Myers - Hunky dory

First published in 2019 by B&B Books

Copyright Laurence Myers 2019

The moral right of Laurence Myers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. However, the publisher will be glad to rectify in future editions any inadvertent omissions brought to their attention.

ISBN 978-1-912892-29-7

Also available as an ebook
ISBN 978-1-912892-28-0

Jacket photography: Getty Images
Front cover images of Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull
copyright Gered Mankowitz

Typeset by Tom Cabot/ketchup
Cover design by Simon Levy
Project management by whitefox
Printed and bound by Clays

Hunky-dory

[Huhng-kee-daw-ree]

adj. informal

Fine: going well

Oxford English Dictionary

For

(in order of appearance)

Marsha,

James, Peter, Beth

O nce upon a time, a long time ago, a young ex-student of the London School of Economics sat at my desk in my Regent Street office. He was a nice young man, skinny with long hair and a distinctively large mouth. He was a singer with a band; I was his accountant and he was interested in pensions.

After all, Laurence, Im not going to be singing rocknroll when Im sixty, he said in his south London accent.

No, youre not, I agreed. How we laughed at the thought Nearly sixty years on, my client Mr Jagger is not only still singing rocknroll, he is still fronting the greatest rocknroll band in the world and he certainly does not live off a pension.

Six years after that meeting, another skinny young man with long hair, also a singer, sat opposite me at a different desk. I was no longer an accountant. I was managing artists. I thought that he was extremely talented but one thing slightly troubled me. Although his wife was by his side, he was clearly flirting with androgyny. It was the received wisdom of the times that it was mostly teenage girls who bought records, so their pin-ups should be handsome in an alpha-male way. After I agreed to take him on, I asked the young David Bowie his views on this.

Dont you worry about that, Laurence, he said, I know what Im doing. And he did

A music-business journalist once asked me: What was it like to be at the heart of the British music industry in the fantastic sixties and seventies? I truthfully answered, Who knew? At the time, although the people I was dealing with on a day-to-day basis were exciting and interesting, I had no idea that years later many of them would be of historic interest and that much of the music I was then involved with would still be relevant more than fifty years later.

They say that, in life, timing is everything and 1964 was the perfect time for me to get involved with the music business. The rock/pop business had burst into the public psyche with a four-to-the-floor drumbeat thumping out the rhythm of a youth revolution. In America young men were burning their draft cards as a protest against the ongoing war in Vietnam. Youth in the UK were rebelling against the general mess that they were going to inherit from the post-war generation the established class system that pigeon-holed the populace according to their accents and anything else that would upset their parents especially their taste in music.

Unlike today, when a kid can make a record in his bedroom, records had to be made in expensive recording studios. Record sales, along with the rest of the economy, were booming. The major record companies had a total lock on the recording industry and took advantage of the artists who were providing the music that reflected the desires of the youth of the day which were, largely, sex and dancing. The contraceptive pill had been introduced in 1961, encouraging the sixties to swing. Lets spend the night together, suggested the Rolling Stones, and many did.

There was a real need for young business brains that would protect the artist against the rapacious practices of the record companies. Whom, you may ask, was amongst the first to fill this need? Twenty-eight-year-old me! How, you may ask, did I begin? Well, heres how although if, like me, you sometimes skip the early years chapters in biographies, go straight to chapter six. I wont be offended.

I was born in London in 1936 within the sound of the Bow bells. This means that technically I am a cockney, but I spurned my birthright as soon as I could toddle, already hating the idea of having to learn to walk with shoulders rolling, thumbs in my braces, doing The Lambeth Walk and shouting Oi! Besides, I didnt think that when I grew up Id want to wear suits that were covered in pearl buttons. Little did I know that through the eras of teddy boys, flower power, glam rock, new romantic and punk, Id flirt with far worse.

I was three years old when what my generation call The War broke out. It was The War because, like the misnamed The War to End All Wars twenty-odd years before it, there was only one war that made the papers. I recently read that currently there are people trying to kill each other in something like three hundred conflicts as little wars are called around the world. There is also, of course, the global war against terrorism. Will we ever learn? It seems, sadly, not.

War can be fun if you are a child and protected from its true tragedy by your parents. For my contemporaries and me it was an ever-changing adventure. Too many changes of schools to take education seriously, and no expectancy to do well. Lots of disruptions from air-raid warnings, fire drills, gas mask practice and, of course, many bomb sites to play on. All wonderful stuff but, to this day, if I ever hear a siren that has been programmed to sound like a wartime air-raid warning, my stomach turns.

Like most kids during the war years, I went to a variety of schools. Between 1940 and 1945 I attended a convent in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, a boarding school in High Wycombe, a school in Soho for refugee kids from Malta and a school for future gangsters in East Ham. There were other schools that I was sent to for just a few days, as I was shunted around the country so that Hitler could not find out where I was.

My fathers parents came from Russia and my mothers parents came from Poland and they were both very influenced by the Fiddler On The Roof experiences of their recent heritage, when Jews were thrown out of countries just for being Jews. This was a generation that generally instilled in their children a need to have their own businesses because:

A) You could not get rich working for someone else. Being rich was perceived as the best insulation from anti-Semitism.

B) It was feared that anti-Semitism would inhibit the advancement of Jews working in the general marketplace.

This was not as paranoid as you might think. In the 1930s, National Socialism was politically and physically active against the Jews in Germany, and Mosleys fascists were gaining traction in the UK. The ruling classes may not have been overtly anti-Semitic, but the cooks in the stately homes of England had no need to learn how to make chicken soup or kosher salt beef for expected Jewish guests, unless the guest was a Rothschild, which supports A) above.

In 1939 when the war started, my parents were operating a small hairdressing salon on the Barking Road, East Ham. During the war my mother Alice, a wonderful woman whom I adored and respected, battled on to operate the salon during my father Gerrys absence in the army. Our home was above the shop a proud Jewish tradition that meant she could work all hours to make ends meet: an even prouder Jewish tradition.