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LIZ AND Larry Yaskiel with their Canary Islands’ English-language

29 - Wednesday, September 7, 1988 - North Shore News

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ROCK ‘N’ ROLL EXECUTIVE CUT TO THE CANARIES

JHE ROYALTY cheques from the German lyrics Larry
Montague Yaskiel penned for English language pop songs in

1964 rollin four times a year.

Yaskiel, 52, is responsible for a
gaggle of gutteral pop) permuta-
tions, He put phonetic German in-
to the mouths of the Beatles with
She Loves You, Petula Clark with
Downtown, The Searchers with
Needles and Pins. He added a
Teutonic twist to cover versions of
Roll Over Beethoven, Wooly Bully
and Winchester Cathedral to name
a few,

Said Yaskiel, currently in North
Vancouver with his wife and co-
worker Liz for an annual visit with
local family members, ‘It pays for
our holiday. It’s like found
money."’

While Yaskiel’s rock 'n’ roll past
as a high powered recording in-
dustry executive lives on in’ the
form of a qtarterty statement of
Deutsch Marks earned every me a
song he has an interest in is aired.
his heart fives in his present incur-
nation as editor of the Lancelot
Island Journal on a Canary island
called Lanzarote.

Larry and Liz first discovered
Lanzarote in 1979, “‘l had just
been on a tour with a heavy metal
group called the Pirates. | was very
tired.” An ad eyed in an English
newspaper pointed the way to the

By MICHAEL BECKER

“ews Reporter

Canary island for rest, relaxation
and an unplanned radical mid-fife
career switch. ‘We had no inten-

tion of staying, but within 12
hours of arrival, we had signed up
to buy a terraced bungalow,”
Yaskiel remembers.

The couple went on to develop
the Lancelot Island Journal, a suc-
cessful bi-monthly English-
language offshoot of a Spanish-
language newspaper. The magazine
serves a growing influx of tourists
flocking to enjoy an exotic, endless
summer in Lanzarote. Larcy writes
the copy and Liz sells ads and
supervises (ie publication's paste
up.

To kick it afl off, New Musical
Express special projects editor Roy
Carr took several weeks of holiday
time to teach the couple the
publication basics.

The decision to leave the music
business for good seven years ago
at age 45 and after over 20 years of
involvement in the recording in-
dustry was easy, Said Yaskicl, ‘‘!
liked the business when it had to

do with the music. Afterwards it
got into accountants, figures and
lawyers. ft was fun, but there was
a lot of pressure and [ was getting
lired.”"

Yaskiel was well positioned in
the early ‘60s to spread the
[inglish-language pop sound
throughout Germany and Europe
while working for Deutsche Vogue
in Hamburg. “Companies couldn't
get German radio to play this
rough sound. Someone said if you
could get any of these records in
German, then we could play the
English songs. As I was the only
Englishman in the music business
there, the German music
publishers asked me if | could
write German lyrics to U.K. and
U.S. songs,”* he said.

After meeting Robert Stigwood
in the mid-’60s, Yaskiel went on to
form Stigwood-Yaskiel  Interna-
tional. The Hamburg-based enter-
prise promoted international artists
in Germany including Cream, The
Bee Gees, Small Faces, Dusty Spr-
ingfield, The Who, T Rex, Joe
Cocker and Jimi Hendrix.

Stigwood went into partnership
with Brian Epstein six months be-
fore Epstein died. ‘‘We were the
office the German press would go

See Rock
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