White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  Blackwell is the only child of Blanche Pereira, heiress to a palm oil fortune and an estate on the north coast of Jamaica, just down the hill from Noël Coward’s Firefly and along from Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye. Local lore has it that she was a staunch friend of the former and a lover of the latter. When I stayed at Goldeneye in the early ’80s, my girlfriend and I were invited round for tea. As we arrived, we could see servants manicuring the lawn and watering the garden. Inside, every conch shell on every marble table-top held a fresh orchid.

  Blanche received us in her bedroom as she was feeling under the weather. Tea was brought on a silver tray while she perched on the four-poster bed, observing us as we surveyed the room. It was full of paintings and photos, many of Chris. She saw me looking at a large photo of a dashing young man in uniform with a Sam Browne belt and the visor cap of a junior officer.

  ‘Chris’s father. Terribly handsome man, don’t you think?’

  Their marriage did not last long but it produced a son of universal appeal. According to tribal custom, Blanche’s Portuguese-Jewish heritage makes Blackwell a Jew. Blond and handsome, he moves effortlessly through a world dominated by Middle-Eastern-descended merchants like a golden WASP, seemingly above such vulgar concepts as ‘trade’. Ahmet Ertegun, Turkish boss of Atlantic Records, dubbed him ‘the baby-faced killer’.

  After an idyllic childhood in colonial Jamaica, he was sent to Harrow. Passing up university, he settled in London and began to dabble: a bit of real estate and a wholesale appliance business whose clients along the Harrow Road had many West Indian customers. Hearing that he was headed home for a visit, one suggested he bring back some local records as the scarcity of Jamaican music in London made it hard to sell phonographs. Chris returned with a trunk full of bluebeat 45s that sold out in days. On his next trip he decided to learn more about the Jamaican music business. Soon he was shuttling back and forth carrying licensed master tapes instead of vinyl. The Island label sold tens of thousands of records up and down the Harrow Road, not to mention Brixton, Handsworth, Moss Side and Toxteth.

  When he started producing his own music, he came up with a track too hot for Island to handle. It was by Millie Small, a fourteen-year-old girl from Tivoli Gardens, one of the poorest slums of Kingston, and it was called ‘My Boy Lollipop’. Licensed to Philips, it became an international hit and Pepsi-Cola invited Millie on a promotional tour of Africa and Latin America. Chris went along as chaperone and loved every minute. At the end of the tour, a heroine’s welcome awaited Millie in Kingston. The motorcade wound its way through cheering, flag-waving crowds: this was Jamaica’s first international success following independence. Finally, it reached Millie’s shack in Tivoli. She jumped out of the limo and ran towards her mother with open arms. The older woman backed away fearfully from the most famous person in Jamaica and bowed low. ‘Welcome home, Miss Millie,’ she said, holding out her hand.

  In that instant, Chris’s high opinion of himself plummeted: he felt his ambition had estranged a mother and daughter. In years to come, he would be an exceptionally protective manager, giving first Steve Winwood and then Bob Marley all the leeway they needed to live their personal lives, to follow their hearts and never be ruled by The Deal.

  He signed the Spencer Davis Group and licensed them to the Philips marketing machine. When Winwood left to start Traffic, Blackwell decided the time was right for Island Records to cross the street. He had just released Traffic’s ‘Paper Sun’, the label’s first ‘white’ record, when our paths crossed at Morgan. He told me how much he liked Fairport Convention and chided me for not bringing them to him before going to Polydor. When I said it might not be too late, we made a date for dinner the following evening.

  On the proverbial paper napkin in an Italian restaurant, we sketched out a deal. He would take over the funding of Witchseason from Polydor and I would have the freedoms Horst had promised me. We drew up the contract in full and signed it, with a clause suspending its execution until the £10,000 cashier’s cheque made out to Polydor Chris had given me cleared his bank.

