Global Markets and the British Popular Music Industry

Richard Coopey

Debate continues around the precise nature of the British economy in the 20th century. The depth, periodisation, sectoral location, or even existence of relative decline still exercises the minds of many economic and business historians.1The post war picture features a series of disappearing industries (automobile, shipbuilding, mining, IT and consumer electronics to name but a few) offset by a resurgent, reconfigured banking and finance sector, all riding on a rollercoaster of political economy. There are success stories to offset this trend, notably in the pharmaceutical and retailing sector, but one particular sector has experienced innovation and growth on an international scale, and has in turn been largely ignored by business and economic historians. The British popular music industry has consistently generated successful enterprises, forming, for the period between 1950 and 1975 at least, one half of a bi-polar Anglo-American global dominance of the industry. Neglect of this sector, by historians is all the more remarkable since, as one of what are increasingly referred to as the “creative industries”, it is seen as part of the bedrock of future advanced economy.2 The industry is also of interest historically in that it displays intriguing characteristics throughout - innovation, management, investment, technology, marketing – almost all aspects of the business present unique perspectives for the historian of business to contemplate. One interesting facet of the business is its essential duality, both manufacturing material goods and generating or transmitting cultural goods. As Frith would have it that “the music industry is not a manufacturing industry, it is a rights industry; it is organised around the management and exploitation of talent.”3

In many ways the years between 1950 and 1975 represent a period of revolutionary change in the sector. Of course such dates are necessarily arbitrary, and the are many continuities which stretch across these boundaries, yet there are a number of striking developments within the period which support the notion of a paradigm shift in the industry. These include the relative decline in the sheet music publication industry and consequent rise of recorded music; the technological changes in production and reproduction of music and in its distribution; market changes, including the expansion of a youth market, but also an increasingly complex hierarchical and segmented marketplace; the consolidation and growth of established enterprises and the emergence of entirely new ones; and a sequential series of phases of international competition and cooperation particularly between Britain and the USA.

1 . Richard Coopey and Peter Lyth, Business in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxfor University Press, 2009), 1-15.

2 See for example Richard Florida The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York, Basic Books, 2003)

3 Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 388.

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In this changing pop business environment several key questions need to be addressed. Firstly, we need to chart the development of a range of enterprises – new and established, small and local to multidivisional and multinational. What were their origins, trajectories, hierarchies, structures and strategies? One of the central features of the period, for example, were systemic changes in managerial cultures, control regimes and corporate governance. The period is also notable for the shifts in the balance of power, and in relational configurations between large firms and new entrants. We also need to confront the idea of innovation and the marketplace. While a range of important technological changes redefined the industry, the creative process at its heart also underwent fundamental reconfiguration. Of course, if we are looking for a theory to explain the nature of innovation and change in the marketplace of pop, the first place we might look would be Joseph Schumpeter, rather than Alfred Chandler. Schumpeter’s essential analysis of capitalist enterprise is based on the idea that change is ever present. New products are always being generated to outperform old products, or to establish new markets. Added to this the cyclical nature of the economy means that phases of competition are periodically enhanced - the famous “winds of creative destruction” will blow during periods of depression, for example, unleashing the opportunities for the efficient corporation, and most importantly the effective entrepreneur, to seize the counter-cyclical opportunity. Increasingly in the arts in general in the 20th century, and in recorded music in particular, we can detect the existence of a constant pressure to innovate, to come up with a new musical fashion. We might typify this as a kind of hyper-Schumpeterian business environment, where the trade winds of creative destruction prevail. Or so it might seem. It is this world that firms such as EMI or Decca created or encountered from the 1950s onwards. How did they cope with it? How did the Chandlerite firm deal with a hyper-Schumpeterian marketplace.

Perhaps as no other the business historian of the music industry needs to mix social and cultural history with business and economic history. Not just to determine the market, but to understand the causal relationship or perhaps dialectic between the market and the strategy. Whether the market impulse travelled up or down. But also, to understand the ways in with the “cultures” of pop invade the corporate world – in a strange coalescence of lifestyle and business strategy. So far economic history analysis of the pop industry has tended to concentrate on the cyclical nature of business activity, but has favoured measurement based on indicators such as record charts, a problematic quantitative in itself.4 Culture has of course been increasingly of interest to economic and business history and forms one of the central debates around the notion of relative decline in the British economy. Culture in this sense has largely been discussed in terms of some pervasive set of ideals and influences - rural or aristocratic values eroding industrial drive at all levels of British society and so on. In the present context culture becomes arguably a more central or embedded concept. However delineated (or indeed measured or estimated) it pervades, indeed defines, both the world of

4. Richard Peterson and David Berger, “Entrepreneurship in Organisations: Evidence from the Popular Music Industry”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1 (March 1971); Richard A. Peterson, “Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music”, Popular Music, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan. 1990); Ross, Gourvish and Tennent.

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production and consumption in pop music. One very graphic development might serve to underline this important aspect. As the industry developed during the 1960s the idea of “commercial” took on two diametrically opposed meanings. From a business point of view the term was used to define the aspirational, the ideal in recording – an appeal to a wide market. From the creative point of view to some it came to mean the opposite, that which was to be avoided, the death of the creative or innovatory – to use the other singular aphorism of the period, a “sell out”. Yet to be “anti-commercial” could be the key to commercial success. An intriguing sector indeed.

The Rise of the Chanderian pop enterprise.

The popular music industry in Britain during the 1950s came to be increasingly dominated by what might be termed “Chandlerian” firms, principally EMI and Decca, followed by Philips and later Pye. These four large firms exhibited all the characteristics of Chandler’s large scale, multidivisional enterprises, and followed patterns of activity and strategy commensurate with this model. And they were very successful. The two market leaders were EMI and Decca, which had different ownership and corporate governance patterns, but similar structural, scale, and strategic profiles. Both companies were manufacturers of a range of products encompassing computers, radar, a range of domestic electrical appliances and so on, with record manufacture and distribution forming only one facet of their activities.5 The degree of crossover and connection between these divisions is unclear, and they seemed fairly discrete divisions within the overarching corporate structure, though some technological competencies did exhibit intra-company transfer. In terms of popular music, big firms such as EMI and Decca manufactured both reproduction devices – principally gramophones of various sizes and degrees of portability – and records. In the case of the latter both firms were responsible for all stages in the process of production, from studio recording, to pressing and distributing records. In the case of EMI, the company’s vertical integration extended to ownership of some retail outlets, and sponsorship of radio shows playing the product.

