Legendary producer Tony Visconti, who worked with Bowie, helped record strings for BG’s new album.

This detail contains the whole history of relations between Soviet rock and the West.

Tony Visconti is an 80-year-old producer who recorded classic albums by Marc Bolan and David Bowie (and played bass on “The Man Who Sold The World”). In BG's new album he did the string arrangements. “Medusa” talks about the recording legend - and how, after working with him, Boris Grebenshchikov summed up the more than half-century history of the relationship between Russian music and Western culture.

It may seem that this news is not enough for a separate article. Tony Visconti is not the producer of the new BG album (more precisely, a mini-album, there are only six songs in it), he only arranged the strings for one of the tracks - the song “Angel” . And this is not the first collaboration of BG with a figure of this level - in previous albums he consistently recorded with musicians who are interesting and dear to him, from the Jamaican dub legend Lee Scratch Perry to Robert Wyatt, Fairport Convention and The Band, which accompanied Bob Dylan.

And yet this short track is more than just a line in the discography. It compresses a huge history of more than half a century, containing the entire chronology of “Russian rock” and its relations with the West. It began in London and Leningrad, continued in New York and ended, in a new round, again in London - and Cape Town.

Tony Visconti was born in 1944 in Brooklyn into a family of immigrants from Italy. He did not receive a classical musical education, but as a teenager he played double bass in the school orchestra and tuba in the wind, and also took private guitar lessons. This was enough for me to become a sought-after session musician by the age of 15, and a little later - a person who helps other musicians record well. “I dreamed of being a singer, or at least playing in a band,” he explained. “And I became something of a director for musicians.”

In an interview, Visconti recalls that no one liked the recordings of his songs, which he made himself and brought to one of the New York studios, but with an important caveat. “The songs are terrible, but they sound really great,” Visconti said. “Would you like to work as a producer for us?” The word “producer” was just becoming popular in the 1960s, so Visconti clarified: “This is the person who sits in the studio and tells the musicians how to play? But I don’t understand anything about this.” “You will need to do exactly what you did with your demo recordings,” they explained to him.

Visconti actively uses the image of a “director for musicians” in interviews and his memoirs - he never dreamed of assembling a band from scratch and producing it completely, limiting himself only to studio work. Visconti emphasizes that he does not have his own “signature sound”, unlike his colleagues in the craft (Phil Spector, Brian Eno), because in the studio he was always trying to find new solutions that suited this particular album.

He did not hide the fact that in everything he tried to imitate George Martin, the producer and arranger of The Beatles, the “fifth Beatle,” who tried to stay in the shadows: it was his discoveries that convinced Visconti that the studio could be treated as a separate, complex instrument. “When I first heard the Beatles recordings that he produced, I realized that sound recording was an art form, and not just a sonic mirror of live performance,” Visconti writes in his memoirs. “I think his stunning arrangement of the string octet for “Eleanor Rigby” is the highlight of The Beatles’ repertoire. As well as the pure magic of 'Strawberry Fields Forever'."

Visconti became famous as a producer not in the USA, but in London - he moved there to record Georgie Fame, a jazzman and important figure in English rhythm and blues. One of Visconti's first and incredibly successful projects was collaboration with a young group with the unwieldy name Tyrannosaurus Rex - and its vocalist Marc Bolan. Visconti oversaw the recording of their debut album with the even longer title “My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows” (1968). After that, he recorded Bolan almost until the musician's death (Bolan died in a car accident in 1977, he was only 29 years old). In total, Visconti recorded ten albums for the group.

It was Visconti who, in 1970, suggested shortening the name to the short T.Rex - this is how he marked the days of the group’s studio recordings in his calendar; the full name simply did not fit. And it was he who, on the album “Electric Warrior” (1971), persuaded Bolan to move from an acoustic folk sound to an electrified rock and roll, making the musician a glam rock star. The album reached number one in the British charts and became the best-selling record of 1971.

At the same time, Visconti became friends with David Bowie. “In 1969, I was throwing parties in my London flat, and the three of us - me, Bowie and Bolan - were hanging out and jamming,” Visconti recalled . “It never occurred to me to record these apartments, I didn’t know that [my friends] would become legends.”

