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      Tony Visconti With Richard Havers

      Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy the Autobiography

      foreword by morrissey

Copyright

      While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions

      Harper

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published by HarperCollins 2007 This edition published 2007

      Copyright © 2007 Tony Visconti

      Images were not made available for the ebook edition

      The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007229451

      Ebook edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007343577

      Version: 2017-01-03

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

      Contents

       Title Page

       Chapter 3 Variety is the Spice…

       Chapter 4 It’s All Hype, Man

       Chapter 5 Myths and Legends

       Chapter 6 It’s the Same Ol’, Same Ol’

       Chapter 7 Abroad and at Home

       Chapter 8 The Low Down

       Chapter 9 Ich Bin Ein Berliner

       Chapter 10 All Change

       Chapter 11 Modern Life

       Chapter 12 Back to Basics

       Chapter 13 Full Circle

       Index

       Acknowledgements

       About the Publisher

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

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

      With Bowie, the tone and cadence are all there: no sentimentalism. The instrumental textures are wispy and often child-like; acoustic and recorder sounds of turn-of-the-’70s dropout London. The Bowie-Visconti vision is concentrated. A good producer gets at something in a singer (or musician) and Tony was there to nail the gift of Bowie just perfectly—making suffering sound like a superior condition—live

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