainly playing R

(36:31):
and B, and he played a lot of black artists,
you know, like Little Richard and the Moon Glows, Harvey
and the Moon Glows, all those old doop groups. And
then I discovered Jocko, who was a DJ. I don't
know his full name. He just used to go like,
I am your engineer, ooh, bop do, how do you do?

(36:52):
This is your engineer Jocko. And I used to listen
to him like one morning a week, and he would
play the most insane he'd go much further with the
R and B. He would find some music from the
Deep South that Alan Freed wouldn't play because Alan Fee
was catering mainly to a white teenage crowd and Jocko

(37:12):
was catering to a black crowd, black audience. So I
had the best of both worlds. I can't complain. Was
that so? Anyway? Alan Freed started the first rock and
roll shows ever, like at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, where
you would have on one bill you would have Buddy Holly,
Little Richard, Harvey and the Moon Glows, the Cleftones, Shirley

(37:36):
and Lee, all singing two songs each and they would
work from morning to night. The first show was like
ten am and the last show ended at midnight, and
I would pay for the I would go in in Brooklyn.
I would take the train to the Brooklyn Paramount, pay
for the to get in, and then hide in the
bathroom in between shows and go back. And I'd stay

(37:58):
till at least eight o'clock at night and see three
shows and to see the people that I was hearing
Alan Freed play on the radio, to see them live
in color, you know, like the Cleftones would wear double
breasted suits in shaw truce, you know, and shar truce loafers,

(38:19):
you know, and they were the cool They would have
the coolest dand steps. You know. While the guy was
singing lead, the other four guys would just drop down
into a split and you can't see that on the radio,
you know. To see these people actually perform these songs
live was incredible. The other thing I remember from this, Bob,
is that they had one guitar amplifier in the middle

(38:41):
of the stage, and that was to suffice for all
the guitar players in the show, and the lead the
guitar chord went all the way to the side of
the stage, like it was about, you know, thirty feet
thirty five feet maybe forty feet long, and only about
half the had a guitar player. The rest was an

(39:02):
in house band. But all of a sudden you would
hear the buzz of, say, somebody plugging it in, and
that had to be either Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly
or somebody like the I think the moon Glows had
an electric guitarist in their band, and that's my heart
would start beating. I said, who is it going to be?
Is it going to be Buddy or is it going
to be you know, Chuck Berry? And that was even

(39:24):
The buzz of that guitar being plugged in was exciting
for me. It made my heart beat quicker.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
Okay, are you an Elvis guy?

Speaker 2 (39:35):
Oh yeah, definitely. I have a picture of me singing
Elvis songs. It's just a photograph on my baritone yuke
because I was still too young to have a proper
sized guitar. But I could sing Love Me Tender, playing
accompany myself on a baritone ukulele, which is a slightly
bigger ukulele than the little guy. And I could never

(39:58):
see him in person. I don't think he ever played
New York. No he didn't. That would have been that
would have been you know, that would amaze, be amazing.
But he, you know, had Colonel Tom Parker, who if
the money wasn't right, like he would want the money
from the whole show if Elvis was to appear. So
he never did shows like that, and I never saw

(40:19):
him in person, Bowie said. He met Elvis in person,
but I never did.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
Okay, you learn how to play the ukulele at age five,
you become infected with rock and roll. What's your musical
life span after that? When do you start playing other things?
When do you decide you want to play in a band.
When do you decide this is what you want to
do for a living.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
Okay? So by when my parents saw that I was
outgrowing the ukulele, they got me a guitar and a
friend of theirs who sold it to them, who was
his secondhand guitar. He said, your son should take lessons.
And I've got this great friend the mine. He's a
guitar teacher who lived in Eastern Parkway, so it was

(41:04):
quite a trick for me. But his name was Leon Block,
and he wrote some great books, great guitar books. And
I went the bus ride from my house to his
and I would do this all four seasons I went.
I studied with him for three years until I was
fifteen fifteen and a half. That would take an hour
both ways, and I would go in the middle of

(41:26):
the winter if it was snowing, I would not miss
a lesson. And it was all It was like three
bus rides, you know, three bus changes, you get you
what do you call it? Transfer? And after the three years,
he said he taught me how to read and write music.
He taught me how to play jazz guitar, classical guitar.
He pulled out some Bach duets. He would take a

(41:49):
Bach two part invention and he would play the bass
line on a guitar and I would I could already
read travel Cleft, so I would play the top line
and they were difficult gault. But you know, by after
about two years, I was pretty good. And then he
surprised me. He said, now we're going to swap. We've
gone through the book. Now you play the bass line
and I'll play the top line. I couldn't have asked

(42:11):
for a better teacher than him. That was three years
of bliss, and I always loved him, and any assignment
he gave me was never too hard. I would just
practice because I wanted to impress him. But by fifteen
and a half I started meeting local musicians who lived
around me and from school and all that, and that's
when I formed my first band. It was actually a

(42:34):
little earlier, but maybe fourteen, and that was with a
sax player who was Mike Di Stefano and his cousin
who was I forget his cousin's name, but he was
a blind drummer and I was the guitarist. So it
was guitar, sax and the drummer and we called ourselves
Mike d and the Dukes. That was my first band.

(42:58):
I was a duke, obviously. So we went and started
playing parish dances, like you know, Saint Bernadette's would have
dance night for the kids, heavily supervised by priests and nuns.
But we'd get up there and we'd play rock and roll,
and then if we played a slow dance, they would

(43:19):
start dancing cheek to cheek and the priest would say,
stop the music. Stop the music. That's enough to get
you know, kids who would fourteen and fifteen really get
into it, you know, if you give him a half
a chance and from there. I played that for a
while and I couldn't it was too young for nightclubs.
But when I was seventeen, the most amazing thing happened

(43:41):
to me. And I can't remember exactly how, but through
a friend, there was this nightclub at the far end
of Brooklyn called Ben Maxick's Town and Country. It was
very close to Floyd Bennett Airfield, and Ben Maxick had
this vision. He loved Las Vegas and he wanted his
was to bring Las Vegas to New York. And he

(44:03):
couldn't find a space like those enormous you know places
that you can build in the desert in Las Vegas.
It couldn't build in Manhattan. But in Brooklyn there was
real estate where he built like a I don't know,
it's probably a six acre nightclub. He could have a
capacity with two thousand people, and he pulled in acts

(44:26):
like Milton Burle, Robert Goulay, Sophie Tucker, the last of
the Red Hot Mammas. I played for all these people.
So through a friend I got the job. The bass
player just quit his wife had a baby or something,
and I was already another instrument I play is you
know double bass? The upright bass, and Ned Harvey, the

(44:48):
leader of the band, wanted a kid in the band.
He wanted a young person in the band. My job
was to play the bass for the dance band and
play the bass for the acts like Robert Gulay and
people that, and then when it was dancing time, I
would have to bring my guitar and play some rock
and roll songs like Elvia songs so the kids could

(45:09):
dance to it, and the kids and their parents could
dance to it. It was a gig from heaven. I
had that job for three years, and I made so
much money I bought That's when I got my own instruments.
I didn't have to have my parents by instruments for
me anymore. And I kind of you know, I was
working till three am. So often my father would come

(45:33):
home and find me. He come over from work, say
at four thirty, and I would have my feet up
watching television, and it made him so angry that I
could just work seven nights a week and make all
this money and he had to work like a dog,
you know. He would often come home at four thirty,
have dinner, and then go out to someone's house and

(45:53):
put up cabinets for them, you know, And one day
he had we had a big fight about this. I said, Dad,
I can't. What do you want me to do? Work
during the day as well as six hours at night.
I can't do it, you know.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
Okay, A couple of quick questions, were you ever Anthony
Anthony junior?

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah? So I get on the I'd answer the phone,
and by that time, as fifteen, we had my father
and I had the same voice, the same accent, and
they go hello Anthony, and I go, yeah, you go, oh, okay, Anthony,
I want to tell you about a job. I've got
few and this would be a carpentry job. I go,
wait a minute, you want Anthony senior. This is Anthony junior. Yeah.

(46:31):
So then they would start calling up I want Anthony
Junior or I want Anthony Senior and all that. So
we had a little problem with that, but it was fun.
It was funny.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Okay, do you finish high school? And is there ever
a thought of college?

Speaker 2 (46:54):
No? I knew I wasn't going to go to college.
I was in college material. I couldn't wait being in
this band until I was seventeen or eighteen. That just
ledged for more great work. And there was no if
you know, I wanted to go to Juilliard. I knew
about Juilliard in Manhattan School of Music, but you could

(47:17):
tell from all these late nights. And I wasn't doing good.
My marks were horrible. In high school, I didn't get
good grades. My only two subjects where I got good
grades were music department grades and English. My English was good.
I was always a good reader, a good speller. I
like poetry, I like novels. I read Charles Dickens and
all that. Had no problem with that stuff. But mathematics,

(47:40):
forget about it. I was the worst, you know, and
algebra I could barely understand. Then when it got up
to trigonometry, I just totally flunked. And I couldn't wait
till I hit sixteen because I could leave school, and
I did. I left school as soon as possible. I
just kept getting gigs after gigs after that, and I

(48:01):
never looked back.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
Okay, so what kind of gigs were you getting?

Speaker 2 (48:05):
Well, mostly club dates where you would play in a
either a catered hal for a wedding or a bar
mitzter or it's something that those are the only two
gigs available. Actually, a wedding or a bar mitzter or
you sometimes get a Jewish wedding where you had to
know how to play the horror and because shee was
have their own dances, you know. So I was so

(48:26):
well versed I could do anything. I don't know. I
played Greek weddings too, which back basically it's the same music.
If you play Hava Nagila at a Greek wedding, they'll
dance to it. It's amazing, but it's the same beat.
So I was doing club dates, club.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
Dates in the music world by time we hit the
late fifties early sixties. Although we have Bobby Darren who
has gotten a renaissance in terms of his reputation, we
had Fabean, we had a lot of other stuff. Ultimately
in the sixties had the Four Seeds of the Beach Boys.

(49:03):
There was also a big folk scene. Where were you
at on all that.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
At the time In my late teens, I definitely wanted
to jump on that bandwagon. And growing up in New York,
it's not really difficult to find a manager or people
who work in the music business. They either live in
Manhattan or they live in Brooklyn, and they actually did
talent scouting in those days, and at one gig, this

(49:31):
guy came up to me, Jay Fishman, and he said,
I was singing this time. I was singing duets with
a guy called Carl, and we were singing like Everly
Brothers songs, and he said, I'm going to make a
record with you, guys. I can get you a deal,
And he actually did get us a record deal, which
got local airplay. In those days, there was not too

(49:52):
much national radio. Everything was basically local. So he didn't
work out, and I just went through a series of
managers who I guess, you know, in reflection, they want
to be managers. We didn't get a big manager who
could actually get us on a big label, but I
ended up through these managers. I ended up doing a

(50:12):
lot of recording sessions. So I stepped into the recording
studio is early is like probably my sixteenth year, and
started playing for demo sessions. They were quite lucrative, so
a songwriter would come in and just say I've written
four songs. I need you guys to just give me
some backing, and we could get that done in maybe
two three hours, and I'd walk away with about you know,

(50:34):
twenty five dollars in my hand, which was good in
those days. Good pay.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
Okay, the Beatles hit What does that mean to you?

Speaker 2 (50:44):
The Beatles changed everything. I keep telling younger people. I said,
the world was black and white, and then when we
heard She Loves You, Yeah, yeah, yeah, the world suddenly
became technicolor. They did that in music, and they did
that in lifestyle. You know, kids actually started looking like
kids instead of you know, young adults wearing your your

(51:06):
bar Mitz for suit all the time when you went out.
You know, we started wearing buying these hip clothes that
were being imported from from England and they were inspired
by the Beatles. With the Beatles wore you know, collarless
jackets and all that stuff. And I said to myself,
somehow I'm going to get over to London. I don't
know how I'm going to do it, but somehow I'm

(51:27):
going to do that. And that took a while, but
it happened. It really it happened. At one point. It
was a keeper, another key person who came into my
life and I had to learn how. I said, okay,
here's how it happened. I had a publishing deal. A
talent scout saw me and my wife, who were doing

(51:47):
a duet act by that time. We called ourselves Toni
and Sigrid, and we were playing at the in the village,
like at the Cafe Wi and all those village kind
of cool hippie places to perform at. And as a
result of a talent scout seeing us there, he got
a publishing deal with the Richmond Organization, which is a

(52:08):
big publishing house in Manhattan and they've got branches all
over the world. So Howie Richmond listened to my songs
for weeks on end and brought me into his office
one day and he said, Tony, I've got to have
a serious talk with you. And I got terrified. He
was the CEO. I got terrified, and I said, okay.

