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| NOTE: King does not usually look like Mitch McConnell, but... |
“I have been studying the music industry for the last three years and it is one big joke. Anyone can make it if they're clever and can fool a few people.”
Back in 1965, a Englishman named Jonathan King wanted to be a pop star very, very badly, so he wrote a song called, “Everyone's Gone to the Moon.” It’s not a great song, one of those popular music hold-outs in the early(ish) age of rock ‘n’ roll that borrowed from it while still sounding like something your local radio station would play after a Petula Clark hit. Whatever I think of that song, Jonathan King understood how pop stardom worked. Maybe not in the most traditional way – and, as it happened, not without prison time(!) – but King gave one hell of a lot more to popular culture than that one cheesy song…
…if nothing else, you can thank him for the “ooga chaka ooga ooga” in his remake of “Hooked on Feeling.” (Even if his version wasn’t the most popular; paging Blue Swede.)
Born to privilege in 1944, King became obsessed with pop stardom around the time he was working on his A levels. He was already performing with a band, The Bumbles, as well as writing and producing for them. That accounted for King’s first crack at fame, a single titled “Gotta Tell” (which I can't find). That flopped, but it only took his third/fourth attempt to write the hit that made him famous. "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" hit No. 4 on the UK charts behind The Beatles’ “Help!” at No. 1 and, to deepen the foreshadowing introduced above (e.g., “prison time(!)”), King played on Jimmy Savile’s Top of the Pops. Wait for it…
The decision to flag “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” as either King’s third or fourth attempt touches on a curious aspect of King’s career. King had persuaded Decca Records to release a 45 based on another song titled “Green Is the Grass”; when they’d asked him for a B-side, he delivered “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” which immediately became the A-side. “Green Is the Grass” flopped in the end, but the way King released his next hit – e.g., without his name attached to it; he didn’t even perform it – established a template that he’d return to throughout his career. That single was titled “It’s Good News Week,” by Hedgehoppers Anonymous. King continued to release hits under his own name – e.g., “Lazy Bones,” Flirt,” and “Hooked on a Feeling” – but he’d also put out songs under names like The Weathermen (“It’s the Same Old Song” (yes, it's a (bad) cover)), Nemo (“The Sun Has Got His Hat On”), Sakkarin (“Sugar, Sugar”), and St. Cecelia (“Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air)”). There was a certain logic to it all:
Back in 1965, a Englishman named Jonathan King wanted to be a pop star very, very badly, so he wrote a song called, “Everyone's Gone to the Moon.” It’s not a great song, one of those popular music hold-outs in the early(ish) age of rock ‘n’ roll that borrowed from it while still sounding like something your local radio station would play after a Petula Clark hit. Whatever I think of that song, Jonathan King understood how pop stardom worked. Maybe not in the most traditional way – and, as it happened, not without prison time(!) – but King gave one hell of a lot more to popular culture than that one cheesy song…
…if nothing else, you can thank him for the “ooga chaka ooga ooga” in his remake of “Hooked on Feeling.” (Even if his version wasn’t the most popular; paging Blue Swede.)
Born to privilege in 1944, King became obsessed with pop stardom around the time he was working on his A levels. He was already performing with a band, The Bumbles, as well as writing and producing for them. That accounted for King’s first crack at fame, a single titled “Gotta Tell” (which I can't find). That flopped, but it only took his third/fourth attempt to write the hit that made him famous. "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" hit No. 4 on the UK charts behind The Beatles’ “Help!” at No. 1 and, to deepen the foreshadowing introduced above (e.g., “prison time(!)”), King played on Jimmy Savile’s Top of the Pops. Wait for it…
The decision to flag “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” as either King’s third or fourth attempt touches on a curious aspect of King’s career. King had persuaded Decca Records to release a 45 based on another song titled “Green Is the Grass”; when they’d asked him for a B-side, he delivered “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” which immediately became the A-side. “Green Is the Grass” flopped in the end, but the way King released his next hit – e.g., without his name attached to it; he didn’t even perform it – established a template that he’d return to throughout his career. That single was titled “It’s Good News Week,” by Hedgehoppers Anonymous. King continued to release hits under his own name – e.g., “Lazy Bones,” Flirt,” and “Hooked on a Feeling” – but he’d also put out songs under names like The Weathermen (“It’s the Same Old Song” (yes, it's a (bad) cover)), Nemo (“The Sun Has Got His Hat On”), Sakkarin (“Sugar, Sugar”), and St. Cecelia (“Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air)”). There was a certain logic to it all:
“Using pseudonyms meant more airtime: radio producers might play several songs by the same artist during a programme without realizing they had devoted so much airtime to one person.”
The particulars of another hit reveal something important about King. In 1971, he recorded a song titled “Johnny Reggae” credited to a band called The Piglets. As noted on King’s Wikipedia page, “’Johnny Reggae’ was the ‘first British hit with a ska beat to have been written by a white Englishman...and performed by white English singers and musicians.’” In a long-familiar pattern with popular music, King’s whiteness opened doors that were closed to the black Jamaican artists he copied, while at the same time introducing white audiences to the music of those same artists – aka, a good outcome by way of a shitty process. At the same time, it shows King’s knack for identifying, and capitalizing, on sounds/concepts before they got big – e.g., the 20% stake he bought in The Rocky Horror Picture Show after seeing it on its second night.
