It became more and more evident to me that although the Rolling Stones had more than a head start on the Pretty Things, one massive record could reverse the roles. By this time it was blatantly obvious that the English record-buying public were looking for the good clean boys versus the nasties. The Beatles had already taken the mantle of the former, so we started looking in earnest for ‘the song’, but no one came up with anything that in my opinion was the big one.

In the summer of 1964, I was sitting having a cup of tea in La Giaconda with the folk singer and songwriter Donovan. We were quite close at the time and I thought he had an incredible talent that was soon to emerge. Sadly for me, by the time we met, he had already committed himself to a management and publishing deal.

On this particular day, I mentioned to him that I was looking for a song for the Pretty Things, but it had to be really special. He said he had just written a fantastic song and would I like to hear it? It is impossible in these pages to play you the music of this song, but the lyrics went like this: ‘Please darling Tangerine Eyes, sing a song for me. One that I can hear all the day …’ and it continued in this vein.

I loved it. It was wonderful – the song I’d been looking for.

‘I need a demo of it,’ I said. Donovan replied he would get it together for me immediately.

Within a couple of days, I played the song to the Pretty Things, but they didn’t see it the way I did. A few weeks went by, and I received a telephone call from another publisher, who invited me to come and see him. I duly took a trip to his Denmark Street offices.

‘Have a listen to this,’ he said, and played me a song that bore more than a passing resemblance to Donovan’s ‘Tangerine Eyes’. I didn’t know how this was possible, but it was even better. It was a brilliant song and a worldwide smash. I was absolutely bowled over.

‘It was written by Bob Dylan; have you heard of him?’ he said. ‘He’s the new American folk singer, who looks like he’s going to be very big.’

I hadn’t, at that time, but it didn’t matter, because this was the song I’d been searching for.

I listened to it again and again. I knew that with this song, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, recorded by the Pretty Things, we’d have a number one around the world. I was totally besotted by it. I took the demo immediately to the Pretty Things and told them that I had found them the song but, once more, they didn’t agree with me. Try as I might, they would not countenance recording it. I continued to harass them for weeks and each time I met with a solid ‘No’.

A month or so later, I got another telephone call from Dylan’s English publisher telling me that the song had been recorded by an unknown band in America, and that, if we were going to do it, we should get our version out fast. Furthermore, as we were already a chart band, they would prefer the Pretty Things’ version to be out first in the UK as it would have more chance of being a hit. I went back to the group for one more try and played them this superb song, but again they said ‘No!’

I rang Dylan’s publisher later that day to tell him regretfully that I could not persuade the band to record it. I had the terrible feeling that a huge opportunity had been lost, but that was that.

‘Don’t worry,’ the publisher said. ‘That’s life.’

‘By the way,’ I inquired, ‘what’s the name of that American band?’

‘The Byrds,’ he replied.

The rest, of course, is rock ’n’ roll history. Their single went on to sell millions around the world and the Byrds soared to huge success. The chance had been lost. We had lost the initiative and never got it back.

We were now into the era of bands performing their own material. The mantra had become ‘Write your own songs’, so the second of the Pretty Things’ singles was the first song I ever published in partnership with one of the monoliths of the publishing industry, Southern Music. Jimmy Duncan and I set up a company by the name of Dunmo Music, and our first release was the group’s next single, ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, which climbed to number 10 in the charts, but it was never an international hit.

The group followed that a few months later with their third single, the self-written ‘Honey I Need’, but that stalled at number 13. It would turn out to be their last entry in the Top 20.

However, this did not mean that the Pretty Things and I didn’t have a couple of years of real fun. These were still the days when rock ’n’ roll was a cottage industry and, as such, attracted numerous gentlemen of disreputable backgrounds. I remember going to see a chap who owed the Pretty Things £200 or so. I knocked on his office door, was told to enter, and said, ‘Mr King. I’ve been trying to ring you for several days about the two hundred pounds you owe the Pretty Things, and as I couldn’t get hold of you, I decided to come in person.’

‘Oh,’ he said, and pulled open a drawer. My spirits rose at the thought of having £200 placed into my hot hand. However, instead of pulling out the money, he pulled out a revolver, pointed it at me, and eloquently told me to ‘Fuck off’. I frankly didn’t see much point in dallying and so did his bidding. Needless to say, we never got paid.

