Latest / The Bob Lefsetz Podcast / Ed Bicknell

Transcript

Ed Bicknell · The Bob Lefsetz Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to a live edition of the Bible
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Left Nest Podcast. If I know him, my guest today
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: has done it all. He's been a promoter, he's been
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: an agent, a legendary manager. Please welcome Ed Bignell. Ed Hi,
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: thank you, thanks for having me. Okay, just a couple
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: of days ago, Michael Godynsky pass. What can you tell
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: us about Godynsky in Australia. He was like a lot
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: of people have said he was a one off. I
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: mean he actually kind of. He really changed the Australian
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: music scene almost singlehandedly, and he was a great character.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: It was a really really funny guy. I made to
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: spend time with him was great. He was just just hilarious.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: He was a complete music enthusiast, which can't be said
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: of some promoters these days. And he got to live straight.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: And condolences to his family, to his to say, his wife,
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: and to everybody else in the Australian music business because
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: he uh, he was definitely a one off, but the
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: sadly beast for those who did meet him, he was
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: really definitely a unique They broke the mold after that,
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: and he always said, I said, what about spreading throughout
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: the world. He said, no, I like being the King
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: of Australia. I like being a big fish and a
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: small And for those who didn't know, he literally did
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: it all. You know he had not only started. You
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: started with a record company, Mushroom Records, at the age
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: of twenty and ultimately became frontier touring and so much more.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: But ed, you've done so much yourself. But let's look
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: at the landscape today. What is the few were an
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: agent and you're involved in uh growing w M. Endeavor
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: in the UK. What is the future of the agency
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: business in a marketplace where there's such consolidation amongst promoters.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: That's a tough one, Thanks very much, Bob. I think
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: the big agencies, and I'm thinking particularly of William Morrison.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Oh sorry, Endeavor. Let me curate myself and see a A.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: They're kind of too big to fail. They're the sort
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: of they're the big banks at the time of the crash,
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: and I think that they will keep going, but they
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: will probably strip some of their activities. Back when I
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: was at William Morris, which was William Morris. Back then
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: they had all these divisions corporate consulting as one I
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: remember and video games and all these kind of things,
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: and nobody seemed to know what they did, and if
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: you if you ask the question, nobody could tell you.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: And there's this, there's been this voracious appetite for gobbling
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: up everything. That's a bit like Live Nation actually as well.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: They have this, these tentacles. I always compare them to
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: that old Steve McQueen film The Blob, and the Blob
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: basically gobbled up everything in its path, and these agencies
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: are a bit like that. But at the same time,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: this pandemic has caused people to split off. There was
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: a panel earlier today of the new agents and there
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: were four people on it who have basically left where
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: they were, including one gentlemen from CIA started their own businesses,
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: and that's inevitable, that's always happened, I think. But the
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: the corporate agency, to me, it didn't work for me
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: personally because I found, I suppose, in simple terms, I
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: found being an employee after being an employer for thirty
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: years very difficult. I couldn't adapt to the corporate culture
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: as it was then, and I couldn't adapt to the
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: they I'm going to say this from the perspective of
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: somebody here in London. They could not leave it alone.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: They were constantly micromanaging me in order to get to
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: wherever they thought they wanted to get. Um. That's not
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: a criticism of anybody, particularly although the management at the
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: time nearly all of whom left very quickly after Arian
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Patrick came in. They were not I didn't think they
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: were particularly competent. Okay, let's be very specific. You mentioned
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: the consolidation of companies. Used to be the ten per centers,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: the movie agents and the live appearance agents. They were
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: the driving force of revenue for these agencies. Now it's sports.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: They're involved with these giant funds. One would think as
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: a music agent you feel like a zip on the
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: end of the rear end of the whole enterprise. Yeah,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: well you do. And that was one of the problems.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: And I think that if you if you come from
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: the generation I come from, and I think you come from,
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: and I'm not saying it doesn't happen with younger people
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: coming into the game. Now, what inspired me was music.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: That was it. It was just there was nothing more
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: than that. I was just completely and totally entranced by music,
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: and music have pretty much every genre it's it's that's
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: something that you don't here played in an agency offices,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: you don't talk about Um. That's not saying that agents
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: don't go out and see bands, you know, five five,
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: six nights a week, probably four or five different venues
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: a night. But but you're you're right. Certainly, when you're
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: in the in a management position in a company like that,
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: you're you're talking about the elements that you're talking about,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: and what you're doing basically is clambering up through layer
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: after later until you get to the person who signs
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: the check. And under the William Morris management I worked with,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: the vain head of finance explained to me one day
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: that his soul, he considered his sole job, was to
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: stop Jim and Dave's mad schemes. This was Jim Wyatt
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: and Dave Workesch after so, which was very encouraging to
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: me because we were I had a great team here.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: We managed to break even in the first year. They
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: budgeted to lose money for seven years and it was
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: impossible to get anything done. The reaction time was ridiculously long.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: We missed out on getting extra office space for that reason.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: They just didn't act quickly. Enough, and after about two
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: and a half years there was a particular incident. I
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: was asked to sign a chit which gave us the
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: right to have semi skim milk as well as full
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: cram milk. This landed on my desk, and that happened
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: to be the catalyst, and I just thought, you know,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: I didn't sign up for this, and and I left.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: And it was very shortly after that Endeavor merged with them,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: and then within about a week took them over. And okay,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: now you come from the era when the whole business
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: was built. This is one of the things that bothers me.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: They say, oh, music is the same as it ever was.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: It certainly is not now. I always analogize it to
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: the internet. There was all this excitement starting in the
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: mid nineties, certainly to about uh in the sixties we
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: were developing the business. If you take about Peter Graham,
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Peter Graham flipped the touring business, said hey, the gig
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: is going to sell out anyway, I might as well
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: take the lion. Sure of the money. The question becomes
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: I always say, a great musician not only is a
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: bad business person, but they couldn't even at the seven
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: eleven because they couldn't show up on time. I say
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: the great same thing about the Titans and the history
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: of the music business. They literally couldn't work anywhere else.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: They could only work for themselves. Do you believe A
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: this is still true? And be what can you tell
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: us about the kind of personality that created and drove
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: this business? I'll take the second part of that first. Um.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Of course my experiences UK and we were always following America,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: So the first thing really that happened here of any
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: significance would have been a N seven when UM a
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: little story for you, E M. I. Back in those
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: days they had four A and R guys who sat
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: on a committee, and back in those days, most of
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: the UK labels just had kind of one off deals
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: with American labels, so they had first refusal for an
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: instance on the records coming out of our C A
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: and I. In later the years of his life, I
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: became very very close friends with Sir George Martin, who
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: was a great He became almost like a second dad
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: to me. And he was on this committee with three
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: other A and OUR men, and a record arrived one
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: day and they played it and they thought there was
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: something wrong with it. They thought that the tape or
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: something had stretched. So they call up the American company
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: and said this record you've sent us, it's it's it
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: doesn't sound right. And the American then said, no, no,
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: that's the record. It's turning into a huge hit here.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: You should pick it up. Originally the vote was three
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: votes against one vote four, which was George. George then
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: set about, over a period of three or four weeks,
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: brain busting the other three. Well, he only needed two
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: more votes. He brain busted, He got two of them
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: to agree, and they put it and that record was Heartbreak,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Hotel Wow, and it changed everything. So George Martin was
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: not just the beat was producer. He was also the
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: person who and that record would have come out anyway obviously,
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: but we only had the only labels I can remember
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: back then were Decca, Pie and E M I, and
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: one of them would have picked it up. And when
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: I came into the music business, first of all, it
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: wasn't called the music business. And secondly it wasn't a business.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: It was this completely chaotic thing which was full of
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: some fairly dubious characters who had spotted that there was
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: cash to be made and I emphasized the word cash
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: in bags. And this was pre Brian Epstein. I'm talking
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: about the period from about nineteen fifty seven to about
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, and there were there were there were guys,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: people with names like Larry Palms. He was nervous Mr Palms,
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: Shillings and Pence because he and he had the first
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: boy bands as we now call them. All of his
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: acts were basically guys who looked great and it didn't
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: matter whether they could sing. We had a couple of
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: very early and pretty primitive television show six five Special
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: which went out at five past six on a Saturday,
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: and a show called Oh Boy, and it was Oh Boy,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: which had an edge to it. It had a producer
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: called Jack Good who went on to do various of
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: the things, and people like Cliff Richard and the Shadows
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: Billy Fury out of a Faith got their start on
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: that show. And that was a black and white TV show.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: And if you were thirteen years old, you made sure
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: you you were at home on a Saturday at six
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: o'clock to watch one of these two shows. The business
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: was full of characters. Of course. One of the things
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: about working in music you don't actually need any qualifications.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: You are what you are what you say you are.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: So if you're a promoter, if you walk into it.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Back when I was in my early days as an agent,
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: a promoter was somebody who walked in and said I'm
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: a promoter, and within five minutes I'd be selling in
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: deep purple dates and praying that they would earn that
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: the the upfront ticket sales would be sufficient that they
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: could pay the deposit, because of course nobody had escrow
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: accounts back then. They just took the money and thought
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: of it as their own money. And I think that
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: the music really followed the early American rock and roll singers,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: the Evely Brothers, Elvis, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: that Chuck Berry. Of course, that era, and that kind
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: of metamorphosized into the Beatles era, and of course on
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: the first Beatles record, or the first album that was
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: released in the UK, there were a large number of covers,
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: including a roll over Beethoven for instance, I can remember.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: So it was a very from about through to probably
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: about sixty sixty seven. It was a pretty it was
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: a bit wild West. We didn't have things like you
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: had in America. Like Paola and that kind of thing,
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: because we only had the BBC, and of course I can't.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: I should absolutely include this Radio Luxembourg. Radio Luxembourg, which
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: was broadcast from Luxembourg, was played pop music from about
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: seven o'clock in the evening to about midnight, and it
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: had a fading signal and in the house I lived
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: up in the north of England, the only place I
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: could get the full signal was halfway up the staircase,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: so I would spend hours sitting on the staircase listening
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: to Roy Orbison whoever it happened to be. The BBC
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: only played pop music on one show, which was directed,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: which was for the American gies who were posted in Germany,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: and they would send in rickly was called Two Way
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: Family Favorites. They would send in requests and once in
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: a while Perry Como would be put aside and you'd here,
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: don't be cruel, all shook up or whatever happened to be,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: and you would you would listen to this entire to
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: our program in the hope that they would play one
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: or two bona fide pop songs. And of course there
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: were no categories. It was just pop music. We didn't
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: have a rock and roll. There was no country, there
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: was no heavy metal, there was no folk, none of that. Okay,
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: maybe I'm interrupting, but let's go back to what circumstances
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: do you grow up in? Well. I was born Yorkshire,
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: which is up in the north of England. I my
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: father was the principle of a grammar school. My mom
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: sort of my mom. I had a younger brother. We
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: lived in a town halfway between Leeds and York until
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: I was about eleven, and then we moved up to
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: where they actually they built a brand new school, which
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: was the largest in Yorkshire at the time, and we
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: moved up there and lived at the school. It wasn't
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: a private school, it was just a regular day school.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: When I was thirteen years old, that Christmas, my parents
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: and I would love it if they were alive now
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: because I would love to be able to ask them
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: why they did this. They bought me Elvis's Gold Records,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Volume one, which were the principle of a grammar school
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: in Yorkshire. In that was quite a stretch and I
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: can remember on Christmas morning going down putting it on
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: the old radio gram you know, when the record would
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: fall down with a crash and the first track on
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: that record on side one is hound Dog and two
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: minutes twenty six seconds later, my life had changed completely. Okay,
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: many many years later, but many years later I had
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Scotty Moore and
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: d J. Fontana, who played guitar and drums on that respectively,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: which was a complete trip. Oh yeah, when you meet
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: your heroes from that era. Uh, but let's go back.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: One thing is as an American, I'm slightly younger than
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: you in that we grew up with television. I had
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: New York markets, so there were off six TV channels, etcetera.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: But we get the impression that in the UK it
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: was economically disadvantage and this impacted the music scene. What
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: was it like growing up in that era. Well, you're correct,
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: because that was the post war era, so we as
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: the UK. I remember once asking my parents what was
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: the most significant thing in their lives, and without a
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: second hesitation, they both said, in unison, the war something.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: And I remember my dad saying our lives were put
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: on hold for seven years. So when we came out
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: of the war, for a certain age group, we still
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: had national service. You still had to go into the army.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: The economy, of course, had been completely ruined by the
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: war effort we had. But my memory of that period
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: is that everything was dark, everything was wet. It was
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: always raining. It's raining now, but it's see different about then,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: and it was a very It was austerea. We didn't
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: have a lot of the modern things I think that
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: you've got in America. Before us, we didn't have central heating,
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: didn't have had coal fires. You would take a bath
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: in a tin in a tin bath. You as the
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: son of a school teacher, you did that. You didn't
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: have senating. You took a bath in a tin bath. Yes, absolutely, Yeah,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: I still do yeah, no, but no, yes absolutely. I
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: mean he was he when he passed. I remember you
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: going through your parents his things. He had kept every
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: single pace lip he had ever received ever and when
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: he passed, when she was in the mid seventies, sorry,
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: in the wh he retired in the mid seventies. He
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: was making a hundred pounds a week. That was a
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: good salary back then. Well, okay, so are you the
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: older brother the younger brother? I knew that, okay, So
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: what was it like going to school? Were your father
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: ro the head mask well fly enough. It was okay.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: I didn't get any stick from the other kids, but
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: there were a few teachers who thought that they would
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: kind of try it on a bit. I was. It
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: was interesting education period because when I look back on it,
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: you know, I as I say, they bought me this record,
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: and then we two Within two years, I had seen
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: an old black and white movie on on Sunday's The BBC,
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: which was then just the BBC used to show old
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: black and white movies from the kind of swing era,
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: Buzzby Barkley kind of films. And they showed a movie
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: called George White Scandals, which featured the American jazz drummer
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Jeane Crooper. And I'm watching Jane Crooper bash this white
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: drum kit and light went on and I, instead of
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: a bicycle, which would be the normal thing you'd want
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: at that age, I decided I wanted to play drums,
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: which got me to the point that I'm talking to you.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: And my dad we went into Leeds. We went to
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: a music store called Kitchens. And there's an interesting coincidence
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: here because at the exactly the same moment in time,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: Martinoffler was going to the same shop. He turned left
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: into guitars. If you turned right you went to woodwinds,
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: And as always happened in music shops, if you went
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: into the basement, there was the drum department. And I
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: went down into the basement and we bought a snare drum,
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: a pair of sticks, a pair of brushes for six pounds.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: And the guy who was the salesman said, we give lessons,
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: which was surprising to me because of course I thought
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: you just hit them, which which you don't. And this
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: was an excuse for him to sell my dad the
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: body Rich drum Tutor, which is the drum tutter. All
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: drummers know this drum tutor, which Buddy Rich just put
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: his name to. He didn't write the thing. It was
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: written by a guy called Henry Adler, and for an
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: extra thirty shillings we got the book and I was
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: enrolled for drum lessons, which I took for four years.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: Okay this when you bought the drums, you'd already heard
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Elvis Presley. Yes, yes, okay, you remember the brand name
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: of that snare drum. It was a a pretty cheap
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: British in put in imitation of American drums, and it
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: was a company called Olympic, who were eventually bought by
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Premier Drums. Okay, so you start off with a snare drum,
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: At what point do you get a complete kit? Wow?
