were amused by the blond-haired youth and his barefaced effrontery. They agreed to take him on as an odd-job boy, teamaker and messenger.
He worked for Mary Quant throughout the period when her plungingly simple black and white dresses, short skirts, sailor necks and oversized bows altered the look of haute couture, and of London, forever. In February 1962, the first issue of a colour supplement by the hitherto stuffy Sunday Times featured a Quant dress worn by a new young model, Jean Shrimpton, and photographed, not by the customary middle-aged society acolyte but by a young man, David Bailey, who came from London’s East End and – still more outrageously – made no attempt to conceal it. This first ‘in crowd’, as defined by the Sunday Times, did not, of course, include anyone named Andrew Loog Oldham; still, he was happy. ‘I was where I wanted to be – around stars.’
At this stage, the only way of achieving stardom himself, as his mental scenario had dictated, was to become a pop singer. The fact that he could neither sing nor play an instrument seemed hardly relevant. Over a period of months, London agents and managers would be intermittently persecuted by the same blond, bespectacled, unmusical youth, posing under such aliases as ‘Chancery Laine’ and ‘Sandy Beach’.
By working for Mary Quant all day, and by night as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club, he saved enough to migrate to the French Riviera. There, for several months, he worked in sea-front bars and as an itinerant window dresser. There, too, in company with two freelance journalists, he concocted his first great money-making scheme. The plan was to kidnap a wealthy heiress. Andrew would keep her, drugged, in a flat in Monte Carlo while the journalists sold the story to the London Daily Express. It would give the story a piquant twist, they said, if Andrew were subsequently to marry the heiress. This he was quite willing to do. Unfortunately, the scheme foundered after the, not unwilling, girl had been taken to the Monte Carlo flat. Her father had friends in the British government, and got an official D-notice issued, prohibiting any newspaper from running the story. Andrew Loog Oldham thus failed to become nationally famous either as a kidnapper or as a cad.
Back in London, a job with the Leslie Frewin publishing house provided an entrée into the decidedly glamorous world of public relations. He left Frewin to join a PR company whose clients included the pop singer Mark Wynter. Handsome, blow-waved and insipid in the prevailing American style, Wynter was following what seemed an inexorable course from Top Twenty hit to low-budget ‘exploitation’ feature film. One of Oldham’s jobs was to accompany him on location to Twickenham studios and share a bedroom with him at a nearby small hotel. ‘Every morning, Mark used to get up very early and creep off to the bathroom to wash and shave and fix his hair. Then he’d come and get back into bed. A bit later, he’d sit up and say “Well, Andrew – time to set off for the studios.” He was convinced I thought he always woke up looking like that. I thought that was great – that really was looking after your image.’
Two major pop impresarios, Larry Parnes and Don Arden, between them controlled all the singers and groups for whom Oldham hoped to work as publicist. Parnes ran a menagerie of exotically named singers from offices in Cromwell Road, opposite the headquarters of the Boy Scout movement (at which, in spare moments, he liked to gaze through binoculars). Don Arden, an authentically frightening figure, rivalled Larry Parnes in promoting pop package tours, cobbled from the hitmakers of the moment. Andew Loog Oldham joined Arden for a while but was fired after inviting journalists to view cinema seats which, during a particularly well-appreciated package show, had been slashed with razors and drenched with female urine.
He was by this time a well-known figure around ABC-TV’s studios in Aston Road, Birmingham, where Thank Your Lucky Stars was recorded. In February 1963, he stood and watched the Beatles give their first nationwide performance of Please Please Me. He later approached Brian Epstein, and offered himself as publicist for Epstein’s company, NEMS Enterprises. Brian Epstein, it happened, was preparing to launch two other Liverpool acts, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. He agreed to hire Andrew Loog Oldham to promote the two groups on a monthly retainer of £25.
The arrangement was somewhat hampered by Tony Barrow, a London-based Liverpudlian already writing press releases about the Beatles and sleeve notes for their first album Brian Eptstein ordained that Barrow should concentrate on written handouts while Oldham – by now running his own PR company – dreamed up stunts to get paragraphs into the papers. The Beatles themselves, watched over with obsessive jealousy by Epstein, remained always tantalizingly out of reach. His NEMS work was for the advancement of Gerry Marsden and Billy J. Kramer, each awaiting Top Twenty success in cardboard shoes and cheap little shortie overcoats.
Oldham’s journeys north, though chilly and unglamorous, brought one further big advance. In Manchester, he met Tony Calder, a young agent handling local groups like the Hollies and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. Manchester groups were by now starting to benefit from London’s obsession with the Mersey Sound. Tony Calder also took on Oldham as publicist for his firm, Kennedy Street Enterprises. ‘It felt just like tiddlywinks. I’d already got Liverpool sewn up, with Epstein and NEMS. Now I’d got Manchester as well.’
A chance PR assignment for the American record producer Phil Spector, early in 1962, altered Oldham’s conception of how he might seize his still unspecified destiny. Up to then, in pop music, celebrity had come only to performers – the singers first, then the star guitarists and, latterly, the groups. No fame, or even credit, was given to the A & R men who arranged and supervised even the biggest hit recordings. Phil Spector was the first A & R man to be as well known as the artists he recorded – to produce each three-minute disc in his individual and unmistakable style of complex multitrack effects and cavernous echo: the Spector Wall of Sound.
Phil Spector became the epitome of all Andrew Loog Oldham wished to be. His persona was that of a semi-gangster, riding round in dark-windowed limousines, protected by ugly bodyguards with bulges under their arms. While Spector was in London, Andrew Loog Oldham rode round with him, devoutly questioning him about the secret of his success. Instead of the hoped-for technical hints, Phil Spector imparted a piece of advice which Oldham at the time found rather disappointing. If Oldham ever found a group to record, Spector said, he should on no account let them use the record company’s studio but should instead pay for an independent studio session and afterwards sell or lease back the tapes to the record company. That way, you had control and you had much more money.
In April 1963, the Beatles were number one in every chart with From Me to You. Gerry and the Pacemakers were Number Two with How Do You Do It? Oldham lost his retainer from NEMS Enterprises, and began looking around for something else to make up that monthly £25. Calling in at the Record Mirror office – a habitual haunt of his for picking up tips – he found Peter Jones enthusing over an unknown blues group whose fortunes Norman Jopling was about to change with a eulogistic article. As Oldham listened, the pop singer and the publicist faded; a brand-new incarnation of himself took shape on his mental Cinerama screen.
He drove to Richmond the very next Sunday. In the narrow passageway beside the Station Hotel, he met a boy and girl coming out into the warm spring dusk. Neither Mick Jagger nor his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton noticed Andrew Loog Oldham, for the simple reason that they were having a furious argument.
The Crawdaddy that night was anything but the wild spectacle Norman Jopling had described. Giorgio Gomelsky had been called away to Switzerland by the death of his father. Without Giorgio to enliven it, the club was in a torpid mood. The Stones had even resumed their old purist habit of playing seated on a ring of bar stools. ‘There was no production,’ Oldham says. ‘It was just a blues roots thing … “Here I am and this is what I’m playing.” Even so, I knew what I was looking at. It was Sex. And I was maybe forty-eight hours ahead of the pack.’
Suffering an uncharacteristic fit of shyness, Oldham did not approach the Stones that first night. For all his hubris, he knew he was in no position on his own to try to manage a pop group. As a PR man he could exist on the wing, using other people’s office desks and telephones. As a would-be manager, he could not function unless connected to the crucial network of tour promoters, song pluggers and record company talent scouts. He realized there was no alternative – his discovery would have to be shared.
His