A Personal History of the British Music Industry 103 – John Burgess.

John Burgess

John Burgess was one of the lesser acknowledged stalwarts of Abbey Road, frequently standing in for George Martin as well as producing in his own right, but his story precedes that, so without further ado…

During my National Service I was a nurse at Stanmore, living in Hillingdon and home every weekend playing football for the local team. In fact I was a more regular player than the guys who were actually employed! When I came out in 1951 I was hunting around for a job. I did try to stay in the medical profession because I liked it, but there was nothing there that really turned me on, especially from the money point of view. The wages were miserable in the medical profession – still are (!). So I just touted around. Living in Hillingdon, EMI was quite a big employer of people in those days, certainly in Hayes. So I cycled round there and got an interview with L.G. Wood, and he turned me down. He said ‘you’re the type of person we need, but not the type of person I need.’ He was an EMI sales manager at the time and was searching for a letter writer to deal with complaints from the public. He didn’t think I was right for that but he did say ‘we do need someone in our promotions department‘ which at that time was run by John Whittle and a guy called David Evans. They were both classical people to the top of their heads and they needed someone to do public relations, press or whatever. They took me on as a PR and that’s how my career at EMI started.

My job was literally to contact the music papers – very few in those days – go over to the factory which was a short walk away, get the latest records off the racks, package them and send them off to the newspapers. In fact the one that caused me more problems than any of the others was The Gramophone. They wanted classical records and for an opera you would have 10 12″ (single) records which all had to be parcelled up. Gradually I began to concentrate more and more on the pop side as it became more popular. I wasn’t writing press releases – largely it was a service dealt with on the phone. Melody Maker and the NME were going at the time, and a few others. I was involved with the dealer side of things as well, in a public relations capacity. It was all in its infancy. I used to have to go to the dealer with an artist to do record signings. I would accompany an artist with the rep who covered the area, and I can well remember Eddie Calvert, Ronnie Harris of the Coronets, Tony Brent, Billie Anthony – all Columbia label artists – and doing store openings with them. There’d be me, the rep and the artist. The shop would have advertised it in the window ‘so-and-so is coming to sign your records today’, and it was a very successful way of selling records. At that time EMI hadn’t really split the labels, so I was working for all of them.. Well, John Whittle was – he was the Promotion Department boss – so we covered every label. I wasn’t involved with radio at all – that came part of promotion later.

Eddie Calvert, Ruby Murray and Michael Holliday

Eddie Calvert in his day was a big star – Ruby Murray too. They were always delighted to do the signings, never any problems. It was probably as important as local radio is today (2006!). Unfortunately on one or two occasions you would turn up at a shop and there was no-one there at all. That got a bit embarrassing. I remember one day with Ronnie Harris, somewhere around Norwich. Jimmy Hanks was the rep and we were all embarrassed because there were big notices in the window but there was no-one there at all! This was in the early 1950’s, pre-rock’n’roll. Cliff Richard started shortly after that and I’m sure he did some shops as well. It was part and parcel of promotion. You had radio, the newspapers, advertising and dealers. The dealers were very important, far more so than they are today as far as promotion is concerned. I know big shops still do it, but these were tiny shops and they were important enough for EMI. The charts were in their infancy – I think the first one was in the NME (see the interview with Percy Dickins for more information on the charts)

At that time it was all vinyl, 78rpm, 7″ and 10″ and then 12″ LP’s – all in mono. That all began down at Hayes and C.H. Thomas was the MD then. Then we all moved up to Castle Street (in the West End off Oxford Street) which was fantastic. That’s what I enjoyed most. I transferred from John Whittle to Arthur Muxlow who was then in charge on Capitol. I was then, if you like, Capitol promotion manager with a guy called Bernard Cook. This was during the period of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and all those sort of people. EMI bought Capitol at the time of the Castle Street move and I was in at the start of it. In fact I was at the start of everything – the EP’s, 7″records – doing the same promotion with the American artists when they came over.

By that time the radio scene had become much more sophisticated, so I was doing a little plugging as well, but you weren’t put into one little slot – ‘you’re the plugger, you’re the dealer man, you’re the artist man – you did everything. Bernard Cook and I did everything that was going, though I’m sure Arthur Muxlow was sales manager and head of Capitol, so he did everything, though I’m sure he had someone under him who did marketing. We were in Princes House in Castle Street, just for Capitol and we had our own little set-up. My secretary was Edna Dolly Bowers, who became Dolly East. She was sixteen-and-a-half when I interviewed her for her first job. I was never involved with what we released, but nearly everything we put out was a massive seller – the original Carousel, all the shows, Oklahoma – you couldn’t go wrong with them – it was ridiculous. I’ve still got a lot of those records upstairs.

Arthur Muxlow didn’t decide which records were released but he did instigate the EMI programmes on Radio Luxembourg with Pete Murray and all the names of that era. Ray Orchard had something to do with Muxlow’s wife. He was Canadian and I remember the parties at Luxembourg with her, Arthur and Ray. Muxlow was a brilliant promotion man – he spent a lot of money but he was brilliant. He left Capitol and returned to EMI and they made him sales manager again and then he was sacked- something to do with the amount of money he’d spent on the Luxembourg programmes I think. He was sacked and I think he lived abroad for a couple of years, came back by himself – his wife had left him by this time. L.G. Wood gave him a job down at Hayes in the royalties department, which was a terribly sad end for such a brilliant guy. He died alone in his flat, just never turned up for work one day. He did a great job for EMI but I think he just went over the top a bit with money and L.G.Wood was notoriously mean and they would never spend money on promotional things like they do today. Arthur was probably a little ahead of his time because whatever he spent he always got full value. He signed up all these disc jockeys and I know they were all on good money at the time, which must have hurt L.G. Wood like mad.

L.G. Wood (left)

I mentioned to John that Wally Ridley had accused L.G.Wood’s meanness having prevented EMI from acquiring the Beatles’ publishing.

No, that’s not true. That’s not a true story. I don’t know what Wally would have known about that. EMI missed out on the publishing purely and simply because Syd Coleman, who ran the HMV publishing side (Ardmore and Beechwood) at that time (Harry Lewis took it on there as well) supervised the demos they’d done at the HMV shop, listened to them and then sent them over to George Martin, which was unusual for Syd because he was Norman Newell’s best friend, but Norman was in America at the time and Syd felt he had to make a fairly quick decision so sent them to George instead. So he signed (the publishing deal for) the first two sides of The Beatles. I was working for Norman at the time and he said to Syd afterwards, ‘why didn’t you send them to John?’.I don’t know what my reaction would have been. I think that, basically, George was very worried about the power of EMI publishing. He heard the tracks and liked them, and I think those two or three titles remain with EMI today, publishing wise. He (Syd) then got hold of Dick James who was struggling at that time, almost going bust, because he felt Dick would do a better job than EMI. He didn’t get involved, he just recommended it and Epstein went and saw Dick James and they did a deal. Dick James actually offered George a large percentage of the publishing side, and George rejected it.

I understood that Columbia and HMV had turned down The Beatles before George heard them.

My memory of it is that George was the only guy at EMI to have heard The Beatles. Norrie was a there at the time, and Ray Martin. I’m pretty sure Norrie never heard them because he was tied up with Cliff Richard or Ruby Murray at the time.

Back to the radio promotion, what were the big programmes of the day that demanded your attention?

The big one was the Saturday morning one, with Jimmy Grant producing..Saturday Club. That was the big one and we used to plug them like man. There were various others, not many. Two Way Family Favourites was a good one. And I think it was the same people who did Housewives’ Choice. And of course Luxembourg was going in those days.

In 1958 I was always popping across from Capitol to EMI in Castle Street. I was going up in the lift one day, and Norman Newell got in and his story is that he fell in love with me in the lift. He thought I had a lot of potential and we had a long chat. A couple of days later I got a phone call asking if I would be interested in being his assistant. Eventually I said ‘yes’ and moved back to Castle Street, up to the top floor with all the A&R people. That was Norman and Ray Martin, Wally Ridley, George and I think at that time Ron Richards was his assistant. They all had assistants except Norman and he wanted the same. Wally I think had Peter Sullivan and John Schroeder was Norrie and Ray’s assistant. His A&R position was different from the others. George just did Parlophone, Wally did HMV and Ray and Norrie did Columbia, whereas Norman’s function was to out records on whichever label he liked. Any music on any label. He did shows and different sorts of artists. I think CH Thomas was still running the joint at that time. Shortly after that he died and Joseph Lockwood took over. He and Norman got on like a house fire, both being of a similar ilk, and the other guys used to get pissed off. We used to have a weekly release meeting in this days and Norman would put out his records on their label! We would call an A&R meeting and invite whoever was around on the sales side and you’d say ‘I’ve just done this Adam Faith record. I want it out on such-and-such a date. I’ve got so-and-so (a plugger) to back it on radio and tv’. ‘ There was never any argument – you didn’t even bother playing it to them. During that period we (A&R) were in control of everything – it was very very successful. There were very few flops – the number of records that didn’t cover their costs was probably 1% – we were making loads and loads of records very cheaply, and also doing loads and loads of auditions. I used to book an afternoon every week at Abbey Road and get people who’d written or sent tapes to me and do an afternoon’d auditions Everyone did it and that’s how we found some of our future artists. But once marketing came in and took over – I think it was when Ron White arrived – A&R became secondary to marketing. That’s when everything started to go wrong. I think the A&R people were more in touch with the buying public than the sales people. This was 1958.

Bernie’s been cut out, but here is rare photo of Ron White.

There was a lot of jumping the gun on American releases. By covering American records with English artists. I did that quite a few times with Adam Faith and got hits out of them. One of George’s biggest ones was Cilla Black’s cover version of a Dionne Warwick hit (Anyone who had a heart). Evie Taylor, Adam Faith’s manager, used to go to America quite a lot and she brought back a couple of titles which we went into the studios and they were hits. His first releases were on HMV. In February and November 1958 I did two records with him and they came out on HMV. The bigger one was High School Confidential. Then he left EMI and went to Top Rank under Dick Rowe and Tony Hatch. Then Norman saw him on the Jack Good TV show. He was out of contract and Norman – he had these hunches – said ‘he looks fantastic on television, we must sign that guy‘ . So we got hold of Evie Taylor and signed him.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Dezo Hoffman/Shutterstock (343417re) ADAM FAITH AND HIS MANAGER EVE TAYLOR Various

Norman said to me ‘I don’t think he’s my type of artist John; it’s really not me. I’ll put him in your hands. I’ll come along to the first session.’, which he did, and we recorded – as was usual in those days – four titles in the three hour session, and Norman literally couldn’t stand the way Adam sang. I think he stayed at the session for about an hour, made a few comments and then left, and never came to another session! He left it all to me. Out of that session we did What do you want, which wasn’t going to be the A-side – that was a thing called From now until forever. And I think we did Poor me on the same session. They were his first two singles and were released in October 1959 and January 1960. He was signed as a solo artiste – The Roulettes were signed later. John Barry had been signed to Norman. He was handled by Evie Taylor as well, and I think it was her idea for John to do the arrangements.

There was a guy on the session, a violinist called Sid Sachs, and to get that pizzicato you’ve got four violinists round a microphone plucking until their fingers bled. Sid was complaining about it to John. Eventually we had to have two sets of four string players because their fingers would start to bleed if you kept the rehearsals going too long. This was pure mono – not even twin track in those days.

John Barry, Eddie Cochran, Adam Faith and Gene Vincent

When Norman first offered me the job, I didn’t have a clue what A&R meant. I’m always been in promotion and press, never in sales. Norman told me what it was all about -‘you’ve got to look after artists; you’ve got to find songs.’ So from the day I joined him I spent most of my life at Abbey Road Studios, either with or without him. He really did throw me in at the deep end. He’d just say ‘well I’m off; I’ll let you carry on with this’. When you go into the studio, not being technical, then you’re faffing around finding out what you’re supposed to be doing! My first-ever recording session was with the Jerry Allen Quartet. He was an organist and I had to do an EP with him and the Rita Williams Singers – basically an instrumental with them oohing and aahing in the background. It was an evening session, so I’d met up with Jerry earlier, and Rita I knew quite well because she was involved in most of Norman’s sessions. I was quite young and immature, and when they all turned up at Studio 2, they brought two cases of beer with them. I started getting worried and thought ‘bloody hell, they’re going to get drunk.’ All we assistants were born and bred to the fact that you don’t go over time. You had three hours to do your tracks and you don’t go over because it costs money. They started breaking open the bottle and playing. It came to the tea break and we hadn’t got anything down at all. I was getting very worried, so I actually went and had a go at Jerry. He was a well known artist in those days and I was just a meagre little assistant, but I thought, ‘well, this is my job. I’ve got to come out of this with three or four titles.’ But then, suddenly, it all swung round and we got the four titles with plenty of time to spare, but discipline within the studios always worried me. You did have to get used to that. Musicians are notoriously undisciplined and you had to be able to say to them ‘come on fellow, let’s get on with it.’ They were quite aware that I wasn’t a musician and used to take liberties at times.

Stuart Eltham was the engineer. He was the first I had used and he was so helpful. I always used him because not only was he a good engineer and very helpful but very musical too. In fact most of the engineers at that time were extremely musical. Instead of being in the studios they probably should have been in A&R.

Stuart Eltham

They (the engineers) used to get quite frustrated with the non-musical assistants. Ron (Richards) wasn’t particularly musical; I don’t think John Shroeder was actually. Peter (Sullivan) wasn’t and I don’t think Bob Barrett was either – he was a writer. I had a very good ear for wrong notes and a very good ear for a song. If you look now at at the titles I’ve produced, most of them were songs that I picked. Producers didn’t get a credit (on the record labels). Never on singles and often not on EP’s or LP’s either. EMI recently released a CD of Adam Faith and it was only because someone knew me and rang to ask if I’d produced all the tracks. In those days you had all those forms to deal with at Abbey Road, performance forms, technical forms, payment forms. But on the forms it would be – “Producer Norman Newell”, because, even though it was John Burgess, he was a nonentity. So the first Adam Faith album that came out, sad ‘produced by Norman Newell’ He just laughed and said ‘well, that’s just life.’. But later, someone remembered and so now all the records go out under my name – doesn’t make much difference because you don’t get any money for it!

Freddie & the Dreamers were the first group I produced that I brought to the company. Danny Betesh had rung me – I had a good relationship with him – to say he’d got this group and would I be interested in seeing them, on spec only. I used to hold auditions and it was on one of them that the group came down from Manchester and they did this song called If you gotta make a fool of somebody which was an American cover. Even though I didn’t think they were particularly good, Freddie had an amazing personality. He used to do that little dance – he did it in the studio. After the audition I said I’d like to sign a contract with him. In this days you drew up your own contract, though the terms were fairly standard. It was a penny (per copy sold) in England and half that in the rest of the world. In those days the artists were over the moon to get a contract. I said I wasn’t too sure about the audition version but that was the song I wanted so they came in a week later and did it again. but it was nowhere as good as the audition one, so, even though it had some wrong bass notes, I used the audition one. In those days there’s was nothing you could do. You couldn’t replace them in those days so they’re still on there!

Mickie Most

Mickie Most was at EMI in those days. He was one of the first people who brought in a finished master for sale, and he brought a version of If you gotta make a fool of somebody. I actually got my record out a week before he did, and that was what put it in the charts. It got a lot of publicity and Danny had secured so much television for the group that we gazumped Mickie. He was furious about that!

Back to the earlier A&R time. There was never any co-operation between the labels. Wally was the most awkward of the A&R men. He was a musician – I think he was in Joe Loss’s band at one time – and I think he aways had the feeling of being the number one man there, and would never discuss things like choice of songs with the other guys. We were all working in close proximity with one another, but you were only interested in your own product. With If you gotta make a fool of somebody I thought at the time that I must get this out quickly (the song had been an American hit for James Ray- released here on Pye International) because it’s a good record. It feels like a hit and people were covering it like you wouldn’t believe in those days – they would cover anything that was going. Mickie had recorded it before me but he couldn’t get it out quicker because the ‘bought-in’ masters took second place to the A&R guys who had more power. So for example I would have had more influence and power over the Sales guys than someone like Derek Everett (who handled Mickie Most), and if I said ‘I want this out’ I’d take precedence. I think Mickie (I think Joe Meek!) was the first independent record producer to bring tapes in for sale – and he seemed to do most of his business with EMI.

I don’t recall anyone bothering if a cover version was being made of a record the company already had. I do recall a little difficulty if George and Norman bother wanted to cover the same song, but then it depended on who the artist was. The A&R department in those days was probably the most efficient, financially. George was always very careful what he spent, Wally was notoriously mean, Norrie was always very practical, and Norman was sometimes a bit over the top because he liked big orchestras. But financially there was no way in the world that the division ever incurred excess costs – they were certainly the best A&R division that EMI ever had. I maintain it was L.G. (Wood) who destroyed it because he wouldn’t come up with terms like putting our names on the label. We weren’t even asking for a royalty in those days…just our name on the label. But ‘no’ he said. The policy wasn’t to build up producers; it was to build up the artists.

Norman Newell, flanked by Geoff Love & Vera Lynn

I think Norman was a very good boss and I think I was the luckiest of all the assistants. I know that Peter wasn’t allowed to do much at all. Even though he’d had success, Wally kept him down. George did it to some extent with Ron, whereas I used to go to Norman and say ‘I’ve found this band‘ and he’d say ‘you’re in a situation where it’s your job to find artists, get the songs, take them to a studio and cut a record. That’s your job.’ He was very free and easy with me. I was always as frugal as he was on the money side. He gave me more or less a free hand, especially once he realised I’d taken on the challenge of the A&R division, and he obviously understood that I was comfortable in the studios with all its ingredients, so he left it to me. I’m a great believer in engineers doing their job. I never knob-twiddled! I do remember he started the series of Sadlers Wells albums. We did ‘The Merry Widow’ and ‘Der Rosencavalier’ – always with the full Sadlers Wells company. There was a girl there called June Bronhill. These were big orchestras and big choirs and they were always doing in Studio 1. He’d booked the sessions for three days. On the first day he did it and that evening he came up to me and said “I’ve got to go to America tomorrow so you’ll have to take over the session. Don’t worry about it; just be your normal self.”

Now this is fine if you’re talking about Adam or Freddie & the Dreamers, because I could communicate with them, but when you’re talking about the Sadlers Wells Orchestra, chorus and main singers, it’s an entirely different thing. I’m not classically inclined at all. The conductor was a very famous Austrian, Wilhelm Towsky and he was the man running everything. The usual routine was, we would do a take and the leaders of the individual sections would come in and listen to it, then Wilhelm and the soloists would come in. As far as I was concerned it was fine; I could hear nothing wrong with it. They were quite well-rehearsed and had been doing it at the theatre every night, but Wilhelm sat there and said ‘can we hear that part again’ Then he’d say to me ‘Did you hear anything wrong in it? Is there a wrong note?‘ So I just said ‘no I’ve got perfect pitch – it sounds fine to me.’ And do you know, that taught me a lesson, because he believed me! He actually took my word for it. All the musicians who came in were looking at me at the end of the take to see if it was OK, and I realised you could get away with so much with bullshit. That was such an important lesson to me because it gave me the confidence that I could if necessary, bullshit my way through anything. Incidentally, there WAS nothing wrong with it because we did check it later. I was right. The feeling was good as once you allow musicians to start nit-picking then you start running into an awful lot of problems. Norman has said ‘just finish it off in your normal way’ and I finished the album.

Norman concentrated more on the theatrical side of things, leaving the pop side to me. When we moved to Manchester Square, we were all in the same area on the fourth floor. I was very friendly with Peter, Ron and George. Wally was older. I was very friendly with Ray Martin, but never understood why he and Norrie were working together. They were a partnership. Ray had a lot of hit records – Eddie Calvert was his – and the Ray Martin Orchestra was often on record labels, as was The Norrie Paramor Orchestra. They weren’t actually orchestras, just individual musicians.

Norman used Geoff Love, Tony Osborne, Brian Fahey, Michael Collins, who did the classical stuff, and John Barry. Even if the record came out as Tony Osborne and his Orchestra, or Geoff Love, it would be exactly the same musicians – just either Geoff or Tony’s arrangements. I think George used Johnny Spence. I used Johnny Keating, John Barry and Tony Osborne – they were all before we started working with groups. I used Johnny Keating with Adam, who got quite big-headed at one time. It seems to me that when an artist gets big-headed, they get rid of everybody who helped them on their way. But he couldn’t get rid of Evie Taylor, try and he might, and for whatever reason he didn’t get rid of me! I had had quite a lot of success, even though I hadn’t picked all his title., but you get used to a team and if it’s successful, why change it? So I was with Adam from What do you want until his very last record with EMI, Cowman milk your cow in 1967, (which we recorded in a small Soho studio because Adam was fed up with the large EMI studios. It didn’t work out!). We had 21 consecutive chart records.

In those days publishers were far more active than they are today. We used to have days when publishers would come round you had to listen to them play the piano and sing the song to you. Then it moved on to tapes, and with someone like Adam Faith you were never short of publishers. Freddie Poser of Mills Music used to come round, and the writer would come too.

I had a couple of hit records with Mitch Murray – he came in with his little ukulele and sang two or three songs which we recorded with Adam, and I’m Telling You Now, by Freddie & the Dreamers, got to No.1. in America. He wrote that with Peter Calendar.

Peter Callander and Mitch Murray

Mitch was with Feldmans and Ronnie Beck was a plugger in those days. He found Queen before anyone else and I think their first productions were with Feldmans; but he left the business for some reason. I think he had a drink problem. He was assistant to Ben Nisbet.

Ben Nisbet

A lot of the day was spent listening to music. When you heard something good, I tended to phone an arranger first to see what they could do with it. Then I’d call Adam to ask him to come and listen. They used to come into the office a lot more than they do now. Once you’d had some recording success your name got to be known throughout the business and suddenly you’d get artists thrown at you left right and centre. Ken Pitt brought me David Bowie with the demo of Space Oddity. I said ‘if this is a demo you don’t need to do much more than this, but I’d love to produce it.’ He was on Philips and I had ring L.G. Wood to get permission because I was contractually tied to EMI, and he refused permission. When the record came out, produced by Gus Dudgeon I think, it was basically the same as they’d played in my office. I knew Ken through Manfred Mann – they were mine. Ken brought them to me and I had then from 1963-1966. They came in and did one of my auditions and we sat in the studio restaurant afterwards and I said ‘yes, I’d like to sign you but I hate your name!’ It was The Huggs Blue Mann Five (actually it was ther Mann-Huggs Blues Brothers) So I said ‘if you accept my conditions I want to give you a recording contract. I want to call you Manfred Mann’ which obviously went down well with Manny, but Paul hated it, and the rest of the band weren’t too keen either. But I said ‘call yourselves Manfred Mann and you’ve got a contract‘ and they were so keen to get the contract that they agreed to nit. I think it was the one of the best things I ever did. Even the band (they had a big article in the News of the World after their success) said at the time ‘we hated the name John Burgess gave us and we hated the tracks he chose for us, but we have go to give him credit because they were all hits and he was right and we were wrong.’)

Why Should We Not was written by the boys, I think, and I thought it was a lovely track – I really did. This was followed by Cock-a-hoop but I suppose the reason they really hit was 5-4-3-2-1. They carried on for three years and then they had a falling out. They were a brilliant band in my opinion but Mann was a funny guy, really South African and very dogmatic. In the early days I used to be able to say ‘that’s it’ but as it got later and later they used to arguing more, and that’s when the hits stopped . The last one I had with them was Pretty Flamingo. The song was brought to me by Cyril Shane. He actually sang it to me in the office and persuaded me to do it. He was very persistent. He was a band singer with the Squadronaires in his youth and he thought the song was just right for them.

Then they asked me to go with them to Philips. Paul had said he didn’t want to stay with the band any more, he wanted to go solo. They still wanted me to look after them from the record point of view, but again EMI said ‘no’. Even though by then I had gone independent I couldn’t get out of the contract. EMI had employed the whole of AIR and that was it. The only one of us who could do things outside of the contract was Peter (Sullivan) who was working for Decca at the time – he was handling Tom, Engelbert and Lulu, and that was allowed. Anything else we produced had to go to EMI.

My first contract was for a total of £75,000 over five years. It was the most complicated contract you’ve ever seen in your life. By this time we were on royalties and it included George’s royalties as well. It all started from January 1965. Anything after that we would get points , but you had to be a mathematician to work them out. Nothing was simple with L.G. – and there was also 10 or 15% breakages (?). So everything worked out at 85% and we were basically screwed. The trouble with the four of us when we left EMI was that we were green. We were good at the A&R side but we weren’t very together far as contracts were concerned.

For example, I used to produce Peter & Gordon. Norman signed them but I produced them. World Without Love was a No.I. all around the world. Their royalty was a penny in England and a ha’penny in the rest of the world (a farthing each) and I always remember Peter saying to be, ‘God, I made £490 on that record! He was far more together. Gordon was a typical ‘muso’, but Peter was the guiding light. He has always been together. I forecast even in those days, that he would become a good producer because he always knew exactly what he wanted. They broke up eventually because Peter was becoming more and more ambitious. He didn’t like touring, so he joined Apple and produced James Taylor.

We (AIR) left EMI and started off in Baker Street, opposite the Apple shop, where we had a fourth floor office, George and Ron – and Judy was their secretary. There there was Peter (Sullivan) and myself – Carol Weston was our secretary and there was Shirley as well with George so that was seven of us. Carol had joined me when she was 17 and was in the typing pool at EMI, and she stayed with us. Norman was very upset when I left – he didn’t talk to me for a long while,. Norman was an expensive producer and when we went out on our own there was the financial consideration to be taken into account. It was mainly the groups that were making all the money at that time. There were very few big orchestral records or singers in the charts, so George said ‘I don’t want to ask Norman because he could be expensive.’ That move was the beginning of the end of house producers at record companies. When we left, Norrie took over A&R – it was the break-up of the EMI team and other people followed. We were the first independent production company.

I was probably the busiest of all of us. George had his Beatles stuff, John Barry carried on. I did Cliff Bennett, Climax Blues Band. Chris Thomas was our assistant But he mainly worked for George – in fact he produced some of the Beatles’ stuff under George. Peter concentrated on Tom Jones, Engelbert and Lulu. He had a couple of hits with Kathy Kirby and Jonathan King. Once we got the company started, it worked out that George was the chairman, Peter was recording his Decca artists, I was the accounts man and Ron was in charge of publishing. We’d started our own publishing company and incidentally, signed Elton John. Dick James screwed us out of Elton as he had all the money which we didn’t. We had The Hollies signed to us for publishing and Elton was signed to the Hollies’ company, so it did all come under Ron Richards.

When the five-year contract was up, we did a second deal with L.G. Wood which was much better. It was also for five years and was all down to new material. We’d covered the first contract within a year and a half, so we were in credit. The second contract was much larger. In total we were with EMI for a total of eight years on an independent basis. We were screwed on the first one and, I suppose, made up for it on the second one. I think we had to offer the product to EMI first and then we could take it somewhere else. Everything we took to them they were turning down….so it was awkward and it wasn’t working and we were as pleased to get out of that contract as they probably were. We did two years and got paid for three. We were the only true independent for a few years and then we sold out to Chrysalis, which was the most stupid thing we did in our whole life. The reason we sold out was that we’d had three offers to buy us. The one was from Gordon Mills at MAM. We’d been going for under year under our first contract with EMI and he offered £2million. Ron Richard negotiated the deal, we all agreed on it and went down to Gordon’s big house in Weybridge, had a lovely dinner, shook hands on the deal. We were going to be tied to the contract for ten years with fantastic salaries. He got Peter (Sullivan) whom he wanted for all artists, and he got George. He went to his board of directors – MAM was a public company – and they disagreed. They didn’t pull out, but came back to us and offered the same amount of money, but most to in over-valued shares and a small amount of cash, and we rejected it.

Gordon Mills’ house in Weybridge.

