This week, record producer, musician and singer Tony Visconti joins Ade Edmondson at Cavita on Wigmore Street for a spot of Mexican food. Out to Lunch with Ade Edmondson is available on all platforms.
Highlights from their chat include discussions into Tony’s relationship with the late David Bowie, Tony’s final phone call with David Bowie and how Tony met T-Rex singer Marc Bolan.
TONY VISCONTI ON HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH DAVID BOWIE
Ade: Your relationship with David [Bowie] sort of ebbed and flowed, didn't it? You’d do a couple of things together and you think ‘well, yeah, that was fun’. Sometimes you need the kind of fallow time to let stuff grow in that field.
Tony: At first, I was really hurt when we just did Scary Monsters and he goes off and does a next album with Nile Rodgers.
Scary Monsters was his plot first platinum record. We were on a trajectory and I was looking forward to doing the follow up to that, which would have been fantastic. Then he goes and does Let's Dance, which is so un-Bowie, and to this day, I mean, it's great Nile Rodgers production, but it's not much of a song.
In my opinion, you know, it got him more fans.
Ade: I heard he himself was a bit p***ed off with it. Is this true that David thought it was too successful? He was cross that it was a commercial success? I mean, everyone wants to be successful, but they want to be successful in the right kind of way, don’t they?
Tony: It's a Chic record. It's a Nile Rodgers record. It's brilliant.
David was the front man, the lead singer. That's it. That was the first time we parted since we started. We did the Berlin trilogy.
And then he went off and worked with other people. Actually, it started something which was really good. We had this fallow period, as you say, but it gave us the opportunity to absorb other people's things, techniques and characteristics and all that. So, I started working with other artists, applying everything I learned between T Rex, David Bowie, even Elaine Page.
TONY VISCONTI ON DAVID BOWIE’S DEATH
Tony: I spoke to him two weeks before he died. And he was... I think he was feigning optimism. I think he knew his number was up, but he said that as soon as Christmas season is over, he's going to go for his op and he'll be much better. And, it wasn't shortly after New Year's that he died.
Ade: Yeah
Tony: And, boy, it hit me like a ton of bricks. And I heard from other people that he was making this phone call, making everyone feel okay and saying he was actually saying goodbye. And, I didn't realize at the time he said goodbye to me.
He said that he was very happy he was about to become a grandfather. And I thought, wow, yippee. You know, I wasn't a grandfather yet. This is terrific news. You know, he was such a good man. Such a good family man. A really good friend. And he never did me wrong, ever. Or anyone, he was very fair. And he even left in his will to, that if his records were to be re-released and remixed and all that, if the producer is still alive, have him get the first shot. Have him do it.
And I've had that privilege since he's passed away. I remixed Low. Who else? I mean, not many people in rock are that nice.
Ade: Yeah. Well, not many people in life are that nice, are they? That's true. You know.
Tony: I can't emphasize how much of a good man he was.
TONY VISCONTI ON MARC BOLAN
Tony: Marc Bolan had a voice like no one ever had. But what he told me was he listened to old blues singers at the wrong speed.
Ade: Was he slowing them down or speeding them up?
Tony: He'd buy a 45 and he'd play it at 78. And he loved it. He was buying like R&B music, like female vocalists. There was this little underground club, they played, specialised and underground music. I walked in and it was dark and I thought no one was there. And I looked down and everyone, all these kids were sitting on the floor. And there was Marc sitting cross legged on stage. He wasn't standing up. Went up to Marc and Marc said to me...he was already full of s**t.
He said, ‘you're the eighth producer who came up to us this week’. He says, ‘John Lennon was here the other night’. All of it was a total lie.
Ade: Was it?
Tony: Yeah.
Ade: Brilliant.
Tony: And he says, ‘but I'll take your business card anyway’. And he says, ‘you work for Denny?’ I said, ‘yeah, I work for Denny Cordell and I'd love to work with you’. And so I went, I went to the office the next morning about 10 a. m. We got there fairly early. And I said, ‘I saw this wacky band last night’. I said, ‘they're really cool. You know, the guy sings like with a great weird voice. The music's really underground’. And he says, ‘’oh, okay, well, let's look into them. The phone rings. Marc is out on the street in a call box. When they used to have call boxes.
Ade: Yeah.
Tony: Says, ‘Hello, it's Marc Bolan. Can I come up and audition for Denny Cordell?’ And Denny says, ‘Uh, yeah, sure. I've got Tony up here with me. Come on up here’. And he was up there in five minutes.
So they came in, and he brought the carpet he was sitting on the night before. He always sat on that little carpet. And they unrolled it and put it on the floor. Sat down. We had, we had to look over the desk, you know.
Ade: Just a bit of curly hair above the desk.
Tony: Yeah. Marc did his audition. He left. I said, ‘well, what do you think?’ And [Denny] said, ‘I like them. He goes, they're very quirky. We'll take them on maybe as our token underground group’.
TONY VISCONTI ON WATCHING FAWLTY TOWERS WITH DAVID BOWIE
Ade: I heard that you and [David Bowie] would often break off recordings to watch things like Fawlty Towers, and Harry and Paul.
Tony: Yes, we did.
Ade: Which is a great image.
Tony: Yeah, we had to.
Ade: Especially when you're in your kind of, well you've always been in an experimental kind of age, ‘cause you're a very experimental person. But the idea that you would break off and watch something as prosaic as those kind of comedies. It’s very heartening.
Tony: We had to get them sent, someone sent us DVDs, from London. We had to get a British DVD player. The PAL DVD player. So it broke up the day. We watched one episode per lunchtime, of both.
TONY VISONCTI ON DAVID BOWIE AND FOOD
Tony: David was a foodie.
Ade: Yeah.
Tony: Clearly a foodie. He loved good food and he found the best restaurants in Berlin to go to. So, during the day we might get a sandwich for lunch.
Ade: Yeah.
Tony: Which was always good. I mean, German food is, it's really excellent in my mind. And then in the evening we would go to a real luxurious restaurant, spend a lot of money, eat some great food. We ate really well there.
Ade: Yeah.
Tony: But he and I and Iggy were, we just never got out of our skulls on alcohol. We used to drink beer, maybe one beer during the session. And then in the evening, maybe we'd have a glass of wine with dinner. So, it was very civilized, you know. We ate very well. So, when you do a David Bowie album, you're doing a foodie album.
Ade: Brilliant.
Tony: It's got to be right, you know.
Ade: I never imagined that. Because he was always so thin, I always thought, well, he probably doesn't eat very much, does he?
Tony: Yeah, he eats like good food, you know I never saw him eat a slice of pizza. He always had to go to a fine restaurant. Not even much bread, you know, that's how he kept slim. I mean, he just naturally avoided carbs. He wasn't on a special diet.
JENNIFER SAUNDERS GOT MARC BOLAN TO SIGN HER EMPTY TAMPAX PACKET
Tony: Say hello to Jennifer by the way, I'm a big fan.
Ade: She wanted me to say to you that she once met Mickey Finn, he was after Took wasn't he? He was the bongo player. And she's an absolute Marc Bolan fan. She was so, in awe of meeting him, and she didn't have anything for him to sign, so eventually she got him to sign her empty Tampax packet. That’s all she had on her.
Tony: How great.
Ade: It was as close as she came to Marc.
