Tony Calder
Colourful promoter who co-founded Immediate, the ‘hip’ 1960s independent British record label
TONY CALDER, who has died aged 74, was a music promoter who worked with the biggest names in pop, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Small Faces, and was the business partner of Andrew Loog Oldham, with whom in 1965 he founded Immediate, one of Britain’s early independent pop labels, with the slogan “Happy to be a part of the industry of human happiness”.
The two self-proclaimed rakes set out to promote a looser ethic than prevailed in the bigger labels such as Parlophone or Decca, and Calder was a master of the buccaneering practices on which the record industry of the era flourished, such as pushing particular records by boosting sales at the shops that filed chart returns. They wanted spontaneity and “hipness”, and to tap into the burgeoning teenage market.
With a roster ranging from the Velvet Underground singer Nico to the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, Immediate released everything from R&B and psychedelia to forgettable pap. But it provided the blueprint for other British independent labels of the 1960s and 1970s.
Oldham was managing the Rolling Stones when the new label was founded and it was the Jagger/richards song Out of Time that gave the label its first No 1 hit with Chris Farlowe in 1966 (the previous year their first single, the Mccoys’ Hang On Sloopy, licensed by Oldham from the US, reached No 5).
The rascally pair had control over the entire process of record-making, from talent-spotting and studio production to publicity hype, though they would later admit that Immediate bought much of its chart success with bribes and other underhand methods.
In fact, while Immediate provided an outlet for many Jagger/richards compositions (others were Backstreet Girl, Sitting On A Fence and Yesterday’s Papers), it never released a record by the Stones themselves and in mid-1967 the band sacked Oldham as their manager.
Immediate then secured the services of the Small Faces, after they had been banned from Top of the Pops for insulting a producer (they were bought, legend has it, from the promoter Don Arden with £25,000 delivered in a brown paper bag). Immediate gave them freedom to develop their sound from R & B to psychedelic, drug-influenced rock. Here Comes the Nice, Itchycoo Park, Lazy Sunday and Tin Soldier were all released on the Immediate label.
There were also memorable one-offs from performers such as Amen Corner (Hello Susie and If Paradise Is Half As Nice) and Fleetwood Mac (Man Of The World – with, on the B-side, Jeremy Spencer’s proto-punk single Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonite). As “pop” morphed into “rock”, Immediate took on Humble Pie, Steve Marriott’s post-small Faces supergroup, whose debut album, As Safe As Yesterday is said to be the first “heavy metal” album.
In 1968 they released Keith Emerson’s group the Nice’s second single America, a subversive take on the West Side Story anthem which, at Oldham’s urging, they accompanied at live performances by burning the American flag. Immediate also worked with Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, John Mayall and Rod Stewart.
But there were as many damp squibs as successes. Nico’s I’m Not Sayin’, her recording debut, sank without trace and she subsequently hooked up with the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol in New York. Rod Stewart flopped with Little Miss Understood (though he would replace Steve Marriott in the Faces).
Vashti Bunyan (recently rediscovered after a gap of 30 years) opted out of singing altogether after a rocky debut with the label. “Immediate was a good name for the label,” she recalled. “If something didn’t work immediately it would get shelved and they would be on to the next thing, leaving in their wake a trail of disillusion.”
By the late 1960s Immediate was haemorrhaging cash. According to a 2009 Guardian profile, a typical day at the office would consist of Calder and Oldham “arriving for work in separate limos at 4pm, quickly perusing the mounting bills, dismissing them with a threat to break someone’s legs, then being whisked off to the next party”.
In 2002, in a long and rambling address on his website, Oldham said: “The fact is that some time between 1967-1969 I went ‘out to lunch’ and did not return until the summer of 1995. During that time many aberrations manifested themselves.”
In 1995 Calder recalled: “We got on until 1969, me and Andrew, but then he had his problems and was away in France, and I had mine, with ulcers and wanting to go off and live in Antigua.”
Immediate vanished from the scene in 1970, leaving debts of more than £1million. Oldham and Calder went their separate ways, Oldham to Bogota, though they paired up briefly in the 1990s in an attempt to revive Immediate’s back catalogue and to collaborate (with Colin Irwin) on Abba, The Name of the Game (1995).
In the meantime, they were embroiled in legal disputes for years over unpaid royalties. The Small Faces, notoriously, only started to be paid for albums like Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake in 1997.
Born at Surbiton, Surrey, to Scottish parents on June 23 1943, Calder began his musical career in the early 1960s in Decca Records’ marketing and sales department, for a time working as Jimmy Savile’s assistant and bag carrier while moonlighting as a DJ. “Jimmy Savile taught me how to DJ at the first dances that didn’t use live bands,” he recalled, “at what were then called off-the-record sessions in Mecca Ballrooms up and down the country.’’
In 1962 he met the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, who hired him to help promote the band’s first single, Love Me Do, which was not getting radio play. Calder sent 100 copies to clubs all over the country with a note saying it was a guaranteed floor-filler.
“We mailed it on the Monday. By Wednesday, they were all playing it,” he recalled. The song made it to No 17 in the charts. Epstein, according to Calder, took more than a merely business interest in his new publicist: “He chased me round the table more than once, actually.”
Calder met Oldham in 1963 when he was still handling press for the Beatles and the 19-year-old Oldham had just taken over the management of a young R & B group called the Rolling Stones. The following year they established Image, a PR company that handled management for the Stones, cementing their reputation as the bad boys of British rock, and eventually promoted the Beach Boys and Freddie and the Dreamers.
In early 1965 Calder stepped in for Oldham to produce Marianne Faithfull’s Come and Stay With Me and This Little Bird, which reached Nos 4 and 6 in the charts respectively. Philip Norman, in his biography of Mick Jagger, quoted Calder as describing the singer as “the Virgin Mary with an amazing pair of tits”.
After the demise of Immediate, Calder stayed in business in London, running his own licensing company and remained active in various guises and business partnerships into the 1990s.
In 1971 he signed the Bay City Rollers, whom he had seen live in Edinburgh. “They were atrocious,” he recalled in an interview with the Herald in 1995, “but there were police outside holding back lines of screaming kids and Tam Paton [the band’s manager] was running my kind of a scam, so I thought I’d grab a stake in some of that.’’ The contract was soon sold on.
In the mid-1970s he did a short stint as chief executive of NEMS Records, where he signed Black Sabbath, Pluto and Marianne Faithfull. From 1978 he managed Eddy Grant, whose I Don’t Wanna Dance (1982) he was said to have saved from oblivion by pushing for its release as a single. In the 1989 he helped the novelty band Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers score three consecutive No 1 hits. He also established his own publishing company, Marylebone Music.
The Herald journalist who interviewed Calder at his mews office in Belgravia in 1995 was less than charmed, describing him as “a bullet-headed, Buddha-shaped barrow-boy … absently barking scabrous stories to me from behind his desk, in between answering phone-callers via a headset.” Others conceded that he was certainly a teller of tall tales, with a fondness for hyperbole, and a rogue, but a lovable one.
He was twice married, first to Jennifer, who worked at Immediate; the marriage was dissolved. In 1980 he married Karen Richardson, and this marriage was also dissolved. He is survived by three children.
Tony Calder, born June 27 1943, died January 2 2018