Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to a live edition of the Bible
Speaker 1: Left Nest Podcast. If I know him, my guest today
Speaker 1: has done it all. He's been a promoter, he's been
Speaker 1: an agent, a legendary manager. Please welcome Ed Bignell. Ed Hi,
Speaker 1: thank you, thanks for having me. Okay, just a couple
Speaker 1: of days ago, Michael Godynsky pass. What can you tell
Speaker 1: us about Godynsky in Australia. He was like a lot
Speaker 1: of people have said he was a one off. I
Speaker 1: mean he actually kind of. He really changed the Australian
Speaker 1: music scene almost singlehandedly, and he was a great character.
Speaker 1: It was a really really funny guy. I made to
Speaker 1: spend time with him was great. He was just just hilarious.
Speaker 1: He was a complete music enthusiast, which can't be said
Speaker 1: of some promoters these days. And he got to live straight.
Speaker 1: And condolences to his family, to his to say, his wife,
Speaker 1: and to everybody else in the Australian music business because
Speaker 1: he uh, he was definitely a one off, but the
Speaker 1: sadly beast for those who did meet him, he was
Speaker 1: really definitely a unique They broke the mold after that,
Speaker 1: and he always said, I said, what about spreading throughout
Speaker 1: the world. He said, no, I like being the King
Speaker 1: of Australia. I like being a big fish and a
Speaker 1: small And for those who didn't know, he literally did
Speaker 1: it all. You know he had not only started. You
Speaker 1: started with a record company, Mushroom Records, at the age
Speaker 1: of twenty and ultimately became frontier touring and so much more.
Speaker 1: But ed, you've done so much yourself. But let's look
Speaker 1: at the landscape today. What is the few were an
Speaker 1: agent and you're involved in uh growing w M. Endeavor
Speaker 1: in the UK. What is the future of the agency
Speaker 1: business in a marketplace where there's such consolidation amongst promoters.
Speaker 1: That's a tough one, Thanks very much, Bob. I think
Speaker 1: the big agencies, and I'm thinking particularly of William Morrison.
Speaker 1: Oh sorry, Endeavor. Let me curate myself and see a A.
Speaker 1: They're kind of too big to fail. They're the sort
Speaker 1: of they're the big banks at the time of the crash,
Speaker 1: and I think that they will keep going, but they
Speaker 1: will probably strip some of their activities. Back when I
Speaker 1: was at William Morris, which was William Morris. Back then
Speaker 1: they had all these divisions corporate consulting as one I
Speaker 1: remember and video games and all these kind of things,
Speaker 1: and nobody seemed to know what they did, and if
Speaker 1: you if you ask the question, nobody could tell you.
Speaker 1: And there's this, there's been this voracious appetite for gobbling
Speaker 1: up everything. That's a bit like Live Nation actually as well.
Speaker 1: They have this, these tentacles. I always compare them to
Speaker 1: that old Steve McQueen film The Blob, and the Blob
Speaker 1: basically gobbled up everything in its path, and these agencies
Speaker 1: are a bit like that. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: this pandemic has caused people to split off. There was
Speaker 1: a panel earlier today of the new agents and there
Speaker 1: were four people on it who have basically left where
Speaker 1: they were, including one gentlemen from CIA started their own businesses,
Speaker 1: and that's inevitable, that's always happened, I think. But the
Speaker 1: the corporate agency, to me, it didn't work for me
Speaker 1: personally because I found, I suppose, in simple terms, I
Speaker 1: found being an employee after being an employer for thirty
Speaker 1: years very difficult. I couldn't adapt to the corporate culture
Speaker 1: as it was then, and I couldn't adapt to the
Speaker 1: they I'm going to say this from the perspective of
Speaker 1: somebody here in London. They could not leave it alone.
Speaker 1: They were constantly micromanaging me in order to get to
Speaker 1: wherever they thought they wanted to get. Um. That's not
Speaker 1: a criticism of anybody, particularly although the management at the
Speaker 1: time nearly all of whom left very quickly after Arian
Speaker 1: Patrick came in. They were not I didn't think they
Speaker 1: were particularly competent. Okay, let's be very specific. You mentioned
Speaker 1: the consolidation of companies. Used to be the ten per centers,
Speaker 1: the movie agents and the live appearance agents. They were
Speaker 1: the driving force of revenue for these agencies. Now it's sports.
Speaker 1: They're involved with these giant funds. One would think as
Speaker 1: a music agent you feel like a zip on the
Speaker 1: end of the rear end of the whole enterprise. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you do. And that was one of the problems.
Speaker 1: And I think that if you if you come from
Speaker 1: the generation I come from, and I think you come from,
Speaker 1: and I'm not saying it doesn't happen with younger people
Speaker 1: coming into the game. Now, what inspired me was music.
Speaker 1: That was it. It was just there was nothing more
Speaker 1: than that. I was just completely and totally entranced by music,
Speaker 1: and music have pretty much every genre it's it's that's
Speaker 1: something that you don't here played in an agency offices,
Speaker 1: you don't talk about Um. That's not saying that agents
Speaker 1: don't go out and see bands, you know, five five,
Speaker 1: six nights a week, probably four or five different venues
Speaker 1: a night. But but you're you're right. Certainly, when you're
Speaker 1: in the in a management position in a company like that,
Speaker 1: you're you're talking about the elements that you're talking about,
Speaker 1: and what you're doing basically is clambering up through layer
Speaker 1: after later until you get to the person who signs
Speaker 1: the check. And under the William Morris management I worked with,
Speaker 1: the vain head of finance explained to me one day
Speaker 1: that his soul, he considered his sole job, was to
Speaker 1: stop Jim and Dave's mad schemes. This was Jim Wyatt
Speaker 1: and Dave Workesch after so, which was very encouraging to
Speaker 1: me because we were I had a great team here.
Speaker 1: We managed to break even in the first year. They
Speaker 1: budgeted to lose money for seven years and it was
Speaker 1: impossible to get anything done. The reaction time was ridiculously long.
Speaker 1: We missed out on getting extra office space for that reason.
Speaker 1: They just didn't act quickly. Enough, and after about two
Speaker 1: and a half years there was a particular incident. I
Speaker 1: was asked to sign a chit which gave us the
Speaker 1: right to have semi skim milk as well as full
Speaker 1: cram milk. This landed on my desk, and that happened
Speaker 1: to be the catalyst, and I just thought, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't sign up for this, and and I left.
Speaker 1: And it was very shortly after that Endeavor merged with them,
Speaker 1: and then within about a week took them over. And okay,
Speaker 1: now you come from the era when the whole business
Speaker 1: was built. This is one of the things that bothers me.
Speaker 1: They say, oh, music is the same as it ever was.
Speaker 1: It certainly is not now. I always analogize it to
Speaker 1: the internet. There was all this excitement starting in the
Speaker 1: mid nineties, certainly to about uh in the sixties we
Speaker 1: were developing the business. If you take about Peter Graham,
Speaker 1: Peter Graham flipped the touring business, said hey, the gig
Speaker 1: is going to sell out anyway, I might as well
Speaker 1: take the lion. Sure of the money. The question becomes
Speaker 1: I always say, a great musician not only is a
Speaker 1: bad business person, but they couldn't even at the seven
Speaker 1: eleven because they couldn't show up on time. I say
Speaker 1: the great same thing about the Titans and the history
Speaker 1: of the music business. They literally couldn't work anywhere else.
Speaker 1: They could only work for themselves. Do you believe A
Speaker 1: this is still true? And be what can you tell
Speaker 1: us about the kind of personality that created and drove
Speaker 1: this business? I'll take the second part of that first. Um.
Speaker 1: Of course my experiences UK and we were always following America,
Speaker 1: So the first thing really that happened here of any
Speaker 1: significance would have been a N seven when UM a
Speaker 1: little story for you, E M. I. Back in those
Speaker 1: days they had four A and R guys who sat
Speaker 1: on a committee, and back in those days, most of
Speaker 1: the UK labels just had kind of one off deals
Speaker 1: with American labels, so they had first refusal for an
Speaker 1: instance on the records coming out of our C A
Speaker 1: and I. In later the years of his life, I
Speaker 1: became very very close friends with Sir George Martin, who
Speaker 1: was a great He became almost like a second dad
Speaker 1: to me. And he was on this committee with three
Speaker 1: other A and OUR men, and a record arrived one
Speaker 1: day and they played it and they thought there was
Speaker 1: something wrong with it. They thought that the tape or
Speaker 1: something had stretched. So they call up the American company
Speaker 1: and said this record you've sent us, it's it's it
Speaker 1: doesn't sound right. And the American then said, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's the record. It's turning into a huge hit here.
Speaker 1: You should pick it up. Originally the vote was three
Speaker 1: votes against one vote four, which was George. George then
Speaker 1: set about, over a period of three or four weeks,
Speaker 1: brain busting the other three. Well, he only needed two
Speaker 1: more votes. He brain busted, He got two of them
Speaker 1: to agree, and they put it and that record was Heartbreak,
Speaker 1: Hotel Wow, and it changed everything. So George Martin was
Speaker 1: not just the beat was producer. He was also the
Speaker 1: person who and that record would have come out anyway obviously,
Speaker 1: but we only had the only labels I can remember
Speaker 1: back then were Decca, Pie and E M I, and
Speaker 1: one of them would have picked it up. And when
Speaker 1: I came into the music business, first of all, it
Speaker 1: wasn't called the music business. And secondly it wasn't a business.
Speaker 1: It was this completely chaotic thing which was full of
Speaker 1: some fairly dubious characters who had spotted that there was
Speaker 1: cash to be made and I emphasized the word cash
Speaker 1: in bags. And this was pre Brian Epstein. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about the period from about nineteen fifty seven to about
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, and there were there were there were guys,
Speaker 1: people with names like Larry Palms. He was nervous Mr Palms,
Speaker 1: Shillings and Pence because he and he had the first
Speaker 1: boy bands as we now call them. All of his
Speaker 1: acts were basically guys who looked great and it didn't
Speaker 1: matter whether they could sing. We had a couple of
Speaker 1: very early and pretty primitive television show six five Special
Speaker 1: which went out at five past six on a Saturday,
Speaker 1: and a show called Oh Boy, and it was Oh Boy,
Speaker 1: which had an edge to it. It had a producer
Speaker 1: called Jack Good who went on to do various of
Speaker 1: the things, and people like Cliff Richard and the Shadows
Speaker 1: Billy Fury out of a Faith got their start on
Speaker 1: that show. And that was a black and white TV show.
Speaker 1: And if you were thirteen years old, you made sure
Speaker 1: you you were at home on a Saturday at six
Speaker 1: o'clock to watch one of these two shows. The business
Speaker 1: was full of characters. Of course. One of the things
Speaker 1: about working in music you don't actually need any qualifications.
Speaker 1: You are what you are what you say you are.
Speaker 1: So if you're a promoter, if you walk into it.
Speaker 1: Back when I was in my early days as an agent,
Speaker 1: a promoter was somebody who walked in and said I'm
Speaker 1: a promoter, and within five minutes I'd be selling in
Speaker 1: deep purple dates and praying that they would earn that
Speaker 1: the the upfront ticket sales would be sufficient that they
Speaker 1: could pay the deposit, because of course nobody had escrow
Speaker 1: accounts back then. They just took the money and thought
Speaker 1: of it as their own money. And I think that
Speaker 1: the music really followed the early American rock and roll singers,
Speaker 1: the Evely Brothers, Elvis, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino,
Speaker 1: that Chuck Berry. Of course, that era, and that kind
Speaker 1: of metamorphosized into the Beatles era, and of course on
Speaker 1: the first Beatles record, or the first album that was
Speaker 1: released in the UK, there were a large number of covers,
Speaker 1: including a roll over Beethoven for instance, I can remember.
Speaker 1: So it was a very from about through to probably
Speaker 1: about sixty sixty seven. It was a pretty it was
Speaker 1: a bit wild West. We didn't have things like you
Speaker 1: had in America. Like Paola and that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: because we only had the BBC, and of course I can't.
Speaker 1: I should absolutely include this Radio Luxembourg. Radio Luxembourg, which
Speaker 1: was broadcast from Luxembourg, was played pop music from about
Speaker 1: seven o'clock in the evening to about midnight, and it
Speaker 1: had a fading signal and in the house I lived
Speaker 1: up in the north of England, the only place I
Speaker 1: could get the full signal was halfway up the staircase,
Speaker 1: so I would spend hours sitting on the staircase listening
Speaker 1: to Roy Orbison whoever it happened to be. The BBC
Speaker 1: only played pop music on one show, which was directed,
Speaker 1: which was for the American gies who were posted in Germany,
Speaker 1: and they would send in rickly was called Two Way
Speaker 1: Family Favorites. They would send in requests and once in
Speaker 1: a while Perry Como would be put aside and you'd here,
Speaker 1: don't be cruel, all shook up or whatever happened to be,
Speaker 1: and you would you would listen to this entire to
Speaker 1: our program in the hope that they would play one
Speaker 1: or two bona fide pop songs. And of course there
Speaker 1: were no categories. It was just pop music. We didn't
Speaker 1: have a rock and roll. There was no country, there
Speaker 1: was no heavy metal, there was no folk, none of that. Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm interrupting, but let's go back to what circumstances
Speaker 1: do you grow up in? Well. I was born Yorkshire,
Speaker 1: which is up in the north of England. I my
Speaker 1: father was the principle of a grammar school. My mom
Speaker 1: sort of my mom. I had a younger brother. We
Speaker 1: lived in a town halfway between Leeds and York until
Speaker 1: I was about eleven, and then we moved up to
Speaker 1: where they actually they built a brand new school, which
Speaker 1: was the largest in Yorkshire at the time, and we
Speaker 1: moved up there and lived at the school. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a private school, it was just a regular day school.
Speaker 1: When I was thirteen years old, that Christmas, my parents
Speaker 1: and I would love it if they were alive now
Speaker 1: because I would love to be able to ask them
Speaker 1: why they did this. They bought me Elvis's Gold Records,
Speaker 1: Volume one, which were the principle of a grammar school
Speaker 1: in Yorkshire. In that was quite a stretch and I
Speaker 1: can remember on Christmas morning going down putting it on
Speaker 1: the old radio gram you know, when the record would
Speaker 1: fall down with a crash and the first track on
Speaker 1: that record on side one is hound Dog and two
Speaker 1: minutes twenty six seconds later, my life had changed completely. Okay,
Speaker 1: many many years later, but many years later I had
Speaker 1: the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Scotty Moore and
Speaker 1: d J. Fontana, who played guitar and drums on that respectively,
Speaker 1: which was a complete trip. Oh yeah, when you meet
Speaker 1: your heroes from that era. Uh, but let's go back.
Speaker 1: One thing is as an American, I'm slightly younger than
Speaker 1: you in that we grew up with television. I had
Speaker 1: New York markets, so there were off six TV channels, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But we get the impression that in the UK it
Speaker 1: was economically disadvantage and this impacted the music scene. What
Speaker 1: was it like growing up in that era. Well, you're correct,
Speaker 1: because that was the post war era, so we as
Speaker 1: the UK. I remember once asking my parents what was
Speaker 1: the most significant thing in their lives, and without a
Speaker 1: second hesitation, they both said, in unison, the war something.
Speaker 1: And I remember my dad saying our lives were put
Speaker 1: on hold for seven years. So when we came out
Speaker 1: of the war, for a certain age group, we still
Speaker 1: had national service. You still had to go into the army.
