Review: Hunky Dory (Who Knew?) - The Jewish Chronicle

Hunky Dory (Who Knew?) by Laurence Myers (B&B Books £20)

This is an engaging story about a Jewish kid from Finsbury Park who made good. Trained as an accountant (it was either that or his mother would have forced him to become a hairdresser), he found his eventual niche as a manager, contract negotiator and music and film entrepreneur during the 1960s and ’70s.

He worked, and brushed shoulders, with musicians and artists who would become icons of pop, including the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Stevie Wonder, Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, Donna Summers, Billy Ocean, and Iggy Pop. And that’s the short list. There is even a longer list of all the behind-the-scenes powerful characters who make (and break) all their careers.

Early on, he worked in his family’s sweet shop and in East End London street markets to finance his accountancy training.

His market-trading experience came in handy later, equipping him to steer through the crazy business of rock’n’roll. He could think fast, had the gift of the gab and understood how to motivate people to agree to deals.

In those early days, recording companies would rake in money from the new lucrative teen market.

Before any musician got paid, an enormous amount of expenses were deducted. Then their manager would take a cut. Musicians were left with a pitiful amount of the profit.

Myers became a specialist in fixing this. He would muscle in to recording companies and rewrite musicians’ contracts.

He would get the musicians he was managing a lot more money, with a bit on the side for himself. He also started all sorts of companies of his own, doing management, recording, music publishing and film-making.

Like a market trader, he adapted quickly to new situations and exploited new opportunities before bigger companies even thought of it, and was gone by the time they got there.

He invested in the pioneering David Bowie, whose first record under Myers’s management was Hunky Dory.

But he was worried: “The problem was that pioneers tend to get arrows up their arses, and financially it was my arse that was the potential target”.

Myers waited years for Bowie to catch on — a well-rewarded patience in the end.

Myers, never carried away with his own importance, tells hilariously self-deprecating stories of failed ventures and of fortunes lost by financing lavish A-list celeb parties.

He tells of such comic moments as the time Mick Jagger visits him to discuss his pension because “I’m not going to be singing rock ’n’ roll when I’m 60, am I?” And when Myers was approached to invest in a musical and thought: “who the hell wants to see a play about cats?” As he repeats throughout: “who knew?”

Myers quotes the old adage, “Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ” and describes countless “orgies” or “tsunamis” of lawsuits over copyrights and broken promises. In one case, after a group broke up, he says that “writs were flying back and forth like kids fighting with paper airplanes”.

It seems, even for an expert like Laurence Myers, navigating the music business is like paddling a paper boat through a school of sharks. And, now, if he is tempted to go back into the business, he says, “I watch Spinal Tap, take a cold shower and go to bed.”

Johnny Belknap is a musician, designer and writer