Hunky Dory (Who Knew)

by Laurence Myers

  I had no obligation to stick to my original offer but I did. There was a saying amongst the literati of market grafters: ‘If they’re gonna hate you anyway, fuck ’em.’ The advice was right. Mickie would have disliked me no more had I held out for the six-figure sum that the shares were actually worth, but I have never regretted my decision. I had earned the true value of my shares, but Mickie was my entrée into the music business, and in any event, it was my choice to leave him.

  I had been in practice for five years without getting found out. I was known and respected in the music business and I had enormous faith in the talent of Mike Leander and Tony Macaulay. I was thirty-five years old, I had a great family and I felt wonderful.

  22. GEM PRODUCTIONS – MIKE LEANDER, TONY MACAULAY

  I said earlier that the sixties were a great time to go into the music business. It was, in fact, a great time to go into any business.

  Post-war, the fifties were austere and grim but the sixties were booming and colourful. Anybody who wanted to work could get a job and if you worked hard you prospered. Most of my friends were lower-middle-class, as was I. We were all state-educated, none of us went to university and, with almost no exceptions, all of us did OK. As a matter of interest, most of us stayed married too. Maybe the two are linked?

  As the business grew, I concentrated on music and Ellis continued to build up his contacts and expertise in the wine and spirits business. He had already formed ADP Ltd to take care of our interest in that industry, and he was about to take that company public. Ellis had a 50 per cent interest in Gem and I had 50 per cent of the shares in ADP. He was also ready to fly the Goodman Myers’ nest and set up a new office in Sackville Street. In January 1970, I walked about two hundred yards out of my office at 273–287 Regent Street, across Oxford Circus, to the space I had taken for Gem at 252–260 Regent Street.

  Nineteen-seventy proved to be a truly amazing year in my career. People spend their whole lives in the music business without being attached to major success. By the end of my first year, I’d had a No. 1 record with Edison Lighthouse, two Top 10 hits with Johnny Johnson and His Bandwagon and had signed David Bowie. A single could sell 300,000-400,000 copies and Gem’s end might come to well over ten thousand pounds (about £100,000 in today’s money). By contrast, today sales of singles are so low that, even with downloads, nobody makes much money and they are largely seen as promotion for the album.

  My offices were about three thousand square feet on the top floor above Dr Scholl’s footwear store, about a hundred yards from Oxford Circus. Formally the London headquarters of Warner Brothers’ Corset Company, you walked into a space with a large reception and a showroom on the left. I took that as my own office/meeting room, and to the right there was a corridor with four small offices on either side. The initial occupants were Mike Leander, Tony Macaulay and Tony’s secretary – a very posh gel called Jane Hickey who went to Fortnum & Mason to buy the office tea supplies. The space was much too big for my immediate needs but … I had a dream.

  I have already mentioned the famous Brill Building in New York, where there were eleven floors crammed full of publishers, writers, song-pluggers and executives who were the heart of the New York music industry. Hits poured out through the windows onto Broadway. I was going to have my own little Brill Building-ette where I would give space to creative people who, in my plan, would create hits that would pour out through the windows onto Regent Street.

  23. DAVID BOWIE

  I had my new office and the most significant hits that drifted out of my Regent Street windows were created by David Jones, aka David Bowie.

  As with the Stones, I have no wish to write a version of David Bowie’s life story, only that part of it that relates to my personal involvement. There are dozens of books written about David but I particularly recommend Alias David Bowie, by Peter and Leni Gillman, who interviewed me extensively in 1986. Also read Stardust: The David Bowie Story by Henry Edwards and Tony Zanetta and Any Day Now by Kevin Cann. This last book contains some very specific accounting information that I do not have and the author told me that he had got it from the Gillmans. They told me that they had been given copies of the accounting by the widow of Peter Gerber, who was my in-house accountant until he was seduced away by Tony Defries. In a way I was getting information back that had originally belonged to me. It was very bizarre.

  As we all know, success has many fathers but failure is an orphan. David’s talent may well have brought him success, but the road to stardom is littered with the bodies of talented people who were never afforded the break they deserved. The financial risk that I took on when David was by no means a star, entitles me to proudly claim to be one of the fathers of his success.

  The first manager to be meaningfully involved in David’s career was Les Conn, at a time when David Bowie was still David Jones of Davie Jones and the King Bees. I first met Les in 1965 when, as a sometime artists’ manager and wannabe songwriter, he was a peripheral figure in Mickie Most’s circle of business friends. Les came from Stamford Hill, a Jewish area in north London close to Finsbury Park, where I had been brought up. There were not many north London Jewish boys in the music business, so there was something of a bond between us and, although I was a little younger, I became something of a confidant. Les had not managed to achieve any real success for the King Bees and they had recently amicably parted company.

