HOLY HOLY's current touring show of The Man Who Sold the World wasn't meant to be an elegy for David Bowie. But sometimes fate has its own way of deciding what happens.
"We were about to play a show in Toronto when we got the news," says Tony Visconti of Bowie's death from liver cancer on January 10. "And we made a choice to continue because the alternative would have been too miserable. If we all went home, it would have been too horrible to deal with."
Visconti has produced countless acts and contributed to dozens of landmark albums, but he's perhaps best known as the producer of several of Bowie's watershed recordings, including the esteemed "Berlin Trilogy" of 1977-1979 and Bowie's final album, 2016's Blackstar. But in 1970, Visconti was more than Bowie's producer—he was also bass player for the Hype, a trio that included drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey and visionary guitarist Mick Ronson that backed Bowie on his third full-length, The Man Who Sold the World.
Holy Holy, featuring Visconti and Woodmansey (Ronson died in 1993, also from liver cancer), is recreating that album in full, along with other choice songs from Woodmansey's early-'70s tenure with Bowie. So it's definitely not a tribute act—it breaks the rule of tribute acts in that these are the original musicians. "We don't really want to be a tribute band and play things that we weren't on," Visconti says of Holy Holy's focused repertoire. "That would be cheesy."
The current batch of shows began long before Bowie's surprise death saturated headlines. In fact, Bowie himself gave Visconti a private approval of sorts. "He knew we were on tour," Visconti says, "and he saw a video of us playing in 2014 in London—and he loved it. He thought we were doing a great job and he bemoaned the fact that we split up before we were able to perform [The Man Who Sold the World] live with him and Mick Ronson. And he said we would have been that good if we went out and played it live. So I'm happy we had his blessings. He didn't do it publicly, but he gave me his blessings, which I
really appreciated."