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: Like I had to save up money pocket money and
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: basically got a bass drum next without a pedal, then
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: got a pedal, and then got a symbol, a ride symbol,
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: and then got high hats and probably took me eighteen months.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: And immediately, of course I got together with some pals
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: at school who played guitar and bass and a singer.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: And of course back then you could be in a
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: band if you owned an amplifier. That was the qualification.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: You didn't have to play. So we formed a beat group,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: this is pre beatles, and we promptly learned every single
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: number by a group called Shadows, who were Cliff Richards
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: backing band. The equivalent in America would have been a
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: band like the Ventures. And we would play two and
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: a half minute instrumentals and we learned probably eighty of
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: them B sides, album tracks, and then we started about
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: five the British blues boom was getting underway with people
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: like Alexis Corner, very early rolling stones, pretty things, so
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: we started we started to shift towards that, and of course,
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: almost slightly before that, the Beatles are arrived, so we
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: so of course, when the Beatles arrived, we did what
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: every other band in Britain did. We dumped the entire
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Shadows repertoire and started learning Beatles song. Okay, let's say
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: once you learn those, mute those songs, you got gigs? Correct? Yes, yes,
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: who booked those gigs? Parents? Okay, because usually the drummer
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: is the business guy, we'll find that interest there. So
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: many drummers would survived the bands and careers like you had.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: So what kind of gigs did he get? We just
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: played in uh um youth clubs, played in played in
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: old people's hopes, played in St Patrick's night dances. There
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: was a hole in the town I lived in which
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: held about four people. We used to play there. We
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: would play in leeds Um and we played in an
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: area which was probably about fifty square miles and we
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: would probably play Fridays and Saturdays and sometimes Sundays. And
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: of course the parents also did the transport. We had
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: very very giving parents. My parents traded in the car
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: they had and got any state car so we could
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: put the seat down and put the drums in. And
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: what kind of money were you making? Two or three
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: pounds show? Okay, many people when they start having gigs
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: like that, never mind within a fifty mile area, they
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: start to experience, shall we call it, the perks of
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: the road, the sex, the drugs, the last we are
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: appearance along and nothing happened, or you know what was
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: tree inspiring? Well, first of all, Bob, we were thirteen fourteen, fifteen,
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: so and I can tell you in that part of
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Britain at the time, people couldn't spell drugs alone access them.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: There were there were no drugs. I mean we would
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: when I got to college, we would smoke grass cuttings.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: We would smoke lawn cuttings, and and and and to
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: listen to the Moody Blues first album and think that
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: we were hip and relevant. Um, there was the sex, drugs,
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: and rock and roll came along a bit later, but
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: at that point, no, I mean you you'd finished at
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: eleven thirty at night, and your mom and dad would
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: be outside with the with the car. You pat your
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: gear up and put it in and then you'd be
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: wished away and that was that. There was, but a
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: lot of people, certainly the lead sixties British musicians, they
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: were not that great verbally, and they said, well, I
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: got into music to meet girls. Yeah, so were you
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: meeting girls? I was meeting them, yes, but that was it.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: I was meeting them. I mean I was, I was
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: motivated by by I just found the whole thing incredibly romantic,
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: just to be playing music. And yes, if yeah, but
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: I mean I'm talking about I was fifteen years old,
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: so I wasn't doing what your point you're into yet
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: all people that we weren't any deeper than that. Now,
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: the Beatles really hit in sixty three, and what was
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: that like being on the ground with the Beatles? Hire
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: certainly an American happened very quickly in January six. What
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: was it like? Okay, Well, their first single, of course
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: was Loved Me Do, and that came out I think
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: made sixty two probably, and it didn't make much of
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: an impact. And I remember as the group, we would
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: rehearse every week and we would start learning adding new songs,
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: and we that record was so insignificant at the time
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: that we didn't even bother adding it to our kind
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: of set list. But this endless set list, but not
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: long after must have been the early part of sixty
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: three or round about spring Please Please Me came out,
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: which George Martin incidentally told me was originally recorded at
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: half the tempo, as like a Royal Orbison ballad. I
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: don't know whether you know this. So the way they
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: recorded it it was like bum bum bum bump, dad
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: bump bump bump like that. And he said double the
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: tempo and put the chorus at the beginning. And when
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: they finished it, he said to them, you've just recorded
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: your first number one. And I said to him, did
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: you really think that? And he said no, no, I
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: was just just trying to keep them around. But I
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: went to see the Beatles on a package tour. It
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: was on June three at the Odeon Theater in Leeds.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: They were on a show with Roy Orbison, Jerry and
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: the Postmaker's Silla Black and a couple of other acts.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: Orbison had originally started the tour as the headliner, and
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: a dozen shows in they flipped it so that he
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: opened the and half chosen. Those days had an interval
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: because you could not hear yourself think or and the
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: other thing I remember, which nobody ever talks about was
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: the smell of girls urinating on velvet cinema seats with
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: steam rising from the seats and you're looking as cancer
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: that But honestly, that was what it was like. The
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: the artist that I saw in that period of time
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: who got the biggest scream and undoubtedly this the largest
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: volume of p was Del Shannon. He people went nuts
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: for him. I say, why particularly, but the Beatle that
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: Beatles show? What I remember about that Beatles Show? And
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: I still got the program I've got the programs from
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: all these shows. I would take a bio and I
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: would write down the set list, and of course they
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: play twenty five minutes, and they did. I remember they
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: started off when I saw her standing there, finished with
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: twist and shout. They did a great version of you
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Really Got a hold on Me, that Miracles number, and
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: they did Taste of Honey, which was quite unusual for
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: the band of that time. But that was the period
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: when they all had the same haircut, they were all
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: wearing the same outfits. They had the round collars on
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: the jackets ties with pins through which we all immediately
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: rushed out to get outfits like that, and they um
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: the screaming was what I remember. You could barely hear
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: a note of music. Were you caught up in the
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: menia or were you like removed saying, well, that's the girls,
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: that's not for the boys. Well I wasn't. I wasn't screaming,
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: that's for sure. You couldn't help. But we swept along
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: by it. I mean, I was fifteen years old. I
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: just had my fifteenth birthday, and I think the music
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: that you hear between the ages of about twelve and sixteen,
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: certainly for me or for my generation, was what fashions
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: your taste thereafter. I think that just kind of because
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: you're of an age where it's so it really gets
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: into your kind of soul, into your being. And I
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: had been collecting Elvis records and the other artist, the
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: rock and roll artist. I just I mentioned to you
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: a few minutes ago. I happened to be a big
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: fan of instrumentals, so I had a lot of Duane
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: Eddie records people like that. But the fact that they
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: were a British group, um completely, I think blew everybody away.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: It was it was the fact that they were home
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: grown and that they were writing their own songs that
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: that was a real leap. I remember George Martin again
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: saying to me that, of course when he first saw them,
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: he I said to him, you didn't. I interviewed him
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: four times and I remember saying to him that, I said,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: you didn't sign them because you thought they were any good,
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: did you? And he said, know, they were terrible. I
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: said you signed them because you liked them as people
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: and he said yes. And I said did you signed
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: them because of Brian Epstein's enthusiasm And he said yes.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: And I said, did you signed them because the E
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: m I record deal back then was so bad it
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: represented no risk to the company. They got one old
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: English penny royalty for the sale of an album in
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: the UK, and they got half of one old English
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: penny for the sale of an album outside of the UK.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: So and they had to use abbey Road em My studio.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: They had to do as an abbey Road producer of
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: an EMI producer, which happened to be George who was
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: making comedy records at the time. He wasn't doing music.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: And they had to use an engine A m I
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: engineers who wore white coats, had like surgical gloves. You
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: had to do an A side and a B side
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: in three hours. The music was never ever ever played
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: back to the act ever. And if you didn't do
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: the I side in the Bay side in three hours,
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: it didn't matter. Whatever you've got recorded was what would
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: come out. Don't no, so don't forget. Everything was very
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: compressed in the US. The Stones came very quickly after
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: the Beatles, and then it would be a big thing
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: on the radio Saturday Night battle between the Rock the
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: Stones in the Beatles. In your particular case, you said
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: you were playing music with your band influenced by the
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: British blues scene. Was there that bifurcation in the UK
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: where you were one or the other? Were you one
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: or the other your Beatles restored, Uh no, not really
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: a little you see, they were all lumped together. They
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: were pop groups. The Rolling Stones were not. We didn't
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: know what blues music was. I mean, we were white,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: middle class kids. I've had this conversation with many musicians
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: who were in the bands of that era, bands like
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: the Searchers, Manfred Man and the rest of them, and
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: Jimmy Page and Robert and so on, and of course
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: they look back on it now as being pretty ridiculous.
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: That white middle aged, sorry, white middle class kids from
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: South London were trying to sound like John Lee Hooker.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: It was just completely ridiculous, but they were all and
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: everybody was slowing the records down by hand to try
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: and grab what the lyrics were because American lyrics. I'll
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: give you an example. Many years ago, I happened to
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: be in Nashville with Martin Offer and we were having
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: dinner with well On Jennings and the Evely brothers and
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: Emmy Harris, and I remember saying, I've always wanted to
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: ask you guys to don Phil what what's a bird dog?
