With his trademark baseball cap, large glasses and over-the-top personality, Jonathan King was the classic self-promoter in a music industry obsessed with fame and the hottest trends.
He saw himself as "strikingly handsome, veering towards God-like," with a gift for "knowing what the public want" and he pursued his love of music with a drive he put down to the fact that his American father died when he was only 12 years old.
With fame as music promoter and television personality came money, a Rolls Royce and properties in Britain and the US. But it was his celebrity, the Old Bailey heard, that he exploited to lure young men to his Bayswater flat in London where he abused them.
Educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, won fame at 21 when he recorded his first number one hit, Everyone's Gone to the Moon in 1965.
A year later, King was appointed manager of Decca Records and by the age of 25 he had founded his own label, UK Records, which he described as "the most lucrative independent record company of all time".
As well as producing a cover of Bob Dylan's Just Like a Woman, King claimed to have had 20 records in the Top 30 under 20 different aliases during the 1970s, including Loop di Love by Shag and Satisfaction by Bubblerock. At UK Records he managed the group 10CC and he promoted Genesis and the Bay City Rollers. But after a brief foray into politics in 1978, when he stood unsuccessfully as an independent in the Epsom by-election, King turned to television. In the 1980s he devised and presented the popular Entertainment USA, and co-presented the music show, No Limits. Asked to revive The Brit Awards show and improve the selection of entrants for the Song for Europe contest, in 1997 he was named by the British Phonographic Industry as "Man of the Year".