The band Tony Visconti called “the next Beatles”
When you’ve produced everything from Blackstar to Bad Reputation, you can certainly be considered a mammoth figure in musical history. Behind the mixing desk, Tony Visconti helped to craft the sound of the future through an endless stream of masterpieces. Much of these arrived alongside David Bowie, with whom he shared a keen understanding that music at its best is bold, dramatic and daring.
The producer and his pal from outer space first began their lifetime friendship and collaboration the year after The Beatles and George Martin advanced stereo sound at the speed of a sonic bullet with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was a record that lingered long in their minds, taking from the avant-garde edges of culture and creating something sumptuously populist.
In Visconti’s eyes, this was a crowning achievement that would define the future of music. To borrow a phrase from Hunter S Thompson, The Beatles had become one of “god’s own prototypes, a high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” Yet, somehow, Sgt Pepper did achieve mass production, and while its timelessness lived on beyond the end of the band, Visconti knew they had ensured it would be oddities that followed in their golden wake.
So, when he set out at the start of his career, he went looking for the next Fab Four. It’s a mark of how much talent they had stirred up that he instantly found them. “As a producer, I needed to find someone to grow with,” he told Louder Sound. “My assignment from Denny was to get a band of my own. It was so easy.”
Visconti simply wandered into a bar and was blown away by a potent welter of folk, psychedelia, rock ‘n’ roll, emerging glam rock and a bluesy heart. As he recalls, “The first night I went out I found a band called Tyrannosaurus Rex. I knew that whoever the next Beatles were going to be, they would be very weird. And I got that feeling when I saw Tyrannosaurus Rex.”
Marc Bolan and his band were, indeed, very weird and very much the future. The band and producer had a great kinship with Visconti going on to work on Electric Warrior and everything good that came from T Rex. As an artist, Bolan is touted, by turns, as being the inventor of glam-rock, punk and even rap music. While these labels might be akin to pinning a sticker onto a river, the point remains that much artistry flowed from the bountiful reservoir of creativity that Bolan harnessed throughout his life, and it was pretty much only Viscnoti who could keep up with it.
They carried forward the spirit of The Beatles simply by attempting not to be anything like them—a feat that was actually easier said than done. Part of the reason they achieved this so easily was that Bolan was already weird before The Beatles.
The fuzzy-haired frontman burst into his prolific vein in 1965. He signed to Decca Records, and within two short years, he had released three solo albums, each of which furthered his progressive approach. Soon after, he joined John’s Children and, thereafter, a folk duo titled Tyrannosaurus Rex. Together, Bolan and Steve Peregrine Took embarked on an explosive artistic splurge—that Visconti spotted in a flash.
However, it always seemed that Bolan’s sui generis punches were just being pulled a little bit or else missing the mark as he tried to make headway in the mainstream. The cultured ways of Visconti helped to change that, launching the 1970s very own revolution.