Unfortunately, it was people like Mr King and several others who, through the sixties and seventies, gave the music business such a bad reputation. In today’s world, though, it has gone too far the other way, becoming a totally sanitised business.

With the success of ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, money began to pour into the coffers of the band. One of the more memorable extravagances was the renting of a beautiful house for forty guineas a week at 13 Chester Street, in Belgravia, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. A song of the same name appears on the Pretty Things’ first album, The Pretty Things.

In late 1964, 13 Chester Street became one of the hubs of what is now known as the Swinging Sixties. Most of the great writers, performers, and artists of the day partied at one time or another, or had dinner in this house. Numerous events took place in the main dining-room, often with a couple of the Beatles or the Stones, the songwriter Lionel Bart, or the glamorous actress Diana Dors, sitting round a table with their various acolytes standing in descending order behind them.

For a large part of the time the Pretties occupied Chester Street, they let the basement flat out to Brian Jones of the Stones. What with his antics and the Pretty Things, it was indeed a house of decadence, and basically covered everything that any red-blooded young man in their late teens and early twenties would love to do. If walls could talk. You name it, Chester Street had it.

During this period, Viv Prince, the Pretty Things’ drummer, had met and befriended the Texan-born singer P.J. Proby. They were inseparable friends. Proby had just had his first smash hit, ‘Hold Me’, and he really went for it.

The excesses were such that in Proby’s house during the height of the mayhem, I remember his telephone being connected to America for twenty-four hours at a time, while the various residents of his house were talking to friends across the sea. From memory, his telephone bill back then was in excess of £1,000 a month. An astronomical amount even today.

There was one particular time when Viv Prince didn’t sleep in a bed for seven days or nights. In the same period, he played five gigs, some of them being two sets per day. By the eighth day, he was a walking mess.

Another of Viv’s little eccentricities took place when I lent him a tape recorder. I was living in a Victorian mansion flat in Kensington. The front door of my apartment was made of mahogany and etched glass. I was sitting at home two or three days after having loaned him the machine when, all of a sudden, there was an incredible smashing sound at the front door. I rushed into the hallway to discover my tape recorder lying on the floor amidst the remains of the glass and mahogany frame, smashed to pieces. Silhouetted in what was left of the front door, was a certain scowling drummer.

I screamed, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

Viv’s deadpan reply was simple and concise: ‘Your tape recorder doesn’t fucking work and I’m returning it to you.’

With that, I took four or five paces forward, brought my arm back (like an archer drawing back his bow) and, punching through what was left of the upper part of my door, landed a heavy right hand on Viv Prince’s chin. Probably more from the assorted mixture of beverages in his body and lack of sleep, rather than the power of my punch, he hit the ground like a pack of cards, pole-axed.

My anger, however, had not been requited. I opened what remained of the door, grabbed Viv by his collar, dragged him to the lift, and threw him into it, before turning to his minder and suggesting to him that he escort his charge home. Then I sought out a brush and pan to clear up the debris and mayhem.

All that because a tape recorder had failed to function.

By now I had learnt to give the media what they wanted and at this time it was sensationalism. The more bedrooms that were smashed to pieces, the more screaming, sobbing fans, the more repugnant to the older generation they were, the bigger the story, and the more interesting they were to the press. If the media wanted action, that’s what they got. A television being thrown out of a hotel window today by a rock band would hardly even get a mention in a local paper, let alone national, but when the Who first did it, it was a sensation.

When the landlord finally threw the Pretty Things out of Chester Street at the end of August 1965, with some manipulation on my part, we made the front page of three national newspapers, as well as the national TV news. Perhaps for me, the best feature I ever obtained at this time and the one I was certainly most proud of, was getting front page and inside story in the Sunday Times colour magazine, which was the first major feature they’d ever done on a rock ’n’ roll band.

Clubs were very important then as they are today, a place where those who believe they are part of the in-crowd can go and hang out with their counterparts. One such club, the only one to belong to at the time, was the Ad Lib in Leicester Square. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Phil May and I and a couple of the other boys would go for an evening there.

