Gordon Haskell's thoughts on the music industry
Browsing through stalls in an antiques emporium in Kingston upon Thames a couple of weeks ago, I came across a six-page letter protected by a clear A4 sleeve, with a Post-It note attached, indicating it was by “Gordon Haskell, lead singer King Crimson, ‘Harry’s Bar’ etc.” On sale for £10, I thought it was an interesting piece of prog memorabilia, so I bought it. On closer inspection, it turns out that it’s Haskell’s opinion of everything that was wrong with the music industry in the mid 80s, beliefs he held up until his death in 2020 as revealed in two articles I’ve cited here.
Haskell, an old school friend of Robert Fripp, had been drafted in for a session fee of £50 to sing on Cadence and Cascade during the recording of In the Wake of Poseidon, Greg Lake having finally left King Crimson for an up-and-running ELP, and would be recruited into the band for subsequent album Lizard.
Gordon Haskell was born on 27th April 1946 at the same nursing home as Robert Fripp, who arrived 19 days later. He attended the local village school in Verwood, Dorset, before moving up to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Wimborne, where he struck up a friendship with one of his classmates, Robert Fripp, a like-minded music lover who shared a passion for early rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and rhythm and blues. Fripp was encouraged by Don Strike, his guitar tutor, to form his own group as a means to further his musical experience, and Haskell pestered his friend into showing him the basics of the bass guitar on a cheap instrument he had bought from Strike’s so that he could be in the group, and the pair put together The Ravens in the spring of 1961, with their debut gig taking place during July, but disbanded with a few live performances under their belts before exams the following spring.
Haskell left school age 16 and enrolled with the Metropolitan Police College in Hendon, but lasted three days before realising he wanted to be a musician and returned home to Verwood, taking a job as an estate agent in Bournemouth. In 1963, the former Ravens formed a new group, The League of Gentlemen, and worked on a repertoire of Beatles, Four Seasons, Coasters, and Shadows covers. In 1964, Fripp left the band to study economics and political history at the Bournemouth Technical College and the remaining trio decided to go their separate ways.
Haskell was subsequently recruited by The Fleur de Lys, a Southampton-based band with an unstable line-up that would eventually dissolve in 1969. They worked as a full-time session band at Polydor Studios in Stratford Place, just off London’s Oxford Street, where they rubbed shoulders with different labels’ new signings, Jimi Hendrix, The Bee Gees, The Who, and were hired whenever Atlantic Records had a new signing or project, even jamming with Vanilla Fudge for eight hours. For a short time, Haskell and bandmate Keith Guster shared an apartment owned by Ringo Starr but leased to The Animals in Cranley Gardens, South Kensington, with Jimi Hendrix, who had arrived from the USA with Chas Chandler. They showed Hendrix around London, attending his first gig at Blaises in Queensgate and his Savile Theatre performance when he opened with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Hendrix played with The Fleur de Lys on three occasions.
Haskell quit The Fleur de Lys after discovering the band’s manager had been ripping them off and in October 1968, following a joint audition with Fripp, joined Cupids Inspiration (Fripp didn’t get the guitarist job but would go on to form King Crimson). Haskell released one album with Cupids Inspiration and completed a package tour with them before leaving the group in 1969 when the promise of more money didn’t materialise. However, Cupids’ producer Jimmy Duncan got Haskell a deal with CBS Records for his first solo album, Sail in My Boat, which was recorded in Lansdowne Studios, London. Featuring a live orchestra, it was completed in just a few days, but it was clear to Haskell that he wasn’t in control and he chalked the experience off as ‘a young artist just starting out and doing as I was told rather than directing’. The album received no promotion but South African singer Wanda Arletti recorded a version of the album track Zanzibar which reached number two in the South African charts and stayed there for thirteen weeks. In fact, Haskell had reached the top of the South African charts a couple of years earlier, when Billy Forrest, lead singer of Durban pop group The Gonks, released an early Haskell-penned song Lazy Life under the pseudonym Quentin E. Klopjaeger. Neither case of his assault on South Africa’s hit parade resulted in any royalty payments.
