Tuesday Feb 4 at 1130 am GMT*, BBC Radio 4 will air a radio documentary presented by Yours Truly on the late great New Orleans pianist James Booker. It’s called “The Black Liberace” and is 30 minutes long. (a copy of this can be found here).  I was asked to do it a) because I produced Booker’s first solo album in 1976 and b) the BBC is getting to like my dulcet tones. I had fun – I got to interview Allen Toussaint among others. What a gent!Speaking of Booker, if you have a chance to see the film documentary about him called “The Bayou Maharajah” by Lily Keber, do! It’s one of the best music documentaries I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot). It’s Lily’s first film (Les Blank was her role model, so she was off to a great start). It’s done a few festivals and will hopefully appear in your local art house or on tv – or vimeo! – before too long.Some of you may be amused by a YouTube clip of my visit to the great Amoeba record store in San Francisco. They gave me $60 credit and a shopping basket – of course I spent more. I had to get out of there fast before my credit card melted down…

Joe Boyd – What’s In My Bag?

And hey, let’s talk a bit more about “me” – this interview I did for a site called “The Agency Review” turned out to be a bit more thoughtful and interesting (for me, anyway) than most. Some of you will have heard me bang on about all this before, so no test questions at the end…

The Agency Review  (password is UFO)

In my next newsletter, I’ll tell about the outing with my “Scandal” cohort screenwriter Michael Thomas to see Lloyd-Weber’s “Stephen Ward” musical. If you want to be fully prepared, have a look on the website at the ‘bonus’ White Bicycles chapter about the making of “Scandal”.

bestJoe

*630 am EST, but available on the BBC iPlayer for a week afterwards as well as being repeated Saturday Feb 8 at 330pm GMT