Fluxedo Junction

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My guest this week was music and film producer Joe Boyd. Mr. Boyd is an American record producer and former owner of the Witchseason production company. Boyd was instrumental in launching the careers of Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, and The Incredible String Band.

He first became involved in music promoting blues artists while a student at Harvard University, and in 1964 made his first visit to Britain, returning the following year to establish an overseas office of Elektra Records. He was eventually to settle in London.

He became best-known for his work with British folk and folk rock artists, including the Incredible String Band, Martin Carthy, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Fairport Convention and Richard Thompson. Some of these were produced by his own production company, Witchseason. He also co-founded London's UFO Club and worked with UFO regulars Pink Floyd (producing their first single Arnold Layne) and the Soft Machine.

Boyd returned to the States in the 1970s, assembling footage for the eponymous film documentary on Jimi Hendrix (1973) and producing records by Maria Muldaur and Kate and Anna McGarrigle among others. He went on to found his own Hannibal label (now a part of Rykodisc) which released records by the likes of Richard Thompson and various discs of so-called world music. Boyd also produced R.E.M.'s third album Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), and records by Billy Bragg and 10,000 Maniacs.

He was Executive Producer for the 1988 feature film Scandal, starring John Hurt and Bridget Fonda about Britain's Profumo Scandal. He left Hannibal/Ryko in 2001 and has written a book about making music in the 1960s called "White Bicycles - Making Music in the 1960s", published in May 2006 by Serpent's Tail Press in the UK.