  Polydor thought I was coming in to sign their contract and had a photographer on hand to record the moment for the trade press. When I told them I wasn’t signing, they shooed the photographer away, tutted and cajoled, and finally got angry: ‘What about the ten thousand pounds you owe us? You can’t just walk away from that, you know.’ That was my cue to place the anonymous bank draft on the table. Afterwards, Chris made me describe the expressions on their faces. They held out for a few days, trying to change my mind, but in the end they cashed the cheque and let me go. Fairport Convention and Nick Drake became Island artists.

  The early years of Island are legendary. Successes poured out of that small office in the late sixties: Traffic, Jethro Tull, Cat Stevens, Spooky Tooth, Free, King Crimson. My roster of Fairport, Nick, Sandy Denny, and John and Beverley Martyn made only a modest contribution to their bottom line, but our critical acclaim added to their reputation as the hottest label in Britain.

  Chris had purchased an old church near Portobello Road and built a couple of studios in it. One end held the label’s offices while tucked up in the opposite corner was Chris’s flat. The Island office was a room dominated by a large circular table with all the employees sat round it. Typewriters and a conference area were a few paces away. The energy was intense, the communication unparalleled: e-mails can’t begin to match overhearing every conversation and discussing events as they happen. Chris’s chair was the same size as everyone else’s. Island became the first British label to have its own hip image. Pink-label pressings from the late sixties are among the most sought-after vinyl treasures today on eBay.

  Chris’s style hasn’t changed over the years. He always wears tennis shoes and jeans, never a tie, rarely a jacket. He has the air of a hip plantation owner who never raises his voice and always thinks laterally. We loved haggling, either with each other or teaming up against a third party. Whenever our deal was renegotiated, we came up with more and more complicated financial structures. At the end of one particularly arduous session, having got his way, Chris turned to me and said: ‘Now how much do you really need?’ and wrote me out a cheque for far more than called for in the contract.

  One day John Gaydon and David Enthoven (managers of King Crimson) and I spent a Sunday with Chris at a house in the country. We held a mini-Olympics of back-yard sports and indoor games: croquet, ping-pong, pool, badminton and backgammon. Proceeding from game to game and always playing hard, close-fought contests, there was never any variety in the result. Chris’s will to win is the fiercest I have ever encountered.

  Witchseason started a booking agency and a publishing company and slowly took on more staff to deal with the growing business. It was a reasonably efficient, bustling office staffed by people who loved the music and worked hard. Marian Bain, my assistant, held it all together. But we never sold enough records. As long as Island continued to advance money, we were OK, but one of two possibilities was always around the corner: a hit, or a day of reckoning. No prizes for guessing which arrived first.

  Chapter 22

  FOREBODINGS WERE VERY much in the background with the Incredible String Band. Everything unfolded as I imagined it: no long years of building up a following through club tours; no puzzled critics or indifferent audiences. I bypassed the folk scene and booked them into UFO and venues like the Speakeasy and the Sunday concerts at the Saville Theatre with Pink Floyd. I hired ‘The Fool’ – Simon and Marijke Posthuma – to design the cover of The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion. (Their lurid psychedelic style provided the huge mural for the Beatles’ Apple shop in Baker Street as well as the paint-job on John Lennon’s Bentley.) Personally, I found their style auto-parodic, but I knew it would send the right signal. When John Peel started playing a track every night on his Perfumed Garden pirate radio show, we were off and running.

  I sent a copy to the Newport Folk Festival committee, who immediately invited them to the 1967 New Folks concert alon
g with Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. The Americans regarded them with amazement. Joni was particularly impressed: the four of us sat under a tree one evening while they swapped songs. She had yet to make her first record, but I felt I was in the presence of three timeless talents.

  When the third LP, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, was finished in early 1968, I thought it was the best thing I had produced. I persuaded Roy Guest to book the Royal Festival Hall, Birmingham Town Hall, Manchester Free Trade Hall and the Liverpool Philharmonic. He thought I was mad, but the tour began a few weeks after the release of the LP and most of the halls sold out. Watching the audiences enter those staid bastions of classical music reminded me of the early UFO audiences coming down the stairs at the Blarney Club a year before. They were delighted with themselves: freaks in the provinces didn’t realize they were so numerous.

