Raymond Horricks (1933-2005)
An appreciation

The team behind the 1963 Reprise LP Sammy Davis Jr Salutes the London Palladium, at the Pye recording studios in Great Cumberland Place, London. Ray Horricks is in front of Sammy, while arranger John Keating is on the far right.

Ray Horricks was a polymath. He applied his considerable intellect to many different areas of enquiry in his all-too-short life. First of all, he was a record producer of note, the guiding hand behind many hit records. He was also a perceptive and entertaining writer, but his experience was not limited solely to music. When he lectured in west Africa in the mid-1980s, the agency had booked him to give a talk about Cardinal Richelieu and another on the period of Napoleon’s First Consulship. At Ray’s suggestion, Dizzy Gillespie was added to the list of topics, and it was these musical sessions that caused “near-riots – albeit of a friendly nature”. 

He was born on 20 April 1933 in Withington on the outskirts of Manchester, the son of Francis Horricks, an analytical chemist, and May Horricks (nee Ingham). In later life, he admitted that he never got on with his parents, and that the most important formative influence on him was that of his paternal grandfather, Alfred Horricks, who “lived every second of his earthly term with a vital and completely spontaneous intensity” and impressed on Ray the importance of being yourself. He was “a big man in every sense…It was my privilege just to know him”.

His school years were spent at the Xaverian College in Manchester, and it was during this period that he added jazz to his list of youthful passions, along with cricket and stamp-collecting. It was shrewd trading in the latter that funded his early record purchases, the first being Harry James’ Trumpet Blues and Cantabile. The second was Coleman Hawkins’ Body and Soul. Ray always had good taste. Later, he studied at the Sorbonne, paying his way through the course by working variously as a waiter and a street sweeper. He was in Paris at the time of the 1949 Jazz Fair, where he heard Charlie Parker for the first time, quite an experience for an innocent abroad. Ray went backstage to pay his respects to Parker, who invited him to join him at his hotel the following day “for a rap about music and perhaps a little sip”, beginning “two of the most subjective, exciting and ultimately inexplicable days of my life”, as the legend invited the young fan to hang around and just talk jazz.

After the Parisian sojourn, Ray returned to England to begin his National Service in the Royal Signals, serving for a period in Egypt. Upon demob, he harboured ambitions to become a writer, but impending marriage encouraged him to seek a steady job, so he joined the Decca publicity department in 1955. Here his immediate superior was Peter Gammond, with whom he forged an enduring friendship and a long creative collaboration, resulting in many books, not least The Music Goes Round and Round: a cool look at the record industry (Quartet, 1980). His first book, written in his first year at Decca, was also a collaboration, with his friend Alun Morgan, called Modern Jazz: a Survey of Developments since 1939.

When this picture appeared in Ray and Peter Gammond's book The Music Goes Round and Round, the caption read: "At the wedding of his sister-in-law, the internationally-known soprano Sheila Armstrong, producer Raymond Horricks discusses with one of his henchmen how to deal with certain difficult record company executives."

He made the move from publicity to the A&R department after he compiled a successful LP of Spike Hughes’ 1930s New York sessions, to which Decca held the rights. Learning production by watching senior Decca producers such as Frank Lee, Dick Rowe and Hugh Mendl at work, he also helped out on a number of classical sessions, including an RCA recording of Handel's Messiah at Walthamstow Town Hall with Sir Thomas Beecham. He was soon given his own sessions to supervise, working with Mantovani, Stanley Black, Edmundo Ros, Ted Heath and Frank Chacksfield, among others. A particularly pungent memory of Ray’s from this period was heading to Hastings beach with a cargo of fish guts and a portable tape recorder to record seagull effects for Chacksfield’s stereo version of Ebb Tide. Ray and the engineer had to wait while the gulls gulped down their lunch before they could record them flying away, making the requisite contented noises. He was also given his head (and a limited budget) to produce jazz records with the likes of Tony Kinsey, Bill le Sage, Ronnie Ross, Alan Clare, Victor Feldman and Ken Moule.

Horricks’ first big hit record came with Ted Heath and his Music in March 1958, with Ken Moule’s arrangement of Swingin’ Shepherd Blues, which reached number 3. Ray was justifiably proud of being responsible for the Baa Baa Black Sheep quote that helped make a catchy number even catchier. More hits followed with Heath, as well as with a young singer called Anthony Newley. Among these was a comic rendition of Strawberry Fair taken at a tempo so ferocious that Ray recalled wearing out three guitarists on the session.

By 1962, Ray had built a reputation as a producer of skill, sensitivity and good judgement, all of which was noted by Roger Threlfall and Louis Benjamin at Pye. He moved over, primarily to set up the new Piccadilly label, and soon resumed his hit-making run, this time with Johnny Keating (whose version of the Theme from ‘Z Cars’ reached number 8), and Joe Brown, with A Picture of You hitting number 1. During his two years with Pye, Ray also worked on the sessions for Frank Sinatra’s Robert Farnon-arranged Great Songs from Great Britain (Reprise, 1962), and shouldered the bulk of the production for Sammy Davis Jr Salutes the London Palladium (Reprise, 1963), for which Johnny Keating and Peter Knight supplied the charts.

In 1964, after nearly a decade as a staff A&R man, Ray became a freelance producer. He was particularly proud of his work on Decca’s D’Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan recordings, as well as of his associations with Owen Brannigan and Kenneth McKellar. He also put on disc West End plays and musicals as diverse as Forty Years On by Alan Bennett and Danny la Rue’s Come Spy With Me, not to mention extensive work with brass bands. He scored another number 1 in 1970, with All Kinds of Everything by Dana, the winner of that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. His production career continued into the 1980s, culminating in some sublime sessions with Ray Swinfield’s Argenta Ora.

By this time, however, his writing had begun to take precedence. In the late 1980s, he moved to the Isle of Wight, which he found gave him the isolation needed to write, which he did prolifically. He was a regular contributor to Crescendo for over 20 years, while the books he wrote and published included Stephane Grappelli, Constructive Warriors, Marshal Ney, Military Mindlessness, Quincy Jones, Svengali - or the Orchestra Called Gil Evans, Miles Davis & John Coltrane, and, most recently, Gerry Mulligan’s Ark.

I first met Ray in January 2002, when he agreed to be interviewed for a book I was writing about the record industry. His natural inclination was to be wary of anyone unknown to him, but he must have sensed a kindred spirit, and we stayed in touch. Sometimes, when I rang him, it became clear that he was preoccupied (Ray was a serious, deep-thinking man, and was certainly not to be interrupted when the muse was present) and the conversation was brief. At other times, we would talk for ages. Then, periodically, there would be a parcel with an Isle of Wight postmark and that familiar handwriting on the envelope, containing his latest book, always inscribed “Avec mes amities, Ray H”. It was my privilege just to have known him, however briefly.

Louis Barfe, 2005

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