MAKE the best possible water-tight financial agreements with your manager right from the start.

The amount of your manager’s percentage depends on what he is going to do for you. Some of the best managers take up to 40 per cent.

For 40 per cent a manager should take care of publicity, photographs, the fan club expenses — plugging your record, and the agency side of it as well, the side that gets you the work.

If your manager takes 15 per cent you’ll still have to pay 10 more for publicity and 10 for the booking agency. It’s often better to have it all under the same roof.

As a general rule I’d say a large slice of your income should be invested, but you must have enough money to enjoy life and to be fairly generous among friends.

I’m not suggesting you have to “buy” friendship, but if you are mean and never seen around at the right parties enjoying yourself, then often you’re not liked. You lose friends and get a reputation for being a bit of a tight wad.

So, in other words, as in so many of these general rules I’m laying down, you must try to tread the rather difficult middle path.

If you are fortunate enough to be highly intelligent you can make up a lot of leeway on your lack of experience or lack of knowledge of the business.

Of course, again, there are exceptions. You can be dumb and still be a star, but the chances are, not for long.

Any girl who wants to become a pop singer would do well to have Susan Maughan’s intelligence. It is, apart from her natural talent and her looks, her greatest attribute. She is a manager’s and publicity man’s dream.

John Lennon. for instance, is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met in the Pop world. And George Harrison surprised me once. We were going to a Press conference and I said: “Don’t you think you’d be better off wearing a shirt and tie rather than that sweater?”

He said: “Do you want me to wear a shirt and tie?” I said: “Yes.”

He said: “Why don’t you say, ‘I want you to wear a shirt and tie,’ instead of asking ME if I think it’s best?”

He was quite right. He wanted me to say exactly what I meant and it was “soft” (i.e., Liverpudlian for unintelligent!) of me to say it in a way I didn’t really mean.

I was, of course, coming from a different generation, merely trying to be diplomatic. But George, although he would never want to hurt anyone, says exactly what he thinks.

And this, in the Beatles’ environment, is intelligent. I can assure you.

There is a great deal to learn when you are an embryo star in the pop world, there are many emotional and material adjustments to be made and if you don’t happen to be highly intelligent by nature, then TRY to be.

Now, I’ve laid down all these rules, but I must emphasise there are exceptions to every one.

And no matter if you followed them all implicitly, no matter how talented you are, how brilliantly you are managed. how cleverly you are publicised, there are still outside influences over which you have no control.

So LUCK plays a big part in a would-be pop star’s success. If you don’t have any luck at all, you could well be in trouble.

But if you follow all these rules and work hard and really try to do what you feel to be true and right for you, then you have opened all the doors you can.

And sooner or later luck should come in through them.

Good luck!

The post How to become a pop star: a lot depends on your luck appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Generally speaking, I think it’s right for a singer or instrumentalist to have proper training, but it’s not essential.

I think John Lennon had a few guitar lessons but I’m sure the Beatles as a whole do not claim to have had professional training.

If they had it might well have destroyed their natural exuberant, gay spontaneity. I think professional training is more important for the individual artist than for the group.

First of all, you must have talent. Secondly, it is a good idea to bring out your talent by being professionally taught. But there is another danger here — and I think this should be your manager’s decision rather than yours — that your natural talent could be suppressed or misdirected by wrong tuition.

It would be silly to be taught by someone who doesn’t understand or like pop music, or cannot foresee the potential of the artist.

The thing to do is find a teacher who is both good at his job and who understands the business.

It might be a good idea to visit several teachers till you find one who suits your needs, who is interested in you and what you hope to achieve and, above all, who understands popular music.

The days when a new young star almost HAD to be good looking are over. Of course, good looks do help, especially on TV, but don’t despair if you’re not good looking.

Today most big artists arrive via the disc charts. That means via records and SOUND. If you make a good sound and your record sells enough to make the charts, and you can follow that up with another.

then you’re accepted anyway and your looks don’t matter.

One could say that the Pretty Things and the Rolling Stones were not good looking but some girls think they are. There is something about them the girls like. It’s the expression that’s so often important. No-one could call Ringo Starr good looking but millions of girls find him most attractive.

