Knitting Circle Simon Napier-Bell
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Simon Napier-BellBorn 22nd. April, 1939, in Ealing Common, London.British pop group manager, writer, and journalist.
In 1940 his mother took him and his elder sister to Devon to escape the bombing, but they returned to London in 1941. They went to Devon again in 1943, and in 1944 Simon Napier-Bell was sent to a local school.
The family were back in London in 1945, and in 1946 Simon Napier-Bell was sent to the private school St Michaels in Montpelier Road, Ealing. However by 1947 the family was in financial difficulties and Simon Napier-Bell was moved to North Ealing primary school in Pitshanger Lane. In 1948 improving family finances meant that he could be sent to the boys' school, Durston House, in Ealing.
In 1949 the family moved to Ruislip and in 1950 Simon Napier-Bell started at the Grammar School. He was not happy there and so in 1953 he was sent to Bryanston, a public school in Dorset. He formed a school jazz band with himself playing the cornet.
In 1956 at the age of 17 he left school and got a job as a roadie with the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra. He also worked semi-professionally as a musician and intended to eventually earn his living that way.
In 1957 he travelled to Canada with the ambition of becoming a jazz trumpeter. When he arrived he discovered that the American Federation of Musicians required him to be a resident for a year before he could join the union. He got a job in a dockside pub in Montreal where he played pop songs. He left Canada and hitch-hiked across the USA. He then spent some time in Spain.
He returned to London in 1959 and he had realised that he was gay, although he would continue to have sex with women occasionally. He joined his father's film business and worked as an assistant film editor. He met, Billy, a young man his own age, and they moved in together. He became part of the gay subculture in London and often in the clubs he saw such famous people asNoël Coward, Johnnie Ray, Dan Farson,John Gielgud, Bob Boothby, Ronnie Kray, Jeremy Thorpe, andJohnny Mathis. He got to know the important gay people in the music industry includingLarry Parnes,Lionel Bart, and Joe Lockwood. He went to the gay clubs around London, including the Calabash in Fulham run by the photographer Leon Maybank, the Festival Club off St Martin's Lane, the Rockingham Club, and the A&B in Soho.
In the early 1960s he had his own film company called Nomis (Simon spelled backwards), hiring out film editing equipment and producing television commercials and documentaries. He was the assistant editor for the filmThe Caretaker, (1964). He took the job of editing and synchronising Burt Bacharach's music for the filmWhat's New Pussycat?, (1965), directed by Clive Donner.
Around 1965 he met Vicki Wickham who booked the acts for the television pop programmeReady Steady Go. She suggested that he get into the music business as a manager. His first venture was with three actors who were in the musicalFlower Drum Song. They got together to form the group Room Ten but he soon dropped them when he realised that they would not be successful. Vicki Wickham then told him that some lyrics were needed for an Italian song thatDusty Springfieldhad found at the San Remo Music Festival. They devised the titleYou don't have to say you love meover a half hour after dinner and then completed the rest of the words during a ten-minute taxi ride on the way to the Ad Lib club. Dusty Springfield had a great success with the song in the 1960s, and when Elvis Presley also performed the song in the 1970s a good income for the songwriters was secured.
The songwriting business seemed like hard work so he decided to get another group to manage. At the time a West Indian girl called Diane Ferraz was working on a television commercial for him and a small, pale, seventeen-year-old man, Nicky Scott, was a boyfriend who was also causing him grief, so he got them to record a romantic song and pressurised radio and television producers to book them. The record was a flop but after two months Nicky and Diane were well known.
As a result of this successful promotion The Yardbirds contacted him and asked him to manage them and he produced the groups last major hitOver Under Sideways Downin 1966. He also got them a role in Michelangelo Antonioni's film,Blow Up, (1966).
In 1967 he was on holiday in St Tropez when the two English musicians, John Hewlett and Chris Townson, asked him to bail them out of prison there. (They had been arrested for vagrancy). The two musicians persuaded Simon Napier-Bell that they were part of a pop group who were destined for great success. He signed them up, but when he saw their group, The Silence, back in Britain he thought that they were the worst group he had seen. He renamed them John's Children after the bass player, and they were later signed up with Track Records run byKit Lambert. They were put on tour with The Who. Marc Bolan asked Simon Napier-Bell to manage him and he was persuaded to be the lead singer of John's Children. It was not long before Marc Bolan formed Tyrannosaurus Rex (later called T. Rex) and Simon Napier-Bell ceased to manage him.
Simon Napier-Bell was the musical director for the filmHere We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, (1968).
