Ray Coleman was the
editor of Melody Maker during the seven years that I worked on the paper. When he died
in 1996 the Daily Telegraph asked me to write an obituary, and that same week obits
of Ray also appeared in The Guardian and The Independent, written by Richard
Williams and Chris Welch respectively. Ray would have been
delighted that three of his former staff members had written his obits in UK
broadsheets. Here’s mine, though it’s a bit dry, as befitting the Telegraph!
Ray Coleman, who has died from cancer aged 59, played a
leading role in the growth of the British music press in the Sixties and
Seventies. Under his editorship Melody
Maker became a flagship magazine for IPC Business Press, selling over
200,000 copies a week at its peak in the early Seventies. No other weekly music
magazine has bettered this circulation since. In more recent years he became a
respected author of solid, unsensational, accurate rock biographies.
Born
in Leicester on 15 June, 1937, Ray began his career as a tea boy on the Leicester Evening Mail at the age of 15,
graduating to the reporters' room two years later. After two years in the Army
on National Service, he joined the Brighton
Evening Argus as a general reporter, then the Manchester Evening News where he stayed for five years,
specialising in industry and, as a sideline, becoming a stringer for Melody Maker.
Impressed
with his work, Melody Maker editor
Jack Hutton invited Ray to join the magazine's editorial team in 1960. Ray
immediately brought a degree of hitherto missing professionalism to music
journalism, digging for stories that might well have been ignored in earlier
times. At this time Melody Maker was
noted for its jazz coverage and treated pop music with some disdain, but this
was to change in 1963 with the advent of Beatlemania. Ray, appointed deputy
editor that year, was at the frontline of the beat boom, travelling with The
Beatles on tour in the UK and America, and becoming particularly friendly with
John Lennon. The Beatles, increasingly irritated at the crassness of trivial
questions from reporters who treated them as a novelty act, welcomed the
erudite, bespectacled figure of Ray Coleman into their dressing room, and he
was soon filing exclusive interviews and stories which, in hindsight, offer a
valuable history of the Beatles phenomenon. He became friendly with Brian
Epstein, the Beatles' manager, and The Rolling Stones, with whom he also
travelled on tour.
In
1967 Ray left Melody Maker to become
editor of Disc, its sister paper, but
three years later, when MM editor
Jack Hutton left to launch Sounds magazine,
Ray rejoined MM, this time as its new
editor. He soon restaffed the paper with young journalists from provincial
newspapers whose backgrounds were similar to his own, and under his direction
the new team began producing a rock magazine that outsold all its rivals.
Indeed, by 1972 MM had become the
world's best selling weekly music paper, referred to in the industry as 'The
Bible'. New Musical Express, MM's only serious rival in the UK, soon
began to look as if it had been designed on the MM subs desk.
Ever
the vigilant reporter, Ray placed an emphasis on rock and pop news and insisted
that MM's front page always carried a
dramatic headline news story about a top act. MM was invariably first with the news about important tours, groups
splitting up or the impending arrival of Elvis Presley to British shores –
though, of course, Elvis never arrived. To his credit, Ray was willing to take
a chance on promising new acts, and the careers of both David Bowie and Roxy
Music benefited from front page coverage before they achieved mass acceptance.
Ray
was also adept at spotting and encouraging talented young writers and many of
the reporters that he employed on MM went
on to achieve eminence in journalism. These include Richard Williams, now the
senior sports columnist on The Guardian;
Michael Watts, Editor of the Independent
magazine; and Alan Lewis, Editorial Director at IPC Magazines.
Largely
due to its rather serious, apolitical approach, Melody Maker fell behind its rivals with the advent of punk rock,
and in 1979 Ray handed over the reins, staying on at IPC in a senior editorial
capacity, but he left after two years to concentrate on books. In recent years Melody Maker's circulation has
plummeted, which saddened him enormously.
Ray's
first book, a two-volume biography of John Lennon published in 1984, was
criticised for its blandness, but few could doubt its thoroughness or accuracy.
He was, after all, constrained by having to accommodate the wishes of Lennon's
first wife, Cynthia, and widow, Yoko Ono, in order to obtain their
co-operation. Far more penetrating was his excellent biography of Brian
Epstein, the Beatles' manager, which spared no blushes when it came to dealing
with Epstein's torrid personal affairs.
Ray
also wrote biographies of Eric Clapton, The Carpenters and Gerry Marsden, and
worked with Bill Wyman, the Stones' former bass player, on his autobiography Stone Alone. More recently he wrote an
appreciation of Frank Sinatra and McCartney:
Yesterday And Today with Paul McCartney, a book largely devoted to the
genesis and subsequent success of the former Beatle’s most famous composition.
Up until to his death, he had been working on a biography of Phil Collins, with
Collins' co-operation.
Ray's
personal choice in music tended towards jazz and sophisticated easy listening
but, paradoxically, he always championed those artists, like Lennon, Bob Dylan
and Miles Davis, who challenged the status quo. During his editorship of Melody Maker he managed to persuade The
Who's Pete Towshend to write a controversial monthly column which to Ray's
delight continually questioned the accepted practices of the music business
establishment.
A
lifelong socialist, Ray was heavily involved with the charity Music Therapy and
was a former schoolboy chess champion. He lived in Shepperton and leaves a
widow, Pamela, and two sons, Miles, 25, and Mark, 22.
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