EX-PINK FLOYD and R.E.M. producer Joe Boyd was hoping to make a timely follow-up to his 2006 psychedelic memoir White Bicycles when he embarked on a book about global music. Things got rather out of hand. Some 15 years on, the ex-Witchseason and Hannibal Records boss has finally put the finishing touches to And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. As he tells MOJO with a shr ug: “Once you get in, you can’t stop.”
An inter-continental meander that takes in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Latin America, the Caribbean and plenty more places besides, the book’s 800-plus pages sparkle with gossip, political intrigue and unlikely connections. Reflecting on how paradigm shifts can come from existing sounds being copied badly, Boyd posits that modern Latin music may be rooted in the 18th centur y, when musicians of African origin in Haiti were compelled to play fashionable English countr y dances to entertain French settlers.
As he seeks to track the musical crosscur rents that have fed into Western pop, Boyd hits a rich vein of telling anecdotes. “Like George Har rison and John Lennon lying in Zsa Zsa Gabor ’s bathtub tripping in the summer of ’65 while Jim McGuinn and David Crosby explained Indian music to them,” he says. “As soon as Har rison got back to London, he went to HMV and bought all the Ravi Shankar albums.”
The title of the book is a lyric from Paul Simon’s 1986 Graceland LP, a voyage into South African sounds Boyd felt was much misunderstood. “Ever ybody felt so virtuous that by buying Ladysmith Black Mambazo records they were somehow supporting the ANC,” he says. “The music of Graceland is basically Zulu, and the ANC hated that, because the South African gover nment supported Zulu independence as a way to under mine the anti-Apartheid movement.”
As Boyd discovered frequently, traditional music has often come under heavy political manners. Easter n Bloc authorities disdained Bulgarian female har mony groups like the Kate Bush-endorsed Trio
