FOR most of his 48 years Paisley-born music business impresario John Reid has lived the sort of life for which pithy tabloid epithets were exclusively invented. Indeed, if you only half-believe one-tenth of the breathless reports of his recent business divorce after 27 years from his most prominent management client, Sir Elton John, Reid is the kind of single-minded Paisley buddy with whom it's difficult for most folk to remain on good terms for 27 minutes.

As one tabloid insider apparently gasped to the Sun yesterday: ''We don't know what's going on. Elton and John Reid have had a massive row and it's not looking good. Everyone is stunned because they shared everything. There seems to have been some sort of power struggle.

''We are waiting to see whether they can sort it out. They have had arguments in the past but this is a big one.''

Rows involving John Reid have hardly been unusual occurrences, mind, this Napoleonic 5ft 6in figure being your very picture of a single-minded pop Svengali. Indeed, Reid has repeatedly been described as ruthless, unpredictable, stubborn, canny, combustible, flamboyant, hard-nosed, and unashamedly aggressive. On what evidence?

Earlier in his career as Elton John's guide, he became notorious for rages which led him to sack and then re-hire his office staff on a near-daily basis. He has also been treated for non-specified ''problems of behavioural addiction'' by celebrity therapist Beechey Colclough, the former alcoholic who was enlisted to curb Paul Gascoigne's propensity for beating his wife.

Reid's initial progress through the music biz was swift and trouble-free. Aged 19, this lowly-born son of a welder and a shop assistant was appointed UK head of the Motown label - barely a year after he'd abandoned both his parental council-scheme home and a marine engineering course at Glasgow's Stow College.

In 1974, however, accompanying Elton John on a New Zealand tour, he received a jail sentence following a nightclub punch-up with a journalist. A similar fracas in 1980, in seeking late entry to a plane at San Francisco airport, landed Reid a community service order for lashing at an

airline employee with a silver-topped cane.

This instinctive, not to say two-fisted, approach certainly paid off, though, for in 1975 Elton John was reckoned to account for a staggering 2% of the world's total record sales, and Reid's negotiating skills had resulted in Elton receiving a guaranteed annual salary of #1m.

In that same year Reid could lay claim to being the most successful backroom boy in the global music industry, having signed another bunch of notables, Queen, shortly before they unleashed Bohemian Rhapsody. Throughout the seventies Reid's record label, Rocket, racked up numerous No 1 hits. Money was no object.

In addition to acquiring luxury homes in London's swanky Knightsbridge, as well as Hollywood and New York, Reid collected flash cars and Hockney canvases. He also took to saluting Elton John's birthday with ostentatious gifts ranging from Rolls-Royces to a Faberge clock. In 1985, as the Rocket label began winding down, multi-millionaire Reid became Billy Connolly's manager.

By 1992, he had further permanent homes in Australia and Spain, and a management stable which included past-it pop dud duo Bros, Barry Humphries, Dame Edna Everage's alter ego, and royal carpenter Viscount Linley.

In 1993 Reid was appointed to the board of Motown when the label was acquired by Polygram. He is also credited with having forged profitable links between ol' Elt and the Disney organisation, the former Reg Dwight's personal fortune currently being estimated at #150m.

More recently, in April, 1997, John Reid was co-opted on to the board of the faltering Really Useful Company by the firm's founder, Lord Lloyd Webber. True to Reid's previous volcanic form, however, last year was also notable for a legal battle in which one of his erstwhile clients, Michael Riverdance Flatley sued him for #1m, alleging ''an unreasonable restraint of trade'' and ''material breach of agreement''.

The prospects for John Reid's Elton-free future? To paraphrase his former protege's most famous hit, it seems to me that you'll continue living your life like a candid can-do cannonball in a whirlwind of your own devising.