FLOPS ON 45: The Ones That Got Away 1965-1979 by Richard Lysons

This is the book that no established rock or pop star will want in their Christmas stocking. With very few exceptions, everyone who has enjoyed a hit record or two has also had a few flops, which they doubtless hope the world has forgotten. Now, along comes Richard Lysons to remind them of their flops, and while his motive is surely not to rub their faces in it, his diligence makes sure that none escape his merciless gaze. 

The truth is, of course that most acts, especially newcomers, record more flops than hits and the ratio of hits to misses across the board is anyone’s guess. Statistics aren’t available – doubtless because the record industry doesn’t want to talk about its failures – but I’m inclined to think that less than one in 30 actual releases became hits. Those that remain unsold might even have been melted down so the vinyl could be used again, a terrible fate. 

Flops On 45 is restricted to UK acts within the period denoted by its subtitle. By and large, it limits itself to acts who have, or had, enjoyed a measure of success along the way, which means that flops by hopefuls who never made the charts are ignored, otherwise the book would be about ten times its length. As it is, it’s 350 pages, including a substantial index and source notes, but no pictures, thus relieving its publishers, Empire Publications of Manchester, of substantial clearance fees. 

“Flops On 45 makes an important contribution to popular music history: it honours a forgotten workforce,” writes the eminent critic and sociologist Simon Frith in his introduction, referring to the detail – the chronicling by Lysons of all those involved, hundreds of names, in a record’s production – that is at the heart of his book. Indeed, I’m hard pressed to think of any pop book, not even those that record the hits, as opposed to the misses, with so much trivial information. As it happens, in 2005, to mark the 1000th UK Number One hit, I commissioned and edited 1000 UK Number One Hits for Omnibus Press, which in many ways is the antithesis of Flops On 45, and though authors Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh did a sterling job, they didn’t pack anywhere near as much information into the generous 600 pages of this large format, illustrated book as Lysons does into Flops On 45.

Faced with a proposal for a book on records that flopped, a commissioning editor such as myself might reasonably be excused for assuming that the book would flop too, for who would want to read about records few people bought? That’s not the point, of course. The point is to contrast the misses with the hits, and explain why an act with plenty of big hits somehow stumbles along the way. More specifically, and Lysons doesn’t hold back in this regard, he explains why he believes a record was a flop, usually because he thinks it’s pretty awful, but other factors such as taste, timing and promotion, or lack thereof, impact on a record's chances too. At the same time, though, he sheds a tear over those records that in his opinion deserved to be hits but weren’t.

Let’s take a random example. Only two acts – The Beatles and The Bee Gees – get a chapter to themselves. The Beatles didn’t have any flops collectively but the same cannot be said for the individuals after they’d split up. The Bees Gees, on the other hand, both top the charts and plumb the depths, and one of their biggest flops was ‘Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)’, to my mind the equal of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ which reached number three, unlike ‘Fanny’ which didn’t chart at all in the UK. “Without doubt, one of the best R&B songs we ever wrote,” Lysons quotes Maurice Gib. “I love Arif Mardin’s production…” while Lysons adds, “It is one of the group’s finest songs and deserved to be a hit. Perhaps the title – inspired by the housekeeper at 461 Ocean Boulevard named Fanny Cummings – was the problem. As British-born, surely the writers knew the problems of using this word? But for me, ‘Fanny’ is in a class of its own.” I agree.

Flops On 45 is divided into 17 chapters, each of which deals with a particular strain of pop – Teen Angels, Underground, Ladies, London Boys, Glam, Punk etc etc – and is a trivia fans delight, well worth the £14.95 rrp. 

PINK FLOYD – SHINE ON: The Definitive Oral History by Mark Blake

“If you’re in a room, as I was at Live 8, with David, Nick, Rick and Roger Waters, nobody speaks,” says Polly Samson, wife of David Gilmour since 1994. “There is nothing but awkward silences. They have no small talk with each other. They have no big talk with each other. They just do not speak. And then they get on stage and suddenly they’re so eloquent, and the way they communicate is beautiful.”

Time was when the concept of an Oral History of Pink Floyd was about as likely as Van Morrison inviting journalists to spend an evening drinking with him while he regaled them with stories about his days in Them. Not only didn’t they speak to each other, they didn’t speak to the press much either. What’s more, pretty much everyone around them was tight-lipped too. They were an enigma, a “faceless obelisk” as more than one of their accomplices comment in Mark Blake’s second book about the group, following on from Pigs Might Fly, his definitive biography, now in its third edition. 

Now, of course, everything’s out in the open. Indeed, it took the squabbling between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, over the latter’s decision to reform the group to record and tour without Waters, that set off a time-bomb, opening the floodgates for all manner of grievances to be aired in public. The air of mystery was dispelled and, suddenly, Pink Floyd was an open book. 

