Joe Boyd: commitment

Transcript context

…When you finished producing Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot the Lights Out, did you just know at the end that this is one of the best records ever? Or did that take you by surprise? It didn’t take me by surprise. We cut the tracks in two days, and it just jumped out of the speakers at us. It took a few more evenings to get Linda’s vocals finished, but it was clearly a fantastic record. I pretty much mortgaged everything I had — or everything Hannibal Records had — to buy plane tickets for them to fly to America to do a tour because I knew that this was Hannibal Records’ first real potential home run. Then I spent the next six months desperately struggling to press enough records to supply the demand that was out there following that tour. It’s the old story of the little independent label: The worst thing that can happen to you is to have a hit. The distributors pay you in 90 days, and the pressing plants need to be paid in 30 days, so you’re always in this terrible squeeze, and the more records you sell, the worse the squeeze gets. How did you think about shaping the sound on that album?…

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