Both companies grew to meet, and help create, a rising demand in recorded music in the post war years. Space does not permit an in-depth analysis of the origins and impact of technological changes in the industry. Features include radical changes in recording techniques with the exponential development of tape recording media; electrification and amplification of instruments; the development of the vinyl disk; plus of course a heightened market awareness of new recordings delivered through the evolving media of radio, TV and film. As this new environment for recorded music developed there was a consequent eclipse of the previous music market – that for sheet music. Publishers did not disappear altogether of course, neither did the leisure activity of playing music in the home, or at small scale public performances and events. Rather a new and burgeoning market for records emerged

5 During the 1950s, EMI for example, manufactured cycle motors, office dictating machines, radiation detection equipment, electronic machine tool controls, photographic print systems, fire alarms and robotic production systems, while simultaneously running the country’s leading recording studio at Abbey Road. S. A. Pandit, From Making to Music: The History of Thorn EMI, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996) 76.

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which tended to eclipse the previous activity, and market leaders in sheet music publishing such as Boosey and Hawkes, Keith Prowse and Chappell faded from the limelight. They did not disappear however, and of course in terms of publishing rights, engaged in a very lucrative part of the new record industry phenomenon.

One key attribute of the Chandlerian firm is the accession to power of a cadre of professional managers. In the case of EMI, we find the archetype of this process in the person of Joseph Lockwood. Lockwood was drafted in to run EMI in 1954. He had no background in the music business, and had in fact gained all his managerial expertise in the grain milling industry. Lockwood’s only contact with the music industry was a self-confessed love of classical music, a love which was not to be displaced, despite subsequently running arguably the most successful pop music enterprise of the period. In a triumph of business strategy over personal preference, Lockwood restructured EMI’s music divisions, curbing the power of HMV, the classical music division, and giving added emphasis to the pop side of the business (including the appointment and promotion of George Martin, eventual producer of the Beatles).6 Lockwood is also notable for his astute acquisition strategy, most notably in the case of Capital Records in the USA, which though bought for a purportedly high price of £3 million in 1955 was subsequently valued £85 million in 1959.7 At Decca the picture is slightly different. Again we can find a key ‘manager’ in the person of Edward Lewis, chief executive and major shareholder. Decca was also notably different in having a more centralised production structure.8

Lockwood was able to re-direct the energies of EMI’s music divisions to promote, and to take advantage of the growth in the popular music record market into the 1960s. In some ways we can see this as astute strategic management – seeing opportunities for acquisitions, finding new ways to supply and control retail output and so on. But we should also consider broader questions of structure and strategy - ways in which a large firm operates in an emergent and changing marketplace, and to what degree its activities are shaped towards controlling or shaping that market. This is a particularly acute question in the case of the popular music industry, at the centre of what might be termed the cultural industries. Commentators have been interested for a long time in the ways in which cultural production operates in the modern period. Marxist scholars and critics of modern industrial society were quick to focus on the mass production of “creative” commodities – from art to film to music – and commentators from Benjamin to Adorno and Horkheimer, and Marcuse and Williams have

6 The story goes that when Lockwood first took over, board meetings featured clandestine chess games and discussions of favoured classical music. Jacques Lowe, Russell Miller and Roger Boar, The Incredible Music Machine (London: Quartet, 1982), 239.

7 Pandit, From Making to Music, 64, 74; Peter Martland, Since Records Began: EMI – The First Hundred Years, (London: Batsford, 1997), 232; Lowe et al, The Incredible Music Machine, 239, 243.

8 Gordon Thompson, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop Inside Out, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2008), 50.

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been keen to allot some kind of numbing, and complicit mass manipulation delivered to a compliant and subdued general (working) class population of consumers. Few studies have tried to come up with any empirical analysis of any depth in support of these positions however, encompassing either on the one hand the actual creative process as it resides in the enterprises of culture, or among enterprises which challenge hegemonies, or among the mass consumers themselves for that matter. Hypotheses instead usually rest on an observance of the growth in popularity of a particular art form, in our case the pop record, and an observance of the growth in scale and power of enterprises providing this good, and an a priori assumption that the latter must be shaping the former. A variant of this approach, and one which is actually based in empirical analysis is that pioneered by Peterson and Berger in trying to understand ways in which the record industry and marketplace is subject to peaks and troughs in terms of the power of larger corporations. Their approach, based on a study of the US record industry from the late 1940s to the early 1970s takes record charts as the basis for mapping the power of large firms, and their consequent stifling of variation or innovation in favour of a stable market, and the alternative rise of smaller labels, more vibrant and innovative enterprises which periodically, or cyclically emerge to challenge this attempted hegemony.9

What kind of structure existed within the large pop enterprise? Importantly, what kind of mechanisms were in place to deal with innovation, or indeed to resist it? Departmentalisation and hierarchy are two of the key factors to begin with. EMI in the 1950s inherited an unusual departmental structure in that many group functions were centralised in special departments, comprising EMI Research Laboratories, EMI Engineering Development, EMI Factories, EMI Suppliers, and EMI Sales and Service. This structure was reorganised along more normal divisional lines by Joseph Lockwood in 1954.10 (There was also a rather loose connection between international groups at some levels. Capitol Records in the USA, remained almost autonomous following its acquisition by EMI in 1955 for example.11) If we take the more normal concept of research and development, we might ask where it resided in these firms and what was the locus of key decisions. Oddly enough, the initial R&D arguably took place outside the firm. Prototype development and market research could be said to reside in a combination of musical and performing experience gained by the performer, enabled by a web of social and commercial venues extending from the church choir to the coffee bar, though not in the location one might suppose. Take, for example, the odd juxtaposition of the Richards - Keith Richards as choirboy, Cliff Richard as leather-clad rocker at the 2i’s coffee bar.12 Only later in the 1950s did it become apparent to some that the talent could be created de novo, as in the case of Heinz, recruited for his looks and subsequently moulded into an ephemeral pop icon by producer Joe Meek. Meek, like others moulding the talent and

9 Peterson and Berger, Entrepreneurship in Organisations.

10 Pandit, From Making to Music, 68-9.

11 Lowe et al., The Incredible Music Machine, 239, 261.

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polishing appearances, such as Larry Parnes, proprietor of a “stable” of young pop singers, were operating outside the control of the large record companies.13 Most acts in the 1950s would somehow, by a process of persistence, rumour, acquaintance or sheer fortune, come under the gaze of an impresario or agent, at which point they would enter the portals of the record company.