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: And they burst out laughing and they said, well, you
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: know when you go hunting, do you have you have
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: a dog? And I said, oh, you mean a retriever
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: and they said, no, no, it's a bird dog. For
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: years we had wondered what a bird dog was, and
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: there were many many examples of that. And I remember
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: Whalon saying to market myself, he said, you you know
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: more about us than we know about us. And I said, well,
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: you have to understand that when we were growing up,
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: everything American was magical. Our introduction to America was through
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: the early Westerns, like raw hide Wagon Train. Then it
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: moved on to the crime shows like Dragnet s Unset Strip,
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: and then through music, through rock and roll music. And
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: I suppose there was a slight overlap with maybe the
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: big band swing era just before that. So on the
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: radio you would hear um maybe the Ellington band or
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: the BASSI Band, probably quite late at night, and the
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: whole I can't overstress the romance of it to us.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: And I remember saying to them, Mark can recite the
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: the entire sleeve note from Elvis is Gold Records Volume one,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: and Mark probably started reciting it and I won't, no, no, no,
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: you don't. But we that we would read, we would
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: memorize the sleeve notes. And the other thing that was
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: mystifying to us, because they were never credited, was who
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: played on these records. This became something of an adventure
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: to try and find out. And it was only really
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: when Phil Spector's Wall of Sound came along that you
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: heard about people like Hal Blaine or Carol Kay or whoever.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: We didn't know who Scotty Moore and d J. Fontana
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: were who or what, or that there was a horn
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: section in Fat Domino's band. I remember when I met
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Roy Orbison years later I said to him one of
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: my memories about him was that he played a show
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: in Leeds in this venue I was talking about on
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: a later tour, and he had four violinists. They were
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: playing white violins sitting on white cane chairs, unamplified. But
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: because you knew the records so well, when they were
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: sawing away, you could imagine the sound even though you
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: couldn't hear the sound well articulated. Now, when the Beatles
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: hit in the US, everybody picked up the guitar. People
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: were forming bands left in the right. What was like
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: in the UK? It was the same, It was the same.
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: There was a there was a magazine in Liverpool called
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: Mersey Beat, which gave Rise and the other music. I'm
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: going to call them trade papers, but they weren't really
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: trade papers like billboards. There were two in particular. One
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: was called the New Musical Express Enemy and the other
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: was Melody Maker, And the Melody Maker was really a
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: jazz paper, and it kind of quite rapidly became Beatles.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: Stones and another band that people forget who were huge
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: here and I know huge in your country, the Dave
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: Clark five. They were big, but for a shorter period
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: of time period, right, um, Once again the drummer was
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: the business guy. Well, yeah, an interesting story about Dave Clark.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: Tell you a little story here. So Dave from the
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: from another drummer nearly all the rather like in your
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: country at the time, we had a very strong musician
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: Miss Musicians union here at the time, and most pop records,
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: which you and I would consider to be the hits
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: of that whole period from about sixty three through to
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: about sixty six, the bands didn't play on them. Studio
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: players played on them, and Dave Clark didn't play on
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: any of his own records. I didn't know that they
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: were all done by a drummer, a drummer called Bobby Graham,
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: and Bobby Graham was one and it was a bit
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: like the Wall of Sound guys, the Wrecking Crew. There
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: were three guys who did all the drums. There were
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: two piano players, there were four bass players, six guitarists
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: and song So Bobby Graham is doing a session for
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: bits and pieces to follow up to Glad all over.
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: I can hear, and he's down in the studio and
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: Dave Clark is up in the producers box and Bobby
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: is playing buff buff into the song and Dave Clark
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: preciously into commen. He says, I need you to play
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: that simpler. So he goes, no, no, no, no, You've
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: got to play it simpler, and he goes, you can't
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: play it. He's just playing four in the bar exactly
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: as you say. And finally Bobby, in exasperation, hits the
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: talkback and says, why have I got to play it
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: like this? And Dave Clark says, because I've got to
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: mind to it and all those records were covered one
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: of my dearest friends. He's getting on in use now.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: It's a drama called Clem Cotini, who played with the
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: Tornadoes on Telstar, which was the first British record to
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: get to number one in the US. I think and um,
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: he played on number one hits in the UK, all
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: of the all the all of the key stuff, for instance,
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: and he doesn't have a dime. Uh correct correct all
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: these legends. Okay, so you're playing drums. The scene goes
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: thermonuclear A. Most of the players from the English world
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: don't go to university. Yet you go to university. Was
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: there any thought, as you say in the UK of
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: turning bro and not going to university. I wanted to
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: do that, but uh, I kind of came to a
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: sort of this is my first deal, if you like,
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: a deal with my parents. But I would go to university.
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: I would hopefully get a degree and then I would
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: go to London and try and be a professional musician. Now,
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: of course I had ah an idea of my own
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: talents that was considerably greater than they actually were, because
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: I was eighteen years old. But a very very strange
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: thing happened. I go up to university in Hull, in Yorkshire,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: in city very like Liverpool on just on the other
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: side of the country. And on the first night I
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: was there, or the second night, they were having a
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: dance in the students union, which is where girls would
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: dance around their handbags and boys would look at them
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: and wonder if they could cut in. And I walk
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: into the front of the student union and something happened
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: which brought me to this place. There's a Tanoi message
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: going out if anybody in the building can play drums,
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: would they please come to reception. And I was standing
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: at reception and I can see the woman who's speaking
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: into the microphone, so without thinking what this might be,
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: I said to her, I can And this guy shot out,
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: who I later learned was a chap called Malcolm Haig,
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: and he said to me, are you any good? I said, well, yeah,
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: quite good it he said, well, how good are you?
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: I said, well quite good? He said, the drama with
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: the band tonight can't play sick and we haven't got
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: any records. We don't have a like a DJ thing.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: He said, so can you play with them? And I went, uh, well, yeah,
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: I don't know what do they play. So anyway, he
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: starts leading me off to the dressing room and it
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: turned out, now you won't know this band, but it
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: turned out they were a band called the Victor Brox
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: Blues Train. Victor Brox later went onto a little bit
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: of success because he sings on the first cast recording
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: of Jesus Christ Superstar, but at the time he was
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: the frontman of a six piece blues band playing blues covers.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: And there was a coincidence because the previous week this
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: group had played in my hometown. I hadn't gone, but
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: I'd seen the posters up everywhere. So I go into
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: the dressing room. I'm into used to them and there's
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: another student who said this message and he's got in
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: there before me, and I think to myself, sad him,
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: I'm going to get rid of him. So I did
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: a bluff. And one of the things in management you
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: have to learn how to do is bluff, bluff like
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: mad and I said to Victor Brox, I said, ah,
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: I saw your band last week in Tadcaster. I know
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: all of the songs you do. The other guy immediately
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: turned around and left, and then I said to them
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: how much are you going to pay me? And they
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: won't pay you. I said, yeah, how much are you
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: gonna pay me? And we settled on five pounds. They
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: were getting forty pounds. When I've done the deal for
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: the money, I said, listen, there's something you need to know.
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: I didn't see you last week. I just saw the posters,
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: which they thought was hilarious. And I said, what do
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: you play? And they did knock on wood, hold on,
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: I'm coming. You don't know like I know Motown Stacks
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: James Brown, which I had played dozens of times. I
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: just said to the bass player, can you count me in?
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: And just signal when you come into the end, because
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: in rock music you only have to know the beginning
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: in the end. What happens in the middle doesn't matter.
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: And I got through two minutes, said kept it simple,
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: didn't screw it up. Big hugs at the end, get
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: my five pounds and I go into the bar. I'm
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: going a drink, and a tall blonde girl called Trudy
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: comes up to me and says, I really enjoyed your playing,
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: And I went, did you? And I bought her a
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: larger in line or something, and she said, would you
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: like to come back to my student house for coffee?
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: Which was which was the sign? So I said, yeah, sure,
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: love love to. So I'm coming out of the student
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: union and a flash gun goes off in my face
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: and a little guy cop pops out and he says,
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: I'm the I'm the editor of the student newspaper, talked,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: we'd like to do a front page feature on you
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: next week. What's your name? What course are you on?
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: Where did you come from? Were you nervous? How did
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: you know all those songs? So I do an interview
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: with this guy. At the same time the chap who
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: had come up to me when I got into the place,
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: who turned out to be the social secretary as we
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: call them here. It was leaving and he came over
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: to me and he said, I'm a I'm a pianist.
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: Do you want to be in my group? And I said, yeah, sure.
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: I said who else is in your group? He said nobody,
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: it's me and you will. But I know a flute
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: player and he happened to be running the entertainments committee.
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: He said, do you want to be on the entertainments committee?
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: And I said that what does that do? I don't
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: know what that is. He said, well, we run all
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: the entertainment. We run a dance every Saturday. We do
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: a union ball once a year. I also run the
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: jazz club and the folk club. Okay, so on my
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: first night, I've played a eg, have made five pounds
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: of pulled a bird, I'm on the front cover of
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: the student in newspaper paper, and I've joined the entertainments committee.
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: And at the end of my first year he stepped
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: down to do his finals exams and he said to me,
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: you take over. And I said we're supposed to have
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: an election and he went, as are you stupid? So
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: I took over entertainment. Okay, let's go back to the beginner.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: Where did you get the Hudspur asked for five paths.
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: I've always had hutspur. That's That's why I'm on your show.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: But exactly that, where does that come from? Your parents?
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: Where did you learn that? Actually? I was quite shy
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: at that point. I mean, having gone through the school
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: experience I had, which was, you know, living at the
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: school that I went to and kind of putting up
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: with a bit of ribbing from certain teachers, and that
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: I don't know, I just I don't know just what
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: makes you the man you are. But since you mentioned
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: her name, we have to ask what happened with Trudy?
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: Oh truly went the way of all ladies of the time.
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: You know. She we we used to, we used to,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: we used to have a dreadful cut coffee with you know,
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: those chemicals sprinkled on the top, and she I dually.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, this was like being let into a sweet
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: shop for me. I mean I had one girlfriend back
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: in Yorkshire and here I am, and I'm suddenly in
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: a sweet shop. And when I took over the entertainments,
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: I was just by default the best known person in
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: the university because I had the most glamorous gig if
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: you like. And I made one decision which stood me
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: in very good stead then and I have kept right
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: up to now. I decided I would only put on
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: bands that I liked, and somehow I would sell them
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: to my audience. And I had including the teacher training
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: college down the road, in the technical college next door,
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: I had twelve thou students to draw and who had
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: a student union card. I had a hall which was
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: the third largest in the UK, held a thousand people.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: So the first band I bought was the Moody Blues. Okay, well,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: well let's slow down a little bit. You were a drummer.
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: Now you got the gig in to use the line
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: from Let It Be, you passed the audition? Yes, at
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: what point do you bring your drums to university? Within
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: two weeks of that? So, at what point do you
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: say I'm a businessman as opposed to a drummer. I've
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: never said that. Um. That was later when I got
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: down to London. Okay, so all this time that you're
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: ahead of the entertainment program, in the back of your mind,
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: the dream is still alive. You're gonna be a drummer. Yeah, absolutely,
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: And what happened. I never had any aspirations to get
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: onto the business side. I didn't know what the business
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: side was. I was, as I was saying earlier, there
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: really wasn't a defined music business like we know it now.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: I had no clue what anybody did. I knew I
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: had heard of Colonel Parker, I'd heard of Epstein. I
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: didn't know what they did, the mechanics of what they did. Okay.
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: So while you were in university, were you also playing
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: in the bands, whether it would be the pianist or
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: somebody else, Yes, yes, and I and I also I
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: got a jazz group together, playing kind of I'm going
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: to call it modern jazz. It was really just rubbish,
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: but that's what we did. Okay. So you booked the
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: Moody Blues. How do you even do that? How do
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: you know who the agent is? How do you know
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: what's going to call? My predecessor as the social secretary,
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: this guy Malcolm, when he said decided to step down
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: and to do his finals, he said, oh look, here's that.
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: He wrote them down. He wrote a list of the
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: agencies that he dealt with. Now, the agency business in
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: London at the time was small. I mean they were
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: probably six five six agencies, and there weren't that many
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: bands either. I mean we didn't have you know, there
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: were maybe playing on the student circuit. There were probably
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: a hundred hundred and fifty bands, and that they might
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: range from a pound a night local group to the
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: most I ever paid for an act was four hundred
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: pounds for Jethro Toll and they had a top three
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: single when I had them. Okay, would you come up
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: with the band and then find the agent or would
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: you call the agency when he had available both? And
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: of course I was also fielding calls constantly the all
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: of the agents in London, and they weren't really agents,
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: that they were bookers. We were no, we didn't call
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: them agents the bookers. Uh. And nobody did tours. Then
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: everybody gaved and and you try to get bands, would
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: try and get, you know, a student date on a
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: Friday and Saturday, because that would pay more. They could
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: make maybe get anywhere between a hundred and twenty five
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: to fifty pounds for a net for a name act,
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: a decent name, and um, those same bands might play
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: on a Sunday night for fifty pounds somewhere, and and
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: everybody was kind of on a wage sort of thing,
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: and typically a musician might make pounds a week back
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: then I'm talking or sixty six through to sixty nine.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: How did you have time to do your school work? Well? Um,
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: just worked hard. I mean I got a decent degree.
