Simon Robert Napier-Bell (born 22 April 1939) is an English record producer, music manager, author and journalist.
At different times, he has managed artists as diverse as the Yardbirds, John's Children, Marc Bolan, Japan, London, Sinéad O'Connor, Ultravox, Boney M, Sinitta, Wham!, Blue Mercedes, Alsou and Candi Staton, among others.
Later, he also scored, wrote and edited music for Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), a film directed by Clive Donner.
[citation needed] In 1966, Dusty Springfield approached Napier-Bell and Vicki Wickham to write an English lyric to an Italian song she had heard at the Sanremo Festival, composed by Pino Donaggio.
[3] A friend, Vicki Wickham, who booked all the acts for the TV show Ready Steady Go!, persuaded him to move into music management.
He began by putting together an act himself; Nicky Scott & Diane Ferraz; a boy from London and a girl from the West Indies.
Napier-Bell managed John's Children,[2] who were better known for their ability to shock rather than for their music, and who were thrown off a major tour of Germany for upstaging The Who, with an act that included running round the audience throwing feathers in the air and whipping each other with chains.
[2] He also spent a year in Australia where he worked for Albert Productions and produced acts such as Alison McCallum, Bobbi Marchini and John Paul Young (who later credited Napier-Bell with having discovered him).
[2] Napier-Bell and Summers led them through four months of legal complications (during which they were unable to record), and finally settled the case by signing a new contract with CBS.
Asia fared better than Ultravox, but eventually Napier-Bell gave up on both of them and spent three years writing a book, Black Vinyl White Powder.
When he ceased managing Asia and Ultravox, he wrote Black Vinyl White Powder; originally conceived as a history of the British post-war music industry, it developed during the writing process into an exploration of "the centrality of drugs and drug culture to the development of the British music business"[6] In March 2005, he published another memoir, I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch, the story of how he took Wham!