Hunky Dory (Who Knew) by Laurence Myers

Author:Laurence Myers [Myers, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912892297
Publisher: B&B Books
Published: 2019-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

22. GEM PRODUCTIONS – MIKE LEANDER, TONY MACAULAY

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

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

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

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

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

I have already mentioned the famous Brill Building in New York, where there were eleven floors crammed full of publishers, writers, song-pluggers and executives who were the heart of the New York music industry. Hits poured out through the windows onto Broadway. I was going to have my own little Brill Building-ette

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