The Eastbourne boy who worked with The Stones and The Beatles

The next time Tony saw his headmaster, however, Tony had just flown in on Concorde – one of the tales he tells from his remarkable career in his new book The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and Geniuses of Rock Music (hardback £20, eBook £9.99, audiobook £29.99).

Leaving school at the age of 16 to start his career in the music industry at Decca Records, Tony soon found himself becoming a close friend and confidant to some of the world’s biggest artists. He went on to work with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Ronettes, Elton John and many more, with personal friendships including Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. Sir Elton, no less, describes Tony as “gold dust.” It’s fair to say Tony has had the last laugh when it comes to that disapproving headmaster all those years ago.

Tony, who is now aged 80, admits it was lockdown perhaps above all that prompted him to start writing the book: “During lockdown I was chatting to a friend of mine David Walliams and he was saying I really should get on and do the book. He said ‘Tony, this is a good chance to do it now!’ I had been putting it off but during the lockdowns I had the time.”

Tony had been working on Elton John's tour but the tour stopped: “And I realised that I was just really at the age where I should do it. Before that I had been living it all still! I chose a wonderful ghost writer. He came here for ten weeks for three hours at a time and I just talked to him. We had these endless conversations and he turned them into the book.”

Obviously the 60s were a great decade but Tony points out he very very much loved the 50s before them too: “I loved everything rock 'n' roll and I always loved to dance. Anything that I could dance to, I was happy and I would go along to the YMCA in Eastbourne on Thursdays for sixpence for jiving. They would put the record player up on orange boxes.”

As for the 60s: “I was working as a promotions man and I was just caught up in the middle of it all. I was working for Decca and I met The Beatles and The Stones. It was fantastic. It was very fast but it was also very creative and it was like everyone was good at what they were doing at the same time. It wasn't just the music. It was hairdressers and fashions and everything really. There was a wonderful shared feeling and you got caught up in it. I knew it was exciting and I felt the excitement but it was just part and parcel of what I did and I just had to get up and show up and do my job. I'd be looking after the American artists coming to England and I would be going off to Heathrow to pick up Roy Orbison. It was exciting times.”

Tony met The Beatles on the Pop In show that Keith Fordyce used to do: “The idea was that you popped in and you brought in an artist. I was there with a guy called Chris Montez and in walked The Beatles though they were not really The Beatles back then as we know them now. This was 1963 and they had had only one hit by then and they hadn't yet gone to America. They were coming in to promote Please Please Me which became their first number one hit but as soon as they came in it was just like a force field of energy around them and I remember thinking who are these guys. They just really stood out especially John Lennon with such a big personality and I just knew that these guys were going to be huge.”

As for the Stones, initially Tony took a little persuading. “Chrissie Shrimpton was Mick Jagger’s girlfriend at the time and Chrissie said to me ‘My boyfriend is a band. Do you want to come and see them?’ My first impression was not tremendous. I was a huge Beatles fan at that time and I thought they were good but I wasn't bowled over. It was not until Andrew Loog Oldham played me Satisfaction that I realised just how fantastic they were and that they were also going to be absolutely huge.”

Tony started his career in the music industry at Decca Records in 1958 before going on to become the youngest promotion man of the time. After setting up Immediate Records with Loog Oldham, he was approached by Sir George Martin’s independent production company to promote his artists and others in the company, including The Beatles, Cilla Black and Tom Jones. In 1970, Tony joined Apple Records as general manager, continuing to work with The Beatles before becoming executive vice-president of Elton John’s label, Rocket. He later headed up disco promotion at RCA, going on to act as the label’s creative director. He left RCA in 1984 to tour with Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones for over 20 years and eventually became Elton John’s creative director for nine years.

Living in an era of seismic social, technological and cultural transformation, Tony experienced the 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 as witness to the AIDS crisis and the devastating consequences. His personal life was intermittently marked by tumult and turmoil.

Tony was born in London and was there for the first few years but moved down to Eastbourne with his parents – actually his grandparents though he knew them as mum and dad: “My mum had TB and we moved down south with my mum who was really my grandmother so that she could take the air. She went straight into an open-air hospital. I would have been about six at the time so it would have been about 1948. I used to go up to see her in the open-air hospital and she used to say how the foxes would come up under the beds. They had to sleep with the windows open because it was part of the treatment and she was eventually cured. I grew up in Eastbourne and I loved it. It was quite an idyllic childhood. I loved the gentility of Eastbourne and I loved the beach and swimming and I loved going up on the South Downs. I would go out primrose picking with mum, and we would go out blackberrying in September. I used to scoff a lot of them and she could always tell by my black tongue! And then when I first started working for Decca, I used to travel up every day on the train. I would get the 7.12 from Eastbourne to London and then the 6.45 back home and mum would have dinner in the oven. I did that for three years before I moved to London.”

Already the accolades for the book are coming in: “This is a brilliant book by a brilliant man. A magician with perfect taste. Thank God I met him. He is gold dust!” Elton John; “Astounding. The Tastemaker takes us back to a time when gods walked among us. It was always about the music, and Tony King's memoir takes you there.” Andrew Oldham