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: And what did you study? I did, Well, it was
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: a new course. It was called social studies and in
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: fact the group I was part of was as I
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: found out when I got there, um because I went
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: for an interview and the professor who interviewed me, she
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: was so grateful I'd applied because this was a brand
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: new course and we were the experiment, this group that
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: I was part of, which was probably about thirty five
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: students they were going to we were going to start
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: this course, and I just and it included sociology, philosophy, economics,
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: things like that at British Social history since since the
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution eighteen and I just I got stuck into that.
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: But my real thing was was doing doing the entertainments.
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: And then a couple of questions, how many gigs would
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: you do a year? How many shows? Are you talking
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: about me personally? And probably be about okay, And there
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: was a fund that you drew on or were you
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: starting at dollar zero, I were starting with the ticket
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: money that came in. Okay, so there are certain acts
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: that are instant sellouts, but a lot of acts are not.
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: How did you promote the shows? I learned some very
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: good lessons very quickly, which stood me in very good
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: stead for my later career. The first was that if
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: you if you can't read a poster from the top
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: of a double decker bus, it's not worth ship. So
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: I just used to do a black background with day
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: glow green, day glow, pink, day glow orange. It would
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: say who it was, where it was, when it was,
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: and how much I got. I got an entertainments committed together,
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: and I delegated two different people. They would go and
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: they would put a flyer under the door of every
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: single room in every single hall of residents. I would
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: put flyers on every dining table for a week. I
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: would try. I would have the music played over the
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: student union p A. And also I had the biggest
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: thing I had going for me was that this was
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: a Saturday night and the students, the male and the
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: female students. Basically, Saturday night was the night where you
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: got together and you know that you ended up with
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: a knee trembler by the end of the evening. And
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: if you don't know what that is, Bob, I'll send
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: you a text. So so but but but you know
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: lust they are now was a big driving force, and
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: certainly in a student environment. And but one, but just
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: a little side story. When I bought the Moody Blues
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: at that time they had had what they had had
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: one number one hit in the UK with a Bessie
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: Banks song called go Now. Danny Lane was the singer
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: who later went onto Wings and they were essentially an
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: R and B group from Birmingham. In between the time
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: I bought them and the time they came, Denny and
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: the bass player left the group and Justin Hayward and
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: John Lodge, who are now very dear friends of mine,
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: ironically had joined the band. They had played a show
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: in a cabaret club in the north of England where
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: they were basically doing go Now three times in the
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: set and some covers, and they played this particular place
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: up in Newcastle or somewhere. Justin told me this story
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: and after the show they're in the dressing room and
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: they were all wearing matching suits, shirts, ties, looking very
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: smart and a guy and his wife came by and
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: banged on the door, and they opened the door and
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: the guy said, he said, it's really great of your
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: lads to come all the way up here, but I
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: got to tell you you were crap. You're absolutely shiped.
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: You're the worst band I've ever seen in my life.
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: Nice to meet you by and left and the movie
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: Blue was got in their van to drive back to
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: London in total silence. They didn't speak for about four hours,
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: and as they getting close to London, one of them
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: said that guy's right, and they all went yeah. They
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: dumped everything they were doing justin and John Lodge got
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: the biggest bag of weed they could lay their hands on.
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: They went to Belgium and they wrote Nights in White
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: Satin Tuesday Afternoon and all of the songs that were
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: on the Days of Future Past record, which they recorded
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: not with the orchestra that was dubbed on afterwards, because
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: Decca had a new stereo system thing and they wanted
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: that record to be the demonstration disc for this particular
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: format that they were going to go with, so they
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: hired Tony Clark to do all those arrangements and it
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: was wasn't until the record was released that the Moody
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: Blues heard them, because back then nobody's consulted the act.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: So anyway, I booked them. When they arrived, I go
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: up to the dressing room and back then nobody had
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: a rider. So you gave them some sausage rolls and
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: to create a beer and they were grateful. And I
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: had written on a piece of paper and felt tip
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: pen Moody Blues eight thirty to nine fifty to ten thirty,
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: because everybody did to forty five minutes. And John Lodge
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: and I'm going to attempt to Birmingham Accent now came
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: and stood behind me, and he's looking at this thing,
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: and he says, we don't do to forty four minutes anymore.
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: We do a concert. And I said, what he should
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: a concert? We do a concert. Now we do seventy
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: four minute still left to sit down, and I said,
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: we haven't got any chairs lift to sit on the floor.
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: We don't do forty four minutes. We do we do
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: a concertitute a concert, And to my astonishment, students sat
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: down and they played a concert complete with melotron. They
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: did the whole of that first album, and they did
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: two songs off the next one, one of which had
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: the amazing lyrics Timothy Leary is dead, No he's yeah,
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: you know the legend of a mind. Yeah, And I
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: a little light went on and I thought, well, if
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: I put I had two refectories that I would put
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: things on. I thought, well, if I put on something
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: in the East refectory which they can dance to, I
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: can put concert song here. And so the next band
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: I bought was Pink Floyd four a hundred fifty pounds,
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: and they came up and again I thought I was
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: getting Sid. No, said David Gilmore walked in. They had
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: they had got rid of? Said well, actually what happened
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: was they were going to play gig in Oxford and
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: they got to the and they had to pick him up. Last,
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: they went to his mum's house where Sid was living.
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: They pulled up outside his house and they sat in
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: the car for twenty minutes in silence, and then Roger,
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: who was driving, drove off without Sid, because David was
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: already in the group covering for Sid. And that's how
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: said Barrett left Pink Floyd. He simply wasn't picked up,
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: and they m they came up to home and they
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: played the whole of the source of Full of Secrets record,
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: and I was totally blown away. I thought they were
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: amazing so on, and I'm on a roll at this point,
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: so then I think, okay, I'll put the Who. So
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: I bought the Who had the Who three times and
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: that was staggering. The only band I've ever worked with
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: where at the end nobody applauded and nobody left. People
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: were stunned. They smashed everything, everything, The entire drum kit
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: came off the front of the stage and landed in
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: the audience. There were bombs going off. That's why, right.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: I interviewed Roger three years ago and I realized halfway
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: through the interview he couldn't hear a word. I was saying,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: he's completely deafening. What he calls his end whist leah,
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: because they back then is you know, all of the
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: sound came off the back line. It was a piddling
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: little p a and Roger had to over sing. He
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: had to basically shout and scream to be heard. And
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: I was standing on the stage right next to Pete's
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: Marshall stacks, two of them, one of which had no
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: speakers in it, so he could spear his guitar through
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: because he possibly going to pay for speakers. And the
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: noise was the sound. Well, I'll call it a noise
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: because Roger said to me we were trying to recreate
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: the sounds of war, and I said to you were
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: entirely successful. They were fantastic, life, fantastic. You have this
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: incredible run. But then you graduate with well when I graduated.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: Of course, by this time I got to know quite
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: a lot of the booker's agents in London because they
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: were constantly ringing me trying to sell me their crappy bands.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: I had a fantastic last week. We had a charity thing,
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: charity week and I put on John Male's Blues Breakers
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: Jethro Tull with led Zeppelin as the opening act, booked
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: as the new Yardbirds. And I've still got the contract
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: and it had been crossed out and it written in
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: was led L E. A D. Polin which Peter had
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: written in um we had The Kinks and Family Family
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: were the best band I put on in the entire
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: two years. They didn't make it in America. True incredible band,
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: fantastic band. So July four, with a hundred pounds, my
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: mom and dad I get on the train. I've got
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: one telephone number. I come down to London. One of
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: the groups I put on in the last week as
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: a support band was a group called Gingerbread. Their bass
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: player was John Wetton, the late John Wetton, who went
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: on to join King Crimson and Asia founded Asia with
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: Carl and I went down to London and within a
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: week I've got a band together, of which John was
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: the bass player and singer. And we found a rehearsal
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: place in South London. Lets go a little bit were
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: you're in the hall, how do you get your drums
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: to London? Or how do you find a new kid
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: in London? With difficulty? I got one of the bands
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: that I booked to stick them at the back of
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: the van and take them down to London. That's it,
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: just improvise. And I slept on a floor for about
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: eighteen months. Joined this group. And whose floor was it?
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: This was just some people I knew, I mean I
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: knew this. This was the one telephone number I called up.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: They said, well, we don't have any rooms, but you
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: can sleep on the floor. So I took a sleeping
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: bag slept on the floor. Did they charge you for that. No, no, Bob,
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: they didn't judge me for that, and I um That
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: group within a few months metamorphosized into what became the
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: Average White Band. Wow, we got this horle type of
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: their bags of question begs how good a drummer was
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: Robbie mcintogh great, it's really good. He replaced me. I
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: was sacked along with John for not being Scottish. They
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: wanted to have an all Scottish band. We were rehearsing,
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: we hadn't. We played one show at the Marquee Club,
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: which was pretty disastrous, to be honest, And in January
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: of v I was summarily sacked, which was fine because
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: I was sacked from what I was sacked from. Nothing. Really,
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: they changed their name. They were called Mogul Thrash. Believe
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: it or not. They changed their name to the Average
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: White Band, got a deal with Yeah it was it
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: yea Atlantic of course ya, And off they went. And
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: then John left and he joined King Crimson, he joined Family. Actually,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: all those eighteen months, are you doing things in you
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: think other than drumming with the future weight average weight?
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: Not in the professional money earning sense. I mean, I
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: was going to see bands constantly I was completely I
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: was in London. I had not been to London before
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: I was. I would go to the Marquee Club five
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: nights a week. It didn't matter what night you went,
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: there would be somebody good on What were you doing
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: for money? I was living off this hundred pounds that
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: my parents had given me, which was which was a
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: substantial sum. Then, I mean when I when I know
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: you're going to come to it in a second. But
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: when I started in the agency business, I was making
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: five pounds a week and you could live on five
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: pounds a week quite comfortably. I mean, I don't mean
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: going to restaurants or anything like that, but you could survive. Okay.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: So you get sacked in January of seven, you say,
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: what's your next move? Total acts. Everything in my life
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: or professional life, certainly has been luck. It's been absolutely
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: the biggest factor. I get sacked from the average white
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: band or mugul thrash as they were. The next morning,
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: I'm walking down Oxford Street and I bump into one
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: of the agents who used to call me when I
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: was at university. Guy called John Sherry, sadly no longer
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: with us, and he said, what are you doing? And
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: I said, I've just been sacked from the average white
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: band for not being Scottish, and he said words which
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: ring down to me over the years. I can't pay
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: you anything, but would you like to come and work
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: in the office and I'll give you half of everything
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: you earn. I had nothing else going, so I go
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: the next morning to the office, which turned out to
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: be one room with one desk and two telephones. Uh.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: And when I get there, he says to me, by
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: the way, I forgot to tell you I don't have
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: any acts. You don't have any acts, he said no.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: So I started booking colleges as the buyer if you like,
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: of which Holy University where I went was one. I
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: got picked up card off the university and several others,
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: and they would be on split commission deals, which don't
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: happen now. So typically a college would have a dance
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: on a Saturday night. They had a budget of a
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: hundred and fifty pounds. They wanted a stripper, a steel band,
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: and a band they could dance to, and I would
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: ring around the way way they would really want a stripper.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: That would not happen now, Yeah, you didn't. You didn't
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: have those in the gigs in the UK US either okay,
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: but back then I mean that was quite Yeah. We
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: want a stripper and we want to deal band, and
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: we want the band that can dance to So I
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: would have a budget. I'd ring around all the agencies.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: What have you got available on the fifth of May
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: five pounds? They would tell me they pick it either
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: sell them on this act or they'd pick an act.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: And I would go back to the agent and then
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: say they can only afford a hundred and you've done
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: the deal, and I'd get five five pounds on that.
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: So that went on for a bit and then in
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: March of one of the two phones ran and this
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: was a bit like the fastest gunfighter in the West,
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: who could get the phone fastest. I grabbed the phone
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: and a voice came on and I won't do his accent,
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: and he said, this is Miles as Copeland the Third
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: And I went, holy shit, Miles ax Copeland the Third Wow.