Look at the Beatles. Fourteen months ago people were saying they were an ugly lot of boys. But now there’s nothing but admiration for them. People go out of their way to talk about their good points as far as their features are concerned.

As I said, good looks like, say, Cliff Richard’s, must be an advantage when he does TV shows or films, but if you’re not as handsome as Cliff don’t worry. If you establish yourself with the right sound first, your looks take second place.

And who’s going to know if you’ve got talent if you don’t actually get up and sing? Forget your looks, that’s my advice.

The question of clothes requires very careful thought. It’s been proved beyond doubt by groups like the Rolling Stones and the Swinging Blue Jeans that you don’t have to be dressed smartly to be successful.

Both the Rolling Stones’ and the Beatles’ managements thought very carefully about how their groups should dress.

The fact that they both ended up with different answers is beside the point.

The Beatles are well groomed and wear more conventional suits. The Stones are professionally dishevelled and by that 1 don’t mean they’re dirty.

The Stones get an identification with a large section of the teenage public because they take casual dress to the nth degree.

You owe it to the public to be clean, shaved and have groomed finger nails. And your hair, like your clothes, no matter what style you decide upon, should be professionally done.

NEXT WEEK: How to avoid the pitfalls of success.

The post How to become a pop star: now – find the right sound appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

WHENEVER anyone asks me, and it’s amazing how many do, if there is one quality a budding pop star needs most of all, I always give the same one-word answer—talent.

If you don’t have talent you might as well go back to the farm, or the bank counter, or wherever it is you work.

Mind you, that talent may not be obvious. It often takes a clever manager to spot it because the person might be shy or trying to start off with the wrong style.

The Beatles illustrate the point. Brian Epstein, their manager, agrees with me that he was extremely lucky in finding four boys who had an incredible amount of talent between them. Some of that talent was obvious but some was not.

John Lennon’s was clear from the start and so was Paul McCartney’s to a slightly lesser extent in that they were both good at composing. But the latent talent in George Harrison and Ringo Starr emerged much later.

Today George is coming out with some really tricky guitar playing. He has proved himself an expert guitarist.

And Ringo has revealed a latent talent in his humour, his new comic image. This talent has been brought out by a process of evolution, actual experience, confidence from success and by being put on the right lines by Brian Epstein.

Another case of really obvious talent is Tommy Steele. He has now graduated from being only a pop singer to becoming a fine all-round entertainer. He always had this natural talent, coupled with a flair for putting it over.

This flair, too, is most important. You need personality to put your talent over.

If you don’t have the personality to put your talent over, you may just as well not have the talent.

Anthony Newley is another example of a man so talented that he emerged as a pop singer as an off-shoot from his main job of acting. He also helps write his own songs and stage shows.

How do you know if you’ve got talent? Most of the time if you are really talented, you won’t know. In fact, if you do think you’re the great undiscovered genius it might be as well to think again. For most talented people I’ve known did NOT know they were talented.

Often the real true artist is the last person to know just how talented he is.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t have the confidence to persevere. You MUST have that.

I remember when I was working in an assistant capacity as publicity man to Peter Sellers. We were watching a scene in a film he’d just made and he didn’t think it was very funny, although to everyone else it was. In fact, it was the funniest scene in the film, yet Peter wanted to do it again.

Just as the law courts will occasionally jail an innocent man or free a guilty man, most people know that justice is almost invariably done. It’s the same with talent in show business. If you’ve got it, you should win through.

There are the freaks — talents who just don’t get noticed and people who get a stardom they don’t deserve. But, generally speaking, talent will be recognised sooner or later and receive its just reward.

Above all, don’t be put off too easily. There may be a number of reasons why you might be told quite consistently by agents and managers that you are not what they want.

Maybe you have some rough edges and they can’t be bothered to smooth them out. Maybe you clash with someone else already on their books. Maybe there is something about you they don’t like, quite apart from your ability.

Never be misled by this. You must still press on. Be as honest as you can with yourself and if you really think you’ve got something, be confident in your own ability. But don’t be too clever or cocky about it.

