I suppose the Ferrari should have given the game away. A low black Dino of classic Sixties design but with doubtless Eighties performance. It was parked in the street, a sleek symbol of success in the real world of big business, it can't belong to Derek Bramble, I thought, as I walked past on my way to his manager's office. This Bramble fellow may have done the last Bowie album but it can't have made him that much money, surely. Not yet anyway. I mean, he's a novice and a newcomer, right?

Wrong. Horribly wrong. Since the release of David Bowie's Tonight LP — bearing Bramble's unfamiliar name sandwiched in the production credits between Bowie's own and that of star engineer Hugh Padgham — the gentlemen of the Rock press have chosen to represent Derek Bramble as a young hopeful with virtually no track record who just happened to be standing in the right place at the right time when the Thin White Duke was on the look-out to transfuse a little new blood into his tired old veins. What grain of truth that tale may once have contained has since been glossed over a few dozen times and transformed into a Rock'n'Roll rags to riches store in the traditional mould. Derek Bramble may well be young — if 24 is still considered young in this era of teenage whizzkids — but the truth of the matter is he goes back years. He is plainly neither novice nor newcomer.

"Do you want to hear a real rags to riches story?" says Bramble from behind his shades and below his wetlook hair-do. A grin and a half plays around his well-fed face, and he carries off a charming impression of a black East End wideboy made very good indeed.

"I joined Heatwave when I was 17. That was in 1979 when they were in the charts with Mind Blowing Decisions. I'd just left school and I was working in a Mobil station in a monkey suit filling up people's cars with petrol. One Friday night my girlfriend introduced me to Roy Carter who had been playing bass with Heatwave. I bragged a bit about how good I was even though I only really played in my bedroom and I didn't have an amp, just a Precision I'd saved up to buy. I showed him a couple of licks I'd worked out and the next thing I know Johnny Wilder picks me up on Sunday for an audition and I'm on a flight to America the following Wednesday."

Even given the fact that time may have compressed the memories just a little, that's still some story. And it doesn't end there obviously. Derek Bramble spent the next three years on the road in the United States as Heatwave toured exhaustively, sharing bills with the biggest and brightest names in contemporary R'n'B. Like Rufus and Chaka Khan. Like the O'Jays, the Isley Brothers, Rick James, and Patti Labelle. Like Sister Sledge, Chic and The Jacksons as they eked out their last and relatively unsuccessful days with Tamla Motown. It's not hard to imagine a younger and slimmer Del Bramble standing wide-eyed in the wings, watching the Maestros doing it all the way it should be done and hardly missing a trick. His own band were no slouches either.

"Heatwave was really where I went to school. On one side I had Rod Temperton kicking me up the ass and teaching me how to write songs while on the other there was Johnny Wilder telling me how to sing and showing me how to arrange voices. Those guys were just all technique. I was like a band of doom, man."

By the time he decided to split in 1982, Bramble had added a wealth of studio experience to his live work, playing bass on three Heatwave albums under master producers like Barry Blue, Phil Ramone and James Guthrie. Put it all together and that must make Derek Bramble one of the best qualified Black British musicians going. But since when did qualifications pay the rent? Or just being a good musician earn a man a Ferrari? Our Derek also learned the ultimate lesson: You have to be on points if you want to eat cake.

So, like many a muso before him, Derek Bramble bailed out of somebody else's boat in order to sink or swim by his own songwriting. His first solo effort was called Spice Of Live and it was co-written with another ex-Heatwaver Rod 'Songsmith To The Stars' Temperton. It made the final shortlist for Michael Jackson's Thriller — pipping people like Stevie Wonder to the post in the process. Unfortunately the song wasn't included on the album but Manhattan Transfer picked it up instead and enjoyed a huge hit with it virtually everywhere in the world bar the UK. Shed no tears though! Bramble's success in this country hasn't exactly been in short supply either. A fruitful relationship with former Linx man David Grant has taken a handful of Bramble's songs into the charts here — while he assumed the producer's chair from Culture Club's Steve Levine en route. Some some critics may have complained that Watching You Watching Me, Stop Go, Love Will Find A Way and Rock The Midnight have cast Grant rather too much in a homegrown Michael Jackson role. But none have dared find fault with the craft and skill which has gone into each one. On the strength of such singles EMI commissioned Bramble first to write and then produce their new club queen Jaki Graham and thence, whether by coincidence or some kind of divine intervention, David Bowie reared his bleach-blond head.

"David actually picked up on some demos I did with Jaki. Demos, for Christ sake! God knows where he heard them but my manager Brian Freshwater got a call from his people asking if I was available during May. Only they wouldn't say who it was for, so Brian said I was busy. They called back a couple of times before they told us it was for Bowie. Then he called me himself one day when I was round at David Grant's house. I had to admit that I wasn't one of his greatest fans, although I've always liked a thing or two. I just thought this was a time when I could either make it or break it and I didn't want to look back 10 years later and kick myself for not taking full advantage of the situation. So I took it by the short and curlies and went for it. The following week I flew to Switzerland to do the demos and then we went to Montreal and did the whole album in four weeks.