Visconti recorded Bowie's second album (1969) and two debut albums by the important prog rock band Gentle Giant. By this time, Visconti had not yet abandoned his ambitions as a musician, so he helped Bowie put together a group that would become his permanent session band, and played bass in it for some time. It is his bass that sounds in the famous “The Man Who Sold The World” .

His collaboration with Bowie would be even longer - he would record 14 of his albums, including the famous Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes and Lodger). After the 1980 album “Scary Monster (and Super Creeps),” there would be a big break in their relationship: Bowie would choose another producer, Neil Rodgers, to record the next record, which would lead to a break in relations with Visconti. But they would collaborate again in the 21st century—Visconti would record several more Bowie albums, including the most recent, “Blackstar.”

Visconti's achievements are not limited to working with Bowie and Bolan. In his huge discography (according to his calculations , he recorded more than two thousand albums as a producer) there are records by The Moody Blues, The Sparks, Thin Lizzy, the Stranglers, Manic Street Preachers, Kaiser Chiefs, The Damned, The Good, the Bad and the Queen, Marc Almond, Morrissey (who wrote the foreword to his autobiography), as well as, for example, the debut album of Iggy Pop, recordings of Afro-rockers Osibisa and flamenco rock Carmen. Special mention should be made of the records of Mary Hopkin, a singer who became popular thanks to the hit “Those Were The Days,” based on the Russian romance “The Long Dear.” Visconti married Hopkin in 1971 and produced all of her records, some on his Good Earth Records label. They lived together with Visconti for ten years, their daughter Jessica Lee Morgan also became a singer.

It seems strange to order string section arrangements from such a person, but they have become one of his signature techniques since the 1960s - the combination of roaring guitars and strings in the rock action films T. Rex amazed many. Inspired by George Martin's arrangement of The Beatles' song "Eleanor Rigby", Visconti encouraged many of the musicians he worked with to think in this direction. As a result, Bolan, Bowie, and other artists featured a distinctive string section, including arranging strings for Paul McCartney and the Wings' album Band On the Run (1973).

In his autobiography, Visconti notes that writing for strings was easy for him (although no one specifically taught him this), it was much more difficult to manage classical musicians - and generally negotiate with them. Not everyone liked the result (Visconti writes in his memoirs that Rolling Stone magazine criticized his string arrangements for Bolan), but his greatness as a producer was generally undisputed. For the world it is still associated with two names: Visconti's autobiography is subtitled "Bolan, Bowie and the Boy from Brooklyn."

In the summer of 1972, when Bowie’s Visconti-produced album “The Man Who Sold The World” took 26th place in the British charts, and the producer himself was recording Bolan’s next record, young Leningrader Boris Grebenshchikov invited his friend Anatoly Gunitsky, nicknamed George, for a walk. BG announced that they should urgently put together a group and start composing songs in Russian, because “at that time no one was doing this,” - this is how Grebenshchikov described the creation of “Aquarium” on the air of “Evening Urgant”.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Visconti-produced albums of Marc Bolan and T. Rex had an incredible influence on the young leader of the Aquarium group and his friends in the St. Petersburg rock underground, showing how songs could be written - and performed. First of all, this applies to Mike Naumenko: when filling out a questionnaire for the samizdat magazine “Zerkalo”, in the “favorite artist” column Mike wrote “Marc Bolan”, and in the “hobbies” column - “I collect materials about Marc Bolan and David Bowie.” “T.Rex music sounded in the house all the time,” recalled Mike’s widow Natalya Naumenko. On the wall in the room of the Leningrad communal apartment where they lived, there was a poster of Bolan. Some of the famous Zoo songs are idiosyncratic versions of Bolan's songs: for example, "Boogie Every Day" is based on the T. Rex song "I Love to Boogie."

“Aquarium” also has such a song: “Sergei Ilyich (Dedication to Marc Bolan) ” from the album “Triangle” uses the melody from the song “Cat Black” from the Tyrannosaurus Rex album “Unicorn” (1969). Both Tsoi (still part of the early Garin and Hyperboloids) and Kinchev have songs dedicated to Bolan - “Doctor Boogie” from the album “Energy”. Bolan's influence can also be heard on BG and Mike's joint album All Brothers and Sisters.

