Tales from the 1960s: Joe Boyd, John Wood, and listening to Sgt. Pepper in a cloakroom with Sandy Denny
February 17, 2024
Andrew Curry writes: One of the features of the Magpie Arc indoor folk festival festival in both of its incarnations has been an extended interview by Matthew Bannister of Folk on Foot with luminaries of folk music. Last year it was Maddy Prior and Peter Knight; this year, the producer Joe Boyd and the engineer (and later producer) John Wood.
Boyd, of course, is an American who has mostly been based here since the mid-1960s. He opened the UFO club on Tottenham Court in the late 1960s, where Pink Floyd and Soft Machine alternated as the house band. He produced Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, and managed the Incredible String Band, among many others.
After escaping from Decca, John Wood opened a studio in Chelsea, Sound Techniques, that became a home for many of these artists to record in.
Wood became friends with them as well—Nick Drake would stay at his house in Suffolk—and as well as engineering and mixing he also ended up as a producer as well, notably on John Martyn’s early records.
(Sound Techniques Stuio, built in a converted dairy in Chelsea. Spot the cow’s head above the door. Photo: Courtesy of Sound Techniques)
The stories were rich and they kept on coming during the interview, so I might as well start at the beginning. Boyd’s first visit to the UK was in 1964, with the Blues and Gospel Caravan, which brought artists such as Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Sister Rosetta Tharpe to the UK in a multi-artist bill. He had tried to promote blues artists in the US, but he could hardly fill a front room.
In contrast the concerts in the UK were packed, and the audiences were knowledgeable and enthusiastic. Demand for tickets was so high that they had to add extra dates. As he told Matthew Bannister,
I realised that these were my kind of people.
It took a little time, but Boyd eventually he managed to wangle a return to London to open a UK office for Elektra records. He got fired a bit later—he said that the Elektra boss Jac Holzman “didn’t trust me with a cheque book”. After that came the UFO Club and then his journey into British folk music.
Wood was in partnership with another engineer, Geoff Frost, and they had bought the building that housed Sound Techniques with some money lent to them by Frost’s mother.
The studio was in a converted dairy in Chelsea, and was an unusual space, with varying ceiling heights. After building a recording desk for the studio, Emerson was in demand for build desks for other people: his workshop was above the studio.
When they were recording in the studio, a red light also went on in the workshop to warn them to be quiet.
Both Boyd and Wood spoke of how influential Judy Collins’ record In My Life was. It was recorded at Sound Techniques in 1966, and may have included the first recording of a song by Leonard Cohen. Collins was moving away from her origins in the folk scene by this point, and Suzanne was included in an adventurous music selection that included songs by Brecht and Weill, the young Randy Newman, Jacques Brel and from the Peter Brook production of Marat/Sade.
The music was arranged by Jonathan Rifkin, more famous now for his work reviving the reputation of the ragtime composer Scott Joplin. As Wood said, “He knew what he was doing”.
The arrangements used strings in the manner of a chamber orchestra rather than the then more conventional ‘60s easy listening style. Her voice was also close miked. Boyd said it became the template for Nick Drake’s first recordings.
When Boyd started producing in London, initially with Elektra artists such as Incredible String Band, he used Sound Techniques. Dave Swarbrick’s record Rags, Reels & Airs, with Martin Carthy and Diz Disley, was also recorded there, along with Nick Drake and a whole slew of Fairport Convention albums.
Boyd was perhaps a little rude about the British music scene in the 1960s, which he said was divided into two. On the one hand, there were the folk clubs, “where a guitar was rarely seen, unless accompanied by Martin Carthy”. Then there were the burgeoning singer-songwriters, seen at places like Les Cousins and The Troubadour.
Les Cousins, featured extensively on Salut! Live recently, was the starting point for a good story about Sandy Denny. Boyd and Denny had had something to eat together after meeting at Les Cousins, and at two o’clock in the morning, she asked if he’d drive her home to Wimbledon.
Boyd was reluctant—central London to Wimbledon was a long haul, even in the middle of the night in 1967. Denny revealed that she had a recording of the whole of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, not yet released but the subject of excited speculation. (It had been taped off Radio Luxembourg by a friend of hers, which was how you got to hear new music then.) This was enough to get Boyd into the car.
But when they got to Wimbledon, her parents were asleep, and she was anxious not to wake them up. (Her parents are seen later on the cover of Unhalfbricking.) So they played the Sgt. Pepper tape huddled together in a small cloakroom on the ground floor, muffling the sound with coats.
(Sandy Denny’s parents, outside their house in Wimbledon, on Unhalfbricking.)
This was before Sandy Denny joined Fairport. More on that in Part Two.
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Read on: The Magpie Arc Indoor Folk Festival reviewed
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