Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left SATs podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is manager agent drummer Ed mcnell ed.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the first time you saw a dire street.
Speaker 2: That was on December the thirteenth, nineteen seventy seven. It
Speaker 2: was just a small club in North London, in a
Speaker 2: part of town called Camden, at a club called Dingwalls.
Speaker 2: I had been I was at the time. I was
Speaker 2: an agent. I was representing, amongst others, all of Seymour
Speaker 2: Stein's acts bless him. And I had a Talking Heads
Speaker 2: tour coming up in January seventy eight for which I
Speaker 2: needed an opening act. I had fifty English pounds to
Speaker 2: ben and which in current money would be about fifty
Speaker 2: one pounds. And I had had a phone call from
Speaker 2: a guy called John Stains, who was the A and
Speaker 2: R guy at Phonogram in the UK, who I knew
Speaker 2: just through you know, being in the agency business and
Speaker 2: so on. And he called me up and he said
Speaker 2: I've just signed a band called Diastraits, to which my
Speaker 2: first reaction, instantly, spontaneously was what a terrible name. And
Speaker 2: he says, how fucking hell be serious? I said, I
Speaker 2: am being serious. It's a terrible name, but he's pushed.
Speaker 2: He pushed me like a good an R guy should,
Speaker 2: and long story shot, I ended up going with him
Speaker 2: to an incredibly cheap and greasy kibab how in North London,
Speaker 2: followed by walking across the road to ding Walls. I
Speaker 2: walked into the venue, which was maybe a third full,
Speaker 2: and they were playing down to the Waterline, which ended
Speaker 2: up on the first album. And I the first thing,
Speaker 2: I was able to stand quite close to them because
Speaker 2: they were not very loud. At the time. I was booking,
Speaker 2: amongst other acts, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and I
Speaker 2: was used to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple volume levels
Speaker 2: and Dastrets were pretty quiet. And the second thing I
Speaker 2: noticed was that Martinoffler was playing a red Fender stratocastic guitar.
Speaker 2: The same guitar had been played by a guitarist called
Speaker 2: Hank Marvin who'd been in a band called The Shadows.
Speaker 2: They were Cliff Richard's backing band and then they became
Speaker 2: a band on their own. They had a whole string
Speaker 2: of hits with instrumentals. I've always been very fond of
Speaker 2: instrumentals for some reason, and a combination of that guitar,
Speaker 2: the and the what what they were what they were performing,
Speaker 2: I mean the songs basically almost immediately kind of got
Speaker 2: me hooked. And remember I was looking for a support
Speaker 2: band for the Talking Heads. I was not considering getting
Speaker 2: into management, although I was dealing with a large number
Speaker 2: of managers who were completely incompetent. So I thought, well,
Speaker 2: if they can do it, I can do this. So
Speaker 2: I went. I met them after the show, asked them
Speaker 2: if they'd like to come into my office the next day.
Speaker 2: I was sharing my office with another agent. I got
Speaker 2: him to move out of the office. He thought I
Speaker 2: just meant him. I didn't. I met his desk, his chairs,
Speaker 2: filing cabinets and everything, and I arranged my rearrange my
Speaker 2: office to make it look like it was extremely large
Speaker 2: and I was very, very, very important. And when the
Speaker 2: guys came in, I got the receptionist to keep buzzing me,
Speaker 2: and I said, to whatever I say, you just keep
Speaker 2: buzzing me until I tell you to stop. So the
Speaker 2: three of them, because they picked the drummer, didn't come
Speaker 2: to meetings. So the three of them, the two and
Speaker 2: Offler brothers and John Illesley sat down on a kind
Speaker 2: of seating thing, and my phone went and I immediately
Speaker 2: grabbed it and I just there was nobody on the
Speaker 2: other end, and I just said, tell him I want
Speaker 2: ten grand and slammed it down. Oh. I should say
Speaker 2: also that I was working at a company called NAMS,
Speaker 2: which was Brian Epstein's old company he had long since past, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: but it did mean that we had a lot of
Speaker 2: Beetles and other type of golden platinum records in the basement.
Speaker 2: So in the intermediate period, I'd gone downstairs and I've
Speaker 2: got a whole load of these and put them up
Speaker 2: on my wall, added a couple of purple discs and
Speaker 2: some of the people we were representing to make it
Speaker 2: look like I had something to do with them, when
Speaker 2: in fact I didn't. And every time I took one
Speaker 2: of these phone calls, I could see the guys looking
Speaker 2: at these records and pointing to you know, a gold
Speaker 2: disc for I want to hold your hand or something,
Speaker 2: and whispering to each other. And I basically went through
Speaker 2: series of questions, have you got any money? No? Have
Speaker 2: you got a van? No? Have you got any gear? No?
Speaker 2: Have you got a roadie? Kind of okay, talking Heads
Speaker 2: tour fifty pounds a night, twenty three shows January next year.
Speaker 2: Do you want to do it? And Mark, quite I
Speaker 2: thought intelligently, did not immediately go yes and jump into it.
Speaker 2: He asked if he could hear some of their music,
Speaker 2: because at that point they had done one tour of
Speaker 2: the UK and Europe, which I'd set up the previous June.
Speaker 2: Excuse me and the talk with the Ramones. That's right,
Speaker 2: So the Talking Heads were not known. They were known
Speaker 2: to the people who were into the kind of new
Speaker 2: wave thing, but that was really only starting. That would
Speaker 2: have been seventy six, so this was late seventy seven. Anyway,
Speaker 2: they took the record away. He called me up that
Speaker 2: evening and he said, yeah, we'd like to do it,
Speaker 2: and so I put them on that tour. I got
Speaker 2: them guessed billing I had. I paid the Talking Head
Speaker 2: sound man, who I'd hired anyway, for an extra five
Speaker 2: pounds to do their sound. I we didn't have any lights.
Speaker 2: We just had white light, which was what the Talking
Speaker 2: Heads wanted anyway, and it was everybody rode in the
Speaker 2: same van. They all met outside the hotel in London
Speaker 2: on the first day and both bands got on really well,
Speaker 2: and it worked musically really really well. That might not
Speaker 2: be obvious to some of your listeners, but it did
Speaker 2: blend together. And they're talking Airs of course weren't a
Speaker 2: punk band. They'd been kind of thrown into that box
Speaker 2: because they were on Sire Records, but they weren't really
Speaker 2: they want thought of as a punk band, and we
Speaker 2: hadn't really invented the words new wave at that point.
Speaker 2: So they did twenty three shows in twenty four days,
Speaker 2: which is how I always toured bands. They were still
Speaker 2: doing twenty three in twenty four when they broke up.
Speaker 2: Why they broke up? Had they got an on call
Speaker 2: us every night? They got great press. The two bands
Speaker 2: got on really great. They used to do a jam
Speaker 2: on take Me to the River, the Al Green's song
Speaker 2: at the end. And while they were on that tour
Speaker 2: Phonogram John Stains, the A and R guy I mentioned
Speaker 2: he'd set about trying to find a record producer for
Speaker 2: the first Stars Traits album, and of course Darstrets were
Speaker 2: completely unknown. There were two people who were interested. One
Speaker 2: was a guitar player called Pete Gage who'd been with
Speaker 2: a sol band, British sol band called Gina Washington and
Speaker 2: the Ramjam Band, and the other was Muff Windward, brother
Speaker 2: of Steve, as he would tell every girl who came
Speaker 2: into the control room. And there was a funny little
Speaker 2: thing went on. The way that the record deal was
Speaker 2: set up, because it had been done before I came
Speaker 2: into the picture by the band's then lawyer, was that
Speaker 2: they got on advance, which was okay, nothing spectacular. The
Speaker 2: rules is were not very good. They got seven and
Speaker 2: a half percent in what were called the major markets,
Speaker 2: and they got six percent in the minor markets. And
Speaker 2: Phonogram paid the record producer. And I'll tell you a
Speaker 2: short story which will embarrass Muff if he's watching this.
Speaker 2: Muff did a deal with business affairs Phonogram for a
Speaker 2: two percent royalty and twenty five hundred pounds advance. And
Speaker 2: about two days before the record started, he called me
Speaker 2: up and he said, I'm not very happy about my deal,
Speaker 2: and I went, really, just you know, and he said,
Speaker 2: I said, how can I make you happy? Muff? And
Speaker 2: he said, well, you know, I'd like some kind of
Speaker 2: an increase. I said, well, actually that's the responsibility of
Speaker 2: the record company, but let me see what I can do.
Speaker 2: So I put the phone down and without ringing the
Speaker 2: record company. I waited for about ten minutes and I
Speaker 2: called him back and I said, okay, you can have
Speaker 2: I could get you either an extra half a percent
Speaker 2: or five hundred pounds, and he took the five hundred
Speaker 2: pounds and the record sold fifteen million. But I have
Speaker 2: to say he was very gentlemanly about it. In fact,
Speaker 2: he was actually on a two week break. He was
Speaker 2: leaving Island Records, where it was running A and R
Speaker 2: to move over to what was then CBS where he
Speaker 2: was going to be running A and R there, and
Speaker 2: he managed in that two weeks he did the whole
Speaker 2: of the Dastrets record and half of an album for
Speaker 2: somebody else.
Speaker 1: Okay, when you go to see Dire Streets to decide
Speaker 1: whether they're going to be on the Talking Heads tour? A,
Speaker 1: do they have a manager? B? How do you become
Speaker 1: the manager?
Speaker 2: Answered the first half of that question. No, they didn't.
Speaker 2: Robert Allen, who was the lawyer that they had at
Speaker 2: the time, had approached the big name managers, Steve A.
Speaker 2: Rock for instance, the late Steve A. Rook who was
Speaker 2: managing Pink Floyd. I can't remember who the others were
Speaker 2: and of course they all said, because anybody who approaches
Speaker 2: a big name manager, the big name manager is a
Speaker 2: big name manager because he has a big name act.
Speaker 2: But that also means that he probably doesn't have very
Speaker 2: much time, or he's got other baby acts that he's
Speaker 2: trying to bring through. And that was the case with everybody,
Speaker 2: and they all basically said to Robert, you know, bog Off, Robert,
Speaker 2: we don't want your POxy little group. Because of their name,
Speaker 2: because of the name Darstras, everybody thought they were a
Speaker 2: punk group. They had done a demo of four songs
Speaker 2: with a London DJ called Charlie Gillert. Sorry, they've done
Speaker 2: the the demo themselves and Charlie had played it on
Speaker 2: his London radio show. That was the only exposure they'd had. So, no,
Speaker 2: they didn't have a manager. They were at the point
Speaker 2: where they needed one. I mean they kind of in fact,
Speaker 2: in some ways they could have. It would have been
Speaker 2: better off if I got involved a bit earlier, but
Speaker 2: that wasn't the way it worked. And they No, they
Speaker 2: didn't have a manager and they were but the good
Speaker 2: thing about them was that they everything was kind of
Speaker 2: in place. They had a publishing deal with Almo Irving
Speaker 2: or Rondo music as it's called over here, which although everybody,
Speaker 2: all four of them, Robert had got them a published,
Speaker 2: each one of them a publishing thing to keep the
Speaker 2: politics good happy between them, but that really only meant
Speaker 2: mark in practice. They had this record deal. They didn't
Speaker 2: have a record deal for North America, which was quite important.
Speaker 1: Hey, what motivated the record deal? This is a band
Speaker 1: with no manager, no thing. How did they get the
Speaker 1: record deal? And why was Warner Brothers not included in
Speaker 1: the Phonogram deal?
Speaker 2: Okay, the record deal came about because the four track demo.
Speaker 2: What happened was they made this four track demo in
Speaker 2: a little studio in North London with an engineer called
Speaker 2: Chas Herrington, who I later asked to become our lighting director,
Speaker 2: and he became a lighting man and he's a fantastic
Speaker 2: lighting guy. And John Illsley, the bass player, who was
Speaker 2: very much the organizer of the band at that point,
Speaker 2: he took that demo round to Charlie's house and delivered
Speaker 2: it one morning and Charlie played it at home, thought
Speaker 2: it was great. The songs on it were saltless, a
Speaker 2: swing down to the waterline, wild West End, and a
Speaker 2: song called Sacred Loving that they didn't record in the end,
Speaker 2: and Charlie played it on his radio show. And Charlie's
Speaker 2: radio show was a kind of arbiter of taste if
Speaker 2: you like. It wasn't like Radio one, BBC or anything
Speaker 2: like that. So a lot of people in the business
Speaker 2: who were music fans, including John Stains, would listen to this,
Speaker 2: and John heard it. Several other people did and on
Speaker 2: the Monday we went out on a Saturday, and on
Speaker 2: the Monday morning, Rob Allen starts getting phone calls from
Speaker 2: A and R guys saying, who's this band you just played?
Speaker 2: Everybody thought they were American. Nobody knew anything about them,
Speaker 2: and it kind of got into something that I never
Speaker 2: did as part of my practice, but it became a
Speaker 2: bit of a bidding war. Chris Blackwell, who's quite a
Speaker 2: good friend of mine, told me a great story about
Speaker 2: how he was invited to see them because his A
Speaker 2: and R guy was Chap called at Howard Thompson wanted
Speaker 2: to sign them very badly. So Chris went to see
Speaker 2: them at some other pub gig in London and halfway
Speaker 2: down the staircase into the basement, he was stopped by
Speaker 2: somebody he knew who dragged him to the bar, and
Speaker 2: he never saw them and he missed out. Richard Branson
Speaker 2: invited them to lunch, and during the kind of the
Speaker 2: coffee and dessert bit, various personnel from Virgin came out
Speaker 2: in this restaurant and presented the group with plates of
Speaker 2: ready roll joints. And none of them smoked weed, and
Speaker 2: in fact they were quite anti So that screwed it
Speaker 2: for Vergin. It's amazing how little things like that and
Speaker 2: what's happened at the time as the Phonogram once they
Speaker 2: decided to go. The band had decided to go with Phonogram,
Speaker 2: and Robert was brokering the financial details. Everybody, well not
Speaker 2: the group guys because they didn't know, but everybody else
Speaker 2: decided that the American the PolyGram operation in America was
Speaker 2: not really happening, and a clause was put in of
Speaker 2: which I was to make enormous play that if RSO
Speaker 2: passed on the group, the rights to place the American
Speaker 2: deal would revert to the band, which went me, who
Speaker 2: had never read record agreement, done alone, done a record deal.
Speaker 2: And RSO passed Because this was nineteen seventy seven and
Speaker 2: they were right on the cusp of Robert Stigwood's you
Speaker 2: know all of that, and thank goodness, that's what That's
Speaker 2: what happened.
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 2: I was subjected some time later, before the Wallers deal
Speaker 2: was actually signed. I was somebody dead attempt to bribe
Speaker 2: me who had been sent by PolyGram, who took me
Speaker 2: into a jacuzzie in Los Angeles and offered me one
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars if the band would quote forget about
Speaker 2: that clause, and I just fled.
Speaker 1: Okay, So one thing at one time, RSO passes. How
Speaker 1: do you end up at Warner Brothers as opposed to
Speaker 1: Columbia or anything else?
Speaker 2: Well, well you're very close because the other competing label
Speaker 2: was Columbia. What happened to this is such a long story.
Speaker 2: There were two ladies, sadly both gone deceased now at
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers, Karen Berg on the East coast and ROBERTA.
Speaker 2: Peterson on the West coast. An unbeknownst to anybody, including
Speaker 2: both of them, each of those girls heard this record
Speaker 2: or heard about this band. Karen came over to London,
Speaker 2: went to see them at a club we had here
Speaker 2: called the Nashville and Roberta. I think Roberta. I don't
Speaker 2: remember how Roberta got onto it, but they I didn't
Speaker 2: know either of these people, and I didn't know that
Speaker 2: they were interested. At that particular moment we started getting
Speaker 2: interest from Columbia. I don't remember who the A and
Speaker 2: R person was, and I think there might have been
Speaker 2: some other labels for some reason. I've got A and
Speaker 2: M in my mind, and they would have been a
Speaker 2: very kind of A and M type of act, and
Speaker 2: of course A and M. But I remember A and
Speaker 2: M have of course had got picked up the publishing
Speaker 2: or Jerry Boss knew of them through that.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: Mark and I flew over to Los Angeles in the summer,
Speaker 2: must have been about they had after the Talking Heads tour.
Speaker 2: I just kept them working for two reasons. One they
Speaker 2: had no money and secondly, they need to play. They
Speaker 2: needed to play live. So I had them doing stuff
Speaker 2: that was ridiculous. I mean they opened for Sticks of
Speaker 2: all People, which was just ridiculous, but didn't matter. They
Speaker 2: got to play for an hour, and they started doing
Speaker 2: their own shows, and in June of nineteen seventy eight
Speaker 2: they did their first headlining tour of Britain, which was
Speaker 2: college's kind of town halls, which held about two thousand people.
Speaker 2: The Marquee Club in London got them a residency there
Speaker 2: and they got a really good buzz going. In June
Speaker 2: of seventy eight, that first album was released in the
Speaker 2: UK and not at that point in the rest of
Speaker 2: the world territories, and Mark and I came over to
Speaker 2: the States in I think it was July seventy eight
Speaker 2: to meet This whole thing was out of time with itself,
Speaker 2: because by July seventy eight we were already looking at
Speaker 2: album number two, because he'd already written a bunch of songs,
Speaker 2: and there were one or two songs which had not
Speaker 2: made it onto the first record. And Karen Berg was
Speaker 2: working on the in the East Coast office of Warner Brothers.
Speaker 2: And the person who, at least in his own mind,
Speaker 2: was running the East Coast office, but he wasn't really
Speaker 2: was Jerry Wexler. And Jerry Wexler heard this record being
Speaker 2: played in the offices. And one thing I'll say about
Speaker 2: Jerry Wexler is he could spot a dime at five
Speaker 2: miles and he very quickly jumped onto this and Mark
Speaker 2: and I went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for what for
Speaker 2: us was an absolutely thrilling trip. I mean, we get
Speaker 2: there and Wexler, we had not met, we meet him.
Speaker 2: He comes and we're putt in a we're put in
Speaker 2: a We're put in a motel that must have cost
Speaker 2: one dollar fifty a night. I remember my bed was
Speaker 2: padlocked to the floor. Each leg of the bed had
Speaker 2: a padlock chained to a lump of concrete to stop
Speaker 2: anybody pinching the bed. Wexler arrived the following morning, met
Speaker 2: us immediately took us off to a southern road stop
Speaker 2: where I remember that the waitress was wearing takeaway bags
Speaker 2: on her feet, and he he took us off to
Speaker 2: the studio and he was recording Mavis Staples and we
Speaker 2: are like, holy shit shit, And of course the guys,
Speaker 2: the musicians were the swampers. There was David Hurd, Barry Beckett,
Speaker 2: Jimmy Johnson, and the next day Pop Staples flew down
Speaker 2: from Chicago, and I remember going out to pick up
Speaker 2: Pops at the airport with Wexler and Mark and we
Speaker 2: went back to the studio and they were recording J. J.
Speaker 2: Kale's Lies and Wexler, ever the opportunist bless him, invited
Speaker 2: Mark to play with these guys. Mark had never done
Speaker 2: a session in his life. I mean, he was completely, like,
Speaker 2: totally gibbering with terror. And they didn't use court notes.