(52:32):
So I went to his office and he said, Tony,
I've got to tell you you've put in a lot
of songs. I've listened to everything. I've listened to your tapes.
He goes, I don't like your songs. Got to tell
you the truth, and I go and my face talk
about crestfallen. I nearly my jaw dropped. I never was

(52:53):
expecting that. So in the next breath he says, but
I like your tape recordings. He says, I like you
recordings very much. He goes, I would like you to
make the house record producer. I have all these kids
here who write music and all that, but we don't
have good recording facilities. I can't get decent demos. They
sound horrible because your demos, what do you do? And

(53:15):
all that? And I go, well, I've got two machines
at home, and I do all this bouncing like Les Paul,
does you know I have five guitars and two basses
and things like that. I hit a pillow for a
kick drum and things like that. So he set me
up with the studio in the Richmond Organization. This is
a fifty ninth street in Columbus Circle. And I worked

(53:35):
there for about a year. I was getting paid to
do all this and not making any records of my
own anymore. But at the water fountain, the water cooler,
one day I happen to be there at the same
time as this very tall, distinguished gentleman was. He had
silvery curly hair. He was wearing a jacket and a
soup and no tie. And he said, she said one thing.

(53:59):
He said, Hellaire an English accent, and I go, you're English.
I was like, the first english person I ever met
my life. He goes, oh, yes, I am. My name
is Danny Cordell. I work in England. And I said,
my gosh. He said what's your name? I go Tony Visconti,
I said, and he says, what do you do here?

(54:20):
I go, well, I'm Tony Visconti and I'm the house
record producer. And he goes, ah, my American cousin. I go,
what do you mean by that? He goes, well, I'm
the house record producer for this company in London. Same thing.
It's the same job. And I went, that's fantastic, you know.
And we sipped a few more cups of water and

(54:41):
I said to him what are you doing here? And
he goes, I'm recording a track for Georgie Fame. It's
a big, big British artist at the time, very jazz
orientated artist. And he said, I'm going to record at
I've got a session book at A and R studios.
The R was Phil ramon phil Ramone Studio, which was
Hallowed Ground. I had never been in there, but this

(55:04):
is cool. I go, well, that's fantastic. Can I see
the charts, you know. He told me he had Clark
Terry on trumpet. I adored Clock Terry, one of the
greatest jazz musicians ever, trumpeters who ever lived. And I said,
can I see the music? And he said, I don't
have any charts. I don't have any music. And I go,
how do you do it in the UK UK? And

(55:26):
he says, well, we booked the studio for three in
the afternoon. I hire a bunch of musicians and we
play a demo and then we'd start rolling some spliffs,
and we smoke some weed, you know, and we just
work all day until maybe by eleven o'clock at night,
we've got it, you know, we've got the track. And

(55:47):
I said, Denny, this is New York City. We have
the local eight oh two Musicians Union. You will be
crucified if you ask Clark Terry to write down these
trumpet parts that you're playing to me on this tape.
He'll do it, but you get it. You'll get a
thousand dollar bill for it. You know, you can't ask
Clock Terry to write the charts, because what am I
going to do? I said, I can read and write music.

(56:10):
So I wrote the chart. I wrote the chord changes
indicated in which bar like in bar number thirty drum fill.
I just wrote the words drum fill. I'm not going
to write a drum fill. I'll leave it to the
clever drummer who we booked. But I had to write
Clark Terry's parts out. It was a very strict written thing.
This took me a good part of an hour. We

(56:30):
slammed it on the Xerox. We had these new Xerox
machines and ran down forty eighth Street in Manhattan with
about eight eight parts, put them in front of all
the musicians, and right away I saw clock Terry right away.
He starts going up up, but he starts playing it
off the sheet music, and I look at Danny, and

(56:51):
Danny looks at me. Danny's got this big grin on
his face. This isn't going to be like London. This
is we're going to get this done. When I told
him he'd be crucified, he was very, very worried by
the way. He had just produced a wider shade of
pale and he was rolling, you know, pop success. But
he didn't have a lot of money. So this session

(57:11):
took all of forty five minutes and we had this
fantastic tracts. The song was because I Love You. It's
an early Georgie fame hit, and clock Terry was cool.
Everybody was cool. They liked the fact that it was
well prepared. So a week two weeks later, he goes

(57:32):
back to London and he phones me up and says,
how soon could you get here? I go, Now, I'm
not doing anything, so he said, okay, He goes, well,
I'm gonna after I spoke to you, I went to
I met a few other people, record producers, and I

(57:54):
even spoke to Phil Specterer asking him to come and
work for me. I said, oh, you'd be lucky. You've
got Phil Specks that to work for you. He's not
that kind of guy, you know, but anyway, he says,
you're the guy I want. He says, the way you
work you did that session was great. I need someone
to translate what I hear in my head into music
into musical notes. And two weeks later I was in

(58:16):
London and went to the studio, but my very first
day I was terribly jet lagged. But then he took
me to a Manfred Man session which he was producing.
He was producing too many people, and he really did
need an assistant, and after about two hours he left
me with Manfred Man on my own. Bob, I had

(58:37):
no experience, no experience dealing with especially with British people
who spoke a different language basically, so they hated me.
They didn't like my American accent. So I thought I'll
be a little cheerful. So I was in the studio
and we did a lot of takes. We did up

(58:58):
to six takes, and they were already in misery, these guys.
They wanted Denny and they got this young American punk instead.
So I said, okay, here we go. We're going to
do take seven, Lucky take seven, and they went oh,
they all audibly groaned. I was like being a DJ,
you know, Lucky takes seven. And so when Denny come back,

(59:22):
came back, we finally got a good take and he
listened to what we had done, and they did as well.
They warmed up to me at the very very end,
but that was was It was horrible. My first day
was so horrible. And the ability not to understand them, like,
you know, they've got different words, like if they're happy
about something, they're chuffed. I didn't know that word chuffed.

(59:44):
I didn't know what chuffed meant. Sounds like a chimney
going what the hell does that mean? You know? So
that was it. That's how I got there, and that's
basically the beginning of my career as what I do today.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
Okay, so play it out. You're in London, now you
work with man from Man, You're working with Denny. What
comes next?

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Well with Denny I played. I went onto all kinds
of sessions, including more another Georgie Fame session two. I
tagged along on his Parcol Harrem sessions and helped again.
He left me in charge one day, which went down
a little bit better. They they knew me already. They
I came to a few before he left me with them,
and they they knew I was on their side, and

(01:00:28):
I knew what I was talking about. So I remember
I produced a whole track from scratch called Magdalene my
regal Zonophone, all in one day. Denny was in awe
of that. He came back, he goes, you did this
all in one day? He was He was slow and
I was fast. So after that I worked with his
group called the Move, which was Birmingham's answer answer to

(01:00:51):
the Beatles, like Birmingham was called the Birmingham Beatles at
one point because they wanted they emulated everything the Beatles did,
and I had had quite a few hit records with them,
both as a co producer and an arranger. The first
record I did for them was a song called Flowers
in the Rain, and I recorded, you know, everybody was

(01:01:14):
doing Elden or Rigby. They wanted strings and all that stuff,
and I thought it's time we got off the strings
and onto some other classical instruments. So because it was
Flowers in the Rain, I thought of Mendelssohn and I thought,
I'm going to write something pastoral and for that you
need a flute, you need an obo, a clarinet and
a French horn. That's that's a win combination that normally

(01:01:36):
plays pastoral music. So it was a wacky arrangement I wrote.
It was reached number two in the charts and when
Radio one in England opened, you know they had these
this corny radio before, but Radio One was the pop station.
I listened to it at eight o'clock in the morning.
I wanted to hear that this station opening up. The
DJ Tony Blackburn the first record he played It was

(01:02:00):
Flowers in the Rain by the Move, and I nearly
screamed and jumped off my couch. You know, it was
just a fantastic experience.

Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
Well, just to stop there for a second. That was
an interesting band. They used to come to America, they
canceled tours, they broke up, whatever. But roy Wood was
seen as the talent and jeff Lynn was a secondary character,
even though we sang a certain amount. Then there was
the first Elo, then they split apart. There was roy
Wood's Wizard, and then ultimately jeff Lynn goes on to

(01:02:31):
this incredible career with Elo and more. Did you have
any idea at that point in time? Was he just
another guy in the band?

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
Well, when they formed Not Yellow, what did you say? Wizard?
Roy wanted me to play keyboards in the band, and
he was dead serious. And I said, Roy, he thought
I played keyboards because I wrote arrangements. I had already
written three arrangements for them by that time. I said, no,

(01:03:00):
I actually write them on the classical guitar. And he says, well,
we've got enough guitar players in the band. Sure, so
you're sure you can't play keyboards? They go, no, I
have to give up on that. So Jeff Lynn came
in around that time, and you know they did a
great job. Well that worked, but I gave birth to

(01:03:21):
some of that. Some of my soul is in the
In the subsequent things that Roy did, we always got
on really great. He's a great guy.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
Okay, So from the move, keep telling, let's what happened.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
Well, from the move, my boss said it's time you
got a band of your own. He goes, you know
how to do it? Conduct a session on your own. Now,
you know, I was with him by his side for
a whole year, and so he tried me out with
a guy called Bedo. First all, he walked into our offices.

(01:03:53):
Bid is a famous Bollywood composer, but he came to London,
as he called himself the Indian Elvis, and in truth
he had a voice just like Elvis Presley, but he
had a bit of an accent. So I made one
record with Bido and I said, and then he said,
well I'm not going to It didn't do anything, and
we didn't leave acrimoniously. It just didn't do anything. So

(01:04:16):
David dropped Bido and he said, you pick your band.
You go out and pick your band. Who you want
to work with? I said, okay. So I heard this
band called Tyrannosaurus Rex played every weekend on John Peel's
radio show, and I happened to see the Underground. I
got a copy of the underground newspaper. I forget what
it was called now and Tyrannosaurus Rex we're playing right

(01:04:37):
around the corner from my office on Tottenham Court Road
in England. So after work, I noted the time it
was seven pm. I left work at six pm, went
to the corner pub, a pub called a Tutor. I
fortified myself with a big pint of ale, and then
I walked down to Tottenham Court Road and went to
that nightclub where Tyrannosaurus Rex was playing. And I walked

(01:05:01):
down the steps. It was like red light, dim light dim,
red lighted steps, and I hear the band playing coming
up through the stairwell and it was dead quiet. And
I'm used to going to gigs where the band the
audience is clapping, singing along and all that, and I thought,
no one's there. I walk in that room and there
were about seventy five kids sitting on the floor, cross legged,

(01:05:26):
listening attentively to Mark and Steve sing these songs. I
have never seen that in my life. They weren't singing along,
they were just worshiping him. So I approached the group afterwards,
and I approached the drummer first, because I didn't even
know if Mark was like an alien. Mark Bowling was
weird and he sang in this very affected voice, which

(01:05:49):
I thought, maybe he's French. You know, I didn't know
how to approach him anyway. Steve said, just don't talk
to me, man, talk to him. He's the leader. So
I gave Mark my business card and Mark followed up.
The next day. He came to our offices and he
phoned from the street. He said, I just happened to
be passing your offices and I'd like to come up

(01:06:12):
an audition for Denny Cordell. So that's how it began.
With my very first talent scouting produced came up with
Mark Bolan and Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
Okay, but they were an acoustic act. Then how did
it end up becoming an electric act? And called t Rex?

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
Well, that was about all I could handle. You know,
two people I could handle. I could play the psychology
games with two people. They had like percussion in the band,
bongo drums, conga drums and all that, and they Denny said, okay,
we'll tell you I like them, we'll take them on
as our token underground group. That was exact words, token

(01:06:57):
underground group. And already there was a very popular or
in England, a band in England called the Incredible String Band,
and Torontosaurus Rex were not unlike them, so there was
a big market for this kind of rock folk early
you know, psychedelic folk people will call it. So we
made these kind of psychedelic rock folk records for three

(01:07:19):
albums with the acoustic instruments, and then by the end
of the second album, Mark used to come around to
my apartment and he would always pick up my Fender
Stratocaster guitar and play it, and he ended up borrowing
it on the third album, and then that's when we
started going electric, but not the drum kit yet, except
everything had to be like miniature. So they did get

(01:07:41):
a drum kit for the next album, where it was
a toy drum set from Hamley's Toy Shop in London,
so it's actually a drum kit for like an eight
year old. But we detuned the drums and Steve played
the hell out of these drums. So it's on especially
on a song called Cat Black the Wizard's Hat, you

(01:08:04):
can hear this full drum kit, but it's actually a
toy drum kit called from a company called Chet, from
a company called Chad Valley.

Speaker 1 (01:08:12):
Okay, in America, the incredible stream band I think was
on Warner Brothers. They had a certain amount of a presence.
T Rex was almost nothing. You saw write a White
Swan in the bins? What was the profile of the
group in the UK?

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
By the time they did right a White Swan they
were Mark was quite famous because he was so cute
and he was a teenage He noticed that the girl
the audience was made mainly of girls who was screaming
while he was on stage. This is towards the fourth
album and with the electric guitar, and he borrowed my bass.