        That element of mystery is most often explained by the strange story of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s founder, once its leading light, whose withdrawal from renown and eccentric behaviour was an ongoing source of invasive, sometimes salacious, speculation. But there was more to it than that, however; a detachment hinted at in the Dark Side song ‘Us And Them’: ”Who knows which is which and who is who?” 

        They didn’t like doing interviews, or having their photographs taken. On stage, they wore black and hid behind lights, screens and props. Their LP sleeves featured surreal, baffling imagery. It seemed as if they didn’t want their fans to know how they created their work, what they thought about it or even what they looked like. They were a conundrum, appealing to the curious, to problem-solvers, to those who believed – rightly or wrongly – that liking their music demonstrated a higher level of perception than, say, fans of Status Quo. 

Gradually, however, as the inner workings of Pink Floyd became exposed, what we saw wasn’t very nice. Beneath that aloof veneer, that inscrutable façade, lingered dysfunction and bitterness, rivalry and vanity, arrogance and greed – all of which Mark Blake reveals in spades this engrossing oral history.

Mark begins at the beginning, with Syd Barrett, or Roger as he was always known to his sister Rosemary, who speaks at length about the brother she tried hard to understand but never really did, and who cared for him later in life. We move on to how the group was assembled from among friends in Cambridge, with Syd as the central figure, soon to be joined in London by drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright. At this point Waters was the least musical, requiring Wright, the only trained musician, to tune his bass. For whatever reason, Waters looked down on Wright thereafter. 

Plenty of people talk about this era, when Pink Floyd was a pop group pure and simple, in frilly shirts, loon pants and kicking their legs in the air for photographers. The inscrutability came later, after Syd was abandoned to whatever was going on inside his head, which no one could understand, and with Gilmour as his replacement an element of professionalism is introduced, along with the walls erected to keep outsiders at bay.

Nevertheless, Mark Blake has unearthed plenty of bystanders to take us through the story, among them a surprising number of former girlfriends – they got married and divorced a lot, leaving a pool of embittered ex-wives who, no doubt, hoovered up a decent chunk of their earnings – road crew, some of whom were retained even when their services were no longer required, record producers and studio hands, management staff, flatmates, collaborators, photographers, journalists and, most especially, Aubrey “Po” Powell who, with the late Storm Thorgerson, made up the design team Hipgnosis, creators of Floydian artwork. Some 92 voices are credited in the acknowledgements, the interviews conducted between 1992 and 2025, which speaks for itself as far as Blake’s diligence is concerned.

The quotes are linked with Mark’s text to explain the background, much of it setting the scene for when and where he interviewed the members of the group and, in his own idiosyncratic way, comments on how they behave. We hear how Waters’ domination of the group tore it apart, how he bullied Wright and alienated Gilmour. For years Mason acted as a go-between but in the end opted for the Gilmour faction, a wise move. Waters’ incomprehension at how Pink Floyd could exist without him is at the heart of the tale. 

“You are antisemitic to your rotten core,” wrote Samson, never one to mince words, to Waters in 2023, “… a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.”

“Imagine waking up to [her] every morning,” responded Waters.

And if the band you’re in starts playing a different tune… 

THE COLONEL AND THE KING by Peter Guralnick

Every great story needs a great villain, and in The Elvis Presley Story the villain has always been Colonel Tom Parker, his manager. Just look at the evidence: he conned poor old Elvis out of 50% of his earnings, maybe more; he was a bully, unsophisticated and uncultured, steering Elvis away from his R&B roots towards MOR and innumerable schlock films, neutering his sexuality in the process; he bartered Elvis’ health-sapping Las Vegas appearances to pay off his gambling debts; and, finally, to hammer the nail into the coffin, he wasn’t even who he said he was, concealing his real identity as – wait for it – an illegal immigrant.   

That, at least, is the commonly held narrative, and also the theme of the “authorised” 1922 biopic Elvis The Movie, with Tom Hanks as, to quote my own review, the “scheming, Machiavellian Parker, thoroughly dislikable, overweight, lumbering, ugly and speaking with a nasty quasi-Boer accent born of his Dutch ancestry, of which Elvis was forever ignorant.”

        Peter Guranlick, Elvis’ premier biographer, however, believes otherwise. The only minor criticism of his magnificent, definitive two-volume Presley biography, Last Train To Memphis (1994) and Carless Love (1999), was that he was too easy on Parker. In this third book – a coda if you like – Guralnick goes out of his way to fully redeem Parker’s reputation, painting a portrait that is the complete opposite of his (un)popular image, an avuncular, wise and witty man who was kind to animals, stood by his friends, always kept his word and was scrupulously honest. Indeed, so robust is the author’s defence of Parker, so persuasive his tone, that I’m inclined to believe him. 