Speaker 2: They had this numbers system, whether you know what that
Speaker 2: is in muscle. In that studio, a number represented a chord,
Speaker 2: So you might have six, five, eleven, twelve nine written
Speaker 2: on the sheet of paper and given to you. And
Speaker 2: Mark's looking at a set of numbers. He just look
Speaker 2: what they are. But he knew the song obviously. And
Speaker 2: I remember thereafter the couple of takes, Pops walked out
Speaker 2: into the studio and he actually put his face within
Speaker 2: about two inches from Mark's face and just stared at him.
Speaker 2: And I said to Wexler, what's what's going on? And
Speaker 2: Wesley goes, he likes him. So we did that record Mayvi.
Speaker 2: This was great. Unfortunately Mayvis had a bit of a complaint.
Speaker 2: She had a weak bladder, so she kept going to
Speaker 2: the bathroom, and of course, being English, we assumed that
Speaker 2: she had a massive cocaine problem, when in fact, as
Speaker 2: she explained to the two of us, the law the
Speaker 2: Lord gave me a problem in that department but we
Speaker 2: did that record. I can't even remember if Mark's credited
Speaker 2: on it. And we hung out with everybody for about
Speaker 2: ten days. Fantastic fun. I remember Bobby Womac showed up.
Speaker 2: I had done a tour with Bobby Womack about two
Speaker 2: years previously of Europe, and he showed up with his
Speaker 2: new wife, whose name was well, the way he pronounced
Speaker 2: it was Vagina, and he meant Virginia, but he didn't pronounce.
Speaker 2: He kept calling this as my new watch, She's called Vagina,
Speaker 2: and everybody in the room was just it was everything
Speaker 2: was a laugh. We were staying at a crap motel.
Speaker 2: The swimming pool was empty and it was full of
Speaker 2: shopping baskets had been thrown in there. But we love
Speaker 2: the South, loved that part of the country, loved the people.
Speaker 2: We got very friendly with Barry Beckett, and we flew
Speaker 2: on to Los Angeles, stayed stayed at the Riot House,
Speaker 2: and I Mark wasn't really he had he didn't have
Speaker 2: much to do, but I was having meetings principally with Warners,
Speaker 2: and I can remember going up there with one copy
Speaker 2: of the album in the vinyl copy under my arm,
Speaker 2: and I had bullshitted my way in to see ma Austin.
Speaker 2: I'd never met Mo in my life, and I just
Speaker 2: bbbbbing got in and he said to me, I'll never
Speaker 2: forget it, and he was so I grew to really
Speaker 2: have huge respect for great liking. He said, I don't
Speaker 2: know anything about music, Go and see THEA and R Department,
Speaker 2: which of course he definitely did know about music, but
Speaker 2: it was probably a bit more Frank Sinatra and Dean
Speaker 2: than it was, you know, although he'd been involved in
Speaker 2: signing those acts from the Monterey Festival, like Jimi Hendrix
Speaker 2: and some And he picked up the phone and he
Speaker 2: rang somebody and that turned out to be Roberta. So
Speaker 2: I was sent down to see Roberta. And there was
Speaker 2: this little blonde girl sitting in an office which had
Speaker 2: more palm trees and plants than I'd ever seen in
Speaker 2: my life. She's got the requisite California tan. I give
Speaker 2: her a record and it was kind of a bit
Speaker 2: spinal tap because she put it on and cranked the
Speaker 2: volume up to eleven and I'm sitting there and my
Speaker 2: hair is kind of the wind and she played the
Speaker 2: whole of the first side, flipped it over and played
Speaker 2: the whole of the second side, and she told me
Speaker 2: later that she was so excited by it, but she
Speaker 2: didn't want to let on to me because she didn't
Speaker 2: know anything about the deal or the politics or anything.
Speaker 2: But the one thing that she forgot was that she
Speaker 2: was tapping. I could see her feet tapping like mad
Speaker 2: under her desk. And she said to me, where are
Speaker 2: you staying? And I said, we're staying at the Hiat
Speaker 2: and that caused a huge smile to appear, and then
Speaker 2: she said, can I keep this copy? I'd like to
Speaker 2: play it to some other people. I should point out
Speaker 2: at this point that she didn't know that Karen Berg
Speaker 2: was already onto this, and I didn't know that, so
Speaker 2: I'm thinking, yeah, sure, of course you could keep it.
Speaker 2: And I said, she said, how long are you in
Speaker 2: town for? I said, how long do you need? You know, whatever?
Speaker 2: And I went back to the hotel and Mark and
Speaker 2: I went and celebrated in the Highat coffee shop, and
Speaker 2: very quickly after that, it was like the snowball coming
Speaker 2: down the mountain picking up snow. And all musicians are effected.
Speaker 2: Anybody who plays an instrument is by definition to me
Speaker 2: a musical snob. And we were musical snobs. Warner Brothers
Speaker 2: had Van Morrison, they were just about to release that
Speaker 2: first Ricky Lee Jones good. They just signed Van Halen.
Speaker 2: I can't remember the other kinds of acts you were,
Speaker 2: the kind of acts that Lenny Warneker would work with
Speaker 2: or people like that. They were kind of like our
Speaker 2: kind of thing. And Columbia, well, first of all, they
Speaker 2: were based in New York and we didn't know any
Speaker 2: plans to go to New York. And I had had
Speaker 2: dealings with Columbia in the UK and this is back then,
Speaker 2: and they were a pain in the arse. They were bureaucratic.
Speaker 2: They were just difficult to deal with. Everything was signing
Speaker 2: a bit of paper, getting a memo, doing all of
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff. And the band. We had to
Speaker 2: get back to England because the band were doing their
Speaker 2: first trip to Europe, which turned out to be a
Speaker 2: seminal event because we went to Holland. What how was
Speaker 2: I got back And this is back in the days
Speaker 2: of telex. I get telex in about September of that year,
Speaker 2: seventy eight from the company in Holland who I'd never
Speaker 2: spoken to, and it said album has entered chart at
Speaker 2: forty three and I just looked at it, crumpled it
Speaker 2: up and I threw it in the bin. The next
Speaker 2: week I got another one. It said album has gone
Speaker 2: up to seventeen, and I went wow, through that one
Speaker 2: in the bin. The next week album has gone up
Speaker 2: to eleven. They had released Songs of Swing as a single.
Speaker 2: Would we go over to Holland and play their weekly
Speaker 2: popsher called Top Pop very much like Top of the
Speaker 2: Pops in the UK. It was a singles show, so
Speaker 2: we went over. This was the original four piece and
Speaker 2: during the show they represented with a gold album, which
Speaker 2: none of us, including me, had any idea about. I
Speaker 2: hadn't at that point got a handle on how to
Speaker 2: use the record company. I wasn't.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 2: Not totally inexperienced, but I didn't know the vagaries of
Speaker 2: how it all worked. We ended up doing or the
Speaker 2: guys ended up doing interviews from ten in the morning
Speaker 2: till ten o'clock at night for two days, and they
Speaker 2: were completely exhausted by it and I had to get
Speaker 2: control of that. But having said that, it worked because
Speaker 2: that record and appear us on that TV show got
Speaker 2: us to number one. So we had our first number
Speaker 2: one and Holland is quite interesting from a geographical point
Speaker 2: of view because it's in right. The radio stations in
Speaker 2: Holland could be heard in Germany, especially in North Germany,
Speaker 2: in Belgium and in northern France. So it was a
Speaker 2: bit like dropping a pebble in a pond and the
Speaker 2: ripples went out and suddenly I'm getting similar tech tallexis
Speaker 2: from Germany, this, that and the other. And we started
Speaker 2: working those territories, by which I mean doing every possible
Speaker 2: television show and every possible interview we could do. My
Speaker 2: attitude to television and it's still the same is that
Speaker 2: all popular music television is rubbish, so you might as
Speaker 2: well do all of it. So we're starting to become
Speaker 2: a bit of a we were getting hot and and
Speaker 2: I was playing we were playing dates. The one thing
Speaker 2: about dar Straits throughout their entire career, but certainly in
Speaker 2: that first two or three years, was their their work
Speaker 2: ethic was unbelievable. I mean you laugh every time I say,
Speaker 2: you know, I put in twenty gigs without a day off.
Speaker 2: That was absolutely common. I days off to me are
Speaker 2: something you do for for Roady's.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's just go back. Got a couple of eyes.
Speaker 1: How did you become the manager?
Speaker 2: Bullshit? Do you know? I don't really know. They came
Speaker 2: into the office that time I was talking about I
Speaker 2: did this whole act because that's what it was, sticking
Speaker 2: up Beatles records on my wall, making the girl phone me,
Speaker 2: all of this sort of stuff. And I think they've
Speaker 2: they told me since when they were left the office
Speaker 2: and they were walking up the road. David Knopfler, younger
Speaker 2: Mark's younger brother, David and Martinofler never agreed about anything.
Speaker 2: If Mark said the sun will come up tomorrow, David
Speaker 2: would say, Nah, it's not going to happen. No. Mark
Speaker 2: and John said, we like that guy. I mean, he's
Speaker 2: a bit off the wall, but he knows what he's
Speaker 2: talking about. And the thing I think that worked was
Speaker 2: that we came from very similar backgrounds. We were the
Speaker 2: same age, we had grown up listening to the same
Speaker 2: kind of music, and we had most importantly the same
Speaker 2: kind of humor. When I was going for drum lessons
Speaker 2: in Leeds in my teens, Mark Knopfler was going to
Speaker 2: the same music shop. At the same time. He would
Speaker 2: turn left into guitars. Woodwinds were on the right, and
Speaker 2: as always, the drum department was in the basement. But
Speaker 2: when we got to know each other because we came
Speaker 2: from within twelve miles of each other. He was actually
Speaker 2: born in Glasgow, grew up in Newcastle on Tyne, and
Speaker 2: then he moved down to Leeds when he was at college.
Speaker 2: And I remember he said to me one day, he said,
Speaker 2: did you used to go to the kitchens of Leeds? No? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I said, I got my drums done and that's where
Speaker 2: I had lessons. And he said, when I said about
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty three, four or five, he said, that's so weird,
Speaker 2: is is that I was going there at the same time.
Speaker 2: So you have these kind of cosmic connections, I suppose.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: I think that it was a it was just a
Speaker 2: feeling and I and it was exactly the right time
Speaker 2: for me. I'd been an agent at that point for
Speaker 2: about seven years. I'd represented some very big acts and
Speaker 2: I was kind of I wanted to move on. I
Speaker 2: wanted to get out of it. It was too it
Speaker 2: wasn't like it is now. I mean there was no
Speaker 2: Live Nations AG's nothing like that. And the promoters you
Speaker 2: tended to be dealing with it was all a bit
Speaker 2: crushy fingers and hope that they don't run off to
Speaker 2: Brazil kind of thing. A Back then, a promoter was
Speaker 2: anybody who walked into the office and said I'm a promoter.
Speaker 2: People would walk in and I'd be selling the deep
Speaker 2: purple dates within five minutes, just hoping that they'd have
Speaker 2: enough money to pay the deposit. It was completely chaotic
Speaker 2: and incredible fun, I mean ridiculously fun.
Speaker 1: Okay, you ultimately become the manager. Do you discuss percentage?
Speaker 1: Do you sign a contract? Who just move forward?
Speaker 2: Well, this is where Robert Allen, the lawyer comes back
Speaker 2: into play, because he's busily bringing up Steve A. Rook
Speaker 2: and Steve A. Roake doesn't take collect calls, so we
Speaker 2: can't find them a manager. And they said to him,
Speaker 2: we've met this guy. We want him to be our manager.
Speaker 2: And Robert had never heard of me, and he dragged
Speaker 2: his feet, and one day, I don't remember who it was,
Speaker 2: it probably would have been Mark, rang him up and
Speaker 2: said Mark, Robert, go on with it. We're going to
Speaker 2: have this guy. Either you do this or we'll get
Speaker 2: somebody else to do it, or however it was phrased
Speaker 2: so Suddenly Robert's attitude changes quite a bit and he
Speaker 2: comes up with a deal, and I can tell you
Speaker 2: what the terms were. It was ten percent of the
Speaker 2: gross of publishing.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: Fifteen percent of the gross of records. There was nothing
Speaker 2: in it about soundtracks, there was nothing in it about
Speaker 2: producer work. And the publishing was fifteen. That was the start.
Speaker 1: But you said the publishing was ten. In the publishing
Speaker 1: was fifteen.
Speaker 2: I beg your pardon. The publishing started off at ten,
Speaker 2: that's right. What was live live was fifteen. Now in
Speaker 2: my head, I immediately saw a problem because if I
Speaker 2: used an agent, if I switched hats and I became
Speaker 2: their manager and I used a third party agent, that
Speaker 2: was probably going to be another ten. So twenty five
Speaker 2: percent off the top of live work was probably going
Speaker 2: to push that live work into a loss if it
Speaker 2: wasn't already in a loss. And if you've got a
Speaker 2: loss going on, you've got a potential problem. I got
Speaker 2: around the problem in a way by I didn't leave NAMS,
Speaker 2: so I was using their phones, their staff, secretarial, their infrastructure,
Speaker 2: and EMS was a big agency. They would be the
Speaker 2: equivalent of back then, they would have been the William
Speaker 2: Morris or CIA of London, and I was a big
Speaker 2: shit there. So we started on that deal because I
Speaker 2: didn't really he wasn't giving me a choice. I had
Speaker 2: a lawyer do my end of it. But that was
Speaker 2: really just crossing t's and dotting eyes when I as
Speaker 2: time progressed, I'm just going to get ahead of myself
Speaker 2: slightly in this ology. That deal changed and I did.
Speaker 2: I did all the record deals myself, I did all
Speaker 2: the publishing deals myself. I booked every show everywhere myself
Speaker 2: except for the USA, and I did every merchandising deal myself.
Speaker 2: I did every film soundtrack deal myself, on the basis
Speaker 2: that nobody knows anything, so why not. And the deal
Speaker 2: over the next couple of years changed so that the
Speaker 2: publishing became twenty percent. Yes, yes, oh yes. The records
Speaker 2: stayed at fifteen, but Mark started getting a producer chunk
Speaker 2: and I got twenty of that.
Speaker 1: And the live.
Speaker 2: Kind of wobbled up and down according to how profitable
Speaker 2: the tours had been. But just before the Brothers in
Speaker 2: Arms tour, which I'm sure you're going to get to,
Speaker 2: Mark and John called me over to the rehearsal room
Speaker 2: and Mark said to me, he said, you book all
Speaker 2: our dates, don't you? And I'm thinking, God, is he
Speaker 2: only just noticed? And I went yeah, and he said,
Speaker 2: and we don't pay for it, do we? And I went, well,
Speaker 2: it's just part of the package. He said, well, we
Speaker 2: think you should get an extra five percent and I
Speaker 2: went done. And that was the deal I ended up on.
Speaker 1: Okay, a couple of questions. When you were in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: did you finalize the deal with Warner Brothers?
Speaker 2: Pretty much? Yeah, pretty much?
Speaker 1: Okay, And in this agreement hang on.
Speaker 2: Sorry to intruct you, we didn't finalize the commercial terms,
Speaker 2: and we ended up with a better royalty rate than
Speaker 2: we got we're getting from a phonograph. Because I was,
Speaker 2: I was involved. This all sounds very grandiose, but I mean,
Speaker 2: I just I mean, I came back to the what
Speaker 2: I said to you a few seconds ago. Back then, No,
Speaker 2: Don Passman hadn't written his book, bless him, so you
Speaker 2: just could kind of make it up as you went along.
Speaker 2: And what and I do. And for a manager, leverage
Speaker 2: is everything, but leverage in part it is not just commercial.
Speaker 2: It's your personality. It's the way you approach things. It's
Speaker 2: knowing when to say no, went to say yes, my
Speaker 2: Austin once said, not my Austin David Berman, who was
Speaker 2: the head of his business affairs for many years. David
Speaker 2: said to me, I'll tell you. I'll tell you this
Speaker 2: to my own benefit. He said, you know your most
Speaker 2: favorite manager. Well, well I am. That's very nice, I said,
Speaker 2: any particular reason. He said, because whenever you ask us
Speaker 2: for something, you give us something in return. He said.
Speaker 2: There are people in this town, meaning Los Angeles, and
Speaker 2: he said that I'm having a couple of lawyers, attorneys
Speaker 2: in mind, who's who think that the best deal that
Speaker 2: they can get for their artist means that we're making
Speaker 2: a loss on every unit we sell. And I said,
Speaker 2: but that's ridiculous, that's just stupid. You have to let
Speaker 2: the other person have a fair crack. Some of the
Speaker 2: big record companies don't believe in that philosophy. But I've
Speaker 2: always believed in that philosophy. I've given promoters money back.
Speaker 2: I actually I cut a merchant I readd a merchandising
Speaker 2: deal with somebody. When the vat the sales tax rate
Speaker 2: went up in this country by two and a half percent.
Speaker 2: I rang the guy up and I said I'm dropping
Speaker 2: your deal by two and a half percent. And when
Speaker 2: he got off the floor, he said why, I said,
Speaker 2: I don't want that to be passed on to the public.
Speaker 1: Okay, you made these deals at low royalty rates? Did
Speaker 1: you renegotiate and when.
Speaker 2: Well, the Warner's deal wasn't that lower rule too rate.
Speaker 2: But the original Phonogram deal, which I hadn't done, which
Speaker 2: I told you about at the beginning, that was pretty low.
Speaker 2: Although you know you have to put all this in
Speaker 2: the context of the time. You can't in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four look back and say, well, Elvis Presley had a
Speaker 2: crap record deal. Yeah, because I mean, I remember Wexler
Speaker 2: saying to me, because Wexley was very proud in a
Speaker 2: strange sort of way of the way that they exploited
Speaker 2: the artists on Atlantic, particularly the black artists, and they
Speaker 2: paid He said to me, I don't know how true
Speaker 2: this is. He said to me one day that they
Speaker 2: had paid Ray Charles thirty dollars flat to record. What
Speaker 2: did I say? And then you look at they sold
Speaker 2: Atlantic to Wea for I think seventeen million dollars, and
Speaker 2: I was just astonished that it was so low and
Speaker 2: Western's response was capital Games, Capital Games rubbish. So in
Speaker 2: answer to your question, I reegotiated the record side with
Speaker 2: the PolyGram countries the Phonogram deal every single time we
Speaker 2: put a record out. Every time. I did not do
Speaker 2: that with Warner Brothers. I waited. I just had a
Speaker 2: sense that we were going to have one day a
Speaker 2: humongous record in America, and since we weren't on a
Speaker 2: bad deal, we were on sixteen percent. I think it
Speaker 2: was I didn't feel the kind of almost sounds sounds
Speaker 2: a bit pretentiousness. I didn't feel a kind of moral
Speaker 2: pressure to be pushing them. And I have to say,
Speaker 2: sort of the listeners to this may think this is
Speaker 2: a very strange motivation. I really liked the people at
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers, and somehow that crept into my I would can't.
