Author:Darryl W Bullock
Subtitled ‘The gay men who ran the swinging sixties’, this very detailed and comprehensively researched book examines the lives, and particularly the influence on the burgeoning sixties music scene, of five key figures – Larry Parnes, Brian Epstein, Joe Meek, Robert Stigwood and Lionel Bart, and, to a lesser extent, celebrity lawyer David Jacobs. In many ways, the ‘gay’ aspect is a bit of a red herring as it’s really the only thing these disparate characters had in common. The book takes a detailed look at the music scene in the UK from the early sixties to the end of that decade and the rise and fall of this influential coterie of managers, composers and promoters and their stable of acts ranging from Billy Fury to The Beatles, who dominated that era. It’s certainly interesting to discover how such a wide range of acts fell under the influence of these father figure type impresarios, who worked them incredibly hard, often for little in the way of financial reward, casually discarding them when their time was up. It’s only on reading this that the reader fully appreciates just how interconnected these figures and their acts were, and how » Continue Reading.