The next person to want to take us over was Dick James. He offered us a fortune. A takeover situation disrupts your whole life for months on end, especially mine because I was the admin guy and had all the accountants coming to see me and asking for details, I think my career as a producer started to go down then. The others were tied up with their artists, Ron had a nervous breakdown after the Gordon Mills episode and he left. He sold his shares to Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, and George had some. So when the Chrysalis deal came along, they bought George, Peter and my shares, and Cook and Greenaway’s. Before that Dick had offered us this deal. Dick and George had been good friends. Dick was originally a singer and George had produced his Robin Hood record.

No producer credit!

George regretted not having a piece of the publishing. I did too. Chris Wright made us an offer which finally went through and I think we joined them in 1974. If we had to get into bed with someone, they were as good as any. They made no demands on us. We basically ran the company exactly as we wanted – I never had to go to Chris or Terry (Ellis) for permission to do what I wanted. I was by then managing director, running the studios at Oxford Circus and still carrying on my few productions roles.

AIR was on the top floor to the best of my recollection.

Then I started up my own management company – AIR Management. I had all the studio engineers and producers – John Kelly, Geoff Emetic, Steve Nye and George – very much an innovation at the time. I was effectively selling our engineers, charging a little excess for them in the studio. minus a little for AIR. And I was still doing a little production work myself. I signed David Dundas, Pipkins. We started a studio in Montserrat which I ran – to do it from London was not the easiest of things. Staffing it was quite a problem. I could get staff to go out there for three to six months, but it was never easy. For engineers it was quite a boring place to record – different if you’re on holiday!

AIR Studios, Montserrat, before and after the volcano

The last production I ever did was Softly Whispering I Love You by The Congregations, written by Cook and Greenaway. I had recorded the track with a singer called Romy Card (I can find no verification of this – anyone know?), but she couldn’t really sing it. So I kept the track and worked on it for about a year. I got Alan Parker to come in on guitar, a school choir of about 60 and it came out about a year later. I got in to a lot of trouble with it because the school teacher threatened to sue EMI and me, for taking advantage of 60 children. He said than even though we’d paid him a fee. it wasn’t enough. At that time nobody knew it was going to be a hit record – you pay a fee and that’s it. He got himself on television. I watching the early evening news one day and he was being interviewed, saying that this producer John Burgess really cheated us.

One person I felt should have been one of the biggest singer/songwriters was Roger Cook. did about eight albums with him on AIR and we had two hit singles – both in Sweden! This was pre Blue Mink. I remember Roger bringing me Melting Pot and playing it for me. I said I thought it was a good song but not really him. He got upset and said ‘it’s a bloody marvellous song,’ but I didn’t think it was him and so I wouldn’t do it. He stormed off and did it with Blue Mink and it went to number one! I think, even now, if I’d done it with him, it wouldn’t have been a hit. It had to have that black and white dynamic, and it worked. I’ve never heard a solo cover of it. But he, to me, was probably the most talented guy I’ve ever handled. Now he’s doing well in Nashville.

Roger Greenaway & Roger Cook, or David & Jonathan

George originally produced him as David & Jonathan. He, Roger and Tony Burrows were in a backing group (The Kestrels) that I used with Adam Faith in the 1950’s, They were a talented lot. Cooky had a great voice and was a very talented songwriter. EMI did nothing with his albums, but contractually I couldn’t take them anywhere else. In those days it was ‘if we don’t like it we’ll keep it’, or ‘we’ll put it out but we won’t do anything with it.’ whereas if I could have got him free from EMI I’m sure that he would have been a hit solo artists as well. It’s a tragedy that it didn’t happen. He’s a far better songwriter than a lot of Americans who have had success. But there you go – that’s life.

Even though we made a big mistake by going to Chrysalis and not getting nearly as much money as we should have done, they were good partners, and they left us alone. We left Oxford Circus in 1991 and found a new site in Hampstead, and then started spending millions of pounds. I said to George ‘I don’t think we should start another studio – I think it’s the wrong move.’ But he thought we should carry on and find another site, so Dave Harris found Lyndhurst Hall. It was a church that was protected. When you’re trying to build a studio in a place like a church you don’t know what’s beneath the walls or ceiling. The original budget was about £10M, but we went way over that. I think it eventually cost £16.5M and that’s when Chris (Wright) started getting awkward. Another partner had been brought in and I think that pissed George off. George found another partner, the Japanese firm Pioneer. The studio site was owned jointly by Chrysalis and Pioneer and George got Chrysalis interested in s trip to Japan. They were big George Martin fans and put in 50%. Chris never rewarded George for that; Pioneer put in £8M for a studio that didn’t start earning money until the end of 1994. It half opened in 1993. I left at the end of 1993 and I think it took another year for one of the studios to be completed. It’s going well now, but only because they’ve had to write off a lot of the costs. I think they had to write off about £11M so they had a £5M debt. I think Chris got very worried during that period because Chrysalis wasn’t doing very well either and this was probably the reason he had to sell the Chrysalis label to EMI. But George always say ‘yes’ to everything he’s asked to do. I say to him ‘George, you’re out of your mind’ but the deal he got with them is terrible. George wouldn’t let me do the deal. I don’t like Chris Wright and I’d love to have screwed as much as I possibly could out of him, but George wanted to do it himself. To have him on their Board of Directors is such a big thing. I could have got him on the board at WEA and EMI I’m sure would have been delighted to have him around. But for some reason he always downgrades his own worth – it’s a shame.

Lyndhurst Studios, inside and out!

When Chrysalis bought us it included all the Beatles’ (royalty) income except for Yellow Submarine for which George did the soundtrack. I think it took Chrysalis about four years to accept that and pay him back his money – he was very upset. I think he felt he’d been done once by EMI , not getting any Beatles royalties, and suddenly during all the second success he wasn’t getting anything out of that either, because it was part of what we sold. The only time that George has ever received royalties was when I went in and negotiated with Rupert (Perry, President of EMI UK & Ireland at the time) Rupert was bit loath to do it, because he said ‘well, we’re already paying Chrysalis’. The deal was that George wouldn’t get paid on the Chrysalis titles (i.e. Beatles’ releases post the formation of AIR) he would get paid on everything else, going back to record one. Rupert was lovely to deal with because he was fair. Chrysalis made millions out of The Beatles because the royalty payments used to come to me at AIR, being the administrator, and I would put them into the AIR bank account, so I knew exactly how much was coming in every quarter.

l/r: Rupert Perry, Neil Aspinall, Martin Benge, George Martin

Before we sold AIR we had a relationship with EMI whereby our accountant would ring their royalty department and say ‘We’re a bit short of money- can you send us £50,000 and it would be there within two days. When we sold to Chrysalis, myself and Chrysalis MD Terry Connolly went to see L.G. Wood and Terry said ‘we’ve been looking at the books since we bought AIR and we feel you owe us an awful lot of money in Beatles royalties.‘ Two days later I received a cheque for just under £500,000 from L.G. saying ‘this in on account’, because Terry Connolly was going to send in the auditors. From then on the royalties were rolling in from EMI to Chrysalis but George was getting nothing. He would see the cheques rolling in – and we’re talking about a lot of money. That cheque should have been George’s,. or it should have been AIR’s. We had an accountant whose wife was Terry Ellis’s secretary so he knew the situation exactly. We found out later that he (Terry Connolly – confusing!) had been offered a job by Chris Wright if he got the sale to go through. As it turned out, he didn’t get the job.

I’ve often asked George if he feels a little bit bitter seeing all this money going to Chrysalis, but he says ‘no, what I’ve never had I’ve never missed,’ He made a lot of money from all the other artists he handled. He wrote to Colin Southgate to say he never wanted to produce anything for Capitol Records in America. I think they had offended him for some reason. They never realised his part in The Beatles. Didn’t they turn down the first two Beatles’ releases?

The parts of my career that I remember with the most affection are from when I joined Norman Newell to to the time we (the producers) started talking of selling out. Peter Sullivan was the main pusher because he was working with Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck – people with a lot of money. He even bought a Rolls Royce; he was trying to live to their standard and not earning anything like what they were and was getting himself into debt. The only way he could get money was to sell his shares. Ron Richards was for it too originally. When it came down to it, I didn’t want to sell at all. When that went to Chrysalis, Chris Wright said ‘well, you own 25% of AIR. We’ve bought you but we’d like to swap your shares for Chrysalis shares’ but I said I’d rather keep the AIR shares. It was an emotional thing; it was something we’d built up ourselves, and even though we’re comfortable; I’m comfortable, George is a millionaire, we shouldn’t have done it. We lost an awful lot of money out of it because The Beatles’ royalties belonged to AIR, which meant I owned 25% of them. From 1958-1972-3 I was getting £1,500 a year from L.G.Wood, and George was on £3,000 a year – they were fantastic years. I moved from Hayes to Castle Street, to Princess House, back to Castle Street, to Manchester Square, to Baker Street, to Park Street, to Stratford Place, to the studios at Hampstead. The first half was by far the most fun.

I don’t play an active part in the music business today. I’ve managed George for about 30 years but as he’s not doing anything there’s no point in negotiating fees for television as they’re largely standard..same with radio. George & I still have a partnership with Montserrat and we talk a lot about that. I keep in touch with Steve Shrimpton; we got friendly when he managed Paul McCartney. I haven’t been to Chrysalis since the day I left but they still send me tapes!

There the interview , conducted on January 3, 2006, concluded. Neither John or Sir George are around to comment on the last 20 years but to conclude, you may be interested to hear John’s views of the music scene at the turn of the century….so…some of his predictions are spot on!

For pleasure I play Celine Dion, The Corrs. The A&R people are looking for young acts. I like The Lighthouse Family, REM. All Saints are quite good but I don’t think they’ll last. I like the Spice Girls; I think theyr’e very poppy and they’re going to have a short life – won’t be around in ten years’ time.

The 50’s and 60’s and some of the 70’s were original. Nowadays it isn’t original – it’s based on someone else. Boyzone’s record is a great song, but I don’t think they’re going to be around for long. But that’s the pop business. I don’t think the teenage market keeps the business alive – it’s the middle market that keeps it alive. They’re still buying Elton John stuff from 10 years ago. I don’t think the music business will last in to the 2000’s. Steve (Shrimpton) told me WEA is having a terrible year. Phil Collins isn’t selling any records and other top names aren’t selling. Enormous amounts of money went into R.E.M. and nothing is selling. They (WEA) think they’ll have a good Christmas. I think the girl from M People is amazing….there are some acts around…..

And there we petered out……

Text ©David Hughes, 2023. Illustrations gleaned from Safari search and just to illustrate and break up the text.

A Personal History of the British Record Business 91 – Walter J. (Wally) Ridley Pt.2

We left Wally enlightening us on the very early days of song plugging and being his father’s piano salesman by playing the instrument in his shop. This photo is pretty much how he looked when I interviewed him

Where are we now…in the late 20’s?

I was 15 years of age – 1928. And all these people used to come in for me to play and teach them songs. Sam Browne used to come in and say ‘go through these with me Wally please‘ and he would bring me five or six songs and I would go through them with him – virtually teach them to him.But he had a wonderful ear, Sammy. Never had a lesson in his life but he had a great ear. He’d leave and go to Decca or HMV or wherever, and record the songs I’d taught him just half an hour earlier, pick up his money – 25 shillings (£1.15) a song, and walk out. But he had a terrible weakness in that he couldn’t stop gambling. A lovely man and a very very good singer, but a foolish stupid gambler …ended his life. A talented man, he worked with Ambrose; worked with the best

Anyway, he recorded hundreds and hundreds of songs. A little later Al Bowlly came in and I’d play piano for him. The last live performance Al ever did, I took him there, played for him, took him back to London and a bomb came over that night and killed him (April 1941). He still owes me for the gig!!

Al Bowlly

But for someone like Al Bowlly, was his record company suggesting songs he might want to sing and then you were playing them for him so he could decide whether or not liked them?

No – he didn’t make any decisions – he was told what to sing.

(Virtually all these interviews were conducted with the aid of Mini-Disc, but Wally’s preceded that technology and I used a mini-tape recorder, designed for journalists, I guess. So right here, the tape ran out, and by the time I’d replaced it, we’d moved on....)

What I was trying to make a point about with you, because I think it is important to know about gramophones, what it was all about, and the beginning of recordings. In this country it was HMV and its subsidiaries. It was an engineering business and all the people employed were engineers.

I feel I know the Fred Gaisberg story reasonable well, and he was a technician, wasn’t he?

Yes, they all were. None of them understood anything about songs or the signing or rejection of talent.

They were just finding people to test out their technology?

All they were doing was, they were providing another source of exposure for artists. Because they thought all people making records were earning a fortune. They weren’t – all the talent we had were on a penny (1d) a record. What they made their money from was live performance. Radio playing their records made them popular and they were then drawn into the theatre or a musical or whatever. That’s what it was all about, but of course you didn’t tell the artists that! Another thing I didn’t tell them was that HMV was a tied dealership and could not sell more than 240,000 records – that was it.

( While I knew about HMV dealerships – as the most prestigious label in the country, it chose to appoint its own exclusive dealers who could not sell records from any other label . It took Sir Joseph Lockwood in the 1950’s to put a stop to it, I’m not sure where the 240,000 maximum came from)

There were a few artists who caused a rumpus when they found out, weren’t there?

Well, it cost me Max Bygraves and Frankie Vaughan

So…go back to Feldman’s

When I was at Feldman’s what I was doing was having the very very first copies of sheet music sent to this country from all the Warner Brothers’ catalogues in America. So the first person in Britain to see them was me. I was seeing the notes, not playing the record. I learned very quickly. After I’d been at Feldmans for a few months I learned that no two artists sing in the same key, so I learned to transpose every song that ever came. The first thing I did when a new song came in was to take it upstairs, play it and then play it in all the other keys, so that whenever anyone came in I could play it in the key they wanted. That’s why everyone came to me – all the great stars of those days wanted me to play piano for them because I could do it in their key- no one else at Feldmans could do that.

Who were the big competitors on the publishing side at that time?

Chappells were in a class of their own because they were basically an offshoot of the American company, which had all the Jerome Kern songs, all Cole Porter, all Irving Berlin – they had pretty much everything that came from America.

Publishing seemed to be dominated by American composers. Did we have anything of our own?

We had a different kind of composer in this country. In my very beginnings I worked with people who came from Music Halls. The very first song I ever wrote, I worked with a man called Harry Castling. Harry was a famous old writer for music halls. He wrote “Just Like the Ivy”, “The Old Garden Wall” and numerous others. I used to look after him and a made sure he had some food because he never had any money. Do you know how much Feldman paid for songs? He was buying them for a fiver !

“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” – five pounds!

So whoever wrote the song never got anything again?

When Jack Judge was a very sick old man, Feldman in his great generosity gave him a pension of twenty shillings a week. He never forgot it – he told everybody as if he (Feldman) was a great benefactor!

But even then there was a royalty system for records, wasn’t there?

That’s when the royalty system began to operate. I have to tell you that in publishing – and I’m not going to name names here – I can tell you there are rich men in America who never paid their writers anything, and they should have done. I knew one man who was selling copyrights tried to get me at it and I wouldn’t play ball. Eventually it got to Sir Joseph Lockwood and he bought the man’s catalogue for a million pounds. I have to tell you it’s not worth £100,000 but this gentleman was very shrewd, Jewish, an old New Yorker, and he wined and dined (Sir Joseph) and sent him presents. This is what was going on in the music business – they were all at it. Francis Day & Hunter just used to pay a fee. It was only when we moved away from that old school and the Performing Rights Society was formed that things started to change. I knew all of these old timers at the very end of their working life – they wrote wonderful songs.

I’m surprised that even in those days it didn’t become a press scandal if songs were so popular yet the people who wrote them were paid so little.

To start with, they weren’t educated people until you got to Noel Gay. Noel was the very first educated man, in that sense. He understood about it and very quickly made sure he kept his copyrights and became his own publisher . Before him the writer had no power; the writer was in the hands of of whoever took your song to, say, Florrie Forde and said “Florrie, I’ve got this song – what do you think?” She would agree to sing it and you would hope that something might happen. But in the meantime you would also go to a publisher for songs….but it still was a wonderful business!

You had been in the publishing business for about 20 years then?

I was in the publishing business from the age of 15. That was 1928 when I started at Feldmans and I was there for nine months. I’d been playing for everybody and nobody paid me anything – no artist ever paid me to teach them. And was sending music out, piles of music. We were paying the postage and everything. Someone would write in from Liverpool where they were playing and ask for a song, and we would send it out, all for nothing. I’d been brought up in my father’s business where we bought something for £15 , sell it for £20 and make a fiver. So I couldn’t work this out. I couldn’t understand how we could keep this building, my salary and that of the other six or seven people..I couldn’t work it out at all. So I went upstairs to the manager of the company, a man called Felix Slavin (I can find no reference to him anywhere) , a dour Scot, actually a delightful man, but like all at that time, very stern. I said ‘can you spare me a minute’ ‘Yes, what do you want?’ I said ‘well, I’ve been here nine months you see and all I do is service everybody. We send out all this music and we don’t get any money. Where does the money some from?’ And he roared with laughter. He sent for the books, two enormous great volumes, and showed me where the money was made, and it was all from sheet music. Nothing else. There really wasn’t anything other than sheet music. There were no record sales, no performance fees. And I’ll tell you a funny story. One day this fella came into the shop and said to Bertie Hyams who was looking after the band and orchestral music, ‘have you got any new pieces?’ And he said ‘I don’t know, I’ll have a look‘. So he goes up on the shelves and says ‘here, take this, here, take that.’ About three Sundays later Grand Hotel (a BBC Light Programme Sunday evening show) played it and the following day the West End was going absolutely berserk… who owns it?, where can I buy it?. We owned it and didn’t know we did. It was on the shelf. We sold a million copies at half a crown a copy. The normal price for sheet music was sixpence. That taught me the value of publishing which I have never forgotten. (Sadly, the full title of this piece is indecipherable on the Mini Disc recording – the second word is Serenade and from the years that Grand Hotel was broadcast I’m guessing this would have been in the mid-late 1940’s)

I tried to tell Mr Len Wood (we’re jumping ahead here, but I did warn you in Part One!) but he didn’t understand what the hell I was talking about. He was a nice man but he should have been behind the counter of a sweet shop. He cost us (EMI) millions and millions – he cost us the rights of The Beatles.

You mean not understanding the value of publishing?

He and Dickie Dawes spent six months talking with Dick James, who owned their copyrights as the publisher, about taking over The Beatles’ publishing. They agreed the deal. Dick James came into the office – I saw him on my way up – to sign the contract. Dickie Dawes and Len Wood said ‘we think it’s too much – we think it’s £35,000 too much.‘ Now Dick James told me that himself. He came out and said ‘gentlemen, we’ve discussed this for six months and we’ve agreed a deal and I came to sign the contract. What do you mean it’s £35,000 too much? Now are you going to sign the contract or not?‘ And he walked out. We’ve just rented those copyrights from Michael Jackson …he lost them for £35,000!!

When you were in publishing, were any of the record companies involved in publishing or were they quite separate companies?

You see once more we come back to the fact that records was an engineering job. We had a Factory and we were making the machinery, the record players – that was our business you see. There was only one man, I promise you, who understood anything about that situation and he was a man called Brenchley Mittell. Brenchley Mittell was an engineer by training, and when I was approached by David Bicknell to join the company (EMI), Brenchley had to do all the paperwork, the agreements and all that stuff. He was in charge of all the people concerned with making records. Everybody in the act of making was his direct concern. The factory was also his concern. If he said he could only make so many (of a particular) title and someone would have to suffer..that was his job. George Martin called him the little Brigadier, but really George didn’t know Mittell at all and didn’t understand anything about it. I can tell tell you that he was a very very clever darling man. He was a Quaker. David Bicknell was a very nice polite man, but he knew nothing about the business, especially the pop side. I think the background was that his father had a lot of money in the company and got him into it. So he said to me ‘would you like to do this job?’ and I said ‘well, the challenge interests me because what I’ve really been doing since I was a little boy at Feldmans is placing the right songs with the right artists‘ So he gave me £750 a year when I started at HMV. I must haver been bloody mad as I’d just finished a film and was earning £125 a week. But then it was only part of what I was doing in life. Basically I was a songwriter. I created Vera Lynn and did all the wartime (radio) programmes with her after the nine-o-clock news. I created Educating Archie which was my conception, and I created Donald Peers

Vera Lynn, Donald Peers, Peter Brough and Archie Andrews…what a team!

At this point I said “now stop there”, and so we shall! The next episode elaborates on Educating Archie and Vera Lynn and takes a further swipe at l.G. Wood

Text ©David Hughes 2021, Illustrations gathered from Google Search just to break up the text.

A Personal History of the British Record Business 75 – Tony Hall, Pt. 2.

 

 

 

 

 

We left Tony as he was about to join Decca Records, at the time when it was indisputably the No.1. record company in Britain, largely because of its foresight not only on the new 45rpm and LP formats, but on the growing importance of American music. And it still had the Capitol Records licence for the UK

What did the job Product Manager mean in those days?

I was dealing with American product, Nat”King’Cole and all that sort of stuff. Then Decca lost Capitol and as a poor substitute I was given the Coral label, and then Brunswick to look after. It  included a bit of promotion, but eventually they allowed me to produce jazz records for the Tempo label. The label existed and had a few traditional jazz things by overseas artists and maybe some English stuff, but then I plunged full time into my modern jazz stuff and recorded all kinds of people I was lucky enough to be able to give work to at the Flamingo. A lot of them were druggies and things, but the music they were making was fantastic – it was that particular era. Ironically I think I must have produced about a dozen, maybe fifteen – I don’t know, I’ve lost count – albums for Tempo. Now they’re changing hand at between £600 to £1000 a piece! That product is now equated in some respectable circles as the UK equivalent of Blue Note, which is the highest honour for me. I was offered a job to go and work for Alfred Lyon. I was like Blue Note’s man in London and Alfred Lyon was my hero. I met him several times and eventually he offered me a job via Art Blakey to go and be his assistant in A&R, which would have been a fantastic job – that would have been at the end of the 1950’s. I did one (Blue Note) album at Decca at West Hampstead on a Saturday afternoon. We bunged the caretaker a fiver to go to the pub for the afternoon and we got in Donald Byrd and Arthur Taylor and put them with Dizzy Reece and Tubby Hayes and did a fantastic albums in about five hours, which was released on Blue Note. It was for Blue Note! It’s called Blues in Trinity and it’s another of the things I’m very proud of. I don’t think it sold, but it’s great music.

I got married for the first time and was getting on a bit (!!). I’d been doing The Flamingo every weekend during this period as well,  but eventually decided to give it up. I never got paid a penny for anything I produced – no royalty, no nothing and the musicians got about £25 if they were lucky. Decca just patted my on the head to keep me quiet so I’d do my day job better. They never spent any money on marketing or distribution. But it was a very important period in my life and I thoroughly enjoyed most of it.

Dealing with Coral and Brunswick – what do you remember?

I remember Brenda Lee coming over with her mother and the manager. I’ve only got one anecdote about Buddy Holly. One of his front teeth fell out before a concert at the Elephant and Castle and we had to get some chewing gum to fill up the gap. I’m embarrassed to say that’s virtually my only memory. Norman Petty did have the coldest wettest handshake I’ve ever know in my life!

Really my ears and soul were totally into jazz – it was just a question of doing the day job as best I could. But then one thing led to another and eventually I was made Promotion Manager for the Decca group at the age of 31. I was the youngest promotion man in the business and I became very respectable from that day on! I was very proud of it, to be the youngest, now you have kids of 18. The title was probably Exploitation Manager, horrible word. Interesting thing about the business in the Fifties was the way in which when you had a big hit song in America, unless it was by a famous artist, invariably you’d have covers by well-known British artists with outlets on TV, and the publishers would play both ends against the middle, pay lip service to America but desperately try and get the song covered here in England. I had one embarrassing situation. The song Sixteen Tons, a huge American hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Coral had a guy called Don Cornell (who’d had a hit called Take my Hand) and he covered it, and it was a good presentable cover version. Smart-arse TH here thought ‘well, I’m a good promotion man; I’ll get my record played on the radio and give Tennessee Ernie Ford a fight. I didn’t get a single play on Don Cornell because the other one just swept everything. And that was the first release on Capitol through EMI!

Another joke I remember on not getting any airplay. On Tempo, I thought I’d be clever and make a couple of nice melodic three-minute things with Ronnie Scott and Jimmy Deuchar and some of the jazz guys. I think one song was called I’ll take romance and the B-side was Speak Low. two good melodic songs and I thought, ‘well, with my promotional know-how I’m sure I’ll be able to get some airplay and maybe introduce people to the albums. Not a single play! – which left me with egg on my face and two nice records.

I used to go through the Radio Times and look through every programme of any description that could be plugged and I would try and invent excuses to get a record on. I’d try and plug both producers and presenters, but presenters were much more important in those days. The stars DJ’s of that period were people like Sam Costa. I remember one of the Decca promotion people was Jackie Buckland, the girl who eventually married Stan Tracey and managed him. She was a tough cookie, started on the switchboard at Decca. Ted Lewis thought she had something and she became promotion.

 

Sam Costa used to get so drunk and would grope her in the taxi afterwards; he would reduce her to tears. He was a nasty guy and would phone with huge lists he wanted of classical LP’s in return for one play on a single. All sorts of weird DJ’s. I remember the editor of the Daily Sketch, Scottish gentleman – if it wasn’t Keir Robertson it was somebody Robertson (it was Keir Robertson!) ; all these strange people had shows on the Light Programme. Then you had the producers. There were three incredible ladies: Esther Farmer, Isabel Burdett and Pat Osborne, who were all characters. Pat was married to an engineer at Decca, who got lumbered with most of the Tempo records. He hated jazz and was so difficult to work with. Half my energies went on fighting the engineer before we could ever get down to creating music. Just being difficult, smoking a pipe and just being bloody minded. “I don’t want to fucking do this anyway.” But Pat Osborne – lots of verbals but all three would help you if you were in trouble with a record and they liked you. Esther Farmer, a real little spinster. I used to take her to lunch and she’d have a dog at home and she’d insist on going to a serious restaurant like the Caprice or Savoy and her doggybag would be there and she’d take home the meal! Isabel Burdett was a real sweetie and she loved to giggle and flirt, touch kneesies under the table. You could go to them for help and they would if they could. It was hard going at times, having to put up with the doggybag suff and playing kneesies with Isabel but it was always fun. Then there was Jack Dabbs, the producer who hit the headlines with a holiday in Cyprus with Dot Squires. All sorts of weird people.

Who were your promotion competitors?

Jimmy Henney and Kay O’Dwyer were in publishing and I was in records. Jimmy was a very handsome guy and very Mr. Showbiz, loved the glamour of the business and fitted it very well, and it served him well because he used to get great covers (cover versions of American hits by British singers). The big love of his life was an actress – I can’t remember her name – there was a very big serious romance.

(From this photo found via Google, I’m assuming the much married actress was Christine Norden).

 

I can remember taking Alma Cogan home after one of the Jimmy Henney parties and having a snog on the doorstep! She was wonderful. I went with Jackie Collins for about three years; she graced the covers of several Tempo albums, photographs by David Redfern. She helped sell the albums – these particular ones were compilations. I also had a passionate and lengthy affair with Barbara Lyon from Life with the Lyons. I got blocked by Bill Townsley at Decca because he thought that because I was going with her I was plugging her record, which I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing because it wasn’t ethical and I was as very ethical guy.

Townsley was regrettably my boss at Decca. My name for him was Dr. No. The classic Townsley thing was in the early 60’s. Motown were shopping for their own label here in the UK because their product had been coming out through London American. I loved Motown’s music and went out of my way to meet Esther Edwards and the Gordy people who were over here and I got on really well with Esther. She knew I was with Decca and I said “listen, if you come with Decca, I’ll make sure I’m responsible for your product and I’ll make sure it’s well looked after.”

Esther Gordy Edwards

So I then went into Sir Edward Lewis and said “Sir Edward, if you can work out the business side, I’ve got the Motown catalogue for you.” He called Townsley in and said “Townsley, what do you think?’ “Oh, take it from me, Sir Edward, Motown will never mean anything here – they’ll never sell records.” You can imagine how I felt. I thought ‘well, fuck you.’ He was so negative about everything. He was really Sir Edward’;s doormat. I hate the speak ill of the dead but…a very negative man. This would have been after Oriole and before EMI. It was typical of Townsley’s attitude to everything.

