Hunky Dory (Who Knew)

by Laurence Myers

  With The New Seekers there was another possible reason for their break-up. After five years together they had had enough of each other. In my own view, any discord was not helped by the fact that although Eve Graham had been the lead voice on every previous hit, Lyn Paul took the role on ‘Beg Steal or Borrow’, the Eurovision Song Contest entry, and ‘You Won’t Find Another Fool Like Me,’ a No. 1 hit in 1973 written by Geoff Stephens and producer Tony Macaulay.

  As a Christmas present to me, the girls in my office went into the studio with the track and recorded ‘You Won’t Find Another Boss Like Laurence’. The line ‘Those Cuban heels for high-powered deals’ sticks in my mind. I plead guilty to the Cuban heels … well, it was the seventies.

  The break-up became extremely acrimonious between the group members themselves. Peter Doyle, one of the original members, who sadly died young of throat cancer in 2001, had left the group in 1973. Marty Kristian and Paul Layton bought the rights to the name from Eve Graham and Lyn Paul. In subsequent years, they reformed the group in various incarnations, including some ex-members of The Springfield Revival. Eve Graham briefly rejoined The New Seekers in 1976, in a line-up which included musician Kevin Finn. Eve subsequently married Kevin and they had a happy marriage until Kevin died in 2016. Lyn Paul went on to have a career on stage, starring in Blood Brothers. Marty and Paul took advantage of owning The New Seekers’ name by making soundalike re-recordings of all of The New Seekers’ hits, without using Eve or Lyn and licensing the recordings to Polydor, who had the original recordings. This seriously devalued the original recordings that I owned, but it was a smart move and I do not blame the boys for doing so. The dispute spluttered on for years until Marty and I eventually ruined the day of several West End lawyers by coming to an amicable settlement.

  The London office had been financially supporting GTO Inc. since the day it started and David had not managed to sign anyone to contribute at all significantly to the running of the LA operation. I had no animosity towards David, but after the breakup of The New Seekers, I decided that it made no business sense to carry on draining our resources indefinitely. I put it to David that if GTO Inc. were not self-supporting by 31 December 1974 we should close the office down, even if there were a promise to sign The Beatles on the next day. David was not happy. I bought Keith Potger’s minority holding in the controlling company of the group so that I had a majority vote. I was never obliged to legally use my controlling vote to ride roughshod over David but – as with all divorces – it was a little messy. David did manage to walk away with the house in Beverly Hills and a nice sum of money and I kept the company. We were both a little unhappy with the deal that we made, which is always a good sign of fairness. Most importantly, we remained friends.

  David decided to get back into radio and moved Robin and his four children to Hawaii. That did not work out as planned and he moved his family back to LA. He got involved in film production and in 1982 made The Pirate Movie based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance in Australia, and was co-producer of Flight of the Navigator for Disney. Neither of the films were box-office successes and he did not manage to get another film made. He went back to Australia and went into the restaurant business.

  I had stayed in touch with David after GTO Inc. closed and tried to be helpful where possible. In 1993, whilst in LA, I met up with him again. He had moved back without his family, which did not surprise me as I figured that Robin had had enough of packing up the kids on yet another major move. I met with him for lunch at a restaurant in Beverly Hills, expecting him to tell me that he and Robin had split up. He said that he had something to tell me which he found difficult and I, rather smugly, said that I thought that I had worked out why he had moved to LA alone.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have always been gay.’ I was so shocked that my pasta went all over the restaurant’s mirrored walls.

  David’s story was not unusual, but it was nonetheless heart-breaking. He had felt that he was gay since he was a teenager but thought that it would ‘go away’ when he married and had a family. It did not, and having had the painful life of keeping his secret for twenty years of marriage, circumstances in Australia obliged him to come out to his wife, kids and mother. I was extremely fond of David and Robin and felt great compassion for all of the family. To make matters worse, David soon found out that he was living with AIDS. This was in the nineties, when the illness was more debilitating and more life-threatening than medicine has made it today. David was unable to work but still endeavoured to support his family, all of whom stayed close to him. I helped him out as much as I could. At one point he planned to move to Spain with his boyfriend, a Mexican, and I offered our house in Majorca for him to live in as a first step but he didn’t make the move. Eventually I became weary of supporting his schemes, all of which revolved around the gay community and in my view were highly unlikely to succeed. Unkindly, I just stopped calling him.

  In 2011, I got a call from Marty Kristian. He and David had made up after some thirty-odd years, David was coming to London, and they were having a New Seekers reunion. Marty wanted me to appear as a surprise guest, which he thought would be ‘the icing on the cake’ for all concerned. I was not proud of the way I had treated David in the later years and would love to have gone along to try and make amends. Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to get there, but I asked Marty to give David my number so that we could arrange to meet. I got a very cold call from David saying that he was not keen to meet with me because I had failed to keep in touch with him for the last few years. I did point out that phone calls work two ways, and that maybe it would be nice to meet up. I then received an email from David saying that he had no wish to meet with me. I had told a mutual friend in Australia that I had stopped calling David because I was fed up with his mainly gay-based business ideas. The friend, who was obviously not a good friend to David, had felt impelled to tell him so. I would have liked to have had a chance to explain to David that I had no homophobic prejudices; I just did not believe that his ideas were commercially viable.

