The first song written by Ken Howard, who has died aged 84, in partnership with Alan Blaikley, was The Yellow Dance, and the pair recorded it on Howard’s father’s Dictaphone in 1954. But it was not until the following decade that the Howard-Blaikley duo shifted into high gear and began to develop into a major force in British pop music.
In 1964 they chanced across a group called the Sheratons playing in the Mildmay Arms pub in north London. They learned that the band were desperate for new material for their imminent audition with the producer Joe Meek.
Howard and Blaikley taught them their composition Have I the Right?, Meek loved it, and it was released in June 1964, by which time the group had been renamed the Honeycombs. Meek accurately predicted that it was “a certain No 1”, and, boosted by the support of the DJ Tony Blackburn on Radio Caroline, it topped the British charts in August, reached No 5 in the US, and soared up the charts in several other countries.
It was the song that defined the Honeycombs as a one-hit wonder, but Howard and Blaikley rapidly turned into a full-scale hit factory. They had become the managers of the Honeycombs, even though Howard commented that “we never dreamed of being managers. We hated the image.”
Nonetheless, they also found themselves managing their next discovery, Dave Dee and the Bostons, who they saw sharing a Honeycombs bill in Swindon, Wiltshire. Howard explained: “We changed their name to Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, because they were their actual nicknames and because we wanted to stress their very distinct personalities in a climate which regarded bands as collectives.”
They went on to create a streak of 13 consecutive hits with the group, including the chart-topping fantasy of The Legend of Xanadu, and the Top 10 hits Last Night in Soho and the lewd Bend It!. Howard described how “we connived to think of crazy ideas and scenarios. They were really actors; if you gave them a plot they would act up on it, whether it was a whip in The Legend of Xanadu or a motorbike in Last Night in Soho.”
Blaikley and Howard also enjoyed significant success with the Herd, who scored Top 5 hits with From the Underworld – based on Virgil’s Orpheus in the Underworld, which the pair had studied in Latin while attending University College school (UCS) in Hampstead, north London – and I Don’t Want Our Loving to Die.
Other artists benefiting from the pair’s songwriting skills included the Tremeloes, Lulu, Marmalade, Sacha Distel, Engelbert Humperdinck and Rolf Harris, and in 1970 they achieved the feat of becoming the first British songwriters to have a song covered by Elvis Presley when the King took I’ve Lost You into the US charts in 1970.
It had originally appeared on the debut album of Matthews Southern Comfort, another Howard/Blaikley client. I’ve Lost You also featured in the 1970 film Elvis: That’s the Way It Is. Heart of Rome, composed by Howard and Blaikley in collaboration with Geoff Stephens, appeared on Presley’s album I’m Leavin’ (1971).
Howard was born in Worthing, West Sussex. His father, Harry, was a solicitor and founder member of the London-based law firm Howard Kennedy, and his mother, Beatrice (nee Leigh, and usually known as Betty), had been a concert pianist. He first met Blaikley at UCS when they were both eight years old, beginning a partnership that would let them nurture “an intuitive empathy that allows us to short-cut the creative process”.
In 1956-57 he attended Aiglon College in Villars, Switzerland, then spent a year working for Granada TV in London before enrolling at Edinburgh University to study social anthropology. While in Scotland he formed the vocal duo Eva and Ken, with Eva Hermann, and performed regularly on the Scottish TV programme Jig Time.
After graduation he reunited with Blaikley (who had studied classics and English at Wadham College, Oxford) when they both enlisted as trainee producers for BBC Television, with Blaikley attached to the talks department and Howard in drama.
The pair joined with Paul Overy, who would become an art historian and critic, to publish Axle Quarterly, which showcased early work by promising young writers including Melvyn Bragg and Simon Raven. Meanwhile, the duo had begun writing songs, using the collective pseudonym “Howard Blaikley” since their extracurricular activities contravened their BBC contracts. When the corporation gave them an ultimatum, they chose to pursue songwriting.
“Everybody counselled us against it,” Howard recalled. “They said, ‘You’re mad – you can’t leave the BBC. It’s your career’… But it wasn’t difficult at all. At the time pop music was the thing that England could excel in.”
But as the 70s loomed, the music industry was losing its earlier noisy naivety and beginning to develop progressive pretensions. Blaikley and Howard took aim at this new era by writing and producing the concept album Ark 2 by the group Flaming Youth (featuring Phil Collins on drums, shortly before he joined Genesis). This won critical plaudits (Melody Maker made it Pop Album of the Month, while the Sunday Times went one better by making it 1969’s Rock Album of the Year) but was a commercial flop. It was after this that they took on the management of Matthews Southern Comfort, but, though the group had a No 1 hit with a version of Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, they could not make headway with original material.
The pair’s influence in pop was waning, but their skills proved to be eminently transferable to other media. They wrote Frankie Howerd’s theme song to the Up Pompeii film (1971), and in the same year created the innuendo-laden A Knight for My Nights, sung by Eartha Kitt in the film Up the Chastity Belt.
The duo’s musical Mardi Gras was staged in the West End in 1976, and Wyndham’s theatre hosted their musical treatment of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole in 1984-86. The BBC broadcast their TV musicals Orion (based on the Ark 2 project) in 1977, and Ain’t Many Angels the following year. Also in 1978 came the album Life Before Death, in which the duo wrote the music for a collection of poems performed by the psychiatrist RD Laing. In 1990 their musical version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda toured UK theatres.
Howard scored several notable BBC productions, among them the award-winning Shadowlands (1985) which starred Claire Bloom and Joss Ackland. He and Blaikley wrote music for The Flame Trees of Thika (1981), the English civil war drama By the Sword Divided (1983-85) and Miss Marple (1984-92).
Howard also directed numerous films for the BBC. John Lennon: A Journey in the Life (1985) was a dramatised documentary to mark the fifth anniversary of Lennon’s death, and starred Bernard Hill. A Penny for Your Dreams (1988) told the story of the cinema pioneer William Haggar, and Mr Abbott’s Broadway (1994) was a tribute to the Broadway writer and director George Abbott.
Howard won the Royal Television Society’s Best Children’s Factual award twice, for his BBC films Braveheart and Today I Am a Man. For The South Bank Show on ITV he made profiles of (among others) Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye and the violinist Maxim Vengerov.
He also wrote two novels, The Young Chieftain (2010) and Follow Me: A Quest in Two Worlds (2017), and ran a board games company, Sophisticated Games.
He is survived by Benjamin Shorten, with whom he entered into a civil partnership in 2006.
• Ken Howard, songwriter, manager and TV director, born 26 December 1939; died 24 September 2024
