Tony Hall (music executive)

Biography

Hall was born in Avening, Gloucestershire, and was educated at Lancing College. After National Service, he started working at the Feldman Swing Club (later The 100 Club) in Oxford Street, London, where he became a regular host and met many of the leading jazz acts of the day. In 1952 he started working for Jeffrey Kruger at the Flamingo Club, and in 1954 started working as an A&R man for Decca Records.

He soon took responsibility for reviving the subsidiary Tempo label, and produced sessions by jazz acts such as Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes, Dizzy Reece and Victor Feldman for the label. The Tempo label was discontinued in 1961. As part of his work for Decca, Hall also presented regular sponsored pop music programmes on Radio Luxembourg during the late 1950s and 1960s, and in the 1960s contributed a regular column to the pop music weekly Record Mirror, which Decca owned. He also managed the promotion and distribution of Atlantic Records product in the UK, and promoted Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep – Mountain High", a record which had failed in the US but became a major hit in the UK.

Hall left Decca in 1967, and formed the UK's first independent promotion company, Tony Hall Enterprises, which was responsible for promoting acts including Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, and Black Sabbath. He then moved into management, guiding the careers of The Real Thing, Loose Ends, and Lynden David Hall in the 1980s and 1990s. He continues to write for Jazzwise magazine.