25 essential albums produced by Tony Visconti

Badfinger’s debut album bears somewhat convoluted production credits due to how it recycles part of Maybe Tomorrow—the 1969 album the band released under their original name of the Iveys—and adds “Come And Get It,” a tune Paul McCartney handed to them telling the group not to change a note of the arrangement. One of three songs produced by McCartney, “Come And Get It” did indeed become a career-making hit for Badfinger and if its presence throws Magic Christian Music—a pseudo-soundtrack for The Magic Christian, a Terry Southern satire co-starring Ringo Starr and Peter Sellers—off, it’s not as much as the new additions produced by Mal Evans, the Beatles confidante who discovered the Iveys; “Midnight Sun” points the way toward the heavy, hooky “No Matter What.” In turn, such Visconti-produced tracks as “Dear Angie” and “Crimson Ship” are exquisite remnants of the tuneful, harmony-laden 1960s guitar-pop that was falling out of fashion as the 1970s dawned.

Vive Le Rock may represent the place where Adam Ant’s hits dried up—after ruling the early 1980s, he fell out of fashion by the middle of the decade—but the years have helped this 1985 album sound like a fascinating oddity. A cacophonic crystallization of the sound of the mid-1980s, Vive Le Rock pushes rhythms and synths to the forefront, allowing Adam Ant to get swallowed up in waves of echoes. It’s possible to hear the heavy twang of guitarist Marco Pirroni underneath the gloss, particularly on the rockabilly bop “Rip Down,” but the appeal of Vive Le Rock is how Visconti manages to find obtuse angles on the familiar tricks of Adam and Pirroni.

The Moody Blues hadn’t exactly been absent from the American pop charts in the 1980s—in 1981, “Gemini Dream” and “The Voice” both threatened to crack the Top 10—but Tony Visconti’s gleaming production of The Other Side Of Life helped bring them back to the upper reaches of Billboard thanks to the lithe adult contemporary bounce of “Your Wildest Dream.” The synthesized rhythms of “Your Wildest Dream” are heard throughout The Other Side Of Life, proof that both the band and producer could adapt to the changing times.

Nearly a decade into his career, John Hiatt was still awaiting his big break when he signed with Geffen Records and headed into the studio with Tony Visconti to record All Of A Sudden. The record didn’t quite change the trajectory of his career but Visconti’s New Wave makeover of Hiatt brought out the singer/songwriter’s cynical sneer and way with a barbed hook, as heard on the punchy opener “I Look For Love” and “Something Happens,” which was cut a year earlier by Dave Edmunds.

For reasons that seemed perfectly sensible in the early 1980s, Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook decided to leave their own band behind, stepping away from Squeeze to record Difford & Tilbrook with Tony Visconti. The pair maintained their clever, tuneful chemistry and Visconti captured them with deft style but the label demanded a new mix from Eric “E.T.” Thorngren, one that didn’t bring the duo a hit. Despite this behind-the-scenes drama, Difford & Tilbrook is slickly appealing, sounding a bit like a Squeeze album made with the charts in mind.

After a four-year hiatus—a period that coincided with The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars—David Bowie reunited with Tony Visconti on Diamond Dogs, hiring him to write string arrangements. This gig revived their collaboration, leading Visconti to co-produce Young Americans, Bowie’s immersion into Philly soul. Young Americans had a difficult birth—its original incarnation as The Gouster was eventually released as part of a box set in 2016—but the end result sounds sleek, cool, and alluring, particularly on such groove-heavy tracks as “Fascination.”

Fresh off his production for Morrissey’s Ringleader Of The Tormentor, Tony Visconti helmed Djin Djin, the 2007 album from the Beninese-French singer/songwriter Angélique Kidjo. Enlisting a superstar cast—Alicia Keys, Peter Gabriel, Branford Marsalis, Carlos Santana, Joss Stone, Ziggy Marley, Josh Groban, and Amadou & Mariam all make appearances—Visconti captured the range and depth of Kidjo’s music, helping her land the Best Contemporary World Music Album Grammy in 2008.

Taking over the producer’s chair from Gus Dudgeon, Tony Visconti helmed Dragonfly, the second album from British folk-rockers Strawbs. Dragonfly walks the fine line separating baroque folk and prog-rock; indeed, Rick Wakeman of Yes makes an appearance on “The Vision Of The Lady Of The Lake,” an eleven-minute epic that anchors the record’s second side. Visconti adds an element of cinematic drama to the finely rendered songs of Dave Cousins without sacrificing their delicate idiosyncrasies.