Speaker 2: I mean, they were a big corporation, et cetera. But
Speaker 2: I really like mo. I love Lenny. I mean, he's
Speaker 2: just he's just adorable, used to used to play some
Speaker 2: terrible jokes on it. But and and all all the
Speaker 2: people I dealt with, and one person in particular, Carl Scott,
Speaker 2: who at the time was head of artist relations there.
Speaker 2: He was a huge supporter of the band and of
Speaker 2: me personally, and he and people in his department. Girl
Speaker 2: called Ellen Darst, another girl called Karen Kaplan who went
Speaker 2: on to She left and she worked for Paul McGuinness
Speaker 2: and you too for many years. They were incredibly supportive
Speaker 2: and I can't remember his name, but the guy was
Speaker 2: head of merchandising had the best split in town.
Speaker 1: Okay, you talk about giving to get when you renegotiated
Speaker 1: with Phonogram, what'd you give them for a higher royalty rate?
Speaker 2: Well, the only thing you can give them is extra records.
Speaker 2: That's all they're I mean, you can say, oh, you know,
Speaker 2: we'll do I won't, I won't be nasty to the
Speaker 2: but it's basically you give them more product. So it's
Speaker 2: very important when you're an at starting out that you
Speaker 2: end up by chance or if you want to call it,
Speaker 2: with the label that is right for you, because whatever happens,
Speaker 2: and certainly now since nearly all record companies are essentially
Speaker 2: corporate unless they're specialized specialty labels, the turnover in personnel
Speaker 2: is an issue I got through in twenty five years
Speaker 2: over twelve managing directors in the UK Phonogram Company, which
Speaker 2: is a terrible way to run a business in the
Speaker 2: States until the time Warner merger and the fallout from that.
Speaker 2: It was basically Moe Austin's company, and he ran it
Speaker 2: in a very particular way, and he was incredibly accessible.
Speaker 2: His staff loved him. I mean most of his staff
Speaker 2: would have crawled over broken glass, you know, Romoe. And
Speaker 2: he was an infinitely interesting person to spend time with
Speaker 2: if I got him on Frank Sinatra anecdotes, Wow, fantastic.
Speaker 2: So I had a different philosophy with the American company
Speaker 2: than I did with the rest of the world. Now
Speaker 2: I should just explain that we were signed to Phonogram UK.
Speaker 2: Phonogram was part of PolyGram, which at the time was
Speaker 2: owned by Phillips and Semens until Phillips bought Semens out,
Speaker 2: and Phillips being a Dutch company, they were based in Eindhoven.
Speaker 2: They had an operation in a place in Holland call
Speaker 2: barn baa Rn, which was a bit like going to prison,
Speaker 2: a prisoner of war camp in the Second World War.
Speaker 2: This was the worst atmosphere. It was a whole lot
Speaker 2: of buildings connected by tunnels underneath, except it wasn't Las Vegas,
Speaker 2: and they were supposed to coordinate, coordinate all of their territories.
Speaker 2: They had companies in most parts of the world, but
Speaker 2: not everywhere. For instance, they didn't have a company in
Speaker 2: South Africa. They had a licensee. They were so totally
Speaker 2: hopeless at coordinating these people. I couldn't even get sales figures.
Speaker 2: So I started dealing with all of these companies direct.
Speaker 2: I just went round this operation in. Of course, the
Speaker 2: people in Holland were extremely ticked off, but the managing
Speaker 2: directors and marketing heads of all of the other companies
Speaker 2: just thought this, Wow, this is great. Why because politically
Speaker 2: within that setup, the fact that they were dealing direct
Speaker 2: with the manager of one of the biggest acts, which
Speaker 2: became the biggest act, and they became my friends, you know,
Speaker 2: so they would It was almost like I was giving
Speaker 2: them political ammunition for their own personal ambition. But he
Speaker 2: got the job done. That was all I was concerned about.
Speaker 2: I wanted to know what I used to make them
Speaker 2: give me. Marketing plans, sales projections, weekly sales figures, the
Speaker 2: whole lot. Not so much because I'm sitting at home
Speaker 2: every weekend reading all this stuff, but because many many
Speaker 2: this She's got nothing to do with what we're talking about,
Speaker 2: but really a really quick story. I did a deal
Speaker 2: many many years later for Mark to do a piece
Speaker 2: of music for a film called Color of Money that
Speaker 2: was Martin Scorsese film that was being distributed by Disney.
Speaker 2: And I got into a huge row with the lawyer
Speaker 2: at Disney because their attitude was we will own everything
Speaker 2: and you will own nothing, and my attitude was, no,
Speaker 2: you will own nothing and we will own everything, which
Speaker 2: is how it ended up. And somebody there who was
Speaker 2: head of script development who I happened to know go
Speaker 2: called Jane Rosenthal. She works, She's run some Tribeca studios
Speaker 2: for Robert de Niro now it has for many years.
Speaker 2: She called me up after a particularly how can I
Speaker 2: put it vicious email to this guy in the legal
Speaker 2: department and she said, are you having a problem with sounds?
Speaker 2: And I went, no, nothing I can't handle. And I said,
Speaker 2: how do you know about that? She said no, At Disney,
Speaker 2: every head of department is copying in on every ingoing
Speaker 2: and outgoing communication every day. And Michael remind me of
Speaker 2: his name, head of Disney, Eisner, Right, Michael Eisler is
Speaker 2: copying in on everything. And I just started laughing. I said,
Speaker 2: Michael Eisner can't possibly read everything that's going in and
Speaker 2: out every day, and she said no, but nobody knows
Speaker 2: what he does read, so it has the same effect.
Speaker 2: So anyway, I was basically but this is by album two,
Speaker 2: certainly by album. By making movies, I was dealing with
Speaker 2: all the Phonogram companies direct everywhere. And when I say everywhere,
Speaker 2: I dealt with the company in Israel, say, or a
Speaker 2: company in Malta or New Zealand. To me, every country
Speaker 2: was as important as every other one. And Brothers in
Speaker 2: Arms sold over four hundred and fifty thousand copies in
Speaker 2: New Zealand. The soundtrack to Last Exit to Brooklyn, one
Speaker 2: of our more obscure items, sold over one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty thousand in South Korea, So don't overlook everywhere. My
Speaker 2: philosophy was, I'm going to make this act huge and
Speaker 2: they're going to be huge worldwide, and they're going to
Speaker 2: have a long career because I considered myself to be
Speaker 2: one of them, and in fairness, they felt the same
Speaker 2: about me.
Speaker 1: Okay, now it comes time for the second album. How
Speaker 1: do you cut it in the South? And you know,
Speaker 1: in America, the albums came out almost back to back. Yes,
Speaker 1: So what was the experience of the second record from
Speaker 1: the inside?
Speaker 2: Very good question. Because of this split record deal, by accident,
Speaker 2: we ended up with a situation where the second record
Speaker 2: was recorded with Wexler and Barry Beckett at Compass Points
Speaker 2: Studios in Nasaw Chris Blackwell's place, before the first record
Speaker 2: had come out in the US. So we were in
Speaker 2: this time lag as far as the US was concerned,
Speaker 2: and having had an album that was very, very hot.
Speaker 2: The problem, the problem with all first releases by any
Speaker 2: act is if you get your first record away, it
Speaker 2: might seem fantastic at the time, and it is, and
Speaker 2: it jumps a lot of barriers in one go. But
Speaker 2: then you've got this situation that you're alluding to, which
Speaker 2: is the second one. I have Alanis Morrissette in mind
Speaker 2: actually at this point, so we had Wexler, had got
Speaker 2: his claws in. We go off to and he and
Speaker 2: he's set, you know, he's laying out. We're going to
Speaker 2: go to the Bahamas. I mean, none of us have
Speaker 2: been to the Caribbean.
Speaker 1: We hadn't.
Speaker 2: We hadn't we hadn't been to the south coast of England.
Speaker 2: We're going to be there, you're going to live here,
Speaker 2: You're going to be We're going to brew on the
Speaker 2: whole thing. And we fell for it hookline, and so
Speaker 2: we went off to Compass Point and we made that.
Speaker 2: You see, the Dye Strikes records were made very quickly.
Speaker 2: First one twelve days including mixing, second one three weeks
Speaker 2: including mixing. So we had a record ready to go
Speaker 2: and the PolyGram territories were gagging for this record. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: the Warners people were not gagging for it. They wanted
Speaker 2: to release at least they wanted to release Down to
Speaker 2: the Waterline as an aside single and probably another track.
Speaker 2: And it all led to a very embarrassing meeting in London.
Speaker 2: Moe was there, rush Thyret was there, the Polyglots were there,
Speaker 2: I don't remember which, and myself, And as this meeting
Speaker 2: was progressing, I suddenly realized that the casting vote was
Speaker 2: coming down to me. And of course I had the band.
Speaker 2: When a band's made a record, they want the record out.
Speaker 2: Well not in Brian Ferry's case, but everybody else wants
Speaker 2: it out. And I could see both sides of the equation.
Speaker 2: I'd already booked or put in place, or I could
Speaker 2: have changed it all a whole British and European tour
Speaker 2: to push this second record, you know, off along and
Speaker 2: that meeting we made a mistake and I absolutely take
Speaker 2: responsibility for it. It doesn't matter now, but we should have waited.
Speaker 2: But the band now now we have to have it out.
Speaker 2: They were already playing most of the songs on it.
Speaker 2: A good number of the songs on the second record
Speaker 2: were played on the first American tour because interesting thing
Speaker 2: about America, I don't know if it's still true, but
Speaker 2: the audiences were completely to do stuff that they'd never heard.
Speaker 2: You know, in Manchester they want to hear the hits,
Speaker 2: but they didn't care about that in Chicago. And we
Speaker 2: decided to go with that second record in the autumn
Speaker 2: of seventeen.
Speaker 1: Was it.
Speaker 2: I can't remember when it came out, yes, late seventy nine,
Speaker 2: which and we had to do it worldwide because of
Speaker 2: what we're called parallel imports. Back then, the Europeans would
Speaker 2: deliberately try and import records into the US and I
Speaker 2: just wish we hadn't done that. It just it created
Speaker 2: a bad atmosphere with the senior management owners, which took
Speaker 2: quite a bit of recovering, and I just instinctively was
Speaker 2: thinking this is wrong. But I didn't really have enough
Speaker 2: experience at the time. I didn't I had never worked
Speaker 2: with an act or a record that had been a
Speaker 2: multiple singles record. In the UK, if you put out
Speaker 2: an album, if you got one hit off it, you
Speaker 2: were doing really well, and if you got two, that
Speaker 2: was a miracle. Most acts didn't. Everybody was recording much
Speaker 2: more quickly than they are now, and stuff was coming
Speaker 2: out faster in this marketplace.
Speaker 1: Okay, from my personal experience, I didn't like the second
Speaker 1: record as much as the first. Not that it was bad.
Speaker 1: You had this release thing. It wasn't really like a
Speaker 1: downhill slide, but there wasn't any increase in career momentum.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 1: What was it like from on the inside.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you've yeah, that's the that's the nail that
Speaker 2: you've squarely hit. Like many second albums by acts that
Speaker 2: have big first albums, there was a I can't speak
Speaker 2: for Mark personally, but he was using material that he
Speaker 2: had rejected for the first one. He was being forced
Speaker 2: not the right word, but he had He was having
Speaker 2: to write on the tour bus in the hotel room,
Speaker 2: the hour, the amount of time. You know, this is
Speaker 2: all boxed in with shows, rehearsals, It's boxed in by interviews,
Speaker 2: Telly's videos, and it was very much boxed in by
Speaker 2: the personal relationship situation that was going on in the
Speaker 2: group off the back of this huge first record. Because
Speaker 2: that record, that first one, none of us quite knew
Speaker 2: how to deal with it. It was and the way
Speaker 2: it led to the issues between Mark and his younger brother,
Speaker 2: which were already pretty fragile, really became quite difficult during
Speaker 2: that period.
Speaker 1: And I.
Speaker 2: So so that record, and that record was when we
Speaker 2: got there was quite an interesting little thing which might
Speaker 2: address what you just asked me. When we got out
Speaker 2: to Compass point, Uh, Distraits did not generally do demos,
Speaker 2: so Jerry Wexler didn't know what the songs were. So
Speaker 2: when we got there, I remember Mark and Jerry and
Speaker 2: I must have been there, Mark kind of running the
Speaker 2: songs down, just plunk in on a guitar, acoustic guitar
Speaker 2: or whatever. And the next day was quite interesting to
Speaker 2: us because we had never been worked with an American
Speaker 2: record company person, let alone a you know, famed legendary
Speaker 2: producer and where's the saying to Mark, what strings did
Speaker 2: you use on the first album? How tar did you use?
Speaker 2: What amplifier, what amplifier settings? All of this kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: And it suddenly occurred, I think, to most of it, well,
Speaker 2: certainly to Mark and I that he was trying to
Speaker 2: copy the first one, but he wanted the sound to be,
Speaker 2: as he put it, we're going to make a record
Speaker 2: that's you know, good for American radio. So what he
Speaker 2: was trying to do was kind of chip off the
Speaker 2: the rougher edges and that's how it sounded. Yeah, which
Speaker 2: gave the first one it's kind of spirit. And that's
Speaker 2: what happened.
Speaker 1: Okay, So before the next album, David is no longer
Speaker 1: in the band.
Speaker 2: No, no, sorry, you're wrong. He left during the recording
Speaker 2: of the third one.
Speaker 1: Okay, how does that happen?
Speaker 2: Well, the momentum of this thing, I mean, notwithstanding what
Speaker 2: you made your comment about the if you like the
Speaker 2: artistry of the second record, the second record just certainly
Speaker 2: over here and in Europe and Australasia and so on,
Speaker 2: just came out of the you know, like a shot
Speaker 2: out of a cannon. I mean, we had that record
Speaker 2: went straight in at number one in Germany and the
Speaker 2: first album was at number two. That kind of thing.
Speaker 2: So the Communicate record was successful, not as successful as
Speaker 2: the first one, but it was. It sold in its
Speaker 2: lifestyme lifetime eight eight million copies, first one in its
Speaker 2: lifetime fifteen, so about half. And within the band myself,
Speaker 2: we all understood that there was a danger of being
Speaker 2: a one hit wonder kind of thing, and that record,
Speaker 2: the second record, didn't have have a hit single on it,
Speaker 2: and back then, hit singles were what you needed, so
Speaker 2: we didn't have a songs of swing on it. I
Speaker 2: can't even remember what the single was that came off.
Speaker 2: It was it Once upon a Time in the West,
Speaker 2: I can't remember, and it kind of I mean, we
Speaker 2: were touring it and we were selling out shows, partly
Speaker 2: because I always tried to keep the shows at the
Speaker 2: right level for the time. So by that time we
Speaker 2: were starting to do arenas, we were up from doing
Speaker 2: big theaters. If you like David Knopfler, I'm picking this
Speaker 2: up from interviews i've seen him do since he said
Speaker 2: to John Ellslie one day, I remember this. He said
Speaker 2: something like, it wasn't supposed to be like this, and
Speaker 2: what he meant by that was he wasn't supposed to
Speaker 2: be as successful. And I remember getting into a bit
Speaker 2: of a fight with him about this. I said, well,
Speaker 2: what the fuck do you want? You want me to
Speaker 2: make it less successful. He got really pissed off about
Speaker 2: the amount of money that Warner Brothers were spending on
Speaker 2: independent promotion, and he's saying stuff to me, like in
Speaker 2: front of the others, like they're criminals. And I went, yeah,
Speaker 2: So he says, you should be trying to stop you
Speaker 2: should stop it. I said, I'm trying to get them
Speaker 2: to spend more. And we got into a really and
Speaker 2: in the background I can hear Mark going shut up,
Speaker 2: shut the shut up. So David's philosophy about what dire
Speaker 2: straits could would and could and should be, we actually
Speaker 2: defined what that was. What it wasn't was to be successful,
Speaker 2: to have chart records, to be on the David Letterman Show,
Speaker 2: or whoever it was at the time, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: And the two brothers. Some people in families get on
Speaker 2: great and some don't. And they didn't and don't as
Speaker 2: far as I know, they have not spoken to each
Speaker 2: other in thirty years. Wow, which is a shame. It's silly.
Speaker 1: Was David pushed or did he jump? And if he
Speaker 1: was pushed, who told them?
Speaker 2: You did say this was going to be deep, right,
Speaker 2: So we go into the making movies record and I
Speaker 2: one very single thing happened Mark Mark expanded the lineup
Speaker 2: of the group to include keyboards. Now in the first instance, well,
Speaker 2: he and I went to New York in January of
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty and we were going to meet with John
Speaker 2: Landaut to produce that third record. And John, who I
Speaker 2: have to say I really like, showed up for the
Speaker 2: meeting on the wrong day, which did not auger well
Speaker 2: because his pa had put the diary entry in wrong,
Speaker 2: which apparently she regularly did. I guess she's not working
Speaker 2: for him now. So he shows So we sit and wait.
Speaker 2: We were staying at the Mayflower Hotel upon the Central
Speaker 2: Park West, and we sit and we wait. No John,
Speaker 2: So I ring the office and he comes on the
Speaker 2: phone and I said, John, we've got a meeting with you.
Speaker 2: There's a silence, and then I hear a shit, she's
Speaker 2: done it again. He came the next day and he
Speaker 2: was making The River with Bruce and Chuck Blockin and
Speaker 2: twenty seven other producers and he was shattered. I mean
Speaker 2: he looked on he looked unwell, and we got him
Speaker 2: a cup of tea and a bun and I said
Speaker 2: to him, are you all right? Went I didn't get
Speaker 2: into I didn't get home till five am, and we
Speaker 2: had this conversation and basically he could not fit our
Speaker 2: record well. He didn't have a schedule, he had no
Speaker 2: idea when the River was going to be finished. They'd
Speaker 2: already been working on it for about a year. And
Speaker 2: if I remember correctly, it's a double album. I think
Speaker 2: it was a double album. Yeah. So, and they were
Speaker 2: up at the power station, which is where we used
Speaker 2: to work. So he mentioned Jimmy Iven and when we
Speaker 2: were doing the Communicator, the play on music that the
Speaker 2: band used to bring them on stage was because the
Speaker 2: night which Jimmy of course had produced with Patti Smith.
Speaker 2: And we're sitting there and so again, long story short,
Speaker 2: I got hold of Jimmy on John's recommendation, and a
Speaker 2: small man dressed entirely in yellow with a yellow cap
Speaker 2: and yellow shades in a yellow car arrives and hops
Speaker 2: out and starts talking like he's been swimming in shark
Speaker 2: infested waters. And one of them's got his balls. Hi,
Speaker 2: how you doing, Jimmy, And he's like, I mean, I
Speaker 2: thought he was on speed.
Speaker 1: It wasn't.
Speaker 2: That's just his personality to Blessing and the two of them,
Speaker 2: we all got on. He recommended the power station. We
Speaker 2: went up to the power station to have to check
Speaker 2: it out, which ironically was where Mark met his wife,
Speaker 2: his first wife Lords And it was funny because when
Speaker 2: we got there, I just told me later that she
Speaker 2: thought that I was Mark and Mark was me, and
Speaker 2: I was going, how how could that be? Anyway, we
Speaker 2: liked the studio, Jimmy was available. I managed to do
Speaker 2: a deal with a manager who I'm not going to mention,
Speaker 2: who was a complete chump. And it was Jimmy who
Speaker 2: recommended Roy Bitten from the Eas Street Band, who couldn't
Speaker 2: have been better. It was absolutely ideal and he was
Speaker 2: fast and he got it straight away. He understand exactly.
