Hancock's England

Terrible Ted

By ROBERT

HANCOCK DENMARK STREET, London, WC, is one hundred yards long. It is a fair cross-section of modern needs, housing bookmakers, two drinking clubs, a Chinese restaurant, a Labour Exchange, a Surgical Ligature Makers and twenty-two major pop-song publishers. News- papers call it Tin Pan Alley.

The King of Denmark Street is Edward Roberts Lewis, who rules by remote control from No. 1 Brixton Road, SW9, where he is the Chairman of the Decca Record Co. Ltd. In Denmark Street some of his more ungrateful subjects refer to him as `Terrible Ted,' for Mr. Lewis has struck a nasty chill in the teddybear-coated heart of Tin Pan Alley. A look at the Top Twenty' list of best- selling pop records reveals the cause of his un- popularity : half the records in the list are manufactured by Mr. Lewis's company and associates; and most of these are rock 'n' roll.

Unlike most pop crazes, rock 'n' roll is taking a long time to die, and for the last eighteen months it has slaughtered the sales of sheet music in Britain. As one publisher put it : 'Who wants to pay two bob for fifteen bars to the words "Cumberland Gap"?' Before the Rock hit Den- mark Street the sheet sales of a pop hit were around 250,000. Today business is sensational with 20,000 sold.

Mr. Lewis has a small, untidy and un-tycoon- like office at Brixton, with pools of gramophone records on the fitted mushroom carpet, and a desk deluged in papers. Mr. Lewis, too, does not fit with the general idea of a man geared to the jeans and crew-cut market. He is splendidly Savile Row suited and wears an Old Rugbeian tie. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he read history and law; his early business career was as a stock- broker; he is still a member of. the Stock Ex- change. His father, Sir Alfred Lewis, was Deputy Chairman of the National Provincial Bank.

`I got into the record business by chance, it's all explained in my book.' This is a ninety-five- page history of the Decca Company called No C.I.C. (meaning 'No Capital Issues Committee,' a body despised by Mr. Lewis). 'Unless we get back to freedom of enterprise, when men can decide to risfc their capital how they will, where lies the future industrial wealth of the country?'

Mr. Lewis was more or less forced into the record business. Just before the Hatry crash his firm underwrote a million-pound issue of Decca stock. Soon the company was in trouble and he joined the board. Despite his ability, it was ten years before the first preference dividend was paid and the bailiffs were as much trouble as the balance sheet. Last year the Decca Company had a trading profit of £433,623 net.

To the financial layman the book is vintage Beachcomber when it deals with the battle to keep Decca going; but it contains an interesting revelation of Mr. Lewis's courtship. 'Early in 1923 I remember I used to buy Victor and Brunswick records in Kingston, Jamaica, to play at the Constant Spring Hotel. On January 27 the hotel was burned down and on the evening of the same day I became engaged to Maisie Hutton.'

After marriage he kept his interest in records and today he personally picks the records he thinks will be hits. He plays through every pop record on the radiogram in his office before it is issued to the public. `My rule is that if a record has been successful in America it will almost certainly sell here no matter how horrible it sounds.' It was this principle that made him decide to go all out on the Bill Haley recording of 'Rock around the Clock.' It sold a million copies in Britain—`the only record I've ever known that's done that'—and made rock 'n' roll the kids' de- light and a police problem. 'I think Rock is here for a long time. The big difference now is that we don't use the word Rock in the song's title. I wish I knew what will follow it; probably anything that bashes, like skiffle.' As for the sheet music problem : 'I don't think Rock has done them any good but the business is dying anyway.'

Mr. Lewis is not only Terrible Ted to Tin Pan Alley but to the great EMI concern as well. Pre- war, with their Columbia and HMV labels, they dominated the disc market. Today Mr. Lewis with his Decca, RCA, Brunswick, London and Vogue labels makes 30,000,000 records a year out of a total British production of some 70,000,000. `Don't say we make more records than EMI or you'll spend your life answering fool letters from them.' Twenty per cent. of Decca's output is of LP records, an invention developed by Decca after a postwar visit to America by Mr. .Lewis. 'I showed an LP to our engineers, they said it would never work. I told-them to make it work. If you listened to experts you'd go broke tomorrow.' EMI apparently listened : Decca had nearly two years' start in this market. In America there is a long and bitter battle between the firms. The latest tactical victory for Decca was their acquisition of the RCA label, formerly the property of EMI. Previously EMI got control of Capitol from Decca.

With the RCA label Mr. Lewis secured the works of Rubinstein and Toscanini. More important, to pay for the luxury of marketing classical records, he acquired the services` of Mr. Harry Belafonte, the Calypso Czar, and of Mr. Elvis Presley, the High Priest of rock 'n' roll. Mr. Lewis hopes that Elvis will not visit Britain. `Every time they appear here,something happens to them. Either the mystique goes or the public gets sick of them.' Mr. Lewis still recalls with bitterness the recent tour of Mr. Bill Haley and his Comets : 'They've hardly sold a record since.'

As a means of selling records Mr. Lewis does not think much of TV. 'Too many gimmicks and not enough record playing.' The `steam' service of the BBC makes him shudder : 'You know how much time they give to records. That programme Housewives' Choice now, a few old pops and some classics. Anyone can -find one postcard wanting some record or other. The best way of selling records is to buy time on Luxembourg.' Even when a disc gets repeated performances on the air, it 'does not necessarily sell. "Mountain Greenery" by Mel Torm6 was the most listened to and least sold record I can remember.'

Mr. Lewis chain-smokes as he talks and his deep-set eyes are almost hidden by thick, black eyebrows. He looks past you, not at you, and one of his staff said : 'I think his eyes are ice-blue, but I've never really been able to tell in the years I've been here.' He is certainly the dictator at Decca : 'I employ about 6,000 people and I am on top of them all right. Together with my family I own enough shares to make a take-over bid very difficult.' He is a very approachable boss. The man who cleans the Gents called one day, mop in hand. 'You know, Mr. Lewis, the way you run this firm is bloody awful.' Mr. Lewis gave him a drink and listened. Later he said : 'You know, that man may be right.'

Although records have made Mr. Lewis rich, he lives modestly. He has a flat in Hampstead and a five-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Essex. `My Bentley is five years old, I've no yacht, and I never go to night clubs.' This abstinence may be due to his religious upbringing. 'I am a Congrega- tionalist but I haven't been recently.' His hobbies are rugby football and cricket. When he is in America during Test matches he rings up three or four times a day for the scores. He once flew to Paris from New York to watch a rugby match and flew back the same evening.

He is a generous man and recently gave £122,000 to the Middlesex -Hospital, He is also very frank. The reason, I suppose, why I have been successful in the record business is, perhaps, because I have the mind of a teenager.'

He is fifty-seven years old.