Among the young visionaries, hustlers and chancers who emerged from the art colleges, advertising agencies, record company mailing rooms and photographers’ studios of postwar Britain with a mission to reshape popular culture, Tony Calder was one who maintained some of the characteristics of the previous generation. The business partner of Andrew Loog Oldham, who moulded the surly, iconoclastic style of the new-born Rolling Stones, Calder looked and acted the part of swinging 60s cultural entrepreneur, but he was the one tasked with counting the money and paying the royalties.
Calder, who has died aged 74, and Oldham were in the forefront of those who set themselves up in opposition to the “straights” running the major record companies: Decca, EMI, Pye and Philips. They took many of the cues for their modus operandi from their opposite numbers in the United States, where the boy genius Phil Spector – whose style and Svengali-like powers made him Oldham’s hero – was part of a scene also populated by more shadowy figures who ran the music business according to a particular ethical code and with a certain exotic glamour of their own. One of them, George Goldner, the Mob-connected boss of the Red Bird label, was Calder’s own exemplar.
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