Two albums after Sparks had an unexpected UK breakthrough with Kimono My House—an album delivered right as glam was starting to wane—the Mael brothers joined forces with Tony Visconti to record Indiscreet. It wound up being the last album they’d record in England before they hightailed back to America, a decision aided by the fact that Indiscreet didn’t perform as well commercially as either Kimono My House or Propaganda. Despite the lack of hits, Indiscreet is an alluring album, thanks in no small part to how Visconti encourages the Maels to indulge in their inherent eccentricity.

Prior to Ringleader Of The Tormentors, Morrissey entered the Tony Visconti orbit, albeit in an off-kilter fashion. The former Smiths singer worked with former Spider from Mars Mick Ronson on Your Arsenal, the 1992 album that featured “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday,” which David Bowie himself covered on Black Tie White Noise. All this suggested that a collaboration between Visconti and Morrissey would be an easy fit and Ringleader Of The Tormentors proved such assumptions true. Without sacrificing the singer’s inherent operatic grandeur, Visconti steers Morrissey away from indulgences, resulting in a tight, punchy record that recalls Your Arsenal.

Thin Lizzy righted themselves with Bad Reputation and its swift sequel Live And Dangerous, both produced by Tony Visconti, so they took chances with Black Rose: A Rock Legend. Adding the brawny guitarist Gary Moore to their lineup, Thin Lizzy builds upon their galloping hard rock on Black Rose, indulging in the folk-rock suite of the title track, collaborating with synth-rocker Midge Ure on “Get Out of Here,” surging through “Waiting for an Alibi” and swinging through “Do Anything You Want To Do,” one of the poppiest songs Phil Lynott ever penned. Visconti articulates each of these musical shifts without diminishing Lizzy’s essential crunch.

The debut of Tyrannosaurus Rex—soon to be truncated to T. Rex—effectively serves as ground zero for Tony Visconti’s production career. It was his first major project and established a bond with Marc Bolan, the elvish-voiced mystic who eventually abandoned hippie folk-rock for glam. There are hints of trash here, particularly in the opening “Hot Rod Mama” and “Mustang Ford,” yet this is firmly within the freak-folk territory, a sensibility Visconti captures by layering Bolan’s voice and placing equal emphasis on the acoustic boogie and Steve Took’s bongos.

A lifelong fan of glam-rock—he named one of his garagey 1990s bands Buick MacKane after an old T. Rex song—Alejandro Escovedo seemed destined to work with Tony Visconti. The pair finally crossed paths in 2008 for Real Animal, a project that originated in a collaboration between Escovedo and Chuck Prophet, who also played guitar on the record. Visconti gives the album a punchy and tough sound that remains open, not closed: it’s a perfect pairing for Escovedo’s blend of punk and Americana.

When The Good, the Bad & the Queen—a collective fronted by Damon Albarn and featuring Paul Simonon, Tony Allen, and Simon Tong—reconvened in 2018 to record Merrie Land, their meditation on the ravages of Brexit, they enlisted Tony Visconti as their producer. Visconti helps the band create a picturesque soundscape, one that’s equally unsettling and comforting as it threads unease into British art-rock tropes.

The last of the great T. Rex albums, Tanx finds Marc Bolan abandoning the electric clamor of The Slider for a slippery pop record that glides through space, touching upon luxurious pop and louche rockers. The boogie is still prominent but Bolan’s touch is lighter, aided by Visconti’s colorful palette: “Rapids” is wrapped in out-of-phase effects, “Electric Slim & the Factory Hen” floats on strings that could possibly take it into the realm of AM radio, and with Flo & Eddie’s harmony vocals cheering Bolan along, “Mad Donna” rides its bubblegum hook into the ground.

Tony Visconti and David Bowie had a fruitful experience on Bowie’s eponymous 1969 album—commonly called Space Oddity after the Gus Dudgeon-produced hit that opens the record—but it was its 1970 sequel The Man Who Sold The World that found their collaboration catching fire. Part of the reason the album hits so hard is that the Spiders from Mars start to form here: guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey are both aboard. This nascent iteration of the Spiders plays hard rock so heavy it could almost be called metallic—witness the crushing “She Shook Me Cold”—without losing the spacier elements of early Bowie.

Commonly accepted as the last of Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy,” Lodger isn’t quite a continuation of Low and “Heroes.” For one, it wasn’t recorded or mixed in Hansa Studios, nor was it structured as a side of songs and a side of instrumentals—differences that help emphasize how Lodger finds Bowie synthesizing his experimentations of Berlin, employing the electronic textures and jagged sensibilities he pioneered on those records on a set of potent avant-pop tracks highlighted by “D.J.,” “Look Back In Anger” and “Boys Keep Swinging.”