  I later met with Les Conn after the struggling David Jones had become the superstar David Bowie and he never showed the slightest bitterness about what might have been. In fact, he laughed when he told me that David and another young hopeful, Mark Feld (aka Marc Bolan), had painted his kitchen. Les was fond of introducing himself as ‘Conn’s the name and con’s the game’ – referring to hype rather than financial misdeeds – and Bowie (who had worked briefly in the advertising industry) was not hype-adverse when it came to advancing his own career. He actually used the name The Hype for a short-lived band that he formed with Tony Visconti and Mick Ronson. He also learned the value of branding, which no doubt influenced his successful self-reinvention during the course of his career.

  Les was an extremely easy-going and affable guy, which could be why he never really achieved his potential in the music business. When Les died in 2008 David wrote a very warm obituary acknowledging the important part that Les had played in his early career.

  I first met David Bowie, briefly, at the Ivor Novello Awards in The Talk of the Town in May 1970. Tony Macaulay was receiving an award as the British songwriter of the year. Peter Sarstetd won best song with ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?’. Peter would be a GTO Los Angeles-managed artist in later years as one of the Sarstedt Brothers, along with siblings Robin Sarstedt and Eden Kane, the stage name of another brother. David’s ‘Space Oddity’ won the special award for originality and without doubt it was the talking point of the evening. I went over to David and congratulated him on writing not a love song, but a great theatrical song with a story. I also mentioned the fact that he did not sing with an American accent, which I greatly applauded. Actually, he sang very much like Anthony Newley, an entertainer I admired immensely. David freely confessed that he was a huge Newley fan, and I recall that in an NME interview in the early seventies, he said ‘I was Anthony Newley for a year.’ It was not only Newley’s voice that David admired. Newley was an actor who could sing and had used mime to great effect in the avant-garde musical Stop The World – I Want to Get Off, written with Leslie Bricusse, a show that I went to see three times. I think that I got brownie points from David because of our shared Newley fandom.

  Newley was the artist I would most like to have managed simply because I was a huge fan of his talent. He was a great actor, songwriter and a great performer. I was in contact with him in the early nineties about a musical project with Don Black. He once left a message on my home answerphone which started: ‘Anthony Newley here, I was very big in the sixties.’ Such was my fandom, I kept that cassette for years. He was a great talent and a lov
ely man. Newley was by then working in UK cabaret venues that, sadly, were a far cry from his days topping the bill at Las Vegas. Joan Collins, who was married to Newley for eight years, once told me that he was the love of her life, but she could not take his philandering. Tony died in 1999, aged 67. It was a great loss to the world of entertainment.

  When I met fellow Newley fan David Bowie at the Novello awards, I had no idea that the wheels were already in motion that would eventually lead him to my office. It was Tony Defries who brought Bowie to see me. I will call Defries by his surname in this book, not to be derogatory but because there are far too many Tonys involved in Bowie’s story and it will get confusing.

  I met Defries when he worked for Martin Boston and Co., a law firm that I had recommended to Mickie Most in his fight with Warrior Records. Defries definitely made an impression on people. He always wore a strange type of frock coat, slightly Dickensian in style. He smoked big cigars, but certainly not the Havanas that he could later afford. He had a huge Afro hairstyle and a slow, rolling gait. He moved slowly, but he thought quickly. Although he was not a qualified lawyer, I thought he was very bright. Soon after I moved into my Gem offices in Regent Street, Defries came to see me. He had left Martin Boston and moved to Godfrey Davis and Batt, a respected firm of lawyers who had engaged him to represent the Association of Fashion Advertising Photographers (AFAP) who were seeking to retain the copyright in the photographs that were commissioned by advertising agencies. He switched sides and decided that models should have a share of the copyright in their photographs. Also, it seemed that the top models were often kept waiting to be paid by their agent and were treated badly in other ways. Defries was aware of the manner in which I had improved the lot of music artists and thought that I might be interested in doing the same for these girls. Why would I not want to meet with some of London’s top models? I was soon hosting a dinner at La Trattoria Terrazza surrounded by about ten of the best-looking girls in London.

  In essence these girls were all unhappy and desperately wanted to improve their financial relationship with their agents. I explained how I improved the lot of recording artists by threatening to withdraw artists’ services and offered to meet with the agents in question and tell them that these girls were not going to work for them any more. I stressed that they would have to back me up by refusing further work until the agencies met what we thought were reasonable demands. We would form an Association of Fashion Models, which of course I would manage. The last time I had hosted a business dinner at the Trattoria was to propose a similar arrangement for songwriters and it had occurred to me that that had not worked out particularly well, but these were beautiful models so, of course … well, of course.

  In spite of the mistreatment, it seemed that all the girls loved their agents. One of the girls said that if they did not work her agency might go broke, to which I replied, ‘So be it.’ One said that they thought it was a horrible thing to do to the agent; another started crying at the thought of my nastiness and that was pretty much the end of my managing models. Whoever said men were from Venus and women from Mars must have, at some point, tried to help models.

