White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  In the end, they approached her while I was in New York. I rushed round to a rehearsal the minute I got back to find Sandy as docile as could be. She was in awe of Richard and overjoyed to have a great band behind her. Inspired by her, Richard started writing songs. The second LP, What We Did On Our Holidays, was streets ahead of the first. Sandy’s voice used to overwhelm her guitar but it fitted perfectly with what was becoming a powerful band. Simon Nicol evolved into the most solid, sympathetic rhythm guitarist I ever worked with. Ashley Hutchings, always an elegant bass player, developed a style that would influence legions of taste-free heavy-metal musicians. Martin Lamble was a fluid, jazzy drummer who gave Fairport a distinctive swing. He was also the fashion plate of the group, turning out in velvet jackets and a knotted scarf when the rest seemed sewn into their jeans.

  By the time we began work on Unhalfbricking, they bore little resemblance to the group I had heard at UFO. The songs Sandy and Richard were writing no longer suited Ian’s vocal style, so the tradition was established: no two consecutive Fairport Convention records have ever featured the same line-up. Ian had always been somewhat of an outsider, bemused by the enthusiasms of the others for jazz, blues and folk music. I imagined many post-Fairport futures for him but never the one he created for himself: making consistently high-quality recordings for more than thirty years in a folk-rock style, and having a bigger hit with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ than anything Fairport ever managed.

  As the album took shape, I got more and more excited. Sandy’s ‘Autopsy’ and Richard’s ‘Genesis Hall’ were mature compositions that showed they could fulfil all the ambitions I had for them. During a break in recording, they summoned me to a gig in Bristol to hear two new songs. First a French version of Dylan’s ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’ performed Cajun-style, then a traditional ballad Sandy had taught them called ‘A Sailor’s Life’. The first became their only hit single, the second turned English folk music on its head. The implications of their version of this old ballad have reverberated far and wide. A member of Los Lobos told a friend of mine that they had been just another rock band from East LA until ‘A Sailor’s Life’ challenged them to find in their own Mexican traditions something as rich as Fairport had found in their English ones. Many bands around the world have begun to look to their own culture when they come up against the limitations of the Anglo-American ‘rock’ model. The map for such journeys leads back to that night in Bristol. And when Fairport were themselves in need of inspiration at a time of trauma and tragedy, they would find it in the same place.

  Martin created the Cajun washboard sound for ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’ by stacking some plastic Eames chairs and running his drumsticks along them. The percussion break was supposed to feature an empty milk bottle lying on the topmost chair, but when the time came it fell and smashed on the floor. I signalled frantically to keep playing: the crash of broken glass was absolutely in time and worked perfectly, a good omen for the session. Guest violinist Dave Swarbrick was still getting used to playing through an amplifier when we recorded ‘A Sailor’s Life’, but on the first take he followed Richard’s solo with one of his own, pointing the way to Fairport’s future. The album cover photograph was taken in the Dennys’ garden with Sandy’s parents in the foreground and the group spread out on the grass, dressed with scant regard for the styles of the time. With no type on the front cover, it conjures up a confident future that wouldn’t necessarily be fashionable, but it would be successful. It would also never happen.

  I took a copy of the finished disc to New York, where I played it to some of the Newport Folk Festival board, who assured me an invitation awaited us. I had a meeting scheduled the next day with Frank Barsalona, the most important rock agent in America, but I was awoken at dawn that morning by a call from my office. Fairport’s road manager had fallen asleep on the M1 and the van had plunged off the motorway. Martin Lamble and Richard’s American girlfriend, Jeannie Franklin, were dead and Richard and Simon were in hospital. When Unhalfbricking came out it was hailed as a great record. But by then the group was determined never again to play the repertoire they had worked on so carefully and for so long with Martin.

  Chapter 21

  SIX YEARS AFTER SGT PEPPER swept across the globe, pervading the consciousness, it seemed, of everyone on the planet, LPs by Carole King and Neil Young far outsold the Beatle masterpiece. Ten years later, sales of Michael Jackson’s Thriller would dwarf those of all Beatles records combined and he would buy up the publishing rights to Lennon & McCartney’s song catalogue with his pocket change. I set up my production company in an innocent age of comparatively modest expectations.