I’ve just taken on a man called Deke Arion. I’m convinced, as are many who’ve seen him, that he’s very talented. He sings, does impersonations that are cleverly satirical. He compares favourably in the early stages with Tommy Steele or even with Danny Kaye. For all manner of reasons, he never signed with anyone, but now I’m certain he’s destined for stardom.

You may have all the talent in the world but without good management, in this highly competitive business, you don’t really have much chance.

I think the Beatles’ greatest debt of gratitude to Brian Epstein must be from the very early days, before they’d made their first couple of records, when Brian came from Liverpool and literally “sold” them to the recording industry.

This doesn’t apply in every case, of course. But Brian found a recording manager, a recording company and a music publisher and convinced them that the Beatles were worth knowing.

Brian had doors slammed in his face and people didn’t want to know him or the Beatles, but he worked very hard.

I do feel that without him they would never have been pushed so well. He brought their great talents to everyone’s notice. Of course, with their talents they would have been discovered by someone but there are very few managers with anything like Epstein’s abilities.

Brian was so convinced by the evidence of his eyes and ears—and he had experience from running a record shop— that he was inspired to work like he did.

And I would say it was essential for any budding pop star to have a manager who feels like this about him or her.

How do you go about finding a good manager? There are no hard and fast rules. A lot of it is inspired guesswork, a lot of it is sheer luck.

But you should be guided by your own instincts. Instinct is a wonderful thing in show business and first impressions are often right.

You should look, of course, for an honest and reputable person. And you must be convinced that when they say “I will do this or that for you” they mean it and are capable of really doing their best to fulfil their promises.

You should feel the manager has a personal interest in you, believes implicitly in your talent, and that in the face of criticism or in a tight corner he will fight for you and defend you — and not just because he’s paid for it.

He should also be aware of your bad points and idiosyncrasies and know how to counteract them.

As in all basic rules, there is a middle path to follow. Don’t depart too far from it.

Publicity, of course, goes hand in hand with good management. But there is one point I must make: Too many people have the idea in the pop world that if you get a good publicity man — you can include the manager in this, too—you are made.

That all you need then is a little bit of patience, a bit of determination and the right song.

This just isn’t true. Publicity is never a substitute for talent. At its best all publicity can do is present the artist, using all the media available, in the best possible light.

With intelligent thinking between yourself, the management and the publicity man, you can knock off the rough edges, project the artist’s best points, and try to play down, and if possible remove, some of the bad ones.

And there must be mutual trust. For instance, with the Kinks, we appreciate each other’s sense of humour. I appreciate their talents and I think they appreciate my professional ability, publicity-wise.

They know I’m working for them and although they may not see that what I am doing is the right thing, they do trust that eventually I will be shown to be right.

If you’re going to buy a new car or an odd looking shirt, if you’re going to change your hairstyle, if your dog is having pups, if your wife is having a baby, or whatever you are up to, it’s your duty to keep the publicity man informed.

It’s then up to him to see it is exploited in the right way. Keeping an artist’s name before the public in an interesting and glamorous way is very important.

NEXT WEEK: I’ll tell you about the time time even the Beatles needed publicity in 1964. And how to find the “right song”.

The post How to become a pop star appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE Small Faces will sing these lines during their number “I Can’t Make It” in The Morecambe and Wise Show on Sunday.

Just to print them, as above, costs £1 1s [£1.05 in decimal, £18.50 now allowing for inflation]. When the complete song is sung on television on Saturday the composers and publishers will share a further £53 12s. 7d. [about £53.63, £950] paid by the television company.

There’s money all right in words and music.

And the song-writing season is with us again.

Now, as the evenings draw in, thousands of more active amateurs, are tinkling, one-fingered, at pianos, fiddling with tape, juggling, jiggling and jingling to find that magic permutation of crochets, quavers, that spells … H—I—T.

Dick James is head of Northern Songs, who publish Beatle numbers. His quote: “We get 20 songs a week through the post in summer. Now our mailbag swells to 50 a week.” Multiply that by 400, the approximate number of British publishers.

That is 20,000 hopeful writers each week from now until spring.

You can’t blame them for trying to ring the bell.