Speaker 2: Roy understood exactly what was needed. He had he wasn't.
Speaker 2: He had a break that was sufficiently long to do
Speaker 2: the tracking and so on. So we started. We booked
Speaker 2: in there in That was January. We booked in there
Speaker 2: and I think it was something like April, May, June,
Speaker 2: something like that. And when I got back to England,
Speaker 2: the guys got together and started rehearsing up the songs
Speaker 2: that became the Making Movies record, which and I generally
Speaker 2: did not attend rehearsals because why you know, that's a rehearsal.
Speaker 2: And I remember very clearly John Elsey rand mid day
Speaker 2: one day and he said, right, we're ready for you,
Speaker 2: which was me being summoned. And I went down to
Speaker 2: this tiny rehearsal studio in by the Cutty Sark the
Speaker 2: ship on the Thames place called the wood Wharf, which
Speaker 2: probably wasn't twenty foot square, and they played Tunnel Love
Speaker 2: Love and Romeo and Juliet with another keyboard player, Alan Clark,
Speaker 2: who we'd found somebody in my office had found and
Speaker 2: he'd come in and they played it like there were
Speaker 2: ten thousand people in the room and we when he
Speaker 2: got to the end of Romeo and Juliet, I knew
Speaker 2: that we were back, artistically speaking, and I was totally
Speaker 2: blown away by it. I thought that I thought Romeo
Speaker 2: and Juliet was just fantastic lyric. There's a line in
Speaker 2: that song you and me babe, how about it?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: A great, great line, how many times have we all
Speaker 2: said that and all been told now fuck off? So
Speaker 2: we made we went off to New York made that
Speaker 2: record with Roy. I did have a bit of a
Speaker 2: problem with Jimmy because I had to have the phones
Speaker 2: cut off into the studio because Jimmy would produce in
Speaker 2: between the phone calls. So he was trying. He had,
Speaker 2: he had, he had this, he had, he was spending
Speaker 2: these plates he'd got Stevie NICKX was one plate. Bob Seger.
Speaker 2: I think he was sort of checking in discussions with
Speaker 2: of course Bruce. I can't remember who else, but he was.
Speaker 2: He was. He was always worried Jimmy. I hope he
Speaker 2: isn't now because he's got so much money and a
Speaker 2: very beautiful wife. But then he was desperately insecure, desperately
Speaker 2: and every night he would we would walk up the
Speaker 2: street and he would ask me the same question, what's
Speaker 2: going to happen to me? And I used to use
Speaker 2: that line, Charles Dickens line from mister Micawber. I said,
Speaker 2: now something will turn up. Something did turn up. But
Speaker 2: he was He and Shelley Yakas, who did the engineering
Speaker 2: on that, were great, But the problem was that they
Speaker 2: approached it from the perspective of the American hit record producers. So,
Speaker 2: for instance, we had a drum kit in there made
Speaker 2: up of other people's drum kit. We had Max Weinberg's
Speaker 2: snare drum, and we had Steve Gadd's floor tom tom,
Speaker 2: and we had somebody else's whatever and so and so,
Speaker 2: and picked with us was getting that. Our drummer was
Speaker 2: really ticked off with this. And we spent eight days
Speaker 2: doing the drum sound. And on the ninth day we
Speaker 2: took a lunch break and Pitch stayed behind and he
Speaker 2: retuned and reset every piece of that drum kit, and
Speaker 2: we came back and Iven literally produced an austri egg.
Speaker 2: He went absolutely nuts. The funny thing about those two
Speaker 2: guys was that every day they would they had two
Speaker 2: dog dog bowls that you would feed a dog, your
Speaker 2: pet dog with, and Shelley would empty an entire bottle
Speaker 2: of bee pollen tablets into each one, and then he'd
Speaker 2: mix it up with some alfalfa sprouts and they'd eat
Speaker 2: the whole lot. Now, bee pollen is a very very
Speaker 2: effective but very powerful vitimin, and you're supposed to take
Speaker 2: one or two a day, and they were taking bottles
Speaker 2: so and it had the effect, the speed effect, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't speed, it was out. It was bee pollen.
Speaker 2: And the two of them were like And in the
Speaker 2: end I just had to disconnect the phone because we could.
Speaker 2: We didn't have that much money then it hadn't flowed through.
Speaker 2: And you know, the pastage was expensive. Jimmy was fairly expensive.
Speaker 2: And they went the way they went about. Everything was
Speaker 2: full on. You know, it's like this, We've got to
Speaker 2: get this done. There's no fucking about, you know, you
Speaker 2: can't go and have a break now all this, and
Speaker 2: Jimmy got very frustrated with David Nofler. David was arguing constantly,
Speaker 2: this is not the way it's supposed to be and
Speaker 2: all this kind of stuff. Why are we staying at
Speaker 2: the Mayflower? We should be staying at Missus Miggins's guesthouse
Speaker 2: down the street. We're spending too much money. And this
Speaker 2: was really starting to get on everybody else's you know,
Speaker 2: as we say in England, everybody else's tits, and in
Speaker 2: particular it was really starting to bug Mark. I mean,
Speaker 2: it was already pretty the relationship was just not working.
Speaker 2: And there came the famous occasion or infamous occasion where
Speaker 2: Mark said to him, I wasn't there for this particular episode.
Speaker 2: Thank god. Mark said to him, right, he said, I
Speaker 2: want you to go back to the hotel. I want
Speaker 2: you to rehearse your part on Romeo and Juliet and
Speaker 2: come in tomorrow and we'll do it. And David just
Speaker 2: rolled his eyes, and then we all went off for
Speaker 2: the evening to do whatever we were doing, which might
Speaker 2: be just having a meal or going to a club,
Speaker 2: or I'll tell you a short aside. It might be
Speaker 2: interesting to you just going back to communicate because it
Speaker 2: just came into my mind. Jerry Wexler took Mark and
Speaker 2: I out one night clubbing, but I don't mean disco clubbing,
Speaker 2: I mean music clubbing. And we went and we saw
Speaker 2: James Blood, Olma and Cindy Lauper, and Cindy was singing
Speaker 2: with a group I think they were called Blue.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That was when she had her deal with PolyGram.
Speaker 2: And she did a fantastic version of a Gene Pitney
Speaker 2: song called I Want to Be Strong. Absolutely blew us
Speaker 2: out of our chairs. And we went back to Wexler's
Speaker 2: apartment and he said, which one of those do you
Speaker 2: think I should sign and Mark and I both went,
Speaker 2: you gotta sign that girl. That girl is ridiculous singer.
Speaker 2: And he goes, no, No, I'm going to sign James
Speaker 2: blood Olma, which he did, so Cindy got to go
Speaker 2: with whoever it was anyway, Sorry, So coming back to
Speaker 2: what you were asking.
Speaker 1: The name of the band was Blue Angel.
Speaker 2: Thank you Blue Angel. Yes. So the next day arrives
Speaker 2: and Mark David shows up and Mark says to him,
Speaker 2: did you practice your part like I told you? And
Speaker 2: David goes no, and everybody in the room went So
Speaker 2: he goes into the studio and he starts tuning his guitar,
Speaker 2: or rather he doesn't tune his guitar. And this has
Speaker 2: gone on for about half an hour. I got all
Speaker 2: from John later on, and finally Mark hit the talk
Speaker 2: back and he said to him, David, shit, I'll get
Speaker 2: off the pot. And David turned round and used a
Speaker 2: word I can't say on your podcast, and Mark just
Speaker 2: stood up, took his coat off the hook on the
Speaker 2: back of the door, put his coat on, and turned
Speaker 2: round to this room of people who had their mouth
Speaker 2: literally open, and said, I'm not working with him anymore.
Speaker 2: I'm going back to the hotel and walked out, so
Speaker 2: everybody Ivan laid another egg. Everybody went back to the
Speaker 2: hotel and Mark sorry, David and John Illslie had a
Speaker 2: conversation and basically John said, look, you got a choice.
Speaker 2: You can either make up with Mark and stay or
Speaker 2: leave and because and David said, I'll leave. And that
Speaker 2: was when I got on the phone call. I was
Speaker 2: on the West coast at that point, David's leaving the
Speaker 2: group and actually I just went, oh, great, thank god
Speaker 2: for that, because I knew that if he had stayed,
Speaker 2: it would have fallen to bits. I'm not saying it
Speaker 2: wouldn't have reconstructed, but at that moment it was very
Speaker 2: close to just collapsing because Pink our Drama was ready
Speaker 2: to go because of David.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Okay, that album comes out with not gigantic expectations
Speaker 1: in the US. Once again, the Europe is a different market.
Speaker 1: It's got a more vibrant, impactful, direct sound. If you
Speaker 1: bought the record when it came out, you were quite stunned,
Speaker 1: especially with Romeo and Juliet, and from my perspective, it
Speaker 1: percolated slowly to become bigger and bigger and bigger. What
Speaker 1: was your perspective on the inside.
Speaker 2: You pretty much described it. I mean, we didn't have
Speaker 2: the Communicate setback in the rest of the world territories.
Speaker 2: And when do you talk about Europe, I don't want to.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to correct you, but I only I
Speaker 2: think of the rest of the world, because it wasn't
Speaker 2: just Europe. It was Australasia, it was Japan, it was Canada,
Speaker 2: all of these territories, parts of South America were always
Speaker 2: going great guns for us. So the Communicate record and
Speaker 2: because of the touring off the back of it and
Speaker 2: keeping them in front of their fan base which was growing.
Speaker 2: When the third one came out, the decision was made
Speaker 2: the record companies. I never tried to impose singles on
Speaker 2: record companies because they have to do the work. I
Speaker 2: only did that once, and we're going to come to that.
Speaker 2: But I thought Romeo and Juliet as a song was
Speaker 2: utterly brilliant, and I did kind of push for that
Speaker 2: to be the single. And it was one of those things.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to tell you something which even the
Speaker 2: band members don't know. Of course, the record company wanted
Speaker 2: an edit, and I said to the guy from Phonogram
Speaker 2: in London. I said, we didn't have this conversation. If
Speaker 2: I ever hear about it, I will deny you and
Speaker 2: I spoke about it. Do you have you got the message?
Speaker 2: And he said I think so. So we put out
Speaker 2: an edited version because I knew radio was going to
Speaker 2: edit it anyway, and it became it went well in
Speaker 2: the UK. It got up to about number three, and
Speaker 2: and again we were off touring again. I mean, it
Speaker 2: was just the touring was relentless. And about a year later,
Speaker 2: John Nilsey said to me, took me aside somewhere, He said,
Speaker 2: did you tell Phonogram that they could edit Romeo and Juliet?
Speaker 2: And I went, He said, well, obviously you did. I said,
Speaker 2: have you mentioned that to Mark? He said no, and
Speaker 2: I'm not going he did exactly the right thing. So
Speaker 2: and the unlikely event Mark's watching this, that's why anyway,
Speaker 2: it didn't matter. So that became a hit. A Tunnel
Speaker 2: of Love became a hit as parts one and two.
Speaker 2: It's like Big Noise from Winnetka Part one kind of thing.
Speaker 2: There was a song on that album I thought was
Speaker 2: a hit song. It was not released, and that was
Speaker 2: a song called Hand in Hand. Had a good chorus.
Speaker 2: But anyway, that record got us back for sure.
Speaker 1: Before we go forward, let's go back. How did Knappler
Speaker 1: end Mark Knopfler end up working with Bob Dylan? And
Speaker 1: what was your experience there?
Speaker 2: Sorry, okay, this is welcome to Comedy Hour Central, Jerry Wexler.
Speaker 2: We are playing in at the Rocks See in La
Speaker 2: on the first American tour, which is packed wall to
Speaker 2: wall with faces I believe you call them. I remember
Speaker 2: Stevin Nix getting up and doing her Rihanna dance and
Speaker 2: being pelted with plastic cups and sit down, yes, silly cow,
Speaker 2: and all of this, and I remember all of the
Speaker 2: members of the band, Robbie and all of them been there,
Speaker 2: and all of these other characters. And we were doing
Speaker 2: two shows a night there. This was in end of
Speaker 2: March seventeen, end of March eighty. I think I got
Speaker 2: my caronology might be wrong.
Speaker 1: I think a little before that.
Speaker 2: I was seventy nine. Sorry, you're right. And we went
Speaker 2: up to on the Rocks upstairs for a drink in
Speaker 2: between the shows, and there was Bob or as we
Speaker 2: call him, rambling, and with wait.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, wait, why do you call him rambling?
Speaker 2: In the sixties, anybody of my generation who listened to
Speaker 2: British radio would have listened to a satirical radio show
Speaker 2: on a Sunday called Round the Horn, which featured a
Speaker 2: spoof folks singer called Rambling sid Rumpole. You can find
Speaker 2: this stuff on YouTube or whatever, and Rambling sid Rumpole
Speaker 2: was played by a wonderful actor called Kenneth Williams, Who's
Speaker 2: Who's who would vocalize everything like a person from the
Speaker 2: West Country of England.
Speaker 1: So what are right?
Speaker 2: Or like that? You know, what are you mean? I'm
Speaker 2: going to sing you a song now. It's called the Toymes.
Speaker 2: They are a changing. He would do a spoof. So
Speaker 2: Mark and I just started calling Bob Rambling. Bob had
Speaker 2: no idea. He thought we were talking about rambling Jack
Speaker 2: Elliottly I bought him a box set of the cassettes
Speaker 2: of this show, but it just went straight over. So anyway,
Speaker 2: we go upstairs and Wexler's there with Bob, and of
Speaker 2: course Bob is Mark's biggest influence. Stroke call him an
Speaker 2: idol exactly, but you know, Bob to Mark was what
Speaker 2: Elvis was to be kind of thing or Buddy Rich
Speaker 2: to me. And they met and went for a huddle,
Speaker 2: and the next thing I know is that Dylan is
Speaker 2: doing an album in Muscle Shoals. Jerry's going to produce it.
Speaker 2: This is taking place in April May of seventy nine,
Speaker 2: and we conveniently had a gap in touring, and it's
Speaker 2: agreed that Mark's going to play on this record. And
Speaker 2: Mark recommends pick with us our drummer, quite rightly, absolutely
Speaker 2: ideal for that. I didn't go down there, I had
Speaker 2: I was also managing Jerry Rafferty at the time, who
Speaker 2: was pretty big, and I had quite a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff to do in La. So they went off down
Speaker 2: to two Muscle Shoals. Tim Drummond played bass, There were
Speaker 2: a couple of backing girls. I can't remember who else
Speaker 2: was on that record. It was oh and what happened
Speaker 2: was that's right. So I was in LA or New
Speaker 2: York wherever, and Mark called me he'd been there about
Speaker 2: three days. Nah, sorry, got this wrong. He went to
Speaker 2: Santa Monica to Bob's place to routine the songs, and
Speaker 2: I was in New York and he rang me and
Speaker 2: he said, he said, all these songs are about God.
Speaker 2: And I went what he said, They're about odd when
Speaker 2: but he's Jewish, isn't he? And Mark went, Mark's whispering
Speaker 2: to me like there's other and I said, why are
Speaker 2: you whispering? He went, oh, well, he said, he said yeah.
Speaker 2: And this was because Bob's Born Again record. So they
Speaker 2: went down there and I had arranged to go down
Speaker 2: to join them. And this was probably eight days, right Mark,
Speaker 2: I said, I'll be down tomorrow. He said, don't bother
Speaker 2: coming And I said, but why, He said, we're done,
Speaker 2: We're finished. I said, you've on him been there eight
Speaker 2: days and he said, Bob only plays a song twice.
Speaker 2: So they did that record in eight days. And I
Speaker 2: don't think. I don't think anybody got paid for it.
Speaker 2: Seemed utterly redundant to be seeking payment. And it came
Speaker 2: out and it did as Bob Dylan records do it
Speaker 2: for the time that it did pretty well, I think
Speaker 2: from what I recall. I mean, I've met Dylan several times,
Speaker 2: but if I you know, if I walked up to
Speaker 2: him now, he wouldn't have a clue who I am.
Speaker 2: And that's fine, no problem. And that was that was that,
Speaker 2: and then and then we were all. Mark had to
Speaker 2: come back to Europe because we were starting a German
Speaker 2: tour around about mid May, so they fitted it into
Speaker 2: that gap that they Of course, there was a different
Speaker 2: situation with the Infidels record, which came along later on.
Speaker 2: And Mark and Bob are good friends as far as
Speaker 2: I know, Yeah, well, I know they are, Yeah, they are, Okay.
Speaker 1: How does Mark end up as the sole producer of
Speaker 1: Love of Gold? And is there a pushback from the
Speaker 1: label over the length of the song? Certainly opening track
Speaker 1: Telegraph wrote.
Speaker 2: It became the sole producer because he said, I'm going
Speaker 2: to be the sole producer. That record was originally going
Speaker 2: to be a double album. There were a ton more
Speaker 2: songs that were recorded, and I can remember in the
Speaker 2: world sometimes you when you're a manager, you have to
Speaker 2: save the act from themselves. I'd say that's quite a
Speaker 2: prominent part of the job. I don't mean artistically, but
Speaker 2: in this case, there was a whole conversation that went on.
Speaker 2: I remember I was in the back of a car
Speaker 2: about the cost this is a ship that we had
Speaker 2: to deal with back then, the cost of cardboard for
Speaker 2: a double hours album, the cost of inner bags, lyric sheets,
Speaker 2: the pricing, retail pricing. I've always been very conscious of that.
Speaker 2: I always lean towards don't bleed people money wise. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's a separate subject. But the whole ticketing thing at
Speaker 2: the moment is I think it's completely bonkers. It's sort
Speaker 2: of it's sort of almost surreal, but the public seemed
Speaker 2: to put up with it.
Speaker 1: Okay, just go sideways for a second. Your take on ticketing,
Speaker 1: Arthur Fogel.
Speaker 2: I also do interviews like you, well, not like you.
Speaker 1: Arthur Fogel, who basically runs the international touring of big
Speaker 1: acts for Live Nation.
Speaker 2: Correct. Yeah, he said to eat something up beautifully. I
Speaker 2: interviewed him a few years ago. He said everything at
Speaker 2: the top is underpriced and everything else is overpriced, which
Speaker 2: I thought was quite a good thing. I think that
Speaker 2: ticketing is this is a this is a very long conversation, Bob.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's let's move on, because I want to get through.
Speaker 2: You were asked me about Love of a Golden Production.
Speaker 2: They by this time, we were we had basically become
Speaker 2: the biggest act as on the PolyGram label, certainly at
Speaker 2: that moment in time, or well on the way to
Speaker 2: becoming the only act I can think of who might
Speaker 2: have been a bigger record seller back then would have
Speaker 2: been Elton John who was a label mate of ours,
Speaker 2: and I just made the decision that he was going
Speaker 2: to produce it. He I can't remember how we met
Speaker 2: Neil Dorfsman. I think we met Neil Dorsman during the
Speaker 2: making of the Local Hero movie soundtrack, which just preceded
Speaker 2: the Love of a Gold record, and no sorry, Love
Speaker 2: of a Gold Sorry. Local Hero came after, just right after,
Speaker 2: and by this time David had left the group. I
Speaker 2: didn't know it at the time, but Pick had decided
Speaker 2: to do that record and leave the group, which he
Speaker 2: did immediately after he'd finished his parts. Quite a crafty
Speaker 2: little economic decision on his part, and they made a record,
Speaker 2: as I say, which had quite a number of more
Speaker 2: songs than the ones that finally ended up on it.