Speaker 1: The economy, of course, had been completely ruined by the
Speaker 1: war effort we had. But my memory of that period
Speaker 1: is that everything was dark, everything was wet. It was
Speaker 1: always raining. It's raining now, but it's see different about then,
Speaker 1: and it was a very It was austerea. We didn't
Speaker 1: have a lot of the modern things I think that
Speaker 1: you've got in America. Before us, we didn't have central heating,
Speaker 1: didn't have had coal fires. You would take a bath
Speaker 1: in a tin in a tin bath. You as the
Speaker 1: son of a school teacher, you did that. You didn't
Speaker 1: have senating. You took a bath in a tin bath. Yes, absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I still do yeah, no, but no, yes absolutely. I
Speaker 1: mean he was he when he passed. I remember you
Speaker 1: going through your parents his things. He had kept every
Speaker 1: single pace lip he had ever received ever and when
Speaker 1: he passed, when she was in the mid seventies, sorry,
Speaker 1: in the wh he retired in the mid seventies. He
Speaker 1: was making a hundred pounds a week. That was a
Speaker 1: good salary back then. Well, okay, so are you the
Speaker 1: older brother the younger brother? I knew that, okay, So
Speaker 1: what was it like going to school? Were your father
Speaker 1: ro the head mask well fly enough. It was okay.
Speaker 1: I didn't get any stick from the other kids, but
Speaker 1: there were a few teachers who thought that they would
Speaker 1: kind of try it on a bit. I was. It
Speaker 1: was interesting education period because when I look back on it,
Speaker 1: you know, I as I say, they bought me this record,
Speaker 1: and then we two Within two years, I had seen
Speaker 1: an old black and white movie on on Sunday's The BBC,
Speaker 1: which was then just the BBC used to show old
Speaker 1: black and white movies from the kind of swing era,
Speaker 1: Buzzby Barkley kind of films. And they showed a movie
Speaker 1: called George White Scandals, which featured the American jazz drummer
Speaker 1: Jeane Crooper. And I'm watching Jane Crooper bash this white
Speaker 1: drum kit and light went on and I, instead of
Speaker 1: a bicycle, which would be the normal thing you'd want
Speaker 1: at that age, I decided I wanted to play drums,
Speaker 1: which got me to the point that I'm talking to you.
Speaker 1: And my dad we went into Leeds. We went to
Speaker 1: a music store called Kitchens. And there's an interesting coincidence
Speaker 1: here because at the exactly the same moment in time,
Speaker 1: Martinoffler was going to the same shop. He turned left
Speaker 1: into guitars. If you turned right you went to woodwinds,
Speaker 1: And as always happened in music shops, if you went
Speaker 1: into the basement, there was the drum department. And I
Speaker 1: went down into the basement and we bought a snare drum,
Speaker 1: a pair of sticks, a pair of brushes for six pounds.
Speaker 1: And the guy who was the salesman said, we give lessons,
Speaker 1: which was surprising to me because of course I thought
Speaker 1: you just hit them, which which you don't. And this
Speaker 1: was an excuse for him to sell my dad the
Speaker 1: body Rich drum Tutor, which is the drum tutter. All
Speaker 1: drummers know this drum tutor, which Buddy Rich just put
Speaker 1: his name to. He didn't write the thing. It was
Speaker 1: written by a guy called Henry Adler, and for an
Speaker 1: extra thirty shillings we got the book and I was
Speaker 1: enrolled for drum lessons, which I took for four years.
Speaker 1: Okay this when you bought the drums, you'd already heard
Speaker 1: Elvis Presley. Yes, yes, okay, you remember the brand name
Speaker 1: of that snare drum. It was a a pretty cheap
Speaker 1: British in put in imitation of American drums, and it
Speaker 1: was a company called Olympic, who were eventually bought by
Speaker 1: Premier Drums. Okay, so you start off with a snare drum,
Speaker 1: At what point do you get a complete kit? Wow?
Speaker 1: Like I had to save up money pocket money and
Speaker 1: basically got a bass drum next without a pedal, then
Speaker 1: got a pedal, and then got a symbol, a ride symbol,
Speaker 1: and then got high hats and probably took me eighteen months.
Speaker 1: And immediately, of course I got together with some pals
Speaker 1: at school who played guitar and bass and a singer.
Speaker 1: And of course back then you could be in a
Speaker 1: band if you owned an amplifier. That was the qualification.
Speaker 1: You didn't have to play. So we formed a beat group,
Speaker 1: this is pre beatles, and we promptly learned every single
Speaker 1: number by a group called Shadows, who were Cliff Richards
Speaker 1: backing band. The equivalent in America would have been a
Speaker 1: band like the Ventures. And we would play two and
Speaker 1: a half minute instrumentals and we learned probably eighty of
Speaker 1: them B sides, album tracks, and then we started about
Speaker 1: five the British blues boom was getting underway with people
Speaker 1: like Alexis Corner, very early rolling stones, pretty things, so
Speaker 1: we started we started to shift towards that, and of course,
Speaker 1: almost slightly before that, the Beatles are arrived, so we
Speaker 1: so of course, when the Beatles arrived, we did what
Speaker 1: every other band in Britain did. We dumped the entire
Speaker 1: Shadows repertoire and started learning Beatles song. Okay, let's say
Speaker 1: once you learn those, mute those songs, you got gigs? Correct? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: who booked those gigs? Parents? Okay, because usually the drummer
Speaker 1: is the business guy, we'll find that interest there. So
Speaker 1: many drummers would survived the bands and careers like you had.
Speaker 1: So what kind of gigs did he get? We just
Speaker 1: played in uh um youth clubs, played in played in
Speaker 1: old people's hopes, played in St Patrick's night dances. There
Speaker 1: was a hole in the town I lived in which
Speaker 1: held about four people. We used to play there. We
Speaker 1: would play in leeds Um and we played in an
Speaker 1: area which was probably about fifty square miles and we
Speaker 1: would probably play Fridays and Saturdays and sometimes Sundays. And
Speaker 1: of course the parents also did the transport. We had
Speaker 1: very very giving parents. My parents traded in the car
Speaker 1: they had and got any state car so we could
Speaker 1: put the seat down and put the drums in. And
Speaker 1: what kind of money were you making? Two or three
Speaker 1: pounds show? Okay, many people when they start having gigs
Speaker 1: like that, never mind within a fifty mile area, they
Speaker 1: start to experience, shall we call it, the perks of
Speaker 1: the road, the sex, the drugs, the last we are
Speaker 1: appearance along and nothing happened, or you know what was
Speaker 1: tree inspiring? Well, first of all, Bob, we were thirteen fourteen, fifteen,
Speaker 1: so and I can tell you in that part of
Speaker 1: Britain at the time, people couldn't spell drugs alone access them.
Speaker 1: There were there were no drugs. I mean we would
Speaker 1: when I got to college, we would smoke grass cuttings.
Speaker 1: We would smoke lawn cuttings, and and and and to
Speaker 1: listen to the Moody Blues first album and think that
Speaker 1: we were hip and relevant. Um, there was the sex, drugs,
Speaker 1: and rock and roll came along a bit later, but
Speaker 1: at that point, no, I mean you you'd finished at
Speaker 1: eleven thirty at night, and your mom and dad would
Speaker 1: be outside with the with the car. You pat your
Speaker 1: gear up and put it in and then you'd be
Speaker 1: wished away and that was that. There was, but a
Speaker 1: lot of people, certainly the lead sixties British musicians, they
Speaker 1: were not that great verbally, and they said, well, I
Speaker 1: got into music to meet girls. Yeah, so were you
Speaker 1: meeting girls? I was meeting them, yes, but that was it.
Speaker 1: I was meeting them. I mean I was, I was
Speaker 1: motivated by by I just found the whole thing incredibly romantic,
Speaker 1: just to be playing music. And yes, if yeah, but
Speaker 1: I mean I'm talking about I was fifteen years old,
Speaker 1: so I wasn't doing what your point you're into yet
Speaker 1: all people that we weren't any deeper than that. Now,
Speaker 1: the Beatles really hit in sixty three, and what was
Speaker 1: that like being on the ground with the Beatles? Hire
Speaker 1: certainly an American happened very quickly in January six. What
Speaker 1: was it like? Okay, Well, their first single, of course
Speaker 1: was Loved Me Do, and that came out I think
Speaker 1: made sixty two probably, and it didn't make much of
Speaker 1: an impact. And I remember as the group, we would
Speaker 1: rehearse every week and we would start learning adding new songs,
Speaker 1: and we that record was so insignificant at the time
Speaker 1: that we didn't even bother adding it to our kind
Speaker 1: of set list. But this endless set list, but not
Speaker 1: long after must have been the early part of sixty
Speaker 1: three or round about spring Please Please Me came out,
Speaker 1: which George Martin incidentally told me was originally recorded at
Speaker 1: half the tempo, as like a Royal Orbison ballad. I
Speaker 1: don't know whether you know this. So the way they
Speaker 1: recorded it it was like bum bum bum bump, dad
Speaker 1: bump bump bump like that. And he said double the
Speaker 1: tempo and put the chorus at the beginning. And when
Speaker 1: they finished it, he said to them, you've just recorded
Speaker 1: your first number one. And I said to him, did
Speaker 1: you really think that? And he said no, no, I
Speaker 1: was just just trying to keep them around. But I
Speaker 1: went to see the Beatles on a package tour. It
Speaker 1: was on June three at the Odeon Theater in Leeds.
Speaker 1: They were on a show with Roy Orbison, Jerry and
Speaker 1: the Postmaker's Silla Black and a couple of other acts.
Speaker 1: Orbison had originally started the tour as the headliner, and
Speaker 1: a dozen shows in they flipped it so that he
Speaker 1: opened the and half chosen. Those days had an interval
Speaker 1: because you could not hear yourself think or and the
Speaker 1: other thing I remember, which nobody ever talks about was
Speaker 1: the smell of girls urinating on velvet cinema seats with
Speaker 1: steam rising from the seats and you're looking as cancer
Speaker 1: that But honestly, that was what it was like. The
Speaker 1: the artist that I saw in that period of time
Speaker 1: who got the biggest scream and undoubtedly this the largest
Speaker 1: volume of p was Del Shannon. He people went nuts
Speaker 1: for him. I say, why particularly, but the Beatle that
Speaker 1: Beatles show? What I remember about that Beatles Show? And
Speaker 1: I still got the program I've got the programs from
Speaker 1: all these shows. I would take a bio and I
Speaker 1: would write down the set list, and of course they
Speaker 1: play twenty five minutes, and they did. I remember they
Speaker 1: started off when I saw her standing there, finished with
Speaker 1: twist and shout. They did a great version of you
Speaker 1: Really Got a hold on Me, that Miracles number, and
Speaker 1: they did Taste of Honey, which was quite unusual for
Speaker 1: the band of that time. But that was the period
Speaker 1: when they all had the same haircut, they were all
Speaker 1: wearing the same outfits. They had the round collars on
Speaker 1: the jackets ties with pins through which we all immediately
Speaker 1: rushed out to get outfits like that, and they um
Speaker 1: the screaming was what I remember. You could barely hear
Speaker 1: a note of music. Were you caught up in the
Speaker 1: menia or were you like removed saying, well, that's the girls,
Speaker 1: that's not for the boys. Well I wasn't. I wasn't screaming,
Speaker 1: that's for sure. You couldn't help. But we swept along
Speaker 1: by it. I mean, I was fifteen years old. I
Speaker 1: just had my fifteenth birthday, and I think the music
Speaker 1: that you hear between the ages of about twelve and sixteen,
Speaker 1: certainly for me or for my generation, was what fashions
Speaker 1: your taste thereafter. I think that just kind of because
Speaker 1: you're of an age where it's so it really gets
Speaker 1: into your kind of soul, into your being. And I
Speaker 1: had been collecting Elvis records and the other artist, the
Speaker 1: rock and roll artist. I just I mentioned to you
Speaker 1: a few minutes ago. I happened to be a big
Speaker 1: fan of instrumentals, so I had a lot of Duane
Speaker 1: Eddie records people like that. But the fact that they
Speaker 1: were a British group, um completely, I think blew everybody away.
Speaker 1: It was it was the fact that they were home
Speaker 1: grown and that they were writing their own songs that
Speaker 1: that was a real leap. I remember George Martin again
Speaker 1: saying to me that, of course when he first saw them,
Speaker 1: he I said to him, you didn't. I interviewed him
Speaker 1: four times and I remember saying to him that, I said,
Speaker 1: you didn't sign them because you thought they were any good,
Speaker 1: did you? And he said, know, they were terrible. I
Speaker 1: said you signed them because you liked them as people
Speaker 1: and he said yes. And I said did you signed
Speaker 1: them because of Brian Epstein's enthusiasm And he said yes.
Speaker 1: And I said, did you signed them because the E
Speaker 1: m I record deal back then was so bad it
Speaker 1: represented no risk to the company. They got one old
Speaker 1: English penny royalty for the sale of an album in
Speaker 1: the UK, and they got half of one old English
Speaker 1: penny for the sale of an album outside of the UK.
Speaker 1: So and they had to use abbey Road em My studio.
Speaker 1: They had to do as an abbey Road producer of
Speaker 1: an EMI producer, which happened to be George who was
Speaker 1: making comedy records at the time. He wasn't doing music.
Speaker 1: And they had to use an engine A m I
Speaker 1: engineers who wore white coats, had like surgical gloves. You
Speaker 1: had to do an A side and a B side
Speaker 1: in three hours. The music was never ever ever played
Speaker 1: back to the act ever. And if you didn't do
Speaker 1: the I side in the Bay side in three hours,
Speaker 1: it didn't matter. Whatever you've got recorded was what would
Speaker 1: come out. Don't no, so don't forget. Everything was very
Speaker 1: compressed in the US. The Stones came very quickly after
Speaker 1: the Beatles, and then it would be a big thing
Speaker 1: on the radio Saturday Night battle between the Rock the
Speaker 1: Stones in the Beatles. In your particular case, you said
Speaker 1: you were playing music with your band influenced by the
Speaker 1: British blues scene. Was there that bifurcation in the UK
Speaker 1: where you were one or the other? Were you one
Speaker 1: or the other your Beatles restored, Uh no, not really
Speaker 1: a little you see, they were all lumped together. They
Speaker 1: were pop groups. The Rolling Stones were not. We didn't
Speaker 1: know what blues music was. I mean, we were white,
Speaker 1: middle class kids. I've had this conversation with many musicians
Speaker 1: who were in the bands of that era, bands like
Speaker 1: the Searchers, Manfred Man and the rest of them, and
Speaker 1: Jimmy Page and Robert and so on, and of course
Speaker 1: they look back on it now as being pretty ridiculous.
Speaker 1: That white middle aged, sorry, white middle class kids from
Speaker 1: South London were trying to sound like John Lee Hooker.
Speaker 1: It was just completely ridiculous, but they were all and
Speaker 1: everybody was slowing the records down by hand to try
Speaker 1: and grab what the lyrics were because American lyrics. I'll
Speaker 1: give you an example. Many years ago, I happened to
Speaker 1: be in Nashville with Martin Offer and we were having
Speaker 1: dinner with well On Jennings and the Evely brothers and
Speaker 1: Emmy Harris, and I remember saying, I've always wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you guys to don Phil what what's a bird dog?
