The Day I Was "Outed" by Britain's Premier Newspaper...
A Bizarre Experience For A Young Straight Man in the 1970s
This is a recollection from my early days in the UK music industry in the very early 1970s. Initially an aspiring freelance music journalist - subsequently a record company publicist.
In those days I attended many record industry parties designed to schmooze and influence journalists. By far the best ones were organized - with vast sums of WEA (Warner-Elektra-Atlantic) Records money - by Derek Taylor who had been the Beatles’ publicist for key years of their exalted reign in the 1960s.
The WEA parties were extravagant, lavish and very successful. I enjoyed them immensely. And I saw how effective they were at generating positive media coverage. I attended several as a nascent journalist - then later as a staff member of that same record company - where I had the immense good fortune to become a protégé of Derek Taylor. Learning the art of publicity at his feet.
The most famous of the many bashes organized by Taylor was a junket in June 1972 to launch Alice Cooper in the UK. Derek got WEA Records to take over a famous fun-fair at Chessington Zoo in Surrey. Ferried everyone there on coaches loaded with booze. Male music journalists (99% of them were male) were given their wildest fantasies. Unlimited free rides on every fairground attraction. Vast amounts of free booze. Huge amounts of tasty, trashy fast food - burgers, hot dogs & fries etc - all dished up by scads of young sexy models dressed as teenage English schoolgirls... (Derek totally understood the mentality of male journalists!)
It was a massive success. Immediately after it - Alice Cooper had "arrived" in the UK. “Schools (Girls) Out” as it were…
By late 1973 I was working at a very small indie company - Transatlantic Records. Formed in 1961 it was actually the first UK indie record company. Island, Chrysalis, Charisma, Virgin all followed in its footsteps.
The company owner Nat Joseph was a very savvy, instinctive fellow. I was very young - but he sensed that I might have the native smarts and zeal to deliver for him. And indeed I did. He initially asked me to be the company’s press officer. Which in the UK record industry was the equivalent of being what was called a Publicity Director in the US music business. Responsible for obtaining coverage for all the company’s artists in Britain’s then all-important print media.
But I turned down that position. I wanted to undertake the same role for Transatlantic that my mentor/hero Derek fulfilled for Warner-Atlantic-Elektra. Derek didn’t work on the entire artist roster of the company. He focused on just a very select handful of acts. That he felt would benefit from concentrated attention.
Moreover - and very crucially - he governed all aspects of the artist’s interactions with the media. Not just print but also radio and TV. Together with the key elements of their visual and graphic identity. It was a unique holistic approach. More akin to a combination of artist management and strategic marketing than traditional record label publicity.
That’s what I wanted to do as well. At the grand old age of just 20!
So it was that I was permitted to self-style with the same job title that Derek held: "Special Projects Manager".
To my delight, my initial forays into launching and developing a select few musical artists were successful at generating large amounts of media coverage. It was a combination of what I'd gleaned from my time with Derek - and what I discovered were my own innate skills. I was on my way in music publicity and marketing...
In late 1973, a project came up at Transatlantic that cried out for a grand media party. The launch of an album of bawdy comedic songs tied-in to a new Australian comedy movie created by Barry Humphries (best known for his comedic character “Dame Edna”). The film was "The Adventures of Barry McKenzie" - the first film directed by Bruce Beresford ("Breaker Morant", "Tender Mercies", "Driving Miss Daisy"). Barry McKenzie was a character created by Humphries that hilariously lampooned the boorish, beer-ish young Australian men who had invaded London in the 1960s and beyond.
A private screening of the new film coupled with a boozy reception would surely generate vast amounts of media coverage and sell the album to millions of Britons eager to own a collection of bawdy Australian drinking songs. What could possibly go wrong?!
But in its then 12 years of existence - Nat Joseph and his Transatlantic Records had never thrown big parties for the media. That was what big record companies with big budgets did.
I was told I could only do a party if it cost the record company literally zero! A wiser twenty-year-old would have seen the warning signs! But I was foolish enough to see that as a challenge! I put together a huge party that cost Transatlantic nothing - hustling freebies from anyone and everyone. Including the Australian Food Commission, the Aussie Tourist Board - and quite crucially - Fosters lager - the Australian alcoholic nectar of choice.
Without going into more details here - as amusing as they are - the party was wild and massively over-crowded. It was gate-crashed by seemingly the entire expatriate population of young Australian men in London - perhaps lured by illicitly-Xeroxed copies of the invitation that promised "Free Booze! Free Sheilahs!" - the latter being Aussie slang for nubile girls. It was the "Springtime For Hitler" of entertainment industry launch parties. So gargantuanly ghastly that it was a funny disaster.
There were several media reactions to the party. The UK equivalent of Billboard - Music Week - ran a story that called the event "The Worst Party Of The Year - or Possibly Ever!" (It's always good to have a superlative I think...)
And there was a diary item in the world's oldest and most august newspaper - The Times.
(A contextual note for American readers: That paper is never called the "London Times" or the "UK Times" - just THE Times - emblematic of the British arrogance at the time that it was founded in 1785 - that Britain was the centre of the universe. An arrogance that perversely only increases the more diminished its role in global affairs becomes.)
It was my first mention by name in The Times.
I recently excavated the clip that appeared in The Times. There is a link to it below - in all its embarrassing detail.
There is a reference in the story to me wearing a sailor-boy shirt (!) that had huge camp/gay connotations then - implications that had entirely eluded the young and innocent hetero me when I purchased the chemise!
So that was an additional embarrassment. (Not that there's anything wrong with being a “sailor”!)
I had been “outed”.
It was bizarre for a young straight lad. I was certainly not good-looking enough to be “gay”!
When I bought the shirt I was naively thinking that I was making a daring fashion choice inspired by the cover art for Gerry Rafferty's first solo album which had been recently released by Transatlantic.
Think again…
Eight years later another British newspaper - Rupert Murdoch's tabloid the Sun - breathlessly listed me in its gossip column as the latest paramour of a former Prince Charles squeeze - Sabrina Guinness (an heiress to the brewing dynasty). Alas as I'd never even met the filly - this was just as fictitious as the Times erroneously outing me as a closeted mariner in 1973 - based on a disastrous fashion faux pas... But of course Rupert Murdoch papers were the inventors and finest purveyors of modern-era “fake news”…
Here's the press clip from The Times in 1973 [click to it see full-size]
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OTHER LITERARY OFFERINGS BY MARTIN LEWIS
A great start!