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: And he said, would anybody they ever interested in booking
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: a band called Wishbone Ash. Now, the previous week I
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: had read a letter on the back of the Melody
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: Maker on the letters page extolling the virtues of this
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: group Wishbone Ash, which I later found out Miles had
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: written under a pseudonym, so based entirely on that, I
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: said to him yes, and he was completely flummo. He
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: had been ringing everybody for weeks and he'd got and
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: I said yes. Long story short. I go up to
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: a house and St John's Wood in North London, which
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: was a very posh area of London where the Copeland
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: family lived when his dad was in the CIA was
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: or he'd retired from the CIA at that point, and
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: I went down that I was going to go and
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: see them play in this house. And I come down
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: the drive and there are a group of about half
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: a dozen Arabs in full ceremonial s going up the
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: front stairs, and I thought I must be at the
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: wrong house. So I walked back down the drive and
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: I suddenly heard from coming out of the basement, and
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: I realized what happened was that Myles's father was advising
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: various oil companies on the political situation in the Middle
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: East as his post ci CI a job, and down
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: in the basement which Bone Ash were rehearsing. So I
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: went down met the band. They played me the whole
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: of their first album sitting in armchairs, which was the
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: first I've never seen a band player a gig sitting
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: in an armchair. And I asked Miles if I could
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: use the phone to call John, and he led me
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: to a pay phone. They had obviously read John Paul
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: get his biography because they had installed a pay phone
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: for guests, and I had to borrow tenpence off him
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: to use the phone. And I called John up and
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: I said we should take this band on. They're really good.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: And they were in London College that following Saturday and
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: we went to see them. Miles was doing the lights.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: He didn't have any overhead lights. He had a run
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: of foot footlights and he had a green boulbon orange
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: bowl of red bulbon pint bulb and he had four
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: things and he was just doing this on the side
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: of the stage and we took them on and then
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: short order Miles came into the business. We all went
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: into business together. They kind of took off a bit.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: They signed to m c A. Within within eighteen months
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: we had like the third or fourth biggest agency in London.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: I've just just work just working at it. What happened
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: are your drumming career? Well, to make up my money,
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: I joined a fantastic soul band. They were called Patrick
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: Dane and the front line we had a four piece
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: brass section, great layers, and we played four or five
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: nights a week. We played American basses, colleges, around London clubs, everything,
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: and we would get all of the London clubs then
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: paid twenty pounds. That was the maximum you could get
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: in any one of the famous This was just post
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: the Swinging sixties, so called the Swinging sixties didn't actually
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: get started in London until about nineteen sixty five sixty six,
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: and it kind of rolled over to about nineteen seventy
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: three four. We would play those anywhere between a Monday
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: and a Thursday, and on a Friday and Saturday. If
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: we played an American bass, we would get a hundred
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: and fifty pounds. If we played a college we would
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: get probably about the same. And when we played the
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: American bassis, because we had to play for dining as
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: well as dancing, we've learned the whole catalog of Duke
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: Allington and big band stuff, which that's what they what
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: they wanted, and we always got rebooked always, so you
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: have this flurishing agency. How did you become a manager? Well,
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: I I traveled through several agencies um in the next
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: let's see five years, sorry, five or six years, and
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: I ended up at Names, which was Brian Epstein's old company,
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: although he'd long gone, and I was working with Steve
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: Barnett recently retired retired president with Capitol Records. We haven't
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: seen him many years. And if you're watching this, hello
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: Steve and m We And that was when I kind
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: of hit I'm going to loosely call it the big
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: time because we had big acts. We had deep Purple Black, Sabbath, Nazareth, Alex, Harvey,
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: band Elton. I did the first British stroke European tours
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: with Steely dan Um and then I had oh sorry,
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: just before that, the person who kind of had was
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: my I would call him my mentor. We all need
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: a mentor in life was Barry Marshall, who now runs
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: Martial Arts. And when I went to work with Barry
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: and his wife Jenny, and they're probably one of the
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: most successful and certainly one of the best promoters in
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: UK and Europe. Um We. He was managing a Welsh
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: group called Man who were a bit like a British
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: kind of grateful dead in the sense that they played
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: numbers that lasted for several days and I think, I
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: think I've been there a week and I put twenty
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: eight gigs in in a month for this group. Man um.
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: I just had a sense of how to do it.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: If I went about something, I think, if you're enthusiastic
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: about something, you can communicate that to people. And we
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: were doing we we were doing. It was the first
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: place I've been where we were doing American acts, and
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: we did people like Jimmy ruffin lou Christie if you
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: remember him, of course, Lightning Strikes, Trightening Strikes. And I
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: got a real feel for working with black American artists,
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: which was quite a I mean, I remember he sent
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: me off to Europe. I think this was about the
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three or four with the con Tina Turner review,
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: which was my first encounter with Ike Turner, which was okay,
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: actually no problem, and I got I've known Tina since then.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: And then I moved to names and as I say,
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: we were looking after what were big acts at the time.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: But again coming back to something I said earlier, they
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: didn't tour they gigged. Everybody gigged. Nobody had a beginning
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: in the middle of an end. It was just continual,
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: and they didn't go into the studio for a period
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: of time. They went in for a few hours at
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: a time and cobbled together records and it was all
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: pretty kind of it's kind of primitive, but it was.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: It was huge fun, definitely fantastic fun. And then how
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: does that turn into the management. Well, I had no
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: aspirations to do management, but I of course I was
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: dealing with at this point quite a lot of managers.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: And I have to say that back then managers were
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: not quite as skilled as they've become. Um. In fact,
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: some of them were. I mean I can remember with
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: Deep Purple, h this was the Mark two with Richie
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: and In Squabbling and Roger and in Pace and John
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: Lord bless him. I remember their manager coming into the
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: office and saying to Steve and I write, Deep Purple,
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: who have got a new album coming out next week. Now,
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: this was the first time that we've been informed that
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: they had made a record. They want to go on tour.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: So we got our notepads and we're ready to go.
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: And I said to him when do you want to start?
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: And he says next week and I said next week, Yeah,
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: next week. That's how it was. How it was, and
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: um what happened was that through a convoluted set of circumstances,
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: I had got to know a guy called Ken Kushnick,
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: who was the general manager at Sire Records in seventy six.
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: I think it was the Sex Pistols clash and the
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: British punk's scene got underway. I might have my chronology
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: slightly wrong, uh, And Ken called me up and asked
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: me if I would put a tour together for the Ramones,
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: who I had never heard of, but given the way
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: things were, I just said yes. And then he said
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: to me there's another act on with them, and I'm thinking, well,
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: it's going to be hard enough to get the Ramones attorney.
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: I said, who's that? He said, they're called the Talking Heads,
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: and I said, wow, what's weird name. Anyway, he sent
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: me a single It's called Love Ghost Building on Fire
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: and it only had a photograph of three of them
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: on the front. Jerry Harrison wasn't in the group at
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: that point, and I remember putting it on the record
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: player at Names and I thought it was great. I
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: loved it, so I I agreed to set up a
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: tour for the two those two acts, which I did,
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: and it was a hard sell. Was six weeks mostly
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: around the UK, few dates in Europe. Just before that
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: tour happened, the Sex Pistols went on British TV and
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: disgraced themselves by swearing on a six thirty live slot,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: and this caused tabloid fury, but it turned the punk
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: new age thing from being like a really underground thing
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: into being very kind of prominent. Now that all of
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: the Pistol shows pretty much got canceled because every town hall,
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: every council said we're not having them, their filthy revolution
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: and all this, but it meant that. It meant that
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: the Romans talking heads to Her suddenly sold out everywhere,
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: so they came over. I remember we started in Geneva
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: and I immediately bonded with the talking heads as people,
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: and they asked me to leave the ends and manage them.
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: And I didn't have enough courage to be honest. I couldn't.
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: I just think I knew enough. What happened then was
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: another piece of luck. I happened to be out at
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: Heathrow airport picking up a friend, a girlfriend who worked
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: at United Artists Records, and she was and she had
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: just been on a promo johnt to Holland with Jerry
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: Rafferty and Baker Street was becoming a big hit. So
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: I got got a lift and I got in the
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: front of the car with the driver, and she and
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: Rafferty got in the back of the car and I
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: was just rattling awhile like I am to you and
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: we're coming into London, and Rafferty tapped me on the shoulder.
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: I've never met him before and he said, ed, would
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: you be my manager? And I just turned around and
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: I said, you don't know me. He said no, but
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: I like you, so okay, So I became Jerry Raffort's manager. Okay,
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: that's a question. Did he have a previous manager? What
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: had happened? Well, yes, he had had when he was
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: in Steeler's Wheel that had led to law suits at
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: all the rest of it, and the Baker Street song
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: happened to be the street where his lawyer's office was,
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: and he was constantly coming down from Scotland. And if
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: you listen to the lyric, and you know that that
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: song is about his trips to London, sitting in lawyers
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: meetings for hours on end while they tried to dissolve
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: because what happened was the management company had gone bankrupt.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: That had to be a liquidation process, and this all
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: took two years and he couldn't he could word live,
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: but he steamers Will broke up and he wrote the
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: songs which became the City to City record, one of
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: which was Baker Street. So but but his concept of
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: what he meant by his manager was rather different to
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: what I thought it was. I never bet. I made
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: no money of him at all, except from some touring
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: that he did, and I didn't participate in the records
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: or song publishing. And I didn't have enough knowledge or
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: courage to even ask. And here anyway, he had a
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: lawyer who was famous. His lawyer was so slow that
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: he would do management agreements with people that might last
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: five years and they would have run out by the
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: time he'd finished the paperwork. So it was academic anyway.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: But the thing about Jerry was he opened a lot
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: of doors for me, and I ended up working with
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: him for about five or six years. But sadly he
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: was an alcoholic and it killed him in the end,
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: and we had a very bumpy time because he canceled
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: five American tours on me, one of which was on sale,
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing. So but it was all a
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: learning exercise. All of this. I was learning as you
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: as you go along. You could even out of every
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: negative situation, you can come out of it. You'll have
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: learned something. You were also booking bands while you were
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: managing jury. I was still at ends Um And what
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: happened was that I was working with him and I
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: had a Talking Heads tour coming up in January, which
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: was the first time they were going to headline on
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: their own in the UK, some Bits and Pieces of Europe,
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: and I needed an opening act. And it was December ninth,
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: and it was a Friday afternoon. I remember my phone
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: rang and a guy that I had met at Phonogram
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: because PolyGram or Phonogram originally were distributed side records until
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: they until Seymour switched to Warner Brothers. So I got
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: to know the people at Phonogram and I bailed bailed
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: them out on a couple of things, saved them quite
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: a bit of money because Seymour was quite good at
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: extracting money from and this guy came on. His name
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: was John Stains, and he said to me, I've just
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: signed a band called Dire Straits. And I immediately said,
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: what a terrible name, and he said, be serious. I said,
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: I am being serious. It's a terrible name. He said,
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: would you be their agent? I said, well, I'm only
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: handling American acts, I said, but in the back of
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: my mind I needed an opening act for this Talking
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: Heads tour and it was coming up quite soon, and
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: I was in a bit of a panic, and I
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: said to him, what are they like? And he said, well,
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: I've got a tape here. Why don't you come over
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: and listen to it. Now their officers were very close
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: to where NAMES was, so I packed up for the day,
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: walked over and he played me the demo tape that
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: had originally got them the record deal, the one that
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: a DJ called Charlie Gillett had played on British on
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: his British Radio London radio show. And on that record
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: on that tape were Sultans have Swing down to the
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: Waterline while west End and a song called Sacred Loving.
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: But thankfully they didn't record and I can remember. It's
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: funny what you remember later on, because I can't remember
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: listening to Sultans of Swing and saying to him this,
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: this guitar player is pretty good. And then he's playing
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: me Wild West End and I said, wow, these lyrics,
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: this is really good lyrically. He said that's the guitar
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: player and I said, Doug, tell me he's the singer
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: as well, and he went, yeat and he gave me
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: the lineup of the group and the mark younger brother
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: David was in the group. John Ellsley and picked with
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: us and they were playing a gig the following Tuesday
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: at ding Walls, which is a little club in North London,
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: and he said typical record company said I'll take you
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: out for a slap up meal and we'll go and
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: see them. So the following Tuesday I find myself in
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: a kibab house in North London watching gobbits of fat
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: fall off this spinning piece of meat. And we went
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: over the road to ding Walls and we walked in
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: and there were two things I noticed straight away. First
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: of all, they weren't very loud, so I could stand
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: quite close to the stage. Secondly, and most importantly, Mark
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: was playing a red Fender Stratocastic guitar, which was the
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: guitar that Hank Marvin the guitarist and the Shadows had played.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: Now I've told this story to Jeff Beck and um
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: They've Gilmore and all the rest of them, and they
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: all instantly get it. Because the red strap was an
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: iconic instrument for us in Britain. The first stratic caster
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: any of us had seen was on the cover of
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: the Chirping Crickets album and Buddy Holly is holding a
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: strap which looked to us like something from outer space.
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: So Mark's playing this red strato caster. And I turned
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: to this an our guy after the second song and
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: I said to him, he's got a red strat just
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: like Hank Marvin's. Who's managing this band? And he said
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: nobody on on the basis of the red strat, I said,
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: I'd like to manage them. And it changed my life.
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: But there was a there's a kind of you know
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: pattern there. There was a sort of just a sequence
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: of events that led to that moment. Okay, now we
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: know that they were on Warner in the US and
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: Phonogram the rest of the world, certainly from the US viewpoint.
