NEMS ENTERPRISES LTD. was formed in Liverpool in 1962 and in response to prolonged pressure for an admission on the point of money, I am prepared to admit that the Company makes a pretty decent profit. I cannot, nor would I, discuss just how much, because in the first place I do not precisely know how much, and in the second place I detest financial arrogance.
I have witnessed the money-boaster, I have been saddened to read of his subsequent downfall and frightened much earlier than that by the signs of disaster. They are unmistakable and familiar and they alarm me. What I can say is that the money coming in is sufficient to ensure that everyone within the organization is amply rewarded for the work they do. The Beatles are great stars and they receive the sort of money great stars are accustomed to receiving. Likewise Gerry, and all my artistes and staffs—ability is well-regarded and well-paid.
Nems was formed to handle the affairs of my artistes, as an offshoot of the family business and I retained the old initials of North End Music Stores chiefly because I didn’t want to follow the showbiz pattern and call it the Brian Epstein Organization or anything of that highly-personalized sort.
At first, after I had signed the Beatles, I operated them as a private business and all of it I handled alone. I simply collected cash at the end of a week and I was grateful if it reached £100. On a very special week it might reach £180 and this made me very excited because it could mean that I made a small profit.
But as 1962 progressed, and Gerry and the Pacemakers joined me, I decided to form a limited company to cope with tax matters, to ease banking arrangements and generally put the growing band of artistes on a proper footing. My brother Clive joined me as a Director and I registered Nems Enterprises Ltd. in June that year.
I was, however, the entire working staff for Clive was very busy with the family businesses. Natural growth and a little of Parkinson’s Law demanded that I take on staff and by the end of June, the new Company had its first employee—Beryl Adams, a secretary who had worked with me before. We had offices on the first floor of the Whitechapel store in Liverpool which we retained even up to the middle of last year and which, on the local scene, became better known than the Liver Buildings, which dominate Liverpool’s waterfront.
Whitechapel was a street where, on a lucky day, you might spot a Beatle or see Gerry buying a packet of cigarettes. Whitechapel became more beleaguered than an ancient fortress. And, eventually, so did I.
Pressures mounted and the staff increased. I took on a personal assistant, an ex-medical student, to deal with small matters, and I concentrated—as I still do now—on the promotion and welfare of the artistes.
A telephonist followed, then a typist. Suddenly our offices were too small and our business too big and in the summer of 1963 we moved to Moorfields, a charming little street near Exchange Station in Liverpool and there we took a suite a few yards away from the Wizard’s Den, the most famous magic shop in the North of England, where you can buy anything from a horror mask to a joke spider or maybe, like most of Liverpool, you don’t buy anything. You just stand there and stare and remember when you were young and magic was a wonderful thing.
Into our offices in Liverpool we brought new furnishings, new people and a seething sense of urgency. A brand-new switchboard was installed with two telephonists. We took on office boys, a general manager, an accountant, a press officer, a fan-club staff who had to be set-up in London. Also I needed a personal secretary, and thus we outgrew our new offices within six months.
But alas, and I regret this very profoundly, we also outgrew our beloved, lovely, Liverpool.
The world over, there is, ultimately, only one place for a major enterprise and that place is the Capital. It is sad and inconvenient but it is inescapable that in England the centre of show-business is London. This I discovered and with immense reluctance, I decided in the autumn of last year that I could resist London no longer. I instructed agents to look for offices and I warned my staff that the upheaval and the separation from their native city and its Sounds was inevitable.
We chose our new offices in London next door to the London Palladium in Argyll Street, W.1. Our neighbours, we argued, should be the biggest names in show-business for if we were to be forced to leave Liverpool, we might as well do it in style.
Much has been written in the newspapers about Nems deserting the city which had ‘made’ them and so on … but the fact was that we had no choice. The move freed me from spending half my life either in the air or on a train shuttling between Liverpool and the Capital; also it enabled me to bring all the staff together and to employ the sort of top-level executives who can only be found in London—a booking manager, a director of presentation and personal assistants.
Much earlier than this, the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer had all become limited companies; and by the end of 1963, so varied were the sources of income, and so substantial the amounts, that one of London’s leading firms of chartered accountants found it necessary to regard Nems artistes as a major industry.
Our money comes in from all sides—from personal appearances, from discs, from television, radio and film work, from merchandising—the sale of Beatle wigs, talcum powder, chewing gum, guitars. Almost, literally, every product under the sun.
Merchandising can be profitable but figures of millions of pounds in royalties from America are undistilled nonsense; I cannot myself estimate how much we will make because the year is not over and new products bear the name ‘Beatle’. One of the features of merchandise is, by the way, its comparatively short life. A product will make an immediate novelty appeal but interest flags quite quickly.
All of us learned a solemn lesson when the Davy Crockett vogue died overnight leaving frenzied wholesalers gazing in despair at hundreds of thousands of unsold coonskin hats.
To handle the sheet-music and publishing side of the business John, Paul and I linked with Dick James, an honourable and well-regarded publisher who had been a well-known band singer—he is the man singing the title song of television’s Robin Hood.
When I met him he had a small publishing office but huge integrity. Now his power in publishing matches his character and I believe both are unequalled in London.
To handle songs written by John and Paul, the two composer-Beatles formed Northern Songs Ltd, with Dick. I also have a share in this company though my major publishing interests are in Jaep Music Co. which is part owned by Dick and part by myself—Ja for the first part of Dick’s surname, Ep for the first part of mine. This company handles material recorded by artistes of mine excepting the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers.
