'I'll Tell You The Full Story…'

During the past 12 months, a series of lavish boxsets have tracked DAVID BOWIE’s early development throughout 1968 and 1969. As this comprehensive archeological survey concludes with Conversation Piece, long-serving producer TONY VISCONTI relives the highs and lows of Bowie’s breakthrough. There are ham sandwiches, Marc Bolan impressions, the peerless “Space Oddity”, and tearful studio interludes… but, most importantly, we learn how the music made during this brief but pivotal period critically influenced one superstar in the making: David Bowie himself…

‘GOING back to these tapes is like time travel. When you open them up, it’s all very real again. Half the people on the recordings are dead – but suddenly they are alive, they are 21 years old, and so am I. This album, Space Oddity, is my early life with David Bowie in London mapped out. I can remember what we did on certain days. I can even remember what we had for lunch…

“We recorded at Trident in St Anne’s Court in Soho. We would usually start around midday and go on until late evening. We’d get lunch at a vegetarian place just off Carnaby Street called Cranks, or we’d go to this café on the corner of St Anne’s Court and Wardour Street. They made the best sandwiches, almost as good as I could get in America. In those days, a British sandwich was two slices of stale white bread with a piece of processed ham in the middle. But these were great, they really filled them up. Those fat sandwiches kept us going!

“This [50th-anniversary] remix was a second chance for me. When I did the album the first time, I was very inexperienced. I had studied music formally and I’d been arranging music for bands since I was 12 – so that part of my job was well handled. But when it came to mixing, I was a novice. This was only the second or third album I ever mixed. I didn’t get it right. At the time, we were encouraged to not put too much bass on anything. Too much bass made the arm jump right off the record. There are very few records from that era that sound big and bassy. We wanted something that could be played on AM radio, so you mixed in that mid-range frequency with the idea that when your record came on the radio it sounds louder than any of the others.