We left Jonathan pondering what might have been should he have taken the role as Chairman of Decca Records, with EMI the two greatest record companies in UK recorded music, now quietly nestling within the wide arms of Universal music.
1965 was my first year at Cambridge, so I was still there in 1966-67. I left in 1968 and did the TV show and a couple of years at Decca. At this point my mother pointed out that I was doing all this work but there was no money coming in any more, so I thought ‘Oh, you’re right’ and resigned, which was an odd thing to do. My mother said ‘wouldn’t you be better off asking them for some money?‘ I replied ‘I’ll make some hits.’ The first one was Let it All Hang Out and I started trying to produce some hit records. It Only Takes a Minute and all those other ones were given birth to. What happened was that I started producing these independent hit records and placing them with different companies, which I still think is the best way to do these things, and at that point the money started pouring back in again. In the early 1970’s the money was coming in like you wouldn’t believe because I had Johnny Reggae and all the other ones, like Loop de Love. A dear old friend, Richard Armitage, took me to one side. I was off to American to see if I could get some interest, and he said ‘You must meet these American lawyers. American lawyers have a terrible reputation, but these two are the nicest people you’ll ever meet in your life, and they’re also very good.‘ So I took his word for it. They were Paul Marshall and Monty Morris, we got on like a house on fire and they are still great friends of mine. Richard did it because he thought I was a nice guy and needed some help. It was Paul who persuaded me that instead of scattering my seed around, I ought to go through one label, so that’s why I formed UK records.
He said that would give me something that in my old age would be worth millions. The tragedy is he was almost right. When I got bored with it a few years later and basically just closed it down, Paul was begging me to keep it ticking away, take on a couple of people to run it – it didn’t matter if it wasn’t doing anything – because in ten years time I’d be able to sell it with a back catalogue and an ongoing concern, for millions. Indeed, labels that started up after UK: Chrysalis with Chris Wright, Seymour Stein’s Sire, Branson’s Virgin, A&M – all these record companies that started up after mine, must be worth millions. I should have kept it going – it was great fun to do and I was very much the face of it. That’s when we came up with acts like 10CC. I was very successful but I hated it. It was only a little label, being distributed by Decca and funded my them to a degree (they paid for the distribution rights, but we had our own marketing division etc), but it was a real pain in the arse because I had to have all these meetings with tax lawyers and all that. We had a very complicated tax structure that Paul had suggested, set up to avoid British tax as it was then. Don’t forget I was paying 98p in the pound on Everyone’s gone to the Moon. The set up was that the company was based in Amsterdam with a trust fund in Bermuda. In the long run it all went terribly wrong and actually hit me for all the tax, and I’d spent a fortune setting up the structure for tax. So the whole thing ended up costing me millions and saved me nothing. All that was a real bore and that was why, when Sir Edward offered me Decca in the late 70’s, my instincts were ‘I’m not getting into that again.’ I do remember once in the 60’s when Sir Edward phoned me at home and said ‘We need to know something about the Rolling Stones and the Allan Klein situation – can you come to the board meeting immediately’. I said ‘Sir Edward, I’m lying on my roof in the sun – I’m not coming to a fucking board meeting.’ ‘No, no, it’s vital.’ ‘But I’m just wearing swimming trunks’.’I don’t mind – come as you are.’
So I went downstairs, put on my flip-flops, drove over to Albert Embankment, got in the lift (and the only two people who were allowed to use the executive lift were Sir Edward Lewis and Jonathan King, very bizarre.) The biggest stars and all the other directors had to go in the other lift. (I do recall a similar situation at EMI’s Manchester Square offices, where Bernard Delfont had one of the lifts all to himself.) So I went up to the executive floor, into the boardroom and there he was sitting at one end of the table with all these bankers in suits and ties, and there’s me completely naked apart from swimming trunks and flip flops. ‘Oh Jonathan, thanks for coming it – sorry to have disturbed your sunbathing.’ We talked for ten minutes and I told him where we were with Klein and everything. ‘Thanks old fellow, back to the sun!’ Off I went, and for the next few weeks Sir Edward and I were terribly amused because the whole of the music business was humming and buzzing about this bizarre occurrence, and yet both he and I said that if it had’nt been for all the gossip afterwards we both would have forgotten about it two minutes later, because it was completely normal behaviour for both him and me. I wasn’t an employee, I was a friend, and it wasn’t odd to him. Only he and I understood our relationship, plus possibly also his wife Jeannie, because she was very close to him especially when he was dying of leukaemia and I used to visit a lot. In many way he did think of me as a sort of son, I think.
