Where Have All the Good Times Gone? by Louis Barfe

Author:Louis Barfe [Barfe, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843540656
Google: hyUJAQAAMAAJ
Publisher: Atlantic
Published: 2004-01-15T04:08:53+00:00

In addition to promoting the renaissance in the British musical theatre, there was, in Mendl’s view, another motivation for the exercise: ‘It was one way of making EMI’s life as hard as possible. My contempt for them was immense. I think we all prefer the underdog, and EMI had all of the arrogance of the BBC without any of the education.’

As Decca approached the end of the 1960s, it had come a long way from being a company that had to worry about having its telephones cut off. In the year to March 1959, the group – including its radar business and the manufacture of radios, televisions and record players – recorded sales of £21.8m, up £850,000 on the previous year, with a net profit of £1.03m, up £100,221 on 1958. Meanwhile, the company was challenging EMI in terms of its market share for discs. In 1960, when manufacturer sales of records in the UK were estimated to be worth £15m, EMI had 38.4 per cent of the total market, with Decca just 1.4 per cent behind.

The exit of RCA meant that the need for EMI to maintain two separate chains of command had disappeared. As a result, in 1957, the two constituent elements of the group’s record business – the Gramophone Company and the Columbia Graphophone Company – became EMI Records Ltd, under the management of C. H. Thomas. For all of its arrogance, EMI had the good sense to follow the pattern set by Decca as regards licensed repertoire. Of that 38.4 per cent market share in 1960, 4.4 per cent came from miscellaneous American labels released in the UK by EMI. This activity was driven largely by Leonard G. Wood, known universally as L. G., who became managing director of EMI Records in 1959, when C. H. Thomas went over to the international side of the business. Born in 1910 and brought up near Hayes at Harlington, Wood had joined his largest local employer in the 1930s, first in the order department, then as a salesman, in the days when EMI instructed its reps to carry a bowler hat even if they never planned to wear it, and to carry cigarettes, even if, like Wood, they didn’t smoke, so that they could offer one to a client at critical moments.

‘Len was great – very old-school English,’ recalls Derek Everett, who joined EMI at Great Castle Street in 1954 as the man who printed the labels for the promotional copies, but who soon moved over to the A&R side. ‘He was always Mr Wood and it was always “Everett, old chap” and “Pop up, old chap”.’41 Although Wood was indeed old school and had been coming up through the ranks during the bad, blinkered era of Clark’s dotage and Fisk’s Luddism, he was open-minded and thus well suited to the Lockwood regime.

The open-mindedness showed through in some of the labels that he bagged for EMI. He negotiated a catalogue deal with Syd Nathan at King in Cincinnati, whose country and soul output was hardly natural territory for an English gent.

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