He is, one can safely assume, the only director of a company quoted on the London market to have written songs for Elvis Presley. He has an OBE for services to the music industry. And he has fixed his sights on potentially the world’s biggest market for recorded music.

Guy Fletcher started in music as a jazz trumpet player, became a session vocalist who sang on 100 or more recordings and has written songs for artists from Ray Charles to Tom Jones to Cliff Richard, although his compositions, it is fair to say, are not household names.

These days he is more concerned with Music Copyright Solutions (MCS), which he founded in 2001 to look after the interests of songwriters and other owners of musical intellectual property. MCS, where he is styled creative director, administers the process whereby his clients get royalties every time that one of their songs is recorded, on a compilation album, for example, or played on television or the radio.

As many as 250 licences to record his clients’ songs come through a month. There is a tiny recording label — among the piles of CDs lying on the desk in his cluttered Covent Garden office is one by Rakhat T — a Kazakh pop singer, whom Mr Fletcher brought to London and recorded for the first time in English.

Mr Fletcher, who left school at 16 and confesses to having received virtually no education before that, is from a talented family. His son Justin is a children’s television presenter and the voice of Shaun the Sheep in the Wallace & Gromit spin-off now on our screens.

He has a nephew, confusingly also Guy, a musician. Indeed, uncle for several years enjoyed nephew’s songwriting royalties through a mix-up at the PRS before the mistake came to light. It is unlikely that the nephew noticed the loss. He was a member of the band Dire Straits.

The Presley connection came about through his session work. He had formed a four-man close harmony singing group who were much in demand in the 1960s, a time when no single was complete without its share of vocalised “woohs” and “waahs”. The King recorded four of his songs, one for his last film. Only three were released; the fourth is still lying in the vaults somewhere.

He is a survivor of the original Tin Pan Alley, Denmark Street in Soho, a tight-knit musical world largely blown apart by the coming of the Beatles and other artists who had the effrontery to write their own material. On the way, he worked with legends such as the producer Joe Meek, recorder of “Telstar” and today better known for having killed his landlady and himself in a paranoid rage, who first suggested he take up session work.

He is engagingly vague on dates, perhaps on the principle of “if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t there”. In the 1970s he was part of a soft rock group who were, by his account, enormous in Holland and Belgium. He spent much of the 1980s out of the frontline music scene, farming sheep in Devon and working for British Music Rights, which he founded to campaign for the interests of those unsung heroes who, as the big record companies increasingly ran the show, were becoming marginalised.

For more than a decade he was chairman of The British Academy of Composers and Songwriters. He remains under standably passionate about the maintenance of the value of copyrights, which he says is still under threat. For example, Mr Fletcher says, the practice in today’s music business is to put together a team that will handle all aspects of a recording for an artist. The songwriter is just a cog within this package and is often pressured to sign away his or her rights in return for inclusion.

MCS, which floated on the Alternative Investment Market in 2004, almost collapsed last year when a deal went sour and various business was lost. It was rescued by Ilyas Khan, a Lancashire-born former investment banker at Nomura, Citigroup and other big names, who in 2002 bought Crosby Capital Partners, the broker. This operates out of Hong Kong and London and has almost 20 per cent of the company.

Crosby is joint venture partner in the new Chinese venture, MCS Asia, which opened in Hong Kong this month. “Initially we’re trying to acquire local catalogues to administer for the world,” Mr Fletcher says. “We’re also going to promote Western material in the East and promote Eastern material in the West.”

In intellectual property terms, China is the Wild East. The normal rules do not apply. Figures from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries claim the market to be worth $400 million, probably a wild underestimate. Of this, only 5 to 10 per cent is legitimate. The vast majority of the CDs bought at markets and in shops are pirate. The performer and the songwriter get nothing from these.

The potential of the market beggars belief, as befits a country of 1.2 billion people. For example, a recent hit, Men Loves Rice by Yang Chengang — the title may have lost something in translation — drew 5.2 million downloads via China Mobile in the first six months after release.

Mr Fletcher is currently in advanced negotiations to buy one Chinese catalogue — “a collection of iconic music” — with other deals in the pipeline. He is not ruling out a Chinese Rakhat T.

Sleeve notes

–– Born April 27, 1944
–– First job news photographer
–– From 1965 Professional songwriter and session musician, working with Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, Tom Jones and Rolf Harris, among many others
–– 1991-2003 Chairman, British Academy of Composers and Songwriters
–– 2001 Founder, Music Copyright Solutions
–– 2005OBE for services to British music
–– Family: son is a television presenter; nephew played keyboard with Dire Straits

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