White Bicycles

Today I have started reading a book that I bought on eBay called White Bicycles, Making Music In The 1960’s.  The reason I was interested in it was because it is written by Joe Boyd who produced some of my favourite music of all time. The list of his achievements is endless, I was just looking through my cd collection and spotted several classic albums produced by Joe such as The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter by The Incredible String Band, What We Did On Our Holidays, Liege And Leif, Unhalfbricking & Full House by Fairport Convention, Just Another Diamond Day by Vashti Bunyan and Kate And Anna McGarrigle. He produced three Nick Drake albums and other people he worked with that I like include Fotheringay, The Albion Band, John & Beverley Martin, 10,000 Maniacs and Richard Thompson.

ISB, Vashti Bunyan, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake.

The title of the book comes from a song by a band called Tomorrow and was about an anarchist movement in Amsterdam in the 60’s to paint all bicycles white so they could be used by everyone. I’m only in the early stages of reading the book so I can’t tell you all that much about it yet but I’m sure I’ll find it fascinating. There are some fabulous rare photos as well of the likes of Anne Briggs, The Watersons, Fairport Convention, Bob Dylan Jimi Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Incredible String Band and many more.

Apart from that I haven’t done much today. I did post off a book which involved a long walk which I quite enjoyed, and I put my Robert Crumb book in my bookshop because I decided I didn’t want to read it. I had a quick look through it and decided that it was a bit dated in the modern age. Great music on the other hand such as that produced by Joe Boyd will never seem dated.