In the 1950s the next stage in this procedure was enabled by regular meetings between music publishers or agents and the company A&R staff, or producers.14 This usually entailed the initial playing of a demo tape or disc, followed by an audition. These auditions were presided over by a variety of A&R and production staff at the major company, but were often an impressionistic, ad hoc affair. Everyone is familiar with the Beatles failure to impress at Decca, and their narrow brush with rejection at EMI, where George Martin thought their repertoire and musicianship limited, but saw something in their cheeky persona. This is perhaps not surprising given Martin’s track record thus far in producing comedy records such as those by Peter Sellers.15 Once inside the enterprise, the raw material, pop’s basic commodity - the acts - were reconfigured according to the preferences and decisions of the regime. In the 1950s, an artist might have a style and look, but more often than not this was adjusted, honed and redirected by an alliance of the act’s management and the record company. The songs to be recorded, and the prominence they would be given (e.g. A or B side of a single) were almost always decisions taken by the producer, for example. More than this, the arrangement of the song, the musical accompaniment etc. were all collated by the company - decisions usually taken outside the artist’s control.16 In this regime, individual producers, such as Norrie Paramor at EMI, wielded a great deal of power.17 Into the late 1950s and early 1960s when an increasing number of groups emerged, it was standard practice for session musicians to play on recordings. This was due to a combination of maximising expensive studio time, and capitalising on the experience in a studio environment

12 The 2i’s in Old Compton St, London, became a focal point for young musicians in the mid-1950s. Cliff Richard was happy play there for the price a taxi home. Cliff Richard, Which One’s Cliff? (Sevenoaks, Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 44.

13 Johnny Rogan, Starmakers and Svengalis: The History of British Pop Management, (London: Macdonald, 1988), 16-38.

14 Simon Napier-Bell, Black Vinyl, White Powder, (London: Ebury, 2002), 7.

15 Better men than Dick Rowe had predicted the demise of guitar groups, and rock and roll in general – Buddy Holly, for example gave it six months or so in 1959. For accounts of Martin and the Beatles see Lowe et al., The Incredible Music Machine, 289; Brian Southall, Abbey Road: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Recording Studios, (Cambridge: Patrick Stephens, 1982), 57.

16 Thompson, Please Please Me, 131-65.

17 John Schroeder, Sex and Violins: My Affair With Life, Love and Music, (Brighton, Pen Press, 2009), 35-64.

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of professional, established (and compliant) musicians, and a lack of faith in the musical ability of the “talent”. Examples of this process include Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, playing on Herman’s Hermits records, or the Ivy League singing on The Who early singles.18 Studio engineers and producers played an important role in shaping the recorded sound of artists, so much so that many are now the focus of musicological histories. Notable figures such as Geoff Emerick, Norman Smith and Norrie Paramor at EMI have claimed a major role in fashioning hit records.19

In the 1950s, the choice of song and musical style was made in a marketplace where the song itself, not the artist, was still to the fore - an overlap from the days of sheet-music. During this period it was the norm for each new song to be “covered” by many artists, as songwriters and their agents queued up at the portals or the “majors”, with their tunes – coteries emerged around Denmark St. in London (Britain’s version of the more controlled environment which emerged at the Brill Building in New York, or 1650 Broadway in some accounts). In the 1950s moreover, everything popular followed the lead of USA.20 From rock and roll, to folk, to trad jazz - even the ersatz skiffle craze led by Lonnie Donegan and Chas McDevitt21 - all flowed from the USA in a musical cultural jet stream, as British artists were shaped to emulate US stars, and to provide cover versions of their songs. The controlled atmosphere in which this all took place was very evident at the EMI Abbey Road studios, for example, which seemed to some to resemble a production line, to others more akin to entering the corridors of the BBC - hierarchies of staff; collars and ties; (though, interestingly, not the mythological white lab coats for engineers); the evident dialects of power revealing the middle class professional to be firmly in command.22 Even the most successful acts were signed to punitive royalty contracts, usually around one percent. Into the 1960s there were moves by Lockwood at EMI to liberalise control in the pop division, and it should be recognised that George Martin, for all his appearance to Beatles and his own junior staff as a toff in a suit, was nevertheless the enfant terrible of EMI at the time. His Parlophone division ruffling the feathers of other, more staid, labels in the group. Nevertheless, even at Parlophone the aura of corporate control pervaded the pop production process at EMI. Record companies could periodically get embroiled in a general flocking process, chasing new acts and pushing up the market price of contracts, or alternatively hurriedly investing in acts which turn out to be poor, as in the case of the hunt for Liverpool-based groups following the

18 Thompson, Please Please Me, 95.

19 Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2005), 140; Thompson, Please Please Me, 66-70, 105-130; Richard, Which One’s Cliff?, 45; Southall, Abbey Road, 61.

20 Jeremy J. Beadle, Will Pop Eat Itself? Pop Music in the Soundbite Era, (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 12-13.

21 Chas McDevitt, Skiffle: The Definitive Inside Story, (London: Robson, 1997).

22 Napier-Bell, Black Vinyl, White Powder, 15, 19; Southall, Abbey Road, 68-9.[7]

early success of the Beatles.23 But up until the early 1960s the industry remained one typified by strong corporate control.