        The story is told in two parts. The first, subtitled How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free? – the proposed title for a book Parker intended to write but never did – is a 300+ page biography that avoids focusing on Presley and instead offers fascinating details on aspects of Parker’s life hitherto unexplored, many of them heart-warming. The second, occupying the final 250 pages, tells his story through a selection from the “tens of thousands” of letters he wrote (and a handful he received); to Elvis and his family, business associates, friends and foes, the earliest eulogising Elvis before he managed him, the majority pushing his point of view with regard to Elvis’ career, many of them illustrating Parker’s quirky sense of the absurd. Some of these letters are alluded to in the biographical section of the book. 

Parker’s upbringing in his native Breda in Holland had been explored before but never in such detail, and the same goes for his early life in the US as a “carney”, a general labourer on travelling fairgrounds and circuses where he was always willing to turn his hand to any task, no matter how unpleasant, and learnt show business from the ground up. He was particularly adept at working as an “advance man”, arriving a week or two in a town before the carnival, setting up deals with local businesses and making absolutely sure its entire population was aware of the coming attraction, thus maximising profits, a skill he maintained with Elvis. I found these pre-Elvis chapters absorbing – there was a likeable streak of eccentricity in Parker’s character, a restlessness, a need to make up his own rules as he went along and not to accept the status quo. Above all, he got things done.

Introduced to the music world through a fairly brief relationship with crooner Gene Austin, he quickly became known as a mover and shaker, moving on to manage Eddy Arnold and, later, Hank Snow. Elvis – a “promising new singer” – was drawn to his attention early in 1955 and after watching him on the Louisiana Hayride Colonel booked him onto a Snow tour that opened in Roswell, New Mexico, on February 14. He stole the show, just as he did on two tours of Florida that followed. The reaction from teenage girls was explosive, and when Mae Boren Axton, a former school teacher (and co-author of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’) who was working for Parker, spotted a former student in the audience, she inquired what was it about Elvis that she liked so much. “Awww Miz Axton,” she replied, “he’s just one great big beautiful hunk of forbidden fruit.” 

Parker moved swiftly. By the end of the year, flying by the seat of his pants, he had edged out Presley’s manager, won over Elvis’ sceptical parents, negotiated a release from Sun Records and transfer to RCA, overseen more chaotic concerts, arranged more TV appearances and set the wheels in motion for Elvis’ first movie which turned out to be Love Me Tender. He worked 16 hours a day, every day, and Elvis sure appreciated it: “You are the best and most wonderful person I could ever hope to work with,” wrote Elvis in a letter addressed to Parker on November 21, 1956. “I will stick with you thru thick and thin… I love you like a father.”

Which pretty much sums up the relationship from then on, though Guralnick is at pains to point out that, creatively, Elvis was in charge, while when it came to business Parker ruled the roost. In amongst what follows are details of complex royalty and advance deals with RCA and various film companies in which Parker, forever astute, invariably comes out on top. He never forces Elvis into doing anything he doesn’t want to do – thus contradicting the widely held belief that Parker stifled Elvis’ artistic ambitions, and reveals how the spendthrift in Elvis was most often to blame for placing earnings before art. 

        Furthermore, according to Guralnick, Parker did not interfere with the production of Elvis’s Comeback Special in 1968 (though he hated the word ‘comeback’, insisting Elvis never went away), the reason why Elvis never toured outside of the US was not Parker’s lack of a US passport but the customs risk to whoever was assigned to carry his drugs, and the impetus behind the notorious sell-out of his back catalogue to RCA in 1973 came from Elvis and his father, not Parker. And the 50/50 income split applied only to joint ventures agreed upon late in Elvis’ career. 

The story gets darker towards the end as Elvis’ weight and health problems interfere with Parker’s innate sense of responsibility towards the paying public. The hopelessness of the situation, the breakdown of the marriage if you like, may have led Parker to become addicted to gambling, squandering his fortune on Vegas roulette wheels, an inexplicable reversal of type for a serial winner. He’s stoic when Elvis dies and bitter when the Estate seeks to free itself from his clutches. Towards the end he’s on speaking terms with its CEO and in the end even Priscilla comes around to appreciating all that he did for her late husband. By this time, too, he and Guralnick have become friends, insofar as Parker could ever befriend a journalist. 

It’s not easy to come to terms with the idea that Colonel Tom Parker was a saint but Elvis And The Colonel succeeds. The book is illustrated throughout with photos, many I’d not seen before, and beautifully written, as you would expect from Peter Guralnick.