Black Vinyl, White Powder: The Real Story of the British Music Industry

Welcome to the pill-popping, thrill-seeking, boy-loving, law-breaking, never-ending moey-making British drugs and Music buisness.A terrific insight into what went on behind the scenes of sixsties pop music-The classic hidden history of sixties pop.

ALL THE WRONG PARTIES By the beginning of 1966 I was managing the Yardbirds.

Although after my first meeting with Paul Samwell-Smith I d felt the opportunity to manage them had passed me by, he had brought the others to meet me and they d decided I was the right person.

Their biggest hit was For Your Love , a great pop song, but really The Yardbirds had never been pop. They d started out playing blues.

Georgio Gomelski, who ran the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, had planned to sign the Rolling Stones for management but at the last minute they were snatched from his grasp by Andrew Oldham. The Yardbirds were the next group to play at the club and Georgio signed them straight away. He did well for them. Under his guidance they had a hit with For Your Love , and a second one with Heart Full Of Soul . After that he suggested they mix Gregorian chant with blues and they had a third hit with Evil Hearted You . Then they made a live album with American blues singer Sonny Boy Williamson. But from all this success the group had hardly earned anything.

Georgio was extravagant in everything he did. He poured money into recording and promotion, and when the group went on tour he went with them, egging them on to eat at expensive restaurants when they would rather have had hamburgers. All this expenditure came out of their income. One time in New York, Georgio needed some cash to take someone to dinner. He went to United Artists and offered them the publishing on the next Yardbirds single for the cost of the meal - $60.

Initially the Yardbirds had included Eric Clapton on guitar, but he was a gloomy, troubled person who told people he expected to die before he was thirty. He was far too dedicated to pure blues to follow the Yardbirds into pop, so he left to form Cream and the Yardbirds replaced him with Jeff Beck. Then they decided to change their management and chose me. At the time, the Yardbirds probably knew more about the music business than I did, but I grabbed the opportunity. I also treated it with respect - this wasn t like messing around with Diane & Nicky. The Yardbirds were one of the five most important rock groups in the world - the Beatles, the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals and The Who. To start with I looked at what the managers of the other top rock acts were doing for their acts.

Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp had found The Who playing in a pub on a stage made of beer crates. The singer had crossed teeth. Kit and Chris offered the group twenty pounds a week, then, in the ensuing struggle to pay their wages, they sold both furniture and clothes. Eventually, to pay for the singer s teeth to be fixed, Kit pawned some cufflinks given to him by his father, the celebrated classical composer Constant Lambert.

Initially The Who s image was all pop - music, art and fashion. Their managers told them to watch mods in the audience as they danced then recreate their steps on-stage so the next audience would think the band had originated them. Pete Townshend insisted. The mod image was forced on us. It was dishonest. Nevertheless, mods seemed to hang on his every word. When I Can t Explain was released, they mobbed him, saying, You ve managed to say something in the song that we ve never managed to say for ourselves. But I only said I can t explain , Pete responded. That s just it, they told him. That s what we find so difficult to tell people We can t explain!

The truth was, the only real connection between The Who and mod culture was the group s excessive use of amphetamine. Nevertheless, when Roger Daltrey sang My Generation with the stutter of a pill freak, it made The Who the figureheads of the Mod movement. The Yardbirds were complaining of having nowhere to live. The best thing I could do for them was to get them a lump sum of money - say, £5,000 each. The only way to get that was from the record company. Their recording contract was with Georgio Gomelski, who leased their records to EMI. I decided that if the agreement for their management could be broken, so could their agreement for their recording. So I went to Len Wood, the general manager at EMI and told him the group would want £25,000 to sign a new recording contract, and that EMI could have first option, but not for long.

From EMI, I went to Jack Baverstock at Philips who offered me £10,000, the most they d ever paid for any artist. I called EMI and said Philips had offered the full £25,000 that we needed and within an hour EMI agreed to pay the same amount. They then had to negotiate with me over the royalties about which I was now becoming something of an expert. In the end, the Yardbirds got more than the Beatles were getting.

Since each of the Yardbirds hits to date had been distinctly different from the other, I thought their new single should contain elements of all of them. Moody, monk-like chanting, exhilarating lead guitar, bluesy riffs. But having once persuaded them of that, I was in the group s hands rather than they in mine. I d never made a record with a rock group before and was surprised at their technique of first devising a backing track, then a song. Moreover, coming from a jazz background in which lush harmonic structures were everything, it seemed strange to have Paul continually telling the others to simplify the harmonies. In the end the entire first verse was played over one single chord. But this was rock music, and I was learning.