  One night in the previous winter, I went to hear a singer named Tod Lloyd, who was opening for Paul Simon at the Troubadour in Earl’s Court. After the gig, Simon told me he had made a record in New York with his friend Artie from Forest Hills and to his alarm, their producer had overdubbed a cheesy drum track on one of the songs. Now he was being summoned back to promote its release as a single. Paul loved his flat in London and his folk club circuit and was reluctant to leave. The song was ‘The Sound of Silence’ and the folk clubs of England never saw him again.

  Tod gave me a demo he had made with his sitar teacher. It was an interesting fusion of folk and Indian, but didn’t tempt me to risk money I didn’t have. Tod, however, turned out to have a small inheritance he was itching to invest in a musical enterprise. He became a partner in Witchseason and moved into my capacious flat in Bayswater (rent £15 a month). We set up office in the front room.

  My trip to the USA with the Incredible String Band for the ’67 Newport Folk Festival in early August led to a visit from Joni Mitchell. I promised to introduce her to music publishers who could collect her songwriting royalties on George Hamilton IV’s recording of ‘The Circle Game’. Her first night at the flat was brought to a spectacular end by the Flying Squad breaking down the door at 6 a.m. They had a search warrant for ‘seditious literature, guns and ammunition’. Tod had come to the attention of the police by providing bail for Michael X when the Black Power leader was arrested for incitement to riot. His photograph leaving court with Michael appeared in the Daily Telegraph and his name must have gone into a few notebooks. We had to stand in the hallway in dressing gowns while they took the flat apart. They opted not to plant any drugs or bombs, but it was certainly an exciting welcome to London for Joni.

  Among the useful things I learned during my year at Elektra was where to find the best espresso in Soho. This was not a matter of trial and error: I was led to a now defunct café off Old Compton Street by a dapper gentleman named Danny Halperin, who knew similar spots in cities all over Europe and North America. Danny, the next piece in the Witchseason jigsaw, had been designing Elektra’s ads and catalogues before I arrived and continued to do so during my time there.

  Halperin was from Toronto, where his father had been an official of the Canadian Communist Party and done time in jail for sedition. After the war, he organized a conference of anti-colonialist leaders from around the British Empire: Albert Luthuli from South Africa; Mohammed Ali Jinnah from what would soon be Pakistan; Kwame Nkrumah from the Gold Coast (now Ghana); and Nnamdi Azikiwe from Nigeria. Danny got to meet them all. He was working for the Toronto Globe and Mail a few years later when Azikiwe got in touch. Would he come to Lagos to run a pro-independence newspaper? Of course he would. He gave up his Toronto flat, broke up with his girlfriend, stopped in New York to say goodbye to his mother and boarded a Pan Am Clipper bound for the Azores, Dakar, Conakry, Monrovia, Accra and Lagos (no long-haul jets in those days). The plane taxied, but did not take off. A couple of brown-suited men got on and asked to have a word in private with Danny.

  ‘You don’t really want to go to Lagos, do you, Mr Halperin?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘No, Mr Halperin, I don’t think you do, really. It would be a big mistake.’

  ‘It would be an even bigger mistake if I didn’t. I’ve signed a contract, given up m
y flat, broken up with my girlfriend and said goodbye to my mother.’

  ‘But if you go, you’ll end up in jail like your father.’

  ‘That’s OK, my contract says I get paid double for any time spent in prison.’

  Despite what Danny might or might not wish to do, they insisted, he was not going to Lagos to run a newspaper. They had promised their pals in the British Colonial Office and must keep their word. When he threatened to go to friends on the New York Times and raise an almighty fuss, they tried another tack.

  ‘Mr Halperin, if you could work on any newspaper in any city in the world, which one would you choose?’

  ‘I suppose, in an ideal world, I would live on the Left Bank and write about jazz for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune.’

  One of the brown-suits left the windowless office at Idlewild airport and made some calls. They waited. Someone called back. A brown-suit went away and returned with a first-class ticket on Pan Am’s next flight to Paris. The following week Danny started work at the Herald Tribune. That was his story, anyway, and he told it well.