(01:08:49):
Uh this is this is very funny because wider White
Swan is an a flat which means he had to
play it with the capo on the fourth fret of
the guitar. And then when he borrowed my bass to
play the bass part, he had to put the capo
on the fourth fret of the bass, which I never
saw a bass player do in my life, put a
capo on a bass, but he played all the guitar

(01:09:12):
and the bass. And by this time we had Mickey
Finn in the band. Steve Peregrine took was fired unceremoniously
fired and that record took about two hours to make,
Right a White Swan, and we put it out. You know,
we always put out singles as Tyrannosaurus Rex, but they

(01:09:33):
didn't do very well. It never did very well. We
did a name change. We called a band t Rex.
John Peel reluctantly played it. He thought that they had
sold out and he was ready to discard them quickly
because he defeated the underdog and now Mark was becoming popular.
That was like, you know, an eth to John Field.

(01:09:53):
But he played it and then Radio one took it
up and that record was played night and day, and
we sold We was selling upwards of about six thousand
a day. In those days. You know, there was no internet,
so you had to go out and buy a record
if you liked it, and maybe you taped it off
your friend's record player. But basically record sales were enormous

(01:10:16):
in those days. He was now he was a megastar overnight.

Speaker 1 (01:10:27):
People don't understand how big he really was. He was
as big as they get.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
He was as big as the Beatles, and Ringo said
so himself when he made the movie with him, he said,
he said when, And then Mark went four piece as well.
By then they were drawing the same crowds and the
same reactions, probably even bigger crowds than the Beatles. Because
the Beatles never really played arenas apart from the say
stadium or something like that. Mark was playing arenas by

(01:10:56):
nineteen seventy two in the UK, not so good in
America though he never quite broke the back of that one.

Speaker 1 (01:11:05):
So how did you feel having this incredible success?

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
I loved it. You know, now all my dreams are
coming true. I wanted to be a successful record producer.
I'm also singing backups on these records. I'm very much
a part of the band. When they're in the studio,
we get on, we get along as friends. It was
the dream everybody wants to happen when they get into
the music business.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:11:27):
I had about three solid years of t rextasy. It
was called by the press, and Mark was controversial. He
used to do the wickedest interviews. He would really be
insulting to the journalists and just to get controversy. You know,
they try to tear him apart, but they were actually
giving him more ink than the normal rock star because

(01:11:49):
because they wanted to tear him down. You know, it
was so cool. You knew what to do.

Speaker 1 (01:11:54):
And how did Bengagong get it on come together?

Speaker 2 (01:11:58):
That was on a trip to America that we both
coincidentally went on at the same time. He got a
mini tour planned for him and it was to start
in New York and then they would fly to LA
to work with Flow and Eddie from the Turtles, and
they got flowin Eddie got a studio and I just

(01:12:21):
happened to be there to see my parents. I came
home for a trip to Brooklyn to see my parents,
but Mark knew I was there and he said, let's
make a record you're here. So we hired Media Media
Sound in Manhattan. It was like a jazz studio, but
we did Jeepster and Monolith. We did a couple of
tracks that would later appear on Electric Warrior. Then the

(01:12:41):
trip to La came up, because do you want to
go with us? You want to go to La, I go.
Of course I do. So we flew out to La
Flowin Eddie arranged Wali Hyder's studio for us, which was
like one of the best studios in La at the time,
and that's how we recorded Get It on Bangagong and
I got some lovely photos from there. And they made

(01:13:03):
the Jewish connection too. When Flo and Eddi, who were
both Jewish, found out that Mark was Jewish, there's something
deeper about that relationship took place, you know, it was
really great. And then they started making Yiddish jokes. You know,
I couldn't believe it. They grew up. Mark grew up
with you know, he heard these words when he was
growing up, and so did Flow and Eddie, you know.
And if you live in New York, no matter if

(01:13:24):
your Italian friend or Jewish, you learn Yiddish. That's one
of the languages you pick up the words. So we
had sessions that were so funny and I left the
tape running, you know, just cracking jokes all the time.
And that's how we re recorded about four or five
more songs at Wally Hiders studios with Flowin Eddi at

(01:13:45):
their auspices because they made it really easy for us
to work there, and then the rest of the tracks
were on the flight back to London. We took up
in Tried Studios in which was a great studio in
Soho and finished the rest of the album. It was
like a Frankenstein album, all different consoles, all different sounds.

(01:14:05):
But I mixed it in Tridon Studios so that in
that way I made it a more cohesive, cohesive sounding record.
But that was we were in Seventh HEAVENO.

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):
Okay. But the sound of the guitar on Bang of Gong,
can you tell us anything about getting it? It just
has an incredible sound.

Speaker 2 (01:14:25):
Yes, he had a two pedals. One was a wah
wah and the other ones. You know what a wah
wah is that it goes so and another one was
a treble booster which had had had a distortion and
crunch to the sound and he had that almost maxed out.

(01:14:45):
So between the wah wah, which if you don't move
the wah wah, you could move it to a certain
position and get a certain tone, but when you move
it up and down you get the wow effect. So
between positioning the pedal in a certain way and having
the screaming bird put in the circuit. He got this
crunchy sound, and then I would go up and you know,

(01:15:06):
like let's make it loud, OR'd turn up the Marshall
lamp and all that, and basically that was the sound.
What I did add in the mixing, which he loved,
was slapback. He was so keen on the you know,
the Elvis Presley slap back, a Wop Boba loom up,
the Little Richard's slap back and all that stuff, and

(01:15:27):
he wanted on both his guitar and his voice, and
it became a signature sound. Having the kick drum to
the four was another sound. We were one of the
early doers of that, you know kick You listen to
early R and B you can barely hear the kick drum.
But suddenly in the seventies people were saying, what what
what the kick drums a great thing? Why is it

(01:15:48):
so quiet in the mix. So we had the drums
up pretty loud. We even put slap back on the
drums too, for the tom phills. And I said, after
about two years of this, I said, you can get
me out of bed at five in the morning and
put me behind a console. I'll get you that sound
in half an hour. You know, it was a formula.
We invented a formula and we were accused of formulizing

(01:16:10):
the sound and I said, yep, that's what we're doing.
You're absolutely Did you know.

Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
Get It On was gonna be a gigantic kit when
you finished it?

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
No, we honestly didn't. We were doing everything the same
we always did, Bob, and we put singles out. They
weren't hits, minor hits, but not major hits. Something was
right about this one. It was more brevity in the
lyrics that helped. You know, Mark was writing these sagas
in his earlier work. They were based on Tolkien and
you know, full of dwarfs, elves and things like that,

(01:16:45):
and he just did the right stuff. There's couplets and
then the chorus, get it on, Banga gong, get it on.
That's the chorus. That's the shortest chorus he had written
in his life. And that was the secret brevity. And
the strings that was another thing. He got very superstitious
about the strings. When we did our next single, gosh,

(01:17:06):
I can't remember what it was, oh metal Guru, he said,
let's go in, let's just mix it and I go, Mark,
the strings, we've had the strings on ride a white
Swan and get it on. I think it's part of
our good luck. And he turned pale. He goes, you're right,
let's have strings on hot hot love. It was hot love.

(01:17:30):
Let's have strings on hot love. So that was it
from then to the very end. I did eight albums
with him. I had to get down and write some
pretty nifty strings every time we made an album.

Speaker 1 (01:17:44):
Afterwards, Okay, the Slider Summer of seventy two, I believe
in the UK gigantic Banya Goong is delayed as a
hit in the US, and it is a big hit,
certainly on FM radio formats were changing. The Slider meant
nothing in America and meant everything in the UK. Do

(01:18:05):
you have any insight on that?

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
That's interesting. I wasn't aware of that. I know a
lot of Americans now like the Slider. You know, looking back,
it is a fantastic album. It's the best of the three,
the first three. The next one would be an album
called Tanks, which tanked. But the Slider was phenomenal, and
I think Mark was at his best. His guitar playing

(01:18:30):
was at his best, his writing was at its best,
and we took a little more time on it. Another
funny thing happened on that he stopped using Flow and Eddie.
We originally had them on one or two tracks, and
then we went in on another day and he said,
we're going to do backing vocals. I go, what happened

(01:18:50):
to Flow and Eddie? He goes, they copped in attitude
with me? I go, what happened? What did they say?
He goes, they wanted to get paid honestly, so I'm
looking at him. I am getting paid as the producer,
but you know, not as a backing singer. So that
was a shame, a real, real shame. I think later on,

(01:19:11):
when he in his late late seventies before he died,
he got back. He got them on one of his
self produced albums. He got them back again. I hope
he paid him. I think he did.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
Okay. He ultimately dies in this car accident and Gigantic
in England. You were the producer. How big a talent
was Mark Bowlin?

Speaker 2 (01:19:34):
He was great. His songwriting abilities were enviable, even David said.
David Bowie said, Mark writes the greatest lyrics and there
his imagery was incredible, like you know, diamond star halo.
You wear a diamond star halo. It's beautiful. David wouldn't

(01:19:55):
come up with diamond star halo, but then he would
go on in the same song more metaphors like that,
you know, crazy ones. And his guitar playing was primitive.
I worked it out one day. He's got a knowledge
of seven chords. But oh boy, what he did to
some people say, oh but oh boy, what he did
with those seven chords. But you know, he would slide

(01:20:17):
his guitar up, his capo up and down the fret.
He could play in any key he wanted. And some
chords he obviously didn't know. And I wondered why he
couldn't even figure that out. And I tried to teach
him these chords. He wouldn't want to learn. He just
had this. He was formulaic himself, and his records were
still sounding the same. But why not, because it was

(01:20:40):
a really good formula we had going. But I'd say
his talent was in the songwriting. He must have written
over two hundred songs, maybe even more than that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:50):
Okay, you're working for the company when you find Taranosaurus
Rex today, Well, let's talk pre internet. A record producer
would get four or five per saying, either from record
one or when we coop, is it you getting paid
a producer's fee on every record? What's going on with you?

Speaker 2 (01:21:09):
So everything up to at the up to the end
of Electric Warrior, I was getting a royalty and till
this day, Bob, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
I get royalties three times a year from that company
and I recorded a few other acts for them as well.
But from the Slider they wanted to we had a

(01:21:30):
deal and Mark said, I don't know. We had a
royalty situation for a while. Then his company stopped paying it.
They said, we feel you've had enough. You know, the
record's long been paid for. You know, it's sold, and
we're not selling those those amounts of records anymore. Then

(01:21:52):
the next album, Tanks, I worked without a contract. He
his wife came to me and she said, you know,
we feel We spoke to Mark's lawyer and we feel
that you don't need a contract anymore. You don't need
a royalty anymore. We're going to make a deal with you.

(01:22:14):
We'll pay you ten pounds per annum something like for
the rest of your life. But maybe it wasn't. It
was like for the next five years or something like that.
So I did. I made the next album, zinc Alloy,
under those conditions, the fourth album that was the big
t Rex hit, and it did well. But then Mark

(01:22:36):
started the cocaine and alcohol abuse started getting out of
control and he was being really unkind to everyone. He
was like he was a drunk, you know. He was
like cursing everyone out, being a very, very unruly. So
I had a little talk to them at the end.
I said, we're going to part company. I don't like
the way you're treating people. And that was it. We

(01:22:57):
parted under those conditions.

Speaker 1 (01:23:00):
How long did you get the ten thousand dollars?

Speaker 2 (01:23:02):
I never got it. I think I got the ten
thousand for that fourth album, the zinc Allo album, and
that was it. And it was you know, it's a
little foggy in my brain because I don't really want
to think about it that much. How David was the
complete opposite. He was a gentleman of his word. He

(01:23:22):
would always honor his contracts, even if it was just
a handshake. He would always honor what he said. Mark
was the opposite. He would just hope you would conveniently
forget about it, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:23:35):
Okay, so you're working with t Rex over a period
of years. You're a record producer. You're not in the band,
so you're working on other stuff. What are you working on?

Speaker 2 (01:23:43):
Well? I went through many period different periods.

Speaker 1 (01:23:46):
In the eighties, no no, no, no, no no. Back
in the seventies, seventies, late sixties. When how do you
ultimately get hooked up with David Bowie?

Speaker 2 (01:23:57):
That was really easy was Mark Bolan's publisher, and my
offices were in the same house as the publishing house.
So Gus Dudgeons. Gus Dudgeon produced Elton John. He was
one house producer. I was another house producer, Denny Cordell
and Don Paul. We were four house producers for that

(01:24:20):
company who had a label called New Breed at first
and then Good New Breed Productions. Oh, I forget what
else it was called. But David Plattz, who was the
publisher who owned all these companies, including our contracts, had
all these writers. One of his main writers was Anthony Newley.