There was, however, a degree of variation among the practices and levels of control exerted by the major record labels. Companies other than EMI were less rigid in some respects, for exmple. Independent producers such as Shel Talmy, Joe Meek, Glyn Johns and Mickie Most were able to co-exist with the majors, though some were more amenable than others.24 Pye, was notable for the more flexible and relaxed atmosphere at its studios, for example, and the pliability, if unreliability, of its royalty and payment arrangements, for example.25 Similarly a less formal atmosphere was evident at Polydor, Philips subsidiary label which made a concerted effort to break into the pop record sector in the mid-1960s. One of Polydor’s major departures was the granting of independent labels. Kit Lambert, The Who’s manager, was tempted away from Decca, by being allowed to release Polydor recordings on his own label, Track Records for example. Tony Stratton-Smith signed up to a similar deal with his label, Charisma.26 Polydor granted similar deals to Robert Stigwood, for recordings of Cream, the Bee Gees, and Jimmy Hendix.27 Independent producers also had a range of small independent studios with which they could work, such as Regent, IBC, Lansdowne and Olympic.28 Like engineers within the larger corporate organisation, these producers, particularly those with musical experience, often took the role of engineer to shape the sounds on the record.29

Even though big record companies controlled and shaped the talent which was fed to them by the network of agencies and impresarios, they still needed other strategies to control or cope with the marketplace. The majors could and did co-operate in certain ways. In the maintenance of pricing they acted as an effective cartel, within the formal structure of retail price maintenance, for many years. They could also come to each other’s aid in response to short term fluctuations in market activity. When Frank Ifield’s I Remember You was an unexpected hit for EMI in the early 1960s, for example, Decca offered its production facilities to help meet demand.30 An article from the Three Banks Review, written by one of EMI’s directors, is very instructive here. Leslie Hill’s description of the ways in which record companies manage the marketplace, or attempt to smooth out the fluctuations which emerge

23 Boyd, White Bicycles, 110; Martland, Since Records Began, 227; Pandit From Making to Music, 78.

24 Thompson, Please Please Me, 51,72,103-4.

25 Ibid. 93.

26 Napier-Bell, Black Vinyl, 128.

27 Boyd, White Bicycles, 136-7.

28 Thompson, Please Please Me, 44-5.

29 Boyd, White Bicycles, 124; Thompson, Please Please Me, 92.

30 Lowe et al., The Incredible Music Machine, 247-8.[8]

in a volatile consumer market such as popular music, amounts to a manifesto for a Chandlerian firm. The hyper-Schumpeterian tendencies in the marketplace could be offset or mollified in a number of ways. Firstly, new artists did not necessarily displace old ones, and many established acts continued to command a niche in the market. The obvious example here would be Elvis – seemingly eclipsed by the Beatles, but in reality a steady source of income for EMI throughout the period. Moreover the record market was in fact a stratified one. There was a mature record buying public – 30 somethings bought rock and roll in the 1950s – plus teenagers were “recycled” every few tears. The teenagers of the late 1950s for example, were not the teenagers of the mid 1950s. The market for pop is best viewed as an accumulation of new markets overlaid on existing ones – a laminated market perhaps – rather than a serial development. If we take 1964 as an example, the best selling single of the year was I Love You Because by Jim Reeves, a country and western ballad. This was followed by another Reeves single, I Won’t Forget You, then Roy Orbison’s Its Over, both ballads, with the Beatles’ Hard Days Night only fourth. A similar picture emerges in LP sales, where the soundtrack to the film West Side Story outsold both the Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ LPs.

In this environment firms like EMI and Decca could devote part of their effort to servicing a steady flow of accumulating “traditional” consumers rather than continually chase new acts. In this way firms could manage their risk – since, although an increasingly sophisticated publicity and marketing machine was supporting new acts, there was still a risk these would not be popular. Pop enterprises were vulnerable in that considerable costs involved in grooming and publicising new artists were in effect unrecoverable sunk costs. Moreover, should an act become successful, they might then be near the end of their contract, and the record company would be renegotiating contracts from a weakened bargaining position.31

Another problem for the Chandlerian enterprise was the unpredictability of the established market – the almost serendipitous nature of success. (The prime example here might be the success of The Mull of Kintyre, by Paul McCartney and Wings in 1977, which, to the record company’s complete surprise, became the biggest selling record in UK history.32 Firms like EMI could adopt new strategies to regularise the market as much as possible. They could of course attempt to manipulate the customer (in Adorno/Marcuse style) and the weight of publicity, radio and TV placement could add considerable momentum to a mediocre record release. “Careful campaigning, planning, image-building and dedicated record plugging often give an ordinary record a chart placing over a better record less professionally handled”.33 But clearly there remained limits to the extent to which the record companies could dupe the market. As an alternative they could repackage recordings in the form of compilation albums

31 Leslie Hill, “An Insight into the Finances of the Record Industry”, The Three Banks Review, (June 1978), No. 118.

32 Ibid. 30-1.

33 Ibid. 43.[9]

or re-releases. This is a commonplace in today’s pop market, but was an innovative strategy in the late 1950s. The virtue of re-releases is that they carry considerably less cost to the company in terms of royalty payments or production costs. The major record companies had also developed a variant of multiple branding during the 1950s. Though it is not clear (and unlikely) that any real brand loyalty existed within the buying public, outside niche markets for specialist records, such as jazz or blues for example. A multi-label strategy was more to do with internal divisional organisation and control within the enterprise

The other weapon in the large corporation’s arsenal was flexibility. Here we might part company with the rigidity associated with the Chandlerian paradigm. While the large pop music firm of the 1950s was, as we have seen, built on a controlling strategy, both within and, as far as possible, outside the firm, they could also be flexible where necessary. As noted above, producers could be allowed independence, where this was seen to function effectively. Or rather, since the producer’s role was itself often seen as a creative rather than a managerial activity, too much corporate regulation might be seen to dampen or frustrate innovation. The most graphic, and perhaps notorious, example here would be that of Joe Meek and RGM music. Meek masterminded a series of hit records for the Tornadoes, Heinz and The Honeycombs in the early 1960s, producing the defining sound of British pop at the time.34 Meek’s productions used innovative manipulation of recording machinery (multi-tracking, overdubbing etc.), and unorthodox instruments and sounds (the beat on some recording produced by stamping on the floorboards for example). Meek chose an unorthodox location for his recording studio – his flat in Holloway Road, where he produced his “bathroom wall of sound”. One of Meek's collaborations with Robert Stigwood - John Leyton's "Johnny Remember Me" is a good example of major-independent producer link up. Robert Stigwood was able to persuade Joe Lockwood at EMI that he should maintain control of the production when the record was released through EMI subsidiary Top Rank.