King Crimson’s Lizard
Haskell wasn’t a fan of King Crimson’s music, but was persuaded to work on Lizard by a combination of Fripp’s pestering and his wife’s belief in the security of a steady income; it probably helped that Andrew McCulloch, the band’s new drummer, was also from Bournemouth, but it all turned out to be a miserable experience. McCulloch found it hard to understand what was required and was guided through the metrical shifts by Haskell, though neither knew how the finished pieces would sound. To make matters worse, the pair were driven to distraction by Fripp and Peter Sinfield wasting hours searching for a suitable drum sound! Haskell also hated Sinfield’s lyrics, labelling the songs as ‘meaningless’ and worse still, the song keys were wrong for his voice, which is why Jon Anderson provided guest vocals on Prince Rupert Awakes, something Haskell described as “the unsingable.”
The final straw for Haskell came during rehearsals for a pre-arranged American tour. He’d already begun to realise that he’d not be permitted to contribute any material and when he complained that 21st Century Schizoid Man was out of his vocal range, Fripp attempted to assuage his doubts by telling him they would put his voice through an effects machine. Outraged, Haskell snapped and quit, with recriminations between the two rumbling on for years; accusations of bullying and complaints that he didn’t receive royalties from album sales on the one hand, and on the other, Fripp’s assertion that Haskell, a hired hand, had breached his contract by walking out.
When interviewed by Klemen Breznikar for psychedelicbabymag.com, Haskell was dismissive of his experience recording with King Crimson. “I remember a great ignorance on their part. I had had four years of first rate studio experience and they were beginners and in my view, simply amateurs full of a false sense of great importance. It was 24 hours of listening to bullshit hailed as ‘art’.”
No longer with King Crimson, Haskell followed his muse and wrote some new songs, observations on the devious workings of the music industry and becoming one of the first artists to embrace environmental concerns. Through John Wetton and record producer John Miller, he met with Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records who liked what he heard and arranged for Haskell to record at Pye Studios in London with a band of Bournemouth alumni; Wetton on bass and organ, Mogul Thrash’s Bill Atkinson on drums, and Alan Barry on guitar and on piano, with Rare Bird’s Dave Kaffinetti (who played Viv Savage in the film This Is Spinal Tap) on keyboards, and Arif Mardin producing. The resulting album, It Is and It Isn’t, was endorsed by Radio Luxembourg DJ David ‘Kid’ Jensen but arrived without fanfare. Haskell’s agent John Sherry, another Bournemouth musician, arranged a support slot with Mountain and Wishbone Ash at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park, and a subsequent tour throughout February 1972 with Audience and Stackridge.
Haskell would later profess to the mutual admiration between Stackridge and himself, “they cut my song No One’s More Important Than The Earthworm. I loved everything they did. They were original in every way and deserved greater success than they achieved. It’s the same old story. Lack of radio (due to the ignorance of presenters and producers in radio).”
The failure of It Is and It Isn’t meant Haskell had to return to the life of a jobbing musician, playing bass in a lounge jazz trio, and making the most of opportunities when they presented themselves: working with Tim Hardin; forming and touring with the short-lived Joe, writing their unsuccessful single How Can I Resist; and spending six weeks in Japan on sessions for the album Golden Flight by Momoe Yamaguchi.
A demo tape by Haskell, Peter Sills and Mike Allison that had landed on the desk of record producer and Shadows rhythm guitarist Bruce Welch led Cliff Richard recording six of the trio’s songs for his 1976 and 1977 albums I’m Nearly Famous and Every Face Tells A Story, and though they were all written by Sills and Allison, Haskell’s bass playing impressed Richard’s management team and he was recruited for the touring band. Haskell has spoken of his enjoyment of jamming with the backing band members but when offered a further year’s work at a reduced rate of pay, he walked away.
Punk effectively put a pause on his solo career, and Serve at Room Temperature, recorded with Richard’s backing band was shelved until a retrospective CD release in 2007. He left for Denmark in 1984, playing "seven nights a week to drunks in bars", a regular gig to eventually eliminate his debts, and moved back to the UK shortly before penning the letter to ‘Frank’.
