Andrew Hickey
speaker
2,253 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Andrew Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And it seems like this was at least in part because of a tension between his desire for commercial success and his realization that this would require him working with other people who might not share his vision, or worse, might just be more talented than him and render him irrelevant.
Rikuda was not the only person who seemed to be taking control of the band.
So was Gary Marker, who was now in place as both producer and manager.
But Marker would not remain the producer for very long.
For reasons that have never adequately been explained, the production was instead turned over to a first time producer, Richard Perry.
Perry had started out as the bass singer in a do up group called The Escorts.
But after the escorts hadn't set the world of music on fire, he had gone into songwriting, with his first credit I can find being for a Barbara Streisand album track from nineteen sixty five.
He'd then gone on to work for Kama Sutra Records.
We'll be seeing quite a bit of Perry in future episodes in one way or another, as he became one of the most successful record producers of the seventies.
But people have often questioned the decision to pair him with the Magic Band, and looking at the records that were his biggest successes, it seems on paper as unsuitable a match as David Gates.
Perry's most successful work was Slick AM Pop and Show Tunes.
He produced many records for Strisand, and he also produced Art Garfunkel's biggest solo hits, The Manhattan Transfer, several Diana Ross solo albums, and records for Neil Diamond, The Pointer Sisters and Andy Williams.
Probably his biggest commercial success of all though was with Carly Simon, and he produced most of her hits, including You're So Vain.
This view of his later career has led many to say that Perry was just fundamentally an unsuitable producer for the band, but there's another way of looking at things which suggests he may have been an inspired choice.
Because there's another streak to Perry's productions.
He had an ability to take eccentric idiosyncratic artists and smooth just enough of their rough edges to make them commercially successful without removing completely what made them interesting.
Yes, Tiny Tim, who we just heard, was regarded as a novelty act, but he was also both a serious artist by his own lights and someone who was very difficult to work with, and Perry managed to make records with him which were both commercially and artistically successful, something no later producer working with him ever managed to do.
Similarly, Harry Nilsen, who Perry produced two albums for, was someone who was vastly talented, but whose idiosyncratic sense of humour led him to do things like get a chorus of people from an old people's home to sing I'd rather be dead than wet my bed.
Perry produced that for Nilsen, but also produced his most commercial work, Like Without You, a song that Nilsen had taken against and didn't want to record by the time they got into the studio.
Richard Perry was, in short, someone who had all the skills necessary to make Captain Beefart and his magic band a real commercial possibility.
Showing 261–280 of 2,253 · page 14 of 113
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