Recording: Aladdin Sane

David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars began a week of recording sessions for the Aladdin Sane album on Monday 4 December 1972.

The sessions took place at RCA Studios in New York City, with Ken Scott producing.

Since the tour was extended and David and the band wouldn’t be back in the UK for some time, it was decided that I should come over to the States to begin recording their next album. We started recording tracks, some of which would eventually become part of Aladdin Sane, in New York City at RCA Studios, such as a version of ‘All The Young Dudes’ that was never used until various releases a lot later, ‘Drive-In Saturday’, ‘The Prettiest Star’, and another that we started but didn’t get very far with. Everything else on the album ended up being done back at Trident. The only change in the band was the addition of Mike Garson on the piano.

Scott was used to working in UK studios, which had different rules from those in NYC.

For the tracks that we did in New York, I had to act literally as a real producer and not as the engineer/producer that I usually was because RCA was heavily unionised, and not being a union member, I wasn’t allowed to touch the board [recording console]. This became unexpectedly problematic at one point after we’d finished putting down a basic track for one of the songs. It was dinner time so we decided to eat before moving on to the next number. The band and I had some food brought in, but engineer Mike Moran and the second engineer decided to go out to eat instead. We finished eating before they got back and everyone was anxious to start running through the next song, so being unaware of the ferocity of New York style union contracts, I hit the one button on the desk so that they could hear themselves in the headphones. When Mike returned and found out what I had done, he hit the roof. ‘Do you realise what you’ve done? The entire studio could have come to a halt if they caught you doing that,’ he admonished me on and on. Hard to imagine that a simple button push could bring down a mighty New York recording studio, but there you go. A heavy moment that was soon forgotten as we carried on creating.