Meek’s albeit brief role as the Svengali of British pop meant that he was able to negotiate an independence from EMI, and operate as his own company RGM. EMI were sensible enough to recognise that, in the case of Meek, a character with all the trappings of an eccentric and tortured genius, the strait jacket of corporate control would stifle innovation. Moreover, Meek was operating at a period when there was a heightened imperative to find British pop acts, to counter the dominance of US acts.35 A more relaxed strategy was therefore needed. We can see a similar example of flexibility in the relationship between EMI and RAK records, the label owned by Mickie Most. Most had graduated from a career in pop with the moderately successful Most Brothers to the production of groups including Herman’s Hermits, The

34 Thompson, Please Please Me, 73-81; John Repsch, The Legendary Joe Meek. The Telstar Man, (London: Cherry Red Books, 2008)

35 This process was accelerated by EMI’s loss of exchange agreements with US companies Columbia and RCA-Victor. Lowe et al. The Incredible Music Machine, 236.

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Animals and Donovan.36 Flexibility could, in rare cases extend to the contractual relationship with the artists themselves as in the case of Dave Clark outlined below.37

The challenge of the new entrepreneurs

“I promote talent. I take something and I sort of put it into shape. I try to make it presentable. To the public. Make it commercial. Anything that has some sort of image I get involved in. I’m a terrible user, thief – not original...every record...oh yes let’s steal a bit out of that and put it together with that. Unfortunately only, I should say, five percent of the people who are in the music business are in it for the right reason – money – they should be in it for the money.” [Andrew Loog Oldham, interviewed on The Pop Boom, BBC, 1964]

“Working with Kit Lambert made me wonder what managers should really be aiming for. What are we supposed to be doing? Making money? Enjoying ourselves? Doing our best for the people we managed? Even if enjoying ourselves was the principal criteria this would mean something different to each person. For one person it meant bucking the system, putting two fingers up at the world, getting the group to piss people off. For another it meant being stoned all day, and for another it might mean making loads of dosh and stashing it away in the bank. For me, as far as I can remember, it meant eating endless good meals, having sex with anyone pretty and making enough money to pay for it all. No wonder most of the acts we managed were pretty upset with us. But then most of them had equally frivolous motives for wanting success.” [Simon Napier-Bell Black Vinyl, White Powder p. 111]

As noted above, Peterson and others have charted the cyclical nature of the popular music industry as new genres, and perhaps new enterprises associated with them, challenge the dominant firms, are then perhaps absorbed or transformed into conservative, established firms themselves until a new wave of creativity again challenges the status quo. One of the major fractures of this kind is commonly thought to have occurred in the 1960s with an apparently tectonic shift in the pop business paradigm. The genesis of the emergent model can be best summarised as a series of processes. These included the emergence of a group of newly creative pop artists with a distinctive British profile. This movement could also be said to encompass an intellectualisation of the world of pop music creativity, attached to, networked into and progressing in parallel, with the worlds of fashion and art, which placed London at the centre of global stage as the 1960s unfolded.38 Allied to this general shift was the supposed cultural and economic empowerment of youth, not just in terms of affluence and spending power in the marketplace, but within the business world itself. Marwick noted a general ousting of the old guard across a range of cultural activity in the 1950s. While the "angry young men" of literature could not in reality be classified as youths, they formed part

36 Thompson Please Please Me, 81-9; Richard Which One’s Cliff?, 49.

37 Napier-Bell, Black Vinyl, 67-8.

38 Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961-1971, (London: Pimlico, 1998); Ian Macdonald, Revolution in the Head, (London: Pimlico, 1998); Barry Miles, In The Sixties, (London: Pimlico, 2002).

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of a generational shift "a kind of shunting effect - intellectuals were now fifteen or twenty years younger than they used to be, so the age of popular entertainers and fashion-setters, too, was shunted back by fifteen or twenty years."39 This trend was to be emulated in the management and entrepreneurship associated with popular music. The interface between the new and the established remains an intriguing place of study. Young entrepreneurs (sometimes teamed with entrepreneurial pop artists) emerged to establish and run influential enterprises, challenging the hegemony of the major companies.40

Perhaps the archetype in this change – this challenge to the old guard of the pop business – was Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham was one of a number of high-profile pop entrepreneurs, generally referred to as “managers” but in practise assuming a number of roles. Oldham emerged from the hustle of the burgeoning London fashion sector where he worked with Mary Quant. This experience, allied to an affinity for US music meant he was well placed to mould and promote the newly emergent Rolling Stones, until that point a popular but derivative and rather purist group of aficionados of American rhythm and blues. Oldham used his astute hustling skills, and unorthodox business methods to redirect the band’s creative direction and, importantly, to restructure their public profile. In terms of creativity and marketability, Oldham was the one who realised that the group needed a musical identity of its own to ensure commercial longevity. Oldham was also quick to realise where the money was made in the record business, and that in order to maximise profits as many as of the writing and production phases as possible needed to be controlled. This extended to the ruse, used by many pop managers, of inserting odd songs, written by themselves (often under pseudonyms) on the B side of singles, since the B side commanded equal royalties to the A side. (Ahmet Ertegun wrote a number B sides under the reversed name of Nugetre, for example.) At any rate Oldham was the key in the Stones’ musical migration from imitation Southern US rhythm and blues to harpsichord-backed ballads about aristocratic girls and misogynist pop-rock.

