Island Records: The Greatcoat Years

No record label has ever had its history subjected to the sort of minutely detailed scrutiny on show in the first two volumes of Neil Storey’s The Island Book of Records, the second of which was published just before Christmas. The initial volume examined the label’s earliest years, 1959-68, from the family background of its founder, Chris Blackwell, to the breakthrough into the new rock mainstream with the debuts of Traffic, Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention. The new one deals with just two years, 1969 and 1970. Their successors will, I gather, each focus on a single year**.

The format is that of an LP-size hardback of considerable heft (432 pages of high-grade paper in case of the new one), an oral history with testimony from participants and interested bystanders lavishly illustrated with photos, sleeve artwork, press cuttings, documents, ads and other ephemera. What 1969-70 means is loads of background (and foreground) material beginning with Steve Winwood’s involvement in Blind Faith and ending with King Crimson’s third album, Lizard. Among those featuring heavily are Spooky Tooth, Free and Mott the Hoople, three classic early Island rock bands whose largely student and mostly male following tended to sport ex-army greatcoats, along with plimsolls, loon pants and cheesecloth shirts.

You get their stories in jigsaw form, pieced together with great diligence in mostly bite-sized chunks of testimony. A good example is the treatment of Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left: the producer Joe Boyd, the engineer John Wood, the bass player Danny Thompson, the guitarist Richard Thompson and the arranger Robert Kirby help describe its making, while Blackwell and his Island colleagues David Betteridge, Tim Clark, Bob Bell and Barry Partlow and the record shop owners John Clare and Eugene Manzi try to explain why it didn’t sell. (When Boyd sold his Witchseason production company to Blackwell in the ’70, it was with the stipulation in the contract that Drake’s three albums should never be deleted.) Others providing testimony include Gabrielle Drake, Nick’s sister, and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, a well connected friend.

There’s too much stuff here for me to begin to do it justice, but the riches include the triumph of King Crimson’s first album, helped by the fact that their two managers, David Enthoven and John Gaydon, were, like Blackwell, Old Harrovians; the debut album by Quintessence, a quintessentially Island band (i.e. Notting Hill hippies) that it turns out nobody in the company really seemed to like; the Fotheringay debacle, which derailed Sandy Denny’s career; the emergence of two ex-Alan Bown Set singers, Jess Roden and Robert Palmer, respectively with Bronco and Vinegar Joe; and the huge success of Cat Stevens, reinvented as a singer-songwriter with Tea for the Tillerman, and of Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Alongside epochal releases like Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die and Fairport’s Unhalfbricking and Liege & Lief, the book features such bit-part players as Dr Strangely Strange (“a poor man’s Incredible String Band”), Blodwyn Pig and McDonald & Giles (respectively offshoots of Jethro Tull and King Crimson), and White Noise’s somewhat prophetic An Electric Storm, which seemed to typify Island’s propensity, in the early days, for backing weird stuff. Nothing is neglected, including the hugely popular and influential compilations, particularly what might be called the greatcoat anthologies: You Can All Join In, Nice Enough to Eat and Bumpers.

The two years covered by this volume pivot around the move from offices on Oxford Street to a former Congregational church on Basing Street in Notting Hill, converted around the time of the First World War into a factory making dressmakers’ showroom busts and wax figures for Madame Tussaud’s. Blackwell bought it and, with the aid of the acoustic engineer Michael Glickman and the studio technician Dick Swettenham, set about converting into a headquarters that incorporated not just offices for the label’s staff but two studios, No 1 on the ground floor, capable of accommodating 80 musicians, and the more intimate No 2 in the basement. This was where a bunch of talented young engineers set to work with Helios 16-track desks and Studer two-inch tape machines, and we hear from some of those hitherto best known as names the bottom of the list of album credits: Brian Humphries, Phill Brown, Richard Digby-Smith (“Diga”) and Phil Ault.

This was a turning point. Basing Street became a creative hub, a 24-hour hang-out, the office business conducted at round tables seating executives and secretaries in a non-hierarchical environment. Guy Stevens, the former DJ at the Scene Club in Ham Yard, for whom Blackwell had created the Sue label, was a maverick A&R presence, introducing Ian Hunter to a bunch of guys from Hereford and giving them the name Mott the Hoople. Lucky Gordon was the resident chef.

I visited Basing Street quite a lot during those early years, sometimes interviewing various people and other times just hanging out, occasionally in the studios. The buzz was terrific. It was, I suppose, a perfect example of hip capitalism in action. Nothing so perfect lasts for ever, but in this volume of his epic and invaluable series — expensive but, to those with an interest, worth every penny — Neil Storey catches it in glorious ascent.

* The Island Book of Records Vol 2: 1969-70, edited by Neil Storey, is published by Manchester University Press / Hidden Masters (£85)

** Not quite right. Apparently Vol 3 (out in the spring of ’26, all being well) will deal with 1971-72. Vol 4 is 1973-76, Vol 5 is probably 1977-79, and Vol 6 could be 1980-83. Neil Storey says he has always thought of the series as consisting of 10 to 12 volumes, so we’ll see.