How Belfast's own Dorothy Solomon helped Van Morrison, the Bachelors and David McWilliams into the charts in London's 1960s music scene: Powerful agent passes away, aged 92
A famed 1960s and 70s music manager, Dorothy Solomon’s life went from Belfast ballrooms to the bright lights of Swinging London – taking in Ireland’s first boyband, helping Van Morrison’s group get their first hit, and the most controversial Number One single in British history.
Dorothy, who passed away last month aged 92, was renowned as a behind the scenes mover and shaker. It’s not common for a woman to be in that position now, but was remarkably rare in the almost exclusively male music industry boardrooms of the mid-20th century.
Indeed, her blend of tough-nosed, shrewd business acumen and high-end fashion sense went on to inspire someone who’s now one of the most famous female managers of all time – Sharon Osbourne.
"Everything about her was glamourous,” wrote Osbourne in autobiography, adding the Belfast woman “in many ways changed my life”.
“It was Dorothy who introduced me to luxury,” she stated. “An apartment on Park Lane was full of beautiful paintings and antique furniture and chandeliers and shiny polished floors. But the centre of it all was Dorothy, who looked and dressed like the ladies in the magazines I used to read.”
Born Dorothy Connell in 1933, her father George was a well-known boxing and wrestling impresario in Ulster. During the 1950s she married Belfast concert promoter Philip Solomon, and the two went into business together staging major tours across Ireland.
Moving to London in 1958, the pair set up talent agency Dorothy Solomon Associated Artistes and worked with star acts including Cliff Richard, Louis Armstrong and Gene Pitney.
The Solomons became a ‘power couple’ on the London scene, Dorothy guiding Dublin act the Bachelors to enormous success throughout the first half of the 1960s.
In the middle of the decade, Belfast group Them released their first single, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’. Now a Sixties anthem, Van Morrison has recalled that his old band’s debut flopped when it first came out – but Dorothy persuaded the producers of hit TV show ‘Ready Steady Go!’ to book the band, catapulting the single into the charts.
The pair were also involved in the most controversial Number One of all time, ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. Initially released on Fontana in 1969, its steamy content saw the song banned from BBC radio and deleted by the label, reportedly because a senior executive’s wife was embarrassed to be associated with the scandalous single.
By then behind their own independent label, Major Minor, the Solomons picked it up and steered it to the top of the charts.
The same label also debuted Northern Irish singer-songwriter David McWilliams, whose ‘The Days Of Pearly Spencer’ was a huge hit all across Europe though didn’t chart in the UK until Marc Almond covered it in the 1990s.
Major Minor was sold in 1970; Philip retired from music while Dorothy became agent to child star Lena Zavaroni, an enormously popular stage and TV regular for the rest of the decade.
The Solomons moved into racehorses, which ran in Dorothy’s colours, and during the 1980s owned art galleries in Dublin and London. In their later years they retired to Bournemouth; Philip died of a heart attack in 2011, and Dorothy’s funeral took place in Bournemouth this week.