Take television this week. Bobby Rydell as well as The Small Faces will sing pop songs in The Morecambe and Wise Show. So will The Dave Clark Five in The Golden Shot. So, probably, will at least one guest in The Eamonn Andrews Show. So will stars on more localised programmes.

Every time someone sings on a fully networked television show, the composers and publishers of that number are paid £53 12s. 7d. by the television company. On local stations a minimum of £6 [£106 allowing for inflation] is shared by the people behind the song.

Ah yes, but how do they keep track of each performance? The writer doesn’t have to bother. It’s done for him by the Performing Right Society. They collect more than £5 million [£88.5m] a year from performances all over the world, even behind the Iron Curtain. Last year from ITV alone they collected £687,950 [£13m].

So you want to be a songwriter? Perry Ford, of The Ivy League, writes about 15 numbers that are recorded each year.

He is one of the elite “in-crowd” among Britain’s song writers. His quote: “My first ever song ‘Someone Else’s Baby,’ in 1960, was a hit for Adam Faith. It just came into my head when I was tinkling the piano.

“The record sold a quarter of a million copies. My cut was £1,500.” [£27,000]

BUT … if someone sings a song by Perry in the Eamonn Andrews Show on Sunday, his share would be £26 16s. 3½d. [about £26.82 in decimal, £475 after inflation]

There are 970 full members of The Song Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, and 890 associate members (the part-time songwriters). A few years ago, the Performing Right Society worked out the average earnings from royalties for a composer was £400 [£7000] a year.

But it is virtually impossible to pin down the “average” in song writing. You can earn a fortune one year (“A Whiter Shade of Pale” could earn £30,000 [£532,000]) and nothing for the next two. Royalties can keep dribbling in for decades.

A high percentage of the songs we hear each week originate from a nucleous of established writers — Perry Ford, Chris Andrews, Graham Gouldman, Les Reed, Mitch Murray, Mick Jagger and Keith Richard (of The Rolling Stones), Tom Springfield.

And, of course, the pop daddies of ’em all, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Round figures become staggering when you investigate their song-writing activities. By the end of the year, they should have completed 120 numbers.

A recent audit showed, since they started five years ago, 2,921 different versions have been recorded, selling 200,000,000 copies at an iceberg cool £20,000,000 [£355m]. And we’re not counting Performing Right Royalties.

In its first 18 months of existence Northern Songs received £289,292 [£5m] in royalties. A quarter of the holdings were sold when the company went public. John and Paul netted £96,875 [£1.7m] each. Tax free — this was before the capital gains tax was introduced.

Dick James, balding, with heavily-rimmed spectacles, sits behind a huge executive desk around the corner from Tin Pan Alley and talks song-writing amicably, but briskly.

“1 wouldn’t buy a song outright. In the past, hard-up writers have sold their interest for a quick fiver and thrown away thousands in royalties Now we work on a shared basis. It gives the business a better reputation.

“No, I don’t think any intentional plagiarism goes on. But be fair: there are only 13 notes for song-writers, amateurs or professionals, to play with. They’ve been permutated for hundreds of years. There are bound to be accidental coincidences.”

But with pop songs, some people, some of the time, just can’t go wrong. No wonder so many people are tinkering with pianos and fiddling with tape recorders now the darker evenings are here.

You’ve heard Dick’s voice at some time or other. You must have, singing the signature tune of ITV’s marathon series Robin Hood. He recorded it in 1955 a month before ITV started and accepted a £100 [£2,610] flat fee. They used the fifth of 37 takes.

Dick said, ruefully: “If I had had a modest royalty, say five bob a performance, I would have made thousands from it. But I did earn £3,000 [£78,000] from record sales of the same number.”

The post Lanning and the write-price of pop appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

If 1965 could be said to be the peak year of the Beatles’ fame with their being awarded their honour by the Queen, their third and most successful tour yet of the United States, their film “Help” a smash box-office success although they didn’t think much of it themselves, plus every record they chose to release going straight to the top of the charts in Britain and almost as quickly in the U.S.A., 1965 could also be said to be the year that we glimpsed the pattern of the future and 1966 could be said to be the year when the big question mark had to be answered — Where do we go from here?