  If David had a business fault it was a blinkered persistence, which could sometimes work against him. He would go on and on browbeating Mr A to agree to something that Mr A really did not want to do. He would then do the same thing with Mr B and Mr C, until they also reluctantly agree to be part of the deal. Inevitably one of them would have second thoughts and pull out and the deal would collapse like a pack of cards.

  David died in 2012 following a hip operation. He was surrounded by his still-loving family – none of whom, I am sure, will think kindly of me, which is a shame because, probably unknown to them, I did help David out financially quite a lot in the years following his illness.

  I led into the GTO Inc. story by saying that it had eaten up the five hundred thousand pounds that I had received from the Bowie deal with Defries. In truth, I do not recall what the losses of GTO Inc. actually were but it was not, as they say, chopped liver. Looking back, I do not regret the cost to me of having supported an LA office that failed. Gertrude Stein once famously said of LA, ‘I went there, and there was no there, there.’ This was not true if you were involved in the entertainment business in the pre-Silicon Valley seventies and eighties. GTO Inc. was struggling but my other business ventures made me a perceived success, something vital to make it with the LA in-crowd.

  I guess I have enough shallowness within me to have thoroughly embraced the bullshit of LA. For me it was exciting and vibrant. I had lots of friends there, many of them UK expats and we did not take ourselves or each other too seriously. The Chateau Marmont, now a five-star hotel, but then delightfully seedy, was the hangout for visiting Brits. Peter Brown, the ex-Apple publicist, an extremely urbane English gentleman, used to arrange a monthly dinner for the expat community at The Dome restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. One such occasion was to celebrate the Queen Mother’s birthday. My ‘date’ for the evening was Hermione Gingold, a once extremely famous English actress who starred in Gigi, The Music Man
and many other major films. Now in her eighties and living in LA, in her youth Hermione was a friend of the Queen Mother who, before she became Queen of England, was the Charleston-loving Betty Bowes-Lyons.

  Hermione, in spite of her age, was as bright and feisty as a teenager. She clearly shared her old friend’s alleged love of a gin and tonic, and during the dinner she regaled us with wonderful stories of the twenties when she and Betty were leading lights in young British society. Of course, the names she scurrilously bandied around were meaningless to us, but she several times confided in me in her cut-glass English accent, that ‘Betty was a bit of a gel, dontcha know.’ Just for the record, when I dropped Hermione home, I did not go in for a drink.

  28. ARCADE RECORDS

  For those of you who are too young to remember, there was a time when you could not buy compilations of various artists. In 1972, I was instrumental in the birth of the compilation business. In fact, I have been credited with actually creating it. A bold accolade that I would be foolish to deny.

  There were a number of factors that serendipitously came together to cause me to get into the compilation business.

  1. In 1972, I had reel-to-reel tapes in my offices that were capable of taking tracks that I chose from different vinyl recordings and putting them onto one cassette. More importantly, I had a kid in the office who knew how to do it. I used to make my own cassettes of music I liked by different artists and also made up compilations requested by friends.

  2. The brothers-in-law. Every successful Jewish businessman has at least one brother-in-law. Sometimes one he has to support and sometimes one who contributes to his success. I got lucky with both of mine. Marsha had two half-brothers, Michael and Larry Levene. They had inherited their father William Levene’s business, which supplied market grafters with product lines to be sold via demonstrations. By 1972, they were in the business of selling TV-promoted kitchen gadgets and the like to the retail trade.

  3. The Levene brothers’ big competitor was a company called K-Tel, a Canadian company also owned by a family brought up in the market grafting business, selling similar products.

  So how did it all come together? One day in early 1972 Michael Levene told me that one of his spies had reported to him that K-Tel had put out a TV-promoted record of polka music in the US that had sold phenomenally well. Could I come up with something similar in the UK for the Levenes? I explained that there was a huge descendant population of middle-European immigrants in America and the polka was the music of their heritage. The nearest thing to polka I could think of in the UK was clog-dancing, the knees-up, or Morris dancing, none of which was ever going to be a winner.

  There was a company called Pickwick Records, which I had noted did very well making soundalike recordings of twelve recent chart hits and quickly getting them into Woolworths and other mass outlet stores. What if I could persuade record companies to license us the original hits that we could put on a single LP?

  Michael was insistent that not only would the content have to be good, the record would have to be a genuine bargain. We came up with the idea of pricing the records at the same retail price as conventional albums, but putting twenty tracks onto one record rather than the usual twelve. Squeezing that many tracks onto a 12-inch vinyl album would slightly reduce the quality of the playback, but not, I thought, enough to spoil the listening of the average consumer. Anyway, the ethos of the TV marketing industry was ‘It’s for selling not for using.’

