Levy: his feet on my dashboard
A cheery Lord Levy (right) in an unlikely face-off with the late Yasser Arafat. In what now seems like a previous life, in the late 1970s, I was Michael Levy’s chauffeur. Michael Levy is now Lord Levy and he’s still in the news a lot more often than I am. After selling Magnet Records to WEA, Levy became the British Labour Party’s chief fundraiser. On 22 June, he gave evidence to a committee of MPs investigating party political funding. Levy had been instrumental in raising millions of pounds to help Tony Blair to win a third term. Controversy has arisen because it’s argued that Levy invited the rich to convert political donations to the Labour Party into loans so they wouldn’t have to be registered. And then there’s the matter of “cash for peerages”, covered by the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, which makes it illegal to reward anyone who has given “any gift, money or valuable consideration” with a title of honour.
Levy has said he won’t become Blair’s “fall guy” over cash for peerages. Fair enough, too, since his close friends (such as producer Pete Waterman, of Stock-Aitken-Waterman fame) have said they hadn’t even realised he was a socialist.
It looks as though this one will run and run, particularly since Levy escaped answering a single question about his fundraising role during a recent meeting with MPs from the Commons constitutional affairs committee, and is now being dubbed “the mouse that fails to roar”. Critics blame Levy (along with a few others) for conjuring up the current intensity of “communal derision” for Blair, in a similar way as millions once loathed Maggot Scratcher.
Meanwhile The Sun complains that Levy has “one of the worst work-rates in the House of Lords” and has not spoken in the Upper House since Blair gave him his peerage nine years ago. He has apparently voted only seven times out of a possible 67:
This year, Levy has been lampooned by the former Whose Line Is It, Anyway? impersonator Rory Bremner in a sketch in which he portrayed Levy as Fagin, complete with prosthetic hook nose. Giles Coren of The Times (who, ironically, was defending Levy) called him:“The PM’s pal — dubbed Lord Cashpoint for his skill at gathering cash — also failed to sit on a single committee or table a question.”
“…a loud, unelected, millionaire smart-arse with a big nose and a widow’s peak and expensive suits and the most Jewish surname imaginable, whose power in the land derives entirely from wealth made in commerce”.
I bet he was happier being ridiculed for releasing Alvin Stardust singles. Which is more or less where I came in: back in the late 1970s, I was yet to turn 20; a shy, wannabe-rockstar who worried about bad skin, wore a succession of silly haircuts and dreamt of a job in an A&R department. I was working for Levy’s independent record label Magnet — which he called a mini-major — home to Bad Manners, Chris Rea and yes, Alvin Stardust.
Levy was the archetypal, 20th Century corporate tyrant. With only one or two exceptions, everyone in the firm was either afraid or in awe of him. This was at a time when the long lunch was king and tabletop Asteroids ruled the pubs. Ozzy Osbourne drank at the Royal Oak (our York Street local), where the ex-Ten Years After drummer held court alongside Den Hegarty from The Darts and other music biz hangers-on, like me. Baker Street was our song and “underground listening” consisted of 12-inch dub-mixes of Night Nurse by Gregory Isaacs.
In my memory, everything from those times is invested with significance. Such as the fact that I once used to drive the man who is now “Lord Cashpoint”, Tony Blair’s major fundraiser and his Middle East Peace Process Envoy, to his meetings with his lawyer at WEA, in Soho’s Broadwick Street. I’d also be sent out to buy him lunch, an experience I previously described here. I liked to think that the smooth running of the company hinged on this task because otherwise, if his salt beef wasn’t hot when I returned with the paper bags of mustard-soaked sandwiches from Reuben’s, the afternoon air would be blue with expletives and resonant with the slamming of doors.
