大象传媒

by Bob Stanley of

It's fifty years since the manager Andrew Loog Oldham launched Immediate Records, one of the great independent record companies, and a blueprint for later labels like Creation and Heavenly. It may have ended up a financial trainwreck, but its track record is hard to argue with.

The first release on Immediate was Hang On Sloopy, licensed from the American Bang label, and it was a no.5 hit straight off the bat. While most of the label's releases were homegrown, Hang On Sloopy certainly got it noticed. One of the first Immediate signings, also managed by Oldham, were Glasgow beat group the Poets who had only managed one minor hit with Now We're Thru on Decca in 1964 but released a string of singles as Oldham had faith in their dark, melancholic sound. Oldham and his sidekick Tony Calder may have had a reputation as "the ultimate b** of b**" according to singer George Gallacher, but he later realised "we never gave them credit for their faith in us."

Producer Glyn Johns reckoned that Andrew Oldham "couldn't produce from an orange", but it was undeniable that pretty much everyone involved in the label enjoyed the ride. There were always high jinks. On a plane with two of his roster, the actor Gregory Phillips and the German chanteuse Nico, Oldham told the stewardess that his charges had just got married - they were given free champagne for the rest of the flight.

The day to day running of the label began to wear Oldham down. His most successful act were the Small Faces, who were also formerly at Decca, and cut the classic Ogden's Nutgone Flake, a number one album, for Immediate. "It was nice having those hits with the Small Faces" Oldham told me in 2011, "but apart from Steve (Marriott) they were all moaners."

The label also had two number one singles - Out Of Time in 1966, and Amen Corner's (If Paradise Is) Half As Nice three years later. "Amen Corner were worse (than the Small Faces)" Oldham recalled. "It was like managing tradesmen." He has since described Immediate as "my way of staying alive after I left the Stones", and he thinks its place in history is "overblown". But, as well as timeless hits like PP Arnold's First Cut Is The Deepest, it was responsible for such fabulous 45s as I'm Not Sayin', the Mockingbirds' You Stole My Love and Duncan Browne's On The Bombsite, and one of the great British late sixties albums in Would You Believe.

The label folded, debts unpaid, in 1969. Andrew Oldham considered that he was "spoilt" in the sixties. "We were born into a time where nobody knew what they were doing, everybody wanted to do it anyway, and we were given a chance to learn on the job. Then we blew it by coming experts."