One night, I was having a long discussion with two of the Beatles about buying a sports car. At the time, I would have given almost anything for one of the new E-Type Jaguars, but they cost about £2,300 new. By the end of the evening, Ringo had decided on some other equally sporty racing machine that he was going to buy, and I’d talked myself into getting an E-Type.

What I hadn’t bargained for was being twenty-four years old, and the horror with which my insurance broker greeted my decision. The next day he told me that because I managed rock ’n’ roll bands, and because of my age, the annual premium fell just short of the cost of the car. As much as I desired it, it was a no-no. I settled instead for an MGB. Days later, Ringo told me he had suffered the same fate at the hands of his insurers but, nevertheless, he’d bought the car of his dreams. Then again, he could afford it.

One of the oddities of the sixties was the general perception that everybody in rock ’n’ roll was a junkie. But in the early sixties, very few bands took drugs. It was principally Bacardi and Coke and other spirits that led the wrecking machine. Obviously, people smoked grass, but not in great quantities. Unfortunately, this changed with devastating effect towards the end of the sixties and in the early seventies, when drugs like acid became more and more readily available. In the meantime, vast quantities of alcohol were consumed.

The Pretty Things tied up too much of my time for me to become a casualty of either alcohol or drugs. I was constantly planning and plotting about how to promote them. For months I had been trying to figure out how to get the Pretty Things onto the international circuit. Europe had been pretty well taken care of, the boys having gigged in Scandinavia, Holland and Germany. But since my cock-up of the year previously, I was now desperate for them to travel to further shores.

My cock-up had, in fact, happened quite early in their career. I had received a call from an American agent who had requested, as only an American could, I join him for a breakfast meeting at the Mayfair Hotel in his suite the next day.

‘What’ll it be? Steak and eggs, smoked salmon, coffee?’ Hang on, this was breakfast, not dinner. We sat there in his huge suite and I was quite overawed, but soon got into it – the steak, that is.

He wanted the Pretty Things to tour the USA. He had, I believe, just secured the Dave Clark Five, who were huge at the time, and was keen to find a largely unknown band to take with them. The problem was that he wanted an agency commission of twenty per cent, and the going rate in those days was ten per cent. We discussed this for some time, me trying to find a compromise, but he was resolute. It was twenty per cent or nothing. Stupidly I turned him down. In hindsight, we should have swallowed the twenty per cent for a year and who knows what might have happened.

This may have been the most costly decision of my career.

I was therefore very keen to get the band into any new territories, when along came the possibility of a two-week tour in New Zealand. Very lucrative and immensely exciting.

A package was put together comprising Sandie Shaw, who had just had her first number one hit with ‘(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me’, and Eden Kane, who’d also had a recent Top 10 hit with ‘Boys Cry’.

We set off in August 1965 for the other side of the world. In those days, the flying time was in the region of thirty-two hours. On arrival in Auckland, we decided to go out for some dinner. Imagine our total surprise in finding that all restaurants closed by nine o’clock in the evening. New Zealand in the sixties was a lot like England in the thirties. The bobbies wore the same hats as the ones back home and a Sunday was really a Sunday. Nothing, absolutely nothing to do, other than to go to church.

One of the interesting phenomena was the ‘six o’clock swill’. For reasons known only to the perversions of the law, pubs in New Zealand at that time opened for one hour per day, from 6 to 7 p.m. You can imagine the scene in a country town or village, forty sheep shearers lining up, waiting for the off. The doors opened and the mass of humanity poured in. The bar staff had hoses with nozzles on the end and they would literally traverse the bar pouring the beer into the pints. Bedlam ensued. One hour later, forty pissed men rolled out of the bar, fighting and swearing.

This particular tour soon became a total riot. One afternoon it was about 1.30 and we had all been up for an hour or so, as no one ever got up before noon. The whole tour party was driving in a coach through the countryside of New Zealand. In the back of the coach, all of the Pretty Things were totally out of their heads. Vodkas, rum, whiskies, the whole shooting match being poured down unquenchable throats. Regrettably, they were inducing Eden Kane to share in their fast approaching, comatose state.