King operated behind the throne for most of the rest of his career – and he backed some very big names. He was introduced to the band that would become Genesis when they were performing as teenagers under the name “Anon.” King gave them the name that stuck and produced their first album, From Genesis to Revelation, before they moved onto another label and Phil Collins. He also produced and wrote a couple hits for The Bay City Rollers, including their first hit “Keep on Dancing.” (King worked with another band, 10cc, who I want to check out before too long.)
King more or less kept going from there, bouncing from one opportunity to the next one he created, but always involved in music – whether selecting the UK’s contributions to the Eurovision Song Context, including 1997’s winner,” Love Shine a Light,” by Katrina and the Waves. He also gets whatever credit/blame the UK wants to give him for pushing Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” and Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out” (please, please, put the dogs back). He also put out a music trade weekly called The Tip Sheet from 1993-2002.
That last opportunity dried up for the very compelling reason of King’s conviction “on four counts of indecent assault, one of buggery and one of attempted buggery” with underage (ages 14-15) in 2001. King did wind up spending time in prison, but he has, 1) maintained his innocence throughout, and 2) very unashamedly confessed to sleeping with young men – up to and including singing “there’s nothing wrong with buggering boys” whilst dressed as Oscar Wilde in a self-produced musical titled Vile Pervert: The Musical - but only those at the age of consent. (Judging by King’s being found not guilty at a second trial, the age of consent in England appears to be 16.) He also released Earth to King in 2008, a damned strange album I listened to about a couple months ago (the bitter, humorless “I Hate Coca Cola” appears somewhere on my timeline), which announces his anger at a media apparatus that he believes defamed him.
King’s legal troubles revived in a 2018 trial for, again, “buggery” attempted and otherwise. It’s here where Jimmy Savile returns to the plot as the cautionary tale that made the Surrey Police a little too committed to securing King’s conviction. The accusations were very old – as with the previous cases, they occurred in the 1970s and 80s (there is no statute of limitation for these crimes, something else King raged against) – but King’s sexual history clearly left him vulnerable to suspicion (it’s worthwhile reading media reports going into the trial). King was acquitted of all charges this time around due to irregularities from the Surrey Police, and even apologized to by the magistrate overseeing the case.
That brings King’s story very current. The latest thing I saw from him was his call for Surrey Police Commissioner to stand down. This turned out as a rare case where I relied almost exclusively on Wikipedia’s entry. King operated mainly as a songwriter/producer and, as such, doesn’t have a massive public profile (related, how many people even know his one hit?). I’ll close with two fun little footnotes. First, King happened to live in New York at the time John Lennon was shot, so it fell to him to be the first Brit to break the news back home. Also, Simon Cowell chipped in on King’s bail at the time of his original indictment. King might not be a household name, at least not in the States, but he absolutely got around.
King operated behind the throne for most of the rest of his career – and he backed some very big names. He was introduced to the band that would become Genesis when they were performing as teenagers under the name “Anon.” King gave them the name that stuck and produced their first album, From Genesis to Revelation, before they moved onto another label and Phil Collins. He also produced and wrote a couple hits for The Bay City Rollers, including their first hit “Keep on Dancing.” (King worked with another band, 10cc, who I want to check out before too long.)
King more or less kept going from there, bouncing from one opportunity to the next one he created, but always involved in music – whether selecting the UK’s contributions to the Eurovision Song Context, including 1997’s winner,” Love Shine a Light,” by Katrina and the Waves. He also gets whatever credit/blame the UK wants to give him for pushing Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” and Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out” (please, please, put the dogs back). He also put out a music trade weekly called The Tip Sheet from 1993-2002.
That last opportunity dried up for the very compelling reason of King’s conviction “on four counts of indecent assault, one of buggery and one of attempted buggery” with underage (ages 14-15) in 2001. King did wind up spending time in prison, but he has, 1) maintained his innocence throughout, and 2) very unashamedly confessed to sleeping with young men – up to and including singing “there’s nothing wrong with buggering boys” whilst dressed as Oscar Wilde in a self-produced musical titled Vile Pervert: The Musical - but only those at the age of consent. (Judging by King’s being found not guilty at a second trial, the age of consent in England appears to be 16.) He also released Earth to King in 2008, a damned strange album I listened to about a couple months ago (the bitter, humorless “I Hate Coca Cola” appears somewhere on my timeline), which announces his anger at a media apparatus that he believes defamed him.
King’s legal troubles revived in a 2018 trial for, again, “buggery” attempted and otherwise. It’s here where Jimmy Savile returns to the plot as the cautionary tale that made the Surrey Police a little too committed to securing King’s conviction. The accusations were very old – as with the previous cases, they occurred in the 1970s and 80s (there is no statute of limitation for these crimes, something else King raged against) – but King’s sexual history clearly left him vulnerable to suspicion (it’s worthwhile reading media reports going into the trial). King was acquitted of all charges this time around due to irregularities from the Surrey Police, and even apologized to by the magistrate overseeing the case.
That brings King’s story very current. The latest thing I saw from him was his call for Surrey Police Commissioner to stand down. This turned out as a rare case where I relied almost exclusively on Wikipedia’s entry. King operated mainly as a songwriter/producer and, as such, doesn’t have a massive public profile (related, how many people even know his one hit?). I’ll close with two fun little footnotes. First, King happened to live in New York at the time John Lennon was shot, so it fell to him to be the first Brit to break the news back home. Also, Simon Cowell chipped in on King’s bail at the time of his original indictment. King might not be a household name, at least not in the States, but he absolutely got around.
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