The other major factor in Oldham’s strategy, and stemming perhaps from his experience in the world of fashion, was to style the group, partly in terms of its appearance, but more importantly in terms of the band’s public persona. In this he superseded an established pattern. One notable early exponent of the crafted image was Larry Parnes. Parnes developed a stable of acts which he controlled and groomed very carefully. This extended to the choice of name, which more often than not was changed to some new evocative appellation. These included, Dickie Pride, Johnny Gentle, Johnny Goode, Vince Eager, Billy Fury and Marty Wilde. Groups such as the Shadows were also moulded and clothed to present a uniform and slick appearance. It is now well known that Brian Epstein moulded the Beatles (in reality a teddyboy/rocker ensemble schooled in the gritty urban clubland of Liverpool and Hamburg) into the lovable, wholesome and zany moptops. Oldham’s strategy for the Stones went in the

39 Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945, (London: Penguin, 1982), 127.

40 Andrew Loog Oldham, Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s, (NewYork: St. Martin’s, 2001).

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other direction. Ironically, given Oldham’s fashion experience the uniform presentation of the band was rejected in favour of a bricolage of trendy outfits. More important was the behaviour of the group, its anti-social style. Long hair, and all it symbolised, was part of this trend, but also a series of public displays of bad behaviour and irreverence, skilfully hyped up in the press, often reinforced through the contrived inarticulacy of Mick Jagger, was designed to alienate the older generation, and to attract the younger. This strategy drove an effective wedge between the generational consumer, running directly counter to previous marketing strategies in pop which aimed to take acts up through the buyer chain – Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard’s ascent from rock and roller to variety star are the paragons here. In effect Oldham’s construction of rock’s behavioural template, the invention of “sex drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” was not new of course. The USA had already ridden out the storm of reaction to deliberately crafted anti-social personae such a Elvis Presley and Gene Vincent and settled back into a world of polite young men, such as Buddy Holly, and the numerous “Bobbies” of the early 1960s. In Britain this anti-establishment rebellious image was to merge and transform into the general cultural nihilism of the later 1960s. To be sure there were plenty of nice boys and girls, and more traditional and mature acts in British pop – from Herman’s Hermits to Matt Monro and Kathy Kirby. But it worth noting Oldham’ alternative business/fashion world, in respect of the impact it had at the time, and the role it played as progenitor of bohemian economics. A system which was to emerge again and again in the coming decades

So what did the Oldham business model look like? One key element in the model was independence. Independence from society’s constraints, but more importantly independence from the major record companies. The term “independents” was to acquire symbolic meaning in itself, re-emerging in the 1980s as the “indie” sector, a loose agglomeration of music styles and movements, purporting to exist outside a notional mainstream of the global pop industry. Oldham struggled to achieve this through a series of deals which formed part of a continuum to the formation of his own record label – Immediate Records. In doing this he perhaps followed a pattern, or was influenced by the successful foundation of independent labels in the USA in the early 1950s such as Sun and Chess. These labels differed in that they were regionally based, niche labels specialising a particular sound, or fusion of sounds, and they existed in a different media environment. They were also characteristically led by entrepreneurial white class , who had cultural access to investment and commercial opportunity, from which the majority of their acts were excluded. Entrepreneurs like Sam Philips and Leonard Chess saw the opportunity to construct a bridge between the localised, and talented ethnic musicians and a wider, white American market. No such situation pertained in the UK in the 1950s and early 1960s, but these America independents did offer a business model in terms of the possibilities inherent in a start up, a pop SME.

The managerial style which characterised the new independent pop enterprise was diametrically opposed to any Chandler schema.41 Managerial training or experience was all learnt on the job, and had to be learnt fast, given that many of the entrepreneurs of pop were

41 Andrew Loog Oldham, 2Stoned, (London: Vintage, 2003), 50-1.[13]

only just out of their teens. Despite the barrow boy image, promoted by many of pops nouveau entrepreneurial elite, many had the benefit of a public school education and came from professional class families. Beatle’s manager Brian Epstein’s family, for example, were established as one of the major retailers in the north west; Kit Lambert, manager of the Who, was the son of classical musician Constant Lambert; Andrew Loog Oldham lived with his mother in Knightsbridge; the mother of Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records was heiress to a palm oil fortune.42 Indeed it was often part of the allure of pop that they could use the unorthodoxy of pop’s social and cultural values to challenge the middle class values of their own family, and public school background - while retaining the economic well-being they were accustomed to. Though it must be noted that some independent pop entrepreneurs did come up from the working classes – Don Arden and Peter Grant being a notable examples, the middle class profile of pop music’s economic and cultural power elite is unmistakable.

Shedding the veneer at least of staid, middle-class professionalism entailed emersion in the culture of rock and pop, talking its language, and adopting its work patterns. Island Records, for example, was renowned for its ramshackle, or informal office style.43 Business dealings for the independents were as likely to be concluded in clubs, or at parties as in any kind of formal business setting. Recognised accounting procedures disappeared, or rather were seldom adopted – except in the case of trying to clear up the mess left when boom turned to bust, or in response to the court actions. From record deals to live performances a cash economy grew within the sector, with as few recorded transactions as possible – not so much a black economy as a rainbow economy stretching from the backhander and the rake off to the formal contractual arrangements with the major companies. The cash economy component was necessary in some respects in that occasional transactions were illegal, not least the purchase and use of drugs, apocryphally remembered as being billed as “flowers” in the company books, but more often than not simply never recorded in any form.

Contract law became almost meaningless in this sector. Deals were signed by artists who were often very youthful or inexperienced, who were content to languish in hoped-for celebrity, or simply secure a record deal. Successful groups were lavished with expensive luxuries, hotel accommodation cars, clothes etc, often unaware that these were being paid for out their own money, and constituted “recoverables” for their management firm. As, for example, the Small Faces, one of the most consistently successful groups of the 1960s found out, when the dust began to settle on their career, and they began to take stock of their (now parlous) financial situation. Moreover, a style of predatory or “hustling” management emerged in the sector, as managers sought to poach acts from other enterprises, particularly if a performer turned out to be successful.44 The aphorism “where there’s a hit there’s a writ”

42 Boyd, White Bicycles, 117-8, 175, 179-82; Andy Neill and Matt Kent, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of the Who, 1958-1978, (London: Virgin, 2002), 29.