Did you meet the other titan, Sir Joseph Lockwood?
I met him a couple of times. He was of course the arch rival to Sir Edward, so he was fascinated by me. I knew all his managing directors much better, but I did meet him a couple of times and he seemed a charming guy to me, very nice but much less involved with the music side than Sir Edward. Sir Edward a actually prided himself on remembering the catalogue numbers of big Vera Lynn hits, and Sir Joseph was not really into all of that. He did have a whole series of very interesting managing directors, the most interesting being a man called Philip Brodie, who came into the business from the Far East, not knowing anything about it. In those days EMI used to promote people who were going up its ladder. I got a call from Manchester Square saying ‘Philip Brodie would like you to come in and meet him.
I thought ‘fair enough’ because I was already doing my bit trying to make sure people in the business knew each other because I thought it was to everyone’s advantage. Anyway, I was always intrigued by these sort of people. Basically, this was the business I had adopted – it was almost like my family. If you’re a naturally curious kind of person, which I am, you go somewhere and think that’s interesting, why’s that? I think ‘why’s he done that? go and ask him’. So I was instantly meeting and questioning people and building up a wealth of experience . So I went to see Philip and he said ‘I’m so glad you’ve come up’ and I said ‘ You probably want to talk to me about the industry’ and he said ‘no,no, no, I wanted to tell you that your father was the nicest man in the world!’ I said ‘what?’. My father had died when I was twelve and had been the Managing Director of Tootals, the shirt and tie manufacturer and Philip said ‘my first job was as a junior salesman for Total ties and I met your father and he was an absolute sweetheart,’ Of course this was wonderful news to me because I knew very few people who knew my father. I was sitting with Philip and he was telling me these wonderful stories about my dad, so we got to be terribly good friends. He knew nothing about the music industry, like many of the others. I used to meet all the top people and got to know everybody.
It was a very small business then
They were all friends with each other. Tony Hall’s organisation at Decca at Pat Campbell who looked after the country side, Selwyn Turnbull, who was a lovely New Zealander whom I’d been trying to track down through Tip Sheet, and Roger Watson who was my age and a plugger. He was plugging Everyone’s gone to the Moon – I got friendly with them all. Selwyn was part of the gay mafia of the sixties and was friendly with most of the others who worked at EMI – people like Phill Greenop and Johnny Evans. I got friendly with all of them as well – we went out to pubs and I was the innocent sweet young pop person and they used to send me up, but they were all very nice to me. John Reid was one of these people – I got to know him.
Little John Reid, and William Cavendish always refers to him
I used to call him Pamela because his nickname at the time was Pamela Motown because he was in charge of Tamla Motown and all the queens had nicknames for each other. Even to this day he says “Jonathan, will you not call me Pamela“
Decca was more the artists than one-offs
I discovered that the way to make money was to create artists so I deliberately stopped making the one-offs. I had a few, like Loop-de-Love Because every time I needed a hit I used to think the best thing was to make one myself. It dawned on me that I needed to build some artists; that’s why we built up 10CC, and later we took on Kursaal Flyers. That’s why I took on The Rocky Horror Show, which was a soundtrack thing. I was aware of the fact that you needed to build artists but I didn’t make the mistake of saying completely ‘I don’t want one-off hits.’ In those days you can take a one-off and make a fortune from day one. The problem these days is that if you take a one-off hit it’s going to take to take hundreds of thousands to turn it into a hit, so why use all that energy and cash? So the basic thing is, times have changed. I was always aware when there was a hit around that no one else knew about, so I would take a Seaside Shuffle by Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs and get the rights, or a Shotgun Wedding by Roy C, or Fattie Bum Bum by Carl Malcolm. I’d suck those records in as part of the whole thing.