Ironically, eventually I went to Detroit. Decca finally allowed me to go to America in 1965 for the first time and I went down to Nashville, then up to New York and I managed to wangle a trip to Detroit, met up with Berry Gordy himself and went to some Motown sessions. I was doing a Record Mirror column in those days and ended up being presented with the key of the door to Detroit by Gordy. I had loads of pictures and went to a Holland Dozier Holland session. Gordy was knocked out by Tom Jones and said “Listen, when you get back, tell your boss to send Tom Jones here and we’ll make an album with him here. It’ll open him right up for the States and to the black audience.”

Went back – Townsley again, I think!

I think I had that job for about seven years and left in 1967.

And we will leave the story there but before we get to the THE days, he does talk more about TV, radio, jazz and compering.

As with the 74 earlier episodes of these interviews, if you have any questions, can add any information, or just have a view, PLEASe either add it to the Word Press site, or email me at dhvinyl@gmail,com.

Text ©David Hughes 2019, Illustration as always are just to bring the extra dimension to the text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Personal History of the British Music Industry 107 – Derek Everett

Derek Everett is another of those long-serving vital industry folk who somehow managed to avoid all the cameras – or maybe they avoided him. So, if you know or worked with him, before you start reading his story, which is littered with household names, do see if you have any photograph of him to add to the preface!

I was an apprentice in the printing trade and after I’d completed my National Service there was still five years left of the apprenticeship. I thought ‘I can’t do that on thirty bob a week – I want to get into the music business.‘ I worked for GEC for a couple of years checking invoices, but was going into every office in Denmark Street and constantly writing to record companies. Eventually I got a reply from L.G. Wood at EMI – would I make an appointment to see him? Eventually I got an appointment to see him in Great Castle Street. What they wanted was someone to print record labels on a hand printing machine. It was the start of the white label DJ copies on 45’s. They had some on 78’s but never used them. With purchase tax at the time, you could press 99 copies of a record before you had to pay tax. So the record companies figured they could use those 99 copies for promotion, but it wasn’t cost effective to print labels just for 99 copies. In my CV, such as it was, I had two years apprenticeship in print as a compositor. LG asked ‘can you do this?’. ‘Yes of course I can.’ He showed me a leaflet showing the Adarna print machine, a little hand press where you set the copy, stick it on the plate and just press the paper up into it.’Yes, I can work one of these’

L.G. Wood (left)

He said ‘well, if I make an appointment, you can go and buy one of those. Oh, and are you interested in music? One question – have you heard of Bonny Lou”?

Yes, I said, she an American kind of country singer – No. 29 in the charts.’ He went ‘you’ve got the job old chap. Incidentally, how did you know that?’ I said ‘I was looking at the magazines in your office before I came in – I just happened to notice it.‘ ‘Very very good’ he said.

So I joined the Sales Promotion Department under John Whittle

He was classical, wasn’t he?

Not at that time – he went into classical afterwards. There was myself, Ronnie Bell, John Burgess and Robert Dockerell. Marketing didn’t exist – this department was probably the start of marketing. We talked through the issues with the salesmen, but my job was to print those bloody labels! I was 20. I learned the politics. You can only print one label at a time. Ray Martin, one of the record producers, said to me one day ‘do you fancy some lunch?’. I thought ‘what’s all this about?’ He said ‘these labels that you print – you couldn’t do mine first, could you?’ I said I thought I could but then they were all at it! There were about six releases a week, so the first person to get the promotion labels printed would be first to start promoting the records. I then got moved into the labels. The first one was MGM where Ronnie Bell was the so-called manager. In 1954-56 EMI was losing RCA and American Columbia (as licensed labels) It was the early funding days of Capitol, and they were looking for more American labels. The first, apart from MGM, was Roulette, where they picked up on Frankie Lymon and released the label through Columbia, Paul Anka from ABC Paramount went through Columbia, and Mercury was set up separately and had its own label.

Ronnie Bell with Connie Francis.

That must have been a big panic time for EMI, losing RCA to its great rival Decca

Particularly as Presley was just breaking. I put together that 10″ Elvis LP – never kept a copy of it. I remember getting ridiculed by the old blokes’ It was compiled here – it had that oblong HMV block at the top.

There were two separate companies in the old Castle Street days. L.G. Wood did the Columbia bit and George Marks was head of HMV, and HMV were like The Untouchables. You couldn’t sell their records in your store unless you had a dealership.

Wally Ridley tells that tale against the company – how he lost Max Bygraves and Frankie Vaughan because of the restricted dealership.

Rock and roll was the big change. We were coming out of the Ruby Murrays, Tony Brents Ronnie Hiltons . Remember Ronnie Harris?

Pete King left Ronnie Scott’s band and went into management. He managed Wee Willie Harris – his wife used to colour Willie’s hair – and we used to do these Sunday concerts at Lewisham Hippodrome or wherever, and there would be a headline like Cliff Richard and the Shadows or Marty Wilde, and the other half of the show would be Wee Willie Harris, Tony Crombie & the Rockets, maybe The Most Brothers – all those aspiring English no-hope rockers. Ronnie Harris used to do some of those as well. The Trocadero at Elephant and Castle was an evil place to play.

Trocadero Elephant & Castle

There were two elements in the crowd – the girls screaming their heads off and the boys doing the total-anti thing, lobbing things at the stage. Ronnie Harris’s big hit was The Story of Tina (well it got to number 12 and was in the chart for three weeks in 1954!). He was a tallish guy with a light Nat ‘King’ Cole type voice, and someone shouted ‘he’s a poof’ and then everyone was shouting it. He then committed professional suicide, stopped singing the song and went “oh, shut up”. The was it. The place erupted and he left the stage with fruit and all sorts being lobbed at him. I thought ‘yes, make records, get them played on the radio, but don’t appear on rock’n’roll package shows, because they’ve come to see Cliff or Marty, and didn’t want this guy singing ballads!’

There was that whole era – Edna Savage, Michael Holliday, then the rock things with American stuff coming in, Paul Anka, Frankie Lymon. The British A&R guys didn’t want to know – they were more interested in ripping off the songs. Ronnie Hilton ripped of almost every Perry Como song.

Wally says he only did it once

I helped Ronnie, and about that time we moved to Manchester Square. Top Rank came into the business and were competing for these American things. There were always whispers that they were on dodgy ground. The Rank hierarchy weren’t really interested in having a record company – they were paying exorbitant fees for American product. EMI never did – “we are EMI – you must be with us, on 3% or 5% or whatever – no advance.’ If you’ve got the power, use it.

\Four major companies and now a new independent trying to get in

I went in one day and somebody said ‘we’ve taken over Rank and we want you to look after it. Go round to their offices at the top end of Oxford Street and see what you can find. You might not find anyone very co-operative as they’ve all been sacked’ I went up there and they had taken everything, lots of empty space. There’d been a fire and they’d taken all their record players with them. There was one guy there, who said ‘it’s all yours mate, if you want it, take it away.’ There were boxes and papers and all sorts. They had had hits – Craig Douglas, John Leyton, Freddie Cannon. We inherited all that. Rank apparently just wanted shot of it. Reportedly they lost a million quid. That’s when I first met an American lawyer, Paul Marshall. He was involved with some of the labels over there, and saw an opportunity to get involved with EMI.

We set up an American office, Transglobal, when Roland Rennie, who was L.G.Wood’s assistant, was sent to New York to put this thing together with Paul Marshall. The office was created so we could be first there to get American masters. The idea was to kill London Records. That was when the Stateside label was set up, to put together all these bits, like Swan, and quite a few of those American labels were inherited from Rank. So I was appointed manager of all that.

(Sir Joseph) Lockwood was in by then. I’m very anti Lockwood, but every week one of my tasks was to analyse the American and British charts, and if we didn’t have six at the top in America, why? And we had to report on the records that weren’t ours. I had to liaise with Roland in New York. Paul Marshall was a rough neck, but a suave American lawyer.

(Paul Marshall died on May 10, 2012 in Florida)

What got you excited before Motown?

Before then they were all one-offs. Things like Dion. My personal love of music was jazz. There was a very vibrant jazz scene at the time – that’s what I did outside the office. Modern jazz. I think nobody knew what was happening musically; we were making it up as we went along. It didn’t matter what you did. There were no guidelines. You couldn’t say ‘oh we did that and it failed.’ Nowadays everything is analysed. The whole rock and roll thing was so rough some British just copied the Americans. There was so much going on. At the same time there was still the other side to the business. Andy Williams and Tony Bennett were still making and selling records. They were flirting a little bit with rock and roll- they were influenced by it all, despite the division. Mitch Miller was adamant it was a five-minute wonder, but actually no one knew. The fact that it grew into this enormous business is incredible.

It created a new business

Publishers ruled the business when I came into it. You had to go to the publisher to agree a release date, and some of them used to play terrible games. Cyril Simons was the bear with the sore head (c.f. Peter Robinson comment at the end of the interview). He was lovely . ‘ right, we’ll put it out on the 3rd of April, no problem.’ Then he’d ring up on the 2nd and say ‘we’ve put the date back, it’s the 17th now.‘ And you’d realise he had recorded a cover version. That’s what he did all the time. But they were also helpful in a way. I knew a guy at Dominion Music – he’d see an opening and he’d say “I’m flying to New York and pick up the publishing. If I get it, will you put it out? I’d say ‘yes’ and we got a lot of recordings like that…Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, Gary ‘US’ Bonds.

Moving on, we then moved to EMI House, where they had Capitol as a separate label, and Mercury and Liberty. Al Bennett, the guy who sold Capitol, was amazing – these guys don’t exist any more. He bought and sold Liberty about three times, making millions.

Did you ever have any dealings with Morris Levy?

I met him once. My favourite story was…we had a lot of success but they were a mafia company. Their office in New York was not from our Transglobal office. I was over there one time – “you must meet Morris Levy”. We walked round and the guy said ‘oh, he’s not in’, and I said ‘how do you know’ ‘The blinds are up and the windows open – he’s out. If the blinds are drawn he’s in.’

There were some lovely stories of LG dealing with him in New York. They used to take him to dinner and leave him. They’d order and then bugger off circulating the room, doing their bit. Is LG still alive? (No!) He was a lovely man. He worked all the time. The floor in his office used to be covered with piles of papers, and at night most of them would go into this canvas holdall of his. This bag went everywhere with him. He put his life into his work. At one time we were trying to pick up the Bell label, Larry Uttal. I said we should do this. I said ‘this is a hit label, we have to have it.’ Larry came over and we went to lunch, the only time I’d been invited to lunch with LG. ‘you come along old chap.’ Then it got to negotiation over the lunch table, and Larry said something like ‘we want 15% and $590,000′ something like that, and LG said ‘we can give you 5% and $2,000 old chap.’ and I thought ‘this is over, we might as well leave now.’ This went on…’make it 7.5% then’ ‘ I’ll take $45,000.’ The gap was enormous. This went on and on, we left and I said to him ‘we’re not going to get that’ . ‘Don’t worry old chap.’ Apparently negotiations went on after that and I was called upstairs and L.G. said ‘he’s accepted the deal, but do we really want it?’ I said ‘yes, we must have it’, so he said ‘right,on your head be it – we’ll do the deal.’ Luckily the first record was Del Shannon and it was a hit – earned back all the advance!

I found him (LG Wood) a scrupulously fair man – tight but fair. I turned down Little Eva’s The Locomotion’, the reason being that we had so many of these bloody dance things coming off the wall each week – most of them were failing – we had The Donkey, The Flick, The Fly. Despite the fact that they were hits in America didn’t mean they were going to be hits here. So I turned it down. It was a two-record deal, so on the back of that we lost Carole King’s It might as well rain until September. I thought ‘ oh Christ, have I done it now – this is the end. I was in the office late-ish one evening and found LG standing beside me and he said ‘how are things?’ I said ‘fine, I’m just clearing up a few things’. Then he said “were we offered The Locomotion old chap?’ and I said ‘yes we were, and I expect you know we turned it down and also we didn’t get Carole King.’ I thought ‘this is going to be a bollocking’ but he said ‘can’t win ’em all old chap – have a good weekend.’ And he walked out. I thought that was great!

Carole King, Little Eva and…

Presumably the Motown successes were known about?

EMI kept turning them down. The guys from Motown kept coming to EMI saying ‘we want to be with EMI.’ They were flogging off the master tapes for however many thousands they could get.In the early days a lot of people didn’t like that and said that every record sounded the same. LG kept turning them down. We got to the stage when I said ‘I think we’d better do something about it.’ It was very much a word of mouth thing – it was difficult to get radio at the beginning, but I can’t remember how it really came about. Maybe it was because the British independents were beginning to start. I think Dennis Preston was the first to have his own identity – Lansdowne with Norrie Paramor, and a then Dave Clark..

Let’s just finish the Motown story. John Schroeder was the man who recognised Motown and said ‘it (the deal), was just about there and EMI stole it from me.‘

Quite possibly. It was time to strike. But I don’t think they would have gone with Oriole anyway. They really wanted to be associated with EMI. No-one talks about it now, but the whole black and white thing was going on, particularly in America. They all came in and did Finsbury Park Astoria, because Georgie Fame was on the bill.

I did an interview with a man writing a book on Motown, Kingsley Abbott – he was doing a whole history of it. I used to go out to the airport to meet them all and the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society were all there with their banners. It was wonderful for us. They used to come over every three months – Barney Ales and the other one (!Berry Gordy?), and have brain storming sessions. There was me, Rex Oldfield and the sales guy – can’t remember his name.

The licensed repertoire from the UK, like Dave Clark, you as a record company really held the power.

A bit later we used to have these dreadful repertoire meetings. John Snell and Roy Squires would come to these Friday afternoon meetings – Ron White would chair them…it was ‘sit on the fence time’. Lots of independent stuff was coming in and you couldn’t OK it – you had to take it to the bloody meeting. It started 2pm in the board room and you took your stuff in and put it on the machine. There were different ways of playing it. You either took it in so many times that someone would say ‘oh, for Christ’s sake put it out!‘. Maybe you had ‘contractual obligation’ which was a good one if you could prove it. The other one was sit on the fence time – “go back to them next week”. I said to Ron White ‘this is getting ridiculous, we’re not making decisions. I’m getting fed up with going back to Joe Meek, or whoever four weeks in a row and saying we haven’t made a decision – we’ve got to take it back next week‘. Eventually we did make decisions.

Bob Dockerill seemed to making release decisions when he ran ‘The Selection Committee’

Prior to that I can remember when I first joined EMI, we’d sit in a circle and this guy would go round for a decision. He always took the last person’s opinion, regardless of what the others had said. EMI were putting out far too many singles. That went on when I was at CBS – we were releasing 6-10 singles a week.

The creation of the Tamla Motown label was the start of a greater power deciding what was released and what wasn’t.

One of my greatest contractual coups, and it worked to EMI’s advantage, was when there was a mini blues boom and the lucky label was Pye because they had the Chess deal. We had Vee Jay Records which we’d signed, not for the blues or the jazz, but for the Four Seasons. Part of the deal was that we were limited to a certain number of contractual releases. They are out and nothing happened. LG called me one day – “this blues thing old chap, do we have any?’. ‘Yes – Vee Jay’ ‘Oh, put some out.’ I said we’d have to reissue them and of course we then had John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Smith hits. It was a freak and it was because of the Four Seasons.

One we lost was A&M. We had issued some – Herb Alpert – we were doing quite well and I said ‘we ought to look at a deal for A&M instead of just picking up the odd thing’.I went off on holiday and when I came back somebody said ‘we’ve had the people from A&M over and we’re not going to get the deal. We told them we can’t do a label deal‘ and they went to Pye and we lost it.

Arthur Muxlow didn’t come into this, did he?

Arthur was the promotion man. The Radio Luxembourg programmes were his empire. He was a bit big time in a small time way! We used to take the artists down to the theatre.

Was MGM part of your brief in that period?

There were a lot of internal problems at MGM. The first time I went to America was when Ronnie Scott’s club put together a trip to New York to the Jazz Gallery Club, and I’m standing at the bar and hear ‘Derek’ and it was Paul Marshall, the lawyer guy. The second time was with Mickie Most. We had just signed Mickie as an artist and we became very close. Someone had sponsored a trip for him to go to America and he took me with him. I went to LG and said ‘Mickie Most has asked me to go to America with him’ He said ‘We can’t help with paying for it old chap.’ I said ‘no, that’s all right – it’s taken care of.’ So he said ‘well, would you visit some people for me? and he starting writing a list of names. ‘will you be going to Philadelphia? I could pay your train fare from New York to Philadelphia.’ I thought that was wonderful – visit all these people for us and I’ll pay your train fare! Arnold Maxim was the head of MGM and we took Animals and other tracks Mickie had produced. House of the rising sun was six minutes long and really couldn’t be edited. Maxim wanted to edit it and they released a three-minute edit which didn’t work. Eventually they had to succumb and put out the English version. No one had ever done this before – they thought a record had to be no longer than three minutes.

I can remember Berry Gordy saying to me ‘can you translate the lyrics of House of the Rising Sun for me?’ I said ‘well, they’re based on an American blues song’ and he said ‘but we can’t understand what they’re saying’. Nor could I – we were getting used to regional accents for the first time.

Herman’s Hermits. Harvey Lisberg was their manager and used to call me every week they were on Scene at 6.30 and ask me if I was going to watch it. It was on Granada and I couldn’t see it in London. A friend told me I could see it at Granada House in Golden Square. I went in one night and told Harvey I was going to watch it. They said ‘the talent scouts at EMI are watching tonight!’ They sang ‘Mashed potato’ .The lyrics were mashed potato all the way through, but I liked the boy. I tried all the A&R guys but they all turned me down, so I went to Mickie Most and told him about them. He said ‘I’ll do it’, so I told Harvey and he sent Mickie an air ticket to Manchester and the whole thing started from there. The first single was a rip-off of an American hit I found – ‘I’m into something good’. Mickie used to do all his recordings at Kingsway Studios and they came and played on a Sunday afternoon and they were bloody awful., We did a test and Mickie said ‘I can’t use this – they’re useless – this one and that one – they’ve got to go.’ Harvey said ‘ Monday morning, I’ll have a new band for you.’ On Monday morning he said ‘I’ve replaced the two guys – when can we do another one?

Peter Noone and Harvey Lisberg

An elderly business man came in one day who’d had business connections in South Africa and had seen Mickie Most there. I knew Mickie because he was half of The Most Brothers who’d done all these show things. He was a big artist in South Africa – he used to rip off all the Cliff Richard recordings – Cliff wasn’t released there. This guy said Mickie had got a deal with Decca but he’d like to be on EMI. I said ‘OK’. Nothing happened. He had another record on Decca; then he brought Sea Cruise out. It wasn’t a bad record but it reactivated Frankie Ford. We did a two record deal with Mickie and put them both together on an EP. He produced them himself.

What about Dave Clark

I think that deal came in via Roland Rennie. The first release was a cover (Do you love me – which was actually the second Columbia single).

I was put in as the guy to look after him. We sold 250,000 of Glad All Over on the Friday of release. That was the initial order and I had to phone him. I got his dad on the phone and he said ‘250, that’s not bad’. ‘No, Mr. Clark – 250 thousand’ ‘Bloody hell’, he said, ‘I’ll tell him.’ I knew it was going to be a big hit. He had the band over at the Royal Tottenham ballroom. He came to EMI and I took him to the pub round the corner. When we came out there was a crowd of girls outside and they followed us back to EMI, and I thought ‘this is something’. I got on fine with him. He controlled it all. I think he was the first one to have a complete package – he wrote and published it, and he remained very good to me. I was doing a sales conference for American CBS and Dave came into the room and praised me in front of the Americans. It was nice.

Were you involved in the Blue Beat label?

No. Georgie was on the label. I knew the Gunnells from the club scene. I nicked Georgie from there to CBS. There was an industry lunch and, coming out, Rik Gunnell said ‘do you want Georgie on CBS now you’re there?’ And I said ‘yes’ ‘We’ll do it’ he said, ‘it’s yours.’

Why did you move to CBS

EMI was wonderful. There were lots of changes. Geoffrey Bridges was coming in. What I really wanted to get into was British A&R. I’d had a couple of offers. There was a guy who dealt with Norrie Paramor – Bunny Lewis – and I didn’t like him. One day I got a call from RCA. I went to see them, and the guy kept going on about publishing. They kept on, but I didn’t want to do it. They said Bunny Lewis had recommended me most highly. I said ‘I don’t like him’. Another person I didn’t like – Phil Solomon – put me up for an MCA job.

Olav Wyper had left EMI and gone to CBS and in 1966 (?) I got a phone call from him asking me if I’d be interested in the A&R job and would I meet with Ken Glancy.

Olav Wyper.

When we met he just talked music and I thought that was great. He said the job was mine if I wanted it. He said he had a bit of restructuring to do to get me in. I joined CBS the day they moved from their Bond Street offices to Theobalds Road – co-ordinating independent productions. I was going to be head of A&R but Reg Warburton was technically the A&R guy, but they found another job for him. We had two in-house producers – Irvine Martin and Des Champ. There we were making records like there was no tomorrow, spending money like there was a bottomless pit, and selling nothing! They (Irvine and Des) had to go, and Reg agreed to run the studio, and I got in there. Georgie Fame was the first artist I signed. ‘Fame in ’68” – that was our Olav Wyper marketing coup and we went on from there. We had tremendous success. I had to bring in producers so I brought in Mike Smith. 1966 was when I moved there. Mike had left Decca and he came to me with Brian Poole, but said he also wanted to do something with The Tremeloes. I always thought packages worked. If you get something that’s buzzing it feeds off itself – managers, agents and publishers always do it. I asked Mike if he wanted to work (at CBS) as house producer. Ken Glancy was an incredible man. He never involved you with the business problems; he kept them well away from everybody and we just talked about the music and the artists. The rest of the nonsense that goes on – we never knew it existed!

From top left: Tompall Glaser, Ken Glancy, Jerry Bradley, Chet Atkins, Waylon Jennings, Jesse Colter, Willie Nelson.

Many years later I was in an office in Denmark Street and L.G. (Wood) phoned up. He said ‘there’s a fellow going round raking the dirt on Joe Meek. I refused to talk to him. I’m phoning a few friends who worked with Joe before his sad death and I’m recommending we don’t talk to him’. I said ‘fine – I know nothing about Joe Meek except the music.’ I thought that was nice. The guy did actually call me and I told him I got on fine with Joe. So there was nothing else he wanted to talk about. Joe did go off in a huff sometimes, but he’d phone up and apologise. I went over to his place a few times and it was amazing – violin players down the hall, someone else sitting on the toilet. He was a strange character but he had his ideas. At that time Shel Talmy came in and did a few things that were quite successful. He had that terrible lawyer Marty Machat. I never got involved in that sort of thing.

Joe Meek (above), Marty Machat with Leonard Cohen (below)

How long were you at CBS?

Five years, fantastic years, with Ronnie Bell. We had old metal desks and Ron always held the cigarette in the palm of his hand. He was on the phone and he had a cigarette perched on the edge of an open drawer and I saw the cigarette drop into the drawer. He was on the phone, and said ‘excuse me old boy, my desk is on fire.‘ He put the phone down and beat it out and then carried on as if nothing had happened !

I went through two or three days of hell with him because he got offered the job at Top Rank and couldn’t make up his mind whether to take it. I said ‘I can’t tell you – you’ve got to make your own mind up.’ L.G. called him up and said ‘Ronnie, you’re getting in a terrible state over this – will you clear your desk and leave.’ Ronnie came down and said I haven’t been fired but he won’t give me the job back and I’m leaving today,’ That’s how he left EMI.

One of Ronnie’s two autobiographies.

Where did you go from CBS?

To MCA in 1970. After I’d been at CBS for about three years I used to get job offers from people. The next logical step for me was to MD a small company, preferably American. I used to say to (Ken) Glancy, ‘I ought to move on soon. This is becoming a big company; it’s becoming fabulously successful, I want to move on‘ There was the usual yearly sales conference and Glancy phoned and asked me to go up, and there were the directors, Oberstein, Robinson (the finance director) and Glancy said ‘Have a drink kid – I’ve got to tell you I don’t work for this company any more,’ Prior to this I’d just accepted the MCA job, but I hadn’t told anyone. He said ‘I’m doing something I said I’d never do– I’m going to RCA.’ Oberstein grabs me and says ‘let’s go and talk. It’s you or me to take over.’ I said ‘I don’t want it.’ The next morning I thought I’d give him a run for his money, and he changed his persona, becoming all things to all men, everyone’s friend, the whole networking thing. I thought it was hilarious. I went to the head of European operations and said I wanted to resign and that I’d got a new job. He’d said ‘you’ve got a contract; we’ll release you but not for a few weeks, so it would be helpful if you don’t tell anyone.’ So I started to do a bit of MCA business. I was taking a guy from CBS with me and we signed a couple of acts – Osibisa and Wishbone Ash. It was a very strange period.

There had been tremendous problems with MCA in America, losing buckets there, over here and elsewhere. At one time they’d had a fairly large staff and they’d got rid of everybody except three people – this was still with the Decca licence. Brian Brolly knew nothing – he used to phone me for advice at CBS. MCA had 35 artists ‘signed’ but only one had actually signed a contract. As it happened we wanted to rid of most of them, but there were one or two we wanted to hang on to – like Tony Christie.

I brought David Howells with me from CBS. David had been involved in A&R doing the American stuff, but Glancy took that away from him and gave it to me. David got a bit upset about that but I said he could come back into A&R but I wasn’t dividing it into English and American, but singles and albums and he could do the albums.

David Howells

I was told by MCA to sign English acts, but not too many, pull the American roster together but it had to go through Decca. I went over to Decca, dear old Bill Townsley, and I met Sir Edward (Lewis) many times – he was a wonderful man – all he wanted to talk about was cricket. It was a difficult time, power cuts, strikes, shortage of vinyl, but Decca were very good to us and we were giving them hits. This was near the end of the old ‘gentlemen’s’ things were everybody used to get on with each other and respected each other. Then Ken East joined. We had meetings at Decca and he said ‘this is what we’re going to do for you‘ and he never really did anything. The politics were all beginning to get very messy. How did a guy get the rights to the London label and then and then sell it for a lot of money? How did he (not identified!) get the rights to the logo?

One of the greatest stories I was involved with was Jesus Christ Superstar and Robert Stigwood. I joined MCA just as Superstar came out. Basically, Brian Brolly got fired because he’d spent £25,000 on this album which was unheard of money. He’d made this terrible album that nobody except Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wanted. It began to break all over the world but over here we couldn’t give it away. Same old story – it was too long. We used to have weekly meetings and while Andrew would sit them out in the corner, Tim would try to be helpful. The pattern around the world was that where it had been played in its entirety it broke soon after, even in Italy. Radio Vatican played it; we got on Luxembourg who played a side a night for four nights and in its entirety on the fifth night. It took off the following week. That method of promoting just worked. I said ‘it’s nothing to do with me – that’s poor old Brian’. Stigwood had signed the rights of the project to MCA, record, film and theatre. He came back to them after a while and said ‘you’re obviously not going to do anything with the film and theatre rights, can we have them back?’ And they said yes. Then the whole thing blew up and Stigwood went back to MCA and said ‘would you like to buy the rights back?’ They said ‘yes please’ and paid all this money for the film and stage rights …and they’d given it back to him once!!

It was all in such a turmoil that Mike Maitland came in and had three or four different companies making their own records in different parts of America. He pulled them all together as MCA. Previously it had been Uni, Brunswick, American Decca – now it was all one.

Mike Maitland (second left) flanked by Conway Twitty and Rick Nelson…and others!