Speaker 1: And they burst out laughing and they said, well, you
Speaker 1: know when you go hunting, do you have you have
Speaker 1: a dog? And I said, oh, you mean a retriever
Speaker 1: and they said, no, no, it's a bird dog. For
Speaker 1: years we had wondered what a bird dog was, and
Speaker 1: there were many many examples of that. And I remember
Speaker 1: Whalon saying to market myself, he said, you you know
Speaker 1: more about us than we know about us. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: you have to understand that when we were growing up,
Speaker 1: everything American was magical. Our introduction to America was through
Speaker 1: the early Westerns, like raw hide Wagon Train. Then it
Speaker 1: moved on to the crime shows like Dragnet s Unset Strip,
Speaker 1: and then through music, through rock and roll music. And
Speaker 1: I suppose there was a slight overlap with maybe the
Speaker 1: big band swing era just before that. So on the
Speaker 1: radio you would hear um maybe the Ellington band or
Speaker 1: the BASSI Band, probably quite late at night, and the
Speaker 1: whole I can't overstress the romance of it to us.
Speaker 1: And I remember saying to them, Mark can recite the
Speaker 1: the entire sleeve note from Elvis is Gold Records Volume one,
Speaker 1: and Mark probably started reciting it and I won't, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you don't. But we that we would read, we would
Speaker 1: memorize the sleeve notes. And the other thing that was
Speaker 1: mystifying to us, because they were never credited, was who
Speaker 1: played on these records. This became something of an adventure
Speaker 1: to try and find out. And it was only really
Speaker 1: when Phil Spector's Wall of Sound came along that you
Speaker 1: heard about people like Hal Blaine or Carol Kay or whoever.
Speaker 1: We didn't know who Scotty Moore and d J. Fontana
Speaker 1: were who or what, or that there was a horn
Speaker 1: section in Fat Domino's band. I remember when I met
Speaker 1: Roy Orbison years later I said to him one of
Speaker 1: my memories about him was that he played a show
Speaker 1: in Leeds in this venue I was talking about on
Speaker 1: a later tour, and he had four violinists. They were
Speaker 1: playing white violins sitting on white cane chairs, unamplified. But
Speaker 1: because you knew the records so well, when they were
Speaker 1: sawing away, you could imagine the sound even though you
Speaker 1: couldn't hear the sound well articulated. Now, when the Beatles
Speaker 1: hit in the US, everybody picked up the guitar. People
Speaker 1: were forming bands left in the right. What was like
Speaker 1: in the UK? It was the same, It was the same.
Speaker 1: There was a there was a magazine in Liverpool called
Speaker 1: Mersey Beat, which gave Rise and the other music. I'm
Speaker 1: going to call them trade papers, but they weren't really
Speaker 1: trade papers like billboards. There were two in particular. One
Speaker 1: was called the New Musical Express Enemy and the other
Speaker 1: was Melody Maker, And the Melody Maker was really a
Speaker 1: jazz paper, and it kind of quite rapidly became Beatles.
Speaker 1: Stones and another band that people forget who were huge
Speaker 1: here and I know huge in your country, the Dave
Speaker 1: Clark five. They were big, but for a shorter period
Speaker 1: of time period, right, um, Once again the drummer was
Speaker 1: the business guy. Well, yeah, an interesting story about Dave Clark.
Speaker 1: Tell you a little story here. So Dave from the
Speaker 1: from another drummer nearly all the rather like in your
Speaker 1: country at the time, we had a very strong musician
Speaker 1: Miss Musicians union here at the time, and most pop records,
Speaker 1: which you and I would consider to be the hits
Speaker 1: of that whole period from about sixty three through to
Speaker 1: about sixty six, the bands didn't play on them. Studio
Speaker 1: players played on them, and Dave Clark didn't play on
Speaker 1: any of his own records. I didn't know that they
Speaker 1: were all done by a drummer, a drummer called Bobby Graham,
Speaker 1: and Bobby Graham was one and it was a bit
Speaker 1: like the Wall of Sound guys, the Wrecking Crew. There
Speaker 1: were three guys who did all the drums. There were
Speaker 1: two piano players, there were four bass players, six guitarists
Speaker 1: and song So Bobby Graham is doing a session for
Speaker 1: bits and pieces to follow up to Glad all over.
Speaker 1: I can hear, and he's down in the studio and
Speaker 1: Dave Clark is up in the producers box and Bobby
Speaker 1: is playing buff buff into the song and Dave Clark
Speaker 1: preciously into commen. He says, I need you to play
Speaker 1: that simpler. So he goes, no, no, no, no, You've
Speaker 1: got to play it simpler, and he goes, you can't
Speaker 1: play it. He's just playing four in the bar exactly
Speaker 1: as you say. And finally Bobby, in exasperation, hits the
Speaker 1: talkback and says, why have I got to play it
Speaker 1: like this? And Dave Clark says, because I've got to
Speaker 1: mind to it and all those records were covered one
Speaker 1: of my dearest friends. He's getting on in use now.
Speaker 1: It's a drama called Clem Cotini, who played with the
Speaker 1: Tornadoes on Telstar, which was the first British record to
Speaker 1: get to number one in the US. I think and um,
Speaker 1: he played on number one hits in the UK, all
Speaker 1: of the all the all of the key stuff, for instance,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't have a dime. Uh correct correct all
Speaker 1: these legends. Okay, so you're playing drums. The scene goes
Speaker 1: thermonuclear A. Most of the players from the English world
Speaker 1: don't go to university. Yet you go to university. Was
Speaker 1: there any thought, as you say in the UK of
Speaker 1: turning bro and not going to university. I wanted to
Speaker 1: do that, but uh, I kind of came to a
Speaker 1: sort of this is my first deal, if you like,
Speaker 1: a deal with my parents. But I would go to university.
Speaker 1: I would hopefully get a degree and then I would
Speaker 1: go to London and try and be a professional musician. Now,
Speaker 1: of course I had ah an idea of my own
Speaker 1: talents that was considerably greater than they actually were, because
Speaker 1: I was eighteen years old. But a very very strange
Speaker 1: thing happened. I go up to university in Hull, in Yorkshire,
Speaker 1: in city very like Liverpool on just on the other
Speaker 1: side of the country. And on the first night I
Speaker 1: was there, or the second night, they were having a
Speaker 1: dance in the students union, which is where girls would
Speaker 1: dance around their handbags and boys would look at them
Speaker 1: and wonder if they could cut in. And I walk
Speaker 1: into the front of the student union and something happened
Speaker 1: which brought me to this place. There's a Tanoi message
Speaker 1: going out if anybody in the building can play drums,
Speaker 1: would they please come to reception. And I was standing
Speaker 1: at reception and I can see the woman who's speaking
Speaker 1: into the microphone, so without thinking what this might be,
Speaker 1: I said to her, I can And this guy shot out,
Speaker 1: who I later learned was a chap called Malcolm Haig,
Speaker 1: and he said to me, are you any good? I said, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: quite good it he said, well, how good are you?
Speaker 1: I said, well quite good? He said, the drama with
Speaker 1: the band tonight can't play sick and we haven't got
Speaker 1: any records. We don't have a like a DJ thing.
Speaker 1: He said, so can you play with them? And I went, uh, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know what do they play. So anyway, he
Speaker 1: starts leading me off to the dressing room and it
Speaker 1: turned out, now you won't know this band, but it
Speaker 1: turned out they were a band called the Victor Brox
Speaker 1: Blues Train. Victor Brox later went onto a little bit
Speaker 1: of success because he sings on the first cast recording
Speaker 1: of Jesus Christ Superstar, but at the time he was
Speaker 1: the frontman of a six piece blues band playing blues covers.
Speaker 1: And there was a coincidence because the previous week this
Speaker 1: group had played in my hometown. I hadn't gone, but
Speaker 1: I'd seen the posters up everywhere. So I go into
Speaker 1: the dressing room. I'm into used to them and there's
Speaker 1: another student who said this message and he's got in
Speaker 1: there before me, and I think to myself, sad him,
Speaker 1: I'm going to get rid of him. So I did
Speaker 1: a bluff. And one of the things in management you
Speaker 1: have to learn how to do is bluff, bluff like
Speaker 1: mad and I said to Victor Brox, I said, ah,
Speaker 1: I saw your band last week in Tadcaster. I know
Speaker 1: all of the songs you do. The other guy immediately
Speaker 1: turned around and left, and then I said to them
Speaker 1: how much are you going to pay me? And they
Speaker 1: won't pay you. I said, yeah, how much are you
Speaker 1: gonna pay me? And we settled on five pounds. They
Speaker 1: were getting forty pounds. When I've done the deal for
Speaker 1: the money, I said, listen, there's something you need to know.
Speaker 1: I didn't see you last week. I just saw the posters,
Speaker 1: which they thought was hilarious. And I said, what do
Speaker 1: you play? And they did knock on wood, hold on,
Speaker 1: I'm coming. You don't know like I know Motown Stacks
Speaker 1: James Brown, which I had played dozens of times. I
Speaker 1: just said to the bass player, can you count me in?
Speaker 1: And just signal when you come into the end, because
Speaker 1: in rock music you only have to know the beginning
Speaker 1: in the end. What happens in the middle doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: And I got through two minutes, said kept it simple,
Speaker 1: didn't screw it up. Big hugs at the end, get
Speaker 1: my five pounds and I go into the bar. I'm
Speaker 1: going a drink, and a tall blonde girl called Trudy
Speaker 1: comes up to me and says, I really enjoyed your playing,
Speaker 1: And I went, did you? And I bought her a
Speaker 1: larger in line or something, and she said, would you
Speaker 1: like to come back to my student house for coffee?
Speaker 1: Which was which was the sign? So I said, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: love love to. So I'm coming out of the student
Speaker 1: union and a flash gun goes off in my face
Speaker 1: and a little guy cop pops out and he says,
Speaker 1: I'm the I'm the editor of the student newspaper, talked,
Speaker 1: we'd like to do a front page feature on you
Speaker 1: next week. What's your name? What course are you on?
Speaker 1: Where did you come from? Were you nervous? How did
Speaker 1: you know all those songs? So I do an interview
Speaker 1: with this guy. At the same time the chap who
Speaker 1: had come up to me when I got into the place,
Speaker 1: who turned out to be the social secretary as we
Speaker 1: call them here. It was leaving and he came over
Speaker 1: to me and he said, I'm a I'm a pianist.
Speaker 1: Do you want to be in my group? And I said, yeah, sure.
Speaker 1: I said who else is in your group? He said nobody,
Speaker 1: it's me and you will. But I know a flute
Speaker 1: player and he happened to be running the entertainments committee.
Speaker 1: He said, do you want to be on the entertainments committee?
Speaker 1: And I said that what does that do? I don't
Speaker 1: know what that is. He said, well, we run all
Speaker 1: the entertainment. We run a dance every Saturday. We do
Speaker 1: a union ball once a year. I also run the
Speaker 1: jazz club and the folk club. Okay, so on my
Speaker 1: first night, I've played a eg, have made five pounds
Speaker 1: of pulled a bird, I'm on the front cover of
Speaker 1: the student in newspaper paper, and I've joined the entertainments committee.
Speaker 1: And at the end of my first year he stepped
Speaker 1: down to do his finals exams and he said to me,
Speaker 1: you take over. And I said we're supposed to have
Speaker 1: an election and he went, as are you stupid? So
Speaker 1: I took over entertainment. Okay, let's go back to the beginner.
Speaker 1: Where did you get the Hudspur asked for five paths.
Speaker 1: I've always had hutspur. That's That's why I'm on your show.
Speaker 1: But exactly that, where does that come from? Your parents?
Speaker 1: Where did you learn that? Actually? I was quite shy
Speaker 1: at that point. I mean, having gone through the school
Speaker 1: experience I had, which was, you know, living at the
Speaker 1: school that I went to and kind of putting up
Speaker 1: with a bit of ribbing from certain teachers, and that
Speaker 1: I don't know, I just I don't know just what
Speaker 1: makes you the man you are. But since you mentioned
Speaker 1: her name, we have to ask what happened with Trudy?
Speaker 1: Oh truly went the way of all ladies of the time.
Speaker 1: You know. She we we used to, we used to,
Speaker 1: we used to have a dreadful cut coffee with you know,
Speaker 1: those chemicals sprinkled on the top, and she I dually.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was like being let into a sweet
Speaker 1: shop for me. I mean I had one girlfriend back
Speaker 1: in Yorkshire and here I am, and I'm suddenly in
Speaker 1: a sweet shop. And when I took over the entertainments,
Speaker 1: I was just by default the best known person in
Speaker 1: the university because I had the most glamorous gig if
Speaker 1: you like. And I made one decision which stood me
Speaker 1: in very good stead then and I have kept right
Speaker 1: up to now. I decided I would only put on
Speaker 1: bands that I liked, and somehow I would sell them
Speaker 1: to my audience. And I had including the teacher training
Speaker 1: college down the road, in the technical college next door,
Speaker 1: I had twelve thou students to draw and who had
Speaker 1: a student union card. I had a hall which was
Speaker 1: the third largest in the UK, held a thousand people.
Speaker 1: So the first band I bought was the Moody Blues. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: well let's slow down a little bit. You were a drummer.
Speaker 1: Now you got the gig in to use the line
Speaker 1: from Let It Be, you passed the audition? Yes, at
Speaker 1: what point do you bring your drums to university? Within
Speaker 1: two weeks of that? So, at what point do you
Speaker 1: say I'm a businessman as opposed to a drummer. I've
Speaker 1: never said that. Um. That was later when I got
Speaker 1: down to London. Okay, so all this time that you're
Speaker 1: ahead of the entertainment program, in the back of your mind,
Speaker 1: the dream is still alive. You're gonna be a drummer. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And what happened. I never had any aspirations to get
Speaker 1: onto the business side. I didn't know what the business
Speaker 1: side was. I was, as I was saying earlier, there
Speaker 1: really wasn't a defined music business like we know it now.
Speaker 1: I had no clue what anybody did. I knew I
Speaker 1: had heard of Colonel Parker, I'd heard of Epstein. I
Speaker 1: didn't know what they did, the mechanics of what they did. Okay.
Speaker 1: So while you were in university, were you also playing
Speaker 1: in the bands, whether it would be the pianist or
Speaker 1: somebody else, Yes, yes, and I and I also I
Speaker 1: got a jazz group together, playing kind of I'm going
Speaker 1: to call it modern jazz. It was really just rubbish,
Speaker 1: but that's what we did. Okay. So you booked the
Speaker 1: Moody Blues. How do you even do that? How do
Speaker 1: you know who the agent is? How do you know
Speaker 1: what's going to call? My predecessor as the social secretary,
Speaker 1: this guy Malcolm, when he said decided to step down
Speaker 1: and to do his finals, he said, oh look, here's that.
