Tony Visconti – ➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ (original) (raw)
Tag Archives: Tony Visconti
2023 ➤ Fans vote for Bowie’s Top 26 best videos
❚ THE OFFICIAL DAVID BOWIE WEBSITE has polled his fans to elect their five favourite videos by the musical genius whose career transformed pop music over 50 years. No surprise perhaps that Ashes to Ashes came out top, capturing a crucial turning point in Bowie’s own progress in 1980 and becoming his second No 1 UK single and an international hit. It was an arty track from his 14th studio album, Scary Monsters, with a funky bassline, refined lyrics reaching back to his debut single Space Oddity and its astronaut Major Tom, while its dreamy solarised visual effects also reflected Bowie’s own experiences with drugs. Several critics declare Ashes to be among Bowie’s best songs musically and for inventiveness, and the video itself stands at number 44 in Rolling Stone’s 100 best.
For both its sleeve and video, Bowie commissioned a Pierrot pantomime costume. Significantly, the video starred four overdressed figureheads (including Steve Strange) from London’s nightlife scene, which was exploding into a gloriously colourful new subculture as a reaction to the bleakness of punk. Let’s not forget that Ashes was the most expensive music video made to date, costing £35,000 (about £140,000 in today’s money) and MTV had yet to be launched. [Read the full background story behind recruiting and filming the Blitz Kids for Ashes here at Shapersofthe80s.]
The team at DBHQ doff their hats to video director David Mallet for achieving nine entries in their video top 20, more than a third.
BEST VIDEOS HIS FANS VOTED FOR
#01 – Ashes to Ashes 1980 – David Bowie and David Mallet
#02 – Life on Mars? 1973 – Mick Rock
#03 – Boys Keep Swinging 1979 – David Mallet
#04 – Jump They Say 1993 – Mark Romanek
#05 – I’m Afraid of Americans 1997 – Dom and Nic
#06 – ★ Blackstar – 2016 – Bo Johan Renck
#07 – DJ 1979 – David Mallet
#08 – The Hearts Filthy Lesson 1995 – Samuel Bayer
#09 – Lazarus 2016 – Bo Johan Renck
#10 – The Stars (are out Tonight) 2013 – Floria Sigismondi
#11 – The Next Day 2013 – Floria Sigismondi
#12 – Let’s Dance 1983 – David Mallet
#13 – Look Back in Anger 1979 – David Mallet
#14 – Strangers when We Meet 1995 – Samuel Bayer
#15 – China Girl 1983 – David Mallet
#16 – Loving the Alien 1985 – David Bowie and David Mallet
#17 – Little Wonder 1997 – Floria Sigismondi
#18 – Blue Jean / Jazzin’ for Blue Jean 1984 – Julien Temple
#19 – Fashion 1980 – David Mallet
#20 – Wild is the Wind 1981– David Mallet
#21 – Thursday’s Child 1999 – Walter Stern
#22 – Where are We Now? 2013 – Tony Oursler
#23 – Absolute Beginners 1986 – Julien Temple
#24 – Space Oddity 1972 – Mick Rock
#25 – The Jean Genie 1972 – Mick Rock
#26 – Be my Wife 1977 – Stanley Dorfman
AMONG THE COMMENTS AT FACEBOOK:
Adam Paramore: Great list, interesting that there’s nothing from Ziggy Stardust (IIRC, some concert clips were used as music videos), no Labyrinth tracks, no Modern Love, and no Dancing in the Street with Bowie & Jagger.
Anthony LeBaron: One notably absent video from the list I would add is No Plan. Released a year after his passing, it captures the enormous loss and despair I still felt at losing him.
Rudy Fuentez: Ashes to Ashes is probably his best video, but to me his best song is too hard to decide. Cat People (Putting out the Fire), Always Crashing in the Same Car, Young Americans, Absolute Beginners, This is not America… too many songs. Might as well ask what do you think is the brightest star in the heavens.
Andrew Seear: I agree. Always Crashing in the Same Car I think is an astonishing piece, even by Bowie’s standards. I’ve never heard despair expressed so elegantly.
Stacey Rich: Coolest thing was cycling to Pett Level [_where Ashes was filmed_] – totally unchanged on the day, a little overcast, the beach empty. Grew up in America & never realised it was an actual place but had shown my partner the video and he recognised the beach immediately. Actually teared up.
Stephen Oldfield: The lyrics and music on this track [_Ashes_] are stunning. The closing synthesiser must be the greatest on any song ever.