  I flew to San Francisco that spring to see Bill Graham and secure an opening spot with Jefferson Airplane at Fillmore West. Within six months, we were selling out our own concerts there as well as at Graham’s Fillmore East in New York. 5,000 Spirits sold ten times what the first LP had and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter did even better, making the Top Five in the UK and the US Top Thirty. In London they played the Albert Hall, creating a dreamy, unworldly atmosphere in the stately old rotunda. Girls placed home-baked cakes and other offerings on the stage before the concert. I remember looking smugly down on the packed hall and marvelling that I had been the only one to imagine this unlikely triumph: even Mike and Robin thought I was crazy when I told them how successful they would be.

  When the Rolling Stones started their own label, they sent a limousine round to try to woo them away from me and Elektra. Two of the world’s greatest songwriters, the Brazilian Caetano Veloso and Silvio Rodriguez from Cuba, have told me how inspirational the ISB were to them. Rodriguez decided to become a songwriter while recovering from a bullet wound in a Cuban military hospital in the Angolan jungle and listening to a bootleg cassette of 5,000 Spirits. Paul McCartney selected Hangman as ‘the best album of 1968’.

  Younger readers may find all this hard to believe. History has deemed the ISB terminally unhip, forever identified with an incense-drenched, tripped-out folkiness. The Beatles may have worn flowers for a brief interlude, but they are usually recalled either in early mop-top guise or the sober-suited Let It Be period. Stones fans give Satanic Majesties a wide berth. Mike and Robin represent aspects of the sixties its survivors find most embarrassing. Seeing this in my crystal ball in 1968 would have shocked me, but in truth, the seeds of their decline were planted early.

  Mike and Robin were Clive’s friends rather than each other’s. Without him as a buffer, they developed a robust dislike for one another. Fortunately, the quality and quantity of their songwriting were roughly equal. Neither would agree to the inclusion of a new song by the other unless he could impose himself on it by arranging the instruments and working out all the harmonies. They also tended to avoid confrontation, making it hard to reach decisions. I would have to ring them both, cajoling them into a consensus – once they got telephones, that is. In the early days, they would phone the office and I would hear the clunk of pennies dropping to the bottom of ancient Scottish call-boxes.

  Like many rivalries at close quarters, theirs was further complicated by a girl. In this case it was Robin’s girlfriend, Christina ‘Licorice’ McKechnie. Initially, I sized her up as a temporary passenger – how wrong could I be? She had a sweet small face marred by a chipped front tooth she never sought to repair. Her dark hair hung down lank and uncombed. She wore wool or corduroy skirts so carelessly that her aversion to underwear became obvious. At first I had only the vaguest notion of her personality as she rarely spoke and when she did it was in a squeaky voice with the thickest of Scots accents. When she began attending recording sessions and coming along on tours, however, it became apparent that Robin was under her thumb more than vice versa. She could alter the direction of a discussion with a steely glance or a murmur.

  We used the new eight-track tape machines during the recording of Hangman, so the possibilities for over-dubs were doubled. Robin liked to inject Licorice’s tiny dog-whistle voice at certain points; she also proved useful keeping time on hand drums and finger cymbals. Robin began to mutter about the possibility of including these embellishments in live shows.

  On a rare excursion to London without Licorice, Robin turned up at my flat with a girl they had encountered after a concert at York University. In the middle of the night she left Robin’s sleeping bag – ‘I realized I was in the wrong bed’ – crawled in with Mike and stayed with him for the next three years. Rose Simpson was – and still is – as bright, cheerful and outgoing as Licorice was dour and secretive. Her laughter is as hearty as Mike’s and the pair were a delight to be around. She was further unlike the other three in that she wasnae Sco’ish! We hit it off immediately and I began to rely on her to inject clarity into discussions that took place out of my presence. She and Licorice were like a dog and a cat living in the same house: they ignored each other bar the occasional low growl or hiss. The day Robin proposed that Licorice join the group, Mike went out and bought Rose an electric bass. ‘Learn this,’ he said, ‘you’re in the group now, too.’