Speaker 2: And I had heard bits and pieces. The Telegraph Road
Speaker 2: first appeared on the first Australian tour we did. I
Speaker 2: remember being in the venue in Perth with just the
Speaker 2: crew guys, actually probably just the sound guy, and they
Speaker 2: played it the whole thing. I was just sitting in
Speaker 2: the stalls and I just ran onto the stage and
Speaker 2: I went, what on earth is that? And that was
Speaker 2: Telegraph Road incidentally, is in Detroit. It's the name of
Speaker 2: the Ring road that goes around Detroit. And I had
Speaker 2: been sitting next to Mark on the bus as we
Speaker 2: were making our way to a venue in the pouring rain,
Speaker 2: and we were stuck in a traffic jam, and he
Speaker 2: had a piece of paper and he wrote down on
Speaker 2: the piece of paper six lanes of traffic, three lanes
Speaker 2: moving slow, and folded it up and put it in
Speaker 2: his pocket. And I heard it coming back at me
Speaker 2: months later. So we did that record, and you would
Speaker 2: ask me about the length of things. By this time,
Speaker 2: the way that people dealt with me had markedly changed.
Speaker 2: I don't mean that I was I didn't. I wasn't
Speaker 2: one of these shouters and screamers and all of that.
Speaker 2: But the you know, this was a big thing for
Speaker 2: the phonogram companies, particularly Phonogram had a not Phonogram, PolyGram
Speaker 2: UK Phonegram is one of the labels, had a wonderful president,
Speaker 2: guy called Ramon Lopez, Spanish guy. And I took that
Speaker 2: record into play to Ramon, just me and him, and
Speaker 2: he put it on and he played the whole album through,
Speaker 2: and I'll never forget what he said to me. He said,
Speaker 2: I want to do a Spanish accent. He said, ed,
Speaker 2: this is not pop me sick, this is classical music.
Speaker 2: And I went and he said, we are going to
Speaker 2: make this the most successful record we have ever had.
Speaker 2: And I'm like because he fucking loved it and he
Speaker 2: could see that it represented a kind of very different,
Speaker 2: you know, not many bad. It had been a long
Speaker 2: time since Aguarda di Vida, so having this mega track.
Speaker 2: I then went up to Scotland where Mark was. We well,
Speaker 2: actually we both went up for the We went to
Speaker 2: the set of Local Hero, which David Putnam was producing
Speaker 2: and on the first so we got up there, staying
Speaker 2: in this poky little hotel with the cast and crew,
Speaker 2: and at breakfast the following morning, Mark said to me,
Speaker 2: I'm going to ask you to do something you don't
Speaker 2: want to do. And I said, we are not having
Speaker 2: sex anyway, no, no, no, no no. I said, you
Speaker 2: want me to get the record companies to put Private
Speaker 2: Investigations out as the first single without an edit. And
Speaker 2: he said, how do you know, I said, because it
Speaker 2: is fucking brilliant. It's totally brilliant. If you're a manager,
Speaker 2: you work with what your artist gives you. And if Heaven,
Speaker 2: Thank Heaven. You love it as a fan, almost not commercially,
Speaker 2: you just love it as a piece of music. And
Speaker 2: I thought it was utterly, absolutely brilliant. And he said yes,
Speaker 2: he said, can you do that? I said yes, I said,
Speaker 2: but there's going to be some pushback on it. When
Speaker 2: I finally got back down to London and I took
Speaker 2: the record into play to the London Phonogram company and
Speaker 2: it was then that I played it to ram On.
Speaker 2: I just got the chronology wrong. The head of radio promotion,
Speaker 2: who I won't name, said to me. I said to them,
Speaker 2: I said, I'm going to ask you to do so
Speaker 2: you're not going to want to do. Said, I want
Speaker 2: you to put that second track Private Investigations out. It's
Speaker 2: the first single without an edit, and it's seven minutes long.
Speaker 2: And the head of radio promotions said to me, we
Speaker 2: can't do that. People will ring up their radio stations
Speaker 2: and think that something's gone wrong. And I went, what why.
Speaker 2: He said, because it stops. I said, yes, those are
Speaker 2: called rest periods. Because I was an it's a bit
Speaker 2: sip teeny bit ticked the managing director. Then one of
Speaker 2: this endless literally of managing directors I was. He said, okay,
Speaker 2: we'll do that. I said, I know, it's a risk.
Speaker 2: I said, this that will be as big as MacArthur Park,
Speaker 2: or it will die death. So they put it out.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I I had, you know, two or three ladies working
Speaker 2: for me at the time, well for nearly the whole time,
Speaker 2: and they would have the radio on downstairs, and I
Speaker 2: was upstairs in my office and I kept hearing this song,
Speaker 2: and I buzzed Gene, my American PA, whose voice would
Speaker 2: strip chrome off a bumper, and I said to her,
Speaker 2: will you please stop playing that bloody record. Wow, it's
Speaker 2: it's not us, it's Radio one. I said what I said,
Speaker 2: But they're playing the whole thing, and she said yes.
Speaker 2: So this thing was picked up by the rest of
Speaker 2: the world radio, no edit, whole thing. We did a
Speaker 2: pretty crappy video to go with it, but didn't really matter.
Speaker 2: And the next week, to give you an idea of
Speaker 2: my own belief and the amount of bullshit I can talk,
Speaker 2: I call up the charts used to come through on
Speaker 2: a Tuesday back then, So I call up Phonogram on
Speaker 2: a Tuesday, and I get the cleaner of somebody on
Speaker 2: the phone and I tell him who I am, and
Speaker 2: I say, have you got this week's radio chart, the
Speaker 2: Music week Charts, which would be equivalent to the Billboard,
Speaker 2: And there's a scrabbling of papers and he said yes,
Speaker 2: And I said, can you look between numbers fifty and
Speaker 2: seventy five and see if a song called Private Investigations
Speaker 2: has gone in? And he looks and he said, nah, no,
Speaker 2: it's not there, and I'm thinking, fuck, we haven't even
Speaker 2: made the top seventy five. And then he said to me,
Speaker 2: he said, what's it called again, I said, private Investigations.
Speaker 2: He said, oh, there's a song called Private Investigations that's
Speaker 2: gone in at number two. And I went wow, wow,
Speaker 2: because I just didn't know. And that record became an
Speaker 2: absolute classic. In the Dos Traits Repertoire Live Repertoire, Big
Speaker 2: Big fan favorite Carl Scott blessed him, who was at
Speaker 2: this point in a totally unenviable position, brings me up
Speaker 2: and he says, the A and R Department have done
Speaker 2: an edit on Telegraph Road and I have they? And
Speaker 2: he said it's two and a half minutes long, and
Speaker 2: I just burst out laughing. I said, Carl, don't be silly.
Speaker 2: We can't put that out, so we weren't able to
Speaker 2: put out a radio friendly length single In America. The
Speaker 2: album did quite well, I mean I can't remember what
Speaker 2: it's sold over two million in the end.
Speaker 1: When do you find Pick is going to leave the band?
Speaker 1: What's going on there? And frequently in the history of groups,
Speaker 1: you'll lose one member, you change the chemistry. I mean,
Speaker 1: Rim the drummer quit after an illness, and it was
Speaker 1: never really you seem being very successful.
Speaker 2: And you're the same.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what do you think when Pick says I'm done?
Speaker 2: It's the same thing in this situation. I mean, I
Speaker 2: played drums. I'm not a professional drummer level, but I
Speaker 2: played drums well enough that I could play with the
Speaker 2: not Hillbillies, etc. And Pick was a really, really good player,
Speaker 2: and he was absolutely right for the music they were
Speaker 2: making at the beginning of their career, and more particularly,
Speaker 2: he was right for the level of venues we were doing.
Speaker 2: We had not got up to mega venues. He had
Speaker 2: unbelievably where these things go. He'd married my first secretary, Linda.
Speaker 2: They divorced and then they remarried. Go figure, So he'd
Speaker 2: married Linda. Linda was still working for me this was
Speaker 2: not a very good arrangement because they'd go you know,
Speaker 2: she'd go home and she'd tell him everything that was
Speaker 2: going on in the office, and how do I do
Speaker 2: this diplomatically. There were some aspects to the way that
Speaker 2: the band was going which Pick was not happy with.
Speaker 2: The first of all, it was, first of all, it
Speaker 2: was getting considerably louder on live shows, and he did
Speaker 2: not like battling with the guitars basically because it was
Speaker 2: not deafening, but it was getting loud. And he's not
Speaker 2: you know, he couldn't do Phil Rudd's job in ac DC.
Speaker 2: He's not that kind of player. There were just personal
Speaker 2: issues arising really between him and Mark, because Mark by
Speaker 2: then had emerged as happens in many, many, many bands
Speaker 2: that start off as democracies, Mark had become a dictator.
Speaker 2: I mean he was right in everything. Now. He was producing,
Speaker 2: he was singing everything, he was arranging everything, and he
Speaker 2: wasn't exactly telling people how to what to play. But
Speaker 2: Mark's very precise about how he hears his songs kind
Speaker 2: of in his head. He's not the kind of musician
Speaker 2: who goes into the studio and like say the Stones
Speaker 2: might from time to time and jam and hope that
Speaker 2: something arises. He goes in and he's got a very
Speaker 2: clear idea. That's not to say he doesn't like let
Speaker 2: other people put their ten cents in. He does, but
Speaker 2: at the end of the day he'll basically dictate if
Speaker 2: you like, how the thing's going to go. And Pick
Speaker 2: was not happy with that aspect. He and his Linda
Speaker 2: my secretary, his wife, my secretary, they just had their
Speaker 2: first baby. He was on one core water of albums
Speaker 2: one and two, had one third on albums three and
Speaker 2: four and plus whatever the tours have produced, because by
Speaker 2: this time the tours were profitable. So he did the
Speaker 2: record and there was a big row about something in
Speaker 2: New York. I can't remember what it was. It was
Speaker 2: something to do with kind of the domestic arrangements. I
Speaker 2: mean a lot of people listening to your You did
Speaker 2: a fantastic podcast some time ago with Bill Kirbishly. It
Speaker 2: was one of my absolute heroes. I love Bill, and
Speaker 2: what struck me about that because I've listened to it
Speaker 2: about three times. Bill was open enough about his personal
Speaker 2: life and the impact that that has had on his career.
Speaker 2: And also Bill said something which absolutely I totally totally.
Speaker 2: If he was here now, i'd give him a hug.
Speaker 2: He was talking about why he and Robert Plant split up,
Speaker 2: and he said that for him, it was a matter
Speaker 2: of principle, and in a strange kind of way. I
Speaker 2: think for Pick it was a bit of a matter
Speaker 2: of principle. And I was very sad to see him
Speaker 2: good because he came to me to tell me, and
Speaker 2: I was very sad to see him go, But I
Speaker 2: didn't try to talk him into staying. In my experience,
Speaker 2: if you try and talk creative people into doing things
Speaker 2: they don't want to do, it's not going to work.
Speaker 2: It'll backfire. And I remember that John Remark and myself
Speaker 2: had lunch with Pick, and I said, I said to
Speaker 2: Pick when he told me, I said, you're going to
Speaker 2: have to You're going to have to tell the other
Speaker 2: and he went, yeah, I know. So he told them
Speaker 2: and it was logistically inconvenient because I already had of course,
Speaker 2: I had a tour already set up, already to go.
Speaker 2: I think the thing was on sale and suddenly we
Speaker 2: needed another drummer. Now I need to go back to
Speaker 2: my days as an agent. I used to work with
Speaker 2: a guy called Barry Marshall, who's one of the absolute
Speaker 2: best promoters in this country that we've ever produced, and
Speaker 2: probably one of my along with his wife Jenny, one
Speaker 2: of my dearest friends. At the time Barry was managed.
Speaker 2: This is back in the seventies. Barry was managing a
Speaker 2: Welsh jam band a bit like the Dead or Dave
Speaker 2: Math more like the Dead really, and they had a
Speaker 2: drummer called Terry Williams, who, of course I became very
Speaker 2: good friends with. And Terry eventually left Man and joined
Speaker 2: Dave Edmunds Rock Pile and was on all of those
Speaker 2: Dave Edmund's records. And Terry is the king of the
Speaker 2: shuffle as we drummers call it, kind of boogie kind
Speaker 2: of playing. So when so so, when Pitt left, Mark
Speaker 2: said to me, and sometimes I wonder where where Mark's
Speaker 2: brain is, because he says to me, do you know
Speaker 2: any drummers?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Loads, he said, can you find us a drummer? Oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll tell you, I said, I'll tell you who you want.
Speaker 2: You need. Terry Williams, who's Terry Williams told him Terry
Speaker 2: comes up, goes to what I suppose you'd call an audition,
Speaker 2: which wasn't really about an hour after he's got there,
Speaker 2: Illy rings me up. He says, great, fantastic, and I
Speaker 2: said what you want him? He went absolutely. He said
Speaker 2: he hasn't walked around his drum kit once, which is
Speaker 2: what Pick would do. Pick would walk around his drum
Speaker 2: kit going like that. Terry became the drummer. And what
Speaker 2: was significant about that was not only could he play
Speaker 2: the catalog if you like the stuff, but we were
Speaker 2: moving into bigger arenas and we were on our way
Speaker 2: to stadiums for better or worse and day and Terry
Speaker 2: was what we needed. He was an absolute powerhouse and
Speaker 2: he has a quality which a lot of your audience
Speaker 2: might not understand. But the drummers in your audience will
Speaker 2: he swings, count Bezi swung, Ellington swung, Oscar Peterson swung
Speaker 2: and the people who drove those swinging units were the drummers.
Speaker 2: Uh and Terry Williams was By this time we already
Speaker 2: had two keyboard players, Alan Clark and Guy Fletcher, and
Speaker 2: then we had Mark and we and we ended up
Speaker 2: we needed a saxon. No, the saxon came a little
Speaker 2: bit later. So we did that tour and we recorded
Speaker 2: a live album the Alchemy record, which amazingly sold over
Speaker 2: five million copies, which is pretty good for a live record. Uh.
Speaker 2: And Terry became a full time member of the band.
Speaker 2: And the other great thing about Terry, and it's true,
Speaker 2: I think of you really need this with musicians. He
Speaker 2: was easy, He didn't he didn't have a drug problem,
Speaker 2: he didn't have a woman problem. He didn't get silly,
Speaker 2: he didn't collapse, he was ready. He never missed a gig.
Speaker 2: He put one hundred percent into every performance. He was
Speaker 2: used to get along with. He never complained. I never
Speaker 2: heard him whining or minging about anything. Fantastic.
Speaker 1: I wish, okay, you bring a new member in the band.
Speaker 1: The others have been working together a better part of
Speaker 1: a decade. Most bands they pay him a flat fee
Speaker 1: and if anything, maybe they'll wait yours and make them
Speaker 1: a full member. Now you only have two original members
Speaker 1: forgetting the songwriting. You know, what do you decide?
Speaker 2: You know, well, yeah, good question. The other guys were
Speaker 2: on a fee. I do believe that if you should
Speaker 2: pay everybody the same, they're riding on the same bus,
Speaker 2: they're going on the same plane, they're playing the same show.
Speaker 2: For two and a quarter rounds whatever it is, and
Speaker 2: we used to pay what I used to do just
Speaker 2: as a tip for any managers who might be listening.
Speaker 2: I used to ring my friends who were managing the
Speaker 2: acts of a simp. Sorry, same kind of level. So
Speaker 2: I used to ring Roger Forrester who was managing Eric Clapton.
Speaker 2: I used to ring Steve or Roger was managing Pink Floyd.
Speaker 2: I used to call Tony Smith who was managing Genesis
Speaker 2: and probably somebody else, and I would find out what
Speaker 2: they were paying their side men, and then I would
Speaker 2: average it and I would increase it, and that was
Speaker 2: the basis on which they were paid, and then we
Speaker 2: were the straits because it's their money, not mine. Were
Speaker 2: very generous with bonuses to our crew. We weren't kind
Speaker 2: of quite at the tailor swift level with our crew,
Speaker 2: but the money we would have been. I got to
Speaker 2: give her eleven out of ten for what she did
Speaker 2: for her truck drivers, people who if the truck drivers
Speaker 2: don't care, there, you'll fucked. You know, these people make
Speaker 2: the thing happen. So we basically had people on what
Speaker 2: I'll call what you call a flat fee salary, whatever
Speaker 2: you want to call it. With a bonus at the end,
Speaker 2: and if they did. For instance, when Terry played on
Speaker 2: the twisting by the pool ep which was a bit
Speaker 2: of a throwaway, he got a royalty on that and
Speaker 2: still does. And the others did that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: I ran a very I like to think. I mean,
Speaker 2: there are people who probably would disagree with this and
Speaker 2: say he's a hard nosed bastard, but I like to
Speaker 2: think that we ran a pretty fair ship. And that's
Speaker 2: why the people that we had stayed with us for
Speaker 2: so long. I mean, Alan Clark gave up at one point.
Speaker 2: He gave a pretty solid gig with Clapton to come
Speaker 2: back to the streets, and I got him a big
Speaker 2: gig prior to that when we were off with Tina Turner.
Speaker 2: Good musicians are good musicians are generally, but not always,
Speaker 2: but generally they're pretty bright. They're pretty intelligent. I mean
Speaker 2: they're not you're not. You don't become whoever by being stupid.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to brother in arms. What do you
Speaker 1: think going in? How does Sting get on the money
Speaker 1: for nothing? Although he'd worked with Deil Dorsman previously, and
Speaker 1: do you know what's about to happen?
Speaker 2: Okay, let's go to back to the beginning of that tale.
Speaker 2: After after Love Over Gold and Alchemy, Mark did a
Speaker 2: couple of movies. He did al with Helen Mirren and
Speaker 2: he did The Princess Bride with whoever was in the
Speaker 2: Princess's Pride of My dam Mental blank. Andre the Giant
Speaker 2: was in it, I know. And and he started he
Speaker 2: was doing a bit of producing with other people. He
Speaker 2: did a record with Aztec Camera and so on and
Speaker 2: so forth. And he was down Phil Man's and Era
Speaker 2: from Roxy Music has a really nice studio outside of town.
Speaker 2: And I was down there one day doing some soundtrack work,
Speaker 2: I think, and I popped down and we drove back
Speaker 2: up to London and he just said to me, this
Speaker 2: would have been this must have been in late eighty four.
Speaker 2: He just said to me, I've got some songs together.
Speaker 2: Can you get the guys back together for me. I
Speaker 2: will say that between the records, I never ever asked
Speaker 2: him about the next Diastraates record, And I have to
Speaker 2: be absolutely fair, the record companies didn't either. Now maybe
Speaker 2: because they were terrified, I don't know, but they never did.