43 Boyd, White Bicycles, 182-3.

44 Ibid. 118.[14]

became a commonplace as challenges to the origins, scope or legality of contracts, or the provenance of recordings were taken through the courts, or at least reached the lawyer’s desk. Occasionally recourse to the courts was obviated by the exacting of a different kind of persuasion. Histories and autobiographies of the pop business are rife with accounts of thuggish behaviour in acquiring or protecting contractual rights as the template of the managerial persona evolved from the avuncular and detached professionalism of impresarios agents and managers of the old Denmark Street days such as Larry Parnes or Tito Burns, and perhaps Epstein, into the (artifice in part to be sure) bravura and confrontation of Arden (the so called “Al Capone of pop”) and Oldham.45

One interesting aspect of the pop music industry is the way in which the artist emerged as entrepreneur, or perhaps found their way into the corporate hierarchy. There are numerous examples of this. Lonnie Donegan, for example, was keenly aware of his own financial interests from an early stage in his career and drove hard bargains even within the comparatively rigid structures of the BBC, and had a very entrepreneurial approach to the promotion of American folk music, and later skiffle in the UK. Perhaps some artists can best be portrayed as gatekeepers for certain styles of music as they emerged. This could be construed as being designed to maintain quality or integrity within the genre, but could also be seen as protective of a financial position – offsetting competition from rival acts. An example here might be the world of folk music at the peak of its popularity in the 1950s. It might be reasonable to expect that this sector, with its inherent affinity for socialist politics, social issues, the working man etc. might be characterised by disdain for profit, or a reverence for equality or opportunity. In reality it was a highly controlled sector, with few select performers effectively acting as gatekeepers.

Pop musicians could also find their way into the corporate hierarchy. Tony Meehan, a member of the Shadows, subsequently went to work at Decca, for example as an A&R man.46 Adam Faith, always a thoughtful and earnest young man, had an interesting career as messenger boy, sound recordist, session singer, pop star, actor, manager, and financial investment advisor. If we are looking for the prototypical artist-entrepreneur, however, Dave Clark stands out. The Dave Clark Five emerged with their “Tottenham sound” in 1963 and were widely touted as successors to the Beatles. The group achieved considerable success on both sides of the Atlantic with a series of number one records, notably outselling the Beatles in the USA. The group, like Herman’s Hermits, also followed the Beatles (or Elvis, or Bill Haley...) template by going into the movies with the popular film, Catch Us if You Can. (These films were thin on plot, but were rather a vehicle for showing the zanyness of the group, encountering establishment figures of various kinds, an interspersed with song opportunities.) The groups musical style featured a driving drum-based rhythm. Clark, who played the drums in the group, was not the most skilful of musicians, and speculation persists about the level of his contribution to the group’s studio recordings. Most of the group’s

45 Johnny Rogan, Starmakers and Svengalis: The History of British Pop Management, (London: Macdonald, 1988), 90-104, 163-71.

46 Oldham Stoned, 135-7.[15]

original material was written by the keyboard player, Mike Smith. Clark was possessed of acute promotional skills however, which partly accounted for the group’s success. He also enhanced his own profile as much as possible, in the name of the group, for example, and in the fact that, unusually for a drummer, he sat at the front of the group during live performances. Beyond this however, Clark demonstrated astute and percipient entrepreneurial skills in negotiating control of his own work from an early age. Later he was to secure the right to the TV show Ready, Steady, Go which proved an ideal vehicle with which to showcase his own group in an astute anticipation of the growing market for retrospective releases. Clark, in effect, built and carried on the brand which was the Dave Clark Five. In some ways we could view the basic practise of establishing an act, promoting the name of an artist or group as part artistry, part entrepreneurship in most cases. Clark’s career, can however be seen to tip the balance towards the latter.

Beside this occasional development of the pop star as entrepreneur, into the late 1960s there was a more general shift of power – away from the structured corporate enterprise and towards the artist, or their near representatives. It is a commonplace now to read in the many accounts of the period that the Beatles were pivotal in this process.47 One problem with the literature of pop is the overwhelming interest in the Beatles as a central cultural phenomenon of the time. In many ways however they do seem to have been complicit in moving the centre of creative gravity inexorably towards the artist. There are numerous accounts of the life of the Beatles at EMI, virtually all of which paint a similar picture of a an irrepressible but malleable new group directed and produced by the experts at EMI, incrementally growing in stature and artistic ability until they reached a point where the company was forced to deal with them on their own terms, economically and artistically.48 The group arguably delayed the production of the Sergeant Pepper album until signing a new contract, for example. Subsequently the group was to engage in its own business trajectory taking in the debacle of the Apple label and shop, and the break up of the group entirely through personal and contractual conflicts, which were played out in the courts.

Conclusions: The Roots of British Pop Imperialism

There were a very wide range of enterprises and "entrepreneurs" in the British music industry as it expanded in the quarter century after 1950 from large firms operating at an international scale, down to perhaps the act or group as an enterprise. There were management and publishing enterprises embedded within the industry and artists themselves, either as musicians per se or song-writers. A range of "technical enterprises" also developed encompassing studios and producers, and instrument and equipment manufacturers. In addition a number of "performance enterprises" evolved and developed, from booking agencies and tour organisers to local or national performance venues. Media or publicity institutions and enterprises also thrived in many forms, from the BBC, to the popular music

47 Southall, Abbey Road; George Martin, Playback, (London: Genesis, 2002).

48 Marc Eliot, Rockonomics: The Money Behind the Music, (London: Omnibus, 1989) 131-3, 157-9; Martin, Playback; Oldham, Stoned, 260.

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press. In all cases the history is one of small and large enterprises in various states, often symbiotic, but always in a dynamic relationship with each other. This chapter has tended towards an examination of enterprise and the production process – the very large firm, particularly EMI, and the smaller independent arriviste entrepreneurs of pop revolutionary years, the 1960s.

