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By then King was too fond of his (grand) Mom and (grand) Dad to allow the relationship of parents and son to be changed. He continued to treat his grandparents as his ‘real’ parents for all of his life. This loyalty of King’s becomes a recurring theme throughout the book. When the disco boom started to fade, King became RCA’s creative director, but by this time he was so burned out that on Good Friday in 1981 he joined AA. “I got sober and I’ve been sober ever since, but it wasn’t easy,” says King. “Six weeks into my sobriety Elton came to town doing copious amounts of coke. And then a few weeks later, bloody Freddie Mercury arrives. ‘Darling, I’m here.’ 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.” By the last 1970s he is in New York. A gay man living in Greenwich Village, he is at ground zero for the AIDS crisis. The telling of living through that is the best and most touching section of the book. Readers will especially enjoy King's tales about promoting the industry's superstars, including the likes of John Lennon, Elton John, the Rolling Stones and Queen, among others. Beatles fans will relish the opportunity to experience King's insider's view of Lennon's Thanksgiving 1974 performance with John at Madison Square Garden. Save for an April 1975 TV special in honor of Sir Lew Grade, it would mark the last time the Beatle played a live show.
Tony has the most impeccable eye,” says David Furnish. “It takes years of experience to develop and train your eye to recognise and champion aesthetic brilliance. Throughout his career, Tony has worked with the biggest and best artists in the business. That level of taste and sophistication he’s developed makes him second to none. He’s our tastemaker extraordinaire. That’s why his business card title says ‘Éminence Grise’. King thought he was grounded, but in reality he was anything but. “I would get on the Concorde and come to London and go down to see my mum and she would say, ‘What do you pay for butter in America?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, Mum,’ but I made sure to learn before I came home again.” From there he worked his way into the music industry in the London of the swinging sixties. His timing could not have been better. This is a brilliant book by a brilliant man. A magician with perfect taste. Thank God I met him. He is gold dust!’I thought he was the most stylish person I had ever seen,” says Elton John. “He had elegance from the word go.” King met the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on their way to becoming the standard bearers of their generation. Reg Dwight (Elton John) hung around the AIR Records office when King worked there. The Tastemaker charts the singular life of a man who has been at the beating heart of music's most iconic moments for over sixty years and features stories of his time working with everyone from the Beatles to the Ronettes and Elton John to the Rolling Stones. Part of King’s personality is his ability to remain good friends with the stars that he has met and worked with through the years; this has served him well. 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. This included spending time with with his friend Freddie Mercury in the Queen frontman’s final days.
He’s brilliant to work with on any creative level and has never lost his eye,” says Elton. “Even now, he’s light years ahead of anyone. Plus, he has an historic knowledge and love of popular music, gleaned from an early career at Decca and having to deal with big stars from America, Britain and Europe. With Tony it’s all about instinct – choosing the right interview, the album cover, etc. Nobody has that more than him. He also has unwavering loyalty and I can’t recall him ever bad-mouthing any of his clients.”
Throughout The Tastemaker, King’s tone, and sometimes his turn of phrase, is that of an elderly benign colonel telling stories of his military career. While he indulges in a great deal of name-dropping, The Tastemaker provides a flavour of how life was in the mad, Atlantic-hopping lives of many of the stars and personalities whose music has withstood the test of time.
As Lennon was going into semi-retirement, and as Apple was winding down, King started looking around for his next perch. Tony eventually repairs to America where he works with John Lennon and Ringo Starr on their solo work. 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. At Decca he started as an office boy, aged 16, but was soon approached by various heads of department to change jobs. “I was very pretty at the time,” says King, with a wink. After a few years he was approached by the promotor Tony Hall and went to work for him. He was 19, living in London and soon a stalwart of the gay scene. “I was very different. I was very young. Promotion men at that time were not 19.” The Tastemaker charts the singular life of a man who has been at the beating heart of music’s most iconic moments for over sixty years and features stories of his time working with everyone from the Beatles to the Ronettes and Elton John to the Rolling Stones.
Including tales of John Lennon and Elton John
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. In the 1970s King moved to the US. He toggled between California and New York and organised concerts and records for John Lennon and others. We live in an age of extraordinary change, an era in which entire industries have been born, while others have been scuttled aside, victims of our rapidly shifting technologies. New jobs exist that we never could have imagined, with countless other employment opportunities on the horizon. 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. King would spend inordinate amounts of time with Lennon and for a while became his regular drinking buddy.
King has successfully worked on many of the iconic albums and tours of the last 60 years. He has earned his moniker of ‘Tastemaker’. The Tastemaker has a nice conversational tone. It is warm, full of good humor and insight like the man himself. Writing in Air Mail, Victoria Segal shared some impressions of King’s memoir. Segal writes that King “knows how to balance irreverent entertainment with respectful discretion” and “has little interest in dishing real dirt.” And it sounds like a compelling read, from its firsthand accounts of some of music’s biggest names to what Segal describes as a harrowing look at the rise of AIDS.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.” This is a brilliant book by a brilliant man. A magician with perfect taste. Thank God I met him. He is gold dust!' Meanwhile, Ono emerges from The Tastemaker as an absolute hoot, a hilarious eccentric who encourages King to take magic mushrooms before a business meeting with a music industry executive. “Oh my God, I took off halfway through lunch,” he laughs. “I was flying. And Yoko leans across the table and says” – his voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper – ‘Good, aren’t they?’” Tony King (standing, third left) with the Ronettes, Phil Spector (seated) and George Harrison in 1964. Photograph: From the author’s collection
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