Obituary: Felix Dennis, 1947-2014

Maverick publisher and poet who planted a forest in Warwickshire

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With his extraordinary energy, roistering humour and "cackling laugh", Felix Dennis was one of the most colourful characters in the British media, said Marsha Rowe in The Guardian. Having become famous as one of the editors of the counterculture magazine Oz, he went on to build up one of the most successful independent media companies in the world. In business, he could be ruthless, and even, by his own admission, amoral: he loved to win, and he loved making money (his chief interest, he once said, was making "f****** loads" of it). But Dennis, who has died aged 67, was no careful conserver of his wealth. Along the way, he gave millions away, to good causes and hard-luck cases, and blew even more on "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll". He once claimed to have "pissed away" £100m on wine, crack cocaine (which he boasted of smoking from a hand-blown glass pipe), and parties where "naked hookers" catered to "my every whim". His aim, he said, was simply to "have a bloody good time filling the gap between being born and dying".

Felix Dennis was born in southwest London in 1947. His father left when he was three, and he and his brother Julian were often cared for by their grandparents, who lived in a "two up, two down" with no hot water and a tin bath in the coal shed. His mother, however, was determined to better the family, said The Times: she went to night school, trained as a chartered accountant, and elevated her sons into the middle class. Dennis passed his 11+, only to be expelled from his grammar school; at 15, he dropped out of art school to join an R&B band. Thereafter, he worked as a grave digger in Harrow and a window dresser on Oxford Street before finding his "métier" in 1967, when he read the first copy of Oz. Entranced, Dennis sent a taped message to Oz's editor, Richard Neville, saying it was the "most fantastic f****** magazine I've seen". The tape was later used in a BBC documentary – and Dennis subsequently turned up at Oz's offices demanding a fee. Instead, Neville gave him a handful of magazines and said he could sell them and keep the proceeds. Dennis sold them, came back for more – and was soon not only co-editing Oz, but running its business side.

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