Educated at Bury Grammar School, he was an amateur footballer playing for Oldham Athletic and Stoke City Reserves between 1960 and 1964, before joining the family business full-time in 1964.

In the mid-1990s, he took a stake in Conrad Continental Limited, an ailing Manchester textile company that was listed on the London Stock Exchange.

In the late 1990s, he was involved in a flurry of similar deals bringing to market larger companies, such as Prestbury Group with Nigel Wray and Nick Leslau, The Pharmacy Restaurant in Notting Hill with Matthew Freud and Damien Hirst and most famously Knutsford where his co-investors were Julian Richer, Sir Archie Norman and again Wray and Leslau.

He has now floated over 20 companies since Prestbury, some of which have performed spectacularly as a result of having brought in budding entrepreneurs, such as Abby Hardoon of Magic Moments and later Host Europe and Nick Robertson of ASOS.

[5][6] Starting in 1981, for 3 years in a row, Edelson became a judge for Miss World alongside its founder Eric Morley as well as Dodi Fayed and Bruce Forsyth.