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liberate themselves, and Bowie and Visconti did so with The Man Who Sold the World… and we played our part by listening.

      The Mael machinery of Sparks utilized Tony for their 1975 surgical offering, Indiscreet. The versifying of Ron Mael introduced a new style of pop poetry, and the scattershot pace of Russell Mael’s vocals sounded like someone running out of a burning house. Russell had been a T.Rex fan, and by 1975 it was Sparks themselves who were shaking public tastes. Indiscreet was their fifth album of great resonance, lunging to #18 in the chart. The sound of this album is so chaotic that it often seems to play for laughs. Either the Maels, or Tony Visconti, were asking: What can we show them that is new? From a tipsy teatime waltz to unstoppable violins, the pace pulverized the listener, and Russell’s mouth seemed unable to close. There are so many latitude and longitude instrumental textures that the masterstroke was just almost overcooked. Since Ron and Russell Mael were obviously insane, Tony could only have walked into this session armed with a swirl of guesswork. The disorder lay in the electronic savagery of the Maels, who had spent their early lives strapped to an iron bed. Pulling them back from the edge, Indiscreet (somehow a commercial venture) produced two riotously diverse hit singles.

      The most important feature of recorded noise is the pleasure it can bring to the listener. Tony has always—somehow—been a part of my life, but I didn’t ever imagine that his success-ridden career would lead him to me, nor I to him, yet in 2005 we recorded Ringleader of the Tormentors in Rome. As a non-musician/ skimmer-scholar, I’ve always known what I wanted without always knowing how to get it. Many years on from the escapist spirits of Bolan and Bowie…it is still there…in the Visconti walk. An actor would be thrilled to discover a new expression for the camera, as Tony Visconti is delighted to ambush the end of a song with a new musical twist. He has astounding recall of whatever it is he’s just heard, and he can talk and listen at the same time. The point of a good recording is to make us more aware of ourselves—as singers or musicians, and Ringleader of the Tormentors stands as a joy greater than pleasure for me. In several countries across Europe…it zaps to #1.

      Tony understands the code of music brilliantly, and he is not authoritarian in the patronizing way that so many producers who have left their fingerprints on the 1960s and 1970s are. He is persuasive without ever making you need to disembarrass yourself; his role is complicity. There are many respected bores of Tony’s generation, nursing memories and resentments and never letting the trapped listener forget—but Tony isn’t like that. He doesn’t pick over the Saxon remains of T.Rex; the time is always now. He is a noble example of the self-flogger who knows that the song doesn’t end just because it’s over. Musical notations are images, and the Visconti style is timeless and lionized and is therefore forevermore.

      MORRISSEY

      October 2006

Introduction What is a Record Producer?

      A group of musicians and a lead singer pour their hearts out into a handful of microphones. When the song finishes a cheerful voice from the control room booms over the speaker, ‘That’s it boys, it’s a take!’ and the band members slap each other on the back and run into the control room to their awaiting girlfriends who are, of course, all models and starlets. It’s a notion and an image that has Hollywood’s fingerprints all over it—reality is a little different.

      On my first recording session, I was the bass player; I too heard that booming voice, only he said, ‘That wasn’t very good. You guys will have to keep going until you get it right. Bass player: your E string is flat!’ We were desperately bashing out this song for an hour or so under the audio equivalent of a microscope. The booming voice was right. The playback of our last take was sloppy and my bass was out of tune. Left to our own devices we would’ve given up and said that was the best we could do. But the booming voice was persistent, and the next few takes steadily got better, all the more so for checking the tuning of my bass before each take. The booming voice saved the day.

      When I grew up I became a booming voice, well, actually a booming voice with the nasal Brooklyn accent. I wanted to be the lead singer or at the very least just one of the boys in the band, but circumstances put me in the director’s chair instead. The circumstances uprooted me from Manhattan and planted me firmly on British soil at the height of Swinging London. I took root and stayed there for nearly 23 years. In the end, I think it was a better deal.

      The role of a record producer hasn’t changed much since Fred Gaisberg cut the performances of opera singers to wax cylinders in the 1890s. He instructed them to move closer or further from a horn; he was the voice of experience, helping the artists to get their performances to a high standard onto the recording medium.

      The first time I heard the term ‘Producer’ was in the ’60s when a mad looking man on the Jack Paar TV show (one of the very first talk shows) audaciously proclaimed that he dictated the musical taste of teenagers in America. He was introduced as a record producer and his name was Phil Spector. I already loved his productions without really knowing that someone other than the artists and musicians were involved (I still melt when I hear ‘Walking In The Rain’ by the Ronettes). It was Spector who brought this role to the public’s attention, but most records of that time were still produced anonymously. It was many years later that the great Quincy Jones admitted to arranging and producing ‘It’s My Party’ for Lesley Gore in 1963.

      When I heard a Beatles record produced by George Martin I began to understand that record production was an art form, not just an aural mirror of a live performance. Before those intricate Beatles recordings it was just that, a live performance captured on cylinder, disk or tape. It is said that once Bing Crosby, the legendary crooner, discovered that two performances could be edited together by cutting audio tape with a razor blade, he gave birth to the ‘art’ of record production.

      There was one pioneering genius who stood the recording world on its head and changed everything forever—Les Paul. His name is on millions of the solid body electric guitars that he designed. But his greatest contribution was his concept of the multi-track tape recorder. With his wife, Mary Ford, he produced supernatural recordings of complex arrangements (supernatural in the sense that two people sounded like twenty). His guitar was used over and over again on a single song as he created a guitar orchestra. For very fast passages he slowed the tape down, played a phrase and then returned the machine back to normal speed. The result was impossible tinkling runs of demisemiquavers. Wife Mary was transformed into a very precise female jazz vocal quartet. At first his one-off 8-track tape recorder was considered a novelty, but when multi-track machines were mass-produced the world of making records changed forever. Since the ’60s most recordings have been made in assembly line fashion, not all the sounds recorded at once, but in layered overdubbed sessions. Even in the sacrosanct world of classical music Maria Callas broke the rules by overdubbing a missed high ‘C’ in an otherwise perfect performance. There was a critical furore but since then classical record producers have been doing virtually what a pop record producer does.

      A record producer is responsible for every aspect of a recording. In the early days the word ‘producer’ was more descriptive because the record producer put up the money for the recording and hired a team of experts to execute the various creative jobs. Eventually the role of a producer became more creative and resembled that of a ‘music director’. George Martin crossed the line and wasn’t shy about giving the Beatles positive feedback and suggesting changes in their musical arrangements. A straight up producer would not be qualified and certainly not welcomed to give such dramatic direction, but George Martin was a very accomplished orchestrator, pianist and oboist. I think his most glorious moment in the Beatles’ recorded repertoire was his stunning string octet arrangement for ‘Eleanor Rigby’. Equally stunning is the sheer wizardry of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. Of course the Beatles contributed greatly and John Lennon refused to take ‘no’ for an answer when he wanted two disparate takes, recorded on different days, in two different tempi and keys to be joined together. George Martin and their extraordinary engineer Geoff Emerick stayed up all night and made it work! There might have been four Beatles, but there were two more Beatles working in the shadows. Record

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