However, it was not limited to music - St. Petersburg musicians also studied Bolan’s bright stage image very carefully. “We dressed poorly and put kilograms of makeup and lipstick, eye shadow, etc. on our faces. It was a cool, albeit somewhat belated glam rock,” explained Naumenko. BG has retained his weakness for surreal, fairy-tale outfits to this day. “A little arrogant handsome man with incredible hair, absolutely confident in his rightness and singing songs about unicorns and magical kingdoms - he did not fit into any scheme, was completely unformatted” - this is how BG describes Marc Bolan in his program “Radio Aerostat” (the screensaver of which, by the way, is also Bolan’s song “Beard of Stars”). In a 1995 interview, answering the question of who he would like to be like, Grebenshchikov named The Beatles, Donovan and Bolan.

As for Bowie, a separate work can be devoted to his influence on BG and Aquarium - we are talking about arrangements, and individual lyrical images or lines, and even about appearance. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was seeing David Bowie in front of me: a clearly defined chin, blond hair framing his face, bright blue eyes” - this is how the American tourist and singer Joanna Stingray saw Grebenshchikov in Leningrad in 1984.

But if Bolan, who died in 1977, remained an inaccessible, fabulous figure for Leningrad musicians, then the leader of Aquarium soon established contact with Bowie. Already in the early 1980s, he managed to give Bowie a reel of the recording of the Radio Africa album. In April 1983, he received a detailed and friendly response from Bowie on letterhead. Bowie wrote:

I really liked what I heard - such a variety of material. It was amazing to hear all these references and how they work, no matter what language... In some cases, even better [than the original]! I played it to my friends, including Iggy Pop, and he loved it too. Hope we see each other someday.

The meeting took place earlier than might have been expected. In 1987, American producer Kenny Schafer and his assistant Marina Albi arranged a trip for Grebenshchikov to America. BG himself didn’t quite believe this at first - in an interview with the samizdat magazine ROXY, he said: “I most likely won’t write any music there - I can only write it here, sitting in all this shit. Most likely, we are talking about buying a tape recorder in the USA and bragging about the fact that I drank with rock stars.” But Shaffer, who had previously worked as a press agent for Jimi Hendrix and Alice Cooper, did help Grebenshchikov sign an eight-album contract with CBS Records and choose a producer. One of the possible candidates was Tony Visconti, writes Alexander Kushnir in his biography of Aquarium, “The Geometry of Chaos.” Marina Albi explained in an interview for the book:

When we were thinking about the future record, I really wanted Boris to record acoustic glam rock. I really saw him in this chamber minimalism, and it seemed to me that Grebenshchikov, with his subtle voice, would do it best.

In the very first days, BG will personally meet Bowie, Iggy Pop, and other important heroes. “We met as old acquaintances, he [Bowie] was aware of what I was doing, I, naturally, was aware of what he was doing,” Grebenshchikov recalled .

He wonderfully introduced me to that world, which I later had to learn quite a lot about. We met in one of the restaurants in Times Square. The company there was like this: David and a couple of his companions, Iggy, Debbie Harry , I think, with Chris , and someone else was just as funny. That is, right away it was a good feeling for me. <…> And in the morning, at eight o’clock, when Bowie was already completely white from the substances he had consumed, he gave me more advice, which touched me very much. I loved them as people.

Apparently, Bowie also treated BG with sympathy. In her memoirs, Joanna Stingray even said that he was ready to play the role of BG in a movie - but this project did not take place. Debbie Harry admitted in Rolling Stone magazine for April 1988 that she became friends with Grebenshchikov, who “writes beautiful things; Some of his lyrics are just incredible." It was not possible to meet Visconti BG personally, but he retained his admiration for him for many years - he mentioned him more than once in “Aerostat”, and in one interview he said that he likes to re-read his autobiography, “you can always learn something interesting from the masters.”

The result of the American trip is generally considered unsuccessful. The producer of the BG album was not Visconti, but Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics group. The English-language album they recorded, Radio Silence, took 198th place on the 1989 Billboard chart. CBS' contract was not renewed.

BG returned to Russia and, as part of the newly assembled BG band, recorded the “Russian Album”. But, as noted by the authors of the telegram channel “Between the Rolling Stones and Dostoevsky” - an invaluable source of documents on how Soviet rockers conquered the West - the albums of BG’s new American friends, released simultaneously with “Radio Silence”, also did not make it into the top hundred of Billboard. Debbie Harry's solo album was in 123rd place, Iggy Pop's was in 110th place. Against this background, the debut album of an unknown Russian singer on 198 doesn’t look so bad. “Guess whose album is considered a failure,” conclude the channel’s authors.

