WITH A LOT OF HELP FROM A FRIEND

Other lesser guests of the nation have received far more media attention than Denny Cordell. He lived among us in Carlow for over a dozen years but only after his wastefully early death - at 51 of lymphoma in St. Vincent’s on February 18th - did the rest of Ireland start to learn what his closest Irish friends and colleagues always knew.

Denny Cordell might not have had quite the same name – recognition as such as Brian Epstein but his contribution to British rock in the Sixties was immense and would have made his reputation alone. But he continued into the Seventies, founding the Shelter label in America. Even after he retired to Carlow to train and breed horses. He returned to the frontline as a super-A&R consultant to Island and all the other labels in the Polygram group.

The checklist of the artists with whom he was associated is a roll of honour - Chet Baker, the Moody Blues, the Move, Procul Harum, Joe Cocker, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Leon Russell, J.J. Cale, Phoebe Snow, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, the Gap Band, Dwight Twilley, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Melissa Etheridge, Marianne Faithfull and The Cranberries. A radio station could devote a full day’s schedule to their music and all the other secondary artists with whom he was linked and there wouldn’t be a bum track.

But Denny Cordell wasn’t only important for his immaculate taste. He was also a pioneer in the British music business, a key player among the coterie of freebooting entrepreneurs who made London swing in the Sixties.

Like his close friend and sparring partner, Chris Blackwell, he was both an insider and an outsider. Both went to public school and acquired the patrician gloss but both were also born and bred outside the U.K.. They might seem to be of or in England but neither had any interest in defending Britain’s stuffier cultural elites.

Cordell was born in Buenos Aires – a fact that led him to paint his Bagnalstown house in the blue and white Argentine colours - and his family then moved to Rio. Jazz was his first love – he was buried clasping his first and favourite Duke Ellington album – and in his late teens, hardly out of public school, he bunked off to Paris to track down the great white trumpeter and singer of the West Coast cool school, Chet Baker.

He was more than a fan; he was precocious. Baker might be sunk in junk but Denny Cordell somehow became his manager, arranging successful recording sessions. This was his apprenticeship, the aperitif before the main course when Denny Cordell really became a main player.

To begin to understand his contribution, you must also

understand the British music industry he entered. Senior executives at the established record companies like EMI and Decca neither appreciated nor sympathised with rock’n’roll.

They were still wedded to the values of Tin Pan Alley; to family entertainment and variety shows like ‘Saturday Night At The Palladium’. Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, groomed to be all-round entertainers, were the approved models for success not The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

A typical senior A&R man was EMI’s Norrie Paramor, the mentor of Cliff Richard and leader of an aggregation known as the Big Ben Banjo Band. Clearly the revolution could only happen from below. So buccaneers like Denny Cordell spotted the gap and became the essential intermediaries between the record companies and the artists.

Men such as Cordell, Blackwell, the Stones’ Andrew Loog Oldham and The Who’s Kit Lambert had an unbeatable combination. They could talk jazz, blues and soul to the musicians but they could also talk posh to the business and any wary bank-managers. Such talents made these men the business driving force of the Swinging Sixties.

His good friend, Marianne Faithfull explains the Quality: “They seemed to be so grand and gentlemanly though none of them had a bean. But they had this upper-class manner which David Dalton who helped me write my autobiography, called Denny’s Raj manner.” Or as she expands : “Denny always said, you mustn’t say Argentinian, you must say Argentine.”

Cordell’s first intervention was with the Moody Blues. Working alongside their management company, he convinced the then-faltering group to cover an American soul track, ‘Go Now’ by Bessie Banks. Sung by Denny Laine, it was both a hit and their best-ever record.

The hit was also the first display of his skills as a deal-maker. For organising the package, Denny Cordell comfortably cleared a five-figure sum. This set the pattern for his later operations, working in his own independent production company, Straight Ahead, and selling on the records to the major labels. Straight Ahead was obviously lucrative; it also made some of the great British records of the period.

In ‘67, Straight Ahead was first aligned with Decca’s Deram outlet but in September, Cordell placed his productions with EMI’s Regal Zonophone label. Then came the cream of the crop - Procul Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ and Joe Cocker’s ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’.

Charlie Gillett devotes three pages of the rock history, ‘The Sound Of The City’ to him. This quote explains why: “Denny Cordell’s early production for Procul Harum . . . dared to go into the one territory The Beatles had been shy to try, white soul.”

So ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ copped from Percy Sledge’s ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, decked it out in a mock-classical arrangement, added mystifying surreal Dylanesque lyrics and through the group’s dual-keyboard sound, stimulated the band. And then recustomising Ringo Starr’s deadpan vocals on the original, Cordell came up with the template for rock-gospel with the Joe Cocker classic.

In Denny Cordell’s career, it is the pivotal record. Through it, he licensed all Straight Ahead’s productions to A&M in America, hit the road to promote Cocker in the States on the ‘Mad Dogs And Englishmen’ tour, met Leon Russell and eventually teamed up with him to set up Shelter in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And yet the migrant had already set up the Seventies in Britain. Stumbling through the Sixties, David Bowie and Marc Bolan had both recorded under his banner. Through Straight Ahead, they both met their most influential producer, Tony Visconti.

Shelter, however was more downhome with Russell, J.J. Cale and Phoebe Snow among its early successes. A young Southern band, Mudclutch were signed. Later, they would be far better known as Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.

He also briefly collaborated with Chris Blackwell in founding the Mango label. Blackwell had actually turned down Procul Harum but they worked together on Toots and the Maytals. Bob Marley’s debut Island single, ‘Duppy Conqueror’, was released in America through Shelter . But the most important result of the partnership was the soundtrack of ‘The Harder They Come’, the record that opened American ears to reggae and paved the way for Marley’s acceptance by the States.

Gradually, Denny started to wind down his operations. He sold his half-share in Mango and then through a legal showdown with Petty – the personal relationship was later repaired – Shelter closed. Denny Cordell recrossed the Atlantic to train and breed horses in Ireland.

For most of the Eighties, he hovered around rather than fully

participated in the Irish music scene. There was the occasional visitation like a speech to a Hot Press seminar but he preferred the nags and the country life. And then in the Nineties, Denny Cordell went back to work again, back in partnership with Chris Blackwell and Island.

He hadn’t been as lucky with the horses as Vincent O’Brien. Paul McGuinness remembers him “inviting us all to a party in Corries and saying he was going to spend what was left of his money at the party and go back to work in the record business.”

If anything, his second coming was the greater achievement. Paul McGuinness, for one, was sceptical that a man in his late forties, however talented, could pick up the threads again in a new and unfamiliar environment.

But his ears were as acute as ever. He overseered Melissa Etheridge’s American success and then, in his own contribution to Irish rock, masterminded the rise of The Cranberries.

His eldest son, Barney found them in Cork but it was the father who planned their American campaign as The Cranberries stole the show from Suede. In this, much irony. After all, Denny Cordell had been one of the brains behind the first British Invasion of America and inspired many of the records that, in turn, inspired Suede.

He was still moving on up when he died. With Kate Hyman, he had formed a new production, publishing and A&R consultancy company, Realisation, with offices in both America and Dublin. Acts were being signed, schemes were being formulated. As Paul McGuinness says : “He was well on his way to his second fortune, he had clearly established in the industry’s mind that he could do it again.” His prestige was such that Realisation had negotiated a uniquely flexible and lucrative deal with Island and the rest of the Polygram group.

Then the end came, fast and with scant forewarning. Denny Cordell felt a pain, consulted a doctor and the tests found he was terminally ill. He survived only a month.

Marianne Faithfull was especially devastated. Not only had Denny overseen her new album, A Secret Life, but he’d also been a long-standing, wise and supportive friend. Quite altruistically, he’d given her confidence as a singer when she began her Seventies comeback. pointed her to the Heathcote Williams poem that became ‘Why Did Ya Do It?’ and stimulated her to write her autobiography.

The funeral and last days brought many stories. Keith Richards sent a consolatory note as The Rolling Stones played his Buenos Aires birthplace as he died. Ronnie Wood stayed up six hours to paint a tribute; Tom Petty dedicated the first night of his tour to Denny.

Denny Cordell died a gentleman squire but with two

Trinidadian members of the Century Steel Band heaping the earth into his grave and wearing a Rhinestone Cowboy Nudie’s suit as he held his copy of Ellington 55. Naturally he also took a bottle of Irish whiskey and a spliff.

Paul McGuinness has the last word to explain how Denny Cordell earned the respect of his peers : “He was a craftsman. He had the ability to shape a record in the studio that you associated with the earlier days of rock’n’roll. The fact that he could do it as recently as this year is really quite remarkable if you consider his age and the age of the artists he was working with”.