There was also a political thing behind MCA and Decca, because of American Decca. Sir Edward thought that morally he had the rights, and Maitland said ‘I can’t upset him.’ I never liked the politics and tried to base the company on the music we put out. Quite a few things were coming our way and they said ‘we don’t want to expand too much..we don’t want more than about ten artists.’ So it was a case of, if we wanted to buy someone, we had to sell someone. I never agreed with that. Jeff Wayne who was working with me, came in with a tape and I said ‘great, we want him but we’ve got the clear it with America.’ It was David Essex’s Rock On. I went to the States and they said ”you’ve got drop someone.’ and I thought ‘this is silly.’ My three year contract was up, so I said ‘I want to move on. I’ve got a hit record and I’ve got to drop someone to get it, so we’ve got to pass on it. This is silly,’ Jeff did a lot of jingles for the advertising company below our offices in Baker Street and and he came in one day and asked if I would be interested in anything that came along. We did Vigrass and Osborne, but I had to turn down David Essex. Two or three years later all the guys at MCA had left, Russ Regan to run Uni etc. We were at MIDEM recounting these stories to one another – all the artists that were turned down went to No.1! They became major No.1. artists

Richard Burton, Jeff Wayne and David Essex.

One time when David Howells and I went to America we took Richard Branson with us, because he had Tubular Bells. No-one knew what to do with it – how do you promote it? David said MCA might be interested in America so we put him and Branson together and they went to Mike Maitland. ‘We don’t want any more British stuff at the moment – you’ve got to tell him ‘no”. We had to tell Branson – he was mad as a hatter.

David Howells

Another part of my job was to liaise with any British acts who were on MCA in America but not here – like The Who and Elton John, Elton used to buy all these millions of records in America, have them shipped to the London office and come in to pick them up. I got on fine with all these people. There was a party to launch Rocket Records which was held on the Western movies lot in Los Angeles. The whole street was full of food and drink, guys doing the gunfights – it was a wonderful night. There’s a big old Western Wagon at the end of the street with horses pulling it. David Howells said ‘step up here, I’ll take your picture.’ It was a hell of a big thing. Branson said ‘hold on Derek, I’ll take you for a ride,’ and he get hold of the reins and pulls this thing down the street. It’s a hell of a weight and I’m thinking he’s going to break his back in a minute. But it starts to gain momentum and then I’m thinking he’s not going to stop this thing now. At the end of the street there’s a band playing – he’s heading towards them and he can;’t stop it. I’m sitting up there and everyone’s saying ‘what’s Derek doing?’ and I can’t get off the thing – it’s too high. The band are all swearing at him and we have to run it into a building to stop it. I’ve got some pictures at home (wonder where they are now!). Richard was great company.

The three years at MCA were good. When I went there I was told ‘nothing untoward, but we ask you to sign the company accounts at the end each year – we will explain to you as much as we want to.‘ There was a lovely old Yorkshire guy who was the head accountant who said ‘what we’re doing is recouping the losses of the last few years, so we won’t show a profit.’ So I never knew how well we did, except for chart-wise with Wishbone Ash, Osibisa and Average White band, whose launch party was upstairs here (Baker Street as I recall) and you couldn’t get in – was wonderful. The two quotes from Mike Maitland on the Average White Band were: “You’ll never sell a band with a name like that”, and “white guys can’t play that kind of music.” I said “you’re wrong“. So they made the album, the white album; it went to Atlantic and sold about five million copies. Again, I think there was talk of mafia connections – the man who ran the whole show was called Levy, but he was charming when I met him. I had just joined and he was always dressed in black. His wife was a specialist in antiques and the whole building was furnished with genuine antiques and you were not allowed to move anything in your own office! He also had a mews house where I went for the interview with Mike Maitland. The idea was that top executives stayed there when they came to London. Mike said “I refuse to stay here – the place is stacked with antiques and I’d be frightened to move.’ Russ Regan, who ran Uni, had an antique book cabinet behind him with a glass door that wouldn’t stay shut and kept hitting him. He wanted to moved it, but they said ‘don’t touch anything!’ .

When I moved into Piccadilly it felt like the beginning of the end of the old MCA. Beautiful building but they mostly revolved around the film business. If they made successful movies they were upon; if they made duff movies the whole business suffered. Just before I joined they’d made three or four big movies in the UK and they all bombed. I heard stories about extraordinary waste – Rolls Royces on call 24 hours a day. We had the soundtrack of American Graffiti and they said the title had to be changed for England because nobody knew what ‘graffiti’ meant. Then the film took off in America and its was ‘don’t change that title – it’s a smash.!’

The next logical step was to do something on my own, and that was Gull. Decca distributed the label, found an office, but then it was the start of the three-day week – couldn’t put the records out until May, I thought. Have I done this wrong? But we did it – David Howells, myself and Monty Babson who worked out at Lansdowne when I first met him with Dennis Preston.

Dennis Preston with Acker Bilk

Gull had a number one in 1975 with Barbados by Typically Tropical. I handed the publishing back when I left – a very silly thing to do. One record doesn’t make an album and that one didn’t. What we made on the single, we lost on the album – should not have done it!

We went into it (Gull records) on David’s premise that it was basically going to be an album label. The fact that we had a hit single kept us in business. We overcame the beginnings and had a folk singer called Steve Ashley, a guy called Ken Elliott (mechanical sounds),mIsotope ( a jazz fusion thing) and picked up If for the UK . We did a jazz instrumental thing called Kaleidoscope with Neil Ardley and did a performance of it at the Festival Hall.

We were very much into that sort of thing. The Decca licence ended, so we did a distribution deal with Pye, and that’s when Ken Glancy came back to the UK as MD of RCA – he called me and said “I want you back.”. Unfortunately I said ‘yes’. RCA was going through tremendous turmoil. The record company was part of their same group as a fast food company and a carpet company. Glancy wasn’t happy because the American company was in a terrible mess. Every marketing manager was also an A&R man, so they could all pick up product. There were four or five of them and it was absolute chaos. The idea was to turn it back into an A&R based company; I was to sit on top of the house producers and the main stuff snd restructure it. This was in 1977. We didn’t do too badly – the main problem was that Glancy was ducking and diving. Every week a new American would come in – head of whatever division, and they were all alike, like ex-generals, crew cuts, rough-neck American guys; all they knew about music was ‘my daughter likes punk.’ Life was all company reports and meetings. Elvis died, which helped me (!) – that kept the company going for a bit. We had a European hit with Baccara. I don’t know how it broke – I think everyone had come back from holiday! The plugger said he was a laughing stock at the BBC – everyone hated it. Obviously we had Dolly Parton and all that (country) stuff, bit it was three years of hell really. The worst record company I’d ever been in. Nobody had a clue. Glancy had lost interest – he’d done America and made a tremendous success there with multi-million sellers, but was just put out to graze to see out his contract. I was a Glancy man and we both agreed to leave.

Baccara

The punk thing (in the late 70’s) was amazing. I’d never seen anything like that before. You’d ship out 150,000 copies of a single and never sell another copy! It went in the charts as No.2 or 3 and went out the next week. Ridiculous. I never knew who bought them.

After I’d left I thought ‘I’ve had enough of this.‘ I’d been friends with Deke Arlon. In fact I’d brought him in to CBS to run their publishing company, April Music way back at its beginning, because he was a runaround at Chappells. It was never official but Glancy said to me ‘look after April Music’. I said ‘oh not again‘, and he said ‘well , find someone to run it and have them report to you,’ Some lady ran it and she was awful and he said ‘ I’ll get rid of her and you get someone in.’ Deke was always in and out of the office. so I said ‘Do you want a job running April Music? You officially report to Glancy but you actually report to me.’ Eventually Deke took it over as the most mammoth thing of all the deals I did – the American catalogues – I used to go to America and get the deals, I stayed close to him when he went to the disastrous York Records.

He’d set this thing up with Sheena Easton and said ‘Chris Neal and I are putting a record company together- why don’t you join us?’ I joined them ostensibly to put together the record company for Chris with Phonogram or Philips, and Brian Shepherd. I forget what we called it – C&D Music?. We signed The Beverley sisters’ daughter and couple of other kids. It didn’t work and I just got involved with Deke’s other businesses, running the companies, trying to stop him spending (which is impossible to do, although the money was flying in…Sheena’s cheques were amazing, Dennis (Waterman) had hits.)

We also had Gerard Kenny whom we all thought was going to be the next Billy Joel, but he never was! I signed him to RCA. John Howells was the sales manager, but it was apparently the “gold watch” album – went straight into the charts and dropped out the following week when word got out that it had been “helped” in. So then we went round everywhere, but everyone’s saying ‘no’, then out of the blue came someone who was working at Tellydisc – the marketing guy Denis Knowles – and they’d had Richard Clayderman selling over half a million copies each. This guy was the marketing man. He said ‘next we have to sign an artist, get his own material, record a Tellydisc album that we own, so instead of handing Richard Clayderman back to Philips as an artist, we’d have everything . We want to do that with Gerard Kenny.’

I thought that was a good idea as we couldn’t give him away, but Deke didn’t want Tellydisc and said he would get Gerard a deal. We went round everywhere all morning and Tellydisc was the last one. Deke wanted to cancel and have lunch, but we went in and Denis said ‘I’d like you meet the head of the company, Charles de Vere.’ ‘The banking family?’, said Deke, and he changed. The guy maps out the deal and it’s unreal; tv spectacular, tv advertising, etc. – you wouldn’t even think of asking someone for this deal. Our legal guys thought it was sheer suicide, but it’s agreed and Deke is having dinner with De Vere. We made an album and booked a theatre for the TV show. It was Tellydisc’s worst-selling record – they must have lost over £750,000 on this one project. I thought at a later stage that someone had made a very elementary mistake that no one owned up. I worked with Deke for six years and thought ‘this is going nowhere.’ We’d had wonderful offers but they took away his independence. Then we went and met with Bernard Delft – what a charming man. He made a genuine offer but Deke didn’t want to work for him. All he wanted was a turnover to live on. I never knew how he got money out of EMI. He got a £300,000 advance against something. I never worked out what, but it never was earned back.

Deke had the ability to make serious offers, but he never went through with them. After it ended, I got a call from Brian Brolly. He said ‘I want to start a record company, Really Useful, and I want you to come in and run it. ‘ OK, sounds good. I had all the plans. No one wanted to know easy-listening music; no one wanted to know middle of the road. Shows were shows and we were going to get them anyway. We’d build a small roster of artists. We set up the office and were getting it together and then Brian left! We got summoned to the boardroom at the Palace Theatre; we look around and there’s no Brian – everyone else was there. There was an announcement “as of 11 o’clock this morning, Brian Brolly has left the company.’ Andrew (Lloyd-Webber) didn’t want to know about the record company because he wasn’t 100% involved. Two years of this and I thought it was getting very silly. Life took over then – I had a heart attack in September 1989. I had a year and a half of my contract to run, but they were very fair until a guy visited and said ‘we think it best if you retire – we’ll pay off your contract and give you the car.’ I thought ‘that’ll do me.’

And so the interview ended – a fascinating insight into the early days of the original vinyl explosion…yet despite a lot of searching, no photograph of Derek has been found. If you know, or even better, if you have one, do let me know. He deserves to be seen!

©David Hughes 2024. All illustrations courtesy DuckDuckGo (for some strange reason they have over ridden Google in the web search hierarchy.

A Personal History of the British Music Industry – 106. Tony Hiller

Tony Hiller with The Brotherhood of Man (and if anyone can identify the man to his right,I can complete the line-up!) John Poole thinks it’s Alyn Ainsworth – I think he’s` right!

Tony Hiller, whose death in November 2018 at the age of 91, seems to have totally passed me by, came from a long but today almost impossible key part of the music business, unless you work in Nashville! – songwriting. Songwriters were the life blood of the music business for decades. The song was always key to success, and pre-Beatles and Stones, the song was everything. British record producers rushed to hear the latest American hits, record them with their own singers and hope the song worked its magic. The song still is the vital ingredient, but today the singer and the song are almost always the same person. Tony was a songwriter whose finest hour was, as shown above, ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’, the 1978 Eurovision winner by a group created specifically for the contest – Brotherhood of Man. Such was the power of songwriting. This fairly short interview dates from December 1998

How did it start?

It goes back to the Hiller Brothers – my brother Irving and myself. We were a double act. We worked in night clubs and variety shows, with people like Tommy Cooper. We weren’t big stars but we had a lot of fun – it was a great time….meeting all those fine entertainers on the road and becoming friendly,

Were you singers or comedians?

Both – we were comics, a double act. We did very good impressions as well… the Everly Brothers, then the Beverley Sisters. At that time there was a very big show – The Perry Como Show. Well, we did the Perry Slowmow Show! We did Nat’King’Cole and lot of comedians, and good dancers. Whoever had a hit at the time, we’d go to the publishers, learn and sing the song

Were you being plugged in those days?

Of course. It was wonderful going down Denmark Street (the home of music publishing) and people saying ‘have you got a broadcast?’, like I did later on. We saw all sides of the business then. It was a great experience being plugged by the song pluggers. The first song they plugged was Mais Ouis which was a minor hit for The King Brothers, and we did that on a couple of occasions.

The clever pluggers were presumably the ones who knew which songs suited your act?

A good plugger should always do some research. If they give you a song for a tenner it should be a comedy song. We were selling songs ourselves yes at that time – Irving, Danny Newman and me – the three of us started songwriting. We would go down Denmark Street and publishers were asking us to to demo songs as we were good singers. We were there most days. This was in about 1954

Who were the best pluggers?

Stuart Reid, Don Agnes, the Mills people, Freddie Poser, Pat Sherlock and young Ronnie Beck. It was a different ball game then – the main thing was to get your broadcast. The song was the most important thing. It was a lot more fun. It was a people’s business – it still is, but it has changed. I also enjoyed the publishers’ “do’s” more than the record companies’

With Lord Grade going, that’s the last of the great entrepreneurs

I knew him very well. I had a company with him at ATV. He was a pro – he’d dance at the drop of a hat. He was one of the boys. The business has changed. When I started you could go and see George Martin, Norrie Paramor, Johnny Franz- these were record people but they loved music.

Did you have any success with your brother and Danny Newman?

The first year that the BBC gave the Eurovision Song Contest to the record companies instead of the publishers – and they only did it once – was in 1962, when we had Kenny Lynch, Dickie Valentine and Jill Day, and I remember going to the session with Dickie. (for completists, the UK entrant was sung by Ronnie Carroll and the winning country was France). It was never easy to get a hearing, but I plugged. I used to love going in and hustling. As performers the only time we were handled was when we were managed by Dick James as a double act. Dick was working for Sidney Bron – Gerry was a kid then. That was a big business. Dick James was our manager and a nicer chap you couldn’t hope to meet.

Sidney(top) and Gerry Bron (I think!) Might Sidney be with Gene Pitney?

Was it more important to you to get the song performed or recorded?

Records. The performance was in essence part of the promotion. For instance, Russ Conway’s Side Saddle sold 300,000 sheets of music…the sheet music would be this, the records would be that (lower) and then they turned. and a hit would do well. Later on I had a big hit with Save Your Kisses for me which sold 300,000.

One of the key things in those days seemed be to get Donald Peers to sing and then everyone would want the sheet music (I think I got this from Kay O’Dwyer!)

Absolutely. But if Donald Peers had recorded your song and sang it on ‘Workers’ Playtime’ for example it was all part and parcel of promotion. I remember when I first started in the promotion department of Mills Music, I used to plug the organists and go to the cinemas.

Did The Hiller Brothers reach a natural conclusion?

We gave up the act after a while because we got signed up as writers, first to Boosey and Hawkes – Maurice Taylor was a very good professional manager and we signed to him. We went on to Mills Music and became writers, and Cyril Gee said ‘I like what you’re doing- why don’t to come into the business. I joined Mills in 1961 and was with them until I had my first world hit, then I left. I was also a producer for Decca Records in that period.

I didn’t know you were involved with The Big Three and The Dennisons

The Big Three

The Dennisons

In your days of plugging, who were the key people?

In those days it was very difficult to plug your own songs. I had to be very careful. I had Greenaway & Cook, Howard Spiro, Val Avon. Rogers Cook and Greenway were phenomenal. I knew Greenaway from The Kestrels, Cook was a bit later. I was in at the beginning. I was seeing every radio producer, every A&R man – these were all with demos. Greenaway and Cook were fantastic writers. So you’d go into a producer. I’d phone up Mickie Most or Johnny Franz. You knew you were going in with a good song, because I’d made the demos – that’s how I got to be a producer. We’d go into Regent Sound, cut about six backing tracks, put the voices on, make them all in a day with a four-five piece band. When you’re running with hot stuff, doors opened. Everyone wanted a Greenaway/Cook song

Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway

They were being four or five different groups at the same time

I remember on one Top of the Pops, they had United we stand, Love grows as Edison Lighthouse, White Plains and Pipkins. That’s how I got Brotherhood of Man

That was a golden period for British Songwriters

When we think of Tony Macaulay, Les Reed, Peter Callander, Mitch Murray… as a member of SODS (Society of Distinguished Songwriters) you’re sitting in a room of 30 guys and you look around and think ‘these people here wrote some of the greatest standards of all time.’ Before The Beatles very few people used to write their own songs, and The Beatles did also open the door to America. It was amazing what they did. All the Dave Clarks, Herman’s Hermits, and others, they all followed. It made our producers and publishers strong. We were all very well sought after and of course we also hit Europe. Previously it was once every ten years that a foreign song, other than American, would sell over here. Now every other song is Swedish, German or French. The middle of the road songs are getting stronger.

A lot of people said that about rock’n’roll

In those days music wasn’t categorised. It wasn’t Country; it wasn’t this or that. Most of Elvis’s old hits came from Country, but you wouldn’t say they were country songs. A song was a song was a song. I mourned that. I mourned it when the BBC became Radios 1, 2 and 3.

I think this business and this country are too small to merit categorisation

I don’t understand it. The listening public misses too much. Sub- divisions like garage, hip-hop etc.

How did you get to produce the Liverpool groups?

I was not an exclusive producer – I did it under contract. I was getting hits with I was Kaiser Bill’s Batman. As a writer my first world hit was United we stand which I also produced. The act (Brotherhood of Man) was Roger Greenaway, Tony Burrows, John Goodison, and Sue & Sunny – all sessions singers.

First of all, Tony Hall started Deram, then Wayne (Bickerton) took over. I was signed to Decca as a producer, I wasn’t working for them in-house. I wrote United we Stand with the late great Johnny Goodison. We did a song called Love One Another which we thought was the greatest thing in the world, but it sold zilch. The second one was United we Stand. Dick Rowe was my boss and I had Wayne on my side as well. The first time Dick was away on holiday. I went to Wayne with Love One Another, and he said ‘great, go ahead’. But Dick Rowe was my boss. I was working for Cyril Gee as a publisher at the same time. Imagine the hours I was working – writing, plugging…

Wayne Bickerton

Dick Rowe.

Did you have those people in mind to sing that song?

Oh yes! Love One Another was a sort of spiritual song, and then we did United we Stand at Decca studios – great session singers, big choral songs. Dick heard the songs and said ‘OK, we’ll go with ‘United we stand’. I had the publishing. Despite being my writers – Roger Greenaway was, and Tony Burrows I knew well – my problem was that they were the top session singers in the country, getting lots of money without having to go outside London. They didn’t really want to tour. We did the big shows of the day. I kept the name alive and put other people together. We won Eurovision with another set of people – Save Your Kisses for Me. In those days, the BBC would choose the artists . I had the first year when we chose our own acts.

You picked two boys and two girls to do the song

Terry King phoned and said ‘do you fancy doing a TV in Belgium?’ I had already signed Lee Sheridan and Martin Lee as writers to Tony Hiller Music , and they were also good singers, then we had Sandra and Nicky and we had an act. I did the original Brotherhood of Man again with Decca and with the second version we had two number ones – Figaro and Angelo.

Who did the deal with Pye?

I did. I sold the act before we won Eurovision. We did nothing really. I got a couple of singles and an album out of the (Decca) deal. I wrote a song with the boys called Lady which charted in Belgium, Holland and France. Then I cut a Barry Blue song –Kiss Me Kiss You Baby. Eddie Levy brought it to my attention because I was then with ATV. It was the B-side of a record that was doing nothing, so we cut it and it was enormous in Europe. That was just before the Euros, so they were known in Europe. We’d done all the TV so that audience knew them. We had an enormous run. I had to sell it before we had a deal, but we did extremely well.

How did you find the relationship with record companies

Even the record men of my era were nicer. That sounds awful, but they were song men. I remember recently going to a certain A&R person and she said ‘would you sit there?’ and her back was to me and I was humiliated.

The business is in trouble

I can tell you when it all went wrong – when the song wasn’t the most important thing. The song had to stand up. You didn’t have to spend £3 1/2 million on it. You had that entree to the producers, you knew them. What they have done is crowd out the creative talent.

There must be thousands of kids who love writing songs but can’t sing

I don’t want to counteract that, but there is a machine now where you can sing badly and still be in tune. But you can’t do it live, though where’s the live work gone?

There’s no incentive to write for writing’s sake, except in Nashville

That’s why I’ve bought a place out there. I started to write with Roger Cook, Bobby Murphy, Byron Hill – all those great writers. For a writer like me it’s a joy. It’s not easy. The one thing about Nashville that differs from here – if you get in eventually and the song is right, politics go out of the window – a song is a song there. It’s a shame here that we’re not getting the songs.

Bobby Murphy

Byron Hill

Can you pinpoint when the business changed?

The Seventies were open. There were people then who had ears and could hear the songs. The personnel changed. People were coming into the business – the so-called giants of today – they understood records. It became a record business, not a song business. Solo artists today write their songs. Bryan Adams, Bruce Springsteen . They are not hearing or wanting the best songs from the writers who can deliver, because they don’t want them. They want to write their own because they known that if they sell a million they’ll get 500 grand. Lyrics don’t mean too much today – kids still want melody and lovely songs like from Boyzone, Take That, and the lovely Bee Gees songs. Arrangers are over, you know. I remember session musicians doing four sessions a day..a jingle and then three full tracks, working day and night. Every record label had orchestras. We’ve lost the musicianship. Things have changed. The thing that bugged me was that they lost the song. Our business was about songs. Look what they’re spending . If you get a great song it stays in the charts for six weeks and does genuine figures. It’s very hard for me to go to a record company today with a song. They say ‘a song for whom’. We can’t get a song to anyone.

What keeps you busy now?

America, I’ve had Bruce, Margot Smith, Anne Murray, Glen Campbell (record my songs) I used to go there 18 weeks a year, but I’ve sold the house now. Right now United we Stand is a jingle for United Airlines. They re-recorded it and it was a very big ad for them. I’m still a working writer. In Nashville it’s different. Most writers are signed. I write with one, so I pay my own expenses and half the demos, so in essence they are working for me and I keep the publishing. But there, everyone is a writer – it’s unbelievable. It’s a music town, so I’m still active.

Have you got a favourite song?

United we Stand – 30 years old (in 1998!)

Was music in your family?

My father worked with Irving Berlin. He went to America in 1914 – all his brothers went to live in America and my Uncle Joe was one of the most famous promotion men in America – Joe Hiller. My father then got a job as a trade boy. He came back here to join the army in 1917. I met some of the great old pluggers. I remember the Brill Building. Jack Dempsey had a bar there. My first trip to America was with United we Stand. I loved it.

Never tempted to tread the boards again?

I love to sing. I sing all day. It’s a shame that variety’s gone. I used to go to the Hackney Empire – that’s how you learnt the business. We were the new kids on the block for publishing – we were writers and artists as well.

You were never tempted to start a label?

I did start the label, Dazzle. Les Reed had Chapter One, Roger Greenaway’s was Target, but he lost a lot of money – you need so much bread. I always had a production company. All I own now is one Johnnie Ray album, Wild Fantasy and some bits and pieces. I was never a builder. I built up something and then sold it and I’m glad I did. Even today people are dying to buy publishing companies and catalogues. That is also one of the problems of our business – the egos of the people in charge. Old songs are fresh money – that’s how most of my peers live. If you’ve got an act and you’re successful, they’re never really satisfied. They always think they need a change. Everything is problematic . They want to be what they think is cool. It’s a constant fight keeping your artists in line. You’ll have hit after hit and they want to become the producer.

For our first retainer, the three of us got £2 a week each, £300 a year, signed to Boosey and Hawkes. When we signed to Mills Music we got £500 a year. It was unusual back then for writers to be signed with a retainer. They started signing writers around 1960. The big names from that period – the 1930’s onwards – were Jimmy Kennedy, Michael Carr, Tommy Connors – they were the beginning of the great pop writers. Then it went really fast.

Jimmy Kennedy

Michael Carr

From the mid fifties, it was the start of people like us going round, good songwriters. You could stand on the corner of Denmark Street and see every singer there was, looking for songs. On radio you had Workers Playtime, Variety Bandbox – no one wrote songs so you had to go to a publisher. That was the era of the publisher . The pianist would play the song – ‘oh, I like that song’ – do the arrangement (£8). We had three arrangers, Ken Woodman, Cy Payne and paid £8 for each one. It was a very busy time.

And there the interview ended, but if you Google tonyhiller.com you’ll find lots of facts and figures about his work and output. Also The Jewish Chronicle has a obituary which duplicates a lot of the information he provided me some 20 years earlier.

© David Hughes 2024. All illustrations come from Google search and are there to bring the copy to life.

A Personal History of the British Music Business 105 – Kay O’Dwyer

As dedicated readers will have realised, these interviews were originally intended to form part of a general, rather than personal, history of the British music business, a post retirement project some 25 years ago. That never happened, but more recently I realised how interesting the unexpurgated interviews were on their own. What I realised is how little knowledge people have of the influential figures who made it happen. Never, it seems, more so than Kay O’Dwyer, a veritable titan and rare female in the music and music publishing businesses from the 1950’s, whose death was quietly announced recently. I thought no photo could be found, but have just uncovered this from her funeral service

I started in music publishing – in plugging. That was the best job in those days. I started with a company called Yale Music. After that I had my own little company called 20th Century Music and I had a song called We all have a song in our hearts which was a big hit in 1950 (by Josef Locke). Then I went to Chappells for a couple of years, Campbell Connally for couple of years, went to Australia in 1950 with Donald (Peers), (who that year had 12 top twenty hits there ), came back and worked with Winifred Atwell. She and her husband were the first people to have a company that combined record promotion and publicity. It started just for her and then they took on other artists. Les Perrin was the publicist and I did the record promotion – we had people like The King Brothers, Marion Ryan, Johnny Dankworth and those sorts of people. I used to do it for a fee, then Les decided that wasn’t quite the way we wanted to go , so we went our separate ways and finished up doing it for David Platz in a firm called Publicity Consultants. From there I went to Francis Day & Hunter where I think I was the first independent record plugger.

Les Perrin (right) with Joni Mitchell, and two others whom someone will identify, I’m sure

Was Les Perrin with the NME then?

He’d finished with the NME. He was a first class publicist and used to create stories like “Winnie Atwell lost the keys out of her piano” – things like that which would make headlines then! You don’t have to use this, but I’m telling you…There was a case: someone murdered a policeman. It was a case concerning a man named Padolla. Les knew a lot of people and someone wanted him to handle the publicity for the man who had committed that crime and I got to hear about it, but only by picking up the phone and one of the newspapers telling me “Les is doing this”. I thought “I can’t be involved with this” and that’s how we split up.

I guess that’s where Max Clifford got it from with all these scallywags?

I’m sure, yes…Les wasn’t just a show business columnist, but a good hack columnist as well. He gave them good stories; he was first class. You couldn’t beat him.

How did you get your first job?

I went to Carl Yale and Yale Music. I started as his secretary – he had a double act with his brother and called themselves The Yale Brothers. They used to do pantomime and it finished with me running the company . He worked with a chap called Peter Hargraves – he was quite a good songwriter. Then they fell out and I finished up song plugging, running the office, packing parcels…you name it.

How did song plugging work in those days?

Well, the writers used to come in with their songs. We’d decide whether they were hits or not and if we thought they were, it was up to us to take them to the artist and convince him or her to sing it, then to convince the record company to record it and then to promote it. In those days we all worked with sheet music and anyone who could sing…in pantomime, on radio, on stage. Those were the times when payola was everywhere, though we didn’t pay people much because we were small and couldn’t compete. The singers were all people of the day – Vera Lynn, Hutch. Dorothy Squires helped me a lot when I first started, She was first class to all music publishers. Being young, she invited me in and said to everybody ‘this girl’s going to be a top song plugger.’ I had to sing the song to them! It sounds crazy now! The first time I had to go to EMI to one of those meetings (Carl couldn’t do it) when all the producers and publishers were invited for a particular time. So I went in with my song . You’d have Dick Rowe, Norman Newell – all those sorts of people. I didn’t know they all went in with a pianist and played the song, but it was just me and any song. Someone said ‘well, how does it go?‘ I looked round and said I was sorry – if I’d known I had to have q pianist I’d have brought one, and started singing. Dick Rowe said ‘thank you Kay, we’ll let you know.’ I left and Dick came up and said ‘let me talk to you, Kay. Next time you come up, you must have a pianist‘. He gave me hints of what to do, and when I came out I got a record out of it. In those days you had to get an artist to like it, a record company to like it and you then had to promote it.