He joined up with the songwriter Ray Singer in founding a production company called Rocking Horse and they touted schemes around gullible record producers to persuade them to give advances for records from groups they claimed to manage but which often did not yet exist. Holding talent contests to create groups they produced records at minimum cost so that they could keep the remainder of the advances. Some of the records were intentionally unsuccessful. However, the group Fresh had a success withFresh out of Borstal, and the group Forevermore also had success with their recordForevermore. Members of Fresh went on to become part of the group Glencoe, and members of Forevermore went on to become part of the group the Average White Band.
In 1970 Simon Napier-Bell retired from the British music business to travel around the world. However he continued to have some connections with pop music and after six years he plunged back into the business.
In 1972 he decided that with so many British people going to Spain for their holidays it was time to launch a Spanish singer. He went to Madrid and auditioned Julio Iglesias but judged that his style of singing would not be popular. He took on a singer called Junior from the 1960s group Los Brincos. He had a number 1 hit in Spain and South America but did not make it in Britain.
Simon Napier-Bell also managed the punk group London which included Jon Moss who was later to join Culture Club withBoy George. London were very short-lived.
In 1977 he took on the management of the group Japan and they had some success in the early 1980s, particularly with their albumTin Drum.
He and Jazz Summers teamed and founded Nomis Management. Simon Napier-Bell then saw Wham!, which consisted ofGeorge Michaeland Andrew Ridgely, performingYoung Guns (Go For It), (November, 1982), on the BBC showTop of the Pops. After many months of pursuit he signed them up. Wham! also had the hit singles ,Wham! Rap, (February, 1983), andBad Boys, (May, 1983), and he took charge asClub Tropicana, (August, 1983), was coming out. Their albumFantasticwent straight to number 1 in the Autumn of 1983. However, at the same time that legal moves were being made to release them from their contract with Innervision George Michael said that he wanted to go solo. This was put off and they produced the singleWake Me Up Before You Go Go, (May, 1984), which went straight to number 1 in the UK and USA. The singleCareless Whisper, (August, 1984), was then released in the UK as being by George Michael. Simon Napier-Bell fulfilled a promise that he had made when signing up Wham! and organised a stadium concert in China. It took place on 7th. April 1985 at the Worker's Stadium in Beijing and was financed using a 1 million advance from CBS. At the end of 1985 Wham! ended its relationship with Simon Napier-Bell and Jazz Summers somewhat acrimoniously, and George Michael then left Wham! for his solo career.
TheDaily Mailprinted excerpts of Albert Goldman's book on John Lennon and mentioned thatBrian Epsteinwas gay. They also printed a photograph of Simon Napier-Bell with a caption saying that he was not a homosexual. He consulted a lawyer about suing for libel but they decided not to pursue the case because it would be possible to show that he had had sex with girls.
He managed the duo Blue Mercedes which had one straight man and one gay man. The duo formed in London in 1984 with singer David Titlow and keyboard player Duncan Millar. They had one worldwide hitI Want To Be Your Property, in 1987, as it went straight to number 1 in the US dance charts and stayed there for 14 weeks. They toured widely and they had a series of singles:See Want Must Have,Love is the Gun,Treehouse/Crunchy Love Affair, andThat Beauty is You/Love Peace Hate & War, but they were not successful. Their albumRich and Famouswas in the US charts briefly in 1988.
Simon Napier-Bell took on the management of Asia, a progressive rock band from the 1970s.
He appeared as himself in the filmThe Brian Epstein Story, (1998).
He became the manager of the most famous pop star in Russia, Alsou.
His bookYou Don't Have To Say You Love Mewas first published in 1983 and caused a stir even though he had taken the advice of his publisher and left out a chapter on sex. The 1998 edition re-instated this chapter.
His bookBlack Vinyl White Powder, (2001), is ostensibly about the importance of drugs to the music industry in Britain but in the forward he says "e;... as I proceeded with the book, I began to see that of almost equal importance was the influence of gay culture"e;. He proceeds to describe the influence of gay figures such as the pop and rock managersLarry Parnes, (Tommy Steele, Billy Fury and many others),Brian Epstein, (Beatles),Kit Lambert, (The Who), Tony Stratton-Smith, (The Nice), Ken Pitt, (Crispian St Peters), Robert Stigwood, (Cream), Vic Billings, (Dusty Springfield), Ken Howard and Allan Blaikely, (Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch), Andrew Oldham, (Rolling Stones), and Tom Watkins (Bros, Pet Shop Boys, East 17). Also featured are the songwriterLionel Bart, the EMI chair Joseph Lockwood, the producers Norman Newell andJoe Meek, the marketing manager and BPI chair Maurice Oberstein, and the performersMarc Almond, Andie Bell,Freddie Mercury,George Michael,Elton John,Tom Robinson,Boy George,Holly Johnson, and Paul Rutherford.