Levy had a reputation within Magnet for throwing ashtrays and reducing his long-suffering PA to tears. I, though, had few problems with the boss — ‘ML’, as everybody called him — and have no axe to grind. He was moody, but the other employees’ complaints about him remained largely hearsay to me. I learned a lot about music and the industry that feeds off it from ML and my time at Magnet and never experienced any ashtray-throwing during my two years with the company. But the “glass-topped table with marble legs”, described in this story, sounds familiar: there was a similar table in Levy’s office in the 1970s and early 1980s — it doubled as the boardroom table and was the scene of many a product meeting shouting-match that would resound through 22 York Street. Also familiar are “the bouffant hair and high heel shoes”, and that wasn’t only our Essex-girl receptionist.
I started at Magnet as the company’s messenger. I ‘inherited’ a beat-up, white Renault 4 van that had been ill-treated by the previous driver. When Peter the ‘post boy’ quit, it became my job to drag the huge sacks of records round to Baker Street Post Office, to refill the franking machine and stick postage labels on thousands of brown cardboard envelopes full of vinyl (there were no CDs then) for DJs, promoters and clubs.
Success at the top end of the British singles charts was on the wane by the time I joined Magnet, but those ‘in the know’ had calculated the firm made most of its money from licensing its master recordings — The Darts’ version of Daddy Cool, or Chris Rea’s Fool If You Think It’s Over, for example — to overseas companies for release on album-length compilations.
The accountant and financial controller would entrust me with wads of cash of a girth bewildering to a mere 20-year-old, for depositing either at a Baker Street bank or Levy’s own, ornately gothic branch on Park Lane. Quite where all this cash came from or for what it was destined I was never to discover, but I remember on more than one occasion carrying well over £10,000 in banknotes, without security, back to the office. My employer must have realised that I was either honest or stupid, or possibly both.
When one day the post-boy and I sneaked out of the office to make a series of mundane record deliveries together, we experienced ML’s wrath firsthand. We’d decided it would be quicker to make these deliveries in tandem — I’d stay in the van while Peter leapt out to deliver envelopes to places like the NME, Melody Maker and Smash Hits. The real reason we went on this mission was for the laughs. And a jolly jape it was; at least until we returned to head office, to find ML apoplectic, fuming that there’d been no one to take him to his meeting, deliver documents, or collect his salt beef sandwiches from Reuben’s.
“I just thought…” I stuttered.
“Don’t think!” yelled ML, in his withering way, “I’m not paying you to think! I do the thinking around here!”
Another abiding ML memory is of a hellish drive to WEA Records in Broadwick Street, Soho, from Magnet’s offices on York Street in the West End. ML had decided it’d be quicker for me to drive him there in the company van than for him to negotiate his Rolls out of the cramped garages in a mews off Gloucester Place, where it and the other company cars were minded daily by a cantankerous old fellow with emphysema who, once he had all the vehicles parked for the day, refused to move them again before close-of-business.
I’d been driving for Magnet for a while by then, and Broadwick Street was one of my regular stops. I’d worked out a number of shortcuts and was reasonably confident I could get us there in 15 to 20 minutes. As was customary, ML sat in the passenger seat with his expensively heeled feet up on the van’s dashboard, occasionally singing boisterously or regaling pedestrians (some of them possibly burqa-clad). Everything was going just fine until we hit a traffic jam on Marylebone High Street. ML was adamant we’d gone the wrong way. It wasn’t long before he had his head out of the window and was bellowing at the traffic and slamming his hands against the dented bodywork.
ML urged me to cut-up the cars in front, pull out onto the wrong side of the road, drive onto the pavement — anything to get him to his meeting. He was intimidating at the best of times, but once he started shouting at you it was no contest — you became a gibbering wreck. “What did you go this way for?! I told you I was in a hurry!”
I protested. I gibbered. I pulled out of the traffic jam and drove down the wrong side of the road. Luckily, I managed to cut back in again, turn down Weymouth Street in front of a taxi, narrowly missing the traffic island, past Harley Street and onto Portland Place. But by now ML’s mood had soured and he leapt out of my van close to his destination on Berwick Street with not so much as a “You’re fired, you idiot!”