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: First album comes out, Sultan's a Swing uh, and then
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: the second album is not as quite as successful that
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: all of a sudden, making movies that starts to blow
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: up from the inside. What is going on? Well, the
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: first record, like many many many bands throughout history, Market
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: spent considerable amount of time writing those songs. He I
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: can't remember what year it was, seventy five or seventy six,
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: but he bent to America and he'd got on a
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: Greyhound bus try trip across the South, and as he
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: said to me later, he fell in love with every
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: waitress that he saw. And he wrote a lot of
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: those songs either in the U s or when he
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: got back to the UK, and a lot of them,
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: as as has always been the case with his writing,
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: were sort of semi biographical. So for instance, songs of swing,
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: they were that that was the name of a band
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: playing in a little pub just down the road from
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: this dreadful apartment that he and John was sharing, David
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: was sharing, uh, And he went down to see them
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: and they were like a little swing band, like the
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: Panama Francis Saltons and swing the American band. And there
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: was nobody in the place, but he was impressed with
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: their enthusiasm and went back to the flat and he
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: wrote the song. So he had these songs. And what
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: happened was that after I had seen them at Dingwalls,
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: I put them on this Talking Heads tour, which, like
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: most of my tours, was like twenty seven gigs without
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: a day off, because I don't believe in days off.
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: They're just days days off one of those and I
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: went on a lot of these dates, A because I
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: was looking after both bands, and B because I wanted
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: to get to know my kind of new charges. So
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: I became very familiar with those songs. And right in
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: the middle of that tour, Um John Stains the Air
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: and R guy I'm talking about I was talking about,
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: came up with a couple of possible producers, one of
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: which was Muff Winward and Steve's elder brother. Elder brother,
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: and Muff was working at Ireland Records at the time.
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: He was about to leave. He had a two week
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: window and then he was starting as head of an
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: R at CBS as they were, so he came to
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: see them at a show in a place called Aylesbury
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: north of London, agreed to produce them and fitted them
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: into that gap. There's a lot of kind of synchronicity
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: going on here. So he he did that record in
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: ten days. And what he basically did was he recorded
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: their lives just bashpreash, bash breash brash. We got. Of
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: course the album cover took way longer and was and
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: was and was. The was the was the source of many,
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: many many arguments and fights and stuff, particularly between the
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: two brothers. And I realized actually at that point that
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: rather like the Kicks and the Gallaghers and others, the
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: sibling thing was going to be a bit of a headache,
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: which it turned out to be. But so they made
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: that record, and I and they finished it, and I
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: had them. I just kept them working because that was
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: how they were making money. The record deal was not
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: a particularly good deal. The royalty rate was pretty poor,
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: but it was for the time, I suppose it was okay.
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: And they so I and I put them on I
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: got them a residency at the Marquee Club and I
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: put them on a kind of club college tour for
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: the whole of June of that year, and the record
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: came out in May. Sultan's came out in May, dribbled
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: into the bottom of the UK chart and fell straight out.
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: The album did okay, we didn't have the American deal
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: at the time. There was an unusual thing in their
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: recording agreement that the PolyGram one the phonogram one, which
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: said that if R s O passed on them the
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: rights to place the record, the deal in America would
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: refer to the group which went Me and I had
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: never done a record deal in my life. I had
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: never read a recording agreement. I had never been in
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: a recording studio. I didn't know anything about any of that.
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: R s O passed because they were in the middle
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: of Saturday night fever at al and uh So the
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: band did a club college tour in June, and then
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: uh Mark and I came over to the States. We
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: went to Los Angeles and I we had some interest
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: from Colombia, but we wanted to be on Warner Brothers
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: because we were musical snobs and they had Van Morrison
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: and just Ricky Lee Jones was just about to come
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: out and things like that. And I went up to
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: uh I managed to get somebody got me, got me
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: an intro to Mo Austin, and I'm like, I don't
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: know what the I really didn't know. I'm not know
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: what I was doing and I went up to Warner
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 1: Brothers and I got I was ushered into Moe's office,
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: which was the most intimidating physical space I've ever been in.
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, he's it's part from anything else that was enormous,
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: and his desk was so far away that you had
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: to sort of it took you five minutes to get
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: from the door to his desk. And anyway, he he
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: said something great to me. Actually, I always I love
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: MO and he's still with us, thankfully. He said to me,
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: I don't know anything about music, go and see the
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: A and R Department, which of course was not true
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: at all, but he did come from the Sinatra reprise background,
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: and he sent me down to see the sadly late ROBERTA. Peterson.
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: When I went into Roberta's office, she had more pot
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: plants in there than I've never seen in my life.
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: And and this is a little girl with the kind
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: of required l a tan and blonde hair sitting amongst
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: all of these palms and pot plants. And I remember
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: giving other record and she put it on and like
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: a lot of A and R people cranked it was
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: spinal tap up. It went to eleven and I'm sitting
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: there and this thing's thundering out. And she told me
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: later she was so excited by it that she tried
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: to pretend she tried to be cool, but I could
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: see her at her foot tapping madly underneath the desk.
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: And when it when she played both sides, she said
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: to me, where are you staying? And I was sadly
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: we were staying at the high at the Riot House.
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: And I remember she was vastly amused by that, and
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: she asked if she could keep that copy because she'd
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: like to play it to some of the people in
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: the department. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, sure,
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: why not. Wow. So I go back to the hotel,
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: and by this time there were a couple of other
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: companies who started chasing me. The American PolyGram Opera Asian
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: had realized what a do do they've made by putting
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: this clause in and they and actually that was the
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: first time I was ever offered a bribe. I was
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: offered a bribe in a sauna in somewhere in Los
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: Angeles by some guy from PolyGram in New York. He
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: offered me a hundred thousand dollars to get the band
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: to forget about that clause in the contract, and I
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: thought he was offering us an advance. I kept saying
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: to him, you mean for the band, and he said, no,
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: it's for you. They kept winking at me, and we're
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: in a sauna and I was sitting on the slatted
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: and he was on top of me, and we were
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: getting further and further back, so we were he was
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: lying on top of me, and I managed to wriggle
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: out from under him make a dash for the door.
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: Never heard from them again. Unfortunately, Warner's decided to sign us.
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: And what I didn't know there was another lady who
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: was also sadly passed on, called Karen Burg, who was
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: in the in our department in New York, who worked
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: alongside Jerry Wexler, and she had been to England and
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: she'd seen them at a little club gig and was
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: also pursuing them, and being a big company, they hadn't
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: actually spoken to each other, so they didn't realize. Roberta
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: didn't realize that Karen was already onto it. But anyway,
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: we ended up doing the deal with them, and it
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: turned out to be a very happy and a very
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: fruitful relationship. Okay, how does the essence of dire Streets
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: end up working with Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, okay, we
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: do the first American tour in February March April of
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: seventy nine. The albums at number two. The Doobie Brothers
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: kept us soft number one with Michael McDonald. Sultan's gets
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: the number two, I think it was. And I had
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: decided one of the things I was trying to do
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: with them live or any act I've worked with, was
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: create an event one and we were being offered I
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: remember Ron Del's and had got hold of my home
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: phone number and offered as Madison Square Garden and I
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: turned it down flat. And there were two reasons. I
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: knew the band were not ready to play a place
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: that big. They hadn't played anywhere bigger than three thousand
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: capacity at that point. And I also knew that as
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: the line up existed at the time with David K.
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: Nofler in it, it wasn't what they didn't really perform.
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: If you understand, they would kind of a bit rooted
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: to the spot mark would throw off mount sense of sweat,
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: which is where the head band came from. But uh so,
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: I what I did was I stuck with a club,
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: small theater. So we played, for instance, The Bottom Line
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: in New York for four nights, and we played The
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: Roxy in l A. At the end. When we were
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: at the Roxy, we'd already moved on to selecting a
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: producer for album number two and who should step forward
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: because he could certainly recognize a dollar bill when it
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: appeared in front of him. But Jerry Wexler, and Jerry
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: who was going to m sorry, he'd already done the
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: second record. That's right, we did the second record before
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: we came to America. He brought Dylan to one of
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: the shows, and of course Marks huge puge Dylan fan.
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: So they met and there was an interesting little aside
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: to this. While they were up we were in that
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: place on the rocks upstairs, and I was chatting to
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: Dylan's mate and I kind of said to him, I
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: said to him, well, what band are you in? And
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: he said, oh, I'm not in a band. I'm with
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: the Children of God. And I went, oh, really, I've
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: not heard of him. So this made no didn't. This
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: came into play a little while later. So anyway, we
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: finished that tour and Jerry had got Mark and our
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: original drama pick with us to go down to Muscle
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: Shoals to make Slow Train Coming. Now, just before that,
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: Mark was rehearsing out in Santa Monica at Dylan's place
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: and he called me up in London and he said, ed,
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: He said, all these songs are about God, and I
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: suddenly remembered the guy at the rock scene. And of
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: course Bob had become born again, which which Jerry, being Jewish,
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: couldn't get his head round at all. Jerry would constantly spit.
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 1: That was his thing, was spitting. So I didn't go
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: down there. I was too busy with the next phase
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: of what was going on. But they went down to
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: Muscle Shoals and I flew over to New York. I
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: called Mark up and I said, oh, I'll be down tomorrow.
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: He said, don't bother coming. I said why not. He said,
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: we're finished and I said, but you've only been there
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: five days. He said, Bob only plays a song twice.
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: So I kicked my heels for a few days and
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: went back to England and he followed fairly quickly after that,
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: and that became the Slow Train Coming record, and that
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: was you know, Bob's kind of born again announcement if
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: you like, but a great record irrelevant of the guy. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: So how do you get rid of of the other? Why?
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: You got some good questions? And the thing that the
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: situation between the two brothers was difficult from the get go.
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: It became increasingly difficult as the band got bigger, um
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: because Mark was emerging as a dictator. And I don't
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: say that in a negative way. I think all bands
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: needed dictator. Basically, the democracies and bands just don't work.
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 1: And David, who of course well as David said, I
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: remember in an interview afterwards, he said, it was pretty
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: tough having my brother constantly telling me what to do.
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: And the problem also was that Mark was Mark and
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: Pick with it us were equally matched in their talent
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: on their instruments. Pick was probably the best drummer we
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: ever had and they and John was very solid as
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: a bass player. And John did all of the band's
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: business with me, and he stopped them breaking up certainly
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: in the earlier years because he was always very sort
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: of sensible, as that's his personality. We got to doing
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: the making movies record in New York at the Power
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: Station with Jimmy Iven and Shelley Akas and there was
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: a they were recording Romeo and Juliette and there was
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: just a huge row, I mean like a total nuclear
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: mega row. And it ended up with David leaving the group.
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: He wasn't fired, it just wasn't working. So he came
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: back to England and Mark finished up the guitar parts
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: and said mcguinnis who was on that with the Paul
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: Schaefer band on Letterman Show. He did a bit of
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: guitar work on it as well. It just ran out
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: of steam. If if he not left, the group would
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: have disintegrated, and he was cool with what he missed
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: out on. I can't answer that question. I mean, I
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: haven't really had much to do with him. It was
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: a situation where I couldn't. I couldn't carry on working
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: with him. The first of all, I didn't consider he
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: was talented enough, and secondly, the sibling thing meant it
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: just in part it was just impossible. But I don't know,
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: I don't know whether he regrets it. I said he
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: received one quarter of the royalties on the first three albums,
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: first two albums, so he did okay financially okay. Ultimately
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: the band is going up. Meanwhile MTV becomes role Lide phenomena.
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: The band cuts money for nothing before the record is released.
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: Do you know you have this monster? And how do
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: you end up making the video? And also how do
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: you get stinged on the intro? Right? Okay, um, The
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: answer to the first part of that question is that
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: you never know anybody who says they can spot ahead.
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: To me, it's they've got their heads up their backsides.
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: Nobody knows what is going to be successful. They only
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: know what has been successful. So people do sequels, and
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: they do copies and so on. What happened with that
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: one was that after the Love of Gold record, which
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: was huge everywhere except the US because it only had
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: five tracks on it. And I must tell you there's
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: a song on they called Telegraph Road, which I think
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: runs from about fifteen minutes one of yeah it is
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: and Warn Brill has actually did a two and a
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: half minute edit that said to me, can we put
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: this out? And I remember saying to Carl Scott bless him.
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: I said, it's Carl that be silly. So we didn't
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: have a hit single of that. Private Investigations was a
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: huge hit all over the rest of the world, I
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: must say, to my considerable surprise since that's seven minutes long.
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: And what happened was we did another great long tour.