The letter shows that even in 1985, Haskell was sure that he was going to be successful, and that success came in 2001 with the single How Wonderful You Are, taken from the album Look Out.
Look Out was another of Haskell’s albums released to no or little press. Ever consistent in his evaluation of the industry, he later described his success as “driven entirely by the public being allowed to hear and buy something they loved as opposed to being dictated to by the radio industry.” He’d managed to get BBC Radio 2 DJ Johnnie Walker on side and subverted the conventional business practice of making a hit “without marketing managers and hype.” How Wonderful You Are became the most requested song on Radio 2, even before it had been officially released as a single, beating Frank Sinatra’s My Way and Hey Jude by the Beatles. Haskell’s DIY approach saw the single reach no.2 in the UK singles chart over Christmas, kept off the top spot by Robbie Williams, and it went on to sell more than 400,000 copies. As a result of the success of the single, Haskell was offered a multimillion-dollar recording contract from the UK label East West Records, distributed by Warner Bros. Records. The album Harry's Bar was released on 7th January 2002, peaking at no.2 in the UK Albums Chart, with similar success around Europe.
Gordon Haskell died on 15th October 2020.
While I’m unsure of the identity of addressee ‘Frank’, Haskell also mentions Peter Knight Jnr., one of the world’s leading experts in music publishing, at the time running his own company, Catalyst Music Publishing which he’d started in the late seventies. He would go on to publish many of the best-known artists in the world, including Black Eyed Peas and Will-I-Am, Quincy Jones, John Denver, Thelonious Monk and Charles Aznavour, and had run successful record companies featuring artists including Black Sabbath, Marianne Faithfull, Small Faces and Amen Corner. He was charge of A&R at Polydor where he worked with The Bee Gees, Jimi Hendrix and The Who.
Transcript
126 Manor Road
Verwood
Dorset
12.6.85
Dear Frank,
I have taken your tape to Peter Knight Jnr. who looks after my scene and will eventually give his opinion. Frankly I’m sick of opinions and I have come to the conclusion that most people that are successful and popular are the product of aggressive marketing. Ears are the thing of the past, now it’s eyes and muscle. So I’ve stopped getting opinions and instead of buying a house I’m going to press up 1000 LP’s of my masters and go round the radio stations and try [and] get airplay.
I’m now back gigging at grass roots level 6 nights a week and have often been asked for tapes by punters so I’m sure I can sell 1000, it might also stimulate interest from the major record companies when they see the action. My stuff deserves to be heard and I know I’m better than 50% of the new millionaires so I’m not waiting any longer for the godfather’s [sic] to give their blessing.
Cliff Richard’s office said yes to 3 of my songs for his last album but it came to nothing and meanwhile I’ve let my career slip so don’t rely on anyone for success. It does happen sometimes just as some people win the pools.
Tell me the name of your publisher that you are suspicious of.
As far as hearing more songs, all I can tell you is, I have to re-establish my position in the business to where I was 5 years ago as I don’t pull any weight anymore so I suggest we keep in touch and meanwhile keep sending say 5 songs to all the major artists that don’t write their own material. There’s no guarantee they’ll listen as most of our artists aren’t artists merely puppets of management.
It’s infuriating but that’s the way it is and I don’t know what else we can do. I believe totally in metaphysics and I believe I am going to be successful and I’m fairly certain I won’t get any help from anyone so that’s why I’m so keen on D.I.Y.
At least painting is still pure. My favourite painters are Magritte and Dali.
I have 15 songs with CBS in America awaiting major artists to cover them. CBS paid me $15000 and still haven’t managed to find someone to record any one of them so you see it’s difficult even when a company has in effect lost money and is keen to recoup.
Stay true to yourself,
Best wishes,
Gordon Haskell
Sources:
https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2020/05/gordon-haskell-interview.html interviewed by Klemen Breznikar
Gordon Haskell 27th April 1946 - 15th October 2020
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