Record producer Ken Scott isn’t in the mood to deny it: talking about David Bowie’s career-defining 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (which he co-produced with Bowie), is, he says with a charitable smile, “a little boring at times — but what is important, and remarkable, is that people are still talking about it 50 years after its release. As far as I’m concerned, it’s amazing that it’s still in the public consciousness.”
Released on June 16th, 1972, Ziggy Stardust was Bowie’s fifth album and his commercial breakthrough. To say it has had a profound, pivotal effect on pop culture (as well as design, fashion and other areas of creative expression) is an understatement. No one had any idea 50 years ago what they had on their hands, says Scott. “I didn’t know what David was on about at the time I started working with him. I knew he had a certain amount of talent, but I thought he was never going to be a superstar.”
It was when Bowie started going through songs earmarked for his 1971 album, Hunky Dory, and others he was writing for that album’s as yet untitled follow-up that Scott realised just how talented he was. “As raw demos, they were very impressive, and I sensed that as an artist he was starting to create a body of work. When we first began to work on Hunky Dory there was a certain amount of trepidation, but as we moved forward and discovered that our ideas were genuinely fusing, we gained confidence.”
Upon stepping inside a recording studio, no musician, engineer, manager, producer or gopher has a notion as to how any song will work out, but what were Scott’s initial thoughts on the Ziggy Stardust studio sessions? As an already established record producer/engineer, was it just another album, was Bowie just another musician to work with or was there a sense that something different might occur?
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“What some people might not be aware of is that we went into the studio for the Ziggy sessions around the end of August 1971, a few weeks after we completed recording Hunky Dory. That album wouldn’t be released until December, so we had no idea how the public was going to react at all to these new songs; we were simply doing what we felt like doing. We were lucky enough that other people liked it as much as we did, but did we, even for a second, consider that it would be talked about in decades to come? We would have laughed you out of the studio if such a thing had been suggested — we had no idea we were making something that special.”
One-take vocals
It helped that he and Bowie went back a few years. As a sound engineer and sound mixer, Scott had also worked on Bowie’s 1969′s Space Oddity and 1970′s The Man Who Sold the World albums. When the sessions for Hunky Dory came about, he says he knew Bowie reasonably well. “The sense I had of him as a musician, a person, was that he wanted to do the best he could.” This included what Scott was not used to hearing in a recording studio: start-to-finish one-take vocals.
“I’m not saying he was the best singer, but he was probably the best performer I’ve ever worked with in the studio. I co-produced four albums with him and of those about 90 per cent of the vocals were first takes from beginning to end. What you hear on the albums, and on Ziggy Stardust of course, are those one-time vocals and what we still hear today.”
As someone who cut their teeth on recording many 1960s pop stars, did he think Bowie was at the forefront of a new, less conservative breed of performer? He was more of a continuation, says Scott. “I had felt for some time that Bowie was another step towards the change in pop culture, so it didn’t hit me quite as suddenly as it might have to people on the outside. It was that way with The Beatles, who I also worked with — at the start, they were considered upstarts but that view gradually changed. I don’t think even The Beatles realised how big they were going to be, and the same could be said of Bowie and those around him.”
No one knows anything, do they — except, perhaps, for a top executive by the name of Dennis Katz at Bowie’s then record company, RCA. Katz listened to an early finished version of Ziggy Stardust and announced that, while he liked it, he felt the album didn’t contain a certified hit single. Bowie was promptly asked to write a new song, something that would be a better fit for the album’s abstract sci-fi themes. Almost as an afterthought, he delivered Starman. “We went back into the studio,” remembers Scott, “recorded it, and that’s when it all started to happen.”
Scott is starting to wilt; he is polite to a fault, despite having surely gone over the same topic time and time again. He finds it difficult, he admits, to accept he was a part of something that has had such a significant effect on so many people. As if he can predict what the last question will be, he beats me to the punch.
“Why is it held in such high regard? I think it’s because the artists were so on top of their respective games at that point, but for me, with Bowie, it was his vocal performances.” Even now, Scott’s enthusiasm overshadows his familiarity with the songs. “They’re real, they’re human, they come from deep within him, and that always resonates with people. These days, too many singers will only sing the chorus once, and then you have to copy and paste it. They’ll autotune everything, and that isn’t real, is it? Bowie’s music is.”
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is released on various vinyl formats on June 16th through Parlophone Records