Speaker 1: He wrote them down. He wrote a list of the
Speaker 1: agencies that he dealt with. Now, the agency business in
Speaker 1: London at the time was small. I mean they were
Speaker 1: probably six five six agencies, and there weren't that many
Speaker 1: bands either. I mean we didn't have you know, there
Speaker 1: were maybe playing on the student circuit. There were probably
Speaker 1: a hundred hundred and fifty bands, and that they might
Speaker 1: range from a pound a night local group to the
Speaker 1: most I ever paid for an act was four hundred
Speaker 1: pounds for Jethro Toll and they had a top three
Speaker 1: single when I had them. Okay, would you come up
Speaker 1: with the band and then find the agent or would
Speaker 1: you call the agency when he had available both? And
Speaker 1: of course I was also fielding calls constantly the all
Speaker 1: of the agents in London, and they weren't really agents,
Speaker 1: that they were bookers. We were no, we didn't call
Speaker 1: them agents the bookers. Uh. And nobody did tours. Then
Speaker 1: everybody gaved and and you try to get bands, would
Speaker 1: try and get, you know, a student date on a
Speaker 1: Friday and Saturday, because that would pay more. They could
Speaker 1: make maybe get anywhere between a hundred and twenty five
Speaker 1: to fifty pounds for a net for a name act,
Speaker 1: a decent name, and um, those same bands might play
Speaker 1: on a Sunday night for fifty pounds somewhere, and and
Speaker 1: everybody was kind of on a wage sort of thing,
Speaker 1: and typically a musician might make pounds a week back
Speaker 1: then I'm talking or sixty six through to sixty nine.
Speaker 1: How did you have time to do your school work? Well? Um,
Speaker 1: just worked hard. I mean I got a decent degree.
Speaker 1: And what did you study? I did, Well, it was
Speaker 1: a new course. It was called social studies and in
Speaker 1: fact the group I was part of was as I
Speaker 1: found out when I got there, um because I went
Speaker 1: for an interview and the professor who interviewed me, she
Speaker 1: was so grateful I'd applied because this was a brand
Speaker 1: new course and we were the experiment, this group that
Speaker 1: I was part of, which was probably about thirty five
Speaker 1: students they were going to we were going to start
Speaker 1: this course, and I just and it included sociology, philosophy, economics,
Speaker 1: things like that at British Social history since since the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution eighteen and I just I got stuck into that.
Speaker 1: But my real thing was was doing doing the entertainments.
Speaker 1: And then a couple of questions, how many gigs would
Speaker 1: you do a year? How many shows? Are you talking
Speaker 1: about me personally? And probably be about okay, And there
Speaker 1: was a fund that you drew on or were you
Speaker 1: starting at dollar zero, I were starting with the ticket
Speaker 1: money that came in. Okay, so there are certain acts
Speaker 1: that are instant sellouts, but a lot of acts are not.
Speaker 1: How did you promote the shows? I learned some very
Speaker 1: good lessons very quickly, which stood me in very good
Speaker 1: stead for my later career. The first was that if
Speaker 1: you if you can't read a poster from the top
Speaker 1: of a double decker bus, it's not worth ship. So
Speaker 1: I just used to do a black background with day
Speaker 1: glow green, day glow, pink, day glow orange. It would
Speaker 1: say who it was, where it was, when it was,
Speaker 1: and how much I got. I got an entertainments committed together,
Speaker 1: and I delegated two different people. They would go and
Speaker 1: they would put a flyer under the door of every
Speaker 1: single room in every single hall of residents. I would
Speaker 1: put flyers on every dining table for a week. I
Speaker 1: would try. I would have the music played over the
Speaker 1: student union p A. And also I had the biggest
Speaker 1: thing I had going for me was that this was
Speaker 1: a Saturday night and the students, the male and the
Speaker 1: female students. Basically, Saturday night was the night where you
Speaker 1: got together and you know that you ended up with
Speaker 1: a knee trembler by the end of the evening. And
Speaker 1: if you don't know what that is, Bob, I'll send
Speaker 1: you a text. So so but but but you know
Speaker 1: lust they are now was a big driving force, and
Speaker 1: certainly in a student environment. And but one, but just
Speaker 1: a little side story. When I bought the Moody Blues
Speaker 1: at that time they had had what they had had
Speaker 1: one number one hit in the UK with a Bessie
Speaker 1: Banks song called go Now. Danny Lane was the singer
Speaker 1: who later went onto Wings and they were essentially an
Speaker 1: R and B group from Birmingham. In between the time
Speaker 1: I bought them and the time they came, Denny and
Speaker 1: the bass player left the group and Justin Hayward and
Speaker 1: John Lodge, who are now very dear friends of mine,
Speaker 1: ironically had joined the band. They had played a show
Speaker 1: in a cabaret club in the north of England where
Speaker 1: they were basically doing go Now three times in the
Speaker 1: set and some covers, and they played this particular place
Speaker 1: up in Newcastle or somewhere. Justin told me this story
Speaker 1: and after the show they're in the dressing room and
Speaker 1: they were all wearing matching suits, shirts, ties, looking very
Speaker 1: smart and a guy and his wife came by and
Speaker 1: banged on the door, and they opened the door and
Speaker 1: the guy said, he said, it's really great of your
Speaker 1: lads to come all the way up here, but I
Speaker 1: got to tell you you were crap. You're absolutely shiped.
Speaker 1: You're the worst band I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1: Nice to meet you by and left and the movie
Speaker 1: Blue was got in their van to drive back to
Speaker 1: London in total silence. They didn't speak for about four hours,
Speaker 1: and as they getting close to London, one of them
Speaker 1: said that guy's right, and they all went yeah. They
Speaker 1: dumped everything they were doing justin and John Lodge got
Speaker 1: the biggest bag of weed they could lay their hands on.
Speaker 1: They went to Belgium and they wrote Nights in White
Speaker 1: Satin Tuesday Afternoon and all of the songs that were
Speaker 1: on the Days of Future Past record, which they recorded
Speaker 1: not with the orchestra that was dubbed on afterwards, because
Speaker 1: Decca had a new stereo system thing and they wanted
Speaker 1: that record to be the demonstration disc for this particular
Speaker 1: format that they were going to go with, so they
Speaker 1: hired Tony Clark to do all those arrangements and it
Speaker 1: was wasn't until the record was released that the Moody
Speaker 1: Blues heard them, because back then nobody's consulted the act.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I booked them. When they arrived, I go
Speaker 1: up to the dressing room and back then nobody had
Speaker 1: a rider. So you gave them some sausage rolls and
Speaker 1: to create a beer and they were grateful. And I
Speaker 1: had written on a piece of paper and felt tip
Speaker 1: pen Moody Blues eight thirty to nine fifty to ten thirty,
Speaker 1: because everybody did to forty five minutes. And John Lodge
Speaker 1: and I'm going to attempt to Birmingham Accent now came
Speaker 1: and stood behind me, and he's looking at this thing,
Speaker 1: and he says, we don't do to forty four minutes anymore.
Speaker 1: We do a concert. And I said, what he should
Speaker 1: a concert? We do a concert. Now we do seventy
Speaker 1: four minute still left to sit down, and I said,
Speaker 1: we haven't got any chairs lift to sit on the floor.
Speaker 1: We don't do forty four minutes. We do we do
Speaker 1: a concertitute a concert, And to my astonishment, students sat
Speaker 1: down and they played a concert complete with melotron. They
Speaker 1: did the whole of that first album, and they did
Speaker 1: two songs off the next one, one of which had
Speaker 1: the amazing lyrics Timothy Leary is dead, No he's yeah,
Speaker 1: you know the legend of a mind. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: a little light went on and I thought, well, if
Speaker 1: I put I had two refectories that I would put
Speaker 1: things on. I thought, well, if I put on something
Speaker 1: in the East refectory which they can dance to, I
Speaker 1: can put concert song here. And so the next band
Speaker 1: I bought was Pink Floyd four a hundred fifty pounds,
Speaker 1: and they came up and again I thought I was
Speaker 1: getting Sid. No, said David Gilmore walked in. They had
Speaker 1: they had got rid of? Said well, actually what happened
Speaker 1: was they were going to play gig in Oxford and
Speaker 1: they got to the and they had to pick him up. Last,
Speaker 1: they went to his mum's house where Sid was living.
Speaker 1: They pulled up outside his house and they sat in
Speaker 1: the car for twenty minutes in silence, and then Roger,
Speaker 1: who was driving, drove off without Sid, because David was
Speaker 1: already in the group covering for Sid. And that's how
Speaker 1: said Barrett left Pink Floyd. He simply wasn't picked up,
Speaker 1: and they m they came up to home and they
Speaker 1: played the whole of the source of Full of Secrets record,
Speaker 1: and I was totally blown away. I thought they were
Speaker 1: amazing so on, and I'm on a roll at this point,
Speaker 1: so then I think, okay, I'll put the Who. So
Speaker 1: I bought the Who had the Who three times and
Speaker 1: that was staggering. The only band I've ever worked with
Speaker 1: where at the end nobody applauded and nobody left. People
Speaker 1: were stunned. They smashed everything, everything, The entire drum kit
Speaker 1: came off the front of the stage and landed in
Speaker 1: the audience. There were bombs going off. That's why, right.
Speaker 1: I interviewed Roger three years ago and I realized halfway
Speaker 1: through the interview he couldn't hear a word. I was saying,
Speaker 1: he's completely deafening. What he calls his end whist leah,
Speaker 1: because they back then is you know, all of the
Speaker 1: sound came off the back line. It was a piddling
Speaker 1: little p a and Roger had to over sing. He
Speaker 1: had to basically shout and scream to be heard. And
Speaker 1: I was standing on the stage right next to Pete's
Speaker 1: Marshall stacks, two of them, one of which had no
Speaker 1: speakers in it, so he could spear his guitar through
Speaker 1: because he possibly going to pay for speakers. And the
Speaker 1: noise was the sound. Well, I'll call it a noise
Speaker 1: because Roger said to me we were trying to recreate
Speaker 1: the sounds of war, and I said to you were
Speaker 1: entirely successful. They were fantastic, life, fantastic. You have this
Speaker 1: incredible run. But then you graduate with well when I graduated.
Speaker 1: Of course, by this time I got to know quite
Speaker 1: a lot of the booker's agents in London because they
Speaker 1: were constantly ringing me trying to sell me their crappy bands.
Speaker 1: I had a fantastic last week. We had a charity thing,
Speaker 1: charity week and I put on John Male's Blues Breakers
Speaker 1: Jethro Tull with led Zeppelin as the opening act, booked
Speaker 1: as the new Yardbirds. And I've still got the contract
Speaker 1: and it had been crossed out and it written in
Speaker 1: was led L E. A D. Polin which Peter had
Speaker 1: written in um we had The Kinks and Family Family
Speaker 1: were the best band I put on in the entire
Speaker 1: two years. They didn't make it in America. True incredible band,
Speaker 1: fantastic band. So July four, with a hundred pounds, my
Speaker 1: mom and dad I get on the train. I've got
Speaker 1: one telephone number. I come down to London. One of
Speaker 1: the groups I put on in the last week as
Speaker 1: a support band was a group called Gingerbread. Their bass
Speaker 1: player was John Wetton, the late John Wetton, who went
Speaker 1: on to join King Crimson and Asia founded Asia with
Speaker 1: Carl and I went down to London and within a
Speaker 1: week I've got a band together, of which John was
Speaker 1: the bass player and singer. And we found a rehearsal
Speaker 1: place in South London. Lets go a little bit were
Speaker 1: you're in the hall, how do you get your drums
Speaker 1: to London? Or how do you find a new kid
Speaker 1: in London? With difficulty? I got one of the bands
Speaker 1: that I booked to stick them at the back of
Speaker 1: the van and take them down to London. That's it,
Speaker 1: just improvise. And I slept on a floor for about
Speaker 1: eighteen months. Joined this group. And whose floor was it?
Speaker 1: This was just some people I knew, I mean I
Speaker 1: knew this. This was the one telephone number I called up.
Speaker 1: They said, well, we don't have any rooms, but you
Speaker 1: can sleep on the floor. So I took a sleeping
Speaker 1: bag slept on the floor. Did they charge you for that. No, no, Bob,
Speaker 1: they didn't judge me for that, and I um That
Speaker 1: group within a few months metamorphosized into what became the
Speaker 1: Average White Band. Wow, we got this horle type of
Speaker 1: their bags of question begs how good a drummer was
Speaker 1: Robbie mcintogh great, it's really good. He replaced me. I
Speaker 1: was sacked along with John for not being Scottish. They
Speaker 1: wanted to have an all Scottish band. We were rehearsing,
Speaker 1: we hadn't. We played one show at the Marquee Club,
Speaker 1: which was pretty disastrous, to be honest, And in January
Speaker 1: of v I was summarily sacked, which was fine because
Speaker 1: I was sacked from what I was sacked from. Nothing. Really,
Speaker 1: they changed their name. They were called Mogul Thrash. Believe
Speaker 1: it or not. They changed their name to the Average
Speaker 1: White Band, got a deal with Yeah it was it
Speaker 1: yea Atlantic of course ya, And off they went. And
Speaker 1: then John left and he joined King Crimson, he joined Family. Actually,
Speaker 1: all those eighteen months, are you doing things in you
Speaker 1: think other than drumming with the future weight average weight?
Speaker 1: Not in the professional money earning sense. I mean, I
Speaker 1: was going to see bands constantly I was completely I
Speaker 1: was in London. I had not been to London before
Speaker 1: I was. I would go to the Marquee Club five
Speaker 1: nights a week. It didn't matter what night you went,
Speaker 1: there would be somebody good on What were you doing
Speaker 1: for money? I was living off this hundred pounds that
Speaker 1: my parents had given me, which was which was a
Speaker 1: substantial sum. Then, I mean when I when I know
Speaker 1: you're going to come to it in a second. But
Speaker 1: when I started in the agency business, I was making
Speaker 1: five pounds a week and you could live on five
Speaker 1: pounds a week quite comfortably. I mean, I don't mean
Speaker 1: going to restaurants or anything like that, but you could survive. Okay.
Speaker 1: So you get sacked in January of seven, you say,
Speaker 1: what's your next move? Total acts. Everything in my life
Speaker 1: or professional life, certainly has been luck. It's been absolutely
Speaker 1: the biggest factor. I get sacked from the average white
Speaker 1: band or mugul thrash as they were. The next morning,
Speaker 1: I'm walking down Oxford Street and I bump into one
Speaker 1: of the agents who used to call me when I
Speaker 1: was at university. Guy called John Sherry, sadly no longer
Speaker 1: with us, and he said, what are you doing? And
Speaker 1: I said, I've just been sacked from the average white
Speaker 1: band for not being Scottish, and he said words which
Speaker 1: ring down to me over the years. I can't pay
Speaker 1: you anything, but would you like to come and work
Speaker 1: in the office and I'll give you half of everything
Speaker 1: you earn. I had nothing else going, so I go
Speaker 1: the next morning to the office, which turned out to
Speaker 1: be one room with one desk and two telephones. Uh.
Speaker 1: And when I get there, he says to me, by
Speaker 1: the way, I forgot to tell you I don't have
Speaker 1: any acts. You don't have any acts, he said no.
Speaker 1: So I started booking colleges as the buyer if you like,
Speaker 1: of which Holy University where I went was one. I
Speaker 1: got picked up card off the university and several others,
Speaker 1: and they would be on split commission deals, which don't
Speaker 1: happen now. So typically a college would have a dance
Speaker 1: on a Saturday night. They had a budget of a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty pounds. They wanted a stripper, a steel band,
Speaker 1: and a band they could dance to, and I would
Speaker 1: ring around the way way they would really want a stripper.
Speaker 1: That would not happen now, Yeah, you didn't. You didn't
Speaker 1: have those in the gigs in the UK US either okay,
Speaker 1: but back then I mean that was quite Yeah. We
Speaker 1: want a stripper and we want to deal band, and
Speaker 1: we want the band that can dance to So I
Speaker 1: would have a budget. I'd ring around all the agencies.
