WITH his trademark colourful spectacles, lopsided smile and string of bubblegum rock hits, Jonathan King has been one of the pop industry's larger-than-life characters throughout the last four decades.

His first hit, Everyone's Gone to the Moon, came when he was a bright-eyed 18-year-old Cambridge undergraduate in 1965; his last hit came last Christmas when he produced the Baha Men's No 1, Who Let the Dogs Out?

In between, he was responsible for groups as diverse as Genesis and the Bay City Rollers, and he even won the Eurovision Song Contest. He established himself as one of the most influential figures in a cut-throat industry in which only the tough survive.

He was born Kenneth George King in Surrey in 1944, the eldest of three boys from a solid middle-class household.

His father, who was the managing director of a local textile firm, died when King was aged just 12. Despite this, he remained a happy child who was popular at his public school, Charterhouse, where he showed early signs of rebellion - and once led other pupils out on strike.

By the age of 13, he had begun to show a passion for showbusiness, regularly sneaking off from school to the bright lights of the West End, where he would watch the hit shows, transfixed by the glamour and glitz.

It was not long before his interest turned to pop, and he developed an obsession with music which would provide the direction and motivation for his future career and life.

''I fell passionately in love with music," he said. "It's the only passionate love affair I've had in my life, with one exception - me."

At 15 he was in no doubt whatsoever that his future lay in the music industry, and such was his drive and determination that he did not allow his lack of formal musical training to deter him.

Before going to Cambridge University, where he read English, King embarked on a year-long round-the-world trip. But like everything in his life, the journey was punctuated with music. He arranged to have copies of the New Musical Express sent to him at various places around the globe so he could keep abreast of developments at home in swinging London and Liverpool.

It was during this trip that he bumped into The Beatles, who were in Hawaii on a leg of their world tour. But, ever the astute businessman, King turned not to John, Paul, Ringo or George for advice, but to their genius manager, Brian Epstein.

Back at Cambridge, King, who was by now completely convinced of his chart-topping destiny, began writing songs.

After a rocky start and a series of eminently forgettable numbers, he finally stumbled upon a successful formula with Everyone's Gone To The Moon, which was said to be an anti-Vietnam protest song. It was a huge worldwide hit, reaching No 4 in the singles chart in 1965, while King was studying for his finals.

Two months later, he was back at No 4 with his own composition called It's Good News Week. He wrote it for a Royal Air Force band whom he called Hedgehoppers Anonymous on the record label. This was the first of a long string of hits to be recorded under increasingly bizarre pseudonyms.

After graduating, he worked as a television and print music journalist, and also for Decca records. While there, he became embroiled in controversy over his designs for the cover of the Rolling Stones' new album, Beggars Banquet. His bosses decided to postpone the release of the record because the cover depicted a grafitti-covered toilet, although, when it was released, the album became to be regarded as the Stones' first masterpiece.

Naturally, when this pop impresario returned to his old school of Charterhouse, he was regarded as something of a hero by the schoolboys. While on his visit, he was given a tape made by the school's own band.

King so liked what he heard, he produced the band's first single, The Silent Sun, and paid for them to have more studio time. He even gave them a new name: Genesis. Genesis went on to become international superstars, although admittedly after they had left King's tutelage. But, without him, it is unlikely that the world would have heard of Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins.

He was still releasing records under his own name or under pseudonyms. He had hits as The Weathermen, Sakkarin (a corny pun as the song was a cover of the Archies' hit Sugar, Sugar) and as St Cecilia - St Celilia's offering reached No 12 and the title, Leap Up And Down And Wave Your Knickers In The Air, provides evidence that the Cambridge graduate's music was far from cerebral.

In 1972, he launched his own label, UK Records, masquerading as Shag with a No 4 hit, Loop Di Love. From such inauspicious beginnings, UK Records found fame when King signed some old friends. He named them 10CC, after a statistic about male ejaculation that only a silly schoolboy would bother remembering, and they had huge hits like Dreadlock Holiday, I'm Not In Love and Rubber Bullets.

UK Records' other major project around this time was a group of Scottish schoolfriends who called themselves the Bay City Rollers. They became the first of the modern teenipop bands, of which Take That and Westlife are only the most recent in a long screamed-at line.

King even found time for success under his own name, the unforgettable Una Paloma Blanca reaching No 5 in 1975. At one point he claimed to be responsible for about 20 of the Top 30 songs.

He was now developing a taste for the extravagant lifestyle which would see him jetting between his homes in London and Manhattan. With his constant energy and an unquenchable desire to be the centre of attention, King was always looking to diversify.

When the hits dried up at the end of the 1970s, he found success in the 1980s as a Radio DJ, and TV presenter, hosting BBC2's No Limits and Entertainment USA.

He also tried his hand at novel writing and had a spell as a controversial newspaper columnist, getting into numerous wars of words. The noisiest of these spats was with Bob Geldof when King loudly attacked the 1985 Live Aid concert. The substance of this attack was largely that King had not been asked to become involved in the Live Aid project and his enormous ego felt badly snubbed.

In 1990, he was asked to help revive the ailing Brit Awards and, in 1997, was named Man of the Year by the British Phonographic Industry. This was just after he had managed to reinvigorate the 1980s pop group Katrina and the Waves so that they won the Eurovision Song Contest just days after Tony Blair won his landslide General Election victory.

King is a loner who never married and insists that he never wanted children of his own. His large ego and vanity, plus his smug one-sided grin, did not win him many admirers.

''Lots of the public simply detest me, I know," he once said. "The reason I think is that life tends to turn you into a caricature of yourself.

''I don't want friends who find it easy to be my friend, my friends have to go through hell and back, but I don't insist that they do.''

He is certainly taking any remaining friends to hell now.