What was your first success

Let Him Go Let Him Tarry. It went into a film; it was a non copyright song and we had recorded it with Barbara Mullen, but lots of artists also recorded it. It was in a film with Jean Simmons called Stairway to the Stars.That was the first record I fixed, and Nat Gonella did it. They were big stars in those days. The main money was coming from sheet music sales. There was no record chart – it was a sheet music chart.

Donald Peers was around at that time. When he was singing on his radio show they (the songs) were all from the sheet music charts, and when he sang a particular song, it went into the chart. You had to plug the song with all the bands like Geraldo and Ted Heath. You had to get everybody going.

I wasn’t with Donald when he first started out. He was a big star. I honestly think, of all the people I’ve seen on stage, he was as good as anyone. On stage he was magical. There was a radio show he had with a live audience – it was the first the BBC had ever done. The records came as a result of that show, about the same time that records began to be very important. I think Wally (Ridley) got his first job at EMI because of that. Wally was a song plugger for Jimmy Philips (Peter’s father. Nick Philips is Peter’s son and his brother Robin runs the background library for EMI). When the emphasis turned to record sales, I worked for people like Ken Dodd and Acker Bilk. Dennis Preston asked if I would promote records by the artists he recorded, on a royalties basis. That’s how I got into independent record promotion. Les (Reed) and I were together professionally. We split up; I went independent and Denis Preston then asked me to work on his artists. I did that for a reasonable length of time, then Francis Day & Hunter asked if I would join them. I didn’t want to give up my own company, so I split the records with them. They gradually increased and then I did an exclusive deal with them for record promotion. When EMI bought them (presumably Lansdowne) I was still an independent. I had worked for all those years but was never on the payroll. In those days it seemed the sensible thing to do was to run your own company and do your own thing. But with EMI I couldn’t do that, so I joined and became a board director at EMI Music Publishing in 1973 to specialise in record promotion. You used to get these double sided white label discs and I’d have a little sticker saying “Please play this side, Kay O’Dwyer” because nobody knew which side to play – they were all white labels. These went to radio producers on Housewives Choice and Two Way Family Favourites.

Jean Metcalfe and Cliff Michelmore

You had to get in and persuade them that the record was going to be requested. I suppose everyone (plugger) did the same thing – some people went over to Germany! As the programmes grew in number it all picked up very quickly - Jack Jackson, Keith Fordyce. It was mainly the producers we dealt with, but also the presenters. Anyone who had anything to do with getting a record played would – and Jean Metcalfe was super in those days. They were all nice – they used to listen. You never contacted the record company to see what they were doing; you just worked the record because that was your job. Before record programmes you were promoting the song, trying to get that song into every programme. You’d go to someone like Geraldo, all the band leaders and organists – that’s how you’d start out – the stars came after that. When you had a song to plug, you went through an advance copy of the Radio Times and tried to get your song on as many programmes as possible – that’s how we earned our money. Nowadays, the publishers leave it to the record companies – a few use independent pluggers. Now that most recording artists write their own songs, it’s a different business. Jerry Lordan was the first person to change things because he wrote things like Apache and Wonderful Land before becoming a singer with Who could be bluer. I think he was the first one I knew in this country who did that.

Then of course, The Beatles came along and it all changed. Everyone seemed to write their own songs and be their own artist, Before, people were looking for songs all the time – they wanted a hit song. Nowadays, by the time you get the song, it’s been recorded..it’s a different job.

It’s the world stars who still look for songs

All the writers had the chance to be recorded – now it’s a closed shop. Roger Cook in Nashville for example was in the Top Five, as good songwriters. The fun was finding the song. The songwriters used to come in and get you to hear their songs – you either liked them or you didn’t. If you liked them you took them (as writers) and you were committed to them.

Where was Yale Music?

It was at the same place as EMI Publishing is now (which was 20 years ago!) 133a Charing Cross Road. Peter Maurice, Laurence Wright, Campbell-Connelly – they were all around Denmark Street except Chappells who were in New Bond Street. It was lovely; everyone went to Denmark Street. All the musicians looking for work congregated in Archer Street. Mr Gifford, who used to engrave the music for the printers, had an office at the back of Archer Street, so all the publishers would get an arranger to arrange the song and Mr Gifford would beat it out on metal ready for the printer.

Where were you when The Beatles exploded?

(Kay didn’t answer this, but..) They made a difference to everybody’s business. The publishers were never quite the same again. The Beatles were a ready made act. They had their own songs. Others still relied on Denmark Street so that was fine, but they started a trend for groups who wrote for themselves. The Rolling Stones followed quickly afterwards and they were always around Charing Cross Road, as were The Shadows.

Norman Newell told me Ardmore and Beechwood were above the HMV shop and when The Beatles did their test recording there, it was the guy from A&B who heard it and passed it on.

Syd Coleman did the publishing deal for the first two songs, but eventually Len Wood (then EMI chairman)sold them back to him, much to my disgust. I could never believe that. It was fun in my day – very hard work, but I loved it. Working in Charing Cross Road you met people like Jimmy Phillips, Jimmy Henney, and I used to think that one day I’d do as well as them. They were all experts in their business, all had big personalities. When I was at Chappells, Jimmy Henney was the top man for promotion – he knew all the American singers. He was always very good looking, very gentlemanly, everybody loved him and he had the open sesame to everything. He was a nice fellow

Jimmy Henney

When I was at Chappells, I sometimes had songs I knew I couldn’t do anything with. They were picked out off the catalogues they represented and gave us the one they wanted promoted. We used to have meetings when they played us the songs. Teddy Holmes was there, Jimmy, me, Sid Green and a guy called Leslie Kettle. They’d play the songs, asked us what we thought of them and allocate them to those who wanted them. When I went to Victoria Music, they said they hadn’t had a hit for six years, so it wasn’t an easy task. But I had In the cool cool of the evening, Day after day, and I apologise. They were American songs in the Victoria Music catalogue which was owned by Chappells. I had to get the bands to play them.

Were the record companies of great importance to you then?

It was a separate business until records started to sell, and then it became more important to get the artist to record a song. The artist would say ‘ play it to Wally Ridley or whoever – tell him I like it. And then you had to convince the A&R manager it was right for the singer. When it was recorded, it had to be a good recording and then I’d promote it at radio the same way I had promoted sheet music. There were so many good American songs, but even if we got a good English song we couldn’t get it released in America, not for love or money. They didn’t want to know until The Beatles came and changed the world.

Did you have any strong association with song writers?

Jerry Lordan, Les Reed, Barry Mason. We had the best days of those people with Francis Day & Hunter. I think Les forged the relationship with Gordon Mills when he was keyboard player for the John Barry Seven. They then wrote a song together for The Applejacks – Tell me When. Les also wrote It’s not unusual. We had him after that. Then Barry came along because he hadn’t had any hits and he wanted to meet Les. We put them together.

Norman Newell?

Norman had a problem. He used to write lyrics to continental songs, so got less money than writing in English in the first place. I think he is accepted as one of Britain’s top lyricists.

Before you got to EMI whom had you worked for the longest?

As an independent. Winifred Atwell for a couple of years, David Platz at Essex Music. When I was at Chappells, Tony Hall and Jimmy Henney were best friends. Tony, Jimmy and a guy called David Raven were like The Three Musketeers. Tony went out with Jackie Collins, Jimmy went out with Lana Morris and we were all together in those days.

I never worked for a record company. I slid in to EMI by virtue of it acquiring FrancisDay and Hunter. I ran it first of all, Peter ran Peter Maurice and perhaps, not at the beginning, Terry Slater was there. At that time I was with Donald (Peers) and he was very ill. Had that not been so, I wouldn’t have been at EMI. I would have stayed independent. But I had a lot of things on my plate and it seemed to me that the way I could manage everything, look after my business, look after Donald, was to go on doing what I knew how to do, which was to stay at Francis, Day & Hunter. Although it was EMI, it was still run as a separate company and for the first year I was still independent. Then EMI formed a new board and asked if I would like to join as managing director. That was the time when Donald was still ill. Not long after that it all changed, but then I was already on the board and had given up my independence . The board was all male, but it was lovely. I enjoyed it very much. The only person I had any trouble with was Ron White. I don’t think he got on with ladies. He didn’t have to give me the job, but he did. I think we both had respect for each other underneath. His wife used to say to me -“you have problems with him, you should have him at home!”. Ken East gave Ron a hard time and I think learned from other people so gave everyone a hard time himself. When Len was no longer in the position he was, he and Ron didn’t seem to hit it off. He used to say “Len Wood kept me back”, which he didn’t – he pushed him all the way. Everyone found him difficult – Brian Hopkins, Terry Slater, and with me it was always boxing gloves on.

Terry Slater.

Was the chart important?

If you weren’t in the charts you were dead! Funnily enough, in those times you went for the singles charts because it was always felt that albums were something that followed singles. Now the album comes first and you take a single from it.

What if you had the B-side and a rival publisher had the A-side?

We weren’t bothered. Very often publishers would say ‘that shouldn’t be the A-side, we should be the A-side’ and people would start to fight, but then of course we were kidding ourselves! But we did that in the beginning, tried to get the record companies to turn the disc over…and it did happen sometimes. Getting the artist to do one of your songs as a B-side was just as important financially, but you didn’t look at it like that. You were in the business to get A-side hits. The big problem was buying American songs because as soon as they went in the charts all the publishers would bid for the rights in this country. That’s how we started out, but really what we wanted to do was to get an English song released in America. That was the hardest thing to do until we opened our company in America. What we should have done in hindsight was to have opened our own record company. We used to think that the most important ingredient was the song. We used to say “the song can make the artist, but if an artist sings a bad song…nothing!” If it’s a hit song anyone can sing it. We did that a little bit. If we had a certain artist we would help financially to make the record.

Dick James did that, forming his own record label

Publishers were different animals. We just wanted to own the copyright; we didn’t care who had the record. They weren’t businesslike in those days – they were only concerned in the publishing. Then Dick came along and had his own record company as well.

Exploiting old songs in TV adverts – was that your initiative?

No. I think Ron White wanted Brian Hopkins to be the next managing director of EMI Music Publishing. He found me a bit of a stumbling block. He tried to find a way round it and that was get me to run the thing for TV advertising. I had no intention of doing it. I thought “I’ll do it for a year, to show him I can, but then I’m out.” But of course, in two years it took off. I did extremely well as no one had done it before. The top artists and songwriters didn’t want their songs on tv commercials – you had to go down on bended knee to persuade them. Now they’re asking me! I changed the whole thing and adapted my plugging technique to fixing songs for TV adverts. I got to know all the advertisers and commercial producers and did it that way. The first ad was Changes by David Bowie, but I can’t remember the first to have a record sales spin-off. We had a Levi’s ad with What a wonderful world’ – maybe that was the first one, Once I’d seen it happen I started to push the back catalogue. It was a new world for advertisers too; they suddenly wanted to be connected to music. It’s true – music sets the actual pace of things. For a long time we were the only company to have our own division. EMI as a publishing group was getting bigger and bigger. Publishers in those days were people who understood music, understood the writers. Writers, let’s face it, were their lifeblood- it’s not the same these days

It used to be secondary exploitation

It’s a different business Not that people in it aren’t just as good – it’s just that the business we were in is no longer there. It’s not so much fun. When we had Queen – the first big world group – EMI had been making records and suddenly we had a world market…things had to change. Whereas before, we had writers and were delighted if they had a hit in England, but with Queen the whole world opened.

We started with Jerry Lordan, and with Apache he had a hit all over the world but that was slightly different. It was an instrumental – no language barrier. When we first met, he didn’t play an instrument. He had a little ukulele but in his head he knew exactly what he wanted. He would drive the people who transcribed his music, mad. He arranged his songs in his head. but he couldn’t play piano.

There are no opportunities for songwriters now – where are they going to go? Les Reed did say to me ‘let’s start a company’ and I might. I’ll think about it

Norman Newell used to say that LP’s had to be full of songs that everybody had heard, or why else would you buy it?

It’s funny – he was right in his day. If you recorded an LP of unknown songs, nobody would buy it. But the difference today is that we’re not buying an artist singing unknown songs, but an artist who writes all their own songs.

If you were starting out again today, would you still go into this business?

No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s a personality business anymore. The people who are running it, ninety times out of ten, are faceless wonders. It’s a money business. Maurice Oberstein is probably the last one. He didn’t need the hat and the dog!! When I started out there were Reg Connelly, Jimmy Phillips, Lawrence Wright…all in publishing .

And there the interview ended, conducted from her flat overlooking Brighton beach. On reflection I should have read it carefully while it was still in my memory as the world of sheet music publishing, so important for so long, is very rarely the subject of music history.

©David Hughes 2024. All illustrations gleaned from Google and there just to break up the copy!

A Personal History of the British Music Industry 104 – Tim Blackmore

Tim Blackmore: 1944-2023

I never worked with Tim Blackmore, yet I feel I knew him well, as much through his BBC links with all the disc jockeys from the launch of Radio 1 as for his later compassion with Duncan Johnson in particular, finding him a place at Brinsworth House in Twickenham, the care home for show business folk, when Duncan’s Parkinson’s Disease made it impossible for him to continue independent living. This interview dates from February 2005

Music was the whole reason I got into radio. I am a child of rock’n’roll. The very first record I was given with my Christmas present record player in 1957, was Paul Anna’s Diana, on a 78rpm disc. The record player had styli that you flipped over to play 78rpm and 45rpm discs, but initially I carried on buying 78’s. The first two records I bought were Be my girl by Jim Dale, which went on to be No.2 in the charts and I think was one of George Martin’s first hits, and That’ll be the day by the Crickets which was on Coral. Be my girl I knew because I listened to Radio Luxembourg at the time and EMI, like the other record companies, had their individual programmes. It’s almost impossible, retrospectively, to get anyone to understand just how important Radio Luxembourg was . That’ll be the day I heard at the fair which came to Pontefract in Yorkshire, where we lived, and that Saturday every ride was playing it. That whole era was phenomenal. I remember also the importance of films like The girl can’t help it where I saw Little Richard for the very first time. I think we’ve also forgotten how important jukeboxes were in those days. Now, with music coning at us from every available outlet in any form you want, it’s hard to explain to people that then (the 1950’s) it was very difficult to hear music. Juke boxes were essential – they were almost the only way to hear music if you couldn’t afford to buy the records, and like most kids – I was 13 at the time – I would put my threepenny bits in to hear the record. I had a terrible obsession with Danny and the Juniors’ At the hop, which I just loved.

Danny and the Juniors

Today you get all these disparaging remarks about white groups ripping off the black. At the time it didn’t matter at all. It was a great sound; it made the adrenaline pump, and you could dance with girls! I wasn’t a great dancer myself. I was one of those guys who always tried to get behind the record player when there was a party on, and put the records on, because it gave me a role. I didn’t have to worry that I had a hopeless sense of rhythm. That’s a concern that still hits people nowadays.

So juke boxes were very very important then, both in funfairs and in cafes so the only music you heard was paid for by the customers. (Needle time – the number of records that could be played on the BBC – was strictly limited by the Musicians’ Union, and cafes and pubs did not play the radio but increasingly installed jukeboxes) We’d make a cup of coffee last hours just to listen to the juke box! We would have heard the music on Luxembourg. To me, music has always been a combination of mouth and radio.

These two things feed the music generations. I remember the absolutely ludicrous situation at the BRIT Awards in the early 1980’s when Chris Wright, who was chairman of the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) at the time, getting up and uttering the immortal words “A record played on the radio is a record sale lost.” This was because he was pursuing what was then the political mantra of the record industry, because of its big dispute with the radio industry. I have to say that, even though I work in radio, I know from personal experience that it was radio that prompted me to buy records, because for me, there was always the thrill of actually holding the record itself. I interviewed Tim Rice the other day and he was saying that he still hasn’t got turned on the CD’s – he still enjoys the album sleeve, the EP sleeve, whatever it might be, to such an extent that he can’t get excited about a CD, no matter how ornate the design is. You can’t read the bloody things anyway because the typeface is so small!

People like us who were starved with music in those days were much keener to find any way to seek it out.

If you were as interested as I was in what would now be called ‘cutting edge’ (though of course that music is now seen as very middle-of-the-road and appears on Radio 2), the frustration was that the BBC at that point presented the music lover with two concerns. The first was that there were hardly any programmes that broadcast contemporary music. You could sit around listening to Two Way Family Favourites on Sunday lunchtime praying that a contemporary record might slip in, but you were more likely listening to Rosemary Clooney followed by The Dam Busters March! We did get to the point when Saturday Club arrived, followed by Easy Beat, which were dedicated to new music. But even then there was an edict by a lady called Anna Instone, who was head of the Gramophone Department and had the responsibility across all the networks for the use of gramophone records as they were then called. It said that where there is a choice of artist singing the song live, we must always support the British. Hence, if you study the statistics it seemed ludicrous. Why was Craig Douglas having more success that Sam Cooke? (Craig’s version of ‘Only Sixteen’ went to No.1, while Sam Cooke’s original version only made 29 – and both recordings were on EMI labels (Top Rank and HMV!!)

Simply because the BBC boss said we should support British artists rather than American – and that caused all sorts of effects. Those kinds of thing were happening all the time. If you were listening to someone like, say, Tony Hall on Radio Luxembourg, who was doing the Decca shows, you would be filled with enthusiasm and would discover records on their London American label that you would hardly ever hear on British radio. That’s why there are so many records from that label that we now look back on and revere. But if the current generation looks in the British Book of His Singles, they won’t find them. And that is very largely due to British policies.

And an excuse for another airing of my wife in 1967 when she worked for Tony (left) with Ray Kane (centre). The cat has never been named!

It was interesting at the end of the 50’s when probably the biggest act in the country was Cliff Richard and the Shadows. I well remember Jimmy Savile’s ‘Teen and Twenty Disc Club’ on Luxembourg. Every record was from the Decca group of labels, except that they included Cliff Richard. I couldn’t work it out at the time, but subsequently spoke to people and they knew Cliff was so big – why have a record programme where you don’t play the biggest star? Much better to sacrifice sixty seconds of your air time and include the biggest name in pop, and use the other 29 minutes to plug your own product. I look back on that now and think it was a very clever move.

Do you remember whether you took an interest in the labels?

Absolutely. I could probably tell you the colour of the label, the colour of the sleeve and maybe even the prefix. The Columbias were all DB something, and HMV was POP. I remember Presley being on HMV and then suddenly he switched to RCA and I didn’t understand why that was. I didn’t know much then about the inner workings of the business, but I was certainly aware of the labels. But I didn’t have much knowledge of or interest in the companies, but I was aware of which labels were in the same groups . You used to go into the record shops and there’d be a a big poster for EMI and it would have the logos of the labels they had, which at that time were Capitol, HMV, Parlophone, Columbia, MGM and Verve

Your Anna Instone story was compounded by the fact that most of the UK acts were drawing on American material

I remember Melody Maker used to list all the versions, so you could look and see That’ll be the Day by The Crickets and underneath it would say That’ll be the Day by Larry Page – that kind of thing. I was aware there was this competition. A song would come out and almost every company would release its own version. The song was powerful, much more than it is today, in setting the running. I think there is a desperate shortage of songs now, which is why people are going through catalogues to find things they can re-work, put a rap lyric across a musical hook. In the Fifties people would recognise a hit song, probably from America and every label would have its version.

A lot of rock’n’roll was recycling songs from the 1940’s

Oh yes Jan and Dean with Heart and Soul – not a big hit record but a good song, and P.J.Proby’s Hold Me. I thought ‘ what a great rocker’ and then I heard some of the versions from twenty years earlier.

And Elvis’s ‘Blue Moon.’

The interesting thing about Elvis for me was, I did buy his records but I was not aware of just how special he was until later. I think to me he was tarnished because the girls reacted so hysterically to him, so I kind of put him to one side. My musical favourites would probably have been Buddy Holly, Everly Brothers, Drifters, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard – they are the ones I would have spent most of my money on.

Did you buy records your parents hated, and were you aware that’s what you were doing?

I was aware that they didn’t like what I was buying! The only point at which there was a crossover was when the folk boom arrived. I didn’t start buying until the end of 1957, and my main recollection would have been Junior Choice more than anything else, but hearing Max Bygraves, Doris Day, Teresa Brewer, I never wanted to buy their records. Ironically, now I’m in my 50’s (2005) I’m going back and listening to some of that music and I think it’s terrific. I just bought the Bear Family compilation of Johnnie Ray’s stuff and some of it is outstanding – the arrangement, performance – terrific stuff, but I was very dismissive at the time.

I wasn’t aware of the hysteria that Johnnie Ray created – it was Elvis who did that. I remember my father took the News Chronicle and in 1956 there was a cartoon of teddy boys tearing up a cinema with some reference to rock’n’roll, and me asking him what rock’n’roll was. I can actually remember asking him that question. He explained it was music from a film. It was after that I went to see Rock Around the Clock, by which time I was into the whole thing.

The other interesting landmark I remember is reading a copy of the NME when I came to London for the first time in 1962, end of September, and seeing an advert from a fan club for a group called The Beatles, wishing them well for their first release, Love me do. I remember saying to my mate ‘what a stupid name for a band’ and now you look back – could they ever have been called anything else? Of course not! It seems like a golden age now, but I think that’s only because it was an age of discovery for me personally. I was getting something for the first time. All of a sudden I discovered this music that spoke to my generation – the lyrics of Felice and Boudleux Bryant which they gave to the Everly Brothers to sing, and the lyrics of Buddy Holly. They hit me; they were singing about scenarios that I knew like having to get a girl home from the cinema before her father started going apeshit. It was all there in the songs; people were writing these songs, making these records, about the life I was living. Fantastic

I’m sure successive generations feel the same

I hope they do, because it’s a great feeling.

The movie wasn’t so hot
It didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked
Our reputation is shot

When did this interest manifest itself in employment?

The first thing I was aware of was when I was very active in a youth club in Blythe, Northumberland when we moved there in 1958. My father was a Methodist minister and had been responsible in 1945 for running youth clubs in Germany, designed to bring together the occupying troops and the young people to try and rebuild Germany – he’d been doing this is Hamburg and, to a lesser extent, in Berlin. When he returned to England he got involved in starting MAYC, the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs, which became the biggest youth club organisation the country’s ever seen – still active even now. When we moved to Blythe I was 14 and able to join. People would bring their record players and discs until, after 18 months when the club had really taken hold, the church allocated some money to having a built in sound system and I bought what must have been the first twin turntable in the North East of England. I had simply worked out that rather than having that awful hiatus when the auto-changer dropped the records down, if we had twin turntables you could start the second one before the first one stopped playing.

To cut out a whole lot of personal crap, I was involved in running drama societies and public speaking groups..all sorts of things, and the end result of all that was Pure Maths. At the end of sixth form I failed to get any of the grades for the university places I’d been offered, so I had to get a job quickly.

There was an advert in the Radio Times for Trainee Technicians at the BBC, which said things like ‘Do you have a special interest in electronics, in amateur dramatics and music’ and I was able to write a later to say I hadn’t got any grades but was very interested because I’ve built this (twin turntable) unit and have been involved in making audio. I’d used a Grundig tape recorder. I didn’t understand editing at that point, but did know that if you found someone else with a tape recorder you could dub from one to the other, and I used to make little tapes to accompany slide shows…and in the end they said ‘look, we’re sorry you didn’t get all the grades you need but we like what you say about yourself and we’d like to offer you a post as a trainee.

Which I did, and joined the BBC as a studio manager, then studio manager announcer and then a studio manager announcer on the World Service at Bush House at the end of 1962. Five years later the government passed the Marine Offences Bill, and Anna Instone of the Gramophone Department advertised for four young people to start the new Radio 1 network. I was then 23 and landed the plummiest job of all which was putting together the new Radio 1 Breakfast Show with Tony Blackburn.

Ann Instone

With no production experience?

None! For the first six weeks it was produced by Johnny Beerling and then I was given the running order for the Tony Blackburn playlist. I’d been working as No.2 to Johnny, but he’d been making the final selection. (he showed me a sheaf of papers) . This shows all the records played and the code system. You either got records played twice in a week – Tuesday and Thursday – or three times – Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I created a Top 40, so we were doing Top 40 radio and ran the same format that Tony had been doing on Radio London, simply adapting the format slightly to fit a BBC scenario. It was based on my ears, but, looking at the chart, the records I deemed inappropriate for the national breakfast show, didn’t appear in the Top 40 at all! We would also move things much faster than the sales chart did. If a record was struggling a bit around the 10-11 mark, we’d abandon it pretty quickly as it was clear it wasn’t going to become immensely popular. And we could have records high in our chart simply because I thought they were great for getting people up in the morning, even if they weren’t going to buy them!

Suddenly, given this programme to produce must have exposed you to the entire record industry?

Yes, it was completely mind boggling. My entry was to the music radio industry (although they are two separate industries, record and radio, there are very strong links). There is a firm interdependency. The first shock to me was that there were these strange people, whom I later came to know as pluggers, who began ringing me up and then saying ‘can we come and see you?’ and they actually gave me free records. Instead of having to decide out of the twelve records I desperately wanted (to buy), which two I could afford all of a sudden every single record that was released – and I guess at that time it was 70-80- a week – something like that – landed on my desk. That was a source of enormous pleasure. What was not a pleasure was the amount of pressure placed on me. I was a 23-year-old music lover with relatively little experience of the commercial world – i.e. the importance of buying and selling music – who happened to have had five years learning how you made radio programmes. It did get to me initially, and I thought ‘I don’t know if I can handle the continual ‘will you do this, will you do that and if not why not’.The majority of the pluggers were people who had been genuine song-pluggers. They had been used to going round the band leaders to persuade them to play their songs, and now they were dealing with getting the finished recordings of these songs played by people like me on the radio.

That was the first time the pluggers had a national station that was going to play records all day.

More to the point, the record companies were receiving payment as well as getting plays, which was totally different from what they were used to where they had to buy whole programmes (on Radio Luxembourg) to get their records in the radio. The way I decided to handle it, and with hindsight I have no idea why I came up with it, was that I was going to be very straightforward with people. During the first few days at Radio 1 I had been shadowing other producers and I’d hear them saying ‘yes, well I’m not sure I need to hear it again. I need to check out the reaction and just see. I’ll certainly be considering it.’ I watched this, and thought it was totally unproductive, so what I adopted was a policy of ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ on the basis that if I said ‘no and then changed my mind after three or four plays, they’d be thrilled, and if I said ‘no, I really don’t rate it; I’m going to play ten new records this week and this isn’t one of them ‘then they were off my back. It was much more effective that saying ‘ well, let me think about it a bit longer.’ The truth is that you do have to hear records more than once. I don’t know how many geniuses there are out there who can hear music for the first time and say ‘; that’s going to be brilliant on radio’ or, in simple terms,’that’s going to be a hit. Most of us get it right sometimes; most of us get it wrong. It’s so variable. You do need to hear a record several times. I started from the point of being pretty firm initially as to whether it was yeah or nay, and I think that worked it my favour. I don’t think the pressure ever really got to me.

Who were these characters trying to persuade you to play their records?

A bundle of now legendary names! Johnny Wise I well remember from what was Pye Records then, and later became PRT records and tapes, with Issy Price also from Pye. At Decca – now serving Her Majesty’s Pleasure, Mr Chris Denning, erstwhile DJ. When his DJ work failed him he became head of Promotion at Decca at the point where Jonathan King had just lessened his activities as an artist and was working with Sir Edward Lewis as a consultant – he got Chris in to do promotion. Decca had a whole team of generally young people. Tony Hall, who’d been the longtime promotion man there had just left and set up the first of many independent promotion companies, with Ray Kane. EMI – I particularly remember Len Wood, Ron White, Ken East. They weren’t plugging but they were the people you met at receptions almost every lunchtime. I remember looking out of the window at Egton House, the headquarters of Radio 1, and seeing Langham Street outside virtually blocked with limousines waiting to take DJ’s and producers to receptions or lunch. It was quite spectacular; there was a choice almost every day of the week of which reception to go to. The receptions could be anything from standing round chatting, someone making a speech, a bite to eat and plenty to drink – through to where you might even get the artist to perform.