PLUS TWO VERY SPECIAL
PERFORMANCES ON VIDEO
In December 1979 Saturday Night Live aired the most immaculate performance of TMWSTW by Bowie, Klaus Nomi, Joey Arias, Stacey Hayden on guitar and Jimmy Destri on keyboards, which some say was the night “he transformed live television”. This nine-minute clip also includes brilliant versions of TVC 15 with Bowie in skirt and heels, plus a hilarious performance of Boys Keep Swinging where he sports a life-sized nude puppet costume. Click on the picture to view, though don’t be surprised if you cannot reach the video. For rights reasons, this unrivalled video keeps being removed from the web by its broadcaster, so we stay on our toes scouting for alternative postings!
❏ I TOTALLY AGREE with the first three videos topping this DB poll, and draw special attention to Mick Rock’s remarkable promo for Life on Mars. Another that haunts my imagination is 2014’s Where are We Now? Moving on, I’d urge those who haven’t seen two other very special performances by Bowie to seek them out. One is an exquisite interpretation of his enigmatic song The Man who Sold the World which some claim “transformed live television” [_pictured above_]. Admittedly this is not a promotional video and yet it was uniquely choreographed and costumed for live performance on American TV’s Saturday Night Live in 1979 before its audience of millions. Idiosyncratic backing singers Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias provide immaculate support, while carrying Bowie forward as a kind of giant pierrot, clad in an oversized black plastic dinner jacket over a tapered tubular body – all inspired by artist Sonia Delaunay’s designs for a subversive Dadaist play from 1923. When written in 1970, the lyrics and the singer were evidently sharing an identity crisis and since his death Rolling Stone has regarded this number as “essential”.
❏ HERE’S A SECOND profoundly affecting video that’s often ignored yet it reveals the extraordinary range of Bowie’s singing voice. Possibly the purest experimental jazz number of his career, the nerve-tingling Sue (or in a Season of Crime) was created in 2014 during a session with 17 jazz soloists including saxophonist Donny McCaslin, all improvising under Maria Schneider’s guidance and running beyond seven minutes. The role of jazz in Bowie’s musical temperament seldom gets discussed, though his producer Tony Visconti says the jazz influence had always been there in the music but beneath the surface. The haunting four-minute video was directed in monochrome by Tom Hingston to promote Bowie’s “best-of” collection, Nothing Has Changed.
All taking place as Bowie was being diagnosed (discreetly) with liver cancer, Sue evokes a discomfiting tale of infidelity inspired by the poet Robert Browning, in which the narrator murders his wife and the last verse begins with the phrase “Sue, I never dreamed”, the title of the first song he recorded in 1963. Such a weepie. (An edgier, punchier, superior re-recording of Sue followed on Bowie’s final album Blackstar, released two days before his death.)
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: 12 January 2016, David Bowie is dead
Posted in Blitz Kids, Clubbing, jazz, live music, musicians, Pop music, Rolling Stone, Tipping points, videos, Youth culture
Tagged Ashes to Ashes, David Bowie, David Mallet, FavouriteBowieVideos, Maria Schneider, Sue (Or in a Season of Crime), The Man Who Sold The World, Tony Visconti
➤ How Bowie threaded blue notes through his final surge of creativity
Bowie as a projected image in the video for Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)
“If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel capable of. Go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting” – David Bowie
◼ THE MOST GRIPPING SEQUENCES in the new TV documentary about Bowie’s final surge of creativity are those which assemble every musician in the bands he worked with from 2012 to the end. Each band re-enacts pivotal moments when they rehearsed the music, inspired by his lyrics, and laid down the tracks for the albums The Next Day and Blackstar. Particularly revealing is the session when pure jazz soloists created the nerve-tingling Sue (Or in a Season of Crime), which Bowie added to his 2014 “best-of” collection, Nothing Has Changed.
To mark the first anniversary of the star’s death, this weekend BBC2 screened David Bowie: The Last Five Years, Francis Whately’s sequel to his other superb documentary Five Years broadcast in 2013. The role of jazz in Bowie’s musical temperament seldom gets discussed, though his producer Tony Visconti says the jazz influence had always been there in the music but underneath the surface. As a small child Bowie heard a jazz band and right away said: “I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in [this] band. So I persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on hire purchase.”
In 2013 in New York he met Maria Schneider, a jazz composer, handed her a demo disc and asked her to extemporise around a tune called Sue. In turn, she told him he had to listen to this sax player Donny McCaslin and without missing a beat Bowie went straight into the studio with his group and Maria and out came possibly the purest jazz number of his career, a discomfiting tale of infidelity. It won Schneider a Best Arrangement Grammy in 2016.
