Happy Trails: Andrew Lauder's Charmed Life and High Times in the Record Business

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What I also noticed is that, at the start of his career, pretty much everyone was wonderful and everyone got on, but as time went by, and his projects became less successful, it was always someone else’s fault, but never Andrew’s. Soon after, we signed the Flamin’ Groovies and some other oddball bands, things that did fairly well without really hitting the charts. To mark the anniversary, we tracked down the man who actually got the band’s signatures on a recording contract.

SEE the BACKSIDE OF the PHOTO - many times the image for sale will present stamps, dates, and other publication details - these marks attest to and increase the value of the press photos.Andrew Lauder is one of British record business’s most significant and highly influential figures but outside the music industry few people will probably know his name. Death, drugs, disease, demons, deportation, dashed romance, and, for this man of the eastern US, unlikely sanctuary in the north of England: “My story is pretty warty,” he warns MARTIN ASTON.

My short stint in Orkney has not only given me a great qualification and contacts, more importantly it has given me lifelong friends. At that point I knew the album we had was definitely a dead duck because two thirds of the recordings weren’t good enough and it was a different band anyway, so even Dave Edmunds’ tracks were now redundant. Dave Thompson is a contributing editor at Goldmine , contributing the Spin Cycle vinyl and reissues column and more besides. Note: Once the band were signed, one of Andrew’s first actions was to record a gig at the Nashville Rooms in London on the 10th of December 1976. Lauder was co-founder of the labels Radar, F-Beat, Demon and Silvertone; this came after a decade in United Artists corporate trenches backing such unlikely nags as Can, Hawkwind, Dr Feelgood, and The Stranglers, as well as fading memories like the Groundhogs and Man.I knew Nick Kent (music journalist who was attacked by Sid Vicious) who was beaten up by a Sex Pistol and I thought ‘he’s a harmless drug-addict music-fan, leave him alone’. Motorhead actually started playing dates in July 1975, little over a month after Lemmy left Hawkwind, and usually to pretty indifferent reactions. They needed places to play, as did Ducks Deluxe, so we started an agency Iron Horse with Nick Lowe to get these bands bookings. You were an early champion of the pub rock scene, signing several influential acts like Dr Feelgood. This was in 1980; Motorhead’s crucial second album for Bronze, Bomber, was out and they’d had a Top 10 EP.

Yes, Hawkwind led us into some strange areas, almost like an English underground version of what was happening in San Francisco with free festivals and playing on the backs of trucks.A much published author, his latest book An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock was released in July 2023.