Speaker 1: What have you got available on the fifth of May
Speaker 1: five pounds? They would tell me they pick it either
Speaker 1: sell them on this act or they'd pick an act.
Speaker 1: And I would go back to the agent and then
Speaker 1: say they can only afford a hundred and you've done
Speaker 1: the deal, and I'd get five five pounds on that.
Speaker 1: So that went on for a bit and then in
Speaker 1: March of one of the two phones ran and this
Speaker 1: was a bit like the fastest gunfighter in the West,
Speaker 1: who could get the phone fastest. I grabbed the phone
Speaker 1: and a voice came on and I won't do his accent,
Speaker 1: and he said, this is Miles as Copeland the Third
Speaker 1: And I went, holy shit, Miles ax Copeland the Third Wow.
Speaker 1: And he said, would anybody they ever interested in booking
Speaker 1: a band called Wishbone Ash. Now, the previous week I
Speaker 1: had read a letter on the back of the Melody
Speaker 1: Maker on the letters page extolling the virtues of this
Speaker 1: group Wishbone Ash, which I later found out Miles had
Speaker 1: written under a pseudonym, so based entirely on that, I
Speaker 1: said to him yes, and he was completely flummo. He
Speaker 1: had been ringing everybody for weeks and he'd got and
Speaker 1: I said yes. Long story short. I go up to
Speaker 1: a house and St John's Wood in North London, which
Speaker 1: was a very posh area of London where the Copeland
Speaker 1: family lived when his dad was in the CIA was
Speaker 1: or he'd retired from the CIA at that point, and
Speaker 1: I went down that I was going to go and
Speaker 1: see them play in this house. And I come down
Speaker 1: the drive and there are a group of about half
Speaker 1: a dozen Arabs in full ceremonial s going up the
Speaker 1: front stairs, and I thought I must be at the
Speaker 1: wrong house. So I walked back down the drive and
Speaker 1: I suddenly heard from coming out of the basement, and
Speaker 1: I realized what happened was that Myles's father was advising
Speaker 1: various oil companies on the political situation in the Middle
Speaker 1: East as his post ci CI a job, and down
Speaker 1: in the basement which Bone Ash were rehearsing. So I
Speaker 1: went down met the band. They played me the whole
Speaker 1: of their first album sitting in armchairs, which was the
Speaker 1: first I've never seen a band player a gig sitting
Speaker 1: in an armchair. And I asked Miles if I could
Speaker 1: use the phone to call John, and he led me
Speaker 1: to a pay phone. They had obviously read John Paul
Speaker 1: get his biography because they had installed a pay phone
Speaker 1: for guests, and I had to borrow tenpence off him
Speaker 1: to use the phone. And I called John up and
Speaker 1: I said we should take this band on. They're really good.
Speaker 1: And they were in London College that following Saturday and
Speaker 1: we went to see them. Miles was doing the lights.
Speaker 1: He didn't have any overhead lights. He had a run
Speaker 1: of foot footlights and he had a green boulbon orange
Speaker 1: bowl of red bulbon pint bulb and he had four
Speaker 1: things and he was just doing this on the side
Speaker 1: of the stage and we took them on and then
Speaker 1: short order Miles came into the business. We all went
Speaker 1: into business together. They kind of took off a bit.
Speaker 1: They signed to m c A. Within within eighteen months
Speaker 1: we had like the third or fourth biggest agency in London.
Speaker 1: I've just just work just working at it. What happened
Speaker 1: are your drumming career? Well, to make up my money,
Speaker 1: I joined a fantastic soul band. They were called Patrick
Speaker 1: Dane and the front line we had a four piece
Speaker 1: brass section, great layers, and we played four or five
Speaker 1: nights a week. We played American basses, colleges, around London clubs, everything,
Speaker 1: and we would get all of the London clubs then
Speaker 1: paid twenty pounds. That was the maximum you could get
Speaker 1: in any one of the famous This was just post
Speaker 1: the Swinging sixties, so called the Swinging sixties didn't actually
Speaker 1: get started in London until about nineteen sixty five sixty six,
Speaker 1: and it kind of rolled over to about nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three four. We would play those anywhere between a Monday
Speaker 1: and a Thursday, and on a Friday and Saturday. If
Speaker 1: we played an American bass, we would get a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty pounds. If we played a college we would
Speaker 1: get probably about the same. And when we played the
Speaker 1: American bassis, because we had to play for dining as
Speaker 1: well as dancing, we've learned the whole catalog of Duke
Speaker 1: Allington and big band stuff, which that's what they what
Speaker 1: they wanted, and we always got rebooked always, so you
Speaker 1: have this flurishing agency. How did you become a manager? Well,
Speaker 1: I I traveled through several agencies um in the next
Speaker 1: let's see five years, sorry, five or six years, and
Speaker 1: I ended up at Names, which was Brian Epstein's old company,
Speaker 1: although he'd long gone, and I was working with Steve
Speaker 1: Barnett recently retired retired president with Capitol Records. We haven't
Speaker 1: seen him many years. And if you're watching this, hello
Speaker 1: Steve and m We And that was when I kind
Speaker 1: of hit I'm going to loosely call it the big
Speaker 1: time because we had big acts. We had deep Purple Black, Sabbath, Nazareth, Alex, Harvey,
Speaker 1: band Elton. I did the first British stroke European tours
Speaker 1: with Steely dan Um and then I had oh sorry,
Speaker 1: just before that, the person who kind of had was
Speaker 1: my I would call him my mentor. We all need
Speaker 1: a mentor in life was Barry Marshall, who now runs
Speaker 1: Martial Arts. And when I went to work with Barry
Speaker 1: and his wife Jenny, and they're probably one of the
Speaker 1: most successful and certainly one of the best promoters in
Speaker 1: UK and Europe. Um We. He was managing a Welsh
Speaker 1: group called Man who were a bit like a British
Speaker 1: kind of grateful dead in the sense that they played
Speaker 1: numbers that lasted for several days and I think, I
Speaker 1: think I've been there a week and I put twenty
Speaker 1: eight gigs in in a month for this group. Man um.
Speaker 1: I just had a sense of how to do it.
Speaker 1: If I went about something, I think, if you're enthusiastic
Speaker 1: about something, you can communicate that to people. And we
Speaker 1: were doing we we were doing. It was the first
Speaker 1: place I've been where we were doing American acts, and
Speaker 1: we did people like Jimmy ruffin lou Christie if you
Speaker 1: remember him, of course, Lightning Strikes, Trightening Strikes. And I
Speaker 1: got a real feel for working with black American artists,
Speaker 1: which was quite a I mean, I remember he sent
Speaker 1: me off to Europe. I think this was about the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three or four with the con Tina Turner review,
Speaker 1: which was my first encounter with Ike Turner, which was okay,
Speaker 1: actually no problem, and I got I've known Tina since then.
Speaker 1: And then I moved to names and as I say,
Speaker 1: we were looking after what were big acts at the time.
Speaker 1: But again coming back to something I said earlier, they
Speaker 1: didn't tour they gigged. Everybody gigged. Nobody had a beginning
Speaker 1: in the middle of an end. It was just continual,
Speaker 1: and they didn't go into the studio for a period
Speaker 1: of time. They went in for a few hours at
Speaker 1: a time and cobbled together records and it was all
Speaker 1: pretty kind of it's kind of primitive, but it was.
Speaker 1: It was huge fun, definitely fantastic fun. And then how
Speaker 1: does that turn into the management. Well, I had no
Speaker 1: aspirations to do management, but I of course I was
Speaker 1: dealing with at this point quite a lot of managers.
Speaker 1: And I have to say that back then managers were
Speaker 1: not quite as skilled as they've become. Um. In fact,
Speaker 1: some of them were. I mean I can remember with
Speaker 1: Deep Purple, h this was the Mark two with Richie
Speaker 1: and In Squabbling and Roger and in Pace and John
Speaker 1: Lord bless him. I remember their manager coming into the
Speaker 1: office and saying to Steve and I write, Deep Purple,
Speaker 1: who have got a new album coming out next week. Now,
Speaker 1: this was the first time that we've been informed that
Speaker 1: they had made a record. They want to go on tour.
Speaker 1: So we got our notepads and we're ready to go.
Speaker 1: And I said to him when do you want to start?
Speaker 1: And he says next week and I said next week, Yeah,
Speaker 1: next week. That's how it was. How it was, and
Speaker 1: um what happened was that through a convoluted set of circumstances,
Speaker 1: I had got to know a guy called Ken Kushnick,
Speaker 1: who was the general manager at Sire Records in seventy six.
Speaker 1: I think it was the Sex Pistols clash and the
Speaker 1: British punk's scene got underway. I might have my chronology
Speaker 1: slightly wrong, uh, And Ken called me up and asked
Speaker 1: me if I would put a tour together for the Ramones,
Speaker 1: who I had never heard of, but given the way
Speaker 1: things were, I just said yes. And then he said
Speaker 1: to me there's another act on with them, and I'm thinking, well,
Speaker 1: it's going to be hard enough to get the Ramones attorney.
Speaker 1: I said, who's that? He said, they're called the Talking Heads,
Speaker 1: and I said, wow, what's weird name. Anyway, he sent
Speaker 1: me a single It's called Love Ghost Building on Fire
Speaker 1: and it only had a photograph of three of them
Speaker 1: on the front. Jerry Harrison wasn't in the group at
Speaker 1: that point, and I remember putting it on the record
Speaker 1: player at Names and I thought it was great. I
Speaker 1: loved it, so I I agreed to set up a
Speaker 1: tour for the two those two acts, which I did,
Speaker 1: and it was a hard sell. Was six weeks mostly
Speaker 1: around the UK, few dates in Europe. Just before that
Speaker 1: tour happened, the Sex Pistols went on British TV and
Speaker 1: disgraced themselves by swearing on a six thirty live slot,
Speaker 1: and this caused tabloid fury, but it turned the punk
Speaker 1: new age thing from being like a really underground thing
Speaker 1: into being very kind of prominent. Now that all of
Speaker 1: the Pistol shows pretty much got canceled because every town hall,
Speaker 1: every council said we're not having them, their filthy revolution
Speaker 1: and all this, but it meant that. It meant that
Speaker 1: the Romans talking heads to Her suddenly sold out everywhere,
Speaker 1: so they came over. I remember we started in Geneva
Speaker 1: and I immediately bonded with the talking heads as people,
Speaker 1: and they asked me to leave the ends and manage them.
Speaker 1: And I didn't have enough courage to be honest. I couldn't.
Speaker 1: I just think I knew enough. What happened then was
Speaker 1: another piece of luck. I happened to be out at
Speaker 1: Heathrow airport picking up a friend, a girlfriend who worked
Speaker 1: at United Artists Records, and she was and she had
Speaker 1: just been on a promo johnt to Holland with Jerry
Speaker 1: Rafferty and Baker Street was becoming a big hit. So
Speaker 1: I got got a lift and I got in the
Speaker 1: front of the car with the driver, and she and
Speaker 1: Rafferty got in the back of the car and I
Speaker 1: was just rattling awhile like I am to you and
Speaker 1: we're coming into London, and Rafferty tapped me on the shoulder.
Speaker 1: I've never met him before and he said, ed, would
Speaker 1: you be my manager? And I just turned around and
Speaker 1: I said, you don't know me. He said no, but
Speaker 1: I like you, so okay, So I became Jerry Raffort's manager. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's a question. Did he have a previous manager? What
Speaker 1: had happened? Well, yes, he had had when he was
Speaker 1: in Steeler's Wheel that had led to law suits at
Speaker 1: all the rest of it, and the Baker Street song
Speaker 1: happened to be the street where his lawyer's office was,
Speaker 1: and he was constantly coming down from Scotland. And if
Speaker 1: you listen to the lyric, and you know that that
Speaker 1: song is about his trips to London, sitting in lawyers
Speaker 1: meetings for hours on end while they tried to dissolve
Speaker 1: because what happened was the management company had gone bankrupt.
Speaker 1: That had to be a liquidation process, and this all
Speaker 1: took two years and he couldn't he could word live,
Speaker 1: but he steamers Will broke up and he wrote the
Speaker 1: songs which became the City to City record, one of
Speaker 1: which was Baker Street. So but but his concept of
Speaker 1: what he meant by his manager was rather different to
Speaker 1: what I thought it was. I never bet. I made
Speaker 1: no money of him at all, except from some touring
Speaker 1: that he did, and I didn't participate in the records
Speaker 1: or song publishing. And I didn't have enough knowledge or
Speaker 1: courage to even ask. And here anyway, he had a
Speaker 1: lawyer who was famous. His lawyer was so slow that
Speaker 1: he would do management agreements with people that might last
Speaker 1: five years and they would have run out by the
Speaker 1: time he'd finished the paperwork. So it was academic anyway.
Speaker 1: But the thing about Jerry was he opened a lot
Speaker 1: of doors for me, and I ended up working with
Speaker 1: him for about five or six years. But sadly he
Speaker 1: was an alcoholic and it killed him in the end,
Speaker 1: and we had a very bumpy time because he canceled
Speaker 1: five American tours on me, one of which was on sale,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. So but it was all a
Speaker 1: learning exercise. All of this. I was learning as you
Speaker 1: as you go along. You could even out of every
Speaker 1: negative situation, you can come out of it. You'll have
Speaker 1: learned something. You were also booking bands while you were
Speaker 1: managing jury. I was still at ends Um And what
Speaker 1: happened was that I was working with him and I
Speaker 1: had a Talking Heads tour coming up in January, which
Speaker 1: was the first time they were going to headline on
Speaker 1: their own in the UK, some Bits and Pieces of Europe,
Speaker 1: and I needed an opening act. And it was December ninth,
Speaker 1: and it was a Friday afternoon. I remember my phone
Speaker 1: rang and a guy that I had met at Phonogram
Speaker 1: because PolyGram or Phonogram originally were distributed side records until
Speaker 1: they until Seymour switched to Warner Brothers. So I got
Speaker 1: to know the people at Phonogram and I bailed bailed
Speaker 1: them out on a couple of things, saved them quite
Speaker 1: a bit of money because Seymour was quite good at
Speaker 1: extracting money from and this guy came on. His name
Speaker 1: was John Stains, and he said to me, I've just
Speaker 1: signed a band called Dire Straits. And I immediately said,
Speaker 1: what a terrible name, and he said, be serious. I said,
Speaker 1: I am being serious. It's a terrible name. He said,
Speaker 1: would you be their agent? I said, well, I'm only
Speaker 1: handling American acts, I said, but in the back of
Speaker 1: my mind I needed an opening act for this Talking
Speaker 1: Heads tour and it was coming up quite soon, and
Speaker 1: I was in a bit of a panic, and I
Speaker 1: said to him, what are they like? And he said, well,
Speaker 1: I've got a tape here. Why don't you come over
Speaker 1: and listen to it. Now their officers were very close
Speaker 1: to where NAMES was, so I packed up for the day,
Speaker 1: walked over and he played me the demo tape that
Speaker 1: had originally got them the record deal, the one that
Speaker 1: a DJ called Charlie Gillett had played on British on
Speaker 1: his British Radio London radio show. And on that record
Speaker 1: on that tape were Sultans have Swing down to the
Speaker 1: Waterline while west End and a song called Sacred Loving.