I also have an acute memory of ML spending £100 of company money on a dark blue suit, white shirt and black tie from an Oxford Street menswear store for me to wear, so that I could chauffeur him about in style. My first official function in this getup was dropping him off at the then-fashionable Italian restaurant La Loggia at the Marble Arch end of Edgware Road in the company Daimler. (Later, on a regular trip to Pye Studios around the corner, I stopped outside La Loggia to examine the menu and spent the better part of a week’s wages on dinner there, to experience life as I imagined a millionaire would experience it, at least until the bill arrived.)
When a bald tyre caused me to write-off Magnet’s Renault 4 van in the rain near Hampstead Heath one night, it was ML who called me at home over the weekend to make sure I was OK. He didn’t seem to care so much about the van, which now looked like a crumpled Coke can. And ML agreed to see me when, a couple of years later, I bravely and rashly (or so it now seems) asked if he’d invest in a business venture I’d been foolish enough to get involved in.
He was courteous rather than patronising — which he could have been, since I had absolutely no business experience — and listened to me enthuse about my plans for half an hour or so. I remember him being surprised by the exclusively Jewish surnames of lawyers and accountants on the business plan I presented him (I’m not Jewish, but I’d learned to value his brand of business acumen) and his shock that I’d had the cheek to open a bank account at his Park Lane branch.
ML shrewdly declined to invest in my business and a little later, the bank on Park Lane called us to ask us most politely to take our business elsewhere. Even though our modest account was in the black, it was thought that perhaps such a prestigious branch did not quite suit our modest startup. I wondered at the time whether ML might have had a hand in this but, as it turned out, it didn’t matter one jot — the venture soon went belly-up.
I haven’t seen ML since the 1980s. The media has been wondering what’s next for him, now that Blair’s days are numbered; apparently he’s been helping the Prime Minister plan his next career move, although he may soon need some help of his own.
Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking that, if I’d stuck with ML, it might have been him and me delivering that letter from Tony Blair to President Mahmoud Abbas — the one outlining proposals to revive the Israel-Palestine peace process. We’d have approached on the wrong side of the road in a beat-up, white Renault 4 van, with ML munching on a salt beef on rye, his feet on the dashboard, waving pedestrians out of the way as I gibbered at the wheel.
More on “Lord Cashpoint”
Lord Levy on terror alert after home attack
Levy was “against secret loans”
The entrepreneur who proved himself rather good at accumulating money
An exclusive offer from Lord Levy
Lord Levy of the £20 note
The Prime Minister’s “sidekick”
His “skill at extracting cash from businessmen”
The cash for honours inquiry
“You have taken a few knocks — in fact more than a few — mainly on my behalf”
Lord Levy and Opus Dei...?
Levy is said to have collected £7 million for Labour
Middle East Peace Process Envoy “exchanging views” in Kazakhstan and Latin America
Regulators: BBC show not anti-Semitic
No questions for Levy
Giles Coren: “What the Dickens were they thinking?”
An eccentric choice as the PM’s envoy for the Middle East
“How did the party of the poor become the best friend of the millionaires?”
Levy ‘told Labour donor to keep loan to party secret’
Like a brother to Tony Blair
Levy was the archetypal, 20th Century corporate tyrant. With only one or two exceptions, everyone in the firm was either afraid or in awe of him. This was at a time when the long lunch was king and tabletop Asteroids ruled the pubs. Ozzy Osbourne drank at the Royal Oak (our York Street local), where the ex-Ten Years After drummer held court alongside Den Hegarty from The Darts and other music biz hangers-on, like me. Baker Street was our song and “underground listening” consisted of 12-inch dub-mixes of Night Nurse by Gregory Isaacs.
In my memory, everything from those times is invested with significance. Such as the fact that I once used to drive the man who is now “Lord Cashpoint”, Tony Blair’s major fundraiser and his Middle East Peace Process Envoy, to his meetings with his lawyer at WEA, in Soho’s Broadwick Street. I’d also be sent out to buy him lunch, an experience I previously described here. I liked to think that the smooth running of the company hinged on this task because otherwise, if his salt beef wasn’t hot when I returned with the paper bags of mustard-soaked sandwiches from Reuben’s, the afternoon air would be blue with expletives and resonant with the slamming of doors.
