ALL A&R people are haunted by two words. To this day the Artiste & Repertoire hordes, who are charged with seeking out and signing new musical talent, are still chilled by any mention of a man who, by default, has become the most famous A&R guy of all time. You still hear the pleading excuse when, on the A&R person's recommendation, a label has spent a small fortune signing up a bunch of tone-deaf no-hopers. The excuse goes: "I didn't want to be the next Dick Rowe."

Dick Rowe was the A&R man for the Decca label in the 1960s. He is, in popular belief, infamous for being the man who turned down The Beatles. The story has grown and grown over the years. Rowe took a look at the nascent Fab Four and said dismissively that "groups of guitarists are on the way out".

The Rowe story is dragged up again by rock biographer Johnny Rogan in his superb book, Van Morrison: No Surrender. This time, though, Rogan tells the real story of Dick Rowe and The Beatles. And, if nothing else, it should rehabilitate Rowe's reputation after all these years.

Rowe went to Belfast to have a look at Van Morrison's Them group on the recommendation of the same person who had tipped him off about a Dublin trio called the Harmonichords. Rowe had signed the Harmonichords and renamed them The Bachelors. (Who can forget hits such as I Believe and Diane?)

In dealing with the old canard about Rowe and The Beatles, Rogan notes that Rowe, like every other A&R person at every other label at the time, turned down The Beatles. It made perfect sense: this was a bunch of amphetamine-chewing Scousers, wearing bad German leather trousers and jackets and singing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. No one would touch them.

Philips, Pye and several labels under the EMI banner laughed The Beatles out of the building. Rowe, unlike everyone else, actually saw some promise in them and gave them an opportunity to record a demo tape. When he eventually passed, the band were signed to Parlophone.

The story would have ended there had it not been for the spiteful nature of The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein. In 1964, Epstein published his ghosted memoir, the lamentable A Cellarful of Noise. Rogan points out: "In one of the most casually vindictive acts ever perpetrated on a British [ music] executive, Epstein lambasted Rowe for his failure to sign the Fab Four. He even credited the A&R manager with the ludicrous assertion, 'groups of guitarists are on the way out'. Not one of Rowe's rivals at the other labels was mentioned, leaving him forever branded as the man who had turned down The Beatles."

At the time, there was a big kerfuffle about Epstein's invidious remarks, and other A&R people were determined to challenge him over his assertion; why single out Rowe when he had done a bit more for the band than most others? But this was 1964 and Epstein, with his friendly contacts in the music press, could not be touched. No one was willing to run a story criticising the man.

What only a few realise is that, shortly after turning down The Beatles, Rowe went on a scouting mission to a pub in Richmond called The Crawdaddy, where a bunch of young London kids were playing a messy blues-rock that, apart from being very derivative, didn't sound that promising. Nevertheless Rowe took a gamble and signed the band to Decca.

As the group's then manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, remarked years later: "Dick Rowe should be remembered not as the man who turned down The Beatles, but the man who signed The Rolling Stones."