Don Arden

Harry Levy (Don Arden), manager, agent, music promoter and record company owner: born Manchester 4 January 1926; married 1950 Hope Shaw (died 1999; one son, one daughter); died Los Angeles 21 July 2007.

Rock and pop managers are supposed to look after their clients' best interests when negotiating with record labels, publishers, promoters and merchandising companies. The notorious agent, promoter and impresario Don Arden was not above using intimidation and litigation and sometimes going even further. Once described by the News Of The World as the Al Capone of pop, Arden became infamous in 1966 after dangling a rival manager, Robert Stigwood, from the fourth-floor balcony of his London office after Stigwood had apparently shown an interest in taking over the affairs of the Small Faces.

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Arden was only 5ft 7ins but played up to his gangster image and wore broad-lapelled suits while he signed and promoted some of the biggest British acts of the Sixties and Seventies. The artists he managed included the Nashville Teens, the Small Faces, Amen Corner, the Move, ELO, Wizzard, Lynsey de Paul, Black Sabbath and their lead vocalist Ozzy Osbourne as a soloist, and Air Supply. All found success but some complained of exploitative contracts, unpaid royalties and diminishing returns and had to resort to the courts to get their dues.

Arden admitted he used unorthodox methods of promotion and hyped some records into the charts but always maintained: "you can't polish a turd. In other words, if the record's no good to begin with it still won't be any good after you've wasted your time and money getting it played."

He showed little remorse when he co-wrote his autobiography, modestly titled Mr Big: Ozzy, Sharon and my life as the godfather of rock (2004). Tellingly, Arden even sued his daughter Sharon and was estranged from her for nearly 20 years. When she married Ozzy Osbourne in 1982, Arden gave her the singer's management contract as a wedding present. But he resorted to legal action after she arranged for Ozzy to leave Jet Records, Arden's label, in order to sign a new deal with Epic. The matter was settled out of court when Sharon paid her father $1m, though she subsequently tried to run him over.

She didn't take too kindly to the fact that Arden left her mother, Hope, and took up with a much younger woman though father and daughter were eventually reconciled when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2001.

Born Harry Levy in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, in 1926, he wasn't going to follow his father and work in a factory making raincoats. Having won a talent contest in his early teens, he soon dropped out of school and began what he called "20 years of rough and tumble" as a would-be all-round entertainer. Renamed Don Arden by his agent, he had a strong tenor voice and could sing like Enrico Caruso or Al Jolson, though he seemed equally at ease doing comic impersonations of George Raft and Winston Churchill. He appeared at the London Palladium and on the Black and White Minstrel Show on television. However, Arden's short temper led to him being banned from the Hippodrome circuit for two years after he repeatedly punched a stage manager who had called him "a fucking Jew boy".

Arden spoke Yiddish and began organising Hebrew folk song contests. For a while, he combined performing with promoting but, by the early Sixties, he was concentrating on bringing American stars like Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent over to the UK. He managed Vincent for six years and made repeated attempts to get the self-destructive singer to clean up his act, but Vincent pulled a knife on his manager and they parted in 1965.

By then, Arden had noticed that homegrown beat groups like the Beatles were eclipsing the visiting US rock'n'rollers and set about finding some British talent of his own. He became the Animals' world-wide agent and claimed he introduced them to Mickie Most, who produced "House Of The Rising Sun", their 1964 chart-topper.

That same year, Arden signed the Nashville Teens to Decca Records and the six-piece group scored four Top 40 hits but the manager constantly bartered with his charges, as the singer Ray Phillips recalled: "If we were owed a grand, he [Arden] would say: would you take £600? Little did you know, that's it, you were paid off."

The Nashville Teens' rather one-way deal with Arden meant he received one third of their gross receipts from live performances but, in retrospect, Phillips felt the group needed more of a Svengali figure: "I liked Don but he couldn't manage a band. He couldn't inject ideas. He was into buying and selling rather than making. The Teens needed guidance and direction."

Arden had more input into the career of the Small Faces, the next signing to his Contemporary Records management and production company. He hyped " Whatcha Gonna Do About It", their 1965 début, into the Top 20; drafted the songwriters Kenny Lynch and Mort Shuman to pen their 1966 hit " Sha-La-La-La-Lee"; recruited organist Ian McLagan to join Steve Marriott (guitar, vocals), Ronnie Lane (bass, vocals) and Kenney Jones (drums); and produced the band's only UK number one, "All Or Nothing", in September 1966.

When the musicians began questioning the absence of accounts, Arden stalled, took advantage of their absence on tour and held a meeting with their parents, more or less convincing them that the Small Faces had become heavy drug-users. The group considered changing management, a move which led to Arden's notorious outburst against Robert Stigwood. He later described what happened:

I had to stop these overtures - and quickly. I contacted two well-muscled friends and hired two more equally huge toughs. And we went along to nail this impresario to his chair with fright. There was a large ornate ashtray on his desk. I picked it up and smashed it down with such force that the desk cracked - giving a good impression of a man wild with rage.

My friends and I had carefully rehearsed our next move. I pretended to go berserk, lifted the impresario bodily from his chair, dragged him on to the balcony and held him so he was looking down to the pavement four floors below. I asked my friends if I should drop him or forgive him. In unison, they shouted: "Drop him". He went rigid with shock and I thought he might have a heart attack. Immediately, I dragged him back into the room and warned him never to interfere with my groups again.

Following the incident with Stigwood, several managers recoiled, though the group did in fact move to Andrew Oldham's Immediate Records. However, despite winning a court case in October 1967, the musicians had to wait 10 years to receive the £4,000 Arden owed them in back royalties.

In 1967, Arden revived his singing career and recorded a version of the ballad "Sunrise Sunset", from the musical Fiddler on the Roof, but it failed to make the charts despite vigorous promotion by his associates. He then worked with Amen Corner, the pop group fronted by the singer Andy Fairweather-Low, but this time Arden found himself on the receiving end of the threatening tactics he usually employed himself. "The story was that £3,000 had been put up to get me 'fixed'. This time I was scared because there was talk of getting at me through my one weakness - my family," he admitted, before hiring more bodyguards to protect his wife and children too.

Arden eventually sold Amen Corner's contract and claimed he made a tidy profit. He then muscled in on the Move, who had previously been managed by Tony Secunda and were considering signing with the impresario Peter Walsh. Arden came out on top, prolonged the group's career into the early Seventies and bankrolled their evolution into the multi-million-selling Electric Light Orchestra.

Ever-litigious, Arden fought a lengthy battle with the singer Lynsey de Paul after failing to pay her a £12,500 advance on time in 1976. "It was a time in my life that I'll never forget and I'll never forgive him. And if anybody was near suicide, and if ever I was near, it was then, because it was awful," she said of the case, which dragged on until 1978 and greatly affected her career. The following year, Roger Cook investigated Arden's activities for the Radio 4 programme Checkpoint.

Arden's son David became his right-hand man and served seven months in prison in 1986 for the kidnapping, blackmail and imprisonment of Harshad Patel, a former accountant with the Jet organisation whom the Ardens had confronted about the alleged disappearance of £70,000. While the case proceeded, Arden Snr stayed in Los Angeles. Having hired Gilbert Gray QC, he was tried on similar charges at the Old Bailey in November 1987, where he was found not guilty on all counts. Despite boasting about his Mafia connections and heavy-handed approach to management, Arden never had a criminal record. He sold the Jet and ELO catalogue, including his publishing interests, for $40m to Sony in 1993.

Pierre Perrone