The Decca thing went very well but it wasn’t making a lot of money. We were only really building 10CC as our major artists. The rest were doing alright but a lot of the money was being used in advertising and marketing and getting things off the ground, and we were coming to the end of of Decca’s first distribution period. I had a meeting with Sir Edward and said: ‘I want to be honest with you. I want a great deal more money for the next period. Now you’re the only person at Decca who knows we haven’t made a lot of money so far’. To everyone else out there UK Records was the most successful independent label of all time. Every week there was a record in the charts, several times we had three in the Top Ten in the same week. Its profile was very high, but the reality was it wasn’t making much money. Polydor at that time had come forward through Freddie Haayen and all the Polydor bigwigs, with a huge offer that was ten times more than Decca knew they could or would make, and Sir Edward and I sort of reached an agreement that he would officially rather grudgingly allow Polydor to do it. Neither he or I looked at the books too closely but we realised there was no way we would make that money back. So that’s what happened. Sir Edward pulled away; I did the deal with Polydor, got a fortune, started the label and it only took them about six months because they realised they would never make the money back. I was probably the first great ripoff merchant
Did Polydor actually call for 50 singles a year. I recall they did
I can’t remember but I do know that Paul Marshall went to see the bigwigs at what was the Polydor organisation, mostly Germans, and absolutely cleaned them out, and then got them to let us out of our contract early with a major pay-off because they suddenly got so petrified at how deep they were in and how little they were going to make back. I had reached the stage when I thought ‘screw this.’ 10CC had left me, which infuriated me because I had explained to the band when I took them on ‘This will take three years of losses to build you up, two years where I will make huge profits and then in five years you’re out of your contract and you can get a fortune from somebody else, or I’ll have to match the money’. As it is with all groups, there let it get to two-and-a-half years of spend, saw the money coming along and instantly sued to get out of their contract with me.
How did they find a legal reason to get out?
They tried everything to get out, and couldn’t. My lawyers were very good, so eventually I ended up selling them to Phonogram because it was too much of a pain in the arse. The reason I did that was because (Richard) Branson came along and basically said to them ‘I’ll take a shot. I don’t care if Jonathan sues me – I need something for Virgin that will be profile. If a judge decides they’re his records, I’ll give him all the royalties afterwards, but I’ll take that chance.’ None of the major were prepared to do that. I realised eventually that Phonogram were offering much more money than Virgin, so I thought I’ll to do the Phonogram deal to get the money. I got the same over-ride that the group was getting from me – 4%. To this day I own all the masters they made for UK. I think they had 16 Top Ten records and eight of them are owned by me.
Do you look back on that UK period with either Decca or Polydor as a fun time?
No fun at all, actually. I don’t like being a boss. I like things that are small and fun and funky. I don’t like having to think about pension funds, personnel and all that crap.
Maybe you were better off dropping records around the industry?
At this very moment (2000?) Doug Morris had been desperate to get me into a deal with Universal, giving them first option. And I’ve sort of been avoiding it, even though a lot of money is being talked. Richard Griffiths said that if I wanted to do the deal with Doug, then do it as well. But actually I like dropping different things to different people. It’s better for the projects.
In 1976-7 I wound down UK Records. I allowed it to tick over and by the end of the seventies I decided I was so bored with it that I was going to live in the American office, now an apartment and write a novel. I had to do something and Derek Chinnery, who was controller of Radio 1, said ‘do a King in New York’ which was like a five-minute Alastair Cooke chat and a Postcard from New York every week on Radio 4 for their Midweek programme.
I was 36 years old and turned off the music industry. I always wanted to be a writer – still do. I’m a great communicator, able to express myself and get through to millions of people through various kinds of media. I’ve probably done more than almost anyone else. A lot have done one specific area far better than I have. I’ve managed to dabble in a lot of areas of communication.
A lot has happened in Jonathan’s life in the intervening 20 years, thwarting his expertise as ‘a great communicator.’ However, his influence on the music industry cannot be denied.
Text ©David Hughes 2021. Illustrations via Google search just to break up the text.
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