Vicki Wickham, a behind-the-scenes force in popular music who helped oversee the influential British television showcase “Ready Steady Go!” and managed artists including the vocal trio Labelle and the singer Dusty Springfield, died on Friday in the Bronx. She was 87.
Her death, in a hospice facility, was confirmed by Tristram Penna, her friend and collaborator.
Raised on a farm in south-central England and educated at a boarding school, Ms. Wickham later said she immediately set out for London after graduating at 16 in the hope of doing all she could to avoid a secretarial job.
Admittedly naïve about music — she confessed to being late to the Beatles craze — she first made her mark when a friend introduced her to a television executive in 1962. He was about to create a youth-oriented showcase for pop music, and she jumped at an offer to help produce, write scripts and book guests.
The show, “Ready Steady Go!,” began airing in 1963, and Ms. Wickham was a vital part of the operation during its three-year run. She was instrumental in booking the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and Cilla Black, and in making the program a crucial forum for introducing British audiences to Black American pop singers and musicians like Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding.
Rather than lip-syncing — as they did on a rival show, “Top of the Pops,” which began airing in 1964 — artists on “Ready Steady Go!” performed live in the studio, within reach of young, stylish dancers Ms. Wickham culled from clubs like the Orchid, the Fender and the Marquee.
Missed cues and technical glitches were common, but the sense of spontaneity was the point — captured by the roving lenses of the cameras, which broadcast a real-time revolution in music, fashion, youth and attitude.
Ms. Springfield, who performed on the show’s first episode and became a recurring musical guest and presenter, forged a close friendship with Ms. Wickham and introduced her to songs by Black American artists that weren’t yet played on British radio.
Their shared passion for the music led to Ms. Springfield’s hosting a special Motown-themed episode in 1965. The performers included the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and “Little” Stevie Wonder.
In 2010, Ms. Wickham told The Express on Sunday, a British publication, that the show sometimes received a vicious response when they invited Black singers.
“I was horrified that people would call up,” she said. “Why not just switch off?”
To interviewers, she was long a fount of earthy anecdotes about some of the guests: Van Morrison showing up tardy and arrogant, Chuck Berry demanding payment in cash and David Ruffin of the Temptations providing her with her first joint.
“I remember coughing myself silly and him laughing at me,” she said.
Sex was, of course, rampant, she recalled, even if people were quiet about the details. She did say that the relationship between herself and Ms. Springfield — they were both gay — was deep but platonic.
“We really were just mates,” she told The Express on Sunday in 2000, “and because of that she could tell me about her affairs and I could tell her about mine.”
With the record producer Simon Napier-Bell, Ms. Wickham wrote the lyrics for Ms. Springfield’s 1966 hit “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” an English-language version of the Italian song “Io Che Non Vivo (Senza Te).”
Ms. Wickham went on to produce concerts with the Beatles manager Brian Epstein at the Saville Theater, including an appearance by an up-and-coming guitarist named Jimi Hendrix.
She moved to New York in 1970 and, with a colleague, Nancy Lewis, helped establish and run the American office of the London-based Track Records. She also signed on to manage Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles, who had been musical guests on “Ready Steady Go!”
Ms. Wickham soon persuaded the group — Ms. LaBelle along with Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx — to ditch the identical gowns, gloves and wigs that had hemmed them in as a “girl group.” She also suggested a new name for them — simply Labelle — to reflect a change in sound and direction.
In 1971, the trio spent six months in London immersing themselves in funk, glam and rock before reintroducing themselves on their debut album, “Labelle,” which was produced by Ms. Wickham and Kit Lambert, a founder of Track Records and a manager of the Who.
In addition to writing songs that often addressed social and political issues, Labelle recorded wildly inventive interpretations of hits by the Rolling Stones, the Who and Cat Stevens.
The group’s 1974 single “Lady Marmalade,” written by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan, went to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Labelle performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and, in 1975, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone; both achievements were firsts for a Black female musical group.
After Labelle broke up in 1976, Ms. Wickham managed the adventurous solo career of Ms. Hendryx, as well as other artists, including the Canadian new wave band Rough Trade, whose 1981 song “High School Confidential” became Canada’s first explicitly lesbian-themed hit.
Ms. Wickham also helped engineer the comeback of Ms. Springfield, who had spent years in and out of rehab for drug addictions. She facilitated a collaboration between Ms. Springfield and the English duo the Pet Shop Boys on the hit song “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” in 1987 and on her album “Reputation” in 1990.
“Vicki always made people feel she was a soft touch,” Mr. Napier-Bell, the producer and her collaborator, said in an interview. “But underneath she was tough as nails and got things done.”
Vicki Heather Wickham, an only child, was born in April 1939 in rural Newbury, about 60 miles west of London, and grew up in nearby Inkpen as an upper-middle-class farmer’s daughter; her mother had been a nurse. (Her exact date of birth was not immediately available.)
She attended a boarding school in the county of Berkshire and then left for London, spending the next few years variously employed as an assistant illustrating children’s books, a movie-theater usher, a coffee-shop worker busing tables, and a cleaner scrubbing office floors. Eventually she landed a job as an assistant to Charles Chilton, a BBC producer who specialized in serialized radio programs.
In 1962, a friend introduced her to Elkan Allan, an executive with the independent TV channel Associated-Rediffusion who was creating a pilot episode of “Ready Steady Go!” Though Mr. Allan initially hired her as a secretary, he promised that if the show was given the green light, she would have a creative role. He made good on that promise.
Ms. Wickham rapidly made up for her modest base of musical knowledge — which she often described as limited to Gilbert and Sullivan and “South Pacific” — by scouring weekly music papers, listening to records by the armful and training herself to spot talent.
In her later years, she managed artists such as Morrissey, Marc Almond and Holly Johnson, the former frontman for Frankie Goes to Hollywood. With the journalist Penny Valentine, she wrote an authorized biography of Ms. Springfield, “Dancing With Demons,” published in 2000, a year after the singer’s death from cancer. Ms. Wickham also produced BBC radio documentaries about Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, George Michael and other singers.
Ms. Wickham is survived by Ms. Hendryx, her partner of almost 60 years.
Recalling the start of her career to the Guardian in 1999, Ms. Wickham was self-deprecating. “It was absolutely easy for women to get ahead in music then,” she said.
“We were all learning on our feet, and it didn’t matter what sex you were,” she added. “I’m more amazed it happened to someone who’s not particularly fantastic-looking and not musical, though I do have musical instincts. I never had any idea what I wanted to do, so I was just in the right place at the right time.”
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