So, how might we understand the global impact of British Pop music during this period? Firstly the role of the major record companies is clearly a factor. Firms such as EMI and Decca conform to the classic Chandler model, not only in important aspects of their internal structure, but also in terms of their international reach. In this respect trans-Atlantic links were a central feature. This was important to British firms in that the biggest market in the world was in the USA, but also in that trans-Atlantic cultural links were crucial as musical styles, influences and performers criss-crossed the ocean (It should be noted though, that with the exception of the comparatively short-lived ‘British invasion’ of the USA in the 1960s the prevailing winds of the pop trade blew in a Westerly direction, towards the shores of Europe.) British firms looked to the USA for innovative developments (or sometimes resisted, or slowly accepted it must be noted, as in the case of the 45 rpm record for example, British record companies sticking to the shellac-based 78 rpm for many years.). They also looked to the USA for an elaborate and constantly re-configuring series of formal and informal agreements, licensing deals and acquisitions. British firms also had a traditional global reach, often but not exclusively into Empire markets. An illustration of this might be Helen Shapiro, for example, who had number one hits for EMI in the early 1960s, which were released round the world simultaneously by EMI. Shapiro found herself an almost overnight success around the globe and was whisked away on world tours almost as soon as she hit the charts.

British record companies also stood to gain from a language perspective. Tied to the USA in a kind of binary Anglo-Saxon hegemony of Western post-war culture, British pop could ride the tide of Cold War cultural imperialism, following the US into global markets opened up in the wake of geo-political manoeuvring. As English increased its hold on international cultures and markets, British and American pop became a kind of global musical lingua franca. This is not to say that across Europe and Far East all pop was British, or indeed that all British pop was sung in English. Many artists re-recorded their hits in foreign languages (Not too much of a problem since they were not expected to learn the language, simply read the words, and the accuracy of their dialect was of little importance to pop fans, lyrics coming a poor second to melody, instrumentation, voice etc. in importance (perhaps)) In addition many songs were recorded by domestic artists. During the 1950s and into the 1960s the song usually had precedence over the artist, so many ‘cover’ versions of the same song might be in circulation simultaneously in the British and US markets. Domestic covers of these songs in wider global markets would not seem unusual in the least. In addition, domestic music, and domestic pop stars were an important sector of the markets. Occasionally artists would reverse the trend of Anglo-US hegemony and achieve success in Britain or the States – Franciose Hardy, Johnny Hallyday, Charles Aznavour, and Horst Jankowski for example. Generally speaking though US and British acts dominated their own markets, and they also

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made great inroads into markets around the world. That the lyrics were often in English seemed no real barrier in a world where English was of increasing centrality.

Another feature in the global reach of British pop music during this period may stem from the position of London as an emerging international cultural capital. Of course pop music was a major contributor to the development of ‘swinging” London in the 1960s. But there were other components to this process – film, art and fashion for example combined with a new spirit of youthful exuberance centred on the city. In some senses London merely carried on its role as an international magnet, a role which had seen successive waves of migration and settlement, a magnet for the refugee and the ambitious alike. From Huguenot weavers to Hamburg bankers London had acted as the New York of Europe and exerted a pull on an entrepreneurial and cultural avante garde for many years. In terms of fashion and the arts in London in the 1960s there was perhaps a quantum shift in this relentless traditional role. Areas of London were to take their place alongside Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury as centres of radical fashions and ideas as the 1960s progressed, but there was much more than this to the impact of the city as a whole, particularly when the diverse range of pop music was added to the equation. Other cities, such as Liverpool, or its German twin, Hamburg (both port cities) generated notable music based youth cultures in the early 1960s, but the speed at which London absorbed and appropriated Liverpool’s blossoming pop status stands as testimony to the gravitational pull of the capital by the mid 1960s. Success, for virtually every act from the Beatles downwards, meant a move to the capital.

London had developed into a state of mind, and a business environment where youthful fashion entrepreneurs like Barbara Hulanicki and Mary Quant, co-existed with their musical equivalents – Andrew Loog Oldham, Chris Blackwell, Chris Stamp etc. A place where youth, enthusiasm and (chemically engineered) energy and naivety and inexperience could be positive assets when harnessed to business in the ferment of Carneby Street and the Kings Road. It could be argued that London was a nodal point for fashion, music and youth culture generally during the 1960s and as such the ‘idea’ of London carried with it an intangible but real promotional gravitas which propelled British pop music into the global marketplace. When many young people across Europe and Asia, and perhaps even the USA, bought British records in the 1960s they were not simply buying a catchy or evocative tune, they were also buying an image, they were buying a dream, all centred on London. A real image, painted and photographed by the avant garde artists like Peter Blake and Francis Bacon, and photographers like David Bailey, also more importantly an image in the mind. British enterprise, particularly the new, youthful enterprise sector, based in the capital, was partly responsible for generating and sustaining this dream. All of which occurred while the rest of British industry was losing its way in world markets. That other great icon of fashion, identity and style, the motorcar – particularly the sports car – was stemming the tide with (as it turned out, mechanically disastrous) models such as the Mini and E-Type, but industry in general was losing its grip on world markets, just as Great Britain was losing its role as a world power, despite random thrusts into high technology nuclear, computing and supersonic

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technologies. As the “American Challenge” became increasingly felt, perhaps the British pop industry stands out as the single example, to move against the tide. All the more remarkable perhaps given the continuing hegemony of that other entertainment sector, the US film and TV business based in Hollywood.

Given the importance of the USA it is remarkable in many ways that the British pop music industry continued to flourish at all into the 1960s. After all, the other great entertainment industry of the 20th century – the movies - had already succumbed to US hegemony in the form of Hollywood, and from the perspective of the early 1950s it seemed like the same thing was happening in pop. That the trend was arrested, or even reversed, is perhaps the result of the development of a peculiarly British kind of Chandlerite enterprise in the first instance, a large corporation with global ambition and emergent flexible and multivariate strategies designed to cope with the hyper-Schumpeterian market which pop was becoming. Later, in phase two of our story, these firms were challenged by new coteries of enterprises, enterprises which sometimes promoted anti-commercial attitudes, yet at their core were viscously entrepreneurial. If there was a revolution however, it was a strange revolution, since the old guard were not displaced. The major labels continued to enjoy business success throughout the period, and to co-exist with often meteoric, always precocious, newcomers. In doing so the industry set the pattern for the coming decades, at least until a new revolution took place with the development of mature digital technologies, which are now restructuring firms and markets in such fundamental ways.

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