Tony Visconti proved to be the ideal producer for Gentle Giant, a group of British eccentrics who were perhaps the quintessential prog-rock band. Visconti gave the band’s explorations muscle on their eponymous 1970 debut, allowing them to wander into jazz and classical detours accentuated by experimental flourishes, all the while grounding them with thunderous rhythms. The blend of earthiness and fanciful gives Gentle Giant a peculiar enduring charm.

David Bowie’s first album of the 1980s, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) is as much a series of farewells as it is a new beginning. It’s the last Bowie record to be grounded in the avant-pop innovations of his Berlin period, the last record he made for RCA, and the last time he worked with Tony Visconti in the 20th century. Despite all this, Scary Monsters feels like its forging new ground: it’s vibrant, artful rock that harnesses the power of arena-rock—Pete Townshend even makes a cameo on the record—while feeling of a piece with the post-punk and new romantics that littered the landscape in 1980.

Tony Visconti signed on to record Bad Reputation at a point when Thin Lizzy was in flux. Johnny the Fox didn’t replicate the success of its predecessor Jailbreak and they were down to a trio after the departure of guitarist Brian Robertson. While the guitarist was eventually persuaded to return to contribute to a handful of tracks, Bad Reputation nevertheless sounds leaner and harder than Johnny the Fox, particularly on its punishing title track and “Killer Without a Cause.” The group still found space for lighter moments—the second side opens with the swinging “Dancing In The Moonlight (It’s Caught Me In Its Spotlight)”—but the rampaging thunder that Visconti captures helps make Bad Reputation one of Thin Lizzy’s best records.

The second installment of Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy” is distinguished by the presence of Robert Fripp, the leader of King Crimson, who brings his inventive guitar skills to the record. Fripp adds gorgeous layers to the album’s surging title track but also brings out the gnarled beauty on its rampaging openers “Beauty And The Beast” and “Joe The Lion.” Like Low before it, “Heroes” is structured as two complementary sides of vinyl—the first contains all the barbed art-pop, the second is devoted to instrumentals—but the kinetic collaboration of Bowie, Fripp, Brian Eno, and Tony Visconti guarantees that this doesn’t sound like a retread: they’re forging ahead into new ground.

Released at the height of “T. Rextasy,” The Slider captures Marc Bolan and Tony Visconti at cruising altitude. Noisier and bolder than Electric Warrior, it’s fueled by such over-the-top rockers as “Buick McCane,” “Metal Guru,” and “Telegram Sam,” yet still finds room for such spacy flights of fancy as “Ballrooms Of Mars,” a combination that turns it into one of the definitive glam-rock albums.

When David Bowie reemerged after a decade of silence with The Next Day in 2013, he had Tony Visconti by his side. Visconti remained there during the secret recordings for Blackstar, the album Bowie made after receiving a liver cancer diagnosis. Bowie was cognizant that Blackstar could be his farewell—the album teems with meditations on mortality—but he couldn’t have predicted that he’d die two days after the record’s release on January 8, 2016, a date that happened to be his 69th birthday. His death lends Blackstar poignancy, yet the record is also thrilling because Bowie continued to forge new paths in his last days, discovering fascinating jazz-rock fusions in collaboration with saxophonist Donny McCaslin, guitarist Ben Monder, pianist Jason Lindner, bassist Tim Lefebvre, and drummer Mark Guiliana.

Tony Visconti had been Marc Bolan’s regular musical partner since the days when T. Rex was known as Tyrannosaurus Rex, helping usher in the rocker’s evolution from hippie mystic to glam rocker. Electric Warrior, the pinnacle of their collaboration, is so indelible because it marries that kinetic boogie to interstellar spectacle. Even the hit “Bang A Gong (Get It On)“ isn’t a stripped-down rocker: it’s dripping with accouterments, from the swirling swings to the gleeful harmonies from Flo & Eddie. Bolan is in high gear throughout Electric Warrior, spitting out sleaze like “Jeepster” with the same ease that he spins elegant spectral fantasies like “Cosmic Dancer.”

Strung out and at rock bottom, David Bowie decamped to France with Iggy Pop in 1976, starting a process where the pair cleaned up as they embarked on musical explorations that would eventually take them to Berlin’s Hansa Studios. There, Bowie began what became known as his “Berlin Trilogy,” working with his trusted producer Tony Visconti as well as Brian Eno, a pioneer in ambient and electronic music. Low, the first record in the trilogy, is divided between cacophonic avant-rock and immersive electronic instrumentals—complementary sides that illustrate how adventurous the collaboration between Visconti and Bowie was.