What happens when you throw Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Andrew Loog Oldham, and a maverick dream into the heart of Swinging London? You get Immediate Records—the UK’s first truly independent label, where anything felt possible (and sometimes impossible). Simon Spence’s Immediate: The Rise and Fall of the UK’s First Independent Record Label is packed with rock legends, wild stories, and enough sixties swagger to fill Carnaby Street. It’s the ultimate behind-the-scenes tour through the music industry’s most colorful, chaotic era.
Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham was the enfant terrible of Swinging Sixties London, the man who had crafted The Beatles’ antithesis. By 1965 he was a millionaire notorious for working every publicity angle for his rising stars but he still felt frustrated by the men in grey suits who controlled the music industry. His solution to that problem was Immediate Records – the UK’s first independent label – with a mission statement to wash away those grey men.
What followed was five years of scams, chicanery, sex, drugs, violence and sensational music. Immediate’s ‘in-house’ polymath producers: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Oldham himself, Jimmy Page and Steve Marriott, attracted a crowd of daring, young British talent, forging the hippest scene in the world.
Yet, following his ousting as Stones manager in 1967, the label itself began to fray at the seams as the drugs and booze clouded Oldham’s creative genius and the grey suits quietly took their revenge.
Simon Spence’s acclaimed telling of Immediate’s rise and fall was first published in 2007 but has now been augmented with explanatory footnotes and even more detail following a further decade’s research.