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: All these records, all these albums were accompanied by huge tours, yes,
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: but there was a point where you literally were playing
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: stadiums and you were literally the biggest touring act in
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: the world. And just a just coming to that in
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: your your chronology. What happened was that Mark started to
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: do a couple of other things. I mean, we did
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: the soundtracks for Local Hero and cal around about the
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: time of Love Over with gold Um with producer David Putnam,
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: who was an absolute delight to work with, and Um.
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: Somewhere in all of that we had a live album
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: out called Alchemy, and he was started producing other people Um,
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: and we got to a point. I remember he and
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: I we were in a car. We've been at film
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: Man's and Era's studio. We were driving back up to
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: London and he said, I've got some songs together. This
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: would have been in late eighty four. He said, can
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: you get the band back together? And those turned out
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: to be the songs that became the Brothers in Arms record.
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: And I remember going down to a rehearsal and I
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: heard money for Nothing for the first time. What what
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: struck me about it was I've done the first ever
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: European tour with zz Top and I remember thinking that
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: he probably had I don't know this, but I kind
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: of detected a bit of Billy Gibbons guitar sound on
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: that particular song. Did I think it was going to
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: be a big hit? I thought it might be do well,
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: but I had no I did had no idea it
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: was going to do that. Records done about that album
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: has done about thirty six million physical sales. So UM,
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: we've we we decided to go to Monsterrat to Georgea's studio.
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: UM made it mainly for the Sun and I remember
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: going over there and we didn't know even though Sting
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: was on the island now Mark and Stein. We've all
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: known each other for many many years when the Straight
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: started out the place he started out, and of course
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: I've known Miles Fat Miles is fact checking fact checking
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: his book with me and a couple of months ago
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: because you've got a book coming out soon, and uh,
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: we we didn't know Sting was on the island, and
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: one day he just the best chef on the Island
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: was the guy at the studio, Michael George. One day,
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: Sting showed up and um with Trudy and because he
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: wanted he wanted something decent to eat and we're having
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: dinner and Mark said to him and he said, I've
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: written this really stupid song about MTV. Do you fancy
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: singing on it? So they went downstairs and they came
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: up with the idea of putting I Want my MTV
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: on the front to the tune of Don't Stand So
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: Close to Me, and that became the record. And um,
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: I remember there was a there was a big headache
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: about that song because of the lyrics see the little
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: faggot with the earring and the makeup. Warner Brothers some
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: not everybody, and I have to say not not more Austin.
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: There were some people in Warner Brothers who wanted to
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: edit that there was a reference to American Express, which
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: people were, you know, this is going to be so
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: and so forth, but that everybody went with it. Although
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: funny enough that the first single off that record, which
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: people have forgotten, was Walk of Life, and that didn't
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: do anything until it came out on the back of
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: Money for Nothing, and then it became a big hit.
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: It actually outsold money for nothing, So that was that's
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: basically the story that it wasn't okay then that the
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 1: video was classic too with the animation. How did you
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: come up with a video? Well, that was done by
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: Steve Barron and he had done Michael Jackson's beat It,
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 1: the one with the lights under his feet, and he
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: basically came up with that idea. We tried. We did
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: have a moment where we were trying to find somebody
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: who would appear in that as a kind of redneck
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: sort of person, and I approached Buddy Rich and Rodney
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: Dangerfield and they both passed on it. There you go,
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: So we ended up. So we ended and this that
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: that that digital thing had just just literally just kind
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: of arrived. So we were shown, we were shown an
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: example of that, and we were already on tour on
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: the we were already started to turn that record that
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: all of the live footage that the band are in
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: on in that clip was shot in in Budapest in Hungary, Okay.
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 1: As we referenced earlier, record comes out far beyond anybody's
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: conception worldwide. Smash. What does it feel like? And how
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: you then decide to play stadiums and what's it like
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: being the biggest act in the world. Um ye, I
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: that's an almost unanswerable question. When you're on the roller coaster,
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: you're just hanging on. I mean, you don't realize what
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: what you just said until you can look at it
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: with hindsight. I knew we didn't actually play stadiums. We
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: played some outdoors, but we didn't. I preferred doing multiple arenas.
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: I think it's fairer on the audience. Did you play
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: stadium in in Israel? Though? Oh well that was the part. Yes, Sorry,
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: we're just mixing up your fragile Yeah, we played. We
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: played to a quarter of the entire population of Israel
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: over three shows. One was in a Roman amphitheater in
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: the middle of Jerusalem that was the closest to a
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: riot I've ever been involved in. And the other two
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: were in the Park, which would be the equivalent of
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: Central Park in New York, and we played that. We
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: filled that for two days and we played big outdoor shows.
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: In Australia, we did play. We played to eighty nine thousand,
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: six d and thirty two people in Auckland, which is
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: the largest gathering of people ever in the history of
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: the Islands of New Zealand, things like that. I could
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: rattle off silly statistics for age, okay, But interestingly, in
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: that era mid eaties, the biggest being in the world.
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: How much production did you curry and what we was
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: at a factor or was it still just the music?
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: It was the music really. I mean we had a
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: We had a great, great lighting man, Chas Harrington. Now
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: Chaz had started out as the engineer at the Demo
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: studio where they did the first demos. And one day
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 1: he was fiddling, he was doing monitors for us, and
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: he was fiddling with the lighting board and we didn't
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: have a lighting man. This is very early on, and
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: I said to him, do you want to do the lights?
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: And he became one of the world's leading lighting designers. Um,
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: we had the same crew we kept. We've always been
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: very low. We used the same trucking company lights, sound,
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: all the rest of it, and I kept Obviously the
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: crew had to grow, but the core of it sound
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: front of the house, UM Robert Collins who now does
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: whose sound? People like the monitor guy. They all the
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: core people. And by this point the band had metamorphosized
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: into a situation where we had really Mark and John
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: and the others were I'm going to call them side men,
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: but they were rather more than side men, and we
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: compensated them on a basis that was more than side men.
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 1: So they were a very That lineup on that Brothers
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: and Arms tour, in my view, is the best lineup
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: we ever had, and they consistently did two hundred and
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: shows in twelve months. It's amazing people are still alive.
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: But interesting, interestingly enough, Mark said to me once he
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: came in the office and he was looking at the
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: date sheet that I put together, and he pointed at
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: this day off. He should what's that for? I said,
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: that's for the crew. The band went and played a
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 1: think reception in a hotel on that day. Wow, okay,
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: what did you do with the money? There are issues
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: of tax, there's issue spending. Where did you put it?
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: What do you do with it? Are you talking about
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: me personally or to the degree you overtaking? Wow? Well,
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: the first thing is none of them actually no artists
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 1: have been involved with but certainly none of dire Straits
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: has acquired. Nobody's got a private plane, nobody's got a yacht.
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: Mark has a collection of classic cars we have. Everybody
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: ended up with nice homes, but I wouldn't say particularly exotic. U.
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: We yeah, we paid, we paid a lot of tax.
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: We decided to stay resident in the UK. Nobody he
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: went overseas or did any of that kind of stuff. Um.
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: It's interesting because you're saying that in the context of now,
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: because you've got to remember that everything was less than
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: Ticket prices were less, merchandising was less, record royalties were
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: actually record realties were better the Newtube. I mean, if
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: the bogey men back then with the record companies. Now
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: it's the internet providers on question. And you know, when
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: I do the thing with Irving tomorrow, I know this
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 1: is going to come up. Um. And I think that
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 1: the the money changes you, but what it really changes
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: is people's attitude towards you. Um, it's a long time
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: since I didn't pick up the bill in a restaurant,
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: so you have that. But you know, I mean, it's
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: churlish to complain about being successful. It did. It does
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: have an impact on your on your psyche definitely, apart
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: from anything else. You can't quite grasp it if you could.
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: I mean, you you've got me to explain my background
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: earlier on if you come from a background like that
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: Mark Mark. Mark's dad was an architect, his mom was
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: a school teacher. John's parents were in were farmers. Um,
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: we weren't. It's frightening. There is an element to it
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: that is frightening, and you kind of stash it away
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: pension funds. You would shove it all into pension fund
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: because they because they were they were very good tax
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: wise in this country, and because there's always this fear
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: all these all creative people are essentially insecure, and some
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 1: of them desperately so so you stash it away kind
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: of under the bed almost because you think it's going
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: to stop tomorrow. So I would say, and we all
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: had very good business advice. I did not use lawyers.
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: I did all the record deals, all the publishing deals,
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: and all of the tours outside of the US. I
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: did myself well. Obviously you were an expert in touring,
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: but especially even in that day, record deals were very
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 1: comprehensive in retrospect. Was but I just but my thing
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: was I had I had huge leverage, so I just
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: used to invent things. I just used to stick closes
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: in that were I used to tie record companies up
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: in knots. For instance. Give an example in the UK
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: m then not now, television advert sizing for records was
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: a big thing, but it was expensive, so the record
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: companies would want to recoup of the TV costs. So
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 1: I put them in as I put in clauses in
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: the deal that were so complicated they didn't know what
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: they were doing. And right now I can't say how
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: much straits technically, Oh what was polychrome now universal? But
• 2:00:25
  Speaker 1: it's saved hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds.
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: We never paid towards TV campaigns, were never paid towards videos. Okay,
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: did at what point? Or did? You renegotiated streets record
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: deal on every single album, And I renegotiated it backwards
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: as well as forwards, So the first album ended up
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 1: on the same royalty as the next one. Wow. But Bob,
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: this sounds I mean, it sounds grandiose. But I had
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: leverage if I had no you only get leverage through
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 1: commercial success if you're one of the things I also
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 1: realized was that the staff in record companies, not so
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: much at Warner Brothers, but certainly in the phonogram companies
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: and PolyGram. I got through seventeen managing directors in twenty
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: five years in the UK company. Nobody knew what the
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: previous lot had done. They lost all of our paperwork fantastic.
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: So they would ring up and they would say, we
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: can't find your contracts and I say, oh, hours is
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: in storage, it's in a it's in a box under
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: the Thames. I can't get it, which is total bullshit.
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: We did. We went for long periods with no contract.
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: We just had deal memos and I and I stole
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: somebody out of the royalties department at Phonogram to be
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: my in house accountant, so he knew exactly what that
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: was going to be. My next question, to what degree
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 1: did your audit frequently and you always found money? Nobody's
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: ever audited a record company and not found money. Okay, Ever,
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: in terms of Sunset deals, are you still getting paid
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: personally from these records? Now? I sold those rights like
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: rather like Irving's buying up publishing and Mecuri artist is
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 1: buying up anything that's warm. I sold those rights about
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: three or four years ago. But I was getting commission
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 1: in perpetuity on records and I had a very long
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: post term on publishing and again I got that after
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: managing them for about eighteen years. Why did you decide
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: to sell some personal reasons, m h and because I
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 1: could see that the catalog was I mean, it's still
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: doing well, but it's been a long time since Brothers
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: in Arms. I liked to be honest with you, I
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: was kind of I was still I was a bit
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 1: fed up having to administer it and so and so forth.
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: And I managed to get an extremely good deal. I mean,
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: if can you tell us sold into a company called
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: Royal to Exchange in Denver, and I got a very
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 1: very high multiple. Okay, so you have this band, it's
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: the biggest band in the world. Yet the band is
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: barely together. You know, most managers are doing everything to
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 1: keep the band together. So one thing in your mind
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: and own this is shaky what was going on in
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: your mind at that point. But when we got two
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: Brothers in Arms and the work that we did on
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: the back of that, which basically lasted for a year,
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 1: that level of success that you're talking about, I would
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: take issue with the biggest band in the world because
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: that's a bit like being the no No. I think
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: if you look, I remember the tour grossest, literally the
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: largest in the world. We can, but I can't quantify
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: all these other things perception when it comes to hard dollars.
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: That's a bit like being the fastest gunfighter in the West.
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: You know one day somebody's going to come around the
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 1: corner and shoot you. Yes, but you have a band
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: with no sex symbol from not saying you know trendy music.
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 1: So and you're as we stated earlier, it's not like
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 1: you're selling the show. You're selling the music. That's why
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: it was so noteworthy. I'm not blow and spoke up
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 1: your ass. For those of us were outside, it was
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: pretty astounding. It was pretty starting. For those of us
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 1: on the inside. I didn't think of it like that,
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: and honestly, a lot of people will when I'm watching
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: this will be surprised. I literally ever thought about the
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 1: money coming in. I constantly thought about the money going out,
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: because when you're running a thing like that, the overhead starts.
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, I've got white hair. I started off with
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: him with black hair. Um, you've had two people on
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 1: the road I had. I can't, I can't. I can't
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: remember the number of trucks, planes and all the rest
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: of it. They What happened was that when we got
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: to the end of that, which was eighty six April May,
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: no sooner as we finished. The mark was he was
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: like a greyhound out of the box. Straightaway is producing
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: Tina Turner, then he's doing something else, then he's doing
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 1: another film. It never stopped. He had an incredible work ethic.
