The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume II, 1968-1984

From Hyde Park to the Hacienda

Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, Emma Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317028833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

To date, there has been a significant gap in work on the social history of music in Britain from 1950 to the present day. The three volumes of Live Music in Britain address this gap and do so through a unique prism—that of live music. The key theme of the books is the changing nature of the live music industry in the UK, focused upon popular music but including all musical genres. Via this focus, the books offer new insights into a number of other areas, including the relationship between commercial and public funding of music, changing musical fashions and tastes, the impact of changing technologies, the changing balance of power within the music industries, the role of the state in regulating and promoting various musical activities within an increasingly globalised music economy, and the effects of demographic and other social changes on music culture. Drawing on new archival research, a wide range of academic and non-academic secondary sources, participant observation and a series of interviews with key personnel, the books have the potential to become landmark works within Popular Music Studies and broader cultural history. The second volume covers the period from Hyde Park to the Hacienda (1968–84).

1 The age of rock

I call it Rock, but I don’t mean Bill Haley. You have to call it Rock to distinguish it from Pop. You don’t imagine I like Engelbert Humperdinck, do you? It’s called Rock in America. Rock is the most efficient and potent means of communication that exists. Number one—Rock. Number two—TV. Number three—telephone. Number four—Newspapers. Number five—Radio. Number six—the Train.

(Geoffrey Cannon, introducing himself to Radio Times readers in 1969 as the magazine’s new editor, quoted in Currie 2001: 129)

Since Led Zeppelin began in 1968 it’s calculated that they’ve made about $60 million on record sales, which means that they’re the largest contemporary rock album sellers. In 1973, in Tampa, Florida, they broke the all-time American concert attendance record for a show by one group with 56,800 people. On their 1975 tour of the States, they drew a total of 120,000 people to their six shows in the New York area and during the tour all six of their albums were in the American charts. Their performances really are tours de force in logistics, involving sets of three hours or more, without any supporting acts, in stadia rather than concert halls … Led Zeppelin are emblematic of a period of rock history in which creative health and the real originality of ideas and personality is dominated by its own magic symbol: the dollar sign.

(Michael Watts, ‘The Strategies of a Supergroup’ in Gold 1976: 120–21, 136)

Introduction

The period of British musical history covered in this volume, from 1968 to 1984, can be thought of as ‘the age of rock’. The first decade of the rock era was marked by a remarkable expansion of the music market. In 1969, Record Retailer reported that in 1968 the industry had “hit new highs,” achieving “new records in sales, exports and LP production,” which “matched singles output for the first time ever” (26.03.69: 1). By 1974, British sales of records and tapes were worth £160 million (compared to £25 million in 1959), and at least 70% of households owned some sort of record playing equipment. In the late 1960s, rock was the most profitable and fastest expanding music market in Britain, and in the 1970s, rock ways of doing music business became routine. The bulk of British record buyers (over 80%) were under 30, and more than 75% of popular sales were to 12–20-year olds. Pop and rock titles accounted for 85%–90% of all record sales (Frith 1978: 9–10, 211). By 1977, even the Musicians’ Union, a determinedly conservative organisation, was employing a Rock Organiser.¹

Within record companies, this meant that rock divisions became the source of power and investment; the classical sector was repositioned alongside jazz and folk as a minority interest, and an industry once conservative, gentlemanly (on the classical side) and slightly seedy (on the pop side) became fashionable, professional and brash, a change marked by a rapid generational turnover of senior executives. Moreover, British rock acts had global appeal. In sales terms, international rock meant Anglo-American music, even as Decca and EMI lost their oligopolistic control of the UK record business and US and European corporations, led by CBS and RCA, set up London offices and acquired UK manufacturing plants.² The power of rock (and the reorganisation of the music industry’s star-making machinery) was encapsulated by the rise of the rock album, a much more profitable product than the pop single, and by the rapid development of commercial recording studios. These were, in Nick Mason’s words, “designed for rock bands rather than as all-encompassing facilities, since rock music was where the new clients were coming from” (Mason 2005: 157).

Institutionally, as the figures above suggest, this was the period in which record companies came to be the dominant players in the music economy. As music journalist Clem Gorman reported in 1978,

The record company occupies the commanding heights of the music business because it owns and markets the central commodity without which the business would disintegrate tomorrow—the sound recording.

