Les Conn: Pop manager and promoter who handled the early careers of David Bowie and Marc Bolan
Leslie Conn, pop music entrepreneur, born Stamford Hill, London 14 December 1929; married 1953 Monica Mendoza (marriage dissolved 1965, one daughter); died Marble Arch, London 13 December 2008.
Monday, 16 March 2009
Leslie Conn was a man of many parts in the British music scene. It is difficult to define his most important role perhaps as a first manager for David Bowie and Marc Bolan but although his career was a mixture of successes and failures, he made a positive mark on all he touched. It was said of him that confusion seemed to beset his life. In his own words, he was: The only guy in the music business that started at the top and worked his way to the bottom.
Conn was born in 1929 into a Jewish family in Londons Stamford Hill. Evacuated to Cambridgeshire at the outset of the Second World War, he was housed with a Christian family who sent him to Sunday school and enrolled him in Ely cathedral choir. Thus began his introduction to music.
He led a far less saintly working life as a comedian, and during national service in East Africa he organised concert parties. Then came his introduction to Tin Pan Alley; he became a song plugger for Chappells Music and met Dick James, who later employed him as a record plugger one who cajoles producers and disc jockeys to play their wares. He was considered successful by means of sheer persistence; Max Bygraves once said that Conn was the only man who could set fire to a bucket of sand.
He moved on to artists management, a succession of young wannabes passing through his doors. Most of them he failed to turn into stars for, although he had an uncanny ability to spot talent, it was generally too soon and the act so undeveloped that no one believed him forcing him to admit he had become the most successful failure in show business. But in those early days there were some successes, and a 17-year-old David Bowie was nearly one of them...........
Full obituary here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/les-conn-pop-manager-and-promoter-who-handled-the-early-careers-of-david-bowie-and-marc-bolan-1645849.html
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