Speaker 1: But thankfully they didn't record and I can remember. It's
Speaker 1: funny what you remember later on, because I can't remember
Speaker 1: listening to Sultans of Swing and saying to him this,
Speaker 1: this guitar player is pretty good. And then he's playing
Speaker 1: me Wild West End and I said, wow, these lyrics,
Speaker 1: this is really good lyrically. He said that's the guitar
Speaker 1: player and I said, Doug, tell me he's the singer
Speaker 1: as well, and he went, yeat and he gave me
Speaker 1: the lineup of the group and the mark younger brother
Speaker 1: David was in the group. John Ellsley and picked with
Speaker 1: us and they were playing a gig the following Tuesday
Speaker 1: at ding Walls, which is a little club in North London,
Speaker 1: and he said typical record company said I'll take you
Speaker 1: out for a slap up meal and we'll go and
Speaker 1: see them. So the following Tuesday I find myself in
Speaker 1: a kibab house in North London watching gobbits of fat
Speaker 1: fall off this spinning piece of meat. And we went
Speaker 1: over the road to ding Walls and we walked in
Speaker 1: and there were two things I noticed straight away. First
Speaker 1: of all, they weren't very loud, so I could stand
Speaker 1: quite close to the stage. Secondly, and most importantly, Mark
Speaker 1: was playing a red Fender Stratocastic guitar, which was the
Speaker 1: guitar that Hank Marvin the guitarist and the Shadows had played.
Speaker 1: Now I've told this story to Jeff Beck and um
Speaker 1: They've Gilmore and all the rest of them, and they
Speaker 1: all instantly get it. Because the red strap was an
Speaker 1: iconic instrument for us in Britain. The first stratic caster
Speaker 1: any of us had seen was on the cover of
Speaker 1: the Chirping Crickets album and Buddy Holly is holding a
Speaker 1: strap which looked to us like something from outer space.
Speaker 1: So Mark's playing this red strato caster. And I turned
Speaker 1: to this an our guy after the second song and
Speaker 1: I said to him, he's got a red strat just
Speaker 1: like Hank Marvin's. Who's managing this band? And he said
Speaker 1: nobody on on the basis of the red strat, I said,
Speaker 1: I'd like to manage them. And it changed my life.
Speaker 1: But there was a there's a kind of you know
Speaker 1: pattern there. There was a sort of just a sequence
Speaker 1: of events that led to that moment. Okay, now we
Speaker 1: know that they were on Warner in the US and
Speaker 1: Phonogram the rest of the world, certainly from the US viewpoint.
Speaker 1: First album comes out, Sultan's a Swing uh, and then
Speaker 1: the second album is not as quite as successful that
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, making movies that starts to blow
Speaker 1: up from the inside. What is going on? Well, the
Speaker 1: first record, like many many many bands throughout history, Market
Speaker 1: spent considerable amount of time writing those songs. He I
Speaker 1: can't remember what year it was, seventy five or seventy six,
Speaker 1: but he bent to America and he'd got on a
Speaker 1: Greyhound bus try trip across the South, and as he
Speaker 1: said to me later, he fell in love with every
Speaker 1: waitress that he saw. And he wrote a lot of
Speaker 1: those songs either in the U s or when he
Speaker 1: got back to the UK, and a lot of them,
Speaker 1: as as has always been the case with his writing,
Speaker 1: were sort of semi biographical. So for instance, songs of swing,
Speaker 1: they were that that was the name of a band
Speaker 1: playing in a little pub just down the road from
Speaker 1: this dreadful apartment that he and John was sharing, David
Speaker 1: was sharing, uh, And he went down to see them
Speaker 1: and they were like a little swing band, like the
Speaker 1: Panama Francis Saltons and swing the American band. And there
Speaker 1: was nobody in the place, but he was impressed with
Speaker 1: their enthusiasm and went back to the flat and he
Speaker 1: wrote the song. So he had these songs. And what
Speaker 1: happened was that after I had seen them at Dingwalls,
Speaker 1: I put them on this Talking Heads tour, which, like
Speaker 1: most of my tours, was like twenty seven gigs without
Speaker 1: a day off, because I don't believe in days off.
Speaker 1: They're just days days off one of those and I
Speaker 1: went on a lot of these dates, A because I
Speaker 1: was looking after both bands, and B because I wanted
Speaker 1: to get to know my kind of new charges. So
Speaker 1: I became very familiar with those songs. And right in
Speaker 1: the middle of that tour, Um John Stains the Air
Speaker 1: and R guy I'm talking about I was talking about,
Speaker 1: came up with a couple of possible producers, one of
Speaker 1: which was Muff Winward and Steve's elder brother. Elder brother,
Speaker 1: and Muff was working at Ireland Records at the time.
Speaker 1: He was about to leave. He had a two week
Speaker 1: window and then he was starting as head of an
Speaker 1: R at CBS as they were, so he came to
Speaker 1: see them at a show in a place called Aylesbury
Speaker 1: north of London, agreed to produce them and fitted them
Speaker 1: into that gap. There's a lot of kind of synchronicity
Speaker 1: going on here. So he he did that record in
Speaker 1: ten days. And what he basically did was he recorded
Speaker 1: their lives just bashpreash, bash breash brash. We got. Of
Speaker 1: course the album cover took way longer and was and
Speaker 1: was and was. The was the was the source of many,
Speaker 1: many many arguments and fights and stuff, particularly between the
Speaker 1: two brothers. And I realized actually at that point that
Speaker 1: rather like the Kicks and the Gallaghers and others, the
Speaker 1: sibling thing was going to be a bit of a headache,
Speaker 1: which it turned out to be. But so they made
Speaker 1: that record, and I and they finished it, and I
Speaker 1: had them. I just kept them working because that was
Speaker 1: how they were making money. The record deal was not
Speaker 1: a particularly good deal. The royalty rate was pretty poor,
Speaker 1: but it was for the time, I suppose it was okay.
Speaker 1: And they so I and I put them on I
Speaker 1: got them a residency at the Marquee Club and I
Speaker 1: put them on a kind of club college tour for
Speaker 1: the whole of June of that year, and the record
Speaker 1: came out in May. Sultan's came out in May, dribbled
Speaker 1: into the bottom of the UK chart and fell straight out.
Speaker 1: The album did okay, we didn't have the American deal
Speaker 1: at the time. There was an unusual thing in their
Speaker 1: recording agreement that the PolyGram one the phonogram one, which
Speaker 1: said that if R s O passed on them the
Speaker 1: rights to place the record, the deal in America would
Speaker 1: refer to the group which went Me and I had
Speaker 1: never done a record deal in my life. I had
Speaker 1: never read a recording agreement. I had never been in
Speaker 1: a recording studio. I didn't know anything about any of that.
Speaker 1: R s O passed because they were in the middle
Speaker 1: of Saturday night fever at al and uh So the
Speaker 1: band did a club college tour in June, and then
Speaker 1: uh Mark and I came over to the States. We
Speaker 1: went to Los Angeles and I we had some interest
Speaker 1: from Colombia, but we wanted to be on Warner Brothers
Speaker 1: because we were musical snobs and they had Van Morrison
Speaker 1: and just Ricky Lee Jones was just about to come
Speaker 1: out and things like that. And I went up to
Speaker 1: uh I managed to get somebody got me, got me
Speaker 1: an intro to Mo Austin, and I'm like, I don't
Speaker 1: know what the I really didn't know. I'm not know
Speaker 1: what I was doing and I went up to Warner
Speaker 1: Brothers and I got I was ushered into Moe's office,
Speaker 1: which was the most intimidating physical space I've ever been in.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's it's part from anything else that was enormous,
Speaker 1: and his desk was so far away that you had
Speaker 1: to sort of it took you five minutes to get
Speaker 1: from the door to his desk. And anyway, he he
Speaker 1: said something great to me. Actually, I always I love
Speaker 1: MO and he's still with us, thankfully. He said to me,
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about music, go and see the
Speaker 1: A and R Department, which of course was not true
Speaker 1: at all, but he did come from the Sinatra reprise background,
Speaker 1: and he sent me down to see the sadly late ROBERTA. Peterson.
Speaker 1: When I went into Roberta's office, she had more pot
Speaker 1: plants in there than I've never seen in my life.
Speaker 1: And and this is a little girl with the kind
Speaker 1: of required l a tan and blonde hair sitting amongst
Speaker 1: all of these palms and pot plants. And I remember
Speaker 1: giving other record and she put it on and like
Speaker 1: a lot of A and R people cranked it was
Speaker 1: spinal tap up. It went to eleven and I'm sitting
Speaker 1: there and this thing's thundering out. And she told me
Speaker 1: later she was so excited by it that she tried
Speaker 1: to pretend she tried to be cool, but I could
Speaker 1: see her at her foot tapping madly underneath the desk.
Speaker 1: And when it when she played both sides, she said
Speaker 1: to me, where are you staying? And I was sadly
Speaker 1: we were staying at the high at the Riot House.
Speaker 1: And I remember she was vastly amused by that, and
Speaker 1: she asked if she could keep that copy because she'd
Speaker 1: like to play it to some of the people in
Speaker 1: the department. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: why not. Wow. So I go back to the hotel,
Speaker 1: and by this time there were a couple of other
Speaker 1: companies who started chasing me. The American PolyGram Opera Asian
Speaker 1: had realized what a do do they've made by putting
Speaker 1: this clause in and they and actually that was the
Speaker 1: first time I was ever offered a bribe. I was
Speaker 1: offered a bribe in a sauna in somewhere in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles by some guy from PolyGram in New York. He
Speaker 1: offered me a hundred thousand dollars to get the band
Speaker 1: to forget about that clause in the contract, and I
Speaker 1: thought he was offering us an advance. I kept saying
Speaker 1: to him, you mean for the band, and he said, no,
Speaker 1: it's for you. They kept winking at me, and we're
Speaker 1: in a sauna and I was sitting on the slatted
Speaker 1: and he was on top of me, and we were
Speaker 1: getting further and further back, so we were he was
Speaker 1: lying on top of me, and I managed to wriggle
Speaker 1: out from under him make a dash for the door.
Speaker 1: Never heard from them again. Unfortunately, Warner's decided to sign us.
Speaker 1: And what I didn't know there was another lady who
Speaker 1: was also sadly passed on, called Karen Burg, who was
Speaker 1: in the in our department in New York, who worked
Speaker 1: alongside Jerry Wexler, and she had been to England and
Speaker 1: she'd seen them at a little club gig and was
Speaker 1: also pursuing them, and being a big company, they hadn't
Speaker 1: actually spoken to each other, so they didn't realize. Roberta
Speaker 1: didn't realize that Karen was already onto it. But anyway,
Speaker 1: we ended up doing the deal with them, and it
Speaker 1: turned out to be a very happy and a very
Speaker 1: fruitful relationship. Okay, how does the essence of dire Streets
Speaker 1: end up working with Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, okay, we
Speaker 1: do the first American tour in February March April of
Speaker 1: seventy nine. The albums at number two. The Doobie Brothers
Speaker 1: kept us soft number one with Michael McDonald. Sultan's gets
Speaker 1: the number two, I think it was. And I had
Speaker 1: decided one of the things I was trying to do
Speaker 1: with them live or any act I've worked with, was
Speaker 1: create an event one and we were being offered I
Speaker 1: remember Ron Del's and had got hold of my home
Speaker 1: phone number and offered as Madison Square Garden and I
Speaker 1: turned it down flat. And there were two reasons. I
Speaker 1: knew the band were not ready to play a place
Speaker 1: that big. They hadn't played anywhere bigger than three thousand
Speaker 1: capacity at that point. And I also knew that as
Speaker 1: the line up existed at the time with David K.
Speaker 1: Nofler in it, it wasn't what they didn't really perform.
Speaker 1: If you understand, they would kind of a bit rooted
Speaker 1: to the spot mark would throw off mount sense of sweat,
Speaker 1: which is where the head band came from. But uh so,
Speaker 1: I what I did was I stuck with a club,
Speaker 1: small theater. So we played, for instance, The Bottom Line
Speaker 1: in New York for four nights, and we played The
Speaker 1: Roxy in l A. At the end. When we were
Speaker 1: at the Roxy, we'd already moved on to selecting a
Speaker 1: producer for album number two and who should step forward
Speaker 1: because he could certainly recognize a dollar bill when it
Speaker 1: appeared in front of him. But Jerry Wexler, and Jerry
Speaker 1: who was going to m sorry, he'd already done the
Speaker 1: second record. That's right, we did the second record before
Speaker 1: we came to America. He brought Dylan to one of
Speaker 1: the shows, and of course Marks huge puge Dylan fan.
Speaker 1: So they met and there was an interesting little aside
Speaker 1: to this. While they were up we were in that
Speaker 1: place on the rocks upstairs, and I was chatting to
Speaker 1: Dylan's mate and I kind of said to him, I
Speaker 1: said to him, well, what band are you in? And
Speaker 1: he said, oh, I'm not in a band. I'm with
Speaker 1: the Children of God. And I went, oh, really, I've
Speaker 1: not heard of him. So this made no didn't. This
Speaker 1: came into play a little while later. So anyway, we
Speaker 1: finished that tour and Jerry had got Mark and our
Speaker 1: original drama pick with us to go down to Muscle
Speaker 1: Shoals to make Slow Train Coming. Now, just before that,
Speaker 1: Mark was rehearsing out in Santa Monica at Dylan's place
Speaker 1: and he called me up in London and he said, ed,
Speaker 1: He said, all these songs are about God, and I
Speaker 1: suddenly remembered the guy at the rock scene. And of
Speaker 1: course Bob had become born again, which which Jerry, being Jewish,
Speaker 1: couldn't get his head round at all. Jerry would constantly spit.
Speaker 1: That was his thing, was spitting. So I didn't go
Speaker 1: down there. I was too busy with the next phase
Speaker 1: of what was going on. But they went down to
Speaker 1: Muscle Shoals and I flew over to New York. I
Speaker 1: called Mark up and I said, oh, I'll be down tomorrow.
Speaker 1: He said, don't bother coming. I said why not. He said,
Speaker 1: we're finished and I said, but you've only been there
Speaker 1: five days. He said, Bob only plays a song twice.
Speaker 1: So I kicked my heels for a few days and
Speaker 1: went back to England and he followed fairly quickly after that,
Speaker 1: and that became the Slow Train Coming record, and that
Speaker 1: was you know, Bob's kind of born again announcement if
Speaker 1: you like, but a great record irrelevant of the guy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So how do you get rid of of the other? Why?
Speaker 1: You got some good questions? And the thing that the
Speaker 1: situation between the two brothers was difficult from the get go.
Speaker 1: It became increasingly difficult as the band got bigger, um
Speaker 1: because Mark was emerging as a dictator. And I don't
Speaker 1: say that in a negative way. I think all bands
Speaker 1: needed dictator. Basically, the democracies and bands just don't work.
Speaker 1: And David, who of course well as David said, I
Speaker 1: remember in an interview afterwards, he said, it was pretty
Speaker 1: tough having my brother constantly telling me what to do.
Speaker 1: And the problem also was that Mark was Mark and
Speaker 1: Pick with it us were equally matched in their talent
Speaker 1: on their instruments. Pick was probably the best drummer we
Speaker 1: ever had and they and John was very solid as
Speaker 1: a bass player. And John did all of the band's
Speaker 1: business with me, and he stopped them breaking up certainly
Speaker 1: in the earlier years because he was always very sort
Speaker 1: of sensible, as that's his personality. We got to doing
Speaker 1: the making movies record in New York at the Power
Speaker 1: Station with Jimmy Iven and Shelley Akas and there was
Speaker 1: a they were recording Romeo and Juliette and there was
Speaker 1: just a huge row, I mean like a total nuclear
Speaker 1: mega row. And it ended up with David leaving the group.
