We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing in the music industry.
CDs and the album format are being swept away by the typhoon of iTunes and streaming services (our old friend Spotify, and coming up on the rails, we7); artists and bands are becoming disposable ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ commodities; and perhaps the biggest storm is created by the rise of the corporate businessman guiding the tastes of the nation.
I imagine if the likes of you or I wanted to discuss this scenario with Mr Cowell, we would need to convince a team of assistants - many carrying clipboards, several personal trainers and security personnel, and a small army of interns, that we wish to make an appointment (next free date, June 2017). Sometime in 2016, we would receive a draft email informing us that Simon has reluctantly cancelled due to pressing commitments elsewhere.
It wasn’t always so.
Over a cheery and nostalgia-tinged lunch yesterday I recalled the rather ad hoc nature of the music business in the early 1970s. There were, of course, no mobile phones. Many of the managers who had grown up through the austerity of the post war years had a less than enthusiastic, and untrusting, relationship with what we now call ‘land lines’, but back then were just ‘telephones’.
As a very young, and very junior, member of the Pye Records conglomerate, it was my job to roam around London delivering hand written notes, acetates, posters, pop stars, and occasionally bottles of Jack Daniels to a variety of characters from Peckham to Denmark Street.
If a chap emerged in the entertainment business today, and he was known as ‘Bunny Lewis’, we would immediately picture a rather camp, effete sort of fellow, possibly bearing
a similarity to Dick Emery’s ‘Mandy’ character. The Bunny Lewis to whom I would be sent as an emissary when Pye were trying to gain his record producing services for a very small fee, was born Bridges George McGibbon Lewis, was happily married and had been awarded the Military Cross in World War Two.
Unfailingly polite, charming and kind to the youthful me, he treated my over enthusiastic sales pitch with tolerance before gently steering me back to Paddington, with a message that whilst flattered by our interest, he would prefer a larger slice of the Pye; a pun which when I delivered it back to headquarters was not viewed with the same amusement which it clearly gave Bunny to send it.
Tony Stratton-Smith designed Charisma to run on the administrative lines of Motown, where everything, records, PR, management and agency could be covered under one umbrella organisation, and under (literally) one roof, in Old Compton Street.
How G.T. Moore and The Reggae Guitars slipped through that tightly woven net, I’m unsure (signed to Charisma Records, but managed by Pye), but as their booking agent, I spent a lot of time hanging around at Charisma, mainly trying to blag free albums, so that I could head directly to Cheapo Cheapo Records in Berwick Street and exchange them for fifty pence a go.
Looking back I have little doubt that ‘Strat’ knew all about my sideline, and that my enthusiasm to own albums by Refugee, Jackson Heights and Capability Brown appeared excessive, especially when repeated most Friday afternoons; incidentally, Monty Python albums were worth double at Cheapo Cheapo, so were highly prized. How I had the cheek, I don’t know, but Strat had a mad driver called ‘Crack’, and despite Cheapos being located about two hundred yards round the corner, Crack used to give me a lift in the Charisma Rover and drop me off on the corner of Berwick Street, before returning to his usual role of chatting to unorthodox ladies in Soho coffee bars.
The day that Charlie Drake turned up at Charisma to talk about recording with Genesis will have to wait for another time.
My favourite music business engagement however, took me neither to Denmark Street nor Old Compton Street but to the Fountain Restaurant of Fortnum and Mason. G.T. Moore’s girlfriend was Shusha Guppy (her son, Darius, would later attain his own form of fame), a Persian singer-songwriter who had achieved a small measure of success in France. We were tasked with trying to improve her profile in the UK.
To attempt to get her a foothold in the crossover market we buttered up a number of songwriters, the most progress made with a musician/lyricist pairing, Gerard Sayer and David Courtney. These two were managed by Adam Faith, who, having seen his own singing career fade somewhat, had made a new career as an actor, and part-time manager of aspiring pop musicians.
Faith didn’t have an office in London, but as Gerard Sayer became Leo, and the hits started to bother the top forty, he needed somewhere to make and take phone calls, and meet people. Extraordinarily, Fortnum and Mason indulged Faith to the extent of allowing him to take up residence, every week day, from about 11:00am until the pubs opened, in the Fountain Restaurant, just off Jermyn Street.
Against a backdrop of murals of bucolic scenes, he was given free use of a telephone, and visitors would be directed to his corner table, where he would offer poached eggs and coffee. I adored these ‘meetings’ which, for me, were magical opportunities to discuss potential songs for the unfortunate Shusha for about two minutes, but to talk over the weekends’ football stories and gossip with (amazingly) Adam Faith, and an occasional entourage of slightly slippery looking associates for an hour or two. How he got away with this rather high class squatting is unclear, but the waitresses fluttered around him, and the formidable woman in charge of them all (Rosie, I think) lost her rather terrifying edge when serving up the extra portions of toast which appeared every fifteen minutes or so.
Times change. The way we live and work has changed. Try arranging a meeting with Simon Cowell in Fortnum and Mason. Short change.
Terence Dackombe, November 2010
