For the young generation that grew up in Britain in the 1940s and 50s, a country of grey skies and mostly grey music, to hear the voices of original African-American R&B artists such as Chuck Berry , Bo Diddley, Little Richard and James Brown was to be shown a land of gold. From Bolton to Bexhill-on-Sea, teenagers went prospecting for it: haunting specialist record shops, starting fanzines and creating fly-by-night record labels for illicit reissues.
That was exactly how the record producer and music executive Mike Vernon, who has died aged 81, began a lengthy career that helped to introduce the world to artists such as John Mayall, Eric Clapton and Fleetwood Mac.
A dedicated record collector in his teens, in 1964 Mike founded a fanzine, R&B Monthly, with his schoolfriend Neil Slaven. The following year, with the help of his brother Richard, he created the Blue Horizon Records label, which reissued obscure American singles in the UK and gave first opportunities to young British musicians who had also heard the siren call of the blues and were discovering their own ways of echoing it.
At 18 Mike was taken on as a producer at Decca Records, where he oversaw the album From New Orleans to Chicago (1965) by the blues singer and pianist Champion Jack Dupree, accompanied by emerging British blues names such as Mayall, Clapton and Tony McPhee. In 1966 he produced Mayall’s debut album Blues Breakers, a key recording in the annals of British blues that showcased Clapton, and then supervised Mayall’s A Hard Road, featuring Clapton’s successor in the band, Peter Green, which was released in 1967.
When, later that year, Green left Mayall’s Blues Breakers for a new band, Fleetwood Mac, he asked Mike to produce them because he liked “the earthy, homely feel” of what he was doing on Blue Horizon. The result was their first, eponymous album in 1968, as well as the single Albatross, an instrumental that topped the UK charts and rapidly became a million-seller.
A door thus opened, and Mike stormed in with project after project under the Blue Horizon name in collaboration with the much bigger CBS label: new British blues rooted acts such as Chicken Shack and Duster Bennett; new recordings of veteran bluesmen in a series called Presenting the Country Blues (1968-69); reissues of classic 50s blues by Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Slim Harpo and others; American trips to record the 1968 Memphis Country Blues festival, and the transatlantic collaboration Blues Jam at Chess (1969). Mike was personable, persuasive and immensely hard working, and in the four years of the Blue Horizon/CBS association (1967–71) he probably produced more blues sessions than anyone in the business.
In 1971, he and Richard built their own recording studio in the Oxfordshire town of Chipping Norton. Open not just for Blue Horizon business, over the following 28 years it generated hits that included Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street and sessions by Duran Duran and Radiohead.
During that period Mike also worked as a freelance producer and, always alert to the possibility of another blues revival, he updated the Blue Horizon model by initiating the Indigo and Code Blue labels, producing the new blues artists they presented. In the 2010s he also produced albums by Dani Wilde and Oli Brown, British blues musicians of yet another generation.
Mike was born in Harrow, Middlesex, but grew up in Kenley, Surrey, and attended Purley County grammar school, where, as a 12-year-old, he thrilled to records such as Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven, Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti and Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill – “slabs of musical genius that were to totally change my life”. Like many blues enthusiasts of his era, he wanted not just to collect the music but to perform it, too, and he and Slaven, playing harmonica and guitar respectively, formed a band, the Mojo Men.
After a period studying at Croydon College of Art, producing and studio work became his main activity over the years, but he kept his hand in as a musician, often contributing backing vocals or additional percussion to recordings, or writing songs for them.
In 1971 he released the album, Bring It Back Home, a collaboration with other musicians, and during the 70s and 80s he was a singer with the Olympic Runners and Rocky Sharpe & the Replays (under the pseudonym Eric Rondo), both of which he also produced.
In 2018 he and his Mighty Combo, which he led, released an album, Beyond The Blue Horizon, and backed it up with an extensive UK tour ending in Spain, where by then he had made his home.
Mike’s work was recognised in 2013 when he was awarded the gold badge of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers & Authors. In 2022 he was appointed MBE.
He is survived by Richard.
• Michael William Hugh Vernon, musician and record producer, born 20 November 1944; died 2 March 2026
