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From there he worked his way into the music industry in the London of the swinging sixties. His timing could not have been better. By the time King discovered he had contracted HIV himself, drugs were available that meant the disease was no longer a death sentence. Nevertheless, he ended up in rehab after a breakdown that seems to have been brought about by seeing so many friends die: “I’d just suffered so much grief. Survivor’s guilt.” 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.
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.King would spend inordinate amounts of time with Lennon and for a while became his regular drinking buddy. 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’. He spent more than sixty years in the music industry working as promotion man, creative director, label chief and personal manager to some of the biggest stars out of the UK. 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. 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.
King has successfully worked on many of the iconic albums and tours of the last 60 years. He has earned his moniker of ‘Tastemaker’. 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. 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.’
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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.”
I’d lie on the bed with [Freddie Mercury] and hold his stone-cold hand while he bid for things from Christie’s’
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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. I thought he was the most stylish person I had ever seen,” says Elton John. “He had elegance from the word go.” Tony King (standing, third left) with the Ronettes, Phil Spector (seated) and George Harrison in 1964. Photograph: From the author’s collection 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.
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.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. 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.
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