TITO BURNS

Photo: Daily Mail/Rex Pictures

The British booking agent Tito Burns, whose heyday was the 1960s, has died aged 89. Here he is tactfully handling Cliff Richard in 1958, the year they acquired each other. He didn't look so tough when Albert Grossman was humiliating him in 1965, as seen in Don't Look Back (the D.A. Pennebaker film of Dylan's last solo acoustic tour, which was, as it happened, in the UK that spring). Burns was an ex jazz band leader who hated rock'n'roll but put up with it.

In The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia entry on the film, he gets this mention:

"[The film is] also mordantly funny: never more so than when the soon to be Newcastle High Sheriff’s Lady comes to call on Bob backstage, or when Albert Grossman gets together with one of the pompous big-name hustlers of the British ‘entertainment industry’, Tito Burns, forces him to negotiate British TV appearances for Dylan right there in front of us all, and makes this wily bully-boy look a bumbling fraud alongside Grossman’s genuine article."

The obituary in the Daily Telegraph reports that "The Searchers complained that Burns worked them too hard, and it was said that another of his pop acts, the Zombies, lived up to the name on account of being permanently exhausted."

Not only that but "In 1986, with his wife, Burns took up golf with a passion..."