Speaker 2: Nobody ever said are we going to get another record?
Speaker 2: Or when are we going to get another record, which
Speaker 2: you might have expected them to, but they didn't, and
Speaker 2: so that's what happened. We got the we got the
Speaker 2: basic group back together. They went down to Phil's place
Speaker 2: and started working up the songs and I remember going
Speaker 2: down there one day and I had money for nothing
Speaker 2: for the first time. And one thing that struck me
Speaker 2: about it was that I had done the first tour
Speaker 2: of UK and Europe as an agent for zz Top,
Speaker 2: a band that I love guys, I mean, Dusty's passed
Speaker 2: away sadly, but the best guys, I mean the best guys,
Speaker 2: especially Billy, fantastic bloke, because they have a sense of humor.
Speaker 2: You'd have to if you're in Zeezy. I'd taken Mark
Speaker 2: to see them. And the guitar tone of that lick
Speaker 2: is not a I'm not saying. I'm not saying because
Speaker 2: I don't know, but it was not a million miles
Speaker 2: away from you know, because when the first time they
Speaker 2: came over, they weren't doing I'll tell you a little aside.
Speaker 2: They came over here to do an old gray Whistle
Speaker 2: test showing London at the Apollo, which is thirty three
Speaker 2: hundred seats, and another show in Germany and the Big
Speaker 2: Two in Germany, and they were on the album is
Speaker 2: Ombree I think it was called, and that.
Speaker 1: Was the first Warner Brothers reckord.
Speaker 2: Yeah, was it okay? And there was a track on
Speaker 2: it called I Thank You, which I think is an
Speaker 2: old day thank you. Yeah, and uh, I remember, I
Speaker 2: remember they they wanted to go. They were constantly going
Speaker 2: on about how they came from Houston and they could
Speaker 2: eat the hottest food known to man, and they wanted
Speaker 2: to go. They wanted to know what Indian restaurant in
Speaker 2: London served the hottest curry. So I took them to
Speaker 2: Funny Enough, a place that Freddie Mercury used to go.
Speaker 2: So I used to see fred In there all the time.
Speaker 2: That Dusty said to me, I want the hottest thing
Speaker 2: that they make. And I said, no, you don't. He
Speaker 2: said no do I said no, you definitely don't. So
Speaker 2: when they were the guy came out to take the orders,
Speaker 2: he said to the waiter, he said, what's the hottest
Speaker 2: curring you make? And the guy looked at him and
Speaker 2: he said, it's called a Bangla file. If any of
Speaker 2: your listeners do not have the So he orders the
Speaker 2: Bangla file and the entire kitchen staff came out to
Speaker 2: watch him eat it. It took one mouthful, it turned
Speaker 2: a completely different color that human beings are supposed to be.
Speaker 2: And he literally ran to the bathroom and for two
Speaker 2: and a half hours he remained in the bathroom and
Speaker 2: we could hear through the door gurglings and plops and groaning,
Speaker 2: and finally a kind of called to prayer. And when
Speaker 2: he came out, he was half the size of the
Speaker 2: person who had gone in. And they had a gig
Speaker 2: the next day, and poor Dusty had he had very
Speaker 2: short say, he had contact lenses. He forgot to put
Speaker 2: his contact lenses in because he was in such a
Speaker 2: panic that something was going to happen on stage. And
Speaker 2: every time he walked up to the microphone, he hit
Speaker 2: the microphone hit him on the head with an incredibly
Speaker 2: loud donk through the PA and Billy could pardly play
Speaker 2: for laughing, and uh, well there's no more to the story, really,
Speaker 2: but that's my little Easy's top story because he couldn't.
Speaker 2: He absolutely thought he was going to die. So funny,
Speaker 2: So don't have the bang of file. Sorry, what was
Speaker 2: your question before?
Speaker 1: Well, we're making the Brothers and Arms album.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they basically went down rehearsed. I heard money
Speaker 2: for Nothing. I didn't. I never listened to records from
Speaker 2: a commercial point of view, honestly. I mean maybe as
Speaker 2: a manager I should have done, but I didn't. I
Speaker 2: just listen. Do I like it. I like to work
Speaker 2: with artists that I liked. The most important thing to
Speaker 2: me about all the artists I worked with, other than
Speaker 2: the fact that I liked them enough to get on
Speaker 2: with them, was that they were great songwriters. You had
Speaker 2: Paul Brady on your show a few weeks ago, I
Speaker 2: mean another of my clients. Fantastic writer and a great guy,
Speaker 2: I mean, a really great guy. And people like Brian Ferry,
Speaker 2: I mean, is Brian's a genius songwriter to me? So
Speaker 2: I wasn't. Particularly the song on that album which I
Speaker 2: heard in rehearsal, which I just loved was the title song,
Speaker 2: the Brothers and Arms song, And at the time, we
Speaker 2: were going through the Falklands War, which is what that
Speaker 2: song was about. It was very I mean, Dostras hardly
Speaker 2: be called a political group, but that was quite a
Speaker 2: moving song given that we had troops out there being
Speaker 2: blown up and the Argentinians were getting blown up as well,
Speaker 2: and one song nearly didn't make it onto it. That
Speaker 2: was Walk of Life. I walked into the studio in
Speaker 2: New York and Mark and Neil Drsman were mixing it.
Speaker 2: I hadn't heard it. And as I think I might
Speaker 2: have mentioned earlier, Mark was a big fan of the
Speaker 2: animals and he happened to like Alan Price's far Feasta
Speaker 2: organ sound and he'd got this deed did he did? Did?
Speaker 2: He did lick at the beginning. And I was listening
Speaker 2: to it and I said, what's this and Mark said, oh,
Speaker 2: it's a B side, because back then we had B sides.
Speaker 2: And I said that's a hit song. No it's not.
Speaker 2: And we had a bit of a debate, not an argument,
Speaker 2: and Neil Drsman's going, yeah, it's right, and Mark went no,
Speaker 2: I said, listen, he said. I said, so it's good
Speaker 2: enough to be a B side and people can hear it,
Speaker 2: but it's not good enough to go on the record.
Speaker 2: And he went, oh, all right. Then that song outsold
Speaker 2: money for nothing worldwide, and it's used in all these
Speaker 2: football commercials in America and what have you. Sometimes, I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't think of myself as being credited with anything
Speaker 2: other than my personal musical taste. That's the only thing
Speaker 2: that I bring to this. I don't listen to pop
Speaker 2: radio and I haven't in years. I don't know. I'm
Speaker 2: not thinking, oh, we need hits. One of my closest
Speaker 2: friends is a songwriter called Nikki Chin who wrote most
Speaker 2: of those glam rockets with Mike Chapman. And had dinner
Speaker 2: with him last night and he said to me we
Speaker 2: had fifty hits. Really, I said, I can only think
Speaker 2: of five of them. And he's like, because I always
Speaker 2: introduced him to people, Britain's worst songwriter by far is terrible.
Speaker 2: I mean, who could write? Can they can? Forkingness sake?
Speaker 2: So we had that record. As always happens in these situations,
Speaker 2: the album cover was a complete accident. Somebody's waving that
Speaker 2: National steel about and I can't remember the lady who
Speaker 2: took the pictures, but stuck a shot and we delivered it.
Speaker 2: And I had this whole world tour set up because
Speaker 2: by this time I had a pretty good idea of
Speaker 2: where we could play, the level we could play, and
Speaker 2: where we needed to go where we hadn't been before.
Speaker 2: Because one of the things you have to do with
Speaker 2: any band is keep it interesting and when you go.
Speaker 2: We were the first really big band to go and
Speaker 2: play in Israel. I mean sadly we couldn't do that
Speaker 2: obviously at the moment, but we played to a quarter
Speaker 2: of the population over three shows and they were going gaga,
Speaker 2: I mean completely bonkers, because nobody went and played in Israel.
Speaker 2: And yea, I used to find these promoters, mostly under
Speaker 2: a stone somewhere and they would we playing on that tour.
Speaker 2: We played that. We started in Israel, and then we
Speaker 2: went to Greece, then we went to the old Yugoslavia
Speaker 2: and worked our way up and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2: And we had my partner, Sadie doesn't believe in the
Speaker 2: idea of luck. She calls it perfect alignment. And I
Speaker 2: always think yeah, and we that was a wonderful piece
Speaker 2: of perfect alignment, which was not intended to be so.
Speaker 2: And that was doing live aid when we had money
Speaker 2: for nothing out with Sting. Oh you asked me how
Speaker 2: Sting appeared on that record. He was on the island surfing. Well,
Speaker 2: not on the island. He went in the sea for that.
Speaker 2: And the best place to eat on the island was
Speaker 2: the studio. There was a great chef up at George
Speaker 2: Martin studio, and one night he showed up in Monsrat
Speaker 2: Yes and Mark said, Tom, I've written I've written this
Speaker 2: really stupid song about MTV. You fancy playing on it?
Speaker 2: And Gordon as we call him, said yeah. So they
Speaker 2: went downstairs into the studio and just came up with
Speaker 2: the idea of sticking I Want my MTV on the
Speaker 2: front to the tune of Don't Stand So Close to
Speaker 2: Me and we had a we had How long did
Speaker 2: that take? Half an hour? I don't know, It's just
Speaker 2: one of those things. Sorry. I was just going to
Speaker 2: say that in pop music, spontaneity it's very difficult. You
Speaker 2: can't engineer spontaneity because of the definition of the word.
Speaker 2: But spontaneity is often produces a great result. And that
Speaker 2: was one.
Speaker 1: Okay, the record is done. At what point do you
Speaker 1: decide to make a video for money for nothing? And
Speaker 1: how does it become the video? It is one of
Speaker 1: the most iconic videos of the empty.
Speaker 2: Right, Okay, Well, it was pretty obvious to everybody. And
Speaker 2: I remember right at the beginning when I very first
Speaker 2: played that album to the record company people, and first
Speaker 2: it would have been the UK company. Everybody, you know,
Speaker 2: everybody jumped on that particular track, and we were because
Speaker 2: the whole thing, because everything had overrun. We were in
Speaker 2: a real time jam we had and we were doing
Speaker 2: various tax things and so on and so forth. We
Speaker 2: had to leave the country by March the thirty first
Speaker 2: of nineteen eighty five, so we had to make the
Speaker 2: video while we were on tour, and we had contacted
Speaker 2: Steve Barron, who had, amongst other things, shot Beat It
Speaker 2: for Michael Jackson, and we were looking for somebody to
Speaker 2: play the role of the redneck guy in the store.
Speaker 2: And I tried to think of the two biggest American
Speaker 2: rednecks I could come up with, and one of them
Speaker 2: was Buddy Rich and the other one was very dry
Speaker 2: comedian you've got when he's passed on what was his name,
Speaker 2: can't remember, and they both of course flipped it back
Speaker 2: and Steve came up with, well, he didn't come up
Speaker 2: with it, but he showed us that computer stuff, which
Speaker 2: was brand new then, which got around the problem of
Speaker 2: having somebody a redneck in it, because we could have
Speaker 2: a cartoon redneck, which is what we had. So we
Speaker 2: basically said yes, and he went off and he made
Speaker 2: that clip and the live sections were all shot at
Speaker 2: a sound check and a gig in Budapest, and the
Speaker 2: girl who's in it was Miss Hungary. Can't write this,
Speaker 2: can you?
Speaker 1: Okay? I bought the album day came out. I knew
Speaker 1: money for nothing before it hit MTV. But this kick
Speaker 1: as big as Dire Streets was. They kicked the whole
Speaker 1: thing into the stratosphere. So what was it like on
Speaker 1: your red.
Speaker 2: I'm going to say something that you It was funny.
Speaker 2: It was really funny. We'd been slogging away and climbing
Speaker 2: up the greasy pole and each step and suddenly we
Speaker 2: have a hit record with a lyric which is basically
Speaker 2: it's not a comedy record. But and it was written
Speaker 2: because he went into an electronics store down in Greenwich
Speaker 2: Village that's going to place down there, and there were
Speaker 2: these guys having this conversation and he just he got
Speaker 2: up a piece of Off Blokes notepad and he went
Speaker 2: and sat in the window display and he just listened.
Speaker 2: And he said to me he couldn't quite remember he
Speaker 2: thought of the band that was on the TV at
Speaker 2: the time, because of course they had fifty TVs all
Speaker 2: played on TV and he thought it was Motley Crue,
Speaker 2: something that my dear friend Dot McGee was very chuffed about.
Speaker 2: And so we had this tour that's totally sold out
Speaker 2: before we've even started. We've got this record, we've got
Speaker 2: some reasonably good art work, I suppose from dastress point
Speaker 2: of view, and we had this video which was, as
Speaker 2: you say, a bit of it was the first one
Speaker 2: ever played on MTV UK when they opened the station,
Speaker 2: and we had radio going nuts for it. So everything
Speaker 2: that had happened previously kind of got us to there,
Speaker 2: and the tour just took off. I mean it just
Speaker 2: took off.
Speaker 1: Well, people don't realize because of course, you know, this
Speaker 1: was by time we hit eighty five. It's no longer
Speaker 1: the advent of MTV. People had certain things. You spend
Speaker 1: the money, you have looked, you have outfits. We people
Speaker 1: didn't realize in America then and for a few years after,
Speaker 1: the Dire Strait was the biggest band in the world
Speaker 1: that could sell more tickets in anybody else around the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Probably no, I mean.
Speaker 1: You would see the stadium grosses. Let's not forget. Dire
Speaker 1: Streets didn't tick the boxes of the emptyv era when
Speaker 1: most of their success was No, it wasn't about flash,
Speaker 1: it wasn't about good looking guys. It wasn't about you know,
Speaker 1: syndromes or et cetera. So to have this, I mean,
Speaker 1: we should have such a thing today.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, but I'll tell you something, Bob, it's funny.
Speaker 2: And I don't know how many other people like me
Speaker 2: you've I know, you've interviewed a lot. When you're in
Speaker 2: the middle of it, you don't really you can't stand back.
Speaker 2: You're thinking more about tomorrow or are the trucks gonna
Speaker 2: break down? If you're a warrior or a very hands
Speaker 2: on person, which I am, and I don't consider that's
Speaker 2: the plus. By the way, I think that the biggest
Speaker 2: mistake I did. I didn't delegate enough. I was too
Speaker 2: I I was too detail oriented. I mean, don't forget
Speaker 2: I wasn't using an agent anywhere except the US, so
Speaker 2: I was doing all of that, dealing with all these promoters.
Speaker 2: But yeah, we had. That was an amazing experience. I mean,
Speaker 2: in terms of my life today, that would be top
Speaker 2: That's the greatest experience of my life other than you know,
Speaker 2: the birth of my kids. Things like that, and it
Speaker 2: and it was and it was so it was a
Speaker 2: very joyful experience. Everybody was getting on, everybody loved what
Speaker 2: they were doing. We had a fantastic crew, well the
Speaker 2: same people we always had, great front of our sound,
Speaker 2: great Chas. Herrington's lights were super. Every show was an event.
Speaker 2: I think if you're a manager, one of the best
Speaker 2: things you can do is try and create an event
Speaker 2: for the audience. And every one of our shows was
Speaker 2: an event. And when we got to Australia where we
Speaker 2: ended up for three months, which is ridiculous, and we
Speaker 2: sold over a million tickets and only little Ed Sheeran
Speaker 2: has managed more. He sold five tickets more than us.
Speaker 2: The biggest show we ever did was one hundred and
Speaker 2: two thousand people in Auckland with no support act. The
Speaker 2: actual capacity of the place was sixty thousand. And when
Speaker 2: we got there Gary van Egmund, the promoter who sadly
Speaker 2: passed away about two months ago, he came up running
Speaker 2: up to me because it had taken ages to get
Speaker 2: into the actual vein because of the people outside. He said,
Speaker 2: can you hold a show for a couple of hours?
Speaker 2: I said sure. He said, we've found all of these
Speaker 2: rolls of cloakroom tickets in the back of this place.
Speaker 2: It was a stock car racing stadium. We sold thirty nine,
Speaker 2: six hundred and thirty two cloakroom tickets to the people outside.
Speaker 1: Explain to the American audience what a cloakroom ticket is.
Speaker 2: Oh, if you put your coat in, If you come
Speaker 2: in a coat, give it to somebody and they'll hang
Speaker 2: it on a hook. And in exchange for your incredibly
Speaker 2: expensive mink coat, you'll get a small piece of paper
Speaker 2: with a number on it which you can claim when
Speaker 2: you leave.
Speaker 1: So where were these people They were in the cloakroom.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, the audience I'm talking about were outside.
Speaker 2: They hadn't got tickets. They'd come along on the chance
Speaker 2: they could get a ticket, and ticket touting secondary ticketing
Speaker 2: was not known in Australia New Zealand at the time.
Speaker 2: So these forty people had shown up on the off
Speaker 2: chance they could get in or they could hear it
Speaker 2: from outside because it was an outdoor show. And I
Speaker 2: had a promoter, one of the best we worked with,
Speaker 2: by far, who had the intelligence and creativity to go
Speaker 2: figure out, how can I do this? And they went
Speaker 2: looking around and they found all of these little they're
Speaker 2: just little paper tickets. So they sold those. So we
Speaker 2: in the two hours and it was an amazing, amazing show,
Speaker 2: because of course it is. I mean when you're when
Speaker 2: you're doing something like that, and I would go in
Speaker 2: the dressing room and I'd say to the band, you're
Speaker 2: not going to believe this, And there was quite a
Speaker 2: lot of you're not going to believe this in their career.
Speaker 2: You know, Princess Diana wants to wants to just do
Speaker 2: a concert for her. Okay, So Hewitt, that's Jim. It
Speaker 2: was king chance as he is now. And we did
Speaker 2: I mean every where we went. The mistake we made,
Speaker 2: but it wasn't mistake. We should have come back to
Speaker 2: the States, but people we'd been We've played two hundred
Speaker 2: and forty eight shows in twelve months, and people were
Speaker 2: at a point of caving in. So we didn't.
Speaker 1: Okay, you make another album on every street. Artistically very strong,
Speaker 1: nothing could sell as many copies, you know, Michael Jackson,
Speaker 1: you know, failed to constantly try to reach the peaks
Speaker 1: of Thriller. But it was both artistically in a commercial success.
Speaker 1: What was that experience and why was that the last record? Right?
Speaker 2: I'll just preface that by saying that up to now,
Speaker 2: I don't know the streaming numbers, but the Brothers in
Speaker 2: Arms record as a physical product sold about thirty six million.