(Gorman 1978: 137)

In terms of our history, then, this was the period when the logic of record selling, the cycle of signing acts, building stars and promoting new releases came to structure the provision of live musical performance. Acts’ gigs were tied into the marketing of their records, and promotional costs were increasingly borne by record company marketing budgets. From the record industry’s perspective, live music businesses were therefore among those that could be absorbed into their own corporate structure. The 1970s saw a process of both horizontal and vertical integration, as a small number of major record companies consolidated their control of record production and distribution through mergers, while at the same time buying up both other components of the music supply chain (such as publishing) and taking over venues and agencies.

In 1969, for example, ATV, which had controlled Pye Records since 1966, took over the Beatles’ publishing company, Northern Songs, having lost out in 1968 when Philips bought Chappell Music. In response, in 1969, EMI bought Keith Prowse Music, adding Affiliated Music in 1972. By the mid-1970s, all the major record companies were also major music publishers.

Equally significantly, the remaining independent publishing companies had to become record companies by default. One of the defining characteristics of rock was that acts sang their own songs. In the words of Bill Martin, co-writer of Britain’s 1967 and 1968 Eurovision songs, ‘Puppet on a String’ (which won) and ‘Congratulations’ (which was a close second and a big European hit):

The idea of writing your own material, if you were in a band, suddenly became the way to do things. From that point onwards, there was little need for the old traditional songwriters. They either disappeared from the scene or became producers for their own songs.

(Hayward 2013: 39)

Publishers still provided songs for artists, but these had to be uniquely theirs, and increasingly this meant publishers producing the records themselves. The pop charts in the early 1970s thus featured an increasing number of session singers turned pop stars. Tony Burrows, for example, was called in by publishers “every time they wanted one of their songs recorded with a vocal.” In 1969,

This happened over a period of six to nine months and all of these songs were sold at the same time, released at the same time and became hits at the same time: so I had the strange situation of being on Top of the Pops with three different bands on the same show. I was changing clothes on one side of the set and going to the next band which was really quite bizarre.

(Ibid. 165)³

When Dick James Music had a hit with ‘Groovin’ with Mr Bloe’, a US B-side reworked by Caleb Quaye’s Hookfoot, who were paid a retainer by the publisher as DJM house band, the group had to follow up their Top of the Pops appearances with live shows:

We had a major tour of seaside resorts as Mr Bloe …. To start with it was a real buzz, because we were playing to packed houses with a couple of thousand people, so the adrenalin was running high, but then, in the end, Caleb just thought “it was a load of shit”, and, of course he was right. They were the wrong audience for Hookfoot—they were not going to buy our records. They were into candyfloss and all that.

(Hookfoot member, Ian Duck, quoted in ibid. 156)⁴

Publishing practice itself, then, was no longer organised around sheet music but, increasingly, around recordings—hence publishers’ use of Regent Sound studio, conveniently located on Demark St.⁵ In the words of Mills Music’s Cyril Gee, “gone were the days when you could go over to a publisher and play the piano, all of a sudden the era of demo records came in” (ibid. 33). At the same time, in signing up songwriters, publishers increasingly thought not in terms of selling their songs but in getting them record company deals (which also meant investing in demos).

In his memoirs, Norman Smeddles nicely captures the difficulties established publishers had in dealing with these changes. In June 1970, his band, Champagne, signed both publishing and recording contracts with Harold Franz at Feldman (which was absorbed into EMI in 1972); Franz also became their co-manager:

We’d had problems deciding on a song for the second single. Harold didn’t hear a single among our originals … Being a big Dylan fan I knew there was a new album imminent, and I knew that because Feldman was Dylan’s publisher they would get a preview. I started to talk to Harold about the possibility of there being a Dylan gem on the new album. Harold promised to give the album a listen as soon as he had the tapes. A week or two later the tapes arrived and Harold listened. He rang to tell me there was nothing commercial on the album, no ‘pop’ songs, no ‘Tambourine Man’ or ‘Mighty Quinn’. Later I was to find that on that album, missed by Harold Franz as a possible hit, was ‘If Not For You’, Olivia Newton-John’s multi-million seller. It could, and should, have been ours because Harold had ‘first shout’.