Levy had a reputation within Magnet for throwing ashtrays and reducing his long-suffering PA to tears. I, though, had few problems with the boss — ‘ML’, as everybody called him — and have no axe to grind. He was moody, but the other employees’ complaints about him remained largely hearsay to me. I learned a lot about music and the industry that feeds off it from ML and my time at Magnet and never experienced any ashtray-throwing during my two years with the company. But the “glass-topped table with marble legs”, described in this story, sounds familiar: there was a similar table in Levy’s office in the 1970s and early 1980s — it doubled as the boardroom table and was the scene of many a product meeting shouting-match that would resound through 22 York Street. Also familiar are “the bouffant hair and high heel shoes”, and that wasn’t only our Essex-girl receptionist.
I started at Magnet as the company’s messenger. I ‘inherited’ a beat-up, white Renault 4 van that had been ill-treated by the previous driver. When Peter the ‘post boy’ quit, it became my job to drag the huge sacks of records round to Baker Street Post Office, to refill the franking machine and stick postage labels on thousands of brown cardboard envelopes full of vinyl (there were no CDs then) for DJs, promoters and clubs.
Success at the top end of the British singles charts was on the wane by the time I joined Magnet, but those ‘in the know’ had calculated the firm made most of its money from licensing its master recordings — The Darts’ version of Daddy Cool, or Chris Rea’s Fool If You Think It’s Over, for example — to overseas companies for release on album-length compilations.
The accountant and financial controller would entrust me with wads of cash of a girth bewildering to a mere 20-year-old, for depositing either at a Baker Street bank or Levy’s own, ornately gothic branch on Park Lane. Quite where all this cash came from or for what it was destined I was never to discover, but I remember on more than one occasion carrying well over £10,000 in banknotes, without security, back to the office. My employer must have realised that I was either honest or stupid, or possibly both.
When one day the post-boy and I sneaked out of the office to make a series of mundane record deliveries together, we experienced ML’s wrath firsthand. We’d decided it would be quicker to make these deliveries in tandem — I’d stay in the van while Peter leapt out to deliver envelopes to places like the NME, Melody Maker and Smash Hits. The real reason we went on this mission was for the laughs. And a jolly jape it was; at least until we returned to head office, to find ML apoplectic, fuming that there’d been no one to take him to his meeting, deliver documents, or collect his salt beef sandwiches from Reuben’s.
“I just thought…” I stuttered.
“Don’t think!” yelled ML, in his withering way, “I’m not paying you to think! I do the thinking around here!”
Another abiding ML memory is of a hellish drive to WEA Records in Broadwick Street, Soho, from Magnet’s offices on York Street in the West End. ML had decided it’d be quicker for me to drive him there in the company van than for him to negotiate his Rolls out of the cramped garages in a mews off Gloucester Place, where it and the other company cars were minded daily by a cantankerous old fellow with emphysema who, once he had all the vehicles parked for the day, refused to move them again before close-of-business.
I’d been driving for Magnet for a while by then, and Broadwick Street was one of my regular stops. I’d worked out a number of shortcuts and was reasonably confident I could get us there in 15 to 20 minutes. As was customary, ML sat in the passenger seat with his expensively heeled feet up on the van’s dashboard, occasionally singing boisterously or regaling pedestrians (some of them possibly burqa-clad). Everything was going just fine until we hit a traffic jam on Marylebone High Street. ML was adamant we’d gone the wrong way. It wasn’t long before he had his head out of the window and was bellowing at the traffic and slamming his hands against the dented bodywork.
ML urged me to cut-up the cars in front, pull out onto the wrong side of the road, drive onto the pavement — anything to get him to his meeting. He was intimidating at the best of times, but once he started shouting at you it was no contest — you became a gibbering wreck. “What did you go this way for?! I told you I was in a hurry!”
I protested. I gibbered. I pulled out of the traffic jam and drove down the wrong side of the road. Luckily, I managed to cut back in again, turn down Weymouth Street in front of a taxi, narrowly missing the traffic island, past Harley Street and onto Portland Place. But by now ML’s mood had soured and he leapt out of my van close to his destination on Berwick Street with not so much as a “You’re fired, you idiot!”
