The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and Geniuses of Rock Music

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Cooper’s family and friends, including her daughter, Natasha Cooper, and her brother, John Cooper, were in court. The pair spoke of the “devastating” impact the murder had had on their family. When the team were thinking about new titles and what topics children might be interested in, climate change and the importance of protecting our world was something we really wanted to explore," Walden said. Dr Tony Juniper CBE is an environmentalist and writer. He is Chair of the official Nature recovery agency Natural England, a fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and Chair of Cool Earth. He was formerly Director of Friends of the Earth, Executive Director at WWF, President of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts and Special Advisor to the Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit. The roll call of Pikes hotel guests reads like a magazine gossip column at times: Mike Oldfield (who stole Tony’s girlfriend at the time), Joan Baez, Frank Zappa, Boy George, Kylie Minogue, Spandau Ballet, Brigitte Nielsen, Robert Plant, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Kenny Everett, the English football team, Bon Jovi and even Tony Curtis (who Tony Pike refused to lend his car to!). There were the iconic songstresses he famously romanced, Sade and Grace Jones, (this gentleman did indeed kiss and tell in his memoir) and the many superstar DJs of the world who passed through the island as Ibiza cemented its reputation as the clubbing capital of the world. In between romancing his glamorous guests over the years, Tony also committed to two more marriages, which in turn produced two more children. Despite admitting the murder in interview, King pleaded not guilty in two preliminary hearings, before changing his plea to guilty in May 2023.

Ever since I was a young teenager I have been deeply worried about the way we have shaped our world.’‘I am pleased to see that children across the world […] are now raising the alarm and calling for big changes to happen," wrote the former Prince of Wales. "Their efforts have emphasised the importance of caring about what life will be like in the future – there is a lesson in this for us all." As if my imagination had been waiting for the question to be asked, I saw a vast deserted city—deserted but alive. I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street. I saw smashed statues (of what I didn’t know, but I eventually found out). I saw a huge, sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds. Those images released the story I wanted to tell.” Clearly, someone with that life must have some stories to tell. Which begs the question: what stories is King telling in his new book? A Ladybird Book: Climate Change" includes an Afterword in which The Prince Charles, the former Prince of Wales sets out a personal message to readers. (The Afterword was written last year, when His Majesty The King was still The Prince of Wales.)This is a brilliant book by a brilliant man. A magician with perfect taste. Thank God I met him. He is gold dust!' As an octogenarian, doctors had called Tony a walking miracle. In recent years, years, Tony had been quietly battling cancer and was hospitalised with pneumonia just a little over a week ago. He cited the medical treatment he received throughout his life as amazing, and while doctors and nurses would continually tell him to slow down, Tony would insist on living his life to the fullest – even in his 80s, he was known to jump off the roof of Room 39 into the pool. “I’m an old man, but I don’t feel it,” he said of his behaviour. When recalling Freddie Mercury’s death, Tony once said: “Freddie was a very brave man. He partied to the end and he entertained to the end.” He could have easily been describing about himself. The words legend and iconic are bandied around quite liberally these days and yet no one in Ibiza – quite possibly even the world – embodied both terms more than Anthony John Pike. Over the course of his lifetime, Tony would be called many more things – playboy, entrepreneur, hedonist, storyteller, raconteur, entertainer, lovable rogue, gentleman, businessman, lover, ‘the Hugh Hefner of Ibiza’ (thank you Boy George) and even ‘the ringmaster for 30 years of celebrity debauchery’ (courtesy of The Guardian). These were among the more flattering descriptions; as for the others, well, as Tony was known to say – you can’t always be everyone’s cup of tea. He said: “In her final minutes she was faced with brutality and horror. We are haunted of the thought of what she endured.” Speaking of their relationship, he said: “We played, we laughed, we fought, she was my sister and now she’s gone.”

In an unpublished TikTok video the following day, after the murder took place, he recorded himself saying: “I have just taken a life today.” King was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 23 years, with 183 days already served. In 1951, Tony left the navy with dreams of emigrating to Australia. His strong work ethic saw him take on all types of work within the building trade – which would go on to serve him well when building Pikes in the late 70s – and after a year of saving, he found himself on a ship bound for Sydney; this time as a passenger rather than crew. It’s worth noting that his renowned exploits as a ladies’ man began at this point; despite much bragging about his experience with women prior to the journey, it was during a stopover in Yemen on that fateful trip that Tony finally declared himself “a man”. His work life in Australia was varied – he began working in millinery (where he met his first wife and the mother of his firstborn son), had a stint in the Australian Army, alongside labouring jobs and sales work. With his natural-born gift of the gab, selling was something Tony excelled at. The Tastemaker charts the singular life of a man who has been at the beating heart of music's most iconic moments for over sixty years and features stories of his time working with everyone from the Beatles to the Ronettes and Elton John to the Rolling Stones.

Including tales of John Lennon and Elton John

Writing in Air Mail, Victoria Segal shared some impressions of King’s memoir. Segal writes that King “knows how to balance irreverent entertainment with respectful discretion” and “has little interest in dishing real dirt.” And it sounds like a compelling read, from its firsthand accounts of some of music’s biggest names to what Segal describes as a harrowing look at the rise of AIDS. This latest title in the heritage non-fiction series for Ladybird and has been newly illustrated by up-and-coming talent Aleesha Nandhra. There has been no more effective or committed champion of this cause than the former Prince of Wales and I am sure this book and his words will help to keep things moving in the right direction.” When the first edition of the Ladybird Expert book on Climate Change was published in 2017, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 405 parts per million (ppm), now they are 420 ppm. As a consequence, the impacts of climate change are becoming worse and we saw temperatures reach an incredible 40C in the UK last summer.