Speaker 1: He wasn't fired, it just wasn't working. So he came
Speaker 1: back to England and Mark finished up the guitar parts
Speaker 1: and said mcguinnis who was on that with the Paul
Speaker 1: Schaefer band on Letterman Show. He did a bit of
Speaker 1: guitar work on it as well. It just ran out
Speaker 1: of steam. If if he not left, the group would
Speaker 1: have disintegrated, and he was cool with what he missed
Speaker 1: out on. I can't answer that question. I mean, I
Speaker 1: haven't really had much to do with him. It was
Speaker 1: a situation where I couldn't. I couldn't carry on working
Speaker 1: with him. The first of all, I didn't consider he
Speaker 1: was talented enough, and secondly, the sibling thing meant it
Speaker 1: just in part it was just impossible. But I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know whether he regrets it. I said he
Speaker 1: received one quarter of the royalties on the first three albums,
Speaker 1: first two albums, so he did okay financially okay. Ultimately
Speaker 1: the band is going up. Meanwhile MTV becomes role Lide phenomena.
Speaker 1: The band cuts money for nothing before the record is released.
Speaker 1: Do you know you have this monster? And how do
Speaker 1: you end up making the video? And also how do
Speaker 1: you get stinged on the intro? Right? Okay, um, The
Speaker 1: answer to the first part of that question is that
Speaker 1: you never know anybody who says they can spot ahead.
Speaker 1: To me, it's they've got their heads up their backsides.
Speaker 1: Nobody knows what is going to be successful. They only
Speaker 1: know what has been successful. So people do sequels, and
Speaker 1: they do copies and so on. What happened with that
Speaker 1: one was that after the Love of Gold record, which
Speaker 1: was huge everywhere except the US because it only had
Speaker 1: five tracks on it. And I must tell you there's
Speaker 1: a song on they called Telegraph Road, which I think
Speaker 1: runs from about fifteen minutes one of yeah it is
Speaker 1: and Warn Brill has actually did a two and a
Speaker 1: half minute edit that said to me, can we put
Speaker 1: this out? And I remember saying to Carl Scott bless him.
Speaker 1: I said, it's Carl that be silly. So we didn't
Speaker 1: have a hit single of that. Private Investigations was a
Speaker 1: huge hit all over the rest of the world, I
Speaker 1: must say, to my considerable surprise since that's seven minutes long.
Speaker 1: And what happened was we did another great long tour.
Speaker 1: All these records, all these albums were accompanied by huge tours, yes,
Speaker 1: but there was a point where you literally were playing
Speaker 1: stadiums and you were literally the biggest touring act in
Speaker 1: the world. And just a just coming to that in
Speaker 1: your your chronology. What happened was that Mark started to
Speaker 1: do a couple of other things. I mean, we did
Speaker 1: the soundtracks for Local Hero and cal around about the
Speaker 1: time of Love Over with gold Um with producer David Putnam,
Speaker 1: who was an absolute delight to work with, and Um.
Speaker 1: Somewhere in all of that we had a live album
Speaker 1: out called Alchemy, and he was started producing other people Um,
Speaker 1: and we got to a point. I remember he and
Speaker 1: I we were in a car. We've been at film
Speaker 1: Man's and Era's studio. We were driving back up to
Speaker 1: London and he said, I've got some songs together. This
Speaker 1: would have been in late eighty four. He said, can
Speaker 1: you get the band back together? And those turned out
Speaker 1: to be the songs that became the Brothers in Arms record.
Speaker 1: And I remember going down to a rehearsal and I
Speaker 1: heard money for Nothing for the first time. What what
Speaker 1: struck me about it was I've done the first ever
Speaker 1: European tour with zz Top and I remember thinking that
Speaker 1: he probably had I don't know this, but I kind
Speaker 1: of detected a bit of Billy Gibbons guitar sound on
Speaker 1: that particular song. Did I think it was going to
Speaker 1: be a big hit? I thought it might be do well,
Speaker 1: but I had no I did had no idea it
Speaker 1: was going to do that. Records done about that album
Speaker 1: has done about thirty six million physical sales. So UM,
Speaker 1: we've we we decided to go to Monsterrat to Georgea's studio.
Speaker 1: UM made it mainly for the Sun and I remember
Speaker 1: going over there and we didn't know even though Sting
Speaker 1: was on the island now Mark and Stein. We've all
Speaker 1: known each other for many many years when the Straight
Speaker 1: started out the place he started out, and of course
Speaker 1: I've known Miles Fat Miles is fact checking fact checking
Speaker 1: his book with me and a couple of months ago
Speaker 1: because you've got a book coming out soon, and uh,
Speaker 1: we we didn't know Sting was on the island, and
Speaker 1: one day he just the best chef on the Island
Speaker 1: was the guy at the studio, Michael George. One day,
Speaker 1: Sting showed up and um with Trudy and because he
Speaker 1: wanted he wanted something decent to eat and we're having
Speaker 1: dinner and Mark said to him and he said, I've
Speaker 1: written this really stupid song about MTV. Do you fancy
Speaker 1: singing on it? So they went downstairs and they came
Speaker 1: up with the idea of putting I Want my MTV
Speaker 1: on the front to the tune of Don't Stand So
Speaker 1: Close to Me, and that became the record. And um,
Speaker 1: I remember there was a there was a big headache
Speaker 1: about that song because of the lyrics see the little
Speaker 1: faggot with the earring and the makeup. Warner Brothers some
Speaker 1: not everybody, and I have to say not not more Austin.
Speaker 1: There were some people in Warner Brothers who wanted to
Speaker 1: edit that there was a reference to American Express, which
Speaker 1: people were, you know, this is going to be so
Speaker 1: and so forth, but that everybody went with it. Although
Speaker 1: funny enough that the first single off that record, which
Speaker 1: people have forgotten, was Walk of Life, and that didn't
Speaker 1: do anything until it came out on the back of
Speaker 1: Money for Nothing, and then it became a big hit.
Speaker 1: It actually outsold money for nothing, So that was that's
Speaker 1: basically the story that it wasn't okay then that the
Speaker 1: video was classic too with the animation. How did you
Speaker 1: come up with a video? Well, that was done by
Speaker 1: Steve Barron and he had done Michael Jackson's beat It,
Speaker 1: the one with the lights under his feet, and he
Speaker 1: basically came up with that idea. We tried. We did
Speaker 1: have a moment where we were trying to find somebody
Speaker 1: who would appear in that as a kind of redneck
Speaker 1: sort of person, and I approached Buddy Rich and Rodney
Speaker 1: Dangerfield and they both passed on it. There you go,
Speaker 1: So we ended up. So we ended and this that
Speaker 1: that that digital thing had just just literally just kind
Speaker 1: of arrived. So we were shown, we were shown an
Speaker 1: example of that, and we were already on tour on
Speaker 1: the we were already started to turn that record that
Speaker 1: all of the live footage that the band are in
Speaker 1: on in that clip was shot in in Budapest in Hungary, Okay.
Speaker 1: As we referenced earlier, record comes out far beyond anybody's
Speaker 1: conception worldwide. Smash. What does it feel like? And how
Speaker 1: you then decide to play stadiums and what's it like
Speaker 1: being the biggest act in the world. Um ye, I
Speaker 1: that's an almost unanswerable question. When you're on the roller coaster,
Speaker 1: you're just hanging on. I mean, you don't realize what
Speaker 1: what you just said until you can look at it
Speaker 1: with hindsight. I knew we didn't actually play stadiums. We
Speaker 1: played some outdoors, but we didn't. I preferred doing multiple arenas.
Speaker 1: I think it's fairer on the audience. Did you play
Speaker 1: stadium in in Israel? Though? Oh well that was the part. Yes, Sorry,
Speaker 1: we're just mixing up your fragile Yeah, we played. We
Speaker 1: played to a quarter of the entire population of Israel
Speaker 1: over three shows. One was in a Roman amphitheater in
Speaker 1: the middle of Jerusalem that was the closest to a
Speaker 1: riot I've ever been involved in. And the other two
Speaker 1: were in the Park, which would be the equivalent of
Speaker 1: Central Park in New York, and we played that. We
Speaker 1: filled that for two days and we played big outdoor shows.
Speaker 1: In Australia, we did play. We played to eighty nine thousand,
Speaker 1: six d and thirty two people in Auckland, which is
Speaker 1: the largest gathering of people ever in the history of
Speaker 1: the Islands of New Zealand, things like that. I could
Speaker 1: rattle off silly statistics for age, okay, But interestingly, in
Speaker 1: that era mid eaties, the biggest being in the world.
Speaker 1: How much production did you curry and what we was
Speaker 1: at a factor or was it still just the music?
Speaker 1: It was the music really. I mean we had a
Speaker 1: We had a great, great lighting man, Chas Harrington. Now
Speaker 1: Chaz had started out as the engineer at the Demo
Speaker 1: studio where they did the first demos. And one day
Speaker 1: he was fiddling, he was doing monitors for us, and
Speaker 1: he was fiddling with the lighting board and we didn't
Speaker 1: have a lighting man. This is very early on, and
Speaker 1: I said to him, do you want to do the lights?
Speaker 1: And he became one of the world's leading lighting designers. Um,
Speaker 1: we had the same crew we kept. We've always been
Speaker 1: very low. We used the same trucking company lights, sound,
Speaker 1: all the rest of it, and I kept Obviously the
Speaker 1: crew had to grow, but the core of it sound
Speaker 1: front of the house, UM Robert Collins who now does
Speaker 1: whose sound? People like the monitor guy. They all the
Speaker 1: core people. And by this point the band had metamorphosized
Speaker 1: into a situation where we had really Mark and John
Speaker 1: and the others were I'm going to call them side men,
Speaker 1: but they were rather more than side men, and we
Speaker 1: compensated them on a basis that was more than side men.
Speaker 1: So they were a very That lineup on that Brothers
Speaker 1: and Arms tour, in my view, is the best lineup
Speaker 1: we ever had, and they consistently did two hundred and
Speaker 1: shows in twelve months. It's amazing people are still alive.
Speaker 1: But interesting, interestingly enough, Mark said to me once he
Speaker 1: came in the office and he was looking at the
Speaker 1: date sheet that I put together, and he pointed at
Speaker 1: this day off. He should what's that for? I said,
Speaker 1: that's for the crew. The band went and played a
Speaker 1: think reception in a hotel on that day. Wow, okay,
Speaker 1: what did you do with the money? There are issues
Speaker 1: of tax, there's issue spending. Where did you put it?
Speaker 1: What do you do with it? Are you talking about
Speaker 1: me personally or to the degree you overtaking? Wow? Well,
Speaker 1: the first thing is none of them actually no artists
Speaker 1: have been involved with but certainly none of dire Straits
Speaker 1: has acquired. Nobody's got a private plane, nobody's got a yacht.
Speaker 1: Mark has a collection of classic cars we have. Everybody
Speaker 1: ended up with nice homes, but I wouldn't say particularly exotic. U.
Speaker 1: We yeah, we paid, we paid a lot of tax.
Speaker 1: We decided to stay resident in the UK. Nobody he
Speaker 1: went overseas or did any of that kind of stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because you're saying that in the context of now,
Speaker 1: because you've got to remember that everything was less than
Speaker 1: Ticket prices were less, merchandising was less, record royalties were
Speaker 1: actually record realties were better the Newtube. I mean, if
Speaker 1: the bogey men back then with the record companies. Now
Speaker 1: it's the internet providers on question. And you know, when
Speaker 1: I do the thing with Irving tomorrow, I know this
Speaker 1: is going to come up. Um. And I think that
Speaker 1: the the money changes you, but what it really changes
Speaker 1: is people's attitude towards you. Um, it's a long time
Speaker 1: since I didn't pick up the bill in a restaurant,
Speaker 1: so you have that. But you know, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: churlish to complain about being successful. It did. It does
Speaker 1: have an impact on your on your psyche definitely, apart
Speaker 1: from anything else. You can't quite grasp it if you could.
Speaker 1: I mean, you you've got me to explain my background
Speaker 1: earlier on if you come from a background like that
Speaker 1: Mark Mark. Mark's dad was an architect, his mom was
Speaker 1: a school teacher. John's parents were in were farmers. Um,
Speaker 1: we weren't. It's frightening. There is an element to it
Speaker 1: that is frightening, and you kind of stash it away
Speaker 1: pension funds. You would shove it all into pension fund
Speaker 1: because they because they were they were very good tax
Speaker 1: wise in this country, and because there's always this fear
Speaker 1: all these all creative people are essentially insecure, and some
Speaker 1: of them desperately so so you stash it away kind
Speaker 1: of under the bed almost because you think it's going
Speaker 1: to stop tomorrow. So I would say, and we all
Speaker 1: had very good business advice. I did not use lawyers.
Speaker 1: I did all the record deals, all the publishing deals,
Speaker 1: and all of the tours outside of the US. I
Speaker 1: did myself well. Obviously you were an expert in touring,
Speaker 1: but especially even in that day, record deals were very
Speaker 1: comprehensive in retrospect. Was but I just but my thing
Speaker 1: was I had I had huge leverage, so I just
Speaker 1: used to invent things. I just used to stick closes
Speaker 1: in that were I used to tie record companies up
Speaker 1: in knots. For instance. Give an example in the UK
Speaker 1: m then not now, television advert sizing for records was
Speaker 1: a big thing, but it was expensive, so the record
Speaker 1: companies would want to recoup of the TV costs. So
Speaker 1: I put them in as I put in clauses in
Speaker 1: the deal that were so complicated they didn't know what
Speaker 1: they were doing. And right now I can't say how
Speaker 1: much straits technically, Oh what was polychrome now universal? But
Speaker 1: it's saved hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Speaker 1: We never paid towards TV campaigns, were never paid towards videos. Okay,
Speaker 1: did at what point? Or did? You renegotiated streets record
Speaker 1: deal on every single album, And I renegotiated it backwards
Speaker 1: as well as forwards, So the first album ended up
Speaker 1: on the same royalty as the next one. Wow. But Bob,
Speaker 1: this sounds I mean, it sounds grandiose. But I had
Speaker 1: leverage if I had no you only get leverage through
Speaker 1: commercial success if you're one of the things I also
Speaker 1: realized was that the staff in record companies, not so
Speaker 1: much at Warner Brothers, but certainly in the phonogram companies
Speaker 1: and PolyGram. I got through seventeen managing directors in twenty
Speaker 1: five years in the UK company. Nobody knew what the
Speaker 1: previous lot had done. They lost all of our paperwork fantastic.
Speaker 1: So they would ring up and they would say, we
Speaker 1: can't find your contracts and I say, oh, hours is
Speaker 1: in storage, it's in a it's in a box under
Speaker 1: the Thames. I can't get it, which is total bullshit.
Speaker 1: We did. We went for long periods with no contract.
