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

Product Information

Lennon had an edge to him. You didn’t want to get on his wrong side, because he could cut you down’ 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’. This is a brilliant book by a brilliant man. A magician with perfect taste. Thank God I met him. He is gold dust!'

The Tastemaker by Tony King: My Life with the Legends and The Tastemaker by Tony King: My Life with the Legends and

I suppose I was always very straightforward, a straight speaker,” King says. “I wasn’t an artist but I understood the artists, I was in their camp. I think I had an innate understanding of what artists needed, and I didn’t put up with bullshit.”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. Later that summer, as King prepared Lennon's new album for the pop music marketplace, he proposed the concept of a Thanksgiving gig to the former Beatle. "So he says to me," King recalled, "'I'll tell you what, if the record gets to number one, I'll do it.' Of course, he was never thinking it was going to get to number one." Propelled by a deft marketing campaign — and aided, no doubt, by Elton's superstardom during that era — "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" topped the U.S. charts. 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.”

The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and Geniuses o…

King would spend inordinate amounts of time with Lennon and for a while became his regular drinking buddy. 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.Tony King (standing, third left) with the Ronettes, Phil Spector (seated) and George Harrison in 1964. Photograph: From the author’s collection As Lennon was going into semi-retirement, and as Apple was winding down, King started looking around for his next perch. While he's undoubtedly a lovely guy, unfortunately his anecdotes and descriptions don't often venture beyond the superficial. A lot of the autobiographies/biographies books I have this year have been either been sports related or music related, and I am absolutely fine with that. 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.’

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

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.”

The Tastemaker has a nice conversational tone. It is warm, full of good humor and insight like the man himself.