Around this time last year, I went to a party at Helen Fielding’s publisher. It was held in honour of an impossibly cool, leather-jacketed Bosnian Serb writer who lived in Chicago, supported Manchester United and spent the evening taking shots of the guests on a swanky-looking camera Can this guy truly be for real, I silently wondered. Meanwhile, someone pointed out a small, Sloaney woman who was apparently putting in a spell of work-experience in the office.Aleksandr Hemon, from Chicago via Sarajevo, is entirely on the level. Whereas “Bridget Cavendish”, as everyone now knows, was Ren?Zellweger in impenetrable disguise, preparing in dedicated Method fashion for the rigours of her part. She, and Helen Fielding, have every right to enjoy the last, and longest, laugh.. “So here it is,” writes Simon Napier-Bell, “money, sex and drugs.

What more could you ask for, except perhaps for a little music?” Indeed. “So here it is,” writes Simon Napier-Bell, “money, sex and drugs. What more could you ask for, except perhaps for a little music?” Indeed. Music often seems like a mere by-product of an industry primarily dedicated to supplying itself with the largest possible quantities of Napier-Bell’s unholy trinity. Few know this better, and describe it with more acrid wit, than the charmingly louche and urbane former manager of The Yardbirds (but not Jeff Beck), Marc Bolan (but not T Rex), Wham! (but not solo George Michael), and Japan.
Black Vinyl White Powder is the belated sequel to his delightfully scurrilous, hugely entertaining and piercingly insightful pop-biz memoir, You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, named after an Italian song for which he wrote an English lyric during a 10-minute taxi ride. That was a hit for Dusty Springfield in the Sixties and was revived by Elvis Presley in the Seventies, providing Napier-Bell with both an income over and above his management earnings and a licence to bite the hand that feeds him.The first book was a sort-of-autobiography; this one is a an eye-opening social history of the British music business analysed in terms of ­ you guessed ­ money, drugs and sex. Peppered with first-person anecdotes, it’s also the cold-print equivalent of a sparkling evening in the company of a world-class raconteur.”If you can remember the Sixties,” goes one of the hoariest gags in the catalogue, “then you weren’t really there.” Napier-Bell drops so many micro-clangers (the editors of Oz were busted for obscenity rather than sued for libel; The Dave Clark Five’s records were issued by EMI rather than Pye; The Rolling Stones were on London Records in the US during the Sixties, rather than CBS; Eric Clapton left The Yardbirds to join John Mayall rather than to form Cream; The White Panther Party was Mick Farren’s drinking club masquerading as a political movement rather than a band; and so on) that it constitutes definitive proof that he was there.Napier-Bell’s lifelong involvement with the music business began in 1956 when, as a 17-year-old wannabe jazz trumpeter fresh out of public school, he became the “posh bandboy” for the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra.

He soon discovered that his duties included more than setting up the instruments ­ that when required to roll an endless supply of joints for the musicians, it was more practical to carry a chunk of hash than a bag of grass.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 ?tism and mass culture, art and entertainment) and complex power structures (producers, promoters, publicists, performers, publishers and publics) that drive pop’s evolution. “Rock’n'roll wasn’t the music itself,” claimed Jack Good, the pioneer of British music television, “it was the response to the music.”In the context of the ecstasy-fuelled dance boom of the Nineties, Napier-Bell tells us: “Like amphetamine sulphate in the ’70s and acid in the ’60s, the drug created the audience Kids on E wanted E-culture music. To profit from all of this, all the music industry had to do was to identify the kids who were taking it, then provide them with the right records.”In a welter of gossip, scams and statistics, Napier-Bell provides a one-stop-shop education in what the music business ­ as opposed to the music itself ­ has always been about: get rich, get high, get laid “Black vinyl may have gone,” he concludes.