"e;It was fascinating, from the sixties onwards, to see how often gays and their lifestyle had cropped up in the history of British music business. The number of gay people in major record companies has been negligible. Even the number of gay artists has been very small. Yet their importance seems to outweigh their numbers. In one form or another, the influence of gays on the British industry has been on a par with the influence of blacks and black music on the American industry."e;Black Vinyl White Powder, page 344.
Writing- You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, 1998, published by Ebury Press, 195 pages, ISBN 0 09 186453 4 (paperback).
- Black Vinyl White Powder, 2001, published by Ebury Press, 390 pages, ISBN 0 09 186992 7 (hardback).
- Scams, blags and pretty boysby Jah Wobble inThe Independent on Sunday magazine, 1st. April, 2001, page 45. "e;The book is a testament to the radical changes in social attitudes that have occurred in Britain over the last 50 years. For example, the change in the way homosexuality is now viewed by society is discussed. The author claims the advent of the 1960s dance craze the Twist made all the difference. At that time, states Napier-Bell, it became acceptable for men to dance together. Hardly a chapter seems to go by without mention of the strong links between the gay world and the music business. Napier-Bell records his own unfussy and pragmatic coming out at the end of the 1950s."e;
"e;Like so many people in the music game, Napier-Bell loves a scam and a blag. He boasts about his greatest one to date, getting Wham! into communist China in the 1980s. I couldn't help thinking of Chairman Mao's comments about Western rock music leading to promiscuity, homosexuality and drug addiction. Hmmm... perhaps he had a point."e;
- Music - the key to getting rich, high and laidby Charles Shaar Murray inThe Independent: The Thursday Review, 5th. April, 2001, page 5. "e;As a gay man exploring the music business, he joined a parade of posh gay managers who acquired stables of sulky-pretty working-class louts and sold them on to teenage girls. What keeps the book jumping is his acute sense of the multiple dialectics (between idealism and commerce, bohemian élitism and mass culture, art and entertainment) and complex power structures (producers, promoters, publicists, performers, publishers and publics) that drive pop's evolution."e;
- The sound and the furyby Ian Penman inThe Guardian Saturday Review, 14th. April, 2001, page 8. "e;Simon Napier-Bell can probably look forward to an obituary - man who took Wham! to China! - that marks the apotheosis of a life spent pulling: strings, strokes, the other one."e;
"e;Pop's real scandals involve low-end financial and contractual practices, but such is their small-print nature that they tend to fall all too conveniently between the business pages and the tabloid splash, and are rarely aired. Thus, the real insider revelations here concern the business of business. Napier-Bell is good on the inelegantly Byzantine clauses of early-1960s pop and how the major labels have always used self-serving sharp practices (like chart rigging) to 'police' themselves."e;
- Sex 'n' drugs 'n' pounds 'n' penceby Ronita Dutta inThe Times Higher Education Supplement, 10th. August, 2001, page 29. "e;Napier-Bell knows that if you scratch the surface of pop music you will find more surface. Pop music is not about dates, statistics and facts. It is about fun and frivolity: beautiful people wearing sparkly clothing striking inane poses to a simple melody. If you think too hard about it, you miss the point. So Napier-Bell avoids the stuffiness of other music histories by sprinkling his account with insider anecdotes, quotes, witticisms and observations about chart fixing, drug taking, copyright wrangles, image making and other mores of the milieu."e;
Bibliography
Press cuttings- Daddy coolby Kathryn Fox inThe Pink Paper, 16th. March, 2001, issue 677, pages 22-26. "e;There is today, surprisingly given the business he's been working in, a strong streak of steely integrity and self-control running through this man, born out of the fact that he has 'been completely faithful to all my serious boyfriends - and still am to my current one'. Simon thinks relationships are emotionally important but doesn't appear to indulge in sentimentality. When relating his own pathway to sexual enlightenment, he is quite candid. 'I am bisexual, but not bi-emotional,' In other words, he can get it up for women but lacks the emotionality he feels for men. 'I'm attracted to effeminate young men, and my current boyfriend of 11 years is Thai, and 30 years younger than me'."e;
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administrator@knittingcircle.org.ukFirst uploaded 13th. April, 2001.
Last altered 15th. July, 2005