(01:24:43):
And when he heard David Bowie sing, he saw a
young Anthony Newley. He hired him on the spot. He
signed him up for a publishing contract, and David had
already made a record for d Ram Records, which is
a Decca company, which tanked. It really didn't do very well,
although it showed off his skills and it was all

(01:25:03):
over the place. So one day David Plattz calls me
into his office after I had all these Tyrannosaur these, yeah,
the Tyrannosaurus rex hits, and you know, I'm making money
for the label. He said, I've got an artist I
think would be a good match for you. And I said, okay,
I'm listening. He goes, so he put on the d
Ram album when he's saying like when I Live My Dream,

(01:25:26):
which sounded exactly like Anthony Nuley. Then he did another
played Another song was the Laughing Postman, which was he
did this chipmunk voice, you know, half speed voice where
he started laughing like a postman but with a chipmunk.
And then all the other songs bore no uh, there
was no continuity in styles. So he said, what do

(01:25:48):
you think. I said, he's great, He's got a great voice,
he's a great writer, but he's all over the place.
If I were to work with him, I would have
to focus him he'd have to do one thing, and
I think the op obviously obvious thing for him to
do would be to be a rock singer. He's got
the chops, he can do it. I'm sure he can
do it. He goes, okay, I was thinking along those lines.

(01:26:09):
He goes, would you like to meet him? I go yeah.
He goes, step right this way, and he opened the door.
It was a setup. He asked David to come in
that day to meet me. He opens the door to
his like inner sanctum there and David's waiting for the meeting,
and I the first thing I noticed were his eyes.

(01:26:30):
You know, I thought he's a good looking boy, But
what's he got these two different colored eyes for? You know,
what's all that about? So he shakes my hand and
he's very, very like excited to meet me. And I
found out that he was a like I don't know
how you said, he equivalent an Anglo file, an American file.

Speaker 1 (01:26:48):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:26:48):
He he loved American music. He grew up on R
and B records, same as I did. We loved we
loved the odd person out, like the legendary star dust cowboy.
We both were in love with those kind of records
Nervous Norvis who sang Transfusion, he had all those records
that I had, and we found that out in that
interview outside of David Plattz's office, and we got on

(01:27:13):
like brothers, and by six, when six o'clock rolled around,
we said, oh wet, they were locking up. They kicked
us out, so we walked down Oxford Street, which is
one part of town, and we walked and talked for
another hour until we got to King's Road in London
and we were looking at all the windows of clothes

(01:27:34):
we couldn't afford yet, and we came to the art
theater they had there. Forget the name of the street,
but they had They only played scratchy black and white films,
which we said, we like scratchy black and white films.
Both of us liked those. And they had a Knife
in the Water playing at one of these cinemas, and

(01:27:54):
we said, shall we go in and watch it? So
this is about eight eight in the evening, so we
bought two tickets, sat down, we watched the Knife in
the Water and we eventually said good night at about
eleven thirty at night. From say three point thirty in
the afternoon, that's We were such good friends by the
end of the day. And then we started seeing each

(01:28:14):
other socially for quite a while. And then he said,
Deco wants me to make one more record, and I
made this record with him. It's kind of a It's
a record called London by Tata. It was as close
as it was pop record. It wasn't a rock record,
it was a pop record. And they had another male artist.
It was either they wanted to drop one of them.

(01:28:36):
It was going to be Bowie or Kat Stevens. So
when I I produced this less than you know, this
less than kind of production, they kept Cat Stevens and
dropped David. But actually it freed him from that label.
He would have they would never have seen him as
a future rock star. I always did. I knew he
was going to go places. So we kind of rambled

(01:28:59):
around over the next couple of years. We never really
did anything great until the Space Oddity album, which we
worked on together, and then The Man Who Sold the World,
which was the next one. Now he was a rock star.

Speaker 1 (01:29:11):
Okay, Space Oddity, that's Gus, right, Are you involved in
Space Oddity? The track?

Speaker 2 (01:29:18):
No? So when David played it to me, I said
to him, I know what you're doing. There's a guy
up in space. Now, you know, the NASA just put
a guy in space in his tin can. I know
what you mean by the tin can. And I said,
but it's a cheap shot, you know, if it's it's
based on a special event, it's not based on like,

(01:29:41):
what are you gonna do? Write an album full of
science fiction songs? Which he eventually right. He goes, he
says yeah, but he goes everyone's saying it's a hit record.
I go, I think it is a hit record. But
I said, in good conscience, I can't go this route
with you. You know, go go it some Gus loves you,
he adores you, and he he had already worked with
When David used to be on Decka, the Deca label,

(01:30:04):
Gus already had worked with him. So I went to
Gus and I said, you like this? He goes, yeah,
He goes, why don't you do it? He goes, you're crazy, Tony.
I go, no, I don't like it. I can't rook.
I can't produce something I don't like. And he said,
you're sure you're okay with this? I go, you got
my blessings. So he finds Paul Buckmaster, who was also

(01:30:25):
published by David Platz. It was all kind of in house,
and when I heard it, I changed my mind. I said, shit,
I should have produced that record, but I don't think
I could have done Gus's job. He he threw the
kitchen sink in it, and I wasn't yet a kitchen
sink producer. I would have it would have been a

(01:30:45):
more subtle piece of work. But since then, with all
these atmosts and all these surround sound mixing things, Gus
Gus has passed away, had passed away years ago. I
have been mixing Space Odyssey over and over again in
new formats. So I'm quite familiar with the song.

Speaker 1 (01:31:03):
Okay, but you work on the album after you hear the.

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
Song, definitely yet so that surprised me. This is where
our friendship came in. So after the song was made,
I met David back in the office and I go, well,
I suppose you're going to be working with gust from
now on. You guys did great together. He goes, oh no, no,
I had to get out. I had to get that
out of the way. Now let's make the album. So

(01:31:28):
he invited me back to make the rest of the album,
which was good. You know, it's not a bad album.
It's got some really good tracks on great songs. And
then Space Out Audity sticks out like a sore thumb.
You know, it's clearly the best track on the album
that you know, you live and you learn.

Speaker 1 (01:31:46):
Okay, then The Man Who Sold the World, which means
nothing when it comes out, nor does Space Oddity in
the US, but I know it had some impact in
the UK. So tell me about that album.

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
But okay. By this time David was coming around to
my flat with Mark Bolin. Sometimes David would would miss
his last train to Beckenham and he would sleep over.
Sometimes he would bring girls back to my flat to
have sex with them. But it was clear that he
had to have a flat of a house of his own,
you know, he was like living between friends apartments and

(01:32:21):
his go back to his parents now and then to
get the laundry done, things like that. So he found
this big house in Beckenham, Kent, which is hat In Hall,
which is you know everyone knows about had In Hall now.
It's an old Victorian house. It was beautiful. It was
like a film set from Hammer Films. It was just
absolutely beautiful and eerie. It felt haunted, I believe it was.

(01:32:45):
So he lives there, and he and Angie, his wife,
felt that it was just too big just for the
both of them, and they asked myself and my girlfriend Liz,
would they like to come and share the place with them.
And we took one look at it and the real
estate was huge. You know, there's a lot of apartment there.
There was a wine cellar where we could set up

(01:33:07):
a band, a drum kit and rehearse. So Liz and
I moved into Haddon Hall and it was like really
great for a while until it became a kind of
meeting place for all the young kids in the neighborhood.
And there would be knights that'd come home from work exhausted.
There'd be about twenty people in that apartment, you know,

(01:33:27):
just hanging off the There was a beautiful balcony around
around the apartment, you know, hanging out doors, smoking dope.
People would disappear into a bedroom upstairs. It was just like,
this is getting like too hedonistic for me, you know,
for a guy who just wanted to come home from
work and chill, you know, So we still kept we

(01:33:49):
still made the Mansoul the world. Under those conditions, I
moved to a nearby town called Penge and we went down.
We finally got Woody in the band. We had Mick
Ronson in the band. He was heaven sent and Mick
slowly got rid of everyone in the band that he
had friends up in Hull, that he wanted to bring

(01:34:12):
them down. So the first thing was he replaced all
London drummer with Woody Woodmansey, who was in his band
called the Rats back up in Hull, and I was
the bass player. So Mick, Woody and myself and David
on twelve string guitar formed a group which we went
through many names, but one of the names that stuck
with us was called the Hype. We were called Joe

(01:34:35):
the Butcher at one point, and so we went into
the studio and we said let's we liked. Mick Ronson
loved Cream and he said, if you're going to play
bass with me, he goes, I want you to listen
to Jack Bruce and Cream. He goes, I want you
to just that's the kind of bass player I want

(01:34:56):
to work with. Because I was, up until that point
of meat and potatoes bass player. I played funky stuff,
but then I listened to Jack Bruce and he's playing
bass like a lead guitar. He's bending all the notes
and he's playing fast scales and going all over the place.
I said, I went back to make I said, oh,
I get it. You want me to play lead bass,
which wasn't a thing yet. I mean, Jack Bruce was

(01:35:17):
the only one doing that. So I started showing off.
And I was also a guitar player, so this was
easy to do this for me, just to play all
over the place and play complicated stuff, and some of
those parts like are iconic, like you hear Neirvada playing
the Manusola World and playing my bass part, you know,
and other people who ventured to play the title track

(01:35:39):
that is some complicated bass part. I'm in a tribute
band now where we do it play some of those
songs on stage, and it takes me about two or
three months to get back into shape again and remember
all those notes again. But the Manusolda World didn't do
what we thought it would do. We thought we were
going to be the next We thought we were gonna be,

(01:36:02):
you know, a really big prog rock band, but they
didn't like us. You know, we did a big gig
at the Roundhouse, and we were booed off the stage.
Not off the stage, but we were you know, some
of the some of the songs went down great, but
some people were just booing us through throughout the songs
and they couldn't get that basis he already had Space

(01:36:25):
Oddity as a hit. They just wanted to, like, hear
more Space Oddity. But he never did write those songs,
those more than Space Ardity songs until maybe Ziggy started us.

Speaker 1 (01:36:43):
Okay, you part ways. He makes a somewhat acoustic album
Hunky Dory, which is phenomenal, but the real breakthrough comes
in seventy two, the same time as the Slider with
Ziggy Stardust. You were not involved in those records. Yet,
you're not involved with a Laddin scene, which I thought
was a little bit of a disappointment, but you come

(01:37:04):
back with Diamond Dogs. So what's your relationship with David
and what's your observation of him during that period?

Speaker 2 (01:37:13):
Well, during his Ziggy days he made contact with me again,
there was a little we didn't speak to each other
for about a year after I left the Hype you know,
the mansoulta world because it wasn't a hit, there was
no point in staying together. He had to rethink his plan.
I had to go back to Mark Bowling and make
records like the Slider and get gainfully employed again. It

(01:37:35):
wasn't making a lot of money and becking him. And
suddenly then he said to me once like we should
have dinner together, and I said, well, have dinner at
my house. My mother's here and she's made, like these girls,
great Italian food. So he comes in in all his

(01:37:56):
ziggy regalia. He was ziggy off stage and when I
say that, he had the like six inch heels, the
spiked orange red hair and all that, and he's wearing
you know, epaulets on his shoulders and he's iggy starred us.
And we have this babysitter who was a Bowie fan,

(01:38:16):
he later found out, and she's in the kitchen with
holding a saucepan that had boiling water in it with
the baby's bottle in it. We had an infant son
at this time, and David walks into the kitchen and
she sees it's David Bowie and she screams and drops
the boiling water on the floor. And he had that

(01:38:37):
impact on people. But anyway, she managed to recover and
we had a lovely get together and then from then
on we saw each other socially a lot and had
dinners and restaurants. So by the time Diamond Dogs came around,
he was, you know, working with other people, but he
said he was making an album. He had been all

(01:38:58):
over town with every engineer, every recording studio, and he
just can't get a good mix out of the record.
It was made under kind of horrible conditions. I won't
go into the engineer who made the album, but it
wasn't a well recorded album. You needed to do some
serious repair jobs on the album. So I said, okay,

(01:39:18):
And I had just built my first home studio. I
had a sixteen track studio in an area called Shepherd's Bush,
and I said, try out my studio. You haven't tried
every studio in town because you haven't tried this one.
So I do the first mix of Diamond Dogs with him,
and he takes it home and phones me up at
like five in the morning and says he thought I

(01:39:39):
stayed up all night like he did, and he said,
it sounds fantastic. Let's finish the album in your studio.
So that's how he got back together again after all
those years.

Speaker 1 (01:39:50):
Okay, Diamond Dogs, he's finally playing arenas in America. Rebel
Rebel is a huge hit. But the critics start to him.
They say, this is a little obvious. He's giving the
people what they want. This comes a complete left turn
with young Americans. Tell us how that happens.

Speaker 2 (01:40:16):
Oh, okay, He's always start with a phone call from him,
and after not hearing from him for ages, and he
said that he's down in Philadelphia at Sigma Studios and
they just started working on a new album. He goes,

(01:40:37):
I want to make a soul album. He goes, but not,
you know, it's not going to be like a sol album.
It's going to be David Bowie singing soul. You know.
I said, Okay, I'm game. You know, we knew, we
knew our backgrounds. We knew I would fit in, and
he knew I would fit in. And about two days later,
I'm flying to Philadelphia from London and I had to

(01:40:57):
show up for work. I just couldn't go to the hotel,
not go straight to the hotel. The limo driver said,
I have instructions to take you directly to the studio
Sigma Studios in Philly. So I walk in there and
it's about eleven at night, midnight something like that, and
he's flying high, you know, little Peruvian marching powder was involved.