Gerry has his own company, again with Dick, called Pacermusic and this, like the others, is doing very nicely. We have been fortunate to have Dick with us as one of the features of Nems is that we are surrounded by people who know their business and behave themselves.
As newcomers to show-business, I and my early staff decided to associate only with the most honest of established experts. We were vulnerable enough to sharp practitioners without making friends with rogues and as a result of our care in the beginning, we have created a team which is incorruptible, powerful and which has a sense of direction and purpose.
One of the chief factors in this business—as in all others—is timing and only after prolonged discussion between George Martin and myself, and after consultation with the artistes is a song chosen and a disc released. I believe I know a hit when I hear one, but George Martin knows the record industry infinitely better than I ever could; and because George has been at it for some time, he has an innate sense of the public mood.
Thus we both pool our views, our flair and our experience before putting discs before the buyers and, up to now, our joint endeavours have been pretty successful. For in 20 months, Nems artistes have placed 16 numbers at the top of the British Record Charts, in addition to countless list-toppers the world over.
This hasn’t happened by accident and it can only be sustained by taking the greatest care for though success breeds success we could easily topple if we tried to flood the market with shoddy goods. The public is no fool.
Though our artistes produce the records, though we—Dick James, the publisher, George Martin and myself—are the men immediately behind the discs, we are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface is the huge imponderable unreliable mass of public taste, the song-pluggers and the disc-jockeys, the television and radio men, the shifts in spending-power—all the factors which can mean the difference, say, between Gerry making Number One and a sale of 500,000 discs, or Number 5 and half these sales.
The song-pluggers are fascinating men, very old hands at the game and everybody’s friends. They have to place a song on this television show or that radio programme. They are diligent and full of enthusiasm and I don’t know where we should all be without them.
The disc-jockeys are an entirely different breed for if the pluggers are the original faceless men, the D.J.s live almost entirely on personality and self. They are, in general, very vain men and considerably less powerful than they believe but I like most of them very much because they are happy extroverts and, usually, very amusing companions.
I think one of my favourites is Alan Freeman because he is fascinated by the charts. So also is Jimmy Saville who will often say the first thing that comes into his head, making wild, unjustifiable predictions with great, infectious gusto.
Brian Matthew, with whom I am involved in a non-pop theatrical venture in Bromley, Kent, is one of the more serious disc-jockeys. He is with-it and accurate and, though it doesn’t always show, a stern, cynical man.
He knows there is a lot of gloss and nonsense in the industry and off-stage he makes no secret of his regard for what might be termed the ‘higher’ things of life. Brian is a great lover of discipline and he once reported one of my groups for fooling around on ‘Thank your Lucky Stars’, which earned him my additional respect even if I didn’t show it at the time.
David Jacobs is very shrewd, full of visual charm, poise and television-warmth. He is an immaculate D.J. so far as musical taste is concerned and a very nice man. He is also the best looking disc-jockey and in the circumstances remarkably modest about it.
If I believe that the control on public taste of the D.J. is limited, I take an entirely different view of the press whose strength and influence only a fool would underestimate. They have power and they wield it exactly when, how and where they please and I cannot see any objection to this.
However, I must say that contrary to some claims, they had nothing to do with making the Beatles. I was amazed that they were so late on the scene and I was profoundly glad that I did not have to rely on newspapers to get the Beatles and Gerry away. For if I had, I would have lost at least a year and that would possibly have been too late.
The Beatles had taken ‘Please Please Me’, to the top of the charts and played to wild packed houses in every British city before any journalist beyond disc-reviewers took an interest in this extraordinary new group and the city which had launched them.
The ‘Mersey Sound’, so called, had been noising loudly for more than eighteen months before an echo landed in any national newspaper office, but to give the press its due—and I always do—once they had discovered what was happening to popular music, they responded and reported with splendid vigour.
In the early days in Liverpool, two Rabelaisian members of the roaring, swinging Press club there offered to form a promotion organization called: ‘Publicity Ink’, to operate on my behalf for a fee of £100—without, of course, the knowledge of their newspaper employers—stunts, gimmicks, rows, scenes. Anything to get the names of my artistes in the papers.
The plan was conceived after much Draught Bass and whisky and it was lightly, though purposefully, pursued by these two reporters but I had nothing to do with it and I’m glad now for it enables me to say that I never pulled one stunt to publicize any of my artistes.
It would have been easy, for instance, to hire a girl or two to leap on stage to mob Paul, or claim that each had received a proposal of marriage from Ringo or something of that sort. It had been done before and it will be done again but if you can get any substance from show-business by those methods I should be very surprised.
I am very fond of journalists. I believe they are wonderful classless people with a great sense of democracy and an enviable zest for life. They are also very interesting to be with because they know something about everything and they know the news behind the news. Individually I find them splendid though collectively they do not always behave terribly well, nor ask the most intelligent questions.
Sometimes I will manipulate the Press without the slightest sense of guilt for I know they would manipulate me if I allowed them. I employ, when I can, the envy of one paper for another’s story; it is a great game and I believe we all enjoy it. I never bear malice and I trust journalists not to.
I believe we are all in this together, public, artistes, management, press, the entire entertainment industry and I believe we should all, like Arnold Bennett’s ‘Card’ be identified with the ‘great cause of cheering us all up’.