With the aim to get their record on your list?

Well, that was the only purpose. It certainly meant we became immersed in the machinations of the record industry, and because we were meeting their representatives on such a regular basis, we were well aware of all the politics of the industry, what was happening. It was useful from that point of view and, let’s be honest, it was jolly good fun. Anyone who pretends it was not enjoyable industry to be part of, is kidding. It was thoroughly enjoyable. These were the now historic Swinging Sixties, as people call them. It was a great era where music was God. Music was the universal means of communication for a generation. That isn’t true now. I don’t think people in the 15-24 age range see music as powerfully as we did. It was all we had – a little bit of film, but normally only when the film included music. The music was the way in which we shared a common experience. If you met people socially there’d always be music playing, conversations about music. If you followed the Top 30 in those days, three quarters of the records were of pretty universal appeal. Nowadays the sales chart is simply a collection of an incredible number of diverse music genres. I don’t know how many universally appealing records you’d find in the Top 30 now – you’d probably be lucky to find three or four with a very strong melody – the highest number being ballads. There’s no denying that the 60’s were very special. Those of us who were part of it, both in record companies and radio stations were very well aware that we were part of something very new. Almost all the bosses were over 55, and if not, they behaved like it! And here we were, a bunch of 20-30 year olds – a lot of us were under 25 – and we were being given great responsibility to make things happen. I don’t think we will see a revolution like that ever again. What it did do is to establish a precedent that young people could take responsibility, make a difference and more or less run things as responsibly as elder people did, In a sense we’ve never looked back. There was a situation when you and I started, that you could reasonably be expected to be in employment until you were 65 – that’s when the pension didn’t start until 65. I’m coming up to 55 next year and I know many people who are 55 and still working in the industry.

Do you remember any wacky record promotions?

We were having a meeting on the top floor of Egton House when one of those painter’s cradles used for the outside of building, came up past our window. In the cradle appeared the faces of two well-known pluggers – Oliver Smallman and Richard Evans. The window was open and they handed in the record they were plugging, I can’t remember the record (!). Richard Evans tells a wonderful (but sad?) story about how he hired a rag and bone man with a horse and cart and the horse died in traffic in Regent Street just as it was coming to Broadcasting House!

How did you see your role, being a passionate music person?

I think I did feel I had a bit of a missionary role. I thought ‘here I am, I’ve got a chance to hear all this music. I can help people towards the great riches that are available’. This came to a peak with me at the end of the 60’s when I was asked to work with the then unknown Noel Edmunds, who had previously been making trailers for the BBC. When Kenny Everett got fired for not abiding by the commitment he had made (he’d had several problems and had agreed not to talk to the press without BBC press officers being present. He broke this commitment and the terminated his contract),

they had to put someone in so they pulled Noel Edmunds out of nowhere, put him on Saturday mornings and gave me the show to produce. I’d moved on from the Breakfast Show in the course of 1970 and was given Noel on Saturdays and Jimmy Savile on Sundays with a chat show called Speakeasy. Then a few weeks on, another change was made – Noel was moved to Sunday mornings and I was given Stuart Henry on Saturday mornings.

Stuart Henry

I couldn’t work out how to get people to notice Noel, but I came up with what I thought was a whizz bang scheme. Noel had an idea that is now commonplace, but literally was not happening then – that you could stimulate the audience to provide you with the bulk of your editorial material. Up until then, the only way the listeners could contribute was by sending in requests and being given dedications. Noel wanted to stimulate competition. For example he talked about the origin of a phrase and asked the listeners to write in with another. My proposal, which we had real struggles with, was to start playing album tracks. Now that sounds silly, but the only real outlets for albums was a weekly programme playing some of the new releases. I was talking about a peak time Sunday morning show. Cat Stevens had just returned from having TB and had recorded Mona Bone Jacon; Elton John has his first album out and in America there were the first stirrings of artists like Harry Chapin, Carly Simon, James Taylor – the singer/songwriter movement was just starting. Partly because of my folk background, but also through instinct, I always had a feeling for what was going to happen musically, which is how I survived that very competitive period. I said ‘ I think we must stop concentrating purely on the Top 30 and must look at these singer/songwriters’ . So I introduced the concept that Noel always took the piss out of. He used to credit me at the end of the programme as ‘Tim-back-from-the-news-with-a-hit Blackmore. That was because we started and came out of the news, which was every half hour, with a hit but the rest of the programme was albums, including segueing three tracks together in the middle. I don’t think anyone had had done that until then. We had an album of the week, from people like Jim Croce or Crosby Stills Nash & Young. I remember having debates with the hierarchy – Teddy Warwick, Doreen Davies and Derek Chinnery were the executive producers at that time; above them would have been Mark White. I remember having a debate with Doreen about this (playing album tracks) and she used her great phrase ‘keep it 2.30 and bright'(i.e.the length and the mood!). She was a very successful producer, but I remember arguing about a style of broadcasting and that maybe we could have a different style. In the end it was down to Teddy who was the executive producer of the Sunday morning slot, and he backed it. Within three months we had achieved a 20% increase of Sunday morning listeners and the show became something of a legend, a) because of the music we were playing, which was supporting this new movement of singer/songwriter, and b) the fact that Noel was creating this fantasy world with tremendous involvement from the listeners providing gags and material to use, which eventually led to the creation of the Manor House and the butler. That ran until 1973 when Noel was promoted to the Breakfast Show and I moved on to making documentaries.

Did you feel you had a hand in making some artists successful who might otherwise have struggled? Did you have a relationship with them and even tell them if you didn’t feel their current single was up to it

I would certainly say ‘yes’ with Cat Stevens. He invited Noel and me to hear at least two of his albums even before they were passed to the record company to see whether we thought they would go down well. We also championed The Strawbs like there was no tomorrow. I remember we played almost every track on New World. We probably had two meetings with Cat Stevens, had dinner three times with Harry Chapin. I loved him – I just thought ‘what a fantastic observer of human life’. I thought the same about Jim Croce. I also remember several times having very upset pluggers who had assumed that because we’d played one record by a particular singer that we were locked into them. I’ve always said that in programming you can never guarantee the artists you will play. There are artists whose material is likely to suit us, but we’re not guaranteeing we will play it because that makes no sense.

At the very first Music Radio Conference that I organised, Paul Gambaccini interviewed Cliff Richard. Cliff said ‘I believe that an artist of my stature with my achievements should receive automatic playlisting from radio stations‘. I don’t believe that is ever ever deserved. There is not artist on this planet that I, as a programmer, would say ‘I will automatically play their next record.’ To some extent it was indulgent radio. That was the only programme I’ve either produced or been responsible for, where wholeheartedly we played music that I appreciated. That is a rare opportunity to have a radio slot, the demands of which totally coincide with what you want to do.

What did the pluggers make of that – that you weren’t playing the singles they were paid to bring you?

Quite often there was a happy coincidence, because most of them at that time were bringing albums at the same time. I remember ‘Your Song’ we played week after week, and talking to Dick James’s plugger , a girl called Sandra, and I said ‘please please please put it out as a single’ and they said ‘Elton doesn’t want to work on any singles.’ He’d had two earlier ones on the Philips label which didn’t sell. I think at that point I was still working on the Tony Blackburn show because I remember saying something I very rarely said to people. ‘If you put that out as a single I will guarantee it as the Tony Blackburn Record of the week’, which was the only spot where we played a record every day. That was incredibly powerful. If I told a plugger a song was going to be record of the week, he would say ’can I use your phone?’ and would literally ring the factory and you’d hear these ludicrous pressing figures being talked about. This was the era when a No.1 single could sell 75-85,000 copies a day. (N.B. from my years in the record business I would respectfully suggest he’d have called his boss!)

What went through your head when something like this happened?

I imagine I would have thoroughly enjoyed the role of being able to have an impact on what was going to happen in the music business, and the track record of Tony Blackburn’s ‘Record of the Week’ – and we didn’t do obvious records; we would try to find something that made people go ‘wow’. We had a lot of this

I remember Derek Chinnery saying more than once: ‘the BBC is not here to serve the record industry’ and we would respond that without us you wouldn’t have anything to play!

Derek was right, but he was only taking one part of reality. There was, and is an interdependence. Radio stations, and particularly a public service broadcast like the BBC, has an obligation to maintain its editorial independence. I think it probably did and still does that. It starts to get blurred now when you have radio stations becoming record companies. That’s not a new thing. In America the links between CBS and the Columbia record company as was, were pretty strong, as with RCA and Westinghouse.

Derek Chinnery

On a smaller scale Yorkshire Television had Deke Arlon running York Records with Lovelace Watkins

And now you have Capital Radio owning a joint venture with Telstar.

The BBC went through a period when Humphrey Walwyn ran BBC Records. He was taking the cast of East Enders and making a record with them.

You will remember that there was a concession in the PPL licence agreement, which it called ‘review time.’ We were allowed to include certain records outside the needle time agreement if they were new releases. The idea was that these records were being reviewed, though they very rarely actually were. What normally happened is that we played a jingle saying ‘Radio 1 new spin’ and the jock would explain which label it was available on. That gave us five or six ‘new spin’ slots in a two-hour breakfast show. Everything else was needle time and we didn’t have to include any live sessions. When I left the BBC in 1977 and went to Capital Radio we were still operating there on a maximum of nine hours a day needle time – a PPL restriction acting on behalf of the Musicians’ Union. They didn’t want what happened in America where they had to end up releasing only a cappella records because none of the Federation people in the State would work with them. The BPI/PPL agreement reflected very closely what the MU was asking for and the restriction demanded was that no more than nine hours of needle time per day should be allowed. So we were employing everybody from The Who to the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, taking in loads of little trios and quartets doing popular song versions which were used in our overnight programming, leaving the nine needle time hours for the most competitive hours of the day!

Going back to the days when you and I listened to the radio, ’Saturday Club’  was full of live bands, trad and pop.

There were some bands live in the studio and some who had pre-recorded sessions because they were away touring. I didn’t become aware of needle time until I’d been there quite a while. I think there may have been a change at the point when the Light Programme became Radio 1 and 2, a little bit more needle time negotiated, or something. . There was The Gramophone Department which did all the programmes that were predominately records, and then there was the Music Department in Aeolian Hall, which did the live music. After some years they amalgamated and created music departments for Radios 1 & 2. Initially we were very well aware that there were programmes which spent a lot of money getting live or specially recorded music, and other programmes that just played records. I must say I didn’t have much interest in live music.

What about the enticement of independent records that had ‘non participation of PPL’ stickers on the labels?

I think there was no doubt that it was very valuable to the BBC in the 60’s and commercial radio in the 70’s that there were record companies which were non-PPL. Almost all of those were more than happy to write a letter saying the BBC had permission to use their recordings on air as much as we wanted, because they much appreciated the airtime. 

When did you switch to commercial radio?

1977. I always say I celebrated Radio 1’s 10th anniversary by leaving! I’d been asked to join commercial radio when it began in 1973, when Capital approached me, but I was in the middle of producing a series called The Story of Pop which was the first substantial effort to tell the story of how rock’n’roll came about. I took the view that if I left with that project not completed, I would be looked upon as a pretty fly-by-night guy and it would be damaging to my future, so I stayed. I completed that project in 1974 and then went on a variety of BBC management courses, good training and they were invaluable to me in what I’ve done subsequently. At the beginning of 1977 I was asked to have lunch with Peter James and Aidan Day. Together with Stuart Grundy and myself, we were the four people hired by the BBC Gramophone Department in 1967. We were four young things. Pete had been a pirate on Radio 390, Stuart was at Radio Luxembourg and Aidan was another studio manager. Aidan and Pete left to start Capital Radio, Stuart stayed at the BBC  until about 2000 and I went to Capital in 1977. I had no great dissatisfaction with the BBC, but I was 32 and I just had this sense that while the people at the BBC seemed pleased with what I was doing, I began to think ‘am I only good at what I do because I’m with the BBC’, this kind of womb like existence where the corporate structure props me up and what would happen if I went into the outside world? So there was this kind of driving thing that was worrying me, so when I was approached this second time, I said ‘OK’. Contrary to what people said at the time I left for exactly the same money as I was getting at the BBC – maybe another £50 or something.

The most exciting thing for me at Capital was that the studios and the offices were in the same building. You just walked across the floor and then went into the studio, so you had this great sense of really being part of a radio station. In the BBC we had our offices in one building and you had to walk across the road to get to the studio – there was a real detachment. I remember ringing Derek Chinnery who was then in charge of Radio 1 and saying ‘Derek, you have to do something in your power to get Radio 1’s studio and offices in the same building.’ And they did a couple of years later. Another big difference was the sense of support. I remember saying to Aidan, who was the controller, that I had to go to Glasgow to see Radio Clyde. ‘Who organises travel round here?’ and he threw a copy of Yellow Pages at me! That kind of crystallised the difference between a big organisation an us, and a couple of others. There was certainly a sense of being a very key part of a whole at Capital. It felt like your radio station. I had a trial period of about three months as executive producer; they then made me head of the music department and for the last two years, head of programs. The same pluggers were still knocking on the doors – that didn’t change.

In the editorial sense there was even more responsibility because Capital operated its whole station on the playlist basis. The biggest programme at that time was Saturday mornings, presented by Peter Young, in which we played the Capital Countdown.

Peter Young

Every Friday night I decided what the Top 40 would be. It would be a mix of records we knew the audience would be comfortable with and new releases that we were introducing. It would lose about 10 records every week and we added a new 10. We’d vary the ones at the top – sometimes they lasted for seven or eight weeks, and if they didn’t work too well, sometimes only two. Some would be hits, others would be what were laughingly called turntable hits, like Solid State Brain by Christopher Rainbow which we played the backside off, but nobody bought. They sounded great on air, and out audience figures went up and up. 

Mike Smith, with Sarah Greene and Alan Freeman

I brought in Mike Smith who had been a researcher – he was also a PR man at Brands Hatch racing circuit. We put him on the overnight slot and later on the Breakfast Show which in its top half hour was getting over a million listeners – three times what Chris Tarrant gets now (or rather later!).

I had no influence hiring people at Radio 1, but at Capital I was employing and removing people, or having a high say. I found a young guy in University Radio in lancaster, called Richard Allinson, who again I brought in to do overnight and then moved him to the Chart Show at weekends. I brought in Charlie Gillett, probably the leading historian of rock music. It was an exciting time to develop talent for radio, just the same as it must be exciting for an A&R man in the record industry to spot someone with potential and help them grow their careers.

What’s you view of the current (2005) state of the record industry?

On the one hand, the only problem the record industry has is working out what its carrier is going to be. The essential task of identifying, developing and marketing talent is still there. What’s not clear is whether you’re going to continue doing it through the traditional retail outlets or through other means. What is the impact of technology that allows you to download any kind of sound recording in perfect clarity? I don’t know what the answer is. You could debate whether there actually is a need for a record industry as we’ve known it. A spin off of the way technology has changed is that there may be no need for record companies as we’ve known them. If we think of the whole history of record companies, how you recorded, manufactured, distributed…all these things that need people in white coats, distribution gangs – technology has changed all that.

I have a degree of cynicism about whether Britain will be able to maintain the place it’s had for the last 40 years as a key source of new and exciting music. I believe quite firmly that it is having something fresh new and different to stimulate them, makes them want to be music makers. Take Paul McCartney – two instances. Firstly, his mates who worked at Liverpool docks, got records from the States that he would otherwise not have heard. He’s said that not even Radio Luxembourg were playing the things that were exciting him. Secondly, had The Beatles not heard radio programmes like The Billy Cotton Band Show and Workers’ Playtime, the concept of “Sgt Pepper” would not have been possible. He would have been listening to “Two-Way Family Favourites”, stayed on for 10-15 minutes and heard jokey bits, funny bits, other types of music and snatches of melodies that stayed with him. My fear is that segmentation of market sections, soulless activities sitting in front of a computer surfing the web, the closing down of avenues that traditionally fed people’s creativity , could have a detrimental effect and people will not be stimulated to use music as a way of expressing themselves. Radio’s creativity is threatened because people don’t see it as a way to creativity. There is a fear now of what I call the dominance of fellowship over leadership. Many many breakthroughs in music came from an A&R man somewhere saying ”I don’t quite know how this is going to work, but by the time we get to the third single, it is going to be something”. People working in A&R now are continuously looking over their shoulders; they’re fearful – will their contracts be renewed next year? No way when we have a fearful over-the-shoulder-looking, must-check-this-out environment, will we encourage any creativity whatsoever.

I agree-it’s the problem of a creative community becoming a business. Maurice Oberstein said “this is a business; we are here to make money.

©David Hughes, 2023. Photos Google searched and there just to break up the text. No money is involved in these interviews!

A Personal History of the British Music Industry – Bob Barratt Pts 1 & 2 combined

Having had a good reaction to the Walter Woyda interview, I thought I try editing Bob Barratt, the first one to appear on Word Press, by copying and pasting the two sections together. A bit of a struggle for a non technical person and the illustrations failed to make the journey. However, I’ve posted it, if only to gain any reaction. You may be reading it for the first time, so do let me know if you’d like other interviews to be amalgamated in this way. The section on A&R, recording and choosing songs relates very closely to part of Walter’s interview.

Bob Barratt started working at Abbey Road studios in 1960 for Norman Newell as an “office boy” at the age of 22, as Newell found Barratt to be particularly polite during their previous interactions. During the following years he worked with a number of the studios’ most famous personnel, including Norrie Paramor and Tim Rice and with a number of well known artists, including Vince Hill, producing his cover version of the song Edelweiss, Max Boyce and The Wurzels including their 1976 Number One  single “Combine Harvester (Brand new key)”. In 1985 Barratt started Grasmere Records, a label specialising in brass band and organ music.

Bob died of liver cancer on January 30, 2004, aged 67.

(Courtesy Wikipedia)

By the time I knew Bob, he had left EMI and as well as his own Grasmere MOR label, was taking freelance record producing commissions. I interviewed him in one of his favourite restaurants opposite Olympia and would venture to gently suggest his liver had taken a fair old bashing over the years. He was a large gentleman with a gentle nature

As a schoolboy I was always more interested in who wrote the songs than who sang them. I bought records and also sheet music at one shilling (5p) a time with my pocket money and I got to know the names of the big songwriters of the time – Bob Merrill and Al Hoffman.

I studied the structure of the songs as they were in the 1950’s, (they were) in many ways far simpler than they are today. I listened to the chords and the rhythms and in my teens sent my (own) efforts off to the (music) publishers. If you were lucky the publisher would give you a (cash) advance but I had everything rejected at that time. At 18 I went into the army to do my National Service and then my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps and get a steady job. I went into the City as an accountant (but) instead of eating lunch I spent my hour taking the tube to Tottenham Court Road knocking on doors in Denmark Street (then the home of the music publishing business), and as a result got to meet a lot of people. They were very friendly even though I was intruding into their lunchtime. (I remember) in particular (John Godfrey Owen) Paddy Roberts who was a big pop songwriter of the time. He wrote “Lay Down Your Arms ” (a big hit for Anne Shelton), “Pickin’ a Chicken” (Eve Boswell) and “I’m in Love for the Very First Time” (from “An Alligator Named Daisy” and was winner of an Ivor Novello award in 1955) (Paddy) had his own publishing company in Denmark Street and was also at that time Chairman of the Songwriters’ Guild , which in this country was the nearest thing they had to a trade union, but in those days was more like a club. I was a very new member but everyone was allowed to submit a song occasionally to one of the Directors. Paddy liked what I was doing and fixed me a record on HMV – “Early Memory” by Barry Barnett (N.B. I can find no trace of this song having been recorded!).

As a result of that banging on doors in my lunch hour, Paddy Roberts said “Why don’t you come into the business full time – your mind’s obviously more on music than accountancy”

At that time it was a whole lot easier than it is now. You could start at the bottom as an office boy, learn the ropes, talk to talented established people. I started with a dozen other young people, but as I was older, having done National Service they had an advantage on me. However, I’d done my homework during the summer, memorising as much as I could of the EMI catalogue and all the prices. I started in Castle Street (EMI’s then head office, just off Oxford Street) in Customer Services under a man called George Wilson, taking calls and letters from dealers and members of the public. I’d been doing that for about six weeks when I got promotion into the A&R (Artists and Repertoire) department, which is what I knew I wanted to do. It came about in an unusual way because Norman Newell, one of the established producers at the time, a great lyric writer and something of a boyhood hero of mine, stopped me in the lift one day and said he’d noticed me going about the building and that I seemed very polite – I’d called him ‘Sir’ – and how would I like to go and work for him. This was a dream come true. A&R at that time had different connotations from today – it combined the role of today’s A&R man in finding stars, doing deals and scheduling releases, with today’s record producer. It did the whole lot, took deals, paid arrangers, employed musicians and had the say in the studio.

Norman threw me right in at the deep end – the first day I joined his department we were out on the road to Oxford to see a (musical) revue called Pieces of Eight, starring Kenneth Williams and Sheila Hancock. We were chauffeur driven there and back and I don’t think I had ever been up so late in my life. Still at work at 9.00 next morning. But it gave me confidence in meeting the stars.

Before we continue, it is worth a paragraph to tell you about the power of the A&R men to which Bob referred. In those golden pre-Beatle days, each label had its own A&R man (and they were always men). At EMI there were three key labels – HMV, which, in addition to its local artists, had access to everything on American RCA; Columbia, and Parlophone. HMV’s output was masterminded by Wally Ridley (and the transcript of two interviews with him will come along in due course), Columbia had Norrie Paramor, who is best remembered for Cliff Richard, The Shadows and Helen Shapiro, and Parlophone was plain George Martin, handling what was unkindly referred to as novelty records! Straddling them, and King Bee, was Norman Newell, who had the ear of the EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood and could choose which label would have the privilege of releasing his recordings.

Back to the interview and I asked Bob whether he was aware of the rivalry between the labels and between Wally, Norrie and George

“They seemed quite matey; they collaborated on songs, and I wrote songs with Norman Newell.The rivalry really only showed itself when George Martin had the runaway success with the Liverpool groups – suddenly! Norrie had all the Columbia acts and it was probably the most successful label at the time with Cliff and the Shadows, Helen Shapiro, Frank Ifield, and suddenly there’s George with a new record scheduled every week and every one was a hit. You’d think ‘what a silly name – Billy J.Kramer and the Dakotas – what chance has a name like that got’, and the next week it would be number one.

“Which is how I got sent to Birmingham – they thought that as it was the second biggest city in England there must be some talent there.”

I reminded Bob that he started at EMI 3-4 years before the Mersey sound, still in the days when different labels within the same company would each put a version of the same song.

“Yes, picking songs was easy in those days. A song was a hit in America and you knew it would be a hit over here. No question about it. A song that had been a hit in America would end up having nine or ten cover versions in England. No one would argue the toss – you’d just choose the version you preferred, like classical music. Most of the backings (all singers were accompanied by ‘orchestra and chorus’) were pretty identical and some of the voices too. That’s where the promotion people, the pluggers, would come in. Inevitably one version would get more airplay than the others. There were six producers on the Light Programme (Radio 2) who did all the gramophone slots and once you’d played them the records there was nothing more you could do. You went round the BBC and chatted to the producers and if they liked your record they’d play it and if they didn’t they wouldn’t! Sometimes there would be several different versions of the same song in the charts. There was an enormous number of reps (salesmen) on the road. The A&R team would say to the sales team: ‘this is the cover version of an American hit song on Philips (Philips had the UK licence to release records from American Columbia, confusingly nothing to do with EMI’s Columbia label at the time) but we’re going to knock spots off them. Go out there and do it’. At that time each producer had an assistant who was a plugger  working exclusively for that producer. Needle time (the amount of time the BBC allocated to records as opposed to “live” or studio orchestras) was limited but there was ‘Saturday Club’ (which my memory says played a record at the beginning, one at the end and three in the middle), ‘Easybeat’ (I don’t recall that including records at all), and Jack Jackson. (Jack, a former band leader, was to my knowledge the only person on the BBC whose whole Saturday lunchtime “Record Roundup” was devoted to records of all types – the others were request programmes and the weekly Pick of the Pops chart show. Jack was hugely influential on my record buying and his style of interspersing the discs with comedy extracts set a pattern followed to even greater effect later by Kenny Everett).

On Radio Luxembourg the programmes were controlled by the sponsors, largely record companies – one hour EMI, one hour Decca, one hour Pye, one hour Philips. They only played the first 60 seconds so you never knew how the record ended! When we were sitting in our meetings in the early 60’s we allocated how many paid for plays a week we would have on Luxembourg.

Tell me about Birmingham

I looked at Birmingham and found it was like the green line through Nicosia in Cyprus at the time, very territorial. There were two with-it agents – Mrs Regan of Ladywood who had a ballroom who had half the Birmingham acts and a fellow named Bob Smith from the east side who had all the others.

(A little research revealed this information, courtesy the Birmingham Music Archive web site.

The Old Hill Plaza was one of four venues run by the legendary Irish husband and wife team Mr and Mrs Regan. Mary ‘Ma’ Regan was an ex-schoolteacher and a shy but formidable woman. She came over with my grandfather Joe from Ireland when they were teenagers. During the Second World War she was a teacher and became head of PE for girls for Warwickshire. After that she opened tea shops in the Birmingham area and started tea dances. This then led to the dance halls. They started on a small scale and they had a lot of success. I remember once that Jerry Lee Lewis was due to play at one of her venues. For some reason there was an issue with his piano and they had to use my grandmother’s. She set up The Plaza in High Street, Old Hill, 45 years ago. It was a dance venue, and hosted almost every top act that was in the Top 30, before later becoming a bingo hall. One of Mrs Regan’s great pleasures was to tell people about The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Animals, who all played at The Plaza in the early 1960s. ©Keith Law.

“I got to know Bob Smith very well and he made all his acts available if I wanted them on EMI. Bob was a young manager with a stable of acts.

(See this link – http://www.brumbeat.net/bobbyash.htm)

I had two weeks in Birmingham and as I had to drive around I had to pass an EMI driving test! In those days before you could hire a car in EMI’s name you had to pass an EMI driving test. We did auditions at the Moat House club and ended up shortlisting ten acts. Some had gone to Decca already, thanks to Mrs Regan. I think Mike Smith or Dick Rowe was my counterpart at Decca. Norrie came up for a day or two and out of ten or twelve acts he chose six that we signed. All the options would have been on the company’s side at the time (but) nobody complained – they were falling over themselves to be heard by someone.