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: I mean absolutely, it was hard to keep up with him.
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: And I had expanded my management company and I was
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: looking after Brian Ferry. Jerry Rafferty had gone by this time,
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: long long gone. We had a great Irish singer songwriter
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: called Paul Brady, and I was managing Scott Walker, from
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: whom I made three fifty pounds commission in seven years.
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 1: And Scott's no longer with us. But if he walked
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: into this room now and asked me to do it again,
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: I do it like a shot. You let's stop with
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: Brian Ferry for a second. You know, he's a very
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: debonair guy artistically at ten successful in America. But we're
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 1: constantly reading these stories how he's one of the richest
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: musicians in the UK. Rubbish. How did you know? That?
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: Is complete rubbish? I would say he's that's complete rubbish.
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 1: Well then let me ask you, since you were the manager,
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: how successful was he in the UK? He wasn't as
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: successful a both within Roxy Music and on his own.
• 2:07:03
  Speaker 1: But if you're talking about physical record sales, for instance,
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 1: on the record I worked on, that record would have
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: done maybe a hundred hundred it up on this end, No,
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: it's that's complete rubbish. I don't know who's writing that crap,
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: and that's no disrespect to Brian. I did a deal
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: for him, or I have finished off a deal in fact,
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 1: his previous management we're doing with virgin Um, which was
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: an extremely but he that they didn't presume they I think,
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 1: I hope I could be corrected on this. I think
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: they dropped him eventually. I mean he and I we
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: it didn't work. It just didn't gell because because he'd
• 2:07:46
  Speaker 1: been whether management company before me, who had a totally
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: different style to me. I don't do personals, I don't
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 1: do mortgages, I don't get people's cars repaired, I don't
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 1: get book their granny's on holiday. And I don't do divorces. Okay,
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: but talking about what you do do they're very hands
• 2:08:06
  Speaker 1: on creative managers like the two guys A C. Prime. Yeah,
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 1: there are there are I know, I know Peter very well. Yeah,
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: And then there are other people say, you go to
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 1: the studio, I'll make the record, but when it comes out,
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 1: I'll do I'll sell whatever. But the creative thing is
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 1: totally yours. You make decision even what's going to be
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 1: on the record. Where do you sit in there? Continuing?
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: I think because I had been a musician, or at
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 1: least I've been a drummer, because that's not necessarily the
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: same thing, um, and because the guy's industrates in particularly
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: when I talk about death strates, I really mean Martin
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 1: Offer and John Ellslie, and I really mean Mark. I
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 1: suppose we are roughly at the same age. We're from
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 1: the same background, we grew up in very similar parts
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 1: of the UK, and most significantly, we grew up listening
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 1: to the same stuff, all the stuff I was talking
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: about at the beginning. So when Mark and I went
• 2:08:57
  Speaker 1: started going to Nashville a lot and chet Atkins Blessing
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 1: opened the door for us to meet everybody. We were
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: like school kids. I mean, meeting the Everly Brothers for
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: us was like you couldn't it was. It was kind
• 2:09:13
  Speaker 1: of dream like and going. And remember he called me
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: one morning, pretty early in the morning, and he said,
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: what are you doing And I said, I'm ranking and
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: he said, we'll stop doing that. He said, We're going
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 1: to go and meet Scotty Moore. So I'm in the
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: lobby in five minutes. I mean, you know, this was
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: and I remember we went to Chech took us to
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: Studio B where Elvis had recorded, and I said to
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 1: check where did Elvis used to stand? And he pointed,
• 2:09:41
  Speaker 1: and Mark and I went and stood and hugged each other.
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: It was that kind of It was the romance thing
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 1: that was talking about earlier. And I think that one
• 2:09:50
  Speaker 1: of the things about Mark Noveler is that he was
• 2:09:53
  Speaker 1: very generous in including me a little bit, because obviously
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 1: I'm doing a different area of the job in the
• 2:10:04
  Speaker 1: creative process. So he would on more than one occasion
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: come into the office brandishing a guitar, sit down in
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 1: front of my desk, can play a song to me
• 2:10:17
  Speaker 1: and say what do you think of that? And I
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 1: can remember not in the office, but he remember him
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 1: when he the first time he played Robbio and Juliet
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: to me and I just stared at the floor I
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: had no idea what to say. And there's a line
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 1: in that song you and me babe, how about it?
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 1: I thought, what a great line, what fantastic lyric. And
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 1: I imagine John Landau has the same kind of I
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: know John's actually played guitar with Bruce and his band
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: and drums. I played drums with the notting Hillbillies for takeing. Okay,
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 1: how did that come about? So that we finished the
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 1: brothers dance thing? And I think as a kind of
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 1: kind of reaction to Mark is not very he's not
• 2:11:11
  Speaker 1: very comfortable with fame and celebrity. And in the same way,
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 1: when Bruce did is Nebraska record, there was a bit
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: of a I think it's a subconscious desire to take
• 2:11:22
  Speaker 1: the heat out of the situation, to try and get
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: it down from the stadiums that you're talking about, and
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: the two road crew and we didn't know their names,
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. And he's always been a fan
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 1: of I'm loosely going to call Americana roots music, blues folk,
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: all of that. And one day, um, he has a
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: little studio in a newshouse not not that far from here,
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 1: and and somebody said to me, somebody who worked for me,
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 1: said Mark, Mark's doing an album. I said what He said,
• 2:11:58
  Speaker 1: He's doing an album And this turned out to be
• 2:12:02
  Speaker 1: the first nothing Elbudis record. And he called me up
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: one day and he said, where are your drums? I
• 2:12:07
  Speaker 1: said there at the house. He said, I'll send Ron,
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: that's one of the roadies, round to get them and
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: we set them up in the downstairs bedroom, trail the
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 1: microphone out from the upstairs bedroom out of the window,
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 1: down the side of the building in and hung it
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 1: off the light. Then he played me Bewildered, which is
• 2:12:29
  Speaker 1: one of the songs on that record. He said, can
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 1: you play that? I said yeah. He said can you
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 1: play it with brushes? This is this is why he
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 1: got me in, because he doesn't know anybody who can
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 1: play brushes and I said yeah, I said yeah. So
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 1: I played it one take. He said, okay, next one,
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 1: played the next one, jud finished, did that, the sampled
• 2:12:54
  Speaker 1: me as well. I'm not saying I'm on every track.
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 1: And then a couple of nights later we were but
• 2:13:00
  Speaker 1: wine Bar and he said, okay, we're going to go
• 2:13:03
  Speaker 1: on tour him you're the drummer and I went no, no, no,
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: and I hang on a minute, Hang on a minute,
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 1: and said, I haven't played in a while. He said, now,
• 2:13:12
  Speaker 1: don't worry about that, is it just play time. Well,
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 1: of course, when we got into rehearsals, we rehearsed for
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 1: forty two days without a day off, from noon until
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 1: nine o'clock at night. We had one day off and
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 1: we played forty three shows without a day off, two
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 1: and a half hour set. And I'll tell you an
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 1: interesting thing. You'll be interested in this, Bob Mark because
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 1: he was a school teacher. At rehearsals, he'll have an
• 2:13:39
  Speaker 1: enormous blackboard and a piece of chalk and he draws
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 1: a grid on it, and in the in the left
• 2:13:47
  Speaker 1: hand side here there's this song list getting longer and
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 1: longer and longer. And if you don't get at the
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 1: end of the day, you have to play the songs.
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 1: And if you don't get a ticket in the box,
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 1: you don't go home. You play it until you get
• 2:14:02
  Speaker 1: a tick in the box. And I've seen dast rights
• 2:14:05
  Speaker 1: rehearsals when the road crew have been going because they
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 1: hadn't taken the box. Okay, So I had it in
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 1: with you and Mark well after they the last straights
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 1: tour that they on every street record, which I have
• 2:14:24
  Speaker 1: to say was a difficult period. That was the kind
• 2:14:27
  Speaker 1: of divorce tour. I will leave it at that, and
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 1: we sold it on. We just ran out of gas.
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 1: We litterally. I mean, we're good friends, we have a
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 1: respectful relationship. I have a good relationship with John and
• 2:14:46
  Speaker 1: some of the road crew in my office staff. But
• 2:14:49
  Speaker 1: we kind of it just ran its course. And I
• 2:14:53
  Speaker 1: think one of the tricks in life, especially if you
• 2:14:55
  Speaker 1: have the wherewithal to do this, is to recognize when
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 1: you've got to the cell by day, speaking of which
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 1: you've been married how many times? Twice? And I'm in
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 1: the middle of getting divorced. It'll probably come through tomorrow
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 1: fully enough. Did it reach its sale by date? Yes? Okay, Um, yeah,
• 2:15:19
  Speaker 1: that's yeah, that's that's a bit of a raw subject. Yes,
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, I think that no disrespect to
• 2:15:28
  Speaker 1: me the lady. Um, yeah, it's we put it in
• 2:15:37
  Speaker 1: a different way. Do you have someone in your life now? Okay,
• 2:15:42
  Speaker 1: because otherwise getting older it can be kind of amazing
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: being I have somebody who unfortunately is marooned in your
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 1: country and I have not seen her since March. As
• 2:15:53
  Speaker 1: they say that will end hopefully within you know, months,
• 2:15:56
  Speaker 1: but in any event, well not or not if not,
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 1: if the governor of Tech excess as his way, you know,
• 2:16:04
  Speaker 1: it's just astounding. We're fighting between states here. You know,
• 2:16:07
  Speaker 1: they keep it, you know, taking ship to California and Texas.
• 2:16:10
  Speaker 1: As far as him dropping all restrictions, you might as
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 1: well shoot people. But um, okay, you came up in
• 2:16:17
  Speaker 1: an error. It was all being developed as we started.
• 2:16:20
  Speaker 1: It's all been consolidated today. What do you feel about
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 1: the business today, the opportunities today, the music and landscape today.
• 2:16:30
  Speaker 1: I think if you're twenty years old and you're coming
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 1: into it, it's probably just as exciting as it was
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 1: for me. For me, I find the process of it.
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 1: You asked why Mark and I split up. It wasn't
• 2:16:45
  Speaker 1: just between me and him. I had become bored with
• 2:16:51
  Speaker 1: the process of it, the bureaucracy of it, if you like.
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 1: It seemed to me that the business part was, if
• 2:17:02
  Speaker 1: you had a kind of graph, the business part was
• 2:17:06
  Speaker 1: going up and the musical bit was coming down. But
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 1: that's a generational thing. You know. I was watching a
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 1: couple of panels of the panels today, and you know,
• 2:17:17
  Speaker 1: I've been doing interviewers for the ISLMC now for some
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 1: twenty years or so. It's been quite interesting because every
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: time I look at from the stage, the audience is
• 2:17:26
  Speaker 1: getting younger, obviously, and what they're interested in is what
• 2:17:33
  Speaker 1: applies to them now and in the future. They're not
• 2:17:37
  Speaker 1: that interested in the history of it, which I think
• 2:17:40
  Speaker 1: is a bit sad, but that's just the way it is.
• 2:17:43
  Speaker 1: So for instance, I'm into viewing Irving days off tomorrow
• 2:17:47
  Speaker 1: and rather than talk about the Eagles, because I don't
• 2:17:51
  Speaker 1: think I could stay awake. Um, we will have to
• 2:17:55
  Speaker 1: tackle some of the current stuff that's going on. And
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 1: he and I had a chat last night. Within two
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 1: minutes we've both fallen into exactly what we're going to
• 2:18:05
  Speaker 1: do tomorrow, and I stopped him. I stopped him because
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 1: I wanted to be spontaneous, right. But of course, with Irving,
• 2:18:11
  Speaker 1: unlike many people like MTV itself for the Internet killed it,
• 2:18:16
  Speaker 1: he kept changing with the generation. Oh yeah, a lot
• 2:18:19
  Speaker 1: of people get stuck in there are Okay, I think
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 1: we've come to the end of the feeling we've known.
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 1: I think some of the audience either needs to get
• 2:18:27
  Speaker 1: up and eat something or urinate. So I think we've
• 2:18:30
  Speaker 1: come to a natural stopping point here and anything. We
• 2:18:34
  Speaker 1: have a weekend, we can do what we can do.
• 2:18:35
  Speaker 1: Part two another time absolutely drilled down on one of
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 1: these areas. Anyway, this has been wonderful. Thanks thanks to
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 1: all the audience from I L m C. This is
• 2:18:46
  Speaker 1: a Bob left That's podcast signing on. Thank you. Thanks,