In the front of the bus, sitting behind the driver, I was passing pleasantries of the day with Sandie Shaw. After a while, Sandie leant forward, tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked if by any chance he knew of a local resting place where she could avail herself of the facilities. As we were in the middle of nowhere, this didn’t look very probable, but, as luck would have it, about ten minutes later the driver pulled up by the side of the road and pointed out a cottage situated about a hundred yards away.

‘Try in there,’ he said, ‘I’m sure they’ll be hospitable.’ Off she hopped, and made her way towards the cottage. Within a few minutes, a stirring occurred, and a rumbling was heard approaching from the back of the coach. Two or three of the Pretty Things, obviously the worse for wear, came staggering towards me, alighted from the bus, and went about their business by the side of the coach. Another minute or so passed before an even slower, smirking, green-faced wreck, looking even worse for wear, lurched towards the door, and sanctuary.

However, in his wisdom, Eden Kane decided to dispense with the necessity of leaving the bus in order to relieve himself, and lurching from side to side with his back to me, stood on the top step, facing out. He, too, then proceeded to go about his business. Unluckily, at that precise moment, our young female singer attempted to clamber back in. Pandemonium and devastation ensued. Poor Sandie. She was inconsolable. I don’t think she stopped crying for days.

On arriving at our hotel that day Eden Kane was led to his room while I was in the foyer with the tour manager, finishing off the preparations for checking in the tour party. Suddenly I heard a dreadful scream at the hotel entrance. I rushed outside with the manager and, gazing up at the first-floor balcony, we saw Eden Kane, paralytic and barely standing, totally naked. The town’s inhabitants had never seen anything like it before (and probably wouldn’t want to again).

Pretty Things mania was, by now, as hot in New Zealand as it was in England. In each place we arrived, we were met by the same screaming kids. For reasons unknown to us all, Viv Prince, on arriving at a hotel would immediately camp in the foyer with a champagne bucket and a dead lobster – within a week, a pretty rancid lobster at that – and why a lobster, I never found out. He would proceed to sit in the foyer on the floor, cross-legged like a yogi and, within minutes, hundreds of kids would come through the doors and join him in his apparent meditation. This process would sometimes go on for hours.

Looking back over the years, I can’t imagine why the hotel managers allowed it, as no one ever attempted to stop him. In fact, the opposite was the case. We were encouraged because we were rock ’n’ roll: we were the harbingers of this new generation that was at last throwing off the shackles of conservatism.

General mayhem continued throughout the two weeks of the tour, made worse by the fact that the new game in town was playing practical jokes while their opposite number was performing. After a week, it became necessary for us to get our own back on Eden Kane, because of some of the high jinks he had pulled on us. It was his custom to walk on stage each night wearing a white suit and, of course, his customary suntan, accompanied by the orchestra playing his hit song of the day, ‘Boys Cry’. He would always enter stage right, to a tumultuous ovation of screaming and clapping.

On the particular night in question, we arranged with the spotlight operator and the compere to start from stage left. On this night, the compere was as usual trying to make himself heard over the roar of the thousands of kids who were baying for Eden.

‘And now, the best-looking man in the world. The one you’ve all been waiting for. The one and only, Eden Kane!’

Hysteria broke out. The spotlight, directed by the compere to stage left, picked out another figure in a white suit. I sauntered across the stage to the accompaniment of ‘Boys Cry’, before bursting into song for the first six bars, in the full glare of the spotlight. Poor old Eden was standing a yard away from me, desolate in blackness, not understanding what had gone wrong. Meanwhile, three thousand girls were all trying to rush the stage at once, to get their hands on me. The adorable man in a white suit.

‘The best-looking man in the world,’ I believe the compere had said.

I have two lasting memories of New Zealand. One was spending three weeks in Auckland Hospital after suffering a major internal haemorrhage. I had wanted to leave with the boys. The other was hearing on the radio that the New Zealand parliament had banned the Pretty Things and their manager Bryan Morrison from ever gracing their shores again. Whether this ban still holds firm, I don’t know.

By 1966, the Pretty Things’ career seemed to be on the wane (although many years later, they are still going strong). However, my partner Jimmy Duncan and I, despite being thrown together, were getting on quite well with each other. That was until a fateful Saturday morning when, for some reason, I decided to go to our offices at 142 Charing Cross Road, near the corner of Denmark Street.