To this writer’s mind the most significant thing about 1965, Beatle-wise, came at the end of the year when two songs written by Lennon and McCartney, “Yesterday” and “Michelle”, caused a sensation sung by other artistes than The Beatles.

Lennon and McCartney have always been a great song-writing team and each Beatles’ number they wrote seemed to get better and better, culminating, in the writer’s opinion, with the very beautiful “We Can Work It Out”, but all these have been Beatle songs sung by The Beatles. Other artistes have sung them, of course, but so far don’t seem, again in this writer’s opinion, to have really got hold of them. Several of these Beatles’ songs will in time become standards, of that there is little doubt, but at the moment they are overshadowed by the aura of The Beatles’ own performance of them, so that we cannot be wholly sure. With “Yesterday” and “Michelle” we have two songs that will undoubtedly become standards, and in each case gaining their effect just as much, if not more, when sung by other artistes.

As good as Paul McCartney’s own rendering of “Yesterday” in The Beatles’ L.P. was, it didn’t come up to the performance given it by Matt Munro, which deservedly made the Top Ten.

So these two songs show the future of two of The Beatles quite clearly, confirming what we always suspected, that we have in them two of the greatest writers of popular music that this generation will produce.

What of The Beatles as a group. For 1966, as we said was a year of problems and questions.

Many fans get up in arms at the mention of The Beatles or any of their favourites being finished, but sometimes forget the real question which is not, “Is the public tired of them?” which the public obviously isn’t, but “Are The Beatles tired of being The Beatles”.

To many fans the idea that The Beatles might wish to stop being The Beatles or Elvis Presley might wish to stop being called The King seems ludicrous. They cannot estimate or even begin to understand that what started out as a great adventure years before, when you had no money and there was all the world to gain, can become not only a bore, but a physical strain when you have enough money to provide you with a rich man’s income for the rest of your life, and yet the public still requires you to perform, expecting each of your offerings to be better than the last, and yet still forcing you to lead a life that is constantly circumscribed by the necessity of securing you from the over-eager admiration of your fans.

Presley found the answer by confining himself entirely to films and although he has gone on making records, his apparent reluctance to cut any new discs, apart from those required for his films, seems to indicate that he, at least, would welcome an easing-off of the fans’ admiration or rather that wild, out-of-hand admiration which seems to be confined almost entirely to recording stars.

Can The Beatles find this answer? Their first film “A Hard Day’s Night” wasn’t as successful as many people thought it might be. It was made on a cheap budget and there were some mistakes left in it that should have been cut out. It was almost as though it had been tried to put the film on to the world’s screens for as little money as possible as quickly as possible.

“Help” was an entirely different kettle of fish and has been a smash success. However, The Beatles proclaimed themselves not altogether pleased with it, and most critics thought it rather over-gimmicked and an attempt at something that didn’t quite come off.

This underlines the problem in making a film about four people. Many people draw the rather obvious parallel with the Marx Brothers and have tried to make out that The Beatles could be another Marx Brothers. Can they?

Well to some extent they have developed different characters. Paul McCartney, the juvenile, John Lennon, the master-mind, Ringo the sardonic clown, George, the burbling good-natured, “uncle” figure. The trouble is quite a number of readers won’t agree with me and will see them in quite a different set of roles—the only one that would be more in general agreement, being Paul as the juvenile romantic lead.

So far, however, the four have not shown themselves to be capable of emulating the talents of the Marx Brothers, and probably they themselves wouldn’t want to be a second lot of Marx Brothers anyway — The Beatles are nothing if not originals.

No doubt that they will be able to work out some satisfactory four-man act in time, which might prove the successful basis of a series of films starring the four boys.

Again, the question mark, may be put after the words — if they want to. It might well be that Ringo with a family and a string of investments, might after perhaps one more film and another American tour, be prepared to call it a day and take life easy on the proceeds. John and Paul obviously have a bright and permanent future ahead of them as composers, which might leave only George Harrison, who married early in the year, wanting to go on as a Beatle.

All this is in the realm of speculation. From the Beatles’ fans’ point of view and wishes The Beatles will go on for ever and there is no doubt they can for how many umpteen more years. The question still remains, however, will they want to?

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