(01:41:20):
And then the band is Carlos Alomar uh Andy Duncan,
Andy Newmark on drums from Sly and the Family Stone,
who I was supposed. I was surprised to find out
he was a white guy because he's in the funkiest
band on earth at that time. And the bass player
was a bass player from Heaven, Willie Weeks, who played

(01:41:41):
with Donny Hathaway and I had a band of Willie Weeks.
He played on a song called Everything Is Everything where
Willy Willy Willie Weeks takes about a five minute bass
solo on that. So I said, Willy, I love you man,
and he was like really playing it Dan. He wasn't smarting,
he wasn't going out. He had this like kind of

(01:42:03):
repressive personality at the time. So we started working immediately
on the title track Young Americans. We start working on
that and Willie's playing really simple. He's playing like one
in five boom boo boom boo, boom boo, boom boo boom,
like that, and I'm here, I know he can shred,

(01:42:23):
so we let that go. It was too late, I think.
The next day we wanted to move on to another
song and he continues to to play this pedestrian these
pedestrian bass parts, and he said, I said, Willie, I
heard you play everything is everything on the Donnie Hathaway album.
He said, why aren't you playing that way for us?

(01:42:44):
And he just crossed his arms and he said, because
you didn't ask me to. I said, well, I'm asking
you you. I'm asking you now. I said, you can shred, man,
you can. So you could hear the difference on the
rest of the tracks on the album. He starts bouncing
around and he's taken all kinds of you know, playing
all kinds of tricky stuff. Oh, he's a genius and

(01:43:06):
genius bass player. I so much enjoyed working with him.
And we were a mixed, racially mixed band too, which
worked perfectly. You know, at first we were going to
get those guys if they get gambling huff maybe who
well they owned that. They that was their studio which
they did a lot of R and B stuff in there,
and David approached them first, I think, and they said,

(01:43:30):
we don't want no blue eyed white boy stealing our music.
They told him that it was an insult, you know.
So when he hired the studio anyway, he brought in
his own band, and it was we were a mixed band.
That's the way you know, music should be played. You know,
you don't have to be a certain race to place
any kind of music. It's it's a different world now,

(01:43:51):
and it was then too well, it was just turning.
It was changing. Times were changing then.

Speaker 1 (01:43:56):
So how does John Lennon get involved?

Speaker 2 (01:44:00):
That was freaking, That was really freaking. This is a
kind of not I could I could make a short
story out of it. So we move operations. We do
young Americans, We do as mess as we can in Philadelphia,
and then we move operations to New York. He puts
me up into like Sheraton Hotel Pierre or something like that,

(01:44:21):
really expensive hotel and all that he had. He was
just throwing money away in those days. And he hires
a studio there and to do some further work in
that studio. So we cut a couple of tracks there.
We didn't cut fame, but one night he left the
studio early. He says I'm going to go back to

(01:44:42):
my suite. He was in a Hotel Pierre, and he said,
Lenin is coming by tonight. He goes, I'm a bit
I'm a bit frightened of him, a bit scared of him.
He goes, would you mind coming after work, after you
finish all your tidying ups and all that, would you
mind coming over and kind of buffer the meeting? Exactly
the word he used to buffer the meeting. I said,

(01:45:03):
I would love to meet John Lennon.

Speaker 1 (01:45:06):
I will be there.

Speaker 2 (01:45:09):
So I finished. At about midnight, Limo takes me over
to the Hotel Pierre. I go up to David's sweet
and I knock on the door a lot and nobody answers.
But I hear a lot of scuffling behind the door,
and finally I don't know who answered, but I think
it was Neil Aspinall, one of the minders of the Beatles.

(01:45:29):
It was Neil Aspinall, and I said, it's Tony, Tony WISCONTI.
David asked me to come by tonight. He goes, yeah, okay,
we were just a bit worried you might be the police.
And I go, oh, well, no, it's me. So he
invited me in and I walk into the main room
and I saw a sight I'll never forget. On the
floor was David and a beautiful Hispanic woman, really really beautiful,

(01:45:54):
and between them there was like a mountain of cocaine.
It was mount everst but about six inches high, you know,
and with ski slopes, it was like the real deal.
And on the couch is my idol, John Lennon. You know,
I couldn't believe it. And I go hello, John, and

(01:46:14):
he goes hello. And next to him was this Asian
girl who I found out was Maypang and she's with
sitting with him. And then there's Neil aspinall sitting next
to John. And I snuggle into between Neil and John
and I'm watching David and the girl chopping out lines
and John and I said to John, I said, do

(01:46:36):
you mind if I ask you some Beatles questions? You
know like? He goes, no, go right ahead, you know,
ask me anything you like. And I go, okay, that
first chord on a hard day's night, What what how
do you play that chord? He goes, well, I know
what I played. You know, George played the other guitar.
I played this chord and he picks up a guitar

(01:46:58):
and he goes and I think George played this chord,
and what you hear is these two chords together. He says,
it's a good clash. It works, It really works. They go, oh, yeah,
it works very much. And then I got into like
lyrics and I had him for a good hour. And
then he's like looking over at David. You know, now
David's being absolutely rude. He's not even he's so frightened

(01:47:20):
of John. He's not even looking up at John. He's
just in with this girl. They're chopping lines away. John
had a few. And then David picks up a pad,
a sketch pad, and he's got some charcoal pencils or
something like that, and he starts, you know, he's a
great David was a great artist, and so is John.
So David starts sketching a lenin of a portrait of John,

(01:47:42):
like a caricature, and John says, hey, give us a
piece of paper and give me a pencil, and John
puts it on like a tea tray or something like that,
and he starts doing David. And from this point onwards,
it broke the ice that I couldn't buffer anything. The
drawing of each was very funny, and they picked it
up and they showed each other the drawings and have

(01:48:04):
a good laugh, and they'd start a few and then
eventually David and John started talking to each other. And
then like I realized that the hour was getting really
really late. It was getting to about six pm, seven pm,
and I said, you know, I got to go. It's
like really late. I had a hard, long day. And

(01:48:24):
John said yeah. He says, we can't go until the
sun rises, and I go, why is that? He goes, well,
he says, you know, I was busted, and I don't
want to I want to stay here. I feel safe here,
and I feel it'd be easier if I leave in
the daylight. They'll think I'm just coming out of a
hotel instead of staying up all night. If I leave now,

(01:48:44):
I'll look suspicious and all that. So it was horrible
to hear him say that. You know, from you know,
his prior bust. He was a victim. He could have
been victimized. So that was really sad that he had
to leave under those situations. But at least I had him,
I don't know, six seven hours. He was all mine.

Speaker 1 (01:49:04):
So how did he end up co writing Fame?

Speaker 2 (01:49:07):
Well, that's it. I went back. The idea was I
would go back with the master tapes to London to
start mixing it. That's where my home base was then,
and David would later join me there. So he phones
me up about he doesn't phone me, No, he did.
He did because there was another incident like this where

(01:49:28):
his assistant phoned me. He phones me up there after
three days and he said, Tony, I did something like amazing,
but I'm afraid it excluded you. He goes, John and
I would just you know. He came back the next
night and we started jamming. We had the guitars and
all that, and then the next night he goes, we
hired a studio and we wrote this song called Fame,

(01:49:49):
and he says, I put it down. It didn't you know.
We hired a drummer in New York. It wasn't even
the Philly group of musicians anymore. I think they got
Carlos because Carlos lived in Manhattan, or he lived in
the Bronx, so they got Carlos in there and he said,
it sounds really good, but but I wrote it with
John and I have to put it on the album.
I have to take something off young Americans put it

(01:50:11):
on the album, I said, I said, David, I would
have bought my own ticket on the concord if you
had told I would have been there in five hours,
you know. He says, well, it's done, and we did it.
And he said, then while we were there, I felt
we had to record another. We had to record one
of John's songs. So we did Across the Universe. And

(01:50:34):
I later met up with John Lennon at some event
or something and and we were talking about then he goes, because, yeah,
because it was good. It was fun recording fame. He goes,
but Across the Universe was never one of my favorite songs.
He says. It was a drag doing that one. You're
singing that one, he goes, But it turned out okay,
you know, very gregarious, very nice.

Speaker 1 (01:50:54):
Okay, those two are on the album. Did you have
to take stuff off the album?

Speaker 2 (01:50:57):
Sure? Oh my god, it took They took off two songs.
Somebody up there Likes Me was taken off the album,
and let It Be Me, which was a funky seven
minute ballad which later when they reissued box sets, you
now can hear those songs like let It Be Me
is like a classic, like sounds like a Ray chall song.

(01:51:18):
It's very slow and dirgy, and I wrote my best
Quincy Jones arrangement for it as well. But you can
now hear all those tracks.

Speaker 1 (01:51:27):
But oh, okay, but I have to I hate to
correct you. You were there. But Somebody Up There Likes
Me is the opening track on the album on the
second side.

Speaker 2 (01:51:36):
Okay, you're absolutely right, so it's another track.

Speaker 1 (01:51:38):
The only reason I mentioned that is that's my favorite
song on the album. Staying on the album, you ultimately
hear and mix Fame, it becomes a gigantic kit. Did
you expect that to be a hit?

Speaker 2 (01:51:52):
I I it likes Space Oddity. I knew it was
a hit and I on the but you know, I
could have done Space Oddity, like I said, you know,
but I think Gus did a great job. I could
have recorded Fame. It's like really simple and I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:52:07):
Well, the only thing about that album is Fame is
not one of my favorites young Americans. Okay, but my
two favorites are Somebody up There Likes Me in Fascination.

Speaker 2 (01:52:19):
Those two they're great.

Speaker 1 (01:52:20):
Never burnout on. Yeah, so and how did this is
before Luther Vandrose is Luther Van Rose? I know, how
does he end up? He's just in Philadelphia and he
shows up. How does he get involved?

Speaker 2 (01:52:34):
Uh? Carlos and Robin went to high school with Luther.
That's how he showed up. And they said, they said,
you're gonna like Luther because they were looking for backup vocalists.
Robin was already in. She was going to sing backing vocals.
Ava Cherry, who was David's mistress at the time, was
going to sing backing vocals. But we needed we needed

(01:52:55):
more people. And so Luther comes in one day like
like wide eyed, really innocent. You know, this tall, lovely
man walks in like looking around. I know he had
some experience in the studio, but this is big time,
big star and all that. And he takes over as
choir master almost immediately. When he hears how sluggish we

(01:53:17):
were writing backing vocals, he goes, how about trying to this?
How about trying this? Because young Americans didn't have the hook,
He wrote the hook. So David wrote that whole song,
but there was no chorus. There was just a musical interlude,
and Luther could sing he's singing over he goes young Americans,
young Americans, She got the young American. That was Luther's input,

(01:53:38):
and David was gobsmacked. That would not have been a
single if Luther did not come up with that. So
Fascination was Luther's song called funky Music. So Luther said,
I've got David said, let me hear your music. So
Luther played him funky Music and he goes, how about?
He said, I love the whole song, and I love

(01:53:58):
most of the lyrics, but would you allow me to
rewrite a few things about it. Luther couldn't believe his love,
and he said, of course, you ken, David. So he
changed Funky Music to Fascination, same melody. And it's so
great to see all these young people for first time experiences,
and you know, we're all kind of young ourselves, you know.

(01:54:21):
And David making a solo album took a lot of balls,
really it did, and especially in Philadelphia, he was on
their turf.

Speaker 1 (01:54:27):
But then he's the so called thin white duke. And
you DeCamp to Berlin. You're really the first act that
does that. And you make Low, which is with Eno
is considered to be an electronic album. How does that
left turn happen and how does it end up? In Berlin?

Speaker 2 (01:54:48):
So David went to the Honky Chateau to do an
album and he said, I've been Brian and I have
been working for a couple of weeks writing some music
this album, and he told me the concept. He said,
the A side is going to be short songs, kind
of brief songs, you know, like it's not going to
be my usual set of lyrics. He goes, and the

(01:55:10):
B side is going to be what Brian does best,
his ambient music, And he said, would you He says,
it's going to be very experimental and we might never
release this album. He goes, but he says, so, I
can't promise you that it's even going to be released,
But are you willing to spend four weeks in France
in the Chateau d'arraville with Brian and myself? He goes.

(01:55:33):
I said, are you kidding? Four weeks with you and Brian?
That's a holiday, that's a vacation. I said, I'll happily
do that. So we sequested ourselves. It was very far
from Paris. We really couldn't go out at night and
get into trouble you know, we couldn't go to bars
and clubs, and we just had you know, food brought in.
It was at first the food was very bad. We

(01:55:55):
were getting sick, sick of you know. We Cheese would
be left out out and I would eat it and
I'd get food poisoning for three days. Things like that
were happening the past. Sometimes the power would go off
at unexpected times, and the studio wasn't really it didn't
have a lot of microphones in outboard gear. It hardly
had any outboard gear. But it was perfect for us.