  Over the years, I met various members of Danny’s kerass. I could always identify them by their old-fashioned hipster jargon: ‘Listen, baby, you dig?’ I had only to hear that nasal urban drawl and the quaintly out-of-date beatnik vocabulary and I would ask, ‘Do you know Danny Halperin, by any chance?’ And Alan Douglas, for example, the man who produced Jimi Hendrix’s last recording sessions, or Marvin Worth, who used to manage Lenny Bruce, would say, ‘Danny? Of course I know Danny, man! We used to snort coke together in Paris in the fifties with Charlie Parker/Django Reinhardt/Bud Powell.’

  Danny was of medium height, with olive skin and a nearly hairless battering ram of a head. His sensitive artist’s eyes were situated uneasily in a face dominated by a jutting jaw and defiant lower lip. He strode briskly around Soho, cashmere coat over his shoulders, his impeccable footwear skipping carefully over puddles, trash and dog-dirt. He had a way of shooting his cuffs and rotating his neck at the same time that you only see in ’50s film noir (like George C. Scott in The Hustler). He smoked Gitanes incessantly and his drugs were of the highest quality. When he took his leave, he would pat you on the cheek, saying, ‘Be good now, baby, see you tomorrow.’

  Danny fulfilled his graphic design contract for a pharmaceutical company with a minimum of effort, leaving him free to design jazz LP covers and organize advertising for Blue Note and Elektra. He worked out of the Track Records office in Old Compton Street where a member of his kerass was a silent partner (with far deeper pockets than Tod’s). Pete Kamron managed the Modern Jazz Quartet and had done very well when there was money to be made in jazz. He also looked after Terence Stamp, the dream boy of British cinema, dabbled in film finance and had an elegant Knightsbridge flat. He was an impressive éminence grise.

  Danny introduced me to Terence’s brother Chris and the other Track partner, Kit Lambert. Chris Stamp was cockney and sardonic and cut quickly to the chase, as we say in the future. Kit was the tortured gay son of ’30s composer Constant Lambert: brilliant, alcoholic, mercurial, original, tragic, and there have been entire books written about him so I won’t go on. With Kamron’s backing they created a brilliant machine for making The Who international superstars. They masterminded Tommy – the LP, the tour and the film – but could not survive success. Chris now lives quietly on Long Island while Kit died, raving and addicted, in 1981.

  They loved the UFO posters and thought there was money in them. They were confident that their distribution deal with Polydor could be expanded to include selling them in record stores the world over. They also liked Fairport Convention and they seemed to like me. They were expanding and needed to reclaim Danny’s office space, so in an adroit shuffle they advanced me some of Polydor’s money for posters and folk-rock. Witchseason spent it on an office in Charlotte Street and Danny took over the back room to run a graphics business.

  It seemed like an elegant parlay of mutual interests, but in the wake of The Who’s triumph at Monterey, the release of a Fairport Convention single was an obscure footnote. Polydor, moreover, was perplexed by the notion of distributing something that didn’t come in a 12 x 12 cardboard sleeve. Kit and Chris disappeared off to the Mexican jungles to take peyote and mushrooms in celebration of their American triumph and could not be reached for a month. I folded the poster enterprise and moved Fairport over to Schmolzi’s Polydor label for the album release. Horst wouldn’t give me my own label, as he had with Kit and Chris and Robert Stigwood, but he did grant me our witch-on-a-broomstick logo beside Polydor’s, control over marketing and promotion, generous budgets and plenty of leeway in signing artists. All seemed well with the world: UFO had hardly bitten the dust and I had a West End office and a production deal with a major label.

  But one day there was a tug on the line and Horst was reeled in back to Polydor HQ in Hamburg. He had seized 12 per cent of the UK domestic market from a standing start and signed hugely profitable artists in his two London years, but perhaps he was enjoying the late nights too much. Even more un-German, he was spending the profits on lavish promotions and new deals like mine. It was time for more sober hands to hold the sterling cheque book and attempt the age-old (and now ubiquitous) corporate fantasy of cutting costs while holding on to the income. When Horst left they were paying my studio bills and giving me overhead money every month, but the contract had yet to be signed.

