Worked With:
- Genres: Rock
- Instrument: Producer, Vocals, Engineer
Biography
Remastering producer Paul Williams started in the business when he was 13 by inadvertently purchasing a copy of Record Retailer instead of a pop magazine. Williams was fascinated by the trade paper and got a job at the local HMV retailer as soon as he was old enough to be employed. At the age of 15, he was doing the inventory control for quite a big store -- in the days when you could sell 100 45s of a number one record on a Saturday without batting an eye. Williams also started a little business importing soul 45s from America, mostly Motown discs, selling them by mail order and constructing a 40-page discography of Motown that gained attention in the press. Around 1970, he began writing and landed an interview for Blues & Soul Magazine with Freda Payne in Birmingham, about 100 miles from where he lived, selling an additional interview conducted at the show with Payne's keyboardist, the legendary Earl Van Dyke. Feeling that writing did not come naturally, he obtained a degree in marketing at what is now the University of Greenwich (formerly Thames Polytechnic). He wrote for Black Music, another R&B monthly paper, as well as Disco International in 1979, a disco trade paper where Williams became reviews editor. After doing that for a while, he had an epiphany when assigned to do an article on kiddy roller disco, an event for children ages ten to 12. He asked himself: "Why am I doing this?" and got a job as a publicist for Ariola Records (basically, what is now BMG) around November 1979, a big German company in the process of purchasing Arista Records at that moment in time. In the summer of 1980, he left Ariola to join RCA in 1981 as product/marketing manager working on a wide range of stuff in his four and a half years, doing all the marketing on the Eurythmics' first five albums, the European campaigns, marketing, point-of-sale materials, advertising "the whole nine yards," and garnering the Marketing Campaign of the Year Award for 1984 presented to him by the trade paper Music Week, the U.K. equivalent of Billboard magazine. He was also instrumental in the breaking of "The Way It Is," the number one hit for Bruce Hornsby & the Range, and developing the video for that song as well. Williams then went into management, but decided it wasn't really his bag so in 1986, he went back to RCA as head of international A&R and marketing. A joint campaign with Levi Jeans got a Sam Cooke oldie, "Wonderful World," to number two on the U.K. charts, selling more than a quarter of a million copies and bringing the album that contained the single to gold status.In 1990, Joe Galante, president of RCA U.S., invited him to work in New York as vice president of international product development. He later became vice president of strategic marketing and for five years, oversaw the development of the
In 1996, he founded House of Hits Productions, a reissue production company that has created compilations with sales in excess of 200 million dollars for clients as diverse RCA, Arista, Sony, Relativity, Rhino, and BMG Heritage. In summer 1998, he formed his own imprint, 7-N Music, with the first release, Eartha Kitt's Purr-Fect: Greatest Hits, in June 1999. Other 7-N discs include reissues from Merle Haggard, Nina Simone, Joe Tex, as well as a CD of original music by a band called Grudge. House of Hits does the majority of the reissue work for BMG, work which has Williams combing the RCA archives for tapes released on one of the world's oldest record catalogs. Music by artists from Lou Reed to