(01:56:18):
It was like making music in a monastery. And it
was a great experience to wake up every day, have
a bit of breakfast, and go and work all day
long on getting the most far out songs sounds we
could think of. And Brian was really like working that
little beast. That that synthesizer in a briefcase. It's called

(01:56:41):
the EMS SYNTHI and I David bought one. I got one.
In the end. It was very complicated to work because
it had no keyboard. You really just you really just
sat there and twiddl knobs and made it go wowow
wow wow. Like things like that and buzz and all that.
So with that we went to We did this experimental album.

(01:57:02):
It was completely panned by the critics at first, but
fans went even fans were worried about what's this B
side business, But in the end it took. It was
a long cell, a long hard sell. Ossier rejected it
at first, they said, this is not a David Bowie album.
There are not enough David Bowie songs on it. And
you know they wanted they were always He says, yeah,

(01:57:24):
they want another Ziggy Star us. They've been wanting me
to make a Ziggy Star this album for years. So
that's how we got stuck into this thing. But then,
you know, just to prove everyone that he was doing
what he wanted, then it was a clever thing. We
moved to Berlin next and do a similar kind of album,
except we had a good leadoff song on that album

(01:57:45):
we had didn't have really We had sound and Vision
on Low that was kind of a hit, but it
wasn't a world wide hit. But Heroes, My God, we
hit all the good points on that.

Speaker 1 (01:57:56):
Okay, before we get the heroes Breaking Glass. I always
thought that was a commentary on Nick Lowe's I Love
the Sound of Breaking Glass any insight there.

Speaker 2 (01:58:14):
I think it was a reaction to that song. I
think David was going to having some fun with that
song by calling that be calling, by writing a song
called Breaking Glass.

Speaker 1 (01:58:25):
And then my favorite song on the album is always
Crashing in the Same Car. Any story there?

Speaker 2 (01:58:31):
Oh, I love that. I love that song and it
really did happen. He was in a hotel. He lived
in a hotel in Berlin for a while, I think
it was Berlin, and they was in the He kept
his car in a sub basement, you know, in a
car park, and he he couldn't see very well in
dim light, and every time he decided to take the

(01:58:52):
car out, he'd always always have a bumper accident with
He'd hit another car in the in the uh in
the garage, and he said he was sick and tired
of it. He just stopped you. He just started parking
the car in the street because he was always crashing.
He was always crashing when he got his car out
of that garage. But it became a metaphor for always

(01:59:13):
doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Speaker 1 (01:59:16):
I guess, okay, you're in Berlin. Berlin, of course is
a divided city. Then the wall doesn't fall for another
you know, twelve years.

Speaker 2 (01:59:28):
What was Berlin like? It was scary, honestly. When we
were there, the streets were full of these huge, black
armored tanks and I think they belonged to the American Yeah,
they belonged to the Americans. They were not your World
War two tanks. These were big, but twice as big,

(01:59:52):
all black and with that paint that you can't detect.
It didn't shine, you know. It was the first time
it was matte paint. And the turrets, the gun start
turrets were sticking right in the air and you feel
you felt like they could shoot a huge missile out
of it at any second if they wanted to. And
that was hard. It was hard to see that every day.
That was a hard thing to live with. David had

(02:00:14):
been there for six months, but when I saw it,
it freaked me out. When I first moved there to
make the album. The second thing was which was weird
was Checkpoint Charlie because we were in the the British.
Wait a minute, we were in the American zone. Yeah,
And the checkpoint went into the into East Berlin, where

(02:00:37):
I think the British had headquarters there. I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (02:00:41):
It was it just.

Speaker 2 (02:00:43):
Was it just the the communist Germans in that side
the Russians. I know, Russians were in there. It was
Russian occupied.

Speaker 1 (02:00:50):
Well East Germany was tied up with Russia, however you
want to put it.

Speaker 2 (02:00:54):
Yeah, so we had a couple of experiences with them
as well. So we would go in there and it
was a different world. Everything was because it was a
communist country. All their billboards had slogans on them, but
it didn't advertise like a BMW car or Camel's cigarettes
something like that. It was slogans like they like eat

(02:01:14):
fish and they would have a big they would have
a big picture of a fish and drink milk and
they have a big glass of milk and somebody with
a mustache, you know, a milk mustache on their face.
But they couldn't sell products like they were driving around
these little Russian cars, cars called Vatborg's and scoters. The

(02:01:35):
cars came from Russia. Whereas on this decide the west
side of Berlin people were driving Mercedes, Benzes and you know,
all the German cars. So that was freaky to go
into westo East Berlin and then when you came back
your car was searched by Russian Russian guards and they'd
put a panel a mirror under your car to make

(02:01:57):
sure you weren't smuggling anyone's, any peaceeople who wanted to escape,
and they had people who made special shoes and clamps.
They could actually hold themselves underneath the car while they
drove across the bridge into West Berlin, and then they
released themselves. So people were actually smuggling bodies that way
into West Berlin. And then then when they went through

(02:02:20):
your stuff at customs, you'd, you know, they just throw
everything out on the counter and everything you had, anything
in your knapsack or anything like that. And then they
when we went through the first time, Iggy Pop had
platinum h blonde hair, and David's passport had him with
the curly perm. He had his hair, had a PERM

(02:02:41):
and he looked very weird. Now both of them looked different,
completely different. But they looked at the passports and they
looked at Iggy's passport had the actual blonde hair and
now Iggy had dark hair. David had the PERM but
now he had darker hair. So they would hold the
passports up in the air and they'd yell, hey, Fritz
come here, they get another god to come over, and

(02:03:01):
suddenly all the gods would gather around the passports and
die laughing. They'd be laughing in our faces, you know.
Then they give that they have a good laugh, and
then they gave the passports back and we could get
back into West Berlin. But things like that have the
weirdest things happened every day. Another one was we're making
heroes in the studio which faced the Berlin Wall, so

(02:03:23):
we're looking at East Berlin from our studio in West Berlin,
and there was a big kind of like a castle,
you know, there was a kind of a big turret.
I don't know, maybe you'd call it a turret. And
in there every day there was a Russian god watching
us with big binoculars. He was watching us make records

(02:03:45):
and they would have you know, and we could see
from our side. They were so close. We could see
the red star on his fuzzy gray helmet that he had,
and he's wearing that big Russian overcoat for like Siberian winters,
and he's watching us. So we asked our engineer, who
is a lovely man, we said, doesn't this freak you out?

(02:04:05):
With Russian gods like looking at every day. It's freaking
us out. He goes, nah, doesn't, doesn't freak me out.
And he took the overhead light that was hanging from
a wire and he aimed it right at the Russian
God and he started sticking his tongue out and sticking
up the middle finger. That's the Russian God. So David
and I dove underneath the recording console. Who he said,

(02:04:26):
don't fucking do that, you know, don't do it. And
he said, ah, it's okay. They can't shoot us. If
you know, if they did, it would be World War three.
You couldn't exchange fire. If anything like that happened to
Checkpoint Charlie, we would have been at war again in
the seventies. So they could restrain themselves. And the other

(02:04:48):
funny thing was David one night went by the wall
on the west side West Berlinside. He was dating a
girl and he just decided he dropped her off and
he took his car right by the wall and the
other side of where all the Russians are, and he
lights up a cigarette and somebody taps on his window.
It was a Red Guard from the from East Berlin.

(02:05:11):
David found out there were other tunnels that nobody knew about.
The Red Guard came into the west just for a
little stroll. This is about three in the morning, and
he said, do you have a light? He ysked David
for a light, freaked David out. He soon got out
of there. He never went back to that spot again.

Speaker 1 (02:05:32):
And so next comes Heroes, Yeah, which ultimately is a
success then, but becomes legendary over the decades.

Speaker 2 (02:05:41):
Right, Well, that was taking Berlin for a place to
live that was really good. He and Niggy had been
living there for at least almost a good part of
a year and they were used to this going back
and forth. They knew all the local drink they knew
all the local drinking spots, and we went out there.
They would often dress with as working men, so they all,

(02:06:02):
the two of them, had scarfs and they would wear
these andy cap you know, these these hats that workers
in the fruit markets where to keep that top of
their head warm. So they thought they could pass as Berliners,
and that they actually did, you know, until they spoke English.
But we often ordered in German. It was easy to order,
you know, si beer, you know, and then when you

(02:06:23):
wanted to pay you would say, v feel how much
things like that? We learned that, We learned a few
good words. So maybe the Germans knew we were in German,
but you know, they were trying definitely to blend in.

Speaker 1 (02:06:35):
So you continue to work with Bowie until all of
a sudden there's a schism in his sound and he
works with now Rogers on Legs Dance. How did that happen?
How did you end up not being involved?

Speaker 2 (02:06:51):
Well, before that happened, we did an incredible album called
Scary Monsters Right, which which was number one and most
of the world. So that was I thought, well, we're
going to make a great record after this. The next
one's going to be killer. The next record was Let's Dance,
and his instead of him phoning me, Coco phoned me

(02:07:15):
his assistant and she said, David's very sorry, but he
just met Nile and they got on really really well
and they're going to make an album together. So he's
very very He said, you know, you'll make the next one,
he says, but he wants he wants to work with Nile.
It's very important to him. They got on really really well.
So I said, okay, and I was really crestfallen. I

(02:07:40):
really was, but it turned out great. You know, Let's
Dance is a big hit, and he said, that's why
I did it. I wanted that sound, and I knew
I was going to get a hit record with him.
I needed another international hit, which Nile gave him. And
I take my hat off to him.

Speaker 1 (02:07:56):
You know, although I do like modern love. If I
never hear Let's Dance again, that's okay with me. Seemed
a little obvious, but brought him back then he worked
with you, pagem before he goes back to you. What's
his explanation there?

Speaker 2 (02:08:11):
He we had a thing like we came together and
we worked a part many times, and I by then
I couldn't blame him. He's, oh, he's looking for a
new sound. He thought, maybe when he works with me,
it's going to be predictable, it's going to be another
the man who sold the world or heroes and all that.
So he would love to like pay a producer to

(02:08:35):
get a new fresh set of sounds. I think you
page him worked with the Police or something. I don't know,
the other great band. You know, he wanted a bit
of the modern sound, but he'd always come back to
me and for another record, Like you know, Diamond Dogs
was a comeback record. Heathen was a comeback record after

(02:08:56):
he worked, Like after we didn't speak to each other
for ten years, he comes back one day and he says,
how'd you like to get together and make another record together?
You know? So I ended up making his last four
albums with no right other producer in between.

Speaker 1 (02:09:09):
But before we get there, he is legendary for changing direction.
Was that very conscious you were?

Speaker 2 (02:09:19):
There?

Speaker 1 (02:09:20):
Was he saying I did this, I need to do
something different, or it's just in retrospect, it was different.

Speaker 2 (02:09:26):
Well, you know, he didn't get that name chameleon for nothing.
It also referred to his change of musical tastes and styles.
He constantly listened to new music. He would bring a
stack of records with him whenever we we'd meet up,
and we would go through the latest releases, and he'd
want to make sure that I was up to date.
And I would be with him and he could take

(02:09:50):
someone's sound like oh what was that other one? Oh gosh,
nine inch nails. He blatantly said, you know, I'll make
a record with you and I I'm going to take
your sound and I'll be your lead singer, so he
would be Nile Rodgers's lead singer. That's he kind of
spent that period being other group's lead singer, and he
copped their sound. He'd steal their sound, but with their blessings.

(02:10:12):
Because you know that by then, to work with David
Bowie was like one of the greatest achievements in a
producer's life or another rock star's life.

Speaker 1 (02:10:22):
And you you know, you talk about the last four records, Okay,
we have The Next Day in two thy thirteen. Then
of course the final album Blackstar. At this point in
time was so much changing. Is he just want to
lay down what he wants to lay down or is
he still conscious of what's going on in charts, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (02:10:44):
Oh, he was forever interested in the charts. And the
Next Day was on purpose. It was a retro look
back at his other styles. So The Next Day is
done in a lot of different David Bowie styles. But
for Blackstar, he wanted to do his dream record that
he never really achieved. He made a few attempts in
the past, but he wanted to make a jazz based album.