(Smeddles 2012: 197, 107–8)

By the end of the 1960s, then, it was not a big step from being a publisher to being a record company. Dick James (who had sold Northern Songs to ATV) opened his own recording studio and launched DJM Records in 1969, releasing Elton John’s early albums; John and his partner, Bernie Taupin, were both on retainers with Dick James Music, the publishing company, as writers. David Platz of Essex Music moved from employing record producers to starting his own label, Fly Records, in 1970. Platz was, in his son’s words, “the first person to actually sign producers and hire them out to other record labels for significant financial benefit to Essex Music.” His inspiration here was the London arrival of Tony Visconti, the in-house producer of Essex’s US partner, Richmond Music; Platz’s own first signing was Gus Dudgeon, who produced Elton John’s first four albums and David Bowie’s Space Oddity—Essex Music thus had a cut of their success, while Fly Records was immediately successful with Marc Bolan’s Visconti produced T. Rex albums (Hayward 2013: 80–81).

In 1969, EMI, whose annual pre-tax profits had risen from £1.1 million in 1953–4 to £17.6 million in 1969–70 (and would reach £27.3 in 1975–6), also acquired the Associated British Picture Corporation, and hence a controlling interest not just in Thames Television but also in a chain of cinemas and theatres that formed one of the major circuits for promotional rock tours (and which neatly complemented the network of Baileys clubs the company already owned), not to mention connected talent and artist agencies, concert promotion companies and ticket outlets. The live music names under EMI control now included not just the Grade Organisation but also Tito Burns and Harold Davison (Frith 1978: 117, 114–5).⁶

Financially, the record industry’s publishing model, in which the economies of scale meant an exponential increase in profits as sales rose, led to cross-subsidy, a proportion of those profits being speculatively invested in new acts, many of whose sales utterly failed to cover their costs. Not surprisingly, anyone who was successful in the music business, not just publishers but also impresarios, managers, record producers and retailers, started to use their success to create record labels of their own.

The result was a huge increase in the amount of money flowing into the music making system. The 1969 Woodstock Festival, which is often taken to mark the beginning of the rock era, demonstrated not just the size of the rock ‘community’, but also more importantly the unprecedented commercial potential of the rock market. The stars of Woodstock could now make demands for appearance fees that far exceeded anything they had earned previously. As Dave Laing notes, for example, “Jimi Hendrix’s fee went up to $75,000 from the $18,000 he was paid for playing the festival” (Laing 2004: 10). Such fees became the rock star norm; following Woodstock, the major record companies used their superior capital resources to sign, promote and control all successful rock acts.

Rock music wasn’t just the most profitable sector of the music market by the early 1970s. It was also, as the example of the Woodstock Festival suggests, a new kind of popular music ideologically. This is most clearly indicated by changes in newspaper and magazine coverage, as a new way of writing about live and recorded music was established. ‘Rock critic’ became a recognisable title and rock criticism both described a new popular music aesthetic and challenged arts page distinctions between high and low culture. When, in 1963, the Times’ chief music critic, William Mann, had devoted his round-up of the year’s music to the Beatles, he had caused something of a furore simply because the paper’s arts pages did not usually cover pop music. Twenty years later, the paper routinely reviewed rock albums and concerts and was more likely to run respectful features on popular than on classical musicians. This remapping of musical worlds affected other media—radio and TV music programming, for example, as well as state policy at both national and local levels.

The 1970s relationship of the record industry and rock music was clearly symbiotic: record companies flourished because of the unprecedented popularity of rock; rock reached an unprecedentedly large market because of the activities of record companies. But there was a paradox here. Ideologically, rock defined itself against pop in terms of art and community rather than commerce. Rock musicians and audiences, publicists and promoters, drew from both folk club and art school accounts of authenticity and creativity, and from the underground and bohemia for their sense of individual and communal self-expression.⁷ In practice, though, in Steve Sparks’ words, “the music business was the engine room of the underground, the source of the finance” (quoted in Green 1989: 275); and in live music terms, as Dave Laing puts it, rock events routinely displayed “the conflicting pressures of corporatisation and the carnivalesque” (Laing 2004: 16).⁸

In simple m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• General editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The age of rock
• 2 Classical music
• 3 Clubland
• 4 Live music business
• 5 Live music and the state
• 6 From DIY to indie
• 7 Soul, disco, DJs and the new club scene
• 8 Rock musicians and their discontents
• 9 The ideology of live music: violence and video
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index