The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and Geniuses of Rock Music

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While he's undoubtedly a lovely guy, unfortunately his anecdotes and descriptions don't often venture beyond the superficial. This is a brilliant book by a brilliant man. A magician with perfect taste. Thank God I met him. He is gold dust!'

The Tastemaker by Tony King | Waterstones

Living in an era of seismic social, technological and cultural transformation, King experienced these defining moments as an influential figure in London and New York's gay scenes. Despite his heady life in showbusiness, however, he would soon learn that a glittering career couldn't shield him from heartbreak – witness to the AIDS crisis and the devastating consequences, his personal life was intermittently marked by tumult and turmoil.

Summary

Then, after a couple of years of this, in 1970, King was off again, this time to Apple, The Beatles’ company, having been offered a job as their chief A&R man by Ringo Starr. He started travelling to the US and while in New York happened upon the Continental Baths, “which was an eye-opener”. The following year he was flown to the US to launch the Ringo album, swanning around New York in his Tommy Nutter suits, causing havoc at every turn, cruising around in a rented Thunderbird. After three weeks he was just about to fly home when he got a call from John Lennon’s girlfriend, May Pang, asking him if he’d stay to help promote his new album, Mind Games.

The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and Geniuses o…

The Tastemaker has a nice conversational tone. It is warm, full of good humor and insight like the man himself. What is it with prisons on TV at the moment? If it’s not Time sending you to bed petrified... Banged Up I wasn’t ambitious. I just flew by the seat of my pants. My ambition was to have a good time, hang out with famous pop stars and get paid for it. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I could become this or that.’ No, I was just looking after pop stars and I was really good at it.” I suppose I was always very straightforward, a straight speaker,” King says. “I wasn’t an artist but I understood the artists, I was in their camp. I think I had an innate understanding of what artists needed, and I didn’t put up with bullshit.” On John Lennon "But John was special, too. I always say that, of the Beatles, he was the Jose Mourinho-the special one."He spent more than sixty years in the music industry working as promotion man, creative director, label chief and personal manager to some of the biggest stars out of the UK. I asked Freddie outright if he was gay and he said, ‘Well, yeah.’ So I said, ‘Does Mary know? And he said, ‘Well, I haven’t said anything.’ So I told him he had to live an honest life and if you don’t live an honest life then you’re not going to be very happy. Within 24 hours he called me up and he goes, ‘Well, darling, I’ve done it.’ I said, ‘What do you mean ‘done it’?’ He said, ‘I told Mary and she was OK.’ An out gay man before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality – “I knew no other way, to be honest” – it was King who encouraged his friend Freddie Mercury to tell his partner, Mary Austin, that he was gay. Meanwhile, King’s unabashed flamboyance had a profound effect on Elton John, who, when they first met, was a struggling singer-songwriter given to dressing down: “Tony would have attracted attention in the middle of a Martian invasion,” John subsequently recalled. “I wanted to be that stylish and exotic and outrageous.”

Rock’s best kept secret: Tony King on life with John Lennon

Leaving school at the age of sixteen to start his career in the music industry at Decca Records, Tony King would soon find himself becoming a close friend and confidante to some of the world's biggest artists - a far cry from his childhood days in Eastbourne. Later that summer, as King prepared Lennon's new album for the pop music marketplace, he proposed the concept of a Thanksgiving gig to the former Beatle. "So he says to me," King recalled, "'I'll tell you what, if the record gets to number one, I'll do it.' Of course, he was never thinking it was going to get to number one." Propelled by a deft marketing campaign — and aided, no doubt, by Elton's superstardom during that era — "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" topped the U.S. charts. He recovered and ended his career working with Elton John, overseeing his album sleeves and working on the staging of his Las Vegas show and ongoing farewell tour. Now retired, he says that writing The Tastemaker was a strange experience, tinged with sadness and regret: many of the characters in it are gone; it ends with the death of Charlie Watts. Then again, King achieved what he set out to do.

As Lennon was going into semi-retirement, and as Apple was winding down, King started looking around for his next perch.