(02:11:07):
It had to he wanted to make it with jazz musicians,
so he met this guy called Donnie McCaslin, who's an
incredible sax player, and Donnie had a four piece band
and he said, come, I want you to see this
band because I'm thinking of using them. So we went
down to the Blue Note in New York together, and

(02:11:28):
I thought Donnie was fantastic. He just great. I loved him,
loved all his players in the band, And when we
got closer to Black Star, we had a couple of
experiences with them. We recorded with Forget her Name again. Anyway,

(02:11:48):
we had a session we worked with Donnie prior to
Black Star, and we knew he was going to work. Also,
Mark Juliana, the drummer in his band, was absolutely unbelievable
and like him, this guy was a loop master. You
thought it was a drum loop, but it's a real
musician playing the same pattern over and over again for
seven minutes. He was just a genius. So we had

(02:12:12):
a pre production, was just one little rehearsal, and then
David seeing me the day before and telling me that
he was he was getting chemo treatment. So he said,
I can't start this album with letting you know that,
without letting you know that, And then the next day
we started the album with the band, and he did

(02:12:33):
the same thing. He gathered them all together in the
studio and then he said, he told them the same
thing he told me the day before. So he wasn't
dead beat about it. He was quite upbeat about it.
He says, but we're going to make the best album ever.
We're gonna just you know, I want you guys to
do your thing, don't hold back. And he gave them.
He gave Danny. He gave Donnie a handful of demos,

(02:12:56):
which is the first time he never gave me a demo.
I always had the demos before we started. But his
idea was to not have my influence at all on
the creative part. At that level. He wanted this to
be purely an album between him and Donnie and the
band Donnie's band. So that's why it sounds so different

(02:13:17):
and really really interesting and he's fulfilling his dream. He
always recorded live in the room with them, and I
have the master tapes and at the end you could
hear him like laughing and cracking up talking to the band.
These were his kind of people that he wanted to
work with. At last, his other musicians that he made

(02:13:38):
albums with prior to this, they some of them could
play jazz, but it would be rock musicians playing jazz.
But he felt, let's get the real thing, Let's get
real jazz musicians, and instead it would have been a
different album. But the songs that he wrote for Black Star,
which just broke my heart, some of them, they were
so beautiful and telltale. I mean, he's telling you, he's

(02:13:58):
wearing his heart on his sleeve on that album.

Speaker 1 (02:14:01):
You know, he tells everybody involved that he has is
being treeated. Was he optimistic at that point and then
had to face the fact that it was terminal or
was he hiding it from you?

Speaker 2 (02:14:14):
He was optimistic because he was going for the treatments.
He wouldn't have gone if if he wasn't optimistic, and
it happened. You know, his death was almost a year
later from from that, and you know, he was good.
Sometimes he had to leave early because he was a
little tired, and so our days would end around five o'clock.

(02:14:35):
But there were there were always things to do in
his absence. So Donnie would play four saxophones and build
up a sack section, things like that, and we'd play
it to David the next day and he'd like what
we had done. But he never never wore a gloomy face.
He was absolutely smiling from ear to ear whenever he
came to the sessions. He was in a great mood.

Speaker 1 (02:14:57):
And when the record was done. You know, interesting thing
is it was released serendipitously just about when he died.
Were you in contact with him in the ensuing months
subsequent to the completion of the album, and how did
you find out that he passed?

Speaker 2 (02:15:13):
Well? When the album ended, he was in great health.
He was really fit. He was doing exercises. I didn't
I stopped asking whether he was doing chemo or not.
And because it was just such a regular thing. I mean,
you know that was interesting. At the beginning of the album,
at the end of the album, we were just a
bunch of musicians making records. I saw him for lunches again,

(02:15:36):
things like that. And then closer we got to Christmas,
he had his family over and he was so pleased
to her. He phoned me up and he said that
he was He said he was going to become a grandfather.
He's very proud of that. And I kept that secret.
He said, this is a secret. Don't tell anyone. I
kept that secret, and that he said he was going

(02:16:00):
to resume some therapy. Afterwards, he says, everything's going great.
I'll be fine, everything's going great. But you know, it
wasn't going great. And he phoned up a lot of
people in that month, so he was kind. It was
kind of a goodbye. I heard from a lot of
my friends. He was making phone calls to everyone he
worked with, old friends, and he never actually said anything.

(02:16:22):
He was just like getting up to date, probably telling
them the same thing. He was going to become a grandfather.
Don't tell anybody things like that. So I went on
tour with my band, Holy Holy. We were doing a
Bowie tribute tour and I was in Toronto and something.
My alarm went off at eight in the morning and

(02:16:43):
my watch, I didn't see my clock my iPhone and
I looked at it and I saw David Bowie passed
at eight o'clock in the morning. I saw he passed.
And this is December tenth. And later there's a knock
on my door. In the group. They come in my room.
They say, Tony, I'm sorry to tell you something terrible
has happened. I go, I know, And we had another

(02:17:06):
show to play in Toronto that night, and said we
had to have a group meeting. What are we going
to do about this? And I said, I don't know.
I think David, you know, without sending code, I think
the show must go on. We have this is our
last date. These fans are going to want to mourn
his death. They're going to and we're going to celebrate

(02:17:27):
his life. Let's go and do the show. And even
the promoterst begged, I just would I hope you're not
going to cancel the show. I said, no, we'll do it.
We'll do it. So we played seven of us. We
played to you know, a rows and rows of people
crying their eyes out, and then it was infectious. You know,
I'm playing I'm crying my eyes out, playing bass, lead singers,

(02:17:48):
choking on the words. And finally it's settled down. By
the second half of the show, we all calm down
with saying nice things about David. What else can you do?
You know? And that was the end of the tour
and I went back and none of us, nobody, there
was no funeral that I knew of, you know, it
was just a family thing. I have no idea how

(02:18:11):
it went after he died, but he said it's goodbye
to me.

Speaker 1 (02:18:17):
Subsequent to his passing, there been you're let's just use
the term Bowie tribute tour, but there's been another Bowie
tribute tour with Adrian Blue. Are you fine with that
or are you unhappy with that? Here's the difference. There's
a tour now with all of them that the Bowie
people who came at the afterwards, they Adrian actually played

(02:18:40):
on an album, he played on larger, but a lot
of the people were just his live people, his live
show people, and some of them played on their albums
and all that. It's just an alumn that's called an
alumni tour. The reason I did that tribute Ben Woody
Woodmansey and I played on The Man Who Sold the World.
It started as a Man Who Saw the World tour.

(02:19:01):
We are the original musicians and we felt that we
had the right to do this to form this band.
We always the tribute was to David, and we always
had a pause in the middle of the show saying
a nice little anecdote about David. And we felt that
it was our right to do this without feeling bad
about it, that we're just capitalizing on his death.

Speaker 2 (02:19:24):
He actually didn't. He died after we started this tour.
We started it as a Bowie tribute show, and he
asked me, he said, why are you doing this? And
I said, because when we finished The Man of Soul
the World, you split up the group. We went four
different ways. Mick and Woody went back to Hull and you,

(02:19:45):
you know, did your thing. You were doing your thing.
He goes, oh, that's right, I said, he forgot. I said,
that's why we're doing this. We do you feel we
could do this? And we got a guy who sings
very well. Would you like to see a video of
one song? So I played the width of a Circle
to him and he sat just behind where I'm sitting
now and he said that's really good. At the end

(02:20:07):
of he gouse, that's really great. You guys did a
great job, because he says, if we stuck together, we
would we would have sounded that good. You know, you're
better rehearsed than we were at the time. I said,
would you put that in writing? He says, no, absolutely not.
It would have been nice if you endorsed the tour.
But he died after this.

Speaker 1 (02:20:29):
You have these incredible highlights with David Bowie and t Rex.
But you also did records with General Giant, the Moody
Blues Bad Finger when it was still called the Ivy's.
There's a lot of stuff there. But before we go,
one thing you mentioned. You said you were writing songs
with your wife. So when did you get married and

(02:20:50):
did that wife go to England with you?

Speaker 2 (02:20:54):
That was nineteen sixty seven. That was her name was
Sigrid and she was in a German America. That was
the wife. Then I was married to Mary Hopkin.

Speaker 1 (02:21:04):
Well before we get to marry Hopkin. Yeah, your first wife.
Did she go to London with you?

Speaker 2 (02:21:08):
Yes, she did, and she left after about seven months
without me knowing it. I got home from work in
the apartment, all her clothes were gone.

Speaker 1 (02:21:18):
Whoaha, whoa whoa, whoa, whoa who Did you have any
idea and what did that feel like?

Speaker 2 (02:21:25):
Well, we were a singing duo and in New York,
but that never continued when we moved to London. All
of a sudden, my career was taking off and Segur
was a stay at home wife and I didn't know
how to deal with that. I invited her to come
to the recording sessions and sit in but there was

(02:21:46):
nothing for her to do, so she left me. She
went back to her to live with her mother for
a while. And by the way, like today, she's a tycoon.
She builds, she builds office buildings in Manhattan.

Speaker 1 (02:22:01):
She Wow, did she get remarried?

Speaker 2 (02:22:06):
Yeah, a couple of times. But you know I met
I met up with her a few years ago, and
she's dressed to the nines. You know, she's dressed so beautifully,
just for a chat. It was her idea. So she
looks at me, and I'm already a successful record producers.
So she looks at me and says the first thing
out of her mouth, so do you need any money?

Speaker 1 (02:22:27):
First thing?

Speaker 2 (02:22:29):
There was the one upman ship. She just had to do.
She just had to do that.

Speaker 1 (02:22:34):
Okay, you're making record with the ivs, become bad Finger, Magic, Christian, etcetera.
How do you meet Mary Hopkins?

Speaker 2 (02:22:42):
That was interesting because I did work with the Ivy's
and I was in and out of the Apple offices
all the time. You know, you could anyone could walk
in off the street. You've heard about this, whether Hell's
angels could walk in anything, you know, And so I
met a lot of people around the offices and they
knew me, they knew I was working with t Rex,

(02:23:03):
things like that. And I just got a call out
of the blue from Mary's manager who said, we like
Mary wants to make a folk album. She's doesn't want
to be a pop star anymore. She doesn't she had
the big hit with Paul McCartney and all that, and
then she feels like people used her voice in the

(02:23:25):
wrong way. She wants to make a folk album and
she loves the music that you made with Ralph mctel
and the Strawbes, to two folk artists that I've worked with.
She says, I want that sound. So I said, well,
I can do that for her. I can get Ralph
mctel playing one guitar and Dave Cousin's playing the other

(02:23:46):
and Danny Thompson in the middle on a double bass
who played with Pentangle. And so I met Mary and
told her all this, and she looked at me like
I was like Jesus or something like that. This is
exactly what she wanted to do. And she was thrilled
as somebody was listening to her, you know, because Paul

(02:24:08):
McCartney just thought she was going to be a pop star,
you know, like he thought that was everyone's goal. But
her roots were always folk music. She played in folk
clubs in Wales and she was bilingual. She used to
sing in Welsh to all these men's clubs. You know,
they'd be drinking, knocking back pints of ale and singing
in Welsh and all that. She was great, you know,

(02:24:30):
but she wasn't a pop singer. So that's how it happened.
I made her this album, Earth Song, Ocean Song. I
spent at least two or three months looking for music
she wasn't writing. Then I found some good songs for
her in New York and brought him back to London
and she was so thrilled. I mean, that was for her.

(02:24:50):
It was the best thing she ever did.

Speaker 1 (02:24:53):
So how did it turn into a romance?

Speaker 2 (02:24:55):
That happened during the making of the album to get
a lift home with her one night? And she had
a limo in those days, a big Bentley limo, and
you know, would you come in for like would you
like to come in for a cup of tea? That's
how it happened.

Speaker 1 (02:25:15):
Okay, you get married. She does not have another hit,
does she care? Or is she done? Now?

Speaker 2 (02:25:23):
She did what she wanted to do. She didn't have
another hit, because that would mean the public wanted her
to be that Mary Hopkin, the one who sang those
were the days. And she was eighteen when she did that.
Now you know, she's a twenty two year old woman
married to me. She has kids. And she said, you know,
I said, are you going to go back on the

(02:25:45):
road or what are you going to do? Do you?
You know, we did a few gigs together with Dave
Cousins and Danny Thompson and the Royal Albert Hall, and
the audience you could see them float up in the air.
She saying like an angel, you know she had, there's
no voice like hers. And she said no. She says,
what's the use of having children if you're just going

(02:26:07):
to go out and work and do gigs. She says,
I'm finished, I'm done. I don't want to do it anymore.
So she used our kids. But you know, quite rightly,
I think she did that made the right decision because
she turned out to be the best mother to my
two oldest children. You know who I am still in
touch with constantly, and Mary and I are friends.

Speaker 1 (02:26:25):
Now. By the way, well how did it end with
you and Mary?

Speaker 2 (02:26:30):
I cheated on her. She would to stay at home.
Mom was not what I married. You know, I was
this wild guy. I was a wild, crazy young man
and I wasn't a very good husband. That's it. I
have nothing to say in my defense.

Speaker 1 (02:26:49):
I think that kind of says it all. Then you
get involved with me. Pang, who came up earlier in
the podcast, how did that happen?