They were at the top of a rank-smelling staircase. It smelled because a very famous publisher’s drinking club was two floors below my office. It was known as the A&R Club, and for some strange reason that I never understood, it had an all-day, all-night drinking licence. Or indeed, it may not have had a licence at all. Maybe they just served alcohol all day. Anyway, this was the gaff where most of the old-world musos and publishers hung out, and there was always this slightly provocative smell of beer and cigarettes, with a hint of cheap perfume.

Where was I? Oh yes, I negotiated the stairs up past the A&R, then past Tony McNally’s first publishing office. I opened the door to my own office, and then picked up a number of letters that had been lying inside on the office floor. I casually opened one or two, before coming to an envelope that contained a bank statement and a number of returned cheques. As I stood looking at this collection, I had this sudden, strange feeling that something was amiss.

It occurred to me that over the course of the previous seven or eight months, I hadn’t come across or seen any letters or statements from the bank. I was to learn within a few minutes that running a business wasn’t simply a question of having hit records and finding the right artists, but also keeping in touch with the accounting and bookkeeping of the company.

I seemed to remember being told by my partner, some weeks before, that we had eight or nine thousand pounds on deposit in the bank. He kept an eye, or so I thought, on the money. A considerable sum back in those days; the money we’d been saving for a rainy day.

I looked at the cheques and suddenly felt a sickness spreading up from the pit of my stomach. My partner had stolen everything.

Each one of my signatures on each one of the cheques was a forgery. I discovered later that he had lost the lot gambling on the horses. All I had to show for three years’ hard work was a wedge of forged cheques, staring at me mockingly. My first thought, besides total anger, was that the end of the partnership was inevitable. Then for some silly reason, which I never could work out, I felt lost.

I questioned whether I had the ability to continue on my own. Maybe it was him that had created all the success in our business. Doom and despair surrounded me like a cloak. I was shattered. I sat there alone in the Charing Cross Road for hours, pondering my predicament. I finally rang my father to seek his advice. He was, as ever, precise and to the point.

‘Call the fraud squad,’ he said. ‘Immediately.’

The die was now cast and I had to do what I had to do, even though I was scared of being alone. On the Monday morning, Jimmy and I met. My first words to him, I think, were, ‘You bastard. What’s this?’

In my hand, I clutched the sheaf of forged cheques. Crestfallen, he stood staring somewhere into space. The body slumped forward, seemingly disconnected with his head, his face had a look of utter dejection. Nothing was said for a full two minutes. Once again, I was feeling lost.

I finally broke the silence of that unusually quiet office.

‘Give me your shares in the company. We’re through, get on your bike. I don’t want to see you again.’

He muttered some sort of acquiescence, and I became the sole owner of a bankrupt music company. I don’t think I ever saw him again from that moment onwards.

• • •

At first glance, the story about ‘Tangerine Eyes’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ appears to be impossible. How could Donovan and Dylan write almost identical songs in the summer of 1964, when they had never met and Bob Dylan only released his recording of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in March 1965?

The tale took a further twist when Dylan toured the UK in May 1965, a visit recorded by the director D.A. Pennebaker in his classic documentary, Don’t Look Back. Donovan was invited to meet Dylan in his suite at the Savoy Hotel in London. In an interview with the music critic Greil Marcus for a reissue of the film in 2010, Pennebaker recalled what happened next:

It transpired that Dylan had completed ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in April 1964 and premiered the song in a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London a month later. Donovan was in the audience and it has been suggested that he assumed Dylan had based his melody on a traditional folk tune. So Donovan thought he would write his own version.

He confessed as much when he reviewed Dylan’s album Bringing It All Back Home in Record Mirror on 15 May 1965: ‘“Mr Tambourine Man”. This is beautiful, this one. When I first heard this about a year and a half ago, I wrote my “Tangerine Eyes” from it, but I didn’t ever record it, because I didn’t want to steal it. I didn’t know what the lyrics were. I’ve sung it to him, he digs it. (Sings along.) That’s the best one on the LP, man …’

So Bryan was right all along.