My friend Harry Maloney, who has died of prostate cancer aged 70, started his working life as a designer of buildings. But he always felt an urge to take risks, which is why he left a promising career in architecture and went into pop music. The decision to swap drawing boards for keyboards, as it were, served Harry very well. He remained in music for more than 40 years and became an eminence grise of rock, pop and rap whose vast experience won him the respect – and affection – of his many colleagues.
Harry could hum a tune but was not particularly musical himself. That changed in 1970 when he was introduced to the rock musician Manfred Mann. The keyboards player had been the power behind the eponymous 1960s group, whose hits had included 5-4-3-2-1 and Do Wah Diddy Diddy, but he was planning to take his music in a new direction. Harry and he got on well and Manfred, recognising the benefits that Harry's phlegmatic approach would bring in coping with the volatile rock scene, offered him a job as manager.
In its new guise as Manfred Mann's Earth Band, the group, inspired by its charismatic leader and astutely managed by Harry, enjoyed a purple patch during which it won 17 platinum, gold and silver discs, culminating with a memorable version of Bruce Springsteen's Blinded By the Light, which reached No 1 in the US in 1976.
After a seven-year spell with Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Harry managed other well-known groups such as Uriah Heep, and Eddie and the Hot Rods. All the time, however, he was searching for projects. In 1985, he bought Great Linford Manor, a 17th-century mansion near Milton Keynes, and with characteristic entrepreneurial zeal converted it into a residential recording studio complex, one of the first in Britain to invest in digital equipment.
Harry then held a succession of senior posts in record companies until 2004, when he joined the trade's umbrella organisation, the British Phonographic Industry. Last year, due to his illness, Harry had to step down from the BPI council, where he represented Britain's many small record labels. At a farewell gathering he received a special award for what the BPI chairman, Tony Wadsworth, described as his fantastic services to the music business. He said Harry's wise counsel and sunny outlook would be greatly missed.
Harry, the third of four brothers, was born and bred in Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham. He was educated at Grangefield grammar school in Stockton and Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University), where I met him. We were friends for more than half a century.
He is survived by his wife, Vicky, daughters, Beth and Nell, and grandchildren, Jack and Chloe.