The "failure" of Radio Silence has been discussed for years and has achieved almost mythological status. Other attempts at collaboration between domestic musicians and Western producers are also usually considered unsuccessful - for example, the recording of Brian Eno and “The Sound of Mu” (the album “Zvuki Mu” was released on Opal Records in 1989). The collaboration between Civil Defense and producer Steve Albini did not take place at all. The only counterintuitive exception remains the collaboration between tATu and Trevor Horn - this sudden success looks especially strange against the background of the entire previous discography of the producer (he recorded albums by Yes, Tina Turner, Grace Jones and Power).

Over time, the idea of ​​recording with Western producers or even in a Western studio ceased to seem so tempting to domestic musicians. Those who could try - "DDT", "Time Machine" - were rather disappointed. After recording the album “Time Machine” (2007) in the legendary Abbey Road studio, “Time Machine” guitarist Evgeniy Margulis admitted that the group was not prepared enough, and he didn’t like the idea itself: “For me, it doesn’t matter where to do it, it’s important what.”

The group considers the album "DDT" "Love" (1996), recorded at the American studio Long View Farm, where, as the musicians were told , the group Aerosmith began, a failure. “We’ll show you a cool signature sound!” — guitarist Vadim Kurylev recalled the mood on the recording. “Sound is sound, but there must be music.” The need to sit in the studio from morning to evening, working off the gigantic budgets allocated for recording in expensive studios (they were paid for by friendly businessmen - fans of the bands), had a rather depressing effect on the musicians, the songs came out constrained.

As a result, it became clear that you should sign up where it is convenient, appropriate and with someone you trust - it doesn’t matter in London, Perm or St. Petersburg. This convention lasted until 2022, but now there is nothing left of it: the musicians who left, even if they wanted to, cannot record in familiar Russian studios, and the domestic artists who remained in the country can hardly afford to record in the West - it is no easier for them to do this again than it was for Soviet rock musicians in the 1980s.

BG's new album was recorded in London and Cape Town - because why not. This ease in choosing a place fits the group into the global context with more confidence than working with a famous producer - in the same way, Paul McCartney and The Wings went to Africa for inspiration to record (the Visconti-produced album “Band On the Run” was recorded in Nairobi) or Paul Simon (his legendary “Graceland” was also recorded in South Africa). The BG album features the voices of South African musicians from the band Ladysmith Black Mambazo - the same ones with whom Simon recorded. And next to it are the parts of Lydia Kavina , the most famous theremin performer. Tony Visconti's strings are just one of the colors in the album.

But paint is extremely important. The song “Angel”, in which this string section sounds, is not new at all; fans of the group know it well: it was intended for the unreleased Aquarium album “Feudalism” and is dated 1988. One of the first recorded concert performances was at the premiere of the film “Assa” in the Moscow cultural center MELZ on April 17, 1988, since then BG often performs it at concerts. The lyrics, written more than 35 years ago, sound frighteningly relevant, from the image of the “church of love and war” to the line “show me happy people and I will show you death.” The author called its driving original “almost grunge,” but there were no violins in it - they appeared only now, in 2024.

Visconti is 80 years old this year, BG is 70, and this is the first time they are making music together. Only now can the founder of Aquarium record on his own terms - without hopes for a “signature sound”, high expectations and the desire to prove something to someone, simply paying tribute to his past and enjoying the work here and now. It will no longer be possible to record with either Bolan or Bowie, but you can still touch on this idea.

Was it necessary to have a legendary producer to make these violins sound there? Is there something definitely unique about this arrangement that no one else can do? Perhaps not - BG is capable of making a similar arrangement himself. Actually, he does - on one of the next tracks. But the magic comes from the combination of all elements at once - roaring electric guitar and strings like in old Bolan albums, the overtones of Bowie songs, the ghosts of all the rock legends of the past. In these chords, between them, behind them - a fabulous corner of a Leningrad communal apartment, the premiere of "Assa", trips to the West and back, the collapsed and erected Iron Curtain, reviews, songs, hopes, flights in dreams and in reality.

“Tell me the miracle of escaping from this prison,” the author repeats his old lines. “And I will say that what we have would be enough for people bigger than us.”

"Jellyfish"