We signed Carl (Barron) and the Cheetahs, Keith Powell and the Valets, Pat Wayne & the Beachcombers and The Beachcombers alone as an instrumental band (a bit like The Piltdown Men), Mike Sheridan & the Nightriders and Carl Barron as a solo act – he sounded like Gene Pitney, Danny King’s Mayfair Set

We did singles with all of them, they sold 75,000 – 80,000 copies each and never made the charts. Probably the majority of them were bought in Birmingham and therefore local weighting counted against them. We reached 46 in the charts with The Cougars and I did Roll Over Beethoven with Pat Wayne and Please Mr Postman with Mike Sheridan, sold that many and never made the charts. We thought at the time that The Beatles did many popular tracks on their first LP’s and for people who wouldn’t pay the money for an LP, we would do cover versions as singles. We certainly never had any resounding success but a lot of great names emerged from these bands. Pat Wayne was a great singer, Keith Powell had an excellent smokey black voice. Idle Race was born from The Nightriders; Roy Wood was brought into Mike Sheridan & the Nightriders – I first met him in a scout hut on the Shard End Estate in Birmingham and later recorded his first song – a ‘B’ side. Ray Thomas had a band of his own that we turned down, but he ended up with The Moody Blues, and of course there was Carl Wayne & the Vikings

” That was 1963 and died out in a couple of years.  Then the AIR (George Martin, John Burgess and others) people left  After the walk out, which came about because L.G. Wood (then EMI’s Managing Director) wouldn’t give producers a royalty, the best thing we could hope for was to work a ‘B’ side now and again, which of course we all did. We weren’t even allowed to have a publishing company strictly speaking although Norrie (Paramor) did. I was eventually allowed to have one that I called Ambleside Music, starting in 1968 but it had to be 50/50 with EMI. With Norrie it didn’t matter – he was writing a lot of songs under a multitude of names, he was paid for arranging and he was doing scores for films, as well as the pop films that were around at the time – “Live it Up”, “Play it Cool”. I don’t think the company would have stopped them doing this extra-curricular work; it enabled them to to carry on paying a small salary. Norrie had started to get sidelined into desk jobs which he didn’t particularly like. He ended up on the fifth (management) floor at Manchester Square. The marketing men were taking over – Colin Hadley and Rex Oldfield came in, Cliff Busby, tough guys and they wanted to rule the roost. There was a certain amount of disarray in the A&R department after the AIR London departure. I think Norman (Newell) and Wally (Ridley) remained aloof and tried to be their own bosses. But now all of a sudden our records were vetted; there was a meeting every week and our records were vetted by a panel and what I thought were the best records I’d ever made were turned down by people whose opinions I didn’t think were valid. On the other hand, records I never saw as being hits were big hits. “Combine Harvester” and “Edelweiss” for example. I struggled to get Vince Hill signed by EMI because they saw him as a dance band singer – he was vocalist with Bob Miller and the Millermen. I was for Vince and Norrie supported me. He had been on Pye doing comedy records. My first record for him was a Burt Bacharach songs, then “Merci Cherie”, a Eurovision song in 1964 I think. “Edelweiss” was in 1966  and that’s when I fell out with Decca marketing man Victor Stevens. I recorded it as the ‘B’ side as I fancied the other song  (“A woman Needs Love”)  more but everyone told me “Edelweiss” was better. It was the neglected song from “Sound of Music” and The Bachelors were going to record it but we got it out first. Victor Stevens said to me “Bob, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this records – this is a waltz in 4/3 time”. Ever since I’ve been trying to work out what 4/3 time is! It got to No.2., kept off the top spot by “The Last Waltz” (Engelbert Humperdinck). It took me to ballad career. I did Solomon King.  I went through a bad era and then got into the jokey regional acts – Adge Cutler. He was managed by a man in Bristol called John Miles who managed the Cougars in 1962 and kept in touch. He wrote to me a few years later enclosing a tape and photograph of an act that was doing very well down there – in the old fashioned wurzel gear with a horse and cart. I didn’t like the music he sent me but the group looked interesting so I organised an artist test at Abbey Road for them, and they were good. John had groomed them so perfectly for their arrival at Abbey Road that he knew they would virtually stop the traffic. They turned up in the wurzel gear on a tractor and trailer with haystacks, and Reg Quantrell, who looked like a thickie country yokel had two instruments to play – guitar and banjo. Coming to the driveway at Abbey Road they stopped work inside for the whole morning. They did the test in Studio 2 and the control room was absolutely full of the whole staff – they were just a hilarious act..so we knew we had a hit.

Initially we invited the press to a  recording but couldn’t get them interested, but when we’d made a big noise with “Drink Up Thy Zyder” we did one again in Somerset. Important guests who had driven miles to be there were left outside as the place was full of locals. But I learned a lesson. I did two “live” recordings in Weston-Super-Mare and on the second one Adge blew it. He was under rehearsed, nervous and possibly drunk and it was a disaster. I realised then, when doing live comedy recordings never visit the same place twice. I learned that lesson with Max Boyce – they were all recorded in different places.

In 1970 Vic Lanza took over as my boss. He established the MOR, Easy Listening Department and had already established the Studio 2 series with which I was much involved. Decca had Phase 4 and we had Studio 2 and I probably made 25 LP’s for them. All the producers contributed – Norman did Brian Fahey and Geoff Love, George did Ron Goodwin, I did Jack Emblow (an accordionist), a Drum Spectacular with Ronnie Stephenson, Hawaiian music with Wout Steenhuis, Latin with Brian Fahey. A lot of the music I did with Alan Hawkshaw was re-released (in the 1990’s) on the Sound Gallery CD’s. We also did albums of TV jingles with Alan on keyboards – “It’s all at the Co-op now”, “The lady loves Milk Tray” – they were actually quite nice tunes. I also inherited from Norrie the semi-classical stuff – brass bands, Reginald Dixon at the Blackpool Tower Ballroom organ, The Morriston Orpheus Choir. At the time I thought “Oh, I’ve drawn the short straw here” but working with them taught me tolerance in my musical tastes and put me in good stead for today where of course the backbone of what I’m recording is MOR……..”

And there the interview ended, though earlier I had asked Bob about Gene Vincent whom he produced at the end of Gene’s career with Capitol.

“I was a rock’n’roll fanatic of course and working with him was working with one of my heroes. He was never well – he’d had a motor cycle accident by then, but he was very quiet and had the demeanor of many of the jazzmen of those days. I think he moved here in 1963 because of a woman who lived in Streatham called Sherri Ann.”

(A Google search reveals that Sherri Ann was in fact the daughter from his third marriage, indeed to a Streatham girl called Margaret Russell Griffith. They married on January 23, 1963 and Sherri Ann was born on May 29 – see the photograph and an extraordinary news story by Daily Mirror show business writer Don Short from the same year)

(DAILY MIRROR)
(24 September 1963)

By DON SHORT

AMERICAN pop singer Gene Vincent, 28, talked last night of love and jealousy – and of the night he accused his London-born wife at gunpoint of having an affair.

Earlier, Gene had been fined £20 at London’s Marylebone Court for possessing two pistols and ammunition without a licence.

He was given a conditional discharge for a year on a charge of threatening his 28-year-old wife with a Luger pistol.

Gene and Margaret, pictured above, later kissed and made-up before going, hand-in-hand, to a BBC recording session.

Gene, real name Gene Vincent Craddock, told me: “The trouble began last week when I was in Hamburg. Friends told me of rumours linked with Margaret when we were last there.

“When I came back to London I questioned her. I felt as savage as any man can when he hears about such a thing.

Explaining that he had two guns, one a Luger, “knocking about” his flat in Notting Hill, Gene went on:

“But I could never have pulled the trigger. I could never have murdered her. I love her too much. I did it just to scare her.

“Now I know the rumours about her are untrue. Margaret is innocent-and she has forgiven me for my fit of jealousy.”

(quoted in full)

“We did quite a few singles and at least one album with The Shouts, a British band who toured with him. That was mostly rock standards but for the singles we did news songs, three were mine. The first one “King of Fools” was on Capitol, a small hit that still earns money.”

A Personal History of the British Music Industry – 103, Walter Woyda 2 and conclusion.

Carrying on seamlessly from where we left off….

One thing I left out. When I was at Keith Prowse I was Chairman of the Record Retailers Association, formed initially for smaller dealers who were up in arms at the way they were being treated by the two major distributors, EMI and Selecta. They got together and then the majors joined them. The first Chairman was a well known Peckham dealer. Harry Tipple was the secretary. When the majors came in it was decided that one of them should become Chairman, so I took the position. While I was at Precision tapes I became Chairman of a committee within the BPI called the Tape Development Committee, because once again the industry felt the retailers needed a push to get behind tape. When I was Managing Director of Pye Group I had eight different companies under me. We had Welbeck Music and by that time we had formed ATV Music in America which almost immediately had a huge hit there with the UK No 1. hit In the Summertime by Mungo Jerry. That taught us very quickly that while you can have enormous sales in America, you can also have enormous returns because everything there is sale or return.

Was Pye an owned company in America?

It was called ATV Music. ATV Records was formed while I was MD. I went over there with a chap who had also been at EMI – Nick Hemden – who was our export manager. We started the company and quite a few subsidiaries and engaged the MD.

Did Lord Grade play an active part in any of this?

Lord Grade played an active part in every area of the organisation – he’d look at the figures every morning. Louis Benjamin was my boss, but Lord Grade was the chairman of the board at ATV on which Louis Benjamin also sat. He was tremendous entrepreneur and of course he inspired everybody else. Just to give you an example – I had to fly to America and went into his office to get some papers and things before I left. I was there at 5.30am and he was already there. I’ve never beaten him to it. He was a phenomenal man. Then of course there was the problem with ATV – they brought out a film called ‘Raise the Titanic’ which cost them a fortune and a big financial disaster. The result was that quite a number of board members – not Lord Grade – wanted to find a buyer to put more finance into it. Lord Grade was quite firm that they’d get over it because he had three other great films on tap that were coning out in a few months – On Golden Pond, The Muppet Movie and Sophie’s Choice, which were all huge successes – but there was a big board split. In fact I remember walking from ATV House to the car park with reporters from the Mail and Mirror asking me what I knew. You had to keep your mouth shut. The long and short of it was that Robert Holmes a’Court came in ostensibly to to participate with Lord Grade and carry the group forward, but it turned out that his interests were simply to make as much money as possible and sell as much as he could. He then sold a third of the group and I think he got four or five times what he paid. He sold off ATV, though it didn’t include Pye Records, which had become PLT Records (I can find no reference to PLT anywhere but must assume it existed) .

Lord Lew Grade

Who made the name change?

What happened was that Pye of Cambridge was split and sold. The electrical and hardware side was sold to Philips and the record side was sold to ATV as Pye Records on the basis that they retained the name for a period of time. When that came to an end ATV tried hard to negotiate a royalty to keep the name, but Philips objected and they lost the Pye name and chose PLT to start again. Later I was persuaded to return as managing director, though it was a very different company and had lost virtually all its artists.Although we distributed BBC records at the time – because of my close liaison with them, my first job when I was brought back was the renegotiate BBC Records. I managed to keep the label but to recreate PLT was an impossible job. When I was at Pye I’d also signed (licences with) Buddha, Kama Sutra, 20th Century Fox, Sugar Hill, but it was quite clear that PLT didn’t have the same aura as Pye Records and it would have been almost impossible to turn it around – it would have taken and lot of money and a lot of time.

Did the artists leave because the name had been changed?

Yes, a lot of the artists had it in their contract that if the ownership passed to anyone else, they could leave. Take one artist who virtually paid the salaries of Pye – Max Bygraves. People like him were all up in arms.’Who’s PLT?’ We had this huge distribution centre in Mitcham which was second to none, and though we still distributed a lot of labels it became untenable. So they sold PRT, which had a very rich catalogue – we still made a lot of money on back catalogue. It was sold to Terry Shand and his company paid quite a large sum. So the record side had been sold off, and the video, the TV and the property, and all that was left was the theatre side, which Janet Holmes a’Court still owns. As I was lucky enough to be 60, I took early retirement, because I really didn’t get on with the Australian people – they weren’t really interested. They knew nothing about the business but were cashing in on all the big films while they could.

Max Bygraves

Terry Shand

It must have been a sad time – Pye must have a thirty year history

Pye showed that beside the majors you could have an independent company and make it a success. I was there at the beginning on the retail side. It started predominately with all English creative material, the cover versions, LP’s, particularly Golden Guinea and from a retail perspective it was a marvellous business. Another marvellous thing was the van sales operation where they called on the dealers. (Being a later arrival in the record business) we suffered at first because the majors had superb catalogues which sold themselves. That’s why we did the van sales. That was very interesting from a retail perspective. Having said that, in the old 78 days I can remember branches having boxes that high next to the counter with 78’s like ‘Whispering Grass’ by The Inkspots just being handed straight to the customers they were selling so well.

The first I read about pre-sales was The Beatles

I always had to do pre-selling because in many cases we were up against the version that was a big hit at the time, so you had to pre-sell and convince people. Of course we had our programmes on Radio Luxembourg which were fairly important at the time, and the van sales people were on a commission basis when we pushed the stuff out.

So (after leaving Pye) I started my consultancy company and Monty Lewis asked me to help him start up a video business as part of their budget label. I came in initially because he had signed BBC and Warner, so I went in to tie up all the nitty gritty of distribution, instructing the salesmen stock control and liaison with all the companies whose product we had signed for distribution. Within three months of its launch it became 50% of Pickwick’s entire business. In fact, the video charts in those days were all product distributed by Pickwick.

Monty Lewis (left) receiving a Gold Disc for a Dutch LP!

(After 53 years in the business, Walter finally retired and I suggested his time at Pye was the best memory)

OK but I was also Managing Director of Precision Tapes. I wasn’t Managing Director of Philips because Leslie Gould was there, but to be General Manager of Sales and Marketing was a terrific job, and don’t forget I’d had no experience because I’d been in retail. But I always maintain and I’ve always said this to my salesmen that they should spend a Saturday behind the counter and see exactly what goes on, because people rarely know what other sides of the business do, and without knowing the retailers’ problems and successes, you really can’t do a good job in manufacturing or A&R or anything else

My perception is that the business has changed so much, with the bottom line being so important, yet retail has remained much the same

No it hasn’t. You have the multiples that are very regulated by their superiors as far as stock holding is concerned, so now you release a lot of records that you know won’t be given a chance by them. In the old days if you came out with new recordings, people would try them, stock one or two and if they were successful they’d fill up their stocks. You don’t have that now. You might have a major retailer saying to you ‘my stock holding is heavy this month – I can’t buy any new releases’. At first you’d think the salesman wasn’t doing this job properly, then you’d go in at managing director level and found you were hitting a block. In addition Record Merchandisers became a competitor to the extent that they regulated what was being bought for a lot of the multiples, and if they wouldn’t take it, you’d have now chance of getting them into the shops. So you couldn’t go to Asda for example and tell them about a record that was really selling. You (the record business) work on the basis that if a third of your releases really made it, you were very successful…but that doesn’t work any more. It has had the effect that we’re not bringing on new artists the way we used to in the old days. You were plumbing all the time for new artists, new creations. You don’t have a Beatles or a Rolling Stones these days like you used to. These days you have legal arguments – like George Michael. We had a major court case with Angelis for something we settled out of court because otherwise everybody would be paying half a million on legal fees. It’s become a totally different business. Now you have huge long contracts and they still find things wrong with them. In the old days it was probably two or three pages and everybody honoured it – you could do a handshake and know you had a good deal. The market completely changed – it was America that started it all. I’m not saying it isn’t a business that can still give you kicks, because it can if you have success, but it’s a totally different business.

There we end a quite different but equally fascinating insight to aspects of the business not covered, I think, by any other of my interviewees. Incidentally, I published part 1 quite forgetting I had not edited it for typos and grammar. A very kind reader pointed this out and offered his services, but if you re-read it (though why would you?) you’ll hopefully find they have been corrected by me!

text © David Hughes. Photos courtesy of Google search.

A Personal History of the British Music Business 102 – Walter Woyda

Walter Woyda

Walter Woyda, who was the top man at Pye Records when I interviewed him all those years ago, seems to be another of those important figures in the British music industry who has managed to avoid all online research. Ironically, when I Google him, all that emerges are the references and name checks unearthed from my other interviews. So, maybe this interview will prompt some response?! I have to assume Walter is no longer alive, though I found no obituary.

I wanted to be a conductor and did quite a lot of amateur conducting, but I felt that if you’re not in the top league you can make a living from it, and this has been proven over the years as top class orchestra conductors are few and far between. I wanted to go into the business because music’s been my love all my life. Having started right at the bottom in the retail trade, learning all facets of it – theatre tickets, impresarios, bookings. There was no Keith Prowse – that was hundreds of years ago. The person in charge of it all (KPM) when I joined, was Herbert Smith – he had a song called Campbell who took over when he died. Peter Cadbury came in as Chairman and the business was very built up on the record side. It was the first company that did rack jobbing in this country. We opened departments in all the major stores throughout the country, like Hammonds, Owen Owen, in every major town in the country.

They were extremely successful but in the end the department stores took them over themselves once we’d shown them how to control stock and all those sorts of things. They could see the money that was being made and from their point of view it also proved to them that they were drawing a younger element into their stores, which they very much needed. This would have in the late 1940’s/early 50’s, though it really took off at the end of the 78rpm era, which would have been in 1952 when LP’s started. I went over to America to look at the One Stops and rack jobbing operations, and it was decided to invest in that field and set up a whole distribution system from the Keith Prowse central office, which had a very large stockroom. Technology also allowed us to be one of the first companies to use a fax machines where we placed our orders directly with EMI and Selecta, and we had the stuff within a couple of hours – we could really work quickly. Obviously we would fax all our departments to make sure we could replenish quickly because that’s always been a problem in the record business. I was General Manager of the record side, in charge of the rack-jobbing operation, the branches and the stock room.

That was an interesting time, because before that everything was behind the counter, wasn’t it?

Absolutely. We bought Henry Staves, who were the leading classical retailer in London, and also Squires of Tooting which was a mail order company for records, books and garden equipment, and because we then had extra space in Tooting we also started a wholesale operation. The warehouse for the rack jobbing was in Wood Street, just behind the Bond Street branch. There was no talk about rent and rates in those days and we owned the place. The wholesale operation went off with a big band because we were doing the Daily Express language courses which were just hitting the market.

We did Monty Lewis’s first record label when he was in Charing Cross Road and many other labels, Chris Blackwell’s first label, Saga and all that sort of thing. We had a very good repertoire and the wholesale side took off very rapidly. What then happened is that Peter Cadbury got interested ing Westward Television, which Keith Prowse had bought, and that really became his life.

Peter Cadbury

So then I was hunted by D’Arcy Glover of Philips to join them and launch the musicassette system in 1966. I’d had 20 years with Keith Prowse, first in Fenchurch Street, then the Kensington and Knightsbridge branches and finally to the main branch because a chap called Hopkins who had been the general manager of the record side, retired and I took over from him. D’arcy Glover showed me a musicassette which I thought was great. I’ve been quite a risk taker in my life, in the sense that I’ve always liked to do something new. I felt I had to show whether or not I was capable making it a success. I went to Philips to start on the cassette system which went off with quite a boom. We begged Philips to come out with what is now known as the Walkman, in other words a machine that didn’t record but just played back, but they refused to do it and gave the whole thing on a plate to Sony.

How did the industry take to this mini explosion of formats?

The LP took off quite rapidly. Decca came out with a very cheap plug-in unit which you could put in to your radio of hi-fi unit which played LP’s. On the other hand they also came out with a thing called the Deccola which was a massive big unit, beautifully made, very expensive, very beautiful sound which appealed to the higher income bracket.

Decca were first to introduce the 45rpm weren’t they?

Yes. You know there was a big argument about the 45 with RCA, and CBS wanted to go a different way (introduce the 33rpm LP before the single). I think the 45 took longer to take off than the LP. There wasn’t any cheap equipment for the 45 – what came out was a machine for all three speeds, which was more expensive, whereas this little Decca deck that didn’t even have a top to it was quite ingenious really. (I’ve searched but can’t find any photos of the machine Walter is describing). The 78 and 45rpm formats were running in parallel for about ten years which is why the 45 didn’t take off quickly, whereas people reacted pretty quickly to the LP, firstly because they could get a whole work (classical or musical) on an LP and the price was cheaper than buying the whole set on 78’s.

Why an LP was called an album…because originally it was!

Our attitude at Keith Prowse was that we were handling a gramophone record department. We were certainly always there in the innovative stage of new developments. We therefore did local recitals and all sort of promotions for new things, because we could do that in the store. We sold hardware in all our branches.

One tends to forget that the arrival of the 45 and 33 speeds and their new equipment was the first change since the flat disc in 1897.

A lot of people, particularly critics will tell you they prefer the sound of an LP to a CD. I was lucky because I was the first to introduce musicassettes and we (Philips) were the first company to introduce pre-recorded video. I don’t imagine many people have had the opportunity to do two new things like that. Quite a lot of our competitors came with us and we launched their product. We manufactured and sold their repertoire on cassette and I had quite a lot to do with the marketing campaigns. In the initial stages they thought the sales would be low, so why take the risk? Because of that success I became General Sales and Marketing Manager for Philips, so then had responsible for the record side as well. Leslie Gould was my boss in Stanhope Place.

Leslie Gould

Pretty soon after I came in (March or April 1968) I had the Top Five singles – Esther & Abi Ofarim, Dave Dee, Manfred Mann, Harry Secombe and Dusty Springfield. That was a record I’ve never been able to beat. In those days you were more honest; you didn’t push product out for nothing. We had two fantastic A&R directors – Johnny Franz on the Philips label and Jack Baverstock on Fontana. Later on we also had Paddy Fleming for Mercury. Cinderella Rockefella got to No.1 despite the A&R managers who thought it was a terrible record, but it came back from the salesmen that people were asking for this thing. I had to use all my powers of persuasion to get Johnny Franz to release it a single. He had recorded the album and thought this was about the worst track,. It became a huge international hit.

Esther & Abi Ofarim

Johnny Franz and Dusty Springfield

Jack Baverstock’s assistant was Dick Leahy. In the promotion department we had Tommy Loftus, Paddy Fleming. Brian Mulligan was the press officer and Tony Mansell, who has a singing group now, was also in the promotion department, so we had three tremendous promotion men and a very good press officer. Geoff Hannington was the sales manager under me, and a terrific sales force. In those days you used to put on Sales Conferences that people talked about for weeks. We used to say that we had to put on a big show to get the dealers to buy the records. We had them in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow and would pull all the top artists out, though they obviously couldn’t go to all of them, but we’d have top artists at each one. Quite staggering they were.

Before I joined Pye, it was the main company that started the Golden Guinea series and was the first company to have a van stock operation, so that the dealer could virtually go out to the van and say “I’m running low on this” – a very clever and fine operation. What happened was, when I was at Philips, Louis Benjamin came to have lunch with me and asked if I would be interested in joining ATV to start a music cassette company which they were forming in conjunction with GRT, responsible for marketing the cassette and have its own manufacturing plant, which would have to be started from scratch. I decided to take the risk. I went round all the record companies like a madman, and ended up representing every major label except CBS & EMI, and every minor label other than Major Minor. We marketed the tapes, both 8-track and cassette through a company called Precision tapes. We marketed them in olive green cases so that we had an identity. I remember joining Precision tapes in January 1970 and we set ourselves a target, having tied up all these labels, to have a factory in operation in April. Everyone said it couldn’t be done – we didn’t even have a site. We found a place in Dagenham where new factory buildings were being constructed over the existing walls of a previous site, so approval was given immediately and the building went up within two months.

Precision Tapes became the number one tape company – the charts were full of their stuff and within five years it made more profit that the One Records Group. That was a good time for Pye – we had The Kinks, Status Quo – we were the company for singles. We had first class A&R men, Cyril Stapleton, Tony Hatch, Bob Macleod and they confined themselves to middle of the road, but were being very good at it. They also did the Top Hit series which was cover versions of all the big hits. Monty Lewis and Pye did these and we came out with them so quickly that the cover version took over from the big one. Pretty much every American hit was covered, and often the British one was a hit in Europe and England. David Parton had a No.1. with a Stevie Wonder hit. It was a very exciting time, about 1975…those Tuesday meetings which I led were fantastic. I believe that in a record company you have to have good leadership, but you’ve got to have a team that works together. When every section of the business from promotion to marketing to A&R works together then it all clicks. There was such a buzz and excitement all the time. There was Peter Prince, Peter Somerfield. Tom Grantham was the marketing manager, Roy O’Dwyer was the Sales Manager. It was a fantastic team, a small organisation though it had its own factory in Mitcham. The advantage of that, which I learnt very quickly, was that if you had a big hit you could turn all the presses on to it. Les Cox was in the organisation and Louis Benjamin was the Chairman.

Brotherhood of Man

Before I joined Pye, they’d had a Eurovision hit with Sandie Shaw, so we went in for it with Brotherhood of Man and Save your kisses for me and at the Royal Albert Hall final we won by two points! And the No.2 record was also one of ours! We had great joy in winning with the number one, but quite a lot of problems with number 2. We went over to Holland for the final and it was just as bad then as it is now – lots of political voting. We were nicely ahead and then Malta didn’t give us one vote! Immediately I got onto London and the phones were just buzzing with people wanting this record, not only in England. All the majors like Boots and Smiths were placing big orders, and also our European companies. I had to make an immediate decision that our factory would have to work day and night and all the presses were turned over to making this record. I think we shipped out something like 250,000 to 300,000 the next day.

It’s amazing how important Eurovision was then, and how unimportant to the record music today.

The difficulty in my day was that you never risked your major artists in case they lost. I think the first company to do that was EMI with Cliff Richard. Sandie Shaw had been successful but that was her first major hit. The other side of the top five I had at Philips, was that immediately afterwards Esther and Abi broke up, Dave Dee etc. broke up and Manfred Mann lost Paul Jones! I brought Robin Blanchflower into Pye and one of his first hits was Carl Douglas and Kung Fu Fighting. He wrote it and performed it and I think we sold like 50,000,000 records around the world. It became a big hit in America, but we could never get him back into he studio. He was quite happy with the £2,000,000 he’d made.

Carl Douglas

Were you at Pye when you lost Status Quo?

That was right at the start when I came in. I tried desperately to hold on to them. I’d been told they were going to leave. I went to see them at the Marquee, I went everywhere with them to try and persuade them, but there had been a bit of a problem which, however hard I tried, had soured the relationship and it was very difficult. My whole life has been to work with the artists and be behind them, not only in the pop field, but classical as well. We signed quite a lot of classical artists, both on Pye and Pickwick. I was responsible for the whole classical catalogue, simply because they were so enthused that I was so close to them, went to their sessions and things like that, which encouraged them to sign. Obviously we had to sell the product as well!

Then I joined Precision Tapes, and, having been at Philips I’d seen all the developments that were in progress. I’d seen the audio cassette and the plans for a video version and to my dying day I’ll never understand why they (Phonogram) didn’t come out with it. I insisted that if I was going to start this tape company and it was going to be successful, I wanted to be in at the beginning of the video business as well. GRT was a 50/50 partner with Precision and were just as keen on the video business, so I was fairly confident it was going to happen. GRT were doing fairly badly in America so Pye took the opportunity to buy their 50%. When it came to launch of pre-recorded video in around 1980, I made a point of ensuring from the Pye board that I would be responsible for the launch. Initially I had a joint managing director with me at Pye and we started up Precision video which took some time to get into operation. A manufacturer had to be found, because, as we no longer had a tie-in with GRT, we didn’t want to manufacture it ourselves. We also looked at the packaging. We were the first major company launch VHS on the market. I decided we should open our own shop in Dean Street, Soho. The reason was that when I was at Philips dealers were stocking cassettes in a very higgledy piggledy way, either on little metal racks or stuck in browsers with the 7″ records. We opened the shop purely for cassettes and in it did very well in the West End. We invited dealers from all over the country to come and see how effectively cassettes could be displayed, with racking specially designed. Having said that, we also made a fatal mistake. When I went to see the majors, they said “this will never work – little things like music cassettes, they’re all going to be stolen. You need to have a large 7″ sleeve and put a cassette in it – and that’s the only way it will be displayed effectively” Being the majors, we decided to issue a special series, using a 7″ sleeve with a cassette slipped into the packaging at the back, so the dealers could display them. The major retailers were delighted, the consumers were horrified. They’d have this clumsy thing with a little cassette in it. We spent our time dealing with consumers writing in wanting to buy a little plastic box – an example of being led by dealers who really don’t know what the consumer wanted – it wasn’t a success.

We’ll take a break here and resume the career of man whose forte was primarily the manufacture and formats, both hugely important skills, as soon as I find a few more hours.

Text © David Hughes. Illustrations are Google sourced and purely here to break up the text!

A Personal History of the British Record History 101 – Harry Walters Pt.2 and conclusion

Someone’s reading this! John Williams has sourced a photo, together with its caption, of Harry back in the days when he was in charge of the Cameo-Parkway label in the UK, then released via EMI’s Columbia. Many thanks, John! We left Harry at Pye, enthusing over their UK artist roster and then..

I had an offer from EMI to take (charge of) promotion for the UK Columbia label, and I turned it down. Then they came back and offered me Capitol. I thought ‘now you’re talking’.I loved Frank Sinatra and all that crowd. This was the late 1950’s. I said ‘yes’ I was Arthur Muxlow’s right hand man. We had wonderful show albums, Carousel and all the rest of them – they were selling in millions in those days – much more than singles. They weren’t having any success with EMI but we were getting hits with Capitol. I plastered the airwaves with Nat ‘King’ Cole’s When I fall in love, which wasn’t easy in those days.

