Bryan Morrison: Music publisher and manager who worked with The Pretty Things, Pink Floyd, Wham! and Paul Weller

In a career spanning more than 40 years, the pop impresario Bryan Morrison worked with some of the biggest and most influential acts of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. Starting out as the manager of the Pretty Things, the self-styled bad boys of Swinging London, he set up the Bryan Morrison Agency and looked after the affairs of Pink Floyd in 1968 as the psychedelic group struggled to reinvent themselves following the departure of their original frontman, Syd Barrett. Morrison then became one of Britain's most successful independent music publishers, handling the catalogues of Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees, Paul Weller of The Jam, and George Michael, both in his Wham! days and as a solo artist.

His involvement in nurturing and developing acts with a big international audience and administering their copyrights paid rich dividends and made him a fortune estimated at around £60m. This enabled him to invest in new talent and also gave him the means to indulge in his hobbies, most notably polo.

Something of a latecomer, Morrison took to polo with gusto, both on and off the field. In 1985, he shook up the sport when he founded the lavishly-appointed 270-acre Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club at Winkfield, near Windsor. The proximity of the club to the Queen's residence ensured the patronage of the Prince of Wales and Princes William and Harry, Morrison also striking up a friendship with Major Ronald Ferguson, the Duchess of York's father. Morrison was the oldest person to turn out for the Great Britain polo team but his fearless attitude lead to several accidents. In July 2006, during a game at the club he owned, Morrison suffered severe head injuries and spent more than two years in a coma until his death.

A tall, tanned, self-made man who retained the accent and forthright manners of his native East End, he collected works of art and relished his reputation as "the cockney with a Hockney". He could be brash, arrogant even, but usually lived up to his boasts. When the Pretty Things appeared in the Sunday Times magazine, Morrison flicked through the pages and landed on a spread featuring the stunning model Greta Van Rantwyk on a white horse, advertising Cossack vodka. He told the group that he would one day marry that girl and duly did in 1972.

Born in Hackney in 1942, he was the son of an accountant who despaired when he dropped out of school in his mid-teens. In the early 1960s, Morrison's interest in furniture design enabled him to secure a place at St Martin's School of Art in Charing Cross Road, where he fell in with a hip crowd, in particular the guitarist Dick Taylor.

A schoolfriend of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Taylor had played bass in an embryonic line-up of the Rolling Stones but had formed the Pretty Things with his fellow student and vocalist Phil May. Morrison promoted a concert by the group at St Martin's and got them a deal with the Fontana label in 1964. The Pretty Things hardly needed any encouragement from their manager to grow their hair – at one point May supposedly had the longest in Britain – and behave outrageously. For a while, they rivalled the Stones as the mean, moody antithesis to The Beatles, and scored hits with "Rosalyn", "Don't Bring Me Down" and an eponymous EP in 1964, as well as "Honey I Need" and the "Rainin' In My Heart" EP in 1965.

Morrison managed them until the release of the ambitious SF Sorrow concept album in 1968 and published their songs, giving them a generous 60 per cent share of royalties. By then, the Bryan Morrison Agency was booking underground acts such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, Tomorrow and Pink Floyd into the hip clubs of London and beyond. Morrison's assistant Steve O'Rourke went on to manage the Floyd until his death in 2003, while Morrison published the music on the A Saucerful Of Secrets, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother and More albums by the Floyd as well as Barrett's own The Madcap Laughs and Barrett solo efforts. Barrett famously bit one of Morrison's fingers during a fractious visit to his office but the entrepreneur held no ill-feeling and named his autobiography, Crazy Diamond (2006), after the musician.

Having sold his agency to Nems Enterprises, the company formed by the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, in 1968, Morrison subsequently focused on publishing and excelled at it, teaming up with Dick Leahy in a formidable partnership. They signed talented up-and-coming writers like Weller, Nick Heyward of the early 1980s group Haircut 100, and George Michael. Good fortune also came Morrison's way in the form of "Down The Road", a Robin Gibb co-write which wound up on the B-side of the multi-million selling single "Night Fever" in 1978, at the height of the Bee Gees' popularity during the Saturday Night Fever disco craze. In 1987, Morrison also gambled on Matador, the musical composed by Mike Leander, which took four years to reach the London stage but provided Tom Jones with "A Boy From Nowhere", his first Top 10 single in 15 years.

When Mark St John took over the affairs of the Pretty Things in the 1990s and set about recovering past and present royalties for the group, he had a meeting with Morrison. "I went in there his enemy and came out his friend," St John said. "He was very charming. He admitted he had been ripped off by EMI and Universal, same as the band. The difference is he hadn't noticed. 'That's right, I'm negligent. I didn't look for the US royalties. They weren't making the money the Floyd were making so I forgot,' he said. He was totally straight," recalls St John. "Later, I did a photo shoot with the Pretty Things for Top Gear magazine and he turned up in a jet black helicopter and landed in a hole sideways. He came out, chomping on his cigar, and said: 'Couldn't you find a flat field?' He was a real character. He had a wide range of friends. Publishers make money while they're asleep but the revenues create opportunities. He took the time and the attention to develop his acts. He made a difference."

Pierre Perrone

Bryan Anthony Morrison, manager, music publisher, entrepreneur and polo club owner: born London 14 August 1942; married 1972 Greta Van Rantwyk (one son, one daughter); died Holyport, Berkshire 27 September 2008.