  After the models fiasco I did not see Defries again until April 1970 when he came to see me about David Bowie. After leaving Leslie Conn in 1965, the singer was managed by Ralph Horton, a young guy from Birmingham. Horton did not have the money or resources to effectively manage a band and approached Ken Pitt, an established agent, who had brought Manfred Mann his first success. Horton wanted Ken to put some money into promoting David, who was by now performing as Davy Jones and the Lower Third. Ken initially said no, but advised David to change his name to the more distinctive David Bowie. Ken did help Horton with money and advice and gradually became a bigger influence on David himself. In February of 1967, David split with Horton and Ken Pitt became his manager. Ken, in my opinion, did a lot of good advancing David’s career. Most of all he was a fan and you cannot successfully manage an artist if you do not admire his or her work. But by 1970 David had decided that it was time for a change of management and I can imagine how Ken must have felt. He had risked money, shown faith and given good guidance.

  Artists often leave a manager who has done a good job for them. The reasons are sometimes valid but as often as not it is because someone has whispered in the artist’s ear that they are not as rich as they should be or are being taken for granted, neither of which might be the case. There are very few managers, including myself, who do not bear some scars as the result of disloyalty. Mickey Duff, in his day a leading manager of boxers, once advised me, ‘If you want loyalty, buy a dog.’

  Ken’s problem was that David had come under the influence of Angie, the powerful American lady he had married in March of that year. They met at The Speakeasy Club, a music-business hangout, about a year earlier. She was with Lou Reizner, an American record producer and Calvin Mark Lee, a Chinese-American friend of Lou’s – one or both of whom she was romantically involved with. I am confining my recollections to matters which concern my relationship with Bowie, but for those of you who are interested in the fascinatingly liberal sexual machinations between these characters and many other people in David’s life, I would refer you to Alias David Bowie which deals in some detail with the web of David and Angie’s sexual preferences and relationships.

  The introduction of a new wife/girlfriend in a pop star’s life is not always positive. Some ladies think that they can do a better job of management than the manager. On the few occasions I was faced with this problem, I encouraged the lady concerned to test her talent by going out and finding someone to manage. This issue is best illustrated in Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner’s satirical but definitive film on the subject of rock bands. If you are considering managing an artist I urge you to watch it every night. In the years after I gave up management I was occasionally tempted to go back by an artist who I believed had talent that I could nurture. I would watch my copy of Spinal Tap, take a cold shower and go to sleep – undisturbed by any 3 a.m. phone calls about the artist’s van broken down outside Sheffield (as if there was anything that I could do about it) or the drummer being arrested for assault, which was the good news because the police had not yet found the drugs taped to the inside of his bass drum.

  Angie, who was very bright, unquestionably had a positive influence on David’s public persona, providing a level of energy and urgency that he lacked. It was she who encouraged him to do something about leaving a manager he was not happy with. They discussed his dilemma with Olav Wyper, the marketing manager of Philips Records, which released ‘Space Oddity’, and he recommended his own lawyer. Enter Defries, who drafted a letter to Ken from David, informing him that he was terminating their business relationship on the basis that Ken had not fulfilled his management obligation to further David’s career.

  Gem had got off to a flying start and the UK music industry was certainly aware of my presence when Defries came to explain that David was free, and that he would like to stop being a lawyer and get involved with managing the star himself. As he had had no music-business experience he did not think that David would go for it, but he had enthused about me and Gem, my hot new management/record production company. Defries offered to bring David up to meet me, on the understanding that he could come and join the company if David signed with us. My experience as an accountant in the music business had taught me that where there’s a hit there’s a writ and, irrespective of getting involved with David Bowie, I quite liked the thought of having Tony Defries as an in-house business affairs person.

  We agreed that Defries would work for me for a salary of thirty pounds a week. I would sign David to Gem and – if everything worked out – I would give Defries 20 per cent of the company and make him a director. It was difficult to define what ‘worked out’ meant but Defries said that he was happy to trust me to ‘do the right thing’ and there was no paperwork between us. It is worth noting that I would never have signed David Bowie had Defries not brought him to me, and equally
it is my belief that David would never have signed with Defries in a management capacity, had he not been working with me.

  Before I committed to sign David I, of course, wanted to get to know him a little and we met a few times to discuss his relationship with Ken Pitt and what his hopes were for the future. My first impression of David was that he was quietly spoken, very gentlemanly and very polite. He was, however, very firm in his ideas about how he wanted to present himself to the public.

  Most artists, encouraged by their management, base themselves on precedents. In the fifties, stars like Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, Eddie Fisher and their contemporaries dressed like cabaret singers in glitzy tuxedos with lots of white teeth. Elvis set the mould for undulating hips in tight trousers and English pop stars like Billy Fury, Cliff Richard and Marty Wilde happily followed The King. Brian Epstein put The Beatles into cute uniforms. the Rolling Stones were the scruffy rebels – although Jagger was very choosy about his stage gear. By and large, the management’s hope was that the artist looked ‘sexy’ to the teenage girls who were a large share of the record-buying market. Part of that sex appeal meant you shouldn’t seem to be gay. Many Hollywood stars disguised their homosexuality or bisexuality, including male pin-ups Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson.