Record label talent scout signed Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and later A-ha
Andy Wickham
music executive b May 9, 1947 d March 29, 2022
One night in the autumn of 1967, Andy Wickham went to the Cafe a GoGo in New York’s Greenwich Village to see the upcoming African-American folk singer Richie Havens. Much as he was impressed by the headliner, he was even more knocked out by the support act, an unsigned artist from Canada named Joni Mitchell.
Wickham, who has died of cancer aged 74, was then a 20-year-old Englishman who had arrived in America two years earlier to become a precocious mover and shaker in the Los Angeles music scene. After promoting artists such as the Mamas and the Papas for the independent Dunhill label, he had been headhunted by Mo Ostin, head of the Warner Brothers’ label Reprise, who hired him as a talent scout.
Mitchell had already been turned down by several labels, but Wickham heard star quality and arranged for Elliott Roberts, her manager, to record a live show. He passed the tape to Ostin and Mitchell was signed.
Within months he had also brought Van Morrison to the label, and helped to get Neil Young through the door. With a track record like that, he was virtually guaranteed a job for life, and Wickham remained at Warners for 30 years, rising to become a vice-president.
When Wickham first met Ostin in 1967, pop music was changing, and Warner Brothers and Reprise were in danger of getting left behind. With a roster dominated by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin, the company was desperately in need of some hip credibility and Wickham provided it.
He was hired as the label’s house hippy, or its ‘‘ambassador to the counterculture’’, in the words of Joe Boyd, an American producer who had moved in the opposite direction, to London. Ostin told his young talent scout to ‘‘find me promising writers and singers’’, so Wickham headed for Laurel Canyon, in the Hollywood Hills, where a countercultural colony of musicians was assembling. Mitchell moved there, as did Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, James Taylor, Neil Young and countless others.
Wickham was in his element and moved into a big and rambling house with the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs and their respective girlfriends.
Not all of his fellow executives back at the label’s offices approved. Fellow Warner-Reprise executive Stan Cornyn said: ‘‘We were all guys in suits, or even blazers. To my knowledge, Mo Ostin never took a drug. We had Andy Wickham to take the drugs. He might come in at two in the afternoon with his eyes not quite focused, but he knew Joni Mitchell and that whole crowd.’’
Yet he was focused enough to sign the likes of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, while he used his UK connections to bring Jethro Tull and Pentangle to the label. He also produced artists in the studio, including Nancy Sinatra and the Everly Brothers.
What he possessed in abundance was perhaps the only skill by which a record company executive is judged: the ability to hear hit potential. He was still at it in the 1980s when he signed the Norwegian synth-pop band A-ha, who had a worldwide No 1 with Take On Me. One of his final discoveries before retirement was Amanda Ghost, whom he signed to Warner Brothers in 2000 and who went on to write hits for James Blunt, Beyonce and Shakira.
A ndrew Wickham was born the son of a wartime RAF squadron leader. He endured an unhappy time at school in Cheltenham, and developed a hatred of authority that led to him being expelled when he was 17.
He got a job as a trainee at the graphic design company where the future Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts worked. After Watts had left, they met again by chance. ‘‘He told me he had joined a blues group and they had a residency at Eel Pie Island and that I should come and see them,’’ Wickham recalled.
There he met the Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and his partner, Tony Calder, who recruited him to their promotions company. He was given a secretary – Chrissie Shrimpton, who also happened to be Mick Jagger’s girlfriend – and found himself promoting the Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman’s Hermits and countless others.
He later became the UK representative for the Beach Boys, and was introduced to Murry Wilson, the group’s manager and father of three of its members. He was sent to meet the group at Heathrow ahead of their first British tour; what he did not know was that the brothers were at war with their controlling father and were trying to oust him as their manager. ‘‘I introduced myself to Dennis Wilson by saying how much I had liked his father. This was the first and only time I have ever been punched by an artist,’’ he recalled.
Wickham hated what he saw as grey, dreary Britain and working with the Beach Boys increased his yearning for Californian sunshine. After his move to the US in 1965, his friend Nik Cohn reported for Queen magazine: ‘‘Reports filtered back that he was driving a Mustang, living in a Malibu beach house and spending cash like so many grains of salt. His Hollywood ambitions had always been the butt of much snickery, but his golden West Coast dreams came true.’’ – The Times
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