Speaker 1: We just had deal memos and I and I stole
Speaker 1: somebody out of the royalties department at Phonogram to be
Speaker 1: my in house accountant, so he knew exactly what that
Speaker 1: was going to be. My next question, to what degree
Speaker 1: did your audit frequently and you always found money? Nobody's
Speaker 1: ever audited a record company and not found money. Okay, Ever,
Speaker 1: in terms of Sunset deals, are you still getting paid
Speaker 1: personally from these records? Now? I sold those rights like
Speaker 1: rather like Irving's buying up publishing and Mecuri artist is
Speaker 1: buying up anything that's warm. I sold those rights about
Speaker 1: three or four years ago. But I was getting commission
Speaker 1: in perpetuity on records and I had a very long
Speaker 1: post term on publishing and again I got that after
Speaker 1: managing them for about eighteen years. Why did you decide
Speaker 1: to sell some personal reasons, m h and because I
Speaker 1: could see that the catalog was I mean, it's still
Speaker 1: doing well, but it's been a long time since Brothers
Speaker 1: in Arms. I liked to be honest with you, I
Speaker 1: was kind of I was still I was a bit
Speaker 1: fed up having to administer it and so and so forth.
Speaker 1: And I managed to get an extremely good deal. I mean,
Speaker 1: if can you tell us sold into a company called
Speaker 1: Royal to Exchange in Denver, and I got a very
Speaker 1: very high multiple. Okay, so you have this band, it's
Speaker 1: the biggest band in the world. Yet the band is
Speaker 1: barely together. You know, most managers are doing everything to
Speaker 1: keep the band together. So one thing in your mind
Speaker 1: and own this is shaky what was going on in
Speaker 1: your mind at that point. But when we got two
Speaker 1: Brothers in Arms and the work that we did on
Speaker 1: the back of that, which basically lasted for a year,
Speaker 1: that level of success that you're talking about, I would
Speaker 1: take issue with the biggest band in the world because
Speaker 1: that's a bit like being the no No. I think
Speaker 1: if you look, I remember the tour grossest, literally the
Speaker 1: largest in the world. We can, but I can't quantify
Speaker 1: all these other things perception when it comes to hard dollars.
Speaker 1: That's a bit like being the fastest gunfighter in the West.
Speaker 1: You know one day somebody's going to come around the
Speaker 1: corner and shoot you. Yes, but you have a band
Speaker 1: with no sex symbol from not saying you know trendy music.
Speaker 1: So and you're as we stated earlier, it's not like
Speaker 1: you're selling the show. You're selling the music. That's why
Speaker 1: it was so noteworthy. I'm not blow and spoke up
Speaker 1: your ass. For those of us were outside, it was
Speaker 1: pretty astounding. It was pretty starting. For those of us
Speaker 1: on the inside. I didn't think of it like that,
Speaker 1: and honestly, a lot of people will when I'm watching
Speaker 1: this will be surprised. I literally ever thought about the
Speaker 1: money coming in. I constantly thought about the money going out,
Speaker 1: because when you're running a thing like that, the overhead starts.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've got white hair. I started off with
Speaker 1: him with black hair. Um, you've had two people on
Speaker 1: the road I had. I can't, I can't. I can't
Speaker 1: remember the number of trucks, planes and all the rest
Speaker 1: of it. They What happened was that when we got
Speaker 1: to the end of that, which was eighty six April May,
Speaker 1: no sooner as we finished. The mark was he was
Speaker 1: like a greyhound out of the box. Straightaway is producing
Speaker 1: Tina Turner, then he's doing something else, then he's doing
Speaker 1: another film. It never stopped. He had an incredible work ethic.
Speaker 1: I mean absolutely, it was hard to keep up with him.
Speaker 1: And I had expanded my management company and I was
Speaker 1: looking after Brian Ferry. Jerry Rafferty had gone by this time,
Speaker 1: long long gone. We had a great Irish singer songwriter
Speaker 1: called Paul Brady, and I was managing Scott Walker, from
Speaker 1: whom I made three fifty pounds commission in seven years.
Speaker 1: And Scott's no longer with us. But if he walked
Speaker 1: into this room now and asked me to do it again,
Speaker 1: I do it like a shot. You let's stop with
Speaker 1: Brian Ferry for a second. You know, he's a very
Speaker 1: debonair guy artistically at ten successful in America. But we're
Speaker 1: constantly reading these stories how he's one of the richest
Speaker 1: musicians in the UK. Rubbish. How did you know? That?
Speaker 1: Is complete rubbish? I would say he's that's complete rubbish.
Speaker 1: Well then let me ask you, since you were the manager,
Speaker 1: how successful was he in the UK? He wasn't as
Speaker 1: successful a both within Roxy Music and on his own.
Speaker 1: But if you're talking about physical record sales, for instance,
Speaker 1: on the record I worked on, that record would have
Speaker 1: done maybe a hundred hundred it up on this end, No,
Speaker 1: it's that's complete rubbish. I don't know who's writing that crap,
Speaker 1: and that's no disrespect to Brian. I did a deal
Speaker 1: for him, or I have finished off a deal in fact,
Speaker 1: his previous management we're doing with virgin Um, which was
Speaker 1: an extremely but he that they didn't presume they I think,
Speaker 1: I hope I could be corrected on this. I think
Speaker 1: they dropped him eventually. I mean he and I we
Speaker 1: it didn't work. It just didn't gell because because he'd
Speaker 1: been whether management company before me, who had a totally
Speaker 1: different style to me. I don't do personals, I don't
Speaker 1: do mortgages, I don't get people's cars repaired, I don't
Speaker 1: get book their granny's on holiday. And I don't do divorces. Okay,
Speaker 1: but talking about what you do do they're very hands
Speaker 1: on creative managers like the two guys A C. Prime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are there are I know, I know Peter very well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then there are other people say, you go to
Speaker 1: the studio, I'll make the record, but when it comes out,
Speaker 1: I'll do I'll sell whatever. But the creative thing is
Speaker 1: totally yours. You make decision even what's going to be
Speaker 1: on the record. Where do you sit in there? Continuing?
Speaker 1: I think because I had been a musician, or at
Speaker 1: least I've been a drummer, because that's not necessarily the
Speaker 1: same thing, um, and because the guy's industrates in particularly
Speaker 1: when I talk about death strates, I really mean Martin
Speaker 1: Offer and John Ellslie, and I really mean Mark. I
Speaker 1: suppose we are roughly at the same age. We're from
Speaker 1: the same background, we grew up in very similar parts
Speaker 1: of the UK, and most significantly, we grew up listening
Speaker 1: to the same stuff, all the stuff I was talking
Speaker 1: about at the beginning. So when Mark and I went
Speaker 1: started going to Nashville a lot and chet Atkins Blessing
Speaker 1: opened the door for us to meet everybody. We were
Speaker 1: like school kids. I mean, meeting the Everly Brothers for
Speaker 1: us was like you couldn't it was. It was kind
Speaker 1: of dream like and going. And remember he called me
Speaker 1: one morning, pretty early in the morning, and he said,
Speaker 1: what are you doing And I said, I'm ranking and
Speaker 1: he said, we'll stop doing that. He said, We're going
Speaker 1: to go and meet Scotty Moore. So I'm in the
Speaker 1: lobby in five minutes. I mean, you know, this was
Speaker 1: and I remember we went to Chech took us to
Speaker 1: Studio B where Elvis had recorded, and I said to
Speaker 1: check where did Elvis used to stand? And he pointed,
Speaker 1: and Mark and I went and stood and hugged each other.
Speaker 1: It was that kind of It was the romance thing
Speaker 1: that was talking about earlier. And I think that one
Speaker 1: of the things about Mark Noveler is that he was
Speaker 1: very generous in including me a little bit, because obviously
Speaker 1: I'm doing a different area of the job in the
Speaker 1: creative process. So he would on more than one occasion
Speaker 1: come into the office brandishing a guitar, sit down in
Speaker 1: front of my desk, can play a song to me
Speaker 1: and say what do you think of that? And I
Speaker 1: can remember not in the office, but he remember him
Speaker 1: when he the first time he played Robbio and Juliet
Speaker 1: to me and I just stared at the floor I
Speaker 1: had no idea what to say. And there's a line
Speaker 1: in that song you and me babe, how about it?
Speaker 1: I thought, what a great line, what fantastic lyric. And
Speaker 1: I imagine John Landau has the same kind of I
Speaker 1: know John's actually played guitar with Bruce and his band
Speaker 1: and drums. I played drums with the notting Hillbillies for takeing. Okay,
Speaker 1: how did that come about? So that we finished the
Speaker 1: brothers dance thing? And I think as a kind of
Speaker 1: kind of reaction to Mark is not very he's not
Speaker 1: very comfortable with fame and celebrity. And in the same way,
Speaker 1: when Bruce did is Nebraska record, there was a bit
Speaker 1: of a I think it's a subconscious desire to take
Speaker 1: the heat out of the situation, to try and get
Speaker 1: it down from the stadiums that you're talking about, and
Speaker 1: the two road crew and we didn't know their names,
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. And he's always been a fan
Speaker 1: of I'm loosely going to call Americana roots music, blues folk,
Speaker 1: all of that. And one day, um, he has a
Speaker 1: little studio in a newshouse not not that far from here,
Speaker 1: and and somebody said to me, somebody who worked for me,
Speaker 1: said Mark, Mark's doing an album. I said what He said,
Speaker 1: He's doing an album And this turned out to be
Speaker 1: the first nothing Elbudis record. And he called me up
Speaker 1: one day and he said, where are your drums? I
Speaker 1: said there at the house. He said, I'll send Ron,
Speaker 1: that's one of the roadies, round to get them and
Speaker 1: we set them up in the downstairs bedroom, trail the
Speaker 1: microphone out from the upstairs bedroom out of the window,
Speaker 1: down the side of the building in and hung it
Speaker 1: off the light. Then he played me Bewildered, which is
Speaker 1: one of the songs on that record. He said, can
Speaker 1: you play that? I said yeah. He said can you
Speaker 1: play it with brushes? This is this is why he
Speaker 1: got me in, because he doesn't know anybody who can
Speaker 1: play brushes and I said yeah, I said yeah. So
Speaker 1: I played it one take. He said, okay, next one,
Speaker 1: played the next one, jud finished, did that, the sampled
Speaker 1: me as well. I'm not saying I'm on every track.
Speaker 1: And then a couple of nights later we were but
Speaker 1: wine Bar and he said, okay, we're going to go
Speaker 1: on tour him you're the drummer and I went no, no, no,
Speaker 1: and I hang on a minute, Hang on a minute,
Speaker 1: and said, I haven't played in a while. He said, now,
Speaker 1: don't worry about that, is it just play time. Well,
Speaker 1: of course, when we got into rehearsals, we rehearsed for
Speaker 1: forty two days without a day off, from noon until
Speaker 1: nine o'clock at night. We had one day off and
Speaker 1: we played forty three shows without a day off, two
Speaker 1: and a half hour set. And I'll tell you an
Speaker 1: interesting thing. You'll be interested in this, Bob Mark because
Speaker 1: he was a school teacher. At rehearsals, he'll have an
Speaker 1: enormous blackboard and a piece of chalk and he draws
Speaker 1: a grid on it, and in the in the left
Speaker 1: hand side here there's this song list getting longer and
Speaker 1: longer and longer. And if you don't get at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, you have to play the songs.
Speaker 1: And if you don't get a ticket in the box,
Speaker 1: you don't go home. You play it until you get
Speaker 1: a tick in the box. And I've seen dast rights
Speaker 1: rehearsals when the road crew have been going because they
Speaker 1: hadn't taken the box. Okay, So I had it in
Speaker 1: with you and Mark well after they the last straights
Speaker 1: tour that they on every street record, which I have
Speaker 1: to say was a difficult period. That was the kind
Speaker 1: of divorce tour. I will leave it at that, and
Speaker 1: we sold it on. We just ran out of gas.
Speaker 1: We litterally. I mean, we're good friends, we have a
Speaker 1: respectful relationship. I have a good relationship with John and
Speaker 1: some of the road crew in my office staff. But
Speaker 1: we kind of it just ran its course. And I
Speaker 1: think one of the tricks in life, especially if you
Speaker 1: have the wherewithal to do this, is to recognize when
Speaker 1: you've got to the cell by day, speaking of which
Speaker 1: you've been married how many times? Twice? And I'm in
Speaker 1: the middle of getting divorced. It'll probably come through tomorrow
Speaker 1: fully enough. Did it reach its sale by date? Yes? Okay, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's yeah, that's that's a bit of a raw subject. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, I think that no disrespect to
Speaker 1: me the lady. Um, yeah, it's we put it in
Speaker 1: a different way. Do you have someone in your life now? Okay,
Speaker 1: because otherwise getting older it can be kind of amazing
Speaker 1: being I have somebody who unfortunately is marooned in your
Speaker 1: country and I have not seen her since March. As
Speaker 1: they say that will end hopefully within you know, months,
Speaker 1: but in any event, well not or not if not,
Speaker 1: if the governor of Tech excess as his way, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just astounding. We're fighting between states here. You know,
Speaker 1: they keep it, you know, taking ship to California and Texas.
Speaker 1: As far as him dropping all restrictions, you might as
Speaker 1: well shoot people. But um, okay, you came up in
Speaker 1: an error. It was all being developed as we started.
Speaker 1: It's all been consolidated today. What do you feel about
Speaker 1: the business today, the opportunities today, the music and landscape today.
Speaker 1: I think if you're twenty years old and you're coming
Speaker 1: into it, it's probably just as exciting as it was
Speaker 1: for me. For me, I find the process of it.
Speaker 1: You asked why Mark and I split up. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just between me and him. I had become bored with
Speaker 1: the process of it, the bureaucracy of it, if you like.
Speaker 1: It seemed to me that the business part was, if
Speaker 1: you had a kind of graph, the business part was
Speaker 1: going up and the musical bit was coming down. But
Speaker 1: that's a generational thing. You know. I was watching a
Speaker 1: couple of panels of the panels today, and you know,
Speaker 1: I've been doing interviewers for the ISLMC now for some
Speaker 1: twenty years or so. It's been quite interesting because every
Speaker 1: time I look at from the stage, the audience is
Speaker 1: getting younger, obviously, and what they're interested in is what
Speaker 1: applies to them now and in the future. They're not
Speaker 1: that interested in the history of it, which I think
Speaker 1: is a bit sad, but that's just the way it is.
Speaker 1: So for instance, I'm into viewing Irving days off tomorrow
Speaker 1: and rather than talk about the Eagles, because I don't
Speaker 1: think I could stay awake. Um, we will have to
Speaker 1: tackle some of the current stuff that's going on. And
Speaker 1: he and I had a chat last night. Within two
Speaker 1: minutes we've both fallen into exactly what we're going to
Speaker 1: do tomorrow, and I stopped him. I stopped him because
Speaker 1: I wanted to be spontaneous, right. But of course, with Irving,
Speaker 1: unlike many people like MTV itself for the Internet killed it,
Speaker 1: he kept changing with the generation. Oh yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of people get stuck in there are Okay, I think
Speaker 1: we've come to the end of the feeling we've known.
Speaker 1: I think some of the audience either needs to get
Speaker 1: up and eat something or urinate. So I think we've
Speaker 1: come to a natural stopping point here and anything. We
Speaker 1: have a weekend, we can do what we can do.
Speaker 1: Part two another time absolutely drilled down on one of
Speaker 1: these areas. Anyway, this has been wonderful. Thanks thanks to
Speaker 1: all the audience from I L m C. This is
Speaker 1: a Bob left That's podcast signing on. Thank you. Thanks,