Robert Stigwood - Rebuilding

Rebuilding

After the disaster of the Berry tour, Stigwood took on David Shaw, an ex-City banker, as his partner, giving him access to previously unavailable funds and expertise, and he gained some extra cashflow by subletting his offices to The Who's managers, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, although he reportedly became the butt of the pair's inveterate and often cruel practical jokes.

He kept his Robert Stigwood Agency intact and worked to rebuild his career as a manager and independent producer. One of the first acts he managed during this period was Junco Partners, a blues band which succeeded The Animals as the house band at Newcastle's Club A Go Go. The band recorded for Columbia (the EMI label) and the French Barclay Records, with one of its first releases being co-produced by Stigwood and Vicki Wickham. The band included Charlie Harcourt, later of Lindisfarne and Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys.

In 1966 Stigwood made an important deal when he paid £500 to Stamp and Lambert for the right to become The Who's booking agent. This soon enabled him to lure the band away from Brunswick Records and onto his own newly established Reaction Records label, for whom they recorded the famous single "Substitute".

The recording was completed secretly, and was explicitly intended by the group as a way of breaking their five-year contract with producer Shel Talmy, with whom they had fallen out (the single's original B-side, "Waltz For A Pig", was reputedly about Talmy). Also in 1966 Stigwood became the manager of a new band comprising three of the best musicians from two groups that he had under contract—guitarist Eric Clapton from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, and bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker from The Graham Bond Organisation.

His connection to The Who enabled him to get this new group, Cream, onto the bill for a 9-day booking at the RKO theater in New York in 1967. It was an important showcase for Cream and enabled Stigwood to introduce them to New York's music cognoscenti and helped break them in the USA. It was for this show that Stigwood commissioned the Dutch art collective called The Fool to paint the striking psychedelic designs on Eric Clapton's Gibson SG guitar, Jack Bruce's Fender VI bass and Ginger Baker's drum kit.

However, during this period Stigwood had another pop flop when he tried to promote a singer called 'Oscar'. Oscar's real name was Paul Beuselinck; his stage name was taken from his father, Oscar Beuselinck, a music business solicitor whose clients included The Who. Oscar had been the pianist in Screaming Lord Sutch's backing band, The Savages. Under the name 'Paul Dean' he released two singles in 1965-66. As 'Oscar' he cut four singles for Stigwood's Reaction label. The first, "Club of Lights" managed to scrape into the lower reaches of the Radio London Fab 40 chart. The second Oscar single was a version of a Pete Townshend song, "Join My Gang", which The Who never recorded. His third single, a novelty song called "Over The Wall We Go" (1967) was written and produced by a young David Bowie, and it gained a degree of notoriety because of Bowie's tongue-in-cheek lyrics concerning escaped prisoners and incompetent cops, which satirised a rash of highly-publicised prison break-outs in the UK.

Once again, however, Stigwood over promoted Oscar, sending out a fake Academy-Awards-style statuette. 'Oscar' vanished from sight for some time, but Beuselinck re-emerged in the late 1960s under the name Paul Nicholas. He maintained a connection with Stigwood, performing in the London productions of Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and Grease, and he played the sadistic Cousin Kevin in Stigwood's film version of The Who's Tommy.

Stigwood moved his recording activities to Polydor Records, where former EMI staffer Roland Rennie had recently been appointed as the new managing director. Stigwood had apparently been forewarned that Rennie was moving to Polydor, and this, according to Napier-Bell, was the major reason that Stigwood had been unwilling to accept EMI's rescue package.

Rennie had been a key figure in promoting The Beatles in America; he had been sent to New York by George Martin and all EMI product was channeled through him for distribution by EMI's American partners. It was Rennie who struck the deal to license the first three Beatles records to the Swan and VeeJay labels, rather than to Capitol, who at first had no interest in the group.

Stigwood signed a much more advantageous deal with Polydor, with high percentages and substantial funding for his recording costs. This gave him the luxury of being able to take Cream to New York, where they cut their records with Atlantic Records' house engineer Tom Dowd and producer Felix Pappalardi.