➢ Watch the Donny McCaslin Group working on Bowie’s Blackstar
Click any pic below to launch slideshow
Composer Maria Schneider developing the jazz arrangements for Sue. (All pix © BBC Music)
Donny McCaslin rehearsing Sue with his group
Guitarist Ben Monder rehearsing Sue
Mark Guiliana rehearsing Sue on drums
Donny McCaslin enthuses about Bowie during rehearsals
Maria Schneider’s proposed scoring for Sue
REVIEWS OF THE LAST FIVE YEARS TV DOC
➢ A thrilling portrait of a late-life renaissance – Jasper Rees at the Arts Desk
“ The opening yielded much joyful footage of Bowie goofing around on the Reality tour (2003), seeming much more like one of the boys than he ever managed with Tin Machine. The band still seemed spooked at the memory of his collapse, before he was carted off to retirement in an ambulance.
Maria Schneider was one of many musicians – three complete bands – who re-formed to walk through the creation of the music. Drummer Zachary Alford still looked shocked at the NDA handed him as he showed up to work on The Next Day. “If I said anything about it,” remembered bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, “I would be in big trouble legally.” Nobody was asked if Bowie really would have sued his collaborators for spilling the beans.
The recent collaborators reflected on the extent to which the new music was steeped in the past. But there was also good stuff from the old lags who worked (and sometimes slept) with Bowie in the feather-cut era: Ideally there would be a DVD with extras featuring much more from each of them. Chief keeper of the flame Tony Visconti sat at a console and played excerpts of Bowie’s unaccompanied vocal takes. On Blackstar came the haunting sound of Bowie wheezing like an ancient mariner fighting for every last scrap of breath. . . ” / Continued online
➢ A treat and a treatise on music’s departed genius – by James Hall, Daily Telegraph
“ The Last Five Years wove previously unheard Bowie interview material with on-screen contributions from collaborators including producer Tony Visconti. The access and insights were faultless. Whately’s programme was essentially a treatise on artistic rebirth. And it showed that although Bowie’s musical style constantly changed, the themes that preoccupied him — alienation, escape, the notion of fame — were there until the end.
During his final creative burst, Bowie gradually revealed to collaborators that he was ill. In the most poignant scene, we learned that Bowie only discovered his cancer was terminal three months before he died. This was in October 2015 when he was filming the video for Lazarus, in which he sings the line “Look up here, I’m in heaven”. Bowie worked and cared and joked until the end. Through tears, Visconti said that he was at ‘the top of his game’. . . ” / Continued online
70TH BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE CONCERT IN LONDON
Brixton tribute concert for Bowie: Gail Ann Dorsey singing Young Americans with Spandau Ballet’s Steve Norman. (Photo: Getty)
❏ On what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday his friend the actor Gary Oldman gathered at the Brixton Academy a 30-strong all-star lineup of musicians who had collaborated throughout his career, with some glorious orchestral and choral support. The show is the first in a run of gigs around the world taking place in cities that have a strong connection with Bowie and his work.
The London concert featured Mike Garson, Earl Slick, Adrian Belew, Mark Plati, Gerry Leonard, Sterling Campbell, Zachary Alford, Holly Palmer, Catherine Russell, plus such guests as Tony Hadley and Simon Lebon. Special highlights saw Gail Ann Dorsey singing Young Americans with Spandau’s Steve Norman on sax; and an audience singalong to Life on Mars? led by Adrian Belew and gifted vocals from Tom Chaplin from the band Keane. Plenty of live videos at YouTube.
➢ Commemorating Bowie at the BBC
Posted in death, History, jazz, London, Pop music, Reviews, Tributes, TV, videos, Youth culture
Tagged Concert, David Bowie, Donny McCaslin, Francis Whately, Gail Ann Dorsey, Gary Kemp, Gary Oldman, Iggy Pop, Maria Schneider, Simon Lebon, Steve Norman, Sue (Or in a Season of Crime), The Last Five Years, Tony Hadley, Tony Visconti
➤ “I’m not a rock star” Bowie often said – No, David, you were a messiah
A humanoid alien comes to Earth with a mission… What a spooky coincidence that David Bowie played the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth
Today’s Times: the masks and the man behind them
◼ ALL 10 BRITISH NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS filled their front pages today with the death of David Bowie at 69 – and so did scores of newspapers overseas. The last pop star whose death justified such deification was Jacko in 2009; and the last British pop star to do likewise was John Lennon, in 1980. The Times of London dedicated 18 pages including an outer broadsheet wrapper to honouring Bowie, plus an editorial comment as blessing. The Guardian topped that with 20 pages, plus the most enlightened editorial comment of them all. Not only did this misfit megastar and cultural icon radiate consummate flair as a performer but he displayed “an instinctive affinity with his times”. He had a “way with the zeitgeist”.
