Relentless ego of self-styled man

An insatiable self-publicist with a hunger for fame, Jonathan King never dreamed he would achieve notoriety quite like this.

Born Kenneth King in London in 1944, he decided at 15 that he wanted to be a pop star, and changed his name to Jonathan.

He went to Charterhouse then Cambridge where, at 21, he recorded his first hit, Everyone's Gone To The Moon.

The song made the English student a millionaire almost before he had finished his finals but served only to whet his appetite for a career in the music industry.

Never one to hide his light under a bushel, and despite the failure of follow-up song Green Is The Grass, King said: "It was instant stardom - offers flooded in."

He further claimed: "At one time I had 20 records in the Top 30 under different names", and "When I was 22, I was running Decca Records. The rest is history." In the mid-Sixties, King returned to his public school for a reunion and was treated as a hero. While there he helped some of his former fellow pupils think of a name for their pop group - Genesis.

By the time he was 25, King had founded his own record company, UK Records, described by him as "the most lucrative independent record company of all time", and he was the subject of much female attention.

None of this, of course, surprised the man who wore baseball caps and big round glasses, and saw himself as "strikingly handsome, veering towards God-like".

King's 15-year pop career produced songs including an unsuccessful cover of Bob Dylan's Just Like A Woman, Let It All Hang Out, and a new version of BJ Thomas's Hooked On A Feeling. Many of his songs were released under other names as King believed the public might tire of so many songs by the same artist.

UK Records was better known for its 10cc hits than those released under its owner's pseudonyms, such as Loop Di Love by Shag, Satisfaction by Bubblerock, and It Only Takes A Minute by 100 Ton And A Feather.

In 1975 Jonathan King released Una Paloma Blanca under his own name and it reached number five. But a plan a few years later to produce 6,000 records of the voice of a Yorkshire Ripper hoaxer was put on hold at the request of the police.

In 1978 he tried to win the safe Tory seat of Epsom and Ewell, near where he grew up, standing as an independent at a by-election. However, the seat went to Sir Archie Hamilton.

By the Eighties King had moved on from the pop world to television. He devised his own show, Entertainment USA, and presented it himself on BBC2, as well as fronting the music programme No Limits.

This, however, was not enough for the relentless egotist, who said he had become a sort of "father figure" for the younger generation, whom he advised to make the most of their education. King said then: "If I am honest, my English MA has done me no practical good at all, but it did give me the chance to appreciate English literature. And although I am a world-famous rock star and TV celebrity, it is not commonly known that my ultimate ambition is to be a world-famous writer."

His 1983 debut novel Bible Two did nothing to help him achieve it. The book told the story of millionaire Jonathan Farting, and was panned by critics as "mind-numbingly banal". Since then, King has worked hard to keep himself in the public eye with newspaper columns and radio appearances alongside his television shows.

But while his professional life was packed, King's private life was uneventful - as far as he let on. At the age of 40 he told an interviewer he was still a virgin, though he claimed to have "close friends" in Britain and America.

King once summed up his empty private life: "I fell passionately in love with music. It's the only passionate love affair I've had in my life, with one exception - me."

In court he told how he would speak to thousands of children about music.

The prosecution said it provided him with a cover to talk to them.