Speaker 2: And after it and after that tour, there was a
Speaker 2: hiatus which lasted about six years. Now, with hindsight, which
Speaker 2: is a blessed thing, indeed, that was too long for
Speaker 2: a lot of reasons, and one was that the music
Speaker 2: scene had changed quite drastically, and if I simply mentioned
Speaker 2: Nirvana and Pearl Jam, that really.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: But we had a very big and a very loyal
Speaker 2: fan base, and I with hindsight, as I say, in
Speaker 2: a way, I wish we'd stopped with the Brothers record,
Speaker 2: But that's with hindsight. What we did do to fill
Speaker 2: that gap was complete a contractual requirement. It wasn't contractual,
Speaker 2: nobody was forcing it, and certainly we were in a
Speaker 2: position to choose the timing. But we put out a
Speaker 2: best of the Greatest Hits which sold fifteen million. And
Speaker 2: I'm just sitting there going this is just ridiculous. So
Speaker 2: and Mark was doing bits and pieces and I'm going
Speaker 2: to say something here which if he was sitting in
Speaker 2: front of him, he might well disagree with me. I
Speaker 2: don't know. I think for any artists when you have
Speaker 2: an app when you have one of those big single records,
Speaker 2: Dark Side of the Moon, the Saturday Night Fever is
Speaker 2: a really bad example, but Back in Black would be
Speaker 2: another one. They're great to have in every sense. And
Speaker 2: I don't mean the income, I mean just but they
Speaker 2: create this expectation and I'm stating the obvious right now,
Speaker 2: and I think that I got a bit intimidated by that.
Speaker 2: I think anybody would, because what happens when you have
Speaker 2: a big record like that is, first of all, your
Speaker 2: audience changes a bit. People start coming to shows who
Speaker 2: are not necessarily distraates music fans. They're becoming because it's
Speaker 2: the hip and relevant thing to be doing. They want
Speaker 2: to be seen. You start selling tickets in catered skyboxes.
Speaker 2: All of that element comes in. And what am with
Speaker 2: the on every Street record? Do you know? I'm trying
Speaker 2: to remember how that even got underway? Oh, I know
Speaker 2: what happened. We were having a conversation. There were some
Speaker 2: people in the organization and I'm including somebody in my
Speaker 2: office who were deciding to sort of leave. And the
Speaker 2: line was I kind of there's nothing going on I'm
Speaker 2: wasting my life and I was getting a bit. But
Speaker 2: on the other hand, I had things like the chet
Speaker 2: Atkins record and you know, to go to Nashville to
Speaker 2: meet chat Atkins and end up having you know, dinner
Speaker 2: with Scottie Moore and DJ Fontana and the whole thing
Speaker 2: that goes with that. And I'm a groupie at the
Speaker 2: end of the day, I'm a groupie for the stuff
Speaker 2: I grew up listening to. I mean, when I met
Speaker 2: Buddy Rich, I didn't I couldn't speak, which is just
Speaker 2: as well because he couldn't stop. And so there was
Speaker 2: a camera point when one particular person basically said I'm leaving,
Speaker 2: and I said, you need to tell Mark and John.
Speaker 2: Mark and John John. John had done a couple of
Speaker 2: solo records which were so so, and we went to
Speaker 2: a little a burger place called Tutsis in Holland Park
Speaker 2: in London, and my colleague said to Mark, I'm done,
Speaker 2: I'm going to go, and Mark said, he says, I
Speaker 2: don't want you to leave, and this guy said, well,
Speaker 2: you know, there's nothing happening, and and Mark suddenly said,
Speaker 2: completely out of the blue, you could have you could
Speaker 2: have literally locked me over with a feather. He said, well, actually,
Speaker 2: I've got some songs together. Why don't we get the
Speaker 2: band back together and do it with the band? And
Speaker 2: I remember saying, no disrespect to so and so, but
Speaker 2: that is a ridiculous reason for doing a record, to
Speaker 2: get somebody to stay. And he said, to please the
Speaker 2: other guy much and Mark said yeah, he said, but
Speaker 2: you know, it's what I do best, It's why I
Speaker 2: enjoy doing the most. So he told we got everybody
Speaker 2: back together, and they went into rehearsals. And by this
Speaker 2: time he had been seduced, if you like, by the
Speaker 2: Nashville scene, which I had very mixed feelings about. I
Speaker 2: have no issue at all with musicians making money professionally,
Speaker 2: that's what they do. But it was quite apparent to
Speaker 2: me that the amount of stroking that was going on
Speaker 2: in Nashville from people there in Mart's direction was not
Speaker 2: because they thought his music was great. But he was
Speaker 2: a big rock star who'd come to town and it
Speaker 2: was very possible that they could probably hitch a ride,
Speaker 2: and quite a lot of them did, and they're great
Speaker 2: people and great players. But he was very I think
Speaker 2: a little bit naive about that. And anyway, that influence,
Speaker 2: and particularly in the form of Paul Franklin, who was
Speaker 2: playing pedal steel guitar extremely well, am I add at
Speaker 2: not in Hillbery sound checks. He and I used to
Speaker 2: play just we'd just go on the stage together, just
Speaker 2: me and and play Orange Blossom Special as fast as
Speaker 2: we could possibly play it, and every sound check it
Speaker 2: would get faster and faster and faster. So Paul came
Speaker 2: into the group and they made that record which had
Speaker 2: this sort of bit of a country flavor to it,
Speaker 2: and on a personal level, I didn't think that it
Speaker 2: was not that it wasn't as commercial as Brothers and Arms.
Speaker 2: I didn't think it was as good an album as
Speaker 2: some of the ones we've done in the past. I
Speaker 2: thought there were some tracks on it that were fault fillers.
Speaker 2: Calling Elvis to me is a lazy song. I love
Speaker 2: the guitar sound on that, Yeah, yeah, hang on. There's
Speaker 2: a qualification to that, which is that that which was
Speaker 2: saved by Jeff Paccaro bless him, I r I p
Speaker 2: and by Mart's guitar playing on it, but doing a song,
Speaker 2: you know, waffling on with Elvis's song titles. It's a
Speaker 2: bit lazy to me. I really liked the title track.
Speaker 2: I thought You and Your Friend, which is the one
Speaker 2: with the Doughbra solo on it was brilliant. But well,
Speaker 2: that's what I had to work with when you're a man,
Speaker 2: and you know we're talking relative here, because most managers
Speaker 2: don't get a record like that in their lives to
Speaker 2: work with. And we and I made a mistake, and
Speaker 2: it was it was made in good faith. I over
Speaker 2: egged the size of the venues and night and multiple
Speaker 2: night things that we were planning to do. And in
Speaker 2: some countries it worked. UK, Europe no problem. Australia was okay,
Speaker 2: but it was we've kind of left it too long
Speaker 2: in a way, and the US was not good. I
Speaker 2: mean we were okay in on the two coasts and
Speaker 2: in Canada, but the middle, it was the middle was
Speaker 2: a you needed a hit single kind of thing, get
Speaker 2: over in Kansas. But that's you know, I mean, it
Speaker 2: sold seven million tickets, so people would say, oh, what
Speaker 2: are you moaning about, But it's just I think that's
Speaker 2: to do with the pride that you have in your
Speaker 2: work and trying to get things right in what is
Speaker 2: an incredibly speculative kind of thing. And what a lot
Speaker 2: of other people. A lot of people don't realize, and
Speaker 2: certainly the audience didn't realize. When you're working with a
Speaker 2: band at that level, you're planning at least a year ahead,
Speaker 2: probably eighteen months. And there was one thing, of course,
Speaker 2: that I could never have anticipated, and that was the
Speaker 2: outbreak of the goal, for which totally stuffed us because
Speaker 2: I had to I had done put nearly the whole
Speaker 2: thing together, and I had to dump it all and
Speaker 2: start again. I put that tour together twice.
Speaker 1: Okay, So how many dates were there on that tour.
Speaker 2: Two hundred and that one? I think it was about
Speaker 2: two hundred and thirty five.
Speaker 1: Okay, you play the two hundred and thirtieth date. Everybody's
Speaker 1: worn out. Yeah. Do you have a sense that this
Speaker 1: is it? Or you do?
Speaker 2: I canceled South America and South Africa because I didn't
Speaker 2: think i'd have a band to do it. Inter Band
Speaker 2: relationships were fraught in the extreme because because our leader
Speaker 2: was not a happy bunny, and he was, there was
Speaker 2: an awful lot going something that people who are fans
Speaker 2: of popular music and love their particular act, be it
Speaker 2: Coldplay or whoever, can never know the impact that personal
Speaker 2: relationships outside of a band and marriage is what I'm
Speaker 2: thinking of the impact that they have on the artistic side.
Speaker 2: It's huge, and it was huge in that case. It
Speaker 2: was a very very very difficult period because people's personal
Speaker 2: lives were in tatus.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the tour stops. Is there ever a conscious
Speaker 1: decision to say we're done, we're not going to go
Speaker 1: out as dire streets or it just never happened again.
Speaker 2: No nobody ever told me. When they finished in a
Speaker 2: town in called Zaragotho or Zaragoza in Spain, they left
Speaker 2: the stage, they got on the private plane back to
Speaker 2: Barcelona where we were staying. Nobody spoke to each other.
Speaker 2: There was no end of tour party, There was no
Speaker 2: end of tour goodbyes. There were no hugs. Everybody went
Speaker 2: their separate ways. Chris Whitten, who was the drummer on
Speaker 2: that tour, who'd been with Paul McCartney up to that,
Speaker 2: has never spoken to Mark since.
Speaker 1: Was there that level of dissension and the animosity in
Speaker 1: the group.
Speaker 2: It was really bad. They might say that I'm completely
Speaker 2: wrong or that I'm exaggerating. I can only tell you
Speaker 2: that from my point of view, it was horrendous. We
Speaker 2: had gone from being at the top of the pile,
Speaker 2: as you've eloquently described. You See, the thing is that
Speaker 2: people look at it and they say, when you sold
Speaker 2: a lot of tickets and he made a lot of money,
Speaker 2: and that record did twelve million physical more. So, all
Speaker 2: of that statistically sounds great, but when when you're Paul
Speaker 2: Franklin was so miserable. When I went out to Barcelona
Speaker 2: at the end of that time, and I took Peter
Speaker 2: Grant with me, led Zeppelin's manager the last gigs, I
Speaker 2: think Peter ever went to him. And when I got there,
Speaker 2: the guys were having a day off before doing six
Speaker 2: nights in Barcelona, I think it was, And I asked
Speaker 2: our tour manager where Paul Franklin was. He said, oh,
Speaker 2: one days off, he said. He takes a load of
Speaker 2: sleeping pills and goes to bed and sleeps through so
Speaker 2: that he doesn't have to mix with anybody else. Ah,
Speaker 2: So it's like that. It was awful. The things I
Speaker 2: could tell you, not because I'm not not telling you
Speaker 2: because they're private, but because they're they're so awful that
Speaker 2: you and your audience would just go, oh, this guy's
Speaker 2: making this out. This is out. This starts straight. So
Speaker 2: I love their music, you know, just it was just
Speaker 2: I have worked over the many years of my career
Speaker 2: with bands which were I remember years and years ago,
Speaker 2: years and years ago, when Richie was still in the
Speaker 2: group Deep Purple, five cars, five dressing rooms didn't speak
Speaker 2: to each other, and Richie would frequently refuse point blank
Speaker 2: to play any guitar solos, so John Lord had to
Speaker 2: hunt the Hammond organ back was forwards across the stage.
Speaker 2: Uh black Sabbath who I happened to laugh. And they
Speaker 2: were great guys because they were so off the wall,
Speaker 2: but they were everybody's fighting and squabbling. I did a
Speaker 2: tour with an American band called War, who Eric Burdens
Speaker 2: sang with for a while. War could not have been
Speaker 2: more aptly named. They would regularly throw furniture at each other.
Speaker 2: There was always a bill for broken chairs and tables
Speaker 2: and crockery. I don't know what it is. I mean,
Speaker 2: somebody once said to me, if you got back into management,
Speaker 2: and that's not going to happen, no, But if you did,
Speaker 2: I said, I try and find a folks singer. It's
Speaker 2: just on their own who's unmarried. Just trust trust them,
Speaker 2: Ed Sheeran come and you know it just and the
Speaker 2: fact that the record, you know, there's a difference, a
Speaker 2: huge difference in our game between a hit record and
Speaker 2: a hot record. Brothers in Arms was on fire and
Speaker 2: on every street somebody had come along with a fire
Speaker 2: bucket and tipped it over it he didn't have And
Speaker 2: we were in Adelaide. The previous time in Adelaide on
Speaker 2: the Brothers and Arms tour, we played to fifty five
Speaker 2: thousand people in a stadium. On this tour, I had
Speaker 2: completely miscalculated. And I'm going to share the blame with
Speaker 2: the promoter, Gary because unfortunately he's passed on. But you know,
Speaker 2: we had broken all these records in Australia, so you
Speaker 2: have certain assumptions planted in your mind. Oh, we can
Speaker 2: do this again. Set the thing up. I arrive in
Speaker 2: Australia a few days after the guys because they've gone
Speaker 2: there to rehearse with the local equipment, and that Gary
Speaker 2: picks me up at the airport and I'm getting ticket
Speaker 2: counts all the time, and I noticed that these ticket
Speaker 2: counts are not It's like it's like a movie, you know,
Speaker 2: in the movie world. They know on the first night
Speaker 2: and I'm looking at this figure for Adelaide and it's like,
Speaker 2: we sold fifty five thousand tickets last time, and we've
Speaker 2: sold six thousand tickets this time. Holy, So we move
Speaker 2: it into another venue and we sell eight thousand tickets,
Speaker 2: which fills the other venue. So that you could say
Speaker 2: that the fault was my fault because I put them
Speaker 2: in a venue that was too big. But in defense
Speaker 2: of myself, what would have happened if I'd put them
Speaker 2: in an eight thousand seater and fifty five thousand people
Speaker 2: had wanted to come? So you're in a no win.
Speaker 2: And I remember after that show, Mark and I were
Speaker 2: having a drink in this hotel and there were two
Speaker 2: ladies there from the record company, entirely professionally, I should add,
Speaker 2: and he suddenly said to me, he said, I made
Speaker 2: a crap record in front of the record company people.
Speaker 2: And I went, no, you didn't. I said, you didn't
Speaker 2: make a commercial record. There's a difference. And I'm thinking
Speaker 2: these two girls are going to go back and repeat.
Speaker 2: This conversation is going to go right round them, and
Speaker 2: he just kind of got up and went to bed.
Speaker 2: That comes with the territory, you know, if you there
Speaker 2: there are ants out there that have had a lifetime
Speaker 2: of god knows how many decades. The Stones Bruce Springsteen
Speaker 2: when they were going to Floyd, uh, and I sometimes
Speaker 2: look at them and I think, I mean, good for
Speaker 2: good for you. You've managed somehow, you've managed to keep
Speaker 2: the plates spinning. And the interesting thing to me about
Speaker 2: the Stones, for instances is that they don't make particularly
Speaker 2: good records. I mean, sometimes they come out with one
Speaker 2: that's better than the others, but they've turned the big
Speaker 2: outdoor stadium into an art form. Pink Floyd turned that
Speaker 2: into an art form. But then then then you've got
Speaker 2: these two characters, Roger and David, who just don't get.
Speaker 1: On, okay, putting a bow on it. How much longer
Speaker 1: do you work with Mark? And how does it end?
Speaker 1: With Mark?
Speaker 2: Right? Well, after the on Every Street thing on every
Speaker 2: Street to and record staggered literally like a very very
Speaker 2: very drunk man towards the gutter, and then he fell
Speaker 2: in it. It was quite clear at the end of
Speaker 2: that well, he actually was quite clear from almost the
Speaker 2: beginning of it that we were doing it for the
Speaker 2: wrong reason, and that written were all reasons, partly monetary,
Speaker 2: partly don't take the strong way. But things that I
Speaker 2: probably shouldn't tell you about, personal stuff, you know, that
Speaker 2: was going on, and the band just it wasn't even
Speaker 2: spoken about. That was what was so strange. Nobody sat around,
Speaker 2: nobody gave it six months and just said, you know
Speaker 2: what a war hand. How do we feel about this?
Speaker 2: Because because you've got a lot of very tight relationships
Speaker 2: that have gone on at that point for nearly twenty
Speaker 2: twenty plus years, and there are people who were just
Speaker 2: completely not speaking to each other and haven't to this day.
Speaker 2: And Mark decided, and he was propelled at least in
Speaker 2: part by the Nashville connection. If you like that he
Speaker 2: was going to he was obviously going to record the
Speaker 2: songs that he wrote and what he wanted I think,
Speaker 2: and this is me being an amateur psychiatrist, which I'm not.
Speaker 2: He wanted to get himself into a position where he
Speaker 2: was completely in control. He wasn't having to everybody who's
Speaker 2: played in the units he's had since, and they've really
Speaker 2: been pretty much the same people are. Essentially, you're a
Speaker 2: division Nashville studio players, and studio players by definition essentially
Speaker 2: play what they're told. I mean Richard Bennett, who plays
Speaker 2: guitar with him. Was with Neil Diamond for nineteen years
Speaker 2: playing I Am, I said, for nineteen years and Sweet
Speaker 2: Caroline and soon it's great stuff. But so he did
Speaker 2: the Golden Heart record, and I spent quite a bit
Speaker 2: of time out in Nashville, which, if you're not a player,
Speaker 2: is not a town which is incredibly stimulating to be in.
Speaker 2: And I'm not having a pop at Nashville. And as
Speaker 2: that record was taking form, I was starting to have doubts.
Speaker 2: It's a strange thing when you go into a situation
Speaker 2: with the belief and passion and love that I had
Speaker 2: for them from for the first ten years, from seventy
Speaker 2: eight to eighty eight, and suddenly find yourself just not
Speaker 2: liking it, not liking the music as much. And that's
Speaker 2: not to say I don't use terms like good and bad,
Speaker 2: because it's so personal the music I listened to personally,
Speaker 2: people would probably be quite surprised because I don't listen
Speaker 2: to rock and pop music except the stuff I grew up.
Speaker 2: I listened to a lot of film music. I'd listen
Speaker 2: to a huge amount of jazz, especially from the sixties
Speaker 2: and seventies, and not fusion stuff, but anyway, and that's
Speaker 2: by the bye, and he did that record, and there
Speaker 2: was I was a bit on. I think the impact,
Speaker 2: one of the impacts of the on every street experience
Speaker 2: was it had made me very unshure. That had a
Speaker 2: big impact on all of us mentally and physically, not
Speaker 2: in a good way. And I suddenly had lost my
Speaker 2: confidence in my own ability to pitch the thing at
Speaker 2: the right level. So when it came to live work,
Speaker 2: those Nashville players are not cheap, or you could say
Speaker 2: they're very cheap, because they they definitely it's how they
Speaker 2: make their living. I don't have a problem with that.
Speaker 2: And we had a very expensive band, and we had
Speaker 2: quite a big production, and I didn't feel confident enough
Speaker 2: to play big places. So it was break even time, really.
Speaker 2: And the other problem is that he, by which I
Speaker 2: mean Mark, he did not have the profile. This might
Speaker 2: sound strange, but you've got to pitch this back to
Speaker 2: that period of time two thousands. He wasn't. He didn't
Speaker 2: have the profile that Sting had within the police, or
Speaker 2: Eric had within Derek and the Dominoes, or he wasn't.
Speaker 2: He came in the office one morning and I happened
Speaker 2: to be downstairs talking to the girls, and he said
Speaker 2: something quite interesting. He said, because he'd obviously been watching
Speaker 2: Breakfast TV. And he said to me, don't you think
Speaker 2: it's strange that people like Elton and Rod go on
Speaker 2: TV and tell millions of strangers about the most intimate
Speaker 2: things in their lives. Like I said, well, that's their personalities.