  I was halfway into the second Fairport LP when they presented me with the final draft. Gone were the freedoms Horst had promised: in a traditionally structured document, rights adhered to the larger company, obligations to the smaller. I decided to go to Hamburg and plead my case with Horst as I was getting nowhere with the bureaucrats who had replaced him. I knew it was probably hopeless, but I had an ulterior motive. The previous summer, I had met a German couple at a Legalize Marijuana rally in Hyde Park. Uwe Nettelbeck was a journalist writing a piece about the London Underground scene for Die Zeit. His wife Petra, in the wheelchair she had occupied since breaking her back in a fall seven years earlier, was a stunning beauty. I invited them out for an evening and we went to the Speakeasy, the after-hours basement club where le tout pop London hung out. At the top of the stairs Uwe scooped up his wife and handed her to me saying, ‘You take Petra, I’ll take the chair.’

  Between top and bottom steps, I became completely entranced. It seems I was not alone. After her injury, she became a presenter on German television, guiding viewers through the evening, reading news bulletins and introducing shows. The whole country fell in love with her during her two years in that role. Then she met and married Uwe, quit television, became a photographer and had two daughters. I found the couple fascinating and decided to take them up on an offhand invitation to visit.

  I brought some rough mixes to play Horst, hoping it would inspire him to intercede with his masters. There were a few tracks showing what a different proposition Fairport were with Sandy Denny and some songs by an unknown songwriter I had just started to record. Fairport had taken part in an anti-Vietnam War marathon held at the Roundhouse that winter. Ashley Hutchings’s decision to stick around after the others left reverberates to this day: at three in the morning he heard a young singer named Nick Drake. Ashley handed me his phone number a few days later, saying, ‘You ought to call this guy, he’s pretty interesting.’

  Horst took me to lunch by the lake and afterwards we listened to the tape. He loved the Fairport tracks and was impressed by Nick, but he was powerless to help me. I looked at my watch and told him I had to be downstairs in ten minutes to meet my ride.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Sit down, have a drink, they can call up.’ I got up and shook his hand. I had to be downstairs. He demanded to know why.

  ‘Because the person picking me up can’t get out of the car to come to reception to ask for me.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Who do you know in Hamburg that can’t get out of an automobile?’

  For Horst, fate was be
ckoning. When I told him who was picking me up in her hand-controlled VW, he was astounded. ‘You know Petra Nettelbeck!?’ When I introduced them in the front driveway, Horst was like a shy teenager. He invited her and Uwe to be his guests in a box at a Frank Zappa concert the following week. I spent a great weekend, smoking powerful dope on the grass-turfed roof of their self-designed house in Lüneburg Heath, enjoying the first of a four-decades-long parade of remarkable meals at their table and meeting their clever and beautiful daughters.

  For Horst, the Nettelbecks provided him with an entrée to the kind of Bohemian world he had been missing since his exile from London. Uwe and Petra were at the centre of radical life in Germany, politically and culturally. He showered them with invitations and visited them in the country. Soon Uwe had a production deal with Polydor. Uwe made wonderful records and played the game with the savoir-faire of an old hand, recording the groups that would forever change the image of German music: Faust and Slapp Happy. Both are written about endlessly in collectors’ and specialist magazines, their recordings (particularly the transparent vinyl of Faust’s first) treated like gold dust. But neither group sold. Horst continued to throw money at them until Polydor management did their sums. Less than three years after I introduced him to Petra, he was out of a job.

  It is a story of kismet, perhaps, but not a sad one. Horst set up an independent label and acquired the rights to a singer named Roger Whittaker, who proceeded to sell millions of LPs during the 1970s. Jimi Hendrix it wasn’t – more like Burl Ives – but it made Horst his fortune.

  When I got back to London, my moment of kismet awaited me. Mixing What We Did On Our Holidays, I tried to keep my mind on the music and not worry about the deal, but it wasn’t easy. I hated the new Polydor and the contract they were forcing on me. The unrecouped advances totalled over £10,000, a huge sum in 1968, particularly if you weren’t having hits. As I arrived for a session at Morgan Studios one day, I brushed past someone leaving as I was coming in. We both stopped: ‘Aren’t you Joe Boyd?’ ‘Aren’t you Chris Blackwell?’