Paul writes:
Bolan, Bowie, Morrissey and me - The Telegraph
(Filed: 23/03/2006)

Excerpts:

Producer Tony Visconti has worked with them all. He talks to Mick Brown

What a lot of people don't realise about Morrissey, says the producer of his new album, Tony Visconti, is that he has a sense of humour. "We were talking one day early on in the sessions, and he said, I'll bet you never expected to find your name in a song, did you? And he pulled out the lyric sheet, and there it was." 

Visconti: 'I have a way of capturing someone's essence'

The song, Morrissey's new single, is called You Have Killed Me: "Visconti is me/ Magnani you'll never be/ I entered nothing and nothing entered me/ till you came."

The reference, of course, is to the Italian film director Luchino Visconti, not the American record producer. Tony Visconti has never found his name in a song; but it is to be found on the more than 100 albums that he has produced over the past 35 years, for artists as various as Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Thin Lizzy and the Moody Blues.

...

Morrissey may be a very different sort of alpha male, but Visconti has been an admirer since the early days of the Smiths. They first discussed the possibility of working together 14 years ago, on Morrissey's album Your Arsenal. It never came to pass.

He was staggered, therefore, when, last September, out of the blue, he was asked whether he could travel to Rome to produce Morrissey's new album. He was on a plane three days later. The singer, the producer says, is "a very private person. I don't know who he is or what he does when he's not in the studio. He doesn't show you that side. But his own personal feelings are obviously very much the source of his songs.

"His lyrics talk a lot about love, about death. The most important thing is emotion, and he demands that from his band and the music. It has to make you cry or feel uncomfortable. The lyrics will provoke you to think, but that's not high on the agenda, and at the same time he'll make big jokes about the songs - 'Who the hell would write a song with all these Roman street names? Who the hell would use the term 'retroussé nose'?"

Visconti laughs. When he took the job, he says, a lot of people warned him that Morrissey was trouble. "I was told he was moody, elusive and hard to work with in the studio. But what that usually means is that someone is professional. In the 45 days I worked with him, we did not have one single argument."

What a lot of people don't realise about Morrissey, he says, is that "the guy's an angel".