Rik Gunnell was a ubiquitous and highly colourful character on the 1960s British pop scene. As the owner of trend-making clubs, he provided many of the venues that helped to shape the dynamic vortex of music, fashion and hedonism that ushered in a profound sea change in British attitudes and mores.

A self-made entrepreneur, he gave early breaks to the likes of the Rolling Stones, the Animals and The Who, all of whom played in his clubs. A raffish bon viveur, when he wasn’t in the back room counting his takings, he enjoyed mixing at the bar with his celebrity clientele, which ranged from Christine Keeler to the Beatles. He also set up a management and booking agency which he ran with his younger brother John, handling such acts as Long John Baldry, Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall and Rod Stewart.

He was born Richard Carl Percival Gunnell in 1931 at Hausbruch, Germany, where his father had married a German woman while working for a shipping firm. The family moved to North London in 1937 as the threat of war loomed. After attending secondary modern school, he moved to Hendon Commercial College at 14 but left two years later to become an amateur boxer, winning 15 out of 20 bouts.

After National Service, he became a bookkeeper at Smithfield meat market but moonlighted as a bouncer at the London jazz club, Studio 51. The experience persuaded him to start his own club, the 2-Way, which opened in 1952 and where the likes of Johnny Dankworth and George Melly played regularly. A second club called the Blue Room followed but financial difficulties forced the closure of both venues and he moved for a while to Paris to avoid his creditors.

He was soon back in London and started a series of allnight jazz sessions in the basement of the Mapleton Hotel in Leicester Square, variously known as Club Americana, Club M and the Flamingo, the latter of which had been started by Jeffrey Kruger, but which Gunnell soon took over. With a cosmopolitan and bohemian clientele that included prominent gangland figures, by the late 1950s Gunnell and his club became the target of a salacious press campaign, which forced the Flamingo to move to Wardour Street in the heart of Soho.

By this time the music scene was shifting away from jazz and towards rhythm and blues, and Gunnell and his brother quickly saw the potential of the new market. Early regular performers at the relocated Flamingo included such pioneers of the British beat group era as Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Brian Auger, Alexis Korner and Georgie Fame.

In January 1963 he invited an unknown beat group, the Rolling Stones, to take over the quiet Monday night slot. The Stones soon livened it up and although they rapidly moved on, the Flamingo was already established alongside clubs such as the nearby Marquee as the epicentre of the emerging R&B scene.

Fame’s group, the Blue Flames, became virtually the house band and the singer also became Gunnell’s first managerial client. The brothers’ management and booking agency grew rapidly and they were soon promoting visiting American stars, including Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino.

In 1966 the Gunnells opened the Bag O’Nails in Kingly Street. It swiftly became the trendiest club in London with the Beatles among the regulars: indeed, it was said that Paul McCartney met his future wife Linda Eastman there. That same year they also opened the Ram Jam Club in Brixton, another multiracial venue where Otis Redding made his British debut and the Animals and The Who also played.

As the music scene changed again, the Gunnells responded by promoting one of Britain’s first rock festivals at Woburn Abbey in the summer of 1968. The headliners included Jimi Hendrix and Ten Years After but when fans camping overnight in the grounds started a fire to keep warm, the blaze got out of control and the bill for the damage wiped out the profits and left the brothers heavily in debt.

The catastrophe persuaded Gunnell to sell out to his rival promoter Robert Stigwood and in late 1968 he moved to New York, where he ran his new boss’s US interests for several years. He left the music industry in 1972 and did not resurface until a few years later when he opened a bar in the Austrian ski resort of Kitzbühel. In 1976 he moved to a larger venue called The Londoner, which he ran as a popular après-ski venue until his death.

He is survived by his third wife, Edith, and their two daughters.

— Rik Gunnell, club owner, was born on July 23, 1931. He died of pneumonia on June 3, 2007, aged 75