Born on August 5, 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts, Joe Boyd was twenty-two when he first stepped foot on European soil. The occasion was the Blues and Gospel Caravan tour he was in charge of organizing. This former Harvard student had already made a name for himself in the world of music, and taking his first steps as a tour manager under the aegis of the famous impresario George Wein (founder of the Newport Jazz Festival), he organized a number of shows for the bluesmen Sleepy John Estes, Skip James, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and Muddy Waters. He was also responsible for the sound system at the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival, during which Bob Dylan went electric in front of a crowd of stunned folk traditionalists! In 1964 he organized various European tours for the jazzmen Roland Kirk and Coleman Hawkins in addition to the Blues and Gospel Caravan tour. It was on this occasion that he met John “Hoppy” Hopkins, who had come along to take photographs. A year later, in autumn 1965, Boyd returned to London, this time mandated by Jac Holzman to represent Elektra Records and recruit new talent.
London was swinging, and Joe Boyd intended to play a full part in counterculture life. With Peter Jenner, John Hopkins, Alan Beckett, and the jazz critic Ron Atkins, he set up DNA Productions. This company signed a management agreement with AMM, an avant-garde jazz band started in 1965 by the guitarist Keith Rowe, the saxophonist Lou Gare, and the drummer Eddie Prévost, which Boyd subsequently contracted to Elektra. Their long improvisations tending toward free jazz were to exert a certain influence on Pink Floyd, in particular Keith Rowe on the playing of Syd Barrett. (This can be heard on the album AMMMusic, recorded at Sound Techniques studios in June 1966 and produced by Hopkins, Jenner, Atkins, and Beckett.)
In 1966, Hoppy abandoned DNA Productions to throw himself into the adventure that was the London Free School (LFS), an “anti-university” comprising a night school and a community advice center whose aim was to offer an “alternative” education based on no-holds-barred debates on any subject with a social dimension. Boyd, his loyal comrade in arms, also got involved. Despite its commendable intentions, the venture got into financial difficulty and soon went under, but not before it had given birth to a number of countercultural institutions in the capital: the happenings at All Saints Church, the Notting Hill Carnival, the newspaper it, and the UFO Club.
In 1966, Boyd decided to open a club, once again in partnership with Hoppy. The two men had become aware of the lack of a suitable venue for the development of underground culture, the Marquee no longer fitted the bill. Boyd would later claim that a void was waiting to be filled, and that hundreds of fans were looking for a central rallying point.24 In December 1966, Boyd and Hoppy settled on the Blarney Club, a former Irish ballroom located below a couple of movie theaters at 31 Tottenham Court Road.
The room, accessed via a wide staircase, had shamrocks on its walls and a ceiling fan above. The UFO (standing for unidentified flying object)—the name favored in the end over “Underground Freak Out”—was born. The opening night was December 23, 1966. On the program, which was entitled “UFO Presents Night Tripper,” were underground films by Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol (imported directly from New York) plus performances by Soft Machine and Pink Floyd.
The initial agreement was for the club to be held on the two last Fridays of 1966 only. On the strength of the success of the first two events, the UFO reopened its doors in January 1967. In addition to Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, the club presented sets by groups such as the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Graham Bond Organisation, Procol Harum, Eric Burdon, Family, the Social Deviants, Tomorrow, Jeff Beck, and Ten Years After, many of which included experimental lighting effects created by Mark Boyle and announced on colorful posters designed by Michael English and Nigel Waymouth (of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat). The Floyd very quickly became the club’s totemic group, playing there between January and September 1967. The UFO literally supercharged the band’s career, and its off-the-wall music and the light shows attracted more and more fans. “They were the first group to open people up to sound and colour,”11 Jenny Fabian, Andrew King’s girlfriend and co-author of the novel Groupie, would later write. “I’d lie down on the floor and they’d be up on stage like supernatural gargoyles […] and the same colour that was exploding over them was exploding over us. It was like being taken over, mind, body and soul.”5
The UFO soon became a victim of its own success. Too small to accommodate its ever-increasing crowd, the club started having confrontations with the law. Hopkins’s arrest on drug offenses in June 1967 marked the beginning of the end. After the owners of the premises canceled the lease, the club moved to the Roundhouse, whose exorbitant rent caused it to close its doors for good in October.
Throughout the UFO adventure, Boyd continued to work as a producer and talent spotter. When the filmmaker Peter Whitehead began to shoot a documentary on Swinging London, Joe Boyd was the natural choice of producer to record “Interstellar Overdrive,” the Floyd song chosen for the soundtrack, at Sound Techniques studio in Chelsea on January 11 and 12, 1967. Boyd tried to get the group signed by Elektra, but met with a refusal from Jac Holzman. The Floyd then turned to Polydor, and the record label accepted an arrangement under which Boyd would act as their producer on an independent basis. Having been dismissed by Elektra in the meantime, Boyd then set up his own production company, Witchseason Productions, and produced the group’s first single, “Arnold Layne”/“Candy and a Currant Bun,” recording both songs on January 29. Unfortunately, Boyd’s flair would not pay off. Bryan Morrison, taken on by Jenner and King to get bookings for the group, intervened with EMI and succeeded in obtaining a far more satisfactory contract. There can be no doubt that Joe Boyd wanted his relationship with Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason to continue, but EMI had other plans. After the contract signing, the head of the A&R (Artists & Repertoire) department, Sidney Arthur Beecher-Stevens, who had never liked independent producers, demanded that the group work with EMI’s own teams. “They owned Abbey Road after all. They wanted their own man, Norman Smith, who had recently been promoted from being the Beatles’ engineer, to be our producer. That was the deal on offer, and we acquiesced […],”5 recalls Nick Mason, before adding that Peter Jenner, who was given the unenviable task of informing Joe Boyd of these changes, regrets to this day having ousted him so abruptly, as does Andrew King, who has admitted that “The alacrity with which Peter and I left Joe standing was shameless.”5
However badly he took it, his brutal ejection from the Pink Floyd spaceship did not stop Joe Boyd from bouncing back. The young producer, who continued to officiate at Sound Techniques with engineer John Wood, now turned his attention to promoting the new British folk-rock scene, as embodied by the Incredible String Band (The Incredible String Band, 1966; The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, 1968), Fairport Convention (Fairport Convention, 1968; Unhalfbricking, 1969; Liege & Lief, 1969), Nick Drake (Five Leaves Left, 1969; Bryter Layter, 1970), and Fotheringay (Fotheringay, 1970).
Returning to the United States in the seventies, Boyd made the excellent documentary entitled simply Jimi Hendrix, and collaborated on the soundtracks of two major movies of the decade: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). Later he founded the label Hannibal, which went on to produce R.E.M.’s third studio album, Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), and Loudon Wainwright III’s Social Studies (1999). In 2006, Boyd published his memoirs in the book White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.