Speaker 2 (02:26:56):
Well, that was under the friendliest circumstances. I'm I met
her when she left John. After she left, I met
her at some kind of do and we went out
on a date. I was single. I didn't cheat on
any wife to go out with me. Pang, I was single,
and we had a little romance in New York and

(02:27:18):
then when I went back to England, she phoned me
up one day after that little romance and said, how
do you feel about babies? And I said, I like babies.
I've got two kids already. I love babies. Because how

(02:27:39):
would you like to be a father? Again? I go,
what are you trying to tell me? She says, you're
going to be a father. If you don't want to
be a father, let me know, I'll get rid of it.
But what do you want to do? And I thought
for a minute, and this is now. I didn't live
with kids for at least a decade by this point,

(02:27:59):
and I made up my mind on the spot. I said,
have the baby. And she goes and I said, and
everything that goes with it. What do you mean by that?
I said, will you marry me? I was in a session.
I was in a recording session, and then I come
out of the wherever I was taking the phone call

(02:28:22):
and I told everyone I was working with, I'm going
to be a father. It sounds flippant, but it was
really romantic in a way. I mean the way she
asked me, the way she kept rephrasing it and rephrasing
it was very interesting, but it was. It was a
great you know, I think all my marriages were great
up to a point. I'm not a good husband. That's

(02:28:42):
a conclusion I came to.

Speaker 1 (02:28:44):
So how did it end with me? Pang?

Speaker 2 (02:28:48):
Well, how do I put this? We started arguing a lot,
and she was reliving her life again in the John
Lennon Years a lot. She wrote that one book, Loving
John or something like that, and started going out on
a book. You when you promote a book, you know,

(02:29:11):
going to different towns, and all that, and I felt like,
at one point, I said, we had John Lennon's photos
all over the wall. She said, one by one, I
come home from work and there'd be another photo of
John Lennon on the wall, or a photo of her
and John Lennon on the wall. And I said, may
you know this is a little bit ridiculous. I feel
like there three of us in bed. And she goes,

(02:29:34):
she said, well, you should have known this when you
took it on, when you married me, you should have
known this would happen. I go, no, I thought you
married me, you know, and then we split, you know,
I lived, We lived apart for a while and we
never got back together again, and finally got divorced.

Speaker 1 (02:29:50):
So how many kids do you have and what are
they up to?

Speaker 2 (02:29:53):
Oh? I've got great kids. My two oldest kids are
from Mary Hopkin. My son, Morgan is Morgan Visconty. He's
a film composer and he owns this company I'm sitting
in right now. This is a whole bunch of recording
studios where the people write jingles and film scores. And
Morgan doesn't come in anymore. He's kind of semi retired

(02:30:16):
at fifty one years old, but he likes to keep
his hand in and write film scores. My oldest daughter,
Jessica is living near Mary in England and she and
Mary just made a duets album. They sound like sisters.
They have the identical voice. My daughter has a voice
from heaven just like Mary has. And she does gigs

(02:30:39):
got She and her man who plays bass, they go
out and do regular gigs all over England and they
write songs, they release records. So that's side of the
family is very musical. Now I'll move on to May.
My two children with May are gifted as graphic artists.

(02:31:02):
My daughter Lara is the youngest child. She's about thirty
two or thirty three now, and I should know her
rage really, but she does graphic work for many, many
different companies, from designing their websites to actually if they
have a new brand of talcum powder, she'll design the

(02:31:23):
box and all the artwork that goes in. You know,
this is a big job, you know, to make an
iconic thing that'll catch the eye in a shop that'll sell.
So she loves graphic art. And then my son Sebastian
does his. He's got like the only one who does
a normal nine to five job, but he does also

(02:31:44):
he's into maga manga the Japanese are from and he
does little comic books like that for his friends and
sells them and stuff like that. But they're all autistic kids,
and I love them all. I'm in touch with all
of them.

Speaker 1 (02:31:59):
Okay, you started in Brooklyn, you ended up in London.
Why are you in Manhattan now?

Speaker 2 (02:32:10):
Good question. In eighty nine, there was a huge recession worldwide,
but it was very, very bad in the UK, and
the studios were dropping like flies. And I had a
really big studio. I had a responsible business that I
was running, and I was in a neighborhood that had

(02:32:33):
about maybe eight or nine recording studios and I saw
them one by one. They were just closing shop forever.
They just couldn't get any any clients. And then there
was a guy called doctor Death who came around to
my studio tried to get me to close my studio
because he he did close the others. And he says, well,
how about sell me some of your gear instead? You know,

(02:32:54):
maybe do you need all your gear? I can, I'll
take your microphones from you and things like that. And
I told him to get lost. But the writing was
on the wall. I knew that I had about bookings
for the next two months. Besides myself, I would use
it for my own productions, but I didn't work world,
I didn't produce all the time, so I had other

(02:33:16):
people come in and use a studio. Quite a few
hit records. We made this in Lizzie and people like that.
And I found a buyer who wanted to buy the
whole studio, lock stock and barrel. He was a jingle guy,
jingle house guy, and they called it Joe and Co.
I just learned yesterday that Joe passed away. But they

(02:33:36):
bought the studio for me and they turned it into
the one of the biggest jingle houses in London. In fact,
it was the big biggest jingle house in London. And
even my son Morgan started working with them first and
he got into the rhythm of writing jingles and what
it takes to do that. But the studio still lives today.
The studio that was came perilously close to closing. It's

(02:34:01):
now owned by the Alvin Lee family. Alvin Lee blues guitarist,
his daughter, his daughter and his wife owned the studio
now and they run it like a really good business,
and I'm entitled to use it anytime I want. Anytime
I go to London, I can go in that place
and it's it's walking through my history.

Speaker 1 (02:34:19):
Believe it.

Speaker 2 (02:34:20):
When I walk down those steps, I'm like hearing hazy
fantasy thin Lizzie, all the things I recorded, all the
great records I made. And the name of the studio
when you owned it, it was called good Earth. And
you know, Good Earth is a pearless buck pearlss buck
book about China. And ironically I lived my studio was

(02:34:41):
a block away from Chinatown in London, so we got
a lot of calls at one in the morning for
people wanting a late Chinese meal. There was another Chinese restaurant.
You know, there were's quite a few Good Earths in
the world, restaurants that call themselves good Earth, the Good Earth.

Speaker 1 (02:34:57):
So how do you end up back in the US?

Speaker 2 (02:35:00):
Well that was because of the recession. I sold my
studio and got out and I went back. I was
with May then. She always was good with money, and
she realized, she says, that's the best thing you could do,
because you'll be broken six months. You're not going to
get any more clients, that studio is going to shut down.
But for a jingle house, it was perfect. He didn't

(02:35:20):
rely on clients like musicians, you know, he just wanted
people who wanted adverts made. And we got on a plane.
I said goodbye to my house, my studio and moved
to New York. At first in her place, she had
a controlled rent place in Manhattan on eighty ninth Street

(02:35:41):
between Third and Second Avenue, Manhattan, So we lived there
for a while until children started to come from that marriage,
and then we had to move to other places. But
it was great. It was great to be back. I
had to literally start all over again because most people
didn't know who I was with whatever great reputation I
had made in London and the rest of the world.

(02:36:05):
Americans just you know, oh oh you did Bangagong that one,
you know, that was it, you know, And so that's
how I ended up back there, and you know, my
career did pick up afterwards. I'm still making records all
the time, working with some great people, discovering new artists.
Did you know about my box set?

Speaker 1 (02:36:27):
Yes? I did. That's what inspired me to do this podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:36:31):
But you can do a little commercial, Oh well, I've
got a box set of six vinyls or four CDs,
whichever one's you want to buy. But I was approached
by Demon Records about a year ago saying they would
like to do this, and I had this idea about
five or ten years ago. But the time is right now.

(02:36:51):
It actually never came off before, but by now I'm
seventy nine years old. I had to have a pretty
dense history behind me. I've worked with I must have
made about five hundred albums. I've must have produced over
two thousand songs, individual songs, and now's the time. I'm

(02:37:12):
really proud of this album. It's got some iconic records
that Americans might not have heard. But I had a
big spate of hits in the eighties in Britain with
Adamant Altered Images, a lot of British and my studio
we turned into a literally a hit factory. I was

(02:37:33):
there every day, new group, every day, Dexi's Midnight Runners like.
I did a lot of stuff in the eighties and
that's well represented on this box set. And then someone
pointed out to me, but you left this off, you
left that off, you left that off, and one group
I'm very proud of was Ossi Bisa. It's the first

(02:37:53):
Anglo African group ever. It came from Kenya and we
made the first two albums we made were massive hits
for them in the UK and also in America. There's
not one Osibisas song on this album. So now I
have to go back to demon Now they don't know this,
but I want to do a volume two and make
sure you know. There's plenty of other records to get

(02:38:14):
on there, but I want to make sure Osibisa gets
on the next one because I'm very, very proud of
that work. It was groundbreaking work. You never heard of
an African rock band before until Osibisa.

Speaker 1 (02:38:27):
Well, they have the covers by Roger Dean, the same
guy who did the Yes covers.

Speaker 2 (02:38:31):
Yeah, those are great, those covers. They are iconic covers.

Speaker 1 (02:38:37):
Okay, So you have this long history, but you have
a similar perspective that I have, except even more information
from the fifties and early sixties. You're excited about these
women you met at Weeperbond, But are as you as
excited about the music as ever? And what do you
think about music and its power and influence and where

(02:38:59):
it's going today?

Speaker 2 (02:39:02):
Well, Back in my day, music was a culture and
record labels they couldn't wait to be invited to the
recording session and sit in and watching a hit being made,
watching an album being made. Even you know, even though
money was to be made by these records, even the
executives felt like they they would be attending ay a

(02:39:26):
history making recording session. They used to come to the
sessions and then when the record it came time to
promote it, they would put a huge budget in the promotion.
And that's just the way things were in those days.
And the freakier album you can make, the better. The
freaky of the album was, the better. They wanted new sounds,

(02:39:46):
different things. Bowie could be as radical as he could,
and you know, Mark Bowling could do say outrageous things
in the press. They loved all that stuff because it
was a culture move. Speed up these days. The difference
between these days is the bottom line is money right now,
it's really money, money, money, and they have to make

(02:40:09):
a sound alike records to get that money. So the
hire producers very very clever young people who work from
laptops mainly. And everything's in the everything's in the box now,
like you would probably The only human being on today's
records might be just the singer. Everything else is programmed,

(02:40:30):
you know, a fake guitar, a fake bass, fake drums,
a swirling synthesizer sounds, and a chorus that goes on
forever until you're sick of it. You know, Oh my god,
what can I say?

Speaker 1 (02:40:45):
So?

Speaker 2 (02:40:46):
I mean, I kind of within this climate, I still
have people who want to work with me. I wish
I could tell you the name of this famous jazz
pianist player that I'm making a record with. She swore
me to secrecy, but I just gave away thee to you.
But I'm making a fantastic record with this person. And

(02:41:06):
there's still that market. There's people who love great music,
and people who are true artists are still being supported
by their fans and by labels too, because you know,
a great artist can sell a lot of records. It
doesn't have to be a Beyonce kind of record or
a Taylor Swift kind of record. It could be a
record of extreme autistic merit and it could sell. And

(02:41:27):
I'm that kind of a producer. I'm this is my
sixth decade and I learned a lot of shit in
my life By six decade, I could still pull rabbits
out of the hat for people.

Speaker 1 (02:41:42):
This has been utterly fantastic. I could talk to you
for another three hours.

Speaker 2 (02:41:46):
I know.

Speaker 1 (02:41:48):
I can see why you're successful. You're a very charming guy,
very friendly. It's funny you just see a name on
a record cover, you have no idea who the person is.
And you're great rock and tour. Really, you're just fucking great, Tony.
I mean, I'm not blowing smoke up your ass because
you never really know. And I said, you know, like

(02:42:08):
after like five bits ago, this guy is great. It's like,
well it stay this good, and it did. So I
want to thank you for taking the time to talk
to my audience.

Speaker 2 (02:42:18):
Well, if you're a sweetheart, I love you.

Speaker 1 (02:42:21):
It's all true. That's one reputation I have. I speak
by truth.

Speaker 2 (02:42:26):
They said, be careful what you tell him. He's going
to ask you these questions. I said, well, I've got
nothing to hide.

Speaker 1 (02:42:31):
You know this is you know, Mike, the whole thing
with this is not gotcha anyway, not that I would
I would even know what gotcha to ask you? As
you say, you have nothing to hide, but you know
you were there and you've told some of those stories
that people don't know. Not to mention your history.

Speaker 2 (02:42:49):
People need to know.

Speaker 1 (02:42:51):
I mean, I can see why you connect with BOYD.
People want to work with You're a good guy, good hang,
irrelevant of your talent. Yeah, that guy is fun to
have around. And he's not like a Sicka fan either.

Speaker 2 (02:43:02):
I always love your podcast. I listened to you you bought.
Podcasts are great. You know they're so different from others.
You know that you don't have one. You're the only
string running through everything you know, and you do great interviews. Bob,
I'm a fan.

Speaker 1 (02:43:16):
I appreciate it. I'll just leave it at that, So Tony,
I want to thank you again. Till next time. This
is Bob left Sets