  One of the most remarkable acts of pure will I have ever witnessed was Rose’s evolution into the ISB’s bass player. She has no natural rhythm or aptitude for music; her voice is tuneless, with no sense of pitch. Licorice was far more musical but could no more have learned to play the bass than fly to the moon. Mike would work out the parts and Rose, her lower lip firmly clasped between her teeth, would practise them. She memorized not just notes, but phrasing and feel. Later, when Mike was making a solo LP and Steve Winwood came to play organ on a track, he watched in amazement as she played an unusual and tricky part perfectly, take after take, as the guest musicians rehearsed the song in the studio. Steve rang me the next day about having her play on a track of his; knowing she could never manage it, she asked me to tell him she was unavailable.

  On stage, Licorice had her virtues as an enigmatic figure, switching from one percussion instrument to another and singing weird but effective harmonies. Rose just grinned and glowed and audiences adored her. Shows now had the air of a family gathering. Musically, however, it was the beginning of the decline. Liccy and Rose were little more than extensions of the wills of two extraordinarily talented people. The first recording with the girls’ full participation, Wee Tam & The Big Huge, lacked the wall-to-wall richness of earlier LPs. It’s a shame the girls were on board for the first extended American tour: outside Newport, US audiences never got a chance to see the duo at its undiluted best.

  Shortly after the girls joined, I accompanied the group on a Swedish tour. The final concert was in Lund, a university town near the southern tip of the country. The following morning we took the tram from Malmö down the coast to the end of the line. We got off in front of a huge old wooden hotel on the point looking south towards East Germany. It had once been a fashionable tourist destination but was now eerily empty except for two rooms on the fourth floor where the new owner, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was staying with one of his aides. Now that the whole world was getting high, Robin and Mike were plotting their next spiritual move. The five of us grouped ourselves around a bed where the tiny guru was perched dressed in a white dhoti that seemed an extension of the bed sheets. Mike and Robin had been to Krishnamurti’s lectures, studied Hinduism and Buddhism and were eager to discuss meditation. But the Yogi had no interest in oriental philosophy: meditation, he said, was only of value when the mantra had been given personally by him or one of his cohorts, and that meant joining the organization and paying the fees.

  It puzzled me that they left the hotel that day so disillusioned yet a few months later were ready to sign on for something far more businesslike and formularized. The Maharishi wasted no tears on his failure to convert the String Band. Within a few months of our meeting, he was welcoming the Beatles to his as
hram in India.

  As their popularity continued to grow, the rituals of an ISB concert were celebrated at every stop: the long-haired girls in flowered dresses, the men in velvet or oriental finery, the aroma of incense, the home-made gifts lining the apron of the stage. The crowds knew the songs and joined in on familiar choruses such as that on ‘You Get Brighter Every Day’ (although to their credit, Mike and Robin never encouraged sing-alongs). The pair had lost some of their amateur spontaneity and could now orchestrate the sweeping waves of affection that passed back and forth between stage and auditorium with professional ease.

  In November ’68, they played to a sold-out Fillmore East for the third time in less than a year. I had an early morning flight to LA and a late date and the tour manager had other tasks so I was anxious to see the group sorted out as quickly as possible after the show. I knew a nice vegetarian place called the Paradox a few blocks from the hall. While they chatted to fans and signed autographs, I ran down the street to hold a table.

  When I entered the restaurant, I was surprised to see David Simon greeting guests and snapping his fingers at waitresses. I knew him from Cambridge, where he had been Jim Kweskin’s court jester. For a year or so he became a member of the Jug Band, adding some wacky vocals on old ragtime tunes and a bit of earnest harmonica. He did a nice line in pseudonyms, appearing on one Jug Band LP as ‘Bruno Wolfe’ and on another as ‘Hugh Bialy’. I ran into him in Greenwich Village in 1965 during the folk-rock supergroup period and he told me he was forming a band called Wolfgang and the Wolf Gang. I had heard nothing of him in four years.