I also have an acute memory of ML spending £100 of company money on a dark blue suit, white shirt and black tie from an Oxford Street menswear store for me to wear, so that I could chauffeur him about in style. My first official function in this getup was dropping him off at the then-fashionable Italian restaurant La Loggia at the Marble Arch end of Edgware Road in the company Daimler. (Later, on a regular trip to Pye Studios around the corner, I stopped outside La Loggia to examine the menu and spent the better part of a week’s wages on dinner there, to experience life as I imagined a millionaire would experience it, at least until the bill arrived.)
When a bald tyre caused me to write-off Magnet’s Renault 4 van in the rain near Hampstead Heath one night, it was ML who called me at home over the weekend to make sure I was OK. He didn’t seem to care so much about the van, which now looked like a crumpled Coke can. And ML agreed to see me when, a couple of years later, I bravely and rashly (or so it now seems) asked if he’d invest in a business venture I’d been foolish enough to get involved in.
He was courteous rather than patronising — which he could have been, since I had absolutely no business experience — and listened to me enthuse about my plans for half an hour or so. I remember him being surprised by the exclusively Jewish surnames of lawyers and accountants on the business plan I presented him (I’m not Jewish, but I’d learned to value his brand of business acumen) and his shock that I’d had the cheek to open a bank account at his Park Lane branch.
ML shrewdly declined to invest in my business and a little later, the bank on Park Lane called us to ask us most politely to take our business elsewhere. Even though our modest account was in the black, it was thought that perhaps such a prestigious branch did not quite suit our modest startup. I wondered at the time whether ML might have had a hand in this but, as it turned out, it didn’t matter one jot — the venture soon went belly-up.
I haven’t seen ML since the 1980s. The media has been wondering what’s next for him, now that Blair’s days are numbered; apparently he’s been helping the Prime Minister plan his next career move, although he may soon need some help of his own.
Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking that, if I’d stuck with ML, it might have been him and me delivering that letter from Tony Blair to President Mahmoud Abbas — the one outlining proposals to revive the Israel-Palestine peace process. We’d have approached on the wrong side of the road in a beat-up, white Renault 4 van, with ML munching on a salt beef on rye, his feet on the dashboard, waving pedestrians out of the way as I gibbered at the wheel.
More on “Lord Cashpoint”
Lord Levy on terror alert after home attack
Levy was “against secret loans”
The entrepreneur who proved himself rather good at accumulating money
An exclusive offer from Lord Levy
Lord Levy of the £20 note
The Prime Minister’s “sidekick”
His “skill at extracting cash from businessmen”
The cash for honours inquiry
“You have taken a few knocks — in fact more than a few — mainly on my behalf”
Lord Levy and Opus Dei...?
Levy is said to have collected £7 million for Labour
Middle East Peace Process Envoy “exchanging views” in Kazakhstan and Latin America
Regulators: BBC show not anti-Semitic
No questions for Levy
Giles Coren: “What the Dickens were they thinking?”
An eccentric choice as the PM’s envoy for the Middle East
“How did the party of the poor become the best friend of the millionaires?”
Levy ‘told Labour donor to keep loan to party secret’
Like a brother to Tony Blair
Update 20 July: Levy secretary’s MBE queried (Jean Cobb was ML’s secretary even when I worked for him in the 1970s, so I reckon she deserves at least an MBE, for putting up with him for so long.)
Update 31 July: The cover of Private Eye
Update 18 December: Blair refuses to back Levy in Labour’s cash for honours scandal
Update 22 January 2007: Blair likely to quit if aides charged in loans inquiry
Update 31 January 2007: Levy arrested over perversion of justice
Update 20 July 2007: No one to face charges in cash for honours inquiry
posted by Chris Bell at 3:35 PM
1 Comments:
Alvin Stardust, eh?
The first record I ever bought - a compilation - had "My Coo Ca Choo" on it. I was nine. I thought it was quite good, actually...
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