In that key period, the dawn of rock’n’roll, you had already done exploitation for three major companies, presumably going to the half a dozen radio people?

You could count the radio producers on two hands. Esther Farmer, Isabel Burdette, Pat Osborne. You had Housewives’ Choice in the morning, a midday spot two or three times a week maybe and Family Favourites on Sunday – three major spots. You had to get those three. I was backwards and forwards to Cologne later for Family Favourites, more times than I had hot dinners!

I always imagined promotion teams spending hours writing fictitious requests

No, there wasn’t much of that. The big problem was getting ‘open’ cards when they ask for anything specific. One broadcaster doing Housewives’ Choice, who shall be nameless, came up with the bright idea. He said ‘if you send an open card to me with a label I can pull off, and underneath…’ We did this and it worked!The only other outlet apart from that was Radio Luxembourg. So the record companies all bought airtime by the hour. EMI had an enormous amount of air time. We bought the time, recorded them here in Hertford Street (Luxembourg’s London office) . They were all our records. This worked because if you couldn’t get something on the air here, at least people could hear it somewhere. The Americans never understood the problems we had here with broadcasting. They’d have a big hit in the States, somebody very American, and couldn’t get it on the air here.’What’s happening? This has been a number one in the States, why haven’t you got it on the air here’

Also it would have been covered by someone else here

One of the biggest offenders was Michael Barclay. He used to take American records and copy them note for note. Sometimes he was very successful.

Did radio veer towards playing the English version?

I don’t think they did. The Americans had its their own way for a long time. The breakdown for us was Elvis Presley. The RCA label had moved over to Decca and EMI was on the last knockings of its output, and Elvis was one of them. I sat at a meeting and heard them turning down this record. I said ‘you’re mad not to release any of these records’ and persuaded them to release one of them (Presumably ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’)

This was Wally? (Ridley)

Talking of copying American records, Wally was really good at it. He used to punch them like mad. In fact EMI lost the RCA Victor label of that, because Perry Como was being constantly covered by Ronnie Hilton, note for note.

Wally owns up to only it once

It was many time. The RCA records would go in a drawer and out would come Wally’s records. He was very naughty but he made a big star out of Ronnie Hilton.

When I went back to EMI, they pulled me from Capitol to EMI proper because Norman Newell had said ‘well, the best guy you’ve got is working on Capitol – you’re wasting him.’ The first thing I discovered was that it was like working with four or five different companies. You had Capitol, Parlophone, HMV, Columbia, MGM all working on their own. Nobody was looking at them saying ‘you’re all covering the same songs’ so you’d get three versions of the one song. As a promotion man, what do you do? This happened with The Story of my Life. Norrie had Michael Holliday , there was the original American version (Marty Robbins) and there was Alma Cogan (all on EMI labels, plus Dave King and Gary Miller recorded if for Decca and Pye respectively). I said ‘L.G. (Wood), this won’t work. We’ve got to work on one version.’ He said ‘who’s going to pick it?’ I said ‘I will.’ ‘Alright, be it on your head, he said,’ He said ‘God knows what Alma Cogan’s family are going to say’ when I told him it would be Michael Holliday, undoubtedly the best record.That’s what we did. Alma Cogan’s family went berserk of course when I had to tell them we weren’t working her record. We had a number one hit with Michael Holliday and this made them sit up and listen.

The other version was by Gary Miller on Pye.

You remind me. I said to L.G. at the time ‘we try and work on these three versions and meanwhile Gary Miller nips in gets all the broadcasts for Pye and we’re going to lose it.’ So I went from strength to strength within EMI. I was assistant promotion manager to John Philips; then I became Sales Promotion Manager. Then I got this recommendation to go to the head office in Hayes and become a sort of trouble shooter to Sir Joseph Lockwood. If they had trouble in some country I would be sent out at Managing Director level to find out what was going on. Cliff and the Shadows were going out to South Africa to do a tour, so I told every disc jockey there what time they were coning in and the result was that the whole mixed black and white crowd were absolutely packed in the street outside the hotel. Peter Gormley (Cliff’s manager), came out and said ‘Jesus Christ’s who’s done this?’. I said ‘I did Peter’ and he said I might have known!’

Were you sorting out their financial problems?

No, mainly promotion and record making. The English speaking repertoire was still dominant – they weren’t recording anything themselves. There was trouble in Sweden with the pirate radio stations. There was an agreement with the Phonographic Industry that nobody supplied them with records but everyone but us was doing it. I went to see these pirate radio people and asked where they were getting their records from. ‘All the companies supply us except yours.’ So I said ‘thank you very much’ and went back to the MD and said ‘If you want to survive you’re going to have to supply the pirate radio stations because they are all getting listeners, but you don’t know anything about it.’

How long did that role last?

When I was travelling and visiting all these places I loved it, because I was back in the record business, but I didn’t enjoy being at Hayes with all those grey people and grey offices. In 1961 Bernie Lowe (who ran Cameo-Parkway Records in America) Called me from somewhere abroad and said he was coming back through London and could I meet him at Heathrow. I went to meet him and he offered me the job of European rep with Cameo-Parkway. I was at a meeting at EMI Hayes. I had been allowed to sit in but wasn’t supposed to to say anything – they weren’t really interested in the record business! They were talking about renewing the Mercury contract which they’d paid an enormous amount of money for, and Mercury hadn’t had a hit for a year. I couldn’t keep quiet any longer and said ‘I don’t know why you’re offering all that money for Mercury. If you offer to renew they’ll jump at it. You won’t have to give them any money because they haven’t had a hit for a year.’

Some time later I ran into Dick Whittington (a pianist signed to Mercury and presumably worked for the label as well?) and I said ‘How much would Mercury have renewed for this time?’ He replied ‘I couldn’t believe it – we weren’t expecting them to renew at all and when they offered money as well…!’ So I went straight back to Hayes and put it all down in writing!

At that time EMI were desperate to add to their American links. Cameo-Parkway were best remembered for Chubby Checker.

With Checker it was funny. They’d released The Twist here and nothing happened. Bernie Lowe invited me over to the States for the first time and when I got there he said ‘I’m going to take you to see Chubby tonight.’ We went to The Casino in Philadelphia, watched the show and afterwards he said to me ‘what do you think?’ I said ‘it’s very obvious to me now why Chubby hasn’t sold in Europe – he needs to be seen on television .’ Bernie said ‘you fix him two or three televisions and we’ll send him over.’ I’d known Lew and Leslie Grade for years – Leslie used to ring me up and ask be what I thought of Guy Mitchell or Johnnie Ray. Iso I went to Leslie and said ‘will you give Chubby Checker a Sunday Night at the London Palladium slot – he’s great. He said ‘Harry we need talent on The Palladium.’ I said ‘when did that rule come in?! Anyways I got Thank your Lucky Stars, Here and Now, which Steve Race was doing, and a programme from Birmingham that was a mixture of trad jazz and pop. Chubby came over and want to do The Twist. I said ‘don’t do that, do ‘Let’s Twist Again’ – it’s a better song and it’s right for the Continent. After a lot of argument he did it on the three programmes and it went off like a rocket!

When I was going to leave EMI it was very flattering. They did everything to try and stop me. They offered me a number two job in Italy and I turned it down. I remember seeing Lockwood, and he said ‘I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm for you to go out there for a while, but you realise that you’re one of the young men who will be running this company in ten years time.’ I said ‘Sir Joseph, if I stay in Hayes for another ten years, I’ll be useless to you and to anyone else!’

(There was then a slight difference of opinion as to whether Chubby Checker’s hits were on Pye or EMI. In fact they were on the Columbia label which licensed Cameo Parkway with a small namecheck on the label.It was only when the licence moved to Pye that Cameo had full label credit. Anyway, Harry moved with the label and I said that everyone always spoke very highly of Pye’s MD Louis Benjamin.)

He was a good record man and a good boss. He certainly looked after his people. The Cameo went down because because of an argument with Harry Chippetts (?), the new owner. I was out of work for a couple of months. Arthur Muxlow wanted mer back at EMI, but L.G. Wood stuck his heels and wouldn’t have it. I’d never had any dealings with Decca – they hated the sight of me, Then Stanley Barnett and Teddy Somerfield (he was one of the best managers, Eamonn Andrews, etc.), wanted to start a publishing company and they pulled me in to do the publishing with them. Didn’t pay much but I was fiddling around with it. I met Andrew Lloyd Webber at the time, whom Stanley was trying to get rid of because he (Andrew) was bugging him. He said ‘there’s this kid Harry; will you see him – he’s driving me mad.’

So I contacted Andrew and went to his father’s flat in Kensington. His father sniffed at me and Andrew played me some tapes. I agreed to go to his school, Westminster, where one of his things was going on. I liked it but didn’t think it was quite ready. The last time I met him was at the BBC and he said ‘we must have lunch one day.’ As I said in my little book – unpublished – thank God I haven’t been hungry!!

A friend of mine was recording at Decca’s West Hampstead studios. I came out of the session and went round to the tube station and as I tried to buy a ticket, heard the coming train but the woman in front of messed about for so long that I missed it. When I got down to the platform, it was a cold dark night. I walked down the platform feeling very low, depressed, no job in the record business, and I heard a voice behind me saying ‘Harry Walters? I’ve been looking for ages.’ It was Mark White! He was then boss of Radio 2 and said ‘how would you like to do (produce) a few sessions for us?’ I said I’d love to, so started to do two or three sessions a week for the BBC, bands, orchestras, small groups, Music While You Work and it built up to almost a full week’s work. Then the BBC offered me a six month contract to do Junior Choice – it was poacher turned gamekeeper. I brought in Ed Stewart. I had all these presenters but they were either school teacher types and were never right. Derek Chinnery’s wife (Doreen Davies) said ‘why don’t you give an audition to this chap, Ed Stewart?’ So I had him in the studio and did a tape with him and he was exactly right. Hewas like a big brother, a big kid. He was an enormous success – Stewpot. I did Junior Choice with him for three years.

Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart

What did the pluggers make of you?

I found it very hard at the BBC in the beginning. You learn to trust people’s judgement. A plugger would come in and say ‘Harry, this is something you ought to listen to’ You know him, you know he doesn’t talk a load of rubbish, so you’d listen. But I did religiously listen to everything that came in – not always right through! I’d had one plugger who’d worked for me at EMI who was doing awfully well on a cover version, and I said ‘it’s very odd how we’re getting all the plays on this record.’ and he said ‘well, every time I go into an office and see the other version I take it away!’ The programme was on Radio 1 & 2 at the beginning so it was enormous listening. When they split us and asked if we wanted to go with 1 or 2, I went for 2. I did three years of Open House with Pete Murray which was a very happy time as we were old friends. A funny story with Pete. Years and years ago when we were both boys we were both working as extras on a film called Day will Dawn and we became friendly. I’d since forgotten him and he’d forgotten me. I met up with him again at Radio Luxembourg and we both thought this was first time we’d met and we became friendly again. When we were doing Open House I was going through some photographs and thought one looks like Pete as a boy, so I took it into the office and said ‘Is that you?’ and he said ‘yes, and is that you? – we’d known each other all those years and never knew!

l-r;Terry Wogan, Colin Berry, Jimmy Young, John Dunn, Pete Murray.

Mark White was Head of Radio 2, Doreen Davies was Radio 1 and Derek Chinnery was Radio 2. After Open House I went to Jimmy Young for ten tears…for my sins! I haven’t spoken to him since I retired. I woulds have stayed friendly with him but Andrew Philips, one of the lawyers, rang me just after I retired and said ‘I walked into the studio the other day and Jimmy made me furious.’ I said ‘why?’ He said ‘I said ‘you’re going to miss Harry aren’t you.He said ‘oh yes, but he made a lot of enemies you know’ but I know what you did for him.’ I never spoke to him again afterwards.

Derek Chinnery said that the BBC was not here to support the record business.

knew when I was making hits. I made Israelites for example. Nobody else would play it and I said ‘well, I’ll play it.’ Then there were the obvious things like ‘Grandad’. I knew when I was doing a publisher or a record company a favour. But I made a rule that I wouldn’t play anything that was bad for the programme. I had to do that I would have been expected to play every piece of crap that came in. And I lost a few so-called friends because of that. When I was a plugger we had an enormous hit with Paul Anka’s Diana. The follow-up was Lonely Boy. What a job it was to plug that – nobody wanted to know. I remember standing in Derek Chinnery’s office when he was producing David Jacobs, and David listened to it and turned to me and said Oh Harry, I’m awfully sorry but I can’t play that.’ It was terrible hard. When I was publishing I had one that was even more difficult – I went to your wedding. I had the publishing on it with Victoria Music. I got Lita Rosa to record it – the original was by Patti Page. I bought a producer a drink at the Grosvenor pub and I remember him saying ‘that damn song of yours, Harry…your mother was crying, your father was crying and even the cake was in tears!’

Jack Jackson had his programme on Saturday nights(though I remember it at Saturday lunchtime), and if he played your record you could rest assured it was going to be a hit. He would play it three days runnings if he liked it. I went down to Brighton to see him with the Lita Roza record. He was very nice. He listened to its and said ‘I’m sorry son but I’m playing Alma Cogan’s version.’ I said ‘Can’t you play Alma Cogan one week and Lita the next?’ The following morning Teddy Holmes summoned me and said ‘you went to see Jack Jackson last night.’ ‘Yes, I tried to get him to play Lita Roza’, and Teddy said ‘well I arranged it that he would play Alma Cogan’ I didn’t know that. I felt responsible because I’d persuaded Lita Roza to record itt and I wanted it to be played. He gave me a terrible balling out about it.

Alma invited Bobby Rydell to one of her legendary parties in Kensington and he said ‘I’ll go if you come with me, Harry.’ I said ‘I daren’t show my face at Alma Cogan’s flat – I’ll get slaughtered. I’ll come to the door with you and we’ll see what the reaction is.’ We went up to the flat and Alma opened the door. I said very quickly ‘Alma, I’m not coming in. I’m just bringing Bobby along.’ and she said ‘oh don’t be silly Harry, come on in’ So I went in and the family immediately ushered me into the kitchen , sat me down and grilled me as to why I’d dropped Alma’s recording of The Story of my Life.. I then had to explain the whole thing about how EMI was working, what had gone wrong, why we weren’t getting any hits why we got a hit with Michael Holliday and how next time it might be Alma, at the end of which time they said ‘well, if we’d known that at the time we would never have given you so much trouble.’ And we all became very friendly. (Sir Joseph) Lockwood was at that party and Anthony Newley and Joan Collins

I’ll tell you another story. Lockwood was involved with the Ballet School up here in the park (Richmond). He’d obviously got clobbered at some charity do because he’s agreed that the Duchess of Bedford and Mrs Gerald Legge would make a record., Mrs Gerald Legge is now Countess Spencer, Lady Raine. L.G. sent for me and said ‘I’m very sorry about this Harry but the record’s been made and it’s got to be promoted. Lockwood is very keen.’ I listened to it and it was an absolutely disaster. I said to my department ‘we’re going to have to go through the motions with this, but I really don’t think we’re going to be able to do much.’ But we tried and one or two people did us a favour and then took the Mickey out of it. I got calls from Raine herself, then from her mother Barbara Cartland, who asked why we weren’t working her daughter’s record. I tried to explain about airplay. Then we had to go and see Mrs Legge. We rang the bell and the butler opened the door. He led us up the stairs and Doug says in my ear ‘Do you think this is Mr Gerald Legge?’(because no one ever knew who he was.) She was sitting at the other end of the room like the Queen and then she cross-examined me about why the record wasn’t selling. It was very hard. I said ‘Well, you know, people do personal appearances.’ She said ‘Oh, I could do a personal appearance’, so we had to arrange one in the HMV shop., Of course nobody turned up for the record to be signed, so I made panic calls to EMI buildings and said ‘for heaven’s sake send your staff round here!’ so I got all the staff pouring into HMV to get the record!

This may or may not have been the record. There’s no reference to The Duchess of`Bedford

Did you retire after Jimmy Young?

Yes, when you hit 60 you go. I didn’t want to go; I could have gone another 10 years. I was what was called a Senior Producer ; I should have been an executive producer, but that again was politics. I retired in 1984. I remember Mark White saying to me when I first started, ‘most producers become depressives or alcoholics!’

Text © David Hughes 2022. All illustrations are there just to break up the text. No money has changed hands anywhere in the process of conducting these interviews some 20 years ago!

A Personal History of the British Record Business 101 – Harry Walters Pt.1

Considering Harry Walters’ music business history goes way back and covers not only publishing, record companies but the BBC, he, as with Selwyn Turnbull, seems to have been largely forgotten online. One or two mentions of the Mercury Cameo-Parkway labels, but no pictures anywhere. So, if anything in this interview prompts your memory, please do add your contribution. There will be plenty of illustrations, but at time of writing, no image of Harry himself. I naively thought that the late legendary Terry Wogan producer Paul Walters might have been related but again…no clues! The only clue I have is that, were he to still be alive, he’d be about 98!

How did you start?

I was working in theatres and film studios as a stage hand, electrician, props and all that. While at the Coliseum Theatre as an electrician, the manager came in and said ‘the Stage Door manager’s been taken ill – would you mind sitting there until we can get someone in.’ So I sat at the stage door at the Coliseum reading the paper and this chap came in with a musical instrument. I was nutty about music even in those days, so we started to talk – he wanted to see one of the girls in the show. When he came out he said ‘how would you like to travel with a band?’ I said ‘would I? I’d love it.’ I was about 20 at the time. He said ‘well, come and see my boss tonight and you’ve got a job!’ So I went to the Monsignor, which was then a studio at Marble Arch, and it was Geraldo. He said ‘OK, take those instruments down to the studio’ and that was it! I got the job.

The Geraldo Orchestra, but which musician came to the Coliseum? Could be Gracie Fields singing?

London Coliseum

I was with him for a couple of years, then Ted, who was the chap I’d met, formed his own band and said ‘come and be my band manager.’ That was about 1946-47. I stayed with him until about 1949. Then I went into the Empress Hall for a very short time as production manager to Mark White. When I arrived he said ‘what are you doing here, Harry?’ I said ‘I’m the assistant production manager.’ and he said ‘Well that’s great. I’m the production manager and I’ve got nothing to do, so I don’t know what you’re going to do.’

Empress Hall, Earl’s Court

Then I was offered the stage manager of The Piccadilly Hayride.

But I’d got fed up with touring so I turned it down. I thought publishing would be the answer to I went to hang around Tin Pan Alley, Denmark Street. I knew a few people because of my contacts with the band. The pluggers had been round to see Dennis Lotis and Lita Roza and Dickie Valentine. Denmark Street in those days was a question of artists walking down the street and being dragged into doorways by the scruff of their neck..’Have I got a song for you?’ It was great fun – people like Michael Carr, whom I became very friendly with.

Michael Carr

I finally got a recommendation to meet two guys who’d just started in the music publishing business, Harold Fields and Joe Roncoroni – Harold Fields Music.

a Harold Fields song

They hadn’t got any money, so the only deal we could make was that I be paid per plug and the agreement was that I would get ten shillings for an organist – they were on the radio every morning at 10.00am for half an hour – thirty shillings for a band and two pounds and ten shillings for a big spot. So I went after the organists who were easiest to find. I met some guy in Denmark Street who knew them all and he said ‘come round with me.’ So I went round with him and met all these organists. They were wonderful characters, people like Louis Mordish, Bobby Pagan, Andrew Fenner. We used to go out to the cinemas in the suburbs to see them, watch the end of a film and then go and plug them the songs. We used to take them for a drink or a meal, but I had no expenses so I had to be very careful. They just had to up the sheets music and play the piece. In those days if you had to write an arrangement there was a deal where the publisher paid for them. I expect Wally (Ridley) told you all about that. I was rumoured that the wealthy publishers would throw their cheque books through the stage door of the Palladium to pay for songs, whoever was going to sing them.

Were you taken at your word that the organist had played your songs?

No. Radio sheets used to come round. It was a private enterprise of some sort – never found out who did it – but someone used to take down the details of everything that was played on the radio from daybreak till radio finished at night. Everything was listed. These sheets came round every day I think it cost the publishers about £6 a week.

Andrew Fenner and Louis Mordish

So the organists were playing these songs on the Light Programme?

That’s right. Later in the week they could check what had been on. I began to pile them up, these organ broadcasts. I used to get the odd band one too from people in the business I knew, but was mainly the organists. The publishers were after the PRS. I did so well that Harold and Joe said they couldn’t afford me. Success paying off! They recommended me to Teddy Holmes at Chappells.I had a short break in between when I had no work and a friend of mine said ‘can you drive a car?’ and I chauffeured for him in a hire car business for a month. Then Teddy Holmes offered me a job.

He was one of the Kings, wasn’t he?

He was a terror. Everyone was terrified of him.We used to say that he’d even take his radio down on the beach with him so he could hear what we were doing. Every morning he would come round and day ‘what did you do last night?’, because you were expected to go round the variety theatres as well.

All this broadcasting was live?

Absolutely. You had to go and see Billy Cotton on a Sunday morning – it was exciting time. I had a theory that I had to meet at least one new person in the business every day, and I used to do that. Sometimes more than that, so you made a lot of contacts.

And this was completely without training?

Absolutely. I think I had the gift of the gab. I came from a working class background. My father had died when I was five years old, so my mother was a widow and we had a tough time. I knew looking around in Marylebone where I was brought up, that the only way I was going to get out of this (poverty) was by show business or marrying a rich woman – and I decided the easiest was probably show business of some sort. I loved the films, went three times a week, so went to film studios in the beginning. I had very good ears for a song. I could pick a hit. Even at my height in the record business I could pick a hit about seven times out of ten.

Was Harold Fields Music getting good song?

No, mostly rubbish, but I was getting plays on them. They had one piece called Flying Saucers. I met a man called Arthur Sanford, a pianist, very strange guy, homosexual but well-known and a wonderful pianist. He got quite a lot of broadcasts and I showed this Flying Saucers, and it attracted him and he said he’d play – did so three or four times. That one was worth about £5 to me.

Was it important to the publisher that the song went on to be recorded?

Ideally they would have liked someone to record it, but it was rare. Even Geraldo and Ted Heath didn’t record much if you back on what they did then compared to today. People like Dennis Lotis, a friend of mine at the time, only made two or three records, which I regretted because later when I was at the BBC I would have liked to have given him more help, but it wasn’t possible. There just weren’t the records.

If you got ten shillings for a play by the organist, what was the PRS on that?

I’m not sure – something like thirty shillings (£1.50). I was with Chappells until about 1951 when Philips went into the record business. I knew Michael Barclay who was in A&R and he used to come and sit in my office. He was listening to what I was doing and how I was doing it. He liked what he saw and recommended me to Norman Newell and off I went to Philips! I became what was called Exploitation Manager -Norman was there when I went there. There was a clash between him and Len Smith. We had the CBS label and Norman was making all these records with British artists like Winifred Atwell and I quickly discovered that one broadcast of a CBS artist like Frankie Laine or Doris Day would bring in sales on 50,000-60,000, whereas ten broadcasts of Norman’s would bring in 1000 if I was lucky. When the battle broke out between Leonard and Norman , Leonard called me one day and said ‘Norman’s attacked you because you’re not plugging his records’ So I said what I’ve just said and he said ‘that’s very interesting.’. He wanted ammunition to fire at Norman which culminated in a battle outside the Albert Hall, and I was right in the middle! Maurice Kinn used to put on the NME Poll Winners Concerts and we all went from Philips. There was a big wheel over from Eindhoven. Leonard Smith hated Maurice Kinn and as we were leaving dug Maurice in the back and said ‘you’ve done very well out of the record business tonight haven’t you, Maurice?!‘ Maurice was furious and turned round and started a row which culminated, as we used to say, with Norman slapping Leonard with his handbag! Meanwhile, this big wheel from Philips was standing by watching it all. It was quite dreadful!

Having got the American Columbia label, the 78’s were very successful.

We had Frankie Laine, Doris Day, Guy Mitchell, Rosemary Clooney, Johnnie Ray. I loved Doris Day when she came over for the first time. I got to know Guy Mitchell well, and Frankie Laine was alright except the BBC wouldn’t play Answer me oh Lord. David Whitfield jumped in and did it as Answer me my love. As someone said at the time, ‘you can sing about the devil but not about the Lord’. (sharp-eyed devotees of these interviews will maybe recall Bunny Lewis’s comments from the Whitfield angle). I had to go to Blackpool to see Frankie Laine who was working there and said I’d got bad news for him and that the BBC wouldn’t play his record. He said ‘what are they afraid of, Harry?’ Well, there’s no answer to that, is there?

Here are the two actual labels.

Who was Norman Newell recording?

Winnie Atwell sold like hot cakes, David Hughes, Beverley Sisters. The record companies got bees in their bonnets about their artists going to a rival company. Alma Cogan was at EMI when I was there. I used to have terrible problems with her family because her records wouldn’t sell. I said to Len Wood ‘why do we hang on to her- why don’t we let her go?’ ‘Oh no, we couldn’t possibly let her go – she might go to Decca.’ This was the thinking. EMI and Decca were great rivals. Frank Ifield came over from Australia with Peter Gormley and couldn’t get a record made here. He came in to see me. Everyone else had turned him down, so I went to Norrie Paramor and said ‘Norrie, the guy’s an EMI Australian artist – you’ve got to record him. Make one record at least.’ So Norrie said ‘all right Harry – I’ll do you a favour.’ He had four No.1’s.

Marion Back said Peter Gormley almost literally arrived with a rucksack and these tapes. His mission was to get the man successful in England.

That’s right. Peter and I got quite friendly. He came to me one day and said ‘I’ve been offered this group, The Shadows, what do you think? I had a look at the sales book and said ”as a matter of fact Peter, they’ve started to do very well.’ They had ‘Apache’ out and I said ‘and what’s more, the fellow singing with them is having trouble with his agent – you might pick him up as well.’ That was Cliff of course. Peter was very grateful and years later when I left EMI he offered me a job with him. I went off to work with him, Cliff, The Shadows and Frank for a couple of years.

Peter Gormley, front left, with Cliff and The Shadows in the Licorice Locking period, and below, as I remember him.

I went from Philips to Pye. Philips’ new managing director didn’t know anything about the record business. He wanted to cut down on things like the white labels which I was giving out for promotion.

Was this Leslie Gould?

No, before him. He’d been an accountant or something like that. I said ‘over my dead body’ and he said ‘if necessary, yes!’ It all went very bad from there, but it’s the life blood. It was all I had to promote the records with and he wanted to cut them off. Anyway I went to Pye and they had Mercury, which they were absolutely nothing with at all, so they asked me to look after it. I took hold of it, rattled it a bit and found Patti Page’s hit (How much is that doggie in the window had been on the label) and then The Platters came along.

So you looked at the label and said ‘what can we do with this?’. Today you’d be getting hourly phone calls from American trying to force your hand.

There was a chap here called Bryce Summers who was a European rep. for Mercury who did put pressure on. Also a nice chap called Dick Whittington – got a story to tell about him later?

We had this enormous success with The Platters and one or two minor hits. Others I worked on, got broadcasts but nothing happened. I was working on the Pye output at the same time, some of which was good, Gary Miller, Marion Ryan, Petula Clark( She was Alan Freeman’s ‘baby’ – this was the record producer not the disc jockey!) and Lonnie Donegan. I hope I don’t sound too big-headed about this – Denis Preston had been asking Alan and Michael Barclay (he was there then too) for a long time to listen to this guy at 100 Oxford Street. They didn’t go, so he asked me. I was a free agent and floating around in the evenings, so I said ‘yes’ and went along. I couldn’t believe the crowd there and it was Lonnie Donegan. I went back to the office and told Alan and Michael.’You must go and see this guy, he’s absolutely extraordinary’, and they went and signed him up. (I’m guessing this was 1956, though Lonnie had already enjoyed chart success with Decca).

One more of a similar length still to come

Text ©David Hughes 2022. Illustrations from Google search just to break up the the text and bring back a few memories!