The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and Geniuses of Rock Music

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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.” 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. He has worked with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Ronettes, Elton John and many more, and his personal friendships included Queen frontman Freddie Mercury.

The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and - WHSmith The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and - WHSmith

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’. The Tastemaker has a nice conversational tone. It is warm, full of good humor and insight like the man himself. Tony eventually repairs to America where he works with John Lennon and Ringo Starr on their solo work. Lennon had an edge to him. You didn’t want to get on his wrong side, because he could cut you down’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.” King would spend inordinate amounts of time with Lennon and for a while became his regular drinking buddy. Marc writes (main picture): I specifically focused on the South Africa captain Siya Kolisi, far left, as he sung the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, as he sings with so much passion and emotion. Suffused with Tony King's disarming warmth and unparalleled charisma – and at times profoundly moving – The Tastemaker paints an intimate portrait of a music legend and captures the unpredictable world he stamped his indelible mark upon.

The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and - WHSmith

I asked Freddie outright if he was gay and he said, ‘Well, yeah.’ So I said, ‘Does Mary know? And he said, ‘Well, I haven’t said anything.’ So I told him he had to live an honest life and if you don’t live an honest life then you’re not going to be very happy. Within 24 hours he called me up and he goes, ‘Well, darling, I’ve done it.’ I said, ‘What do you mean ‘done it’?’ He said, ‘I told Mary and she was OK.’ Tony King (standing, third left) with the Ronettes, Phil Spector (seated) and George Harrison in 1964. Photograph: From the author’s collection This is a brilliant book by a brilliant man. A magician with perfect taste. Thank God I met him. He is gold dust!” - Elton JohnI 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.” I’d lie on the bed with [Freddie Mercury] and hold his stone-cold hand while he bid for things from Christie’s’ King worked for Hall for three years before being poached by Andrew Loog Oldham, who at the time was managing The Rolling Stones and was even younger than King. This was when Swinging London started to move through the gears and when suddenly teenagers were in positions of genuine power. i remember descriptions of tony from elton john's autobiography, and it was immediatelly clear how immersed he was in the scene. tony was a guest on probably the best beatles podcast there is (something about the beatles), where he promoted the book and i knew it is a must-read for me.

Tony King — Robert Caskie Tony King — Robert Caskie

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.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. What is it with prisons on TV at the moment? If it’s not Time sending you to bed petrified... Banged Up On John Lennon "But John was special, too. I always say that, of the Beatles, he was the Jose Mourinho-the special one."

The Tastemaker by Tony King, review: A man with tales to tell

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.”

Summary

Rugby union | Premiership guide Why omens are bad for Gloucester at Sale, Exeter’s stat kings and Leicester on alert I became enamoured with people who knew what they were doing. Jagger certainly knew what he was doing’ I thought he was the most stylish person I had ever seen,” says Elton John. “He had elegance from the word go.”