All media, notably social media, captured the dominant sentiment of generations of fans suddenly plunged into mourning. Again and again they claimed: He changed my life. . . He taught me how to be myself. . . David was my inspiration. . . David was my tutor. And most could quote their own favourite song lyric expressing their faith: Oh no, love – you’re not alone. . . Don’t tell them to grow up and out of it. . . It’s only for ever, not long at all. . . All you’ve got to do is win. . . We can be heroes just for one day.
Blanket coverage: Bowie on all UK front pages… Image updated 14 Jan to include news magazines
➢ ‘THE WORLD HAS LOST AN ORIGINAL’ DECLAREs THE GUARDIAN – MORE OBITUARIES AND KEY VIDEOS INSIDE AT SHAPERS OF THE 80S
Posted in cinema, Europe, Fashion, London, Media, North America, Pop music, Youth culture
Tagged Ashes to Ashes, BBC London, cremation, David Bowie, death, Dick Cavett, Guardian, Heroes, Man Who Fell to Earth, Man Who Sold the World, New York Times, obituaries, Robert Elms, rock music, Space Oddity, Starman, TheTimes, Tony Visconti, Tributes, videos, Vogue
➤ Thanks to Neil McCormick for the only Bowie Blackstar review we need to read
Late-life melancholy with jazzy modulations: Bowie in messianic mode in the video for the album’s title track Blackstar
“ For his 27th studio album, has Bowie gone jazz? On first listens to Blackstar, released on 8 January, Bowie’s 69th birthday, it certainly sounds like rock’s oldest futurist has dusted down his saxophone. They are tooting, parping, wailing and gusting all over the place, occupying rhythmic, atmospheric and lead parts, with guitars and keyboards intermingling in a weave of supporting roles.
Donny McCaslin: Bowie’s new-found friend
The saxophone was Bowie’s first instrument, which he started learning in his pre-teens inspired by a bohemian, jazz-loving elder half-brother, Terry Burns. Bowie once said that, aged 14, he couldn’t decide if he wanted “to be a rock’n’roll singer or John Coltrane”. Even in his rise to rock fame, Bowie remained a creature of the jazz age, at least in the sense of the boundary-crashing freedom that characterises his work.
A new single, Lazarus, released today, may kick off in the vague realm of contemporary music, with spectral guitar and stuttering rhythms calling to mind the young British trio the xx, but it is not long before those saxophones are sighing and the beat is fragmenting. Just about holding it together are the familiar tones of Bowie’s teeth-gritted, tight-chested whisper of a vocal, proclaiming it is This way or no way / You know I’ll be free / Just like that bluebird / Now ain’t that just like me? Sure sounds like jazz to me. . .
What Bowie has created with this hardcore jazz crew, though, is not something any jazz fan would recognise and is all the better for it. At its best, free jazz is amongst the most technically advanced and audacious music ever heard but it can be uncompromisingly difficult to listen to for the non-aficionado. The improvisational elements that make it so gladiatorial and hypnotic live can make it over complex and inaccessible on record. Bowie’s intriguing experiment has been to take this wild, abstract form and try to turn it into songs. Blackstar is an album on which words and melody gradually rise from a sonic swamp to sink their hooks in. It is probably as close as free jazz has ever got to pop. . . ” / Read the full review at Telegraph online
◼ IN AN UNNERVING SIMULATION OF BOWIE’S VOICE, the star of Bowie’s new musical Lazarus, Michael C. Hall, sings its title track for the CBS Late Show (below) the day it is released as a single. The maestro himself is watching the show at home in his armchair. How meta-modern is that?!
➢ Bowie fulfills his jazz dream – Listen to an NPR Music interview with the two main characters who accompany Bowie on this new adventure in music – his longtime friend and producer Tony Visconti and his new-found friend/saxophonist and band leader Donny McCaslin.
➢ Nov 23, more background revelations in Rolling Stone – “We were listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar,” says producer Tony Visconti. “The goal was to avoid rock & roll”
➢ PLUS: The Blackstar album reviewed track by track by Neil McCormick
Posted in North America, Pop music, TV, Youth culture
Tagged album, Blackstar, David Bowie, Donny McCaslin, Interview, jazz, Lazarus, Michael C. Hall, Neil McCormick, NPR, pop music, Reviews, Tony Visconti, Video
➤ The non-Bowie tribute super-duper group Holy Holy to stage The Man Who Sold The World
TMWSTW: Bowie’s ambitious album to be updated in live performance by Tony Visconti and Woody Woodmansey’s band Holy Holy
➢ David Bowie’s website announces:
“ Tony Visconti and Woody Woodmansey perform David Bowie’s classic The Man Who Sold the World album with supergroup Holy Holy. Keep reading for further details of this and Holy Holy’s debut 45 with a Bowie cover on the B-side, not to mention a few words from a clearly excited Tony and Woody regarding the event. [Today’s update: After the Sept 17 London gig, a second performance is announced for Sheffield, Sept 18.]
