White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s

When Muddy Waters came to London in the early ’60s, Joe Boyd was his tour manager. When Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar. When it was the summer of love, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO. When a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Joe Boyd was the producer. When a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd.

More than any previous ’60s music autobiography, Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles offers the real story of what it was like to be there at the time. As well as the ’60s heavy-hitters, this book also offers wonderfully vivid portraits of a whole host of other musicians. His greatest coup is bringing to life the famously elusive figure of Nick Drake - the first time he’s been written about by anyone who knew him well.

Record and film producer Joe Boyd was born in Boston in 1942 and graduated from Harvard in 1964. He went on to produce Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, REM and many others. He produced the documentary ’Jimi Hendrix’ and the film ’Scandal’. In 1980 he started Hannibal Records and ran it for twenty years. Boyd lives in London where he writes for the Guardian and Independent.