The sonic pathfinder for Bolan and Bowie (but also Morrissey and Mary Hopkin) straddles glam and folk and prog and pop and is still twiddling knobs as he closes in on his eighties. “It’s been an emotional rollercoaster,” sighs Tony Visconti.

Interview by JIM IRVIN • Portrait by GRAMAIN VINCENT

Gramain Vincent/ABACA/Shutterstock, Tom Oldham

MEET ANTHONY EDWARD VISCONTI, A rock’n’roll fan raised in a poor Italian district of Brooklyn, who learned guitar and, in his teens, managed to make a living playing double bass for Jewish holiday-makers in the Catskill resorts. The jazzman’s life meant brushes with heroin, which he eventually resisted, but he avoided being drafted into the US army by making sure there were opiates in his system on the day of the medical, and thus being rejected as a junkie.

Attracted to hippydom, he married singing girlfriend Siegrid Berman when they were both 21, and they enjoyed taking acid trips together ever y weekend. Their folk duo failed to connect but led to Visconti becoming in-house producer for a New York publishing company and, subsequently, the arranger for busy pop producer Denny Cordell (Move, Moody Blues, Procol Harum) in London in the summer of 1967.

At first, he found daily life in London – home of bewildering un-gridded streets, inedible food, mouldy, shilling-in-the-meter flats with no showers, 240 pennies to the pound and people who said incomprehensible things like ‘chuffed’ and ‘knackered’ – to be anything but swinging. But its pop life was another matter. There was exciting music ever ywhere.

Having discovered a taste for a scotch egg chased with half a bitter (despite being a vegetarian), that was the meal he bolted before going to catch fellow hippies Tyrannosaurus Rex play a Middle Earth Club night on Tottenham Court Road. Feeling the hairs on his arms stiffen, he realised he wanted to work with this corkscrew-haired elf and his bongo-banging wingman. Visconti’s records with Marc Bolan would make both their names, until Visconti began to feel taken for granted and resigned in anger. A ver y close relationship with David Bowie would also sputter out. Twice. But each time rebound and grow stronger. They’d make 11 celebrated, wildly different records together, from 1969 until 2016. When Bowie wanted his final statement, Blackstar, to sound like nothing he’d ever done before, he asked Visconti to produce it.

As Visconti took charge of his first production in London in 1967 – Daughter Of Love, a forgotten single for Indian artist Biddu – he could not have known he’d still be doing the job over 50 years later, producing over 125 albums and dozens of stand-alone tracks for artists from Thin Lizzy to Elaine Page, The Damned to Angélique Kidjo, Gentle Giant to Gay Dad, Sparks, Boomtown Rats, Junior’s Eyes, Altered Images, Morrissey… The list goes on and on.

Now Demon Records have compiled a 4-CD/6-LP collection of highlights from this illustrious six-decade career, Produced By Tony Visconti, a colourful parade of those disparate acts, linked only by the subtle skills of the Brooklyn boy who learned how to score for strings and wanted to know, more than anything else, how the Brits made pop records that got in his head. His quest for an answer has kept him busy longer than any other producer of his generation.

Faced with this treasury of a life’s work… how does it feel?

Well, it’s an eerie feeling. Music is a way to recall things you’ve totally blocked or forgotten. Play something you heard in your youth and maybe you’ll remember the time you scraped your knee in the schoolyard. You wouldn’t normally have these memories floating up to the surface. So hearing my musical past has been an emotional rollercoaster.