Ken Scott Relives Hunky Dory
The producer of David Bowie’s first masterpiece is the star of My Classic Album – streaming this Sunday.
This Sunday – February 7, at 8pm – Classic Album Sundays’ online My Classic Album features Hunky Dory, with producer Ken Scott reliving the making of David Bowie’s make-or-break 1971 album, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Catch it on YouTube or Facebook: youtube.com/ClassicAlbumSundays; facebook.com/ClassicAlbumSundays
In the seventh episode of the series, Scott talks about how he came to meet Bowie, on his uppers after the failure of The Man Who Sold The World. Having served as engineer on Beatles and Bowie albums, but never having helmed an album as producer, Scott too was stepping up.
“Did I know that Bowie would be a superstar? Never,” Scott tells CAS presenter Colleen Murphy. “I thought, ‘Finally, I can make mistakes because no one is going to hear this album.’ He showed me the demos and I realised there is so much more to him, that this would be huge and I was petrified again.”
Scott had stumbled on an artist ready to make his first masterpiece, and he describes an atmosphere of tension as musicians prayed they'd nail their parts and Bowie’s vocal takes electrified. “He was the best vocalist in-studio I've ever worked with,” reckons Scott, who’s worked with a few. “Of the four albums I co-produced with him, 95 per cent of the vocals are the first take, he'd do it once and that's what you hear today.”
My Classic Album is the new artist interview series from Classic Album Sundays. Previous episodes have seen UK jazzer Moses Boyd hymn Miles Davis’s Nefertiti. Next week’s episode – streaming live on February 14 – features Black Midi on D’Angelo’s Black Messiah.
But Ken Scott thinks you could hardly choose a better “immersive listen” than Hunky Dory.
“A lot of albums done from the mid ’60s onward suit exactly that,” he tells MOJO. “The Beatles turned the making of an album into an art form. It wasn’t just a bunch of single songs. They put them together as a complete package and that’s what we continued. And that’s one of the things with Hunky Dory. It’s meant as a complete package, not just a bunch of songs.”