“ David Bowie’s seminal album The Man Who Sold the World, produced by Tony Visconti, was recorded in 1970. It is unusually sonically heavy and dystopian for a Bowie album, with lyrical themes including annihilation and a totalitarian machine. The sound combines riff-laden heavy rock with futurist synth sounds and Visconti’s innovative production techniques.
“ Tony Visconti says: “I’ve rarely played anything as ambitious and demanding as the music of that great batch of songs conceived by David Bowie. With Woody Woodmansey and Mick Ronson, two of the finest musicians I’ve had the pleasure of recording and playing with, we set out to create something both new and classic, we called it our Sgt. Pepper. David gave us a chance to bring our unique talents to the table and we made up our parts within David’s framework. Mick forced me to listen to Jack Bruce, however, and told me ‘That’s what great bass playing was all about’. I got it, lead bass playing – as a guitarist this came natural to me. With David as our charismatic frontman we were Young Turks determined to spin heads and change the world of music… ” / Continued at davidbowie.com
Holy Holy at Peckham Liberal Club last December: Malcolm Doherty on guitar and Steve Norman on sax. Photograph © Marilyn Kingwill
➢ A few tickets remain for Holy Holy’s TMWSTW on Sept 17 at The Garage, London
➢ Buy tickets for Holy Holy’s second performance on Sept 18 at the O2 Academy, Sheffield
➢ Update 5 June: more dates added, for Glasgow and Shepherd’s Bush Empire, plus a live discussion about the Bowie album at the ICA
Tony Visconti on bass, and Woody Woodmansey on drums, will be joined by this stellar Holy Holy line-up:
Glenn Gregory (Heaven 17), lead vocals
Steve Norman (Spandau Ballet), sax, guitar, percussion and vocals
Erdal Kizilcay (David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Freddie Mercury), keyboards and vocals
James Stevenson (Generation X, Scott Walker, Gene Loves Jezebel), guitar
Paul Cuddeford (Ian Hunter, Bob Geldof), guitar
Rod Melvin (Ian Dury, Brian Eno), piano
Malcolm Doherty (Rumer), 12-string guitar and vocals
Lisa Ronson (A Secret History), vocals
Maggi Ronson backing vocals and recorder
Hannah Berridge Ronson backing vocals, recorder and keyboards
➢ Bowie collaborators Woody Woodmansey and Tony Visconti will lead a 12-strong ensemble, says The Guardian:
“ Woodmansey said the time was right to revive the album that first brought him, Visconti and Bowie together, and that it would be a fitting tribute to Mick Ronson, the guitarist and musical genius behind Bowie’s most successful run of albums, who died in 1993. The Man Who Sold the World was the first album Mick Ronson and I played on, our first even in a proper London studio, yet it never got played live,” Woodmansey said. “It was the forerunner of what we could do sound-wise, and we just let rip. We spent three weeks recording [it] because we were creating the songs as we went… ” / Continued at Guardian Online
The day they signed the deal for Hunky Dory in 1971… In a band called Hype, Bowie, Visconti and Ronson (right) created a sound that led to The Man Who Sold the World. And that meant the future was hunky-dory
➢ At Facebook Spandau Ballet’s Steve Norman confirms: “And if that’s not enough, there’s a brand new track scheduled for release on the day of the gig, We Are King. I can’t wait!” A little bird says Steve himself wrote it as the Holy Holy debut single, backed with their cover version of Bowie’s Holy Holy.
❑ Not forgetting possibly the definitive performance of the title track The Man Who, with Klaus Nomi. This thrillingly exact video is (for rights reasons) available to view only in the V&A’s touring exhibition, Bowie Is, which is currently at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany, until August 10, later visiting Chicago and next year Paris.
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: How Bowie defined the difference between glam and glitter
Posted in London, Pop music, Youth culture
Tagged album, Bowie Is, David Bowie, Glasgow, Glenn Gregory, Holy Holy, ICA, Klaus Nomi, live concert, Malcolm Doherty, man-dress, Sheffield, Steve Norman, The Man Who Sold The World, Tony Visconti, UK, V&A, Video, Woody Woodmansey