"I was amazed at how loose the atmosphere was. I expected it to be very English and stuffy working with David and Hugh Padgham. You know, military English, 'We do things this way' time. But it wasn't at all. I know I'm down as co-producer but I really couldn't tell you what my function was because it was really a very communal situation where ideas came from everybody including the teaboy! I might have been the unknown quantity but I think I came across. I certainly didn't feel out of my depth with all those guys like Carlos Alomar and Omar Hakim around because I quickly realised that if they didn't think I was good enough I wouldn't have been there in the first place and the same went for them. That was the bottom line. Everybody knew and respected each other.

"David himself is just like Joe Bloggs down the road. He puts across this untouchable image with an aura of mystique. But he used to come to work in a flat cap with his shirt hanging out his trousers and tatty old tennis shoes on. He was simply one of the boys, he didn't try to keep up any appearances. Some days he had a growth which was serious. He looked really rough! He never sounded rough though, which surprised me. I mean, as a musician he's got about as good a sense of rhythm as a limp lettuce. But he'd get vocals down in no time at all. Tina Turner was on some of the tracks and she has the same quality. They can both walk up to a mike, find their tuning, take a couple of seconds to warm up and then all you got to do is roll the tape once or maybe twice and it's all done.

"One thing really came home to me though. If you go through your musical life working with people of a certain calibre you automatically think there are standards and rules. But there are none. You just do what makes you feel good. The number of mistakes there are on Tonight would have shocked me a couple of years ago. We did a lot of the backing tracks virtually live without sequencers or anything like that and on something like Dancing With The Big Boys we never even worked out any arrangements but simply knocked it out straight, following the chord sequence. Carlos got the band together, 1-2-3-4 and there it was finished in a couple of takes. Mistakes and all. There were bummers, missed notes, chords changed in the wrong places but it all felt natural and it created the sort of oddities people expect from Bowie records. I've come to like all of that because I feel there are too many technicians around these days and people are forgetting what music is and what it's supposed to do to you. I can't see how you can have a sequencer going zzghdda zzghdda zzghdda zzghdda and claim that it makes you feel as good as a great band working. Or even as good as a piano player who's maybe only playing three notes but he's putting all his feeling into them. So there was never any temptation to make a technically fashionable album with Bowie like Let's Dance was — but with all the Hip Hop and Scratching stuff which is on every trendy R'n'B record these days, that would have been just too obvious. We thought, well, we've got a band, we've got a singer and we've got a bunch of songs — let's go in and have a laugh. My only disappointment is that there weren't more Bowie songs on it."

That, of course, was one of the major criticisms levelled at the Tonight LP when it was released in the early Autumn of 1984. Strangely lighthearted and whimsical; lacking the bite of Bowie's characteristic sense of finely tuned menace; its weight made up by oddly aimed Reggae tracks and Beachboys hits. Tonight nonetheless boasted a clearer, more transparent and highly polished sound than many of its predecessors. Even on the big hit Blue Jean which revealed Bowie at his most succinct — and some would say obvious — the man's voice seems to bubble up from deep within a fishbowl, its echoes caught round the rim like refracted light while the pedalpoint bass and the simple tambourine (recorded, so it transpires, by slapping it down on a detuned floor tom which was miked from underneath) provide the skeleton of an insidious dancebeat. Take a listen to Jaki Graham's recent single Once More With A Feeling and you will hear much the same stereo perspective. Could this be a style-in-the-making rapidly developing into a hallmark?

"I don't know about that. Melody and textures and a killer rhythm track are what I go for every time. I like to hear a bottom end that rattles, that goes grrr at you. Once you've got that then it kicks everything else up into the air. You can then do wonders with some careful Eqing and placement of the sounds. I like to hear mixes where everything cuts through and is individual but is ultimately working as once. I'm a Neve Eq freak and I always use their outboard floating Eq units because they seem to give you so much more depth of tone than just about anything else. They make a sound which is only so big suddenly appear massive. On that Jaki Graham track, for instance, I tried to make the whole thing sound like a hologram where you think you can look behind it but really you can't. We used a Sony digital reverb when we recorded her voice and then put some more on it when we mixed. If we'd left that extra reverb flat when we mixed it would have gone unnoticed and simply added to the mush behind. But using the Neves to wind on a lot of top we were able to make it kick out from behind the original voice. When she sings "Yeah" you can really hear her breath. It helps make the whole thing sizzle and it enables you to sink the vocals further back into the track without losing their cut. In New York where I've been finishing the new David Grant album, we have 24 floating Neve units so we can mix entire tracks through them. They make all the difference in the world."

But what do they do for the Ferrari's petrol consumption, Derek?