  My first call was to EMI, the company with the biggest roster of artists at the time. I met with Ron Tudor, the MD, who was not enthusiastic but said that he would look into it. At our follow-up meeting, Ron told me that his legal affairs department had told him that there was no provision in their artists’ contracts that allowed them to be put onto albums with other artists and there was a further doubt – twenty tracks on one LP, sold for the same price as a current album, would be a budget album and that meant a different royalty rate. Generally, EMI were living up to their reputation as being the Ministry of Pop, so I tried RCA – with a similar outcome.

  All this took some time and I then got a panic call from Michael to say that his spy had told him that K-Tel’s own spy had told the company’s founder and boss, Ray Kives, that I was trying to put together a complication of hits, and they were now trying to do the same. The competition between K-Tel and the Levenes was intense and sometimes I got confused as to who was spying for whom.

  I was close to John Fruin, the head of Polydor, who were The New Seekers’ record company. He loved the idea, railroaded his legal department to make it happen, and it did. The Levenes were great believers in the approach now known as ‘Does what it says on the tin’ and we called the album 20 Fantastic Hits by the Original Artists – to distinguish it from the Pickwick soundalike releases. I had three of my own recordings on the LP, The New Seekers’ ‘Beg, Steal or Borrow,’ Johnny Johnson’s ‘Blame it on the Pony Express,’ and Edison Lighthouse’s ‘Love Grows …’, and an interest in the publishing of two other tracks, so I was also earning as a supplier. Happy days! K-Tel’s 20 Dynamic Hits hit the market a week or so before us but – slight puff of the chest here – our content was much better than theirs and we easily outsold them.

  The Levenes and I became partners in a company called Arcade Records, named after Arcade House, GTO’s building. Our first release was announced to the trade in a front-page article in Music Week in July 1972. In the same edition, there was a report that Pickwick had obtained an injunction against a company called Multiple Sound, who were also releasing soundalikes, for using the name ‘Pick Of The Pops’. Multiple Sound was owned by Ian Miles, who later started the record arm of Ronco – a company in competition with Arcade and K-Tel – but they had little success with their releases. They did, however, do well with TV merchandising of weird gadgets like a device that made your old wine bottles into vases.

  The Levenes did all of the marketing and distribution for Arcade Records, and my office made the repertoire selections and negotiated with the record companies. The Levenes’ marketing was quite brilliant. On the basis that our TV campaign was driving customers into the shops, he offered the retailer a smaller margin. In addition, unlike conventional record companies, they offered the retailer full sale-or-return privileges. The pitch was that the retailer had nothing to lose by stocking our records. This was true, although some chains were initially resistant to the smaller margin before eventually realising that they were losing out on sales. All retailers, even Woolworths, the biggest mover of records at that time, gave in and stocked Arcade Records.

  In no time Arcade had fully staffed offices in Germany and Holland. Larry opened an office in Paris but was frustrated by being unable to buy cost-effective TV time and soon closed the operation. We also became partners in PPL in Germany, a company making TV commercials. PPL was based in an abandoned swimming pool in Munich. It was a very creative atmosphere and I loved to spend time there.

  Germany was by far the biggest market. K-Tel continued to be strong rivals but we usually won when it came to fighting for the most current hits. I really understood the record industry and used this knowledge to great advantage. I knew that one of the more difficult financial problems for a major record company was managing their pressing plants. They were obliged to have the capacity to deal with the demand created by a hit, but often were not aware of the extent until a record was released. This meant that most majors had idle capacity that they were obliged to keep in case. I would offer the record companies the contract for pressing a particular Arcade release, which could utilise their spare capacity. If they had an artist whose advance was unrecouped, I would offer to get that artist onto one of our records to help with the recoupment. I also had existing relationships with many of the writers, producers and managers of artists we wanted. If the record company was reluctant to give us a particular track, I could call one of the people behind the record and tell them that they were missing out on income because their record company woul
d not license it to Arcade. Wherever possible, I chose a track in which a business friend had an interest, and that generally helped me within the industry. I was still seen as a hot source of talent so the record companies preferred to keep me happy.

  K-Tel knew that Arcade was a family business, but at the 1975 Midem, Ray Kives, one of the owners, frustrated with usually coming second in the race for product, asked me what I would want to defect to them, which of course I would not even consider.

  I did not want the record companies who were licensing us their product to realise how successful we were. In the UK I had managed to keep Arcade releases out of the charts, but in Germany both Arcade and K-Tel records were listed and the trade magazines also published their market share. In one quarter, Arcade and K-Tel had almost 25 per cent of the German market between them. When we made compilations, the majors sort of understood that it would be difficult for them to compete as they would have to agree with their rivals how many tracks each would have, who would do the pressing, etc. But when we started to make best-ofs for single artists, the majors began to wonder why they could not do this themselves. Over the years I persuaded major record companies to license us Elvis, the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Kinks, Hot Chocolate, The Beach Boys, The Everly Brothers, Johnny Cash, Diana Ross and some big local artists. We convinced them that there was some mystique about our operation. They believed that we had a secretive market-research department helping us to choose the less obvious compilations. In fact, with my trusted and brilliant lieutenant Sylvia Curd, I simply used to browse the record departments of the major department stores, Kaufhof in Germany and Vroom & Dreesmann in Holland, to see what was selling well in the budget record department.