And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music, Joe Boyd, Faber, £30

It is difficult to write well about music without resorting to the usual clichés, especially so when tapping into the psychoactive vein of the 1960s, an era that has been ground into the dust a thousand times. But when Boston-born music producer Joe Boyd published his memoir in 2006, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, critics and novelists furnished it with high praise (‘Terrific… engaging’, wrote Hanif Kureishi, ‘lucid and insightful’, wrote Michel Faber). Sales rocketed. Its success was likely down to two factors: first and most importantly, Boyd had stories that nobody else had, and second, he delivered them in a modest but magnetic style exempt from the off-putting egomaniacal bluster often found in rock and roll memoirs. Given what he had to shout about this was all the more remarkable.

He was tour manager for Muddy Waters when he came to London in the early 1960s. He founded UFO, London’s psychedelic nightclub on Tottenham Court Road, where in 1966 Pink Floyd and Soft Machine played. He was the producer and manager of the singer-songwriter Nick Drake. He worked on the documentary Jimi Hendrix and the film Scandal and he founded Hannibal Records in 1980 and ran it for 20 years. His life has been spent ‘listening for a living’, as he wrote in White Bicycles, and, luckily for the reader, he has proved himself a brilliant chronicler besides.

Hannibal Records is central to his new book, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, which for fans of his first has certainly been a long time coming. Weighing in at over 900 pages – ‘sherpas will be provided to purchasers to help them carry it home,’ as Boyd has joked – it is a sprawling atlas with the title reflecting its breadth and ‘the circular flows of musical influence and the interconnectedness of cultures’.

Travelling back in history and across the globe from Africa to the Caribbean and Latin America, through Europe to South Asia and back again, the tales compress and fold like a concertina. Hannibal Records was known for looking at artists from outside the UK and North America, releasing albums by Muzsikás, Ketama and Kanda Bongo Man, with Boyd producing or co-producing records by Ivo Papasov & His Bulgarian Wedding Band and ¡Cubanismo! It is this championing of music outside of the West, and how it became the focus of his production work, where the text is most illuminating. It is perhaps worth mentioning at this point that not only is Boyd’s writing as razor sharp as it ever was, he is now over 80 years old.

Anecdotes flow as rhythmically as the artists he produced. The Hannibal Records promotional T-shirt, we learn, features a quote from the late great Malian musician Ali Farka Touré: ‘For some people when you say “Timbuktu”, it is like the end of the world, but that is not true. I am from Timbuktu and I can tell you we are right at the heart of the world.’ Quite.

Memories of master kora player Toumani Diabaté, another great Malian musician, are bittersweet as he died, probably as this book was being printed and boxed up, in July 2024, aged just 58. Kaira (1988), his first album, was released on Hannibal, and it was instantly hailed as a timeless classic that introduced Toumani (and the kora) to a Western audience. For that album, Boyd worked with ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán, an expert on traditional music, particularly of Cuban and African origin.

‘Editing Kaira quickly became “producing”, treating the music with the respect with which a classical producer would approach editing an album of Chopin nocturnes. Durán may have been the only one who could have found edit points in the music’s complex patterns. Toumani was thrilled with the result, we put together a jacket design with a photo of a Malian cloth from the Museum of Mankind, Lucy wrote some liner notes and Hannibal Records became the proud home of a classic.’ Diabaté, echoing the importance of Malian culture and music just as Farka Touré did, was quoted once as saying, ‘our music is older than Beethoven’.

Boyd, using his pleasingly chatty and irreverent tone, never loses sight of his central argument, despite the far-ranging global scope and the topics covered. The fundamental message is that music from around the world has shaped Western popular music and it is because of this that most major in-the-know stars have long had Boyd on their rolodex.

‘One afternoon in the Hannibal Records office, a colleague answered the phone and shot me a funny look as she pushed the hold button: “Someone who says she’s Kate Bush.” Indeed it was Kate Bush; she wanted to add Bulgarian harmonies to her new record and had heard that I was the man to talk to.’ A few pages on, we find out that it wasn’t exactly novel for harmonic Bulgarian singing to enter the realm of ‘capitalist popular music’. Joni Mitchell had got there before Bush, ‘by multitracking Bulgarian harmonies on “Rainy Night House” on 1969’s Ladies of the Canyon’.

Unexpected historical anecdotes appear like regular thunderflashes. In 1853, Charles Dickens wrote a bigoted review of a Zulu choir’s performance in London (‘the show, however, was a hit; English audiences loved the powerful singing…’). Then there is the unforgettable image of George Harrison falling for Indian music while lying in ZsaZsa Gabor’s bathtub.

I guarantee that anyone who picks up this book will find themselves frequently surprised. For example, I know Istanbul’s museums quite well, but it seems Boyd can teach even me something about them: ‘Turks have always loved the sound of brass. The army museum in Istanbul has a concert every afternoon celebrating the janissary bands who provided a soundtrack for the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.’

There is undoubtedly something of the scholar and anthropologist about Boyd and his forays into Bulgaria in the mid-1980s are particularly fascinating and curious. Kate Bush we learn is severely averse to flying but she gets on a plane with him to seek out Bulgarian melodies in situ. In the music room of a high school in the capital Sofia we learn that ‘Kate would play a passage on her ghetto blaster and Rumyana [Rumyana Tzintzarska, Head of Folk Music for Radio Sofia and co-producer of Boyd’s Bulgarian records] would come up with a Bulgarian folk melody that fit the harmonies of Kate’s song.’

Personal memories easily segue into sweeping histories. Unlike Kate Bush, the Soviets hated the music of the peasant, ‘dirges and songs that celebrated superstition, religion or shamanic ritual were banned’. Their view was that peasant culture must be destroyed in order to renew it. ‘It was a cultural and economic stand-off: urbanites hated and feared the “dark” and backward peasants they relied on, while villagers fiercely resisted collectivisation; from long experience, they knew that “trouble always comes from town”.’ Boyd also looks to Russia’s present invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s confrontation with the West and how his ‘hysterical response to Pussy Riot’ echoed the Stalinist fear of singing peasants.

This work, hefty in the hand but ethereal in style, is a venus flytrap of the scintillating stories within Boyd’s mind. It is also an invaluable historical record as well as a memoir well told. Music will never be the same for all who read it.