Speaker 2: And I don't know whether you've read Elton's book. Elton's
Speaker 2: book is about as open a book as you could
Speaker 2: possibly find, and that's what Elton's personality is. And Rod
Speaker 2: is a no. I'm just using these two examples because
Speaker 2: he did. And Run Stewart knows the game backwards forwards
Speaker 2: upside down. I interviewed Narl Rogers a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2: It's brilliant because he knows what to do, he knows
Speaker 2: how to do it, and he's not people like that are.
Speaker 2: It's just they're happy to be stars. Mark's quite a
Speaker 2: private person. He's not particularly he doesn't enjoy he never
Speaker 2: enjoyed any of the ass the stuff that comes with
Speaker 2: being a rock star, whatever that is. And you asked
Speaker 2: what happened with me and him, Well, we did the
Speaker 2: Golden Heart thing, And I mean commercially that was quite
Speaker 2: successful and the tour did okay given the level that
Speaker 2: we were doing it at, and but the relationship, the
Speaker 2: relationship between us was shifting and we were both older. Obviously,
Speaker 2: it's very different when you're twenty six twenty seven and
Speaker 2: you meet somebody who's got a red fender and it
Speaker 2: makes you think that the shadows and by this time
Speaker 2: you're married or you're divorced, you've got children, you've got
Speaker 2: the responsibilities, and you think you think like a fifty
Speaker 2: year old person, not a twenty five year old person.
Speaker 2: And if you're not thinking like a fifty year old person,
Speaker 2: then something's wrong. And it was quite obvious as I
Speaker 2: as I was alluding to with the Australian thing. You know,
Speaker 2: the music scene is ever changing, there's new things coming along.
Speaker 2: Getting marked man offer on television was difficult. There's a
Speaker 2: line of people trying to get those slots and how
Speaker 2: many slots are there and in this country not many.
Speaker 2: And so he ended up he's the guy who took
Speaker 2: over from me, had him on programs with a guy
Speaker 2: who was basically a market gardener. Yeah, I mean kind
Speaker 2: of you end up. It's almost a sense of desperation
Speaker 2: sets in and everybody's coming along and the whole it's
Speaker 2: just even saying, really, the whole music industry changed. It
Speaker 2: became in the eighties and we were in the We
Speaker 2: were in the change. It went from being pretty chaotic
Speaker 2: to being corporate, and it's corporate now. So the last
Speaker 2: interview I did for the ILMC was with j Marciano
Speaker 2: from AG Great Guy, Lovely Man, and I actually said
Speaker 2: to him, I said, does AG have a sense of humor?
Speaker 2: And he said yes. I just started laughing. He does
Speaker 2: the corporations have a sense of hum you know. I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't have any beef against this. What happened in
Speaker 2: the music interest to me, and particularly the live side,
Speaker 2: was totally inevitable. It was completely inevitable.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to Mark. Yes, sorry, did he say
Speaker 1: we're done or did you say we're done?
Speaker 2: Oh? It was one of the weirdest meetings I've ever
Speaker 2: had in my life. And after it, after it, I
Speaker 2: honestly didn't know what had happened. I didn't know if
Speaker 2: I'd been sacked or I'd quit. We had a conversation
Speaker 2: he had done the record that came out of selling
Speaker 2: to Philadelphia and we were talking about the promotion on it,
Speaker 2: and without giving away too many secrets, as it were,
Speaker 2: he had agreed to do a certain amount of promotion
Speaker 2: which I had then set up, which was principally our
Speaker 2: old favorites, video clip TVs gigs, but he didn't want
Speaker 2: to do more than four months touring, which was fun.
Speaker 2: And I had put in all the TVs that you
Speaker 2: can get for somebody like him, because you can't get
Speaker 2: somebody like that or anybody of that age onto Saturday
Speaker 2: morning kids television shows. So it was the lettermans or
Speaker 2: whether the post is now Stephen Colbert, whoever it is,
Speaker 2: it was the other here Michael Parkinson, the kind of
Speaker 2: chat show format with musical guest, and having got the
Speaker 2: whole lot together in a very kind of odd way,
Speaker 2: he decided he didn't want to do any of them.
Speaker 2: And his reason was that he did not want to
Speaker 2: be as public a figure as that would make him.
Speaker 2: And I was not best pleased because I'd spent quite
Speaker 2: a long time doing this and it wasn't a particularly
Speaker 2: easy thing to do, and I didn't want the record
Speaker 2: companies and someone to be demotivated, because when you go
Speaker 2: to Belgium to do, Telly, you end up doing a
Speaker 2: pile of interviews, so you have print going on, or
Speaker 2: whatever the technology is of the time. And we had
Speaker 2: and his pa rang me up and told me, and
Speaker 2: I had him come into the office one evening, just
Speaker 2: me and him, and we had a very surreal conversation
Speaker 2: which ended with him, well, it ended with I don't
Speaker 2: know how honestly, if I could explain it to you,
Speaker 2: I would. I don't really know what happened. It was
Speaker 2: a bit like Bill's comment about Robert Plant. I just
Speaker 2: thought that he said something to me which was so upset.
Speaker 2: I just thought, I can't do this anymore. And you
Speaker 2: have to put that in the context. And I would
Speaker 2: say that of Bill, and Bill would absolutely agree with me.
Speaker 2: It's a lot easier to be able to say that
Speaker 2: when you can, you know, and sometimes in life it's
Speaker 2: like marriages and all that. Everybody uses that example, and
Speaker 2: actually managing acts is not like being married. But things
Speaker 2: just have run their course, and it had run its course,
Speaker 2: and it had probably run it. We were probably quite
Speaker 2: a bit by our cell by day, and I said
Speaker 2: to him, I mentioned somebody else who happened to be
Speaker 2: in the building at the time. For you know, who
Speaker 2: was working on the promo tool that we I thought
Speaker 2: we were going to do. And I said, if you
Speaker 2: pay him a salary, he knows how to get you
Speaker 2: from A to B and do you think he's funny?
Speaker 2: So that's what happened. And then the irony was that
Speaker 2: he went off and he did seventy television shows Europe
Speaker 2: in the UK on that record. I have don't understand
Speaker 2: and our relationship now he lives literally one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty yards from where I'm speaking to you from this apartment,
Speaker 2: and I don't see him. We have the occasional interaction
Speaker 2: which is usually something to do with which happened when
Speaker 2: we were together. I mean, when he went on tour
Speaker 2: with Bob Dylan, you know, a double bill thing. I
Speaker 2: got an email from him that in itself is amazing.
Speaker 2: There was a wonderful interview some years ago with Charlie
Speaker 2: Watson Ronnie Wood, and Ronnie was telling Charlie Charlie was
Speaker 2: a wonderful man, fantastic guy. He mentioned that Keith Richards
Speaker 2: had sent an email and I thought Charli was going
Speaker 2: to have a comera, but Mars would send me an
Speaker 2: email and he sent me this email, I can do
Speaker 2: it for baiting for you. It said, Well, he hasn't
Speaker 2: spoken to me, he hasn't spoken to my manager, he
Speaker 2: hasn't spoken to my band, and he hasn't spoken to
Speaker 2: any of my crew. He hasn't spoken to his band,
Speaker 2: and he hasn't spoken to his manager. Nothing changes, Boss.
Speaker 2: The love mark didn't even tell me who it was
Speaker 2: and it was straight away.
Speaker 1: Okay, it's the it's.
Speaker 2: The sorry just to I know we're going to be
Speaker 2: finishing up the It's the characters for the generation that
Speaker 2: I belong to that has made it interesting. The people
Speaker 2: who've got a sense of humor about themselves. Somebody who
Speaker 2: was like that, who people would never imagine she was
Speaker 2: like that, was Tina Toern. Tina was so funny. She
Speaker 2: was such a gossip. Who's going out with so and so,
Speaker 2: Who's was who's having sex with? Brilliant? Brilliant?
Speaker 1: Okay, Dire Streets was very successful. We went through your
Speaker 1: various percentages. What did you do with all the money?
Speaker 2: Yeah, being from the North of England and having a
Speaker 2: father who was the principal of a large grammar school,
Speaker 2: I was careful put it into property pension funds because
Speaker 2: we get a very good tax break thing in this
Speaker 2: country on pension funds, had a great life. I'm in
Speaker 2: traveled a lot because when you're traveling with bands, you're
Speaker 2: not traveling. You're in a just You're in this just box.
Speaker 2: I don't say this, should I say this? I helped
Speaker 2: a few people. I think there's a kind of when
Speaker 2: you have such a when you have such a when
Speaker 2: you live your dream, when you get to live your dream.
Speaker 2: I never stopped being surprised about the financial end. Ever,
Speaker 2: I could never get my head around it at all.
Speaker 2: So sometimes you help people out. You certainly, of course
Speaker 2: help your kids out if you can. My kids are
Speaker 2: grown now. I mean I've got grandchildren. My grandson's fifteen
Speaker 2: and my granddaughter's thirteen, and I'm very proud of my kids.
Speaker 2: My daughters are very high ranked lawyer at Meta for
Speaker 2: Better or Worse, driving her mad and my son teaches
Speaker 2: foreign students English on the web, and they're great. They're
Speaker 2: totally different. But I have I don't buy art or stuff,
Speaker 2: but I've got some nice antiques. But I'm not particularly
Speaker 2: I think you go through phases. I always say that
Speaker 2: people in the rock and roll game, they go through
Speaker 2: their art New vaux phase, and then they go through
Speaker 2: their Art Deco phase and then they come out at
Speaker 2: the other end and get a sofa that's comfortable to
Speaker 2: sit on. And it's always like that, and there's a
Speaker 2: real pressure in our society, of course, because it's capitalist consumers.
Speaker 2: I might have said this to you was before. It's
Speaker 2: a long time since I didn't pick up the check
Speaker 2: at dinner.
Speaker 1: But that's yes, let's just go one step further. You
Speaker 1: were the one and only manager of dire streets, which
Speaker 1: is not usually the case, and usually when they get
Speaker 1: a new manager there's an argument over the sunset clause
Speaker 1: and all this other stuff. In your particular case, are
Speaker 1: you still a royalty participant on the stuff you were
Speaker 1: involved with?
Speaker 2: No, but I chose not to be. I sold those rights.
Speaker 1: And how long agoing too?
Speaker 2: Oh, I told those about six years ago, seven years
Speaker 2: ago to a company called Royalty Exchange in Denver. I
Speaker 2: mean that that was partly to do with a divorce
Speaker 2: that was looming. It was partly to do with I
Speaker 2: just kind of got fed up running it all, and
Speaker 2: it was partly to do with the fact that there
Speaker 2: was a decline. Now I'm not saying that it's a
Speaker 2: massive decline. And I don't know because I don't get
Speaker 2: statements anymore, but I'm sure that the distracts catalogue that
Speaker 2: I need to qualify this. I had a sunset clause
Speaker 2: on publishing which had a cut off date. It was long,
Speaker 2: but the cutoff date had passed and the publishing was
Speaker 2: about sixty percent of the total. And the record side,
Speaker 2: especially after streaming came in and the entire artistic community
Speaker 2: got stuffed, that had declined. And quite soon, of course
Speaker 2: there will be an Ai Nofler a little be even less.
Speaker 2: But I just then there were personal reasons, psychological reasons sometimes,
Speaker 2: you know, if you've had some of the stuff that
Speaker 2: went down at the end was pretty awful. And I'm
Speaker 2: not saying I'm not saying I'm blameless.
Speaker 1: Don't you talk about the end of the band or
Speaker 1: just before you solved your royalty interest?
Speaker 2: No, the end of the relationship with that side of
Speaker 2: the relationship with Mark. I mean, he and I perfectly
Speaker 2: polite with each other. I don't listen to his music,
Speaker 2: don't have I don't feel any connection with it. I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't know whether you know Bill curvisly sits around
Speaker 2: listening to Judas Priest albums when he goes home. Probably not.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Yeah, I think you. I learned a
Speaker 2: lot from Peter Grant. Now, Peter Grant is if you
Speaker 2: mentioned Peter Grant's name and people and people who remember him,
Speaker 2: and people do remember him, tell you a funny little
Speaker 2: story because it came up last night. Full enough. Back
Speaker 2: in the late sixties, Peter shared an office on Oxford
Speaker 2: Street in London with Mickey most famed South African record
Speaker 2: producer Nicky Chin the songwriter I was mentioning had got
Speaker 2: had met a waiter at a club called Annabel's whose
Speaker 2: name was Mike Chapman, who was serving him drinks. I
Speaker 2: love stuff like this, So somebody's told Mike. The disc
Speaker 2: jockeys told Mike that Nicky is a songwriter lyricist, and
Speaker 2: Mike's thick considers himself to be a melody writer. So
Speaker 2: Mike's sister NICKI, I write songs, and Nicky says I
Speaker 2: write songs, and that neither of them has written Diddley's Squit.
Speaker 2: But they get together. Nicky finds out the name and
Speaker 2: phone of the phone number of Mickey most Pa, so
Speaker 2: he rings her up and he asks her out on
Speaker 2: a blind date and she goes and on the day
Speaker 2: he inveigels Mickey's home phone number out of her. This
Speaker 2: is this is our this is when it was fun.
Speaker 2: So he goes how it's the middle of bloody night,
Speaker 2: and he calls the number, and this very gruff voice
Speaker 2: because he's just been woken up, says she's Mickey most
Speaker 2: who's that? And Nicky comes on and Nicky says, this
Speaker 2: is Nicky Chin. I'm a songwriter with Mike Chapman. We
Speaker 2: write hits. They haven't written a song. Sorry, they have
Speaker 2: written some songs, they've not had anything like it. And
Speaker 2: Micky mos did something which is probably what I would
Speaker 2: have done. Micky said to them, all right, my office
Speaker 2: eleven o'clock tomorrow morning, now fuck off. Puts the phone down.
Speaker 2: So they turn up and it turns out that NICKI
Speaker 2: that Mickey is sharing an office with Peter Grant and
Speaker 2: it's about twelve feet wide by sixteen foot long, and
Speaker 2: there are two desks and Peter, at the time weighed
Speaker 2: over three hundred pounds and Mickey's like this little bloke.
Speaker 2: And it's a famous address in London called one five
Speaker 2: to five Oxford Street because below them were Chris Wright
Speaker 2: and Terry Allis being Chrysalis, and below then were the
Speaker 2: Chrystalies agency booking out. So they go in and they
Speaker 2: give and they got some demos cut on forty five's
Speaker 2: No Sorry tape, Big Bum cassette tape. Ingo's the tape.
Speaker 2: Mickey plays the first song, stops it after ten seconds
Speaker 2: it's rubbish, rolls it on next one fifteen seconds, rubbish,
Speaker 2: Rubbish plays six songs, rubbish and he went, nah, nothing, nothing,
Speaker 2: there nothing. They can't do anything with any of that.
Speaker 2: And he says, you got anything else, and Nicky says, well,
Speaker 2: we've got one other song and it was cool old
Speaker 2: believe it or not. It was called Tom Tom turn around.
Speaker 2: Puts it in, listens to the whole thing. He says,
Speaker 2: which one of you two twats called me last night?
Speaker 2: And Nicki goes, that was me and he says, you
Speaker 2: said you're the one who said you can write hits,
Speaker 2: and Nicky goes, yeah. He says, you're right, you can.
Speaker 2: That's a hit. I'll take it, and it's a big hit.
Speaker 2: It's the number one for sweet groups when they go out.
Speaker 2: Nicky told Nicki this many years later, Peter says, I
Speaker 2: don't think you're going to get anywhere with those two.
Speaker 2: They're fucking newslet. And of course they had hit after
Speaker 2: hit after hit after it after it. What I learned
Speaker 2: from Peter was that the fuggy image was Peter was
Speaker 2: a shy man or not. He was quite private. He
Speaker 2: was quite shy, and it was all a bit of
Speaker 2: an act, helped by the fact that before he got
Speaker 2: into music he had been an amateur. He'd been a
Speaker 2: professional wrestler. His wrestling name was Count Bruno Alisi of Milan, Italy,
Speaker 2: which in itself is hilarious. And when I got to
Speaker 2: know Peter, and he had stopped the drugs by then,
Speaker 2: I must and he wouldn't mind me saying that. I mean,
Speaker 2: his his desk was like the last scene of Scarface
Speaker 2: most of the time, and he was his persona. He'd
Speaker 2: become a country gentleman. He used to wear suits with ties.
Speaker 2: And he lost. He lost. He said to me once,
Speaker 2: he said, ed I've lost a person in weight, And
Speaker 2: ARMED said to me once, he said, when I saw
Speaker 2: Peter Grant, I didn't recognize him, And he said, and
Speaker 2: the whole way you've spoken everything, and what Peter had
Speaker 2: done was he had decided. People constantly asking him to
Speaker 2: get back into the business, and would you manage this,
Speaker 2: and Queen Queen he turned Queen down. He understood. He
Speaker 2: said to me, when you have an experience like the
Speaker 2: one I had with led Zeppelin and the one you've
Speaker 2: had with Diastreit, there is no point trying to repeat it.
Speaker 2: And I completely agreed with that. There's no point going
Speaker 2: back and trying to recreate something that you did when
Speaker 2: you were thirty two and your I'm seventy five now.
Speaker 2: So what I do now, Bob, is I go music
Speaker 2: conferences like CMW in Toronto, and I ring up Don
Speaker 2: Passman and came to come and who else? Bill Silver
Speaker 2: and it'll be fun.
Speaker 1: Well, certainly two good friends of mine. I will see
Speaker 1: you in Toronto soon. There's a whole other area that
Speaker 1: we never even touched. Will do down the line, but
Speaker 1: I think we got most of the dire stray.
Speaker 2: Give me a hint on the other area.
Speaker 1: I'm just well, I would like to know more about
Speaker 1: Jerry Rafferty, who I'm a bit saying of. I would
Speaker 1: also like to hear about your experience with Brian Ferry
Speaker 1: and your experiences with a Blue Nile.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Taylor Swift, your.
Speaker 1: Favorite right, and how you promoted shows in college and
Speaker 1: how you became.
Speaker 2: An I will say, just to sign off, that's there's
Speaker 2: some great topics and stories there about everybody you just mentioned,
Speaker 2: because they all the other artists I work with. Jerry
Speaker 2: was difficult, but I loved Scott Walker, who you didn't
Speaker 2: mention just there. I thought Jerry had a prodigious talent
Speaker 2: which got wasted because of alcohol. I'm not going I
Speaker 2: won't do the thing now. And Brian. Brian's a one off,
Speaker 2: but I'm on good terms with everybody. I've represented most
Speaker 2: of them. It's the situation with Mark is just strange,
Speaker 2: and it's just you get to the point where you
Speaker 2: just accept the way things are. There's no point pushing
Speaker 2: against it. I've really enjoyed this. This has been great.
Speaker 2: I must say that you. I'm going to flatter you.
Speaker 2: I've been interviewed many times by many people. You're in
Speaker 2: a class of your own. Definitely, you've really know what
Speaker 2: happened makes makes somebody sweat.
Speaker 1: Well, on that note, and I'll see you in Toronto.
Speaker 2: You will. I wish you well, Bob.
Speaker 1: I wish you well. Until next time. This is Bob
Speaker 1: Left SAIDs