Bill Curbishley

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left That's Podcast.
My guest today is manager Bill Kurbish, Lick Bill, how
are we doing? Okay, So, how did you get the
How did I get the who? Or how did they
get me? Well? I got the who because in the

(00:29):
very early days one of my oldest pals from school
two were very early days. Put a year on it. Well,
when I was a boy, Okay, when in my early years,
I went to school with two guys, Chris Stamp and
Mike Sure. Oh, I didn't know you that far back. Yeah,
we were scored together, and then we we left school.
We became MUDs in our teenage years. Anyway, Mike Shure

(00:54):
was constantly on at me about going with Oh he
was originally a lightened director for a comedian called Normal Wisdom.
And they then got together and they they were messing
around trying to create an independent label. Okay, this was
Christap and your other friends. Yeah, and along with then

(01:16):
Stamp got together with Kit Lambert. So eventually Mike Share
persuaded me. He said, listen, like music has been your life.
You know, we've been powered since we're at school, Come
in with us. So I went in with them. What
year was that? That was seventy, so that is the
year of the Timmy tour. In Who Live It leads

(01:37):
exactly around that period. And unfortunately it wasn't long before
I realized that both Chris and Kit we're suffering the
vagaries of excess drugs, different stuff, different ship. So um
I had a quick learning curve in that sense, and

(01:58):
I had to try and keep the ship afloat. And
we had over the that couple of years prior to
them really getting themselves in trouble, we acquired a lot
of really good artists. You know. We had Jimmy Hendrix,
he was brought to us by Chess Chandler from the Animals.
We had Mirk bol and t Rex and thunder Clapped Nerman,

(02:21):
and we were one of three small independent labels. Really
we had Trek Records. The only others were Chrysalist and
Charisma at that time, so it was quite innovative. And
we were dealing with Polydor PolyGram Polydor Records, which was
mainly a German company and as far as I and

(02:44):
R went, they didn't have much. So we did a
tape lease still with them, which enabled us to give
our artists, quite a very good royalty. But then we split.
We had a profit split with the distributor, so we
were often running. However, um Kit and Chris died really
suffering from their excesses. And I was a little bit

(03:06):
naive in away because I thought that they were really
just like banging away out cocaine and bows, but they
were doing smack. And there's only it's a one way road.
There's only one it takes. It takes the fire away
from you, you know so. And also my great pal

(03:27):
Mike Sure, he suffered a car crash. He was taking
some lights and stuff up to the cavern in Liverpool,
which is famous of course the Beatles, and he was
in the van and he hit a patch of fog
on the motorway. He hit some fog and they found
him the other side of the motorway and as a
consequence of the car crash he became quadriplegic. However, he

(03:53):
had a great music, suns, great mind, and he continued
to work with me for several years after that, quite
an number of years, but it was left to me
in a sense to steer the ship. And at that
time as well, we were heavily heavily involved in the
making of the movie Tommy. So I would get phone
calls from Stick would Bill, can you come in and

(04:16):
see me? They're driving me fucking mad. Why what's wrong? Well?
Kit wants his money and gold bullying, and Chris I
can never find. So I helped him stitch together the
the Tommy movie. I didn't really understand much about movies
in those days, so I used to go off and
pick the brains of friends of mine, you know, like

(04:37):
David Putnam, Sandy Leeberson who made quite a few movies,
you know, a long distance runner, all those, and I
used to pick their brains. Go back, change it a
bit with Stiggy, go away, come back, change it. Eventually
we got a great deal on what we wanted and
we made what's a classic movie of course. Um then

(04:58):
Chris Kit unfortunately Lee suffered probably fell down the stairs
and suffered a brain hemorrhage. And Chris went off to
New York and after quite a number of years, cleaned
up his act a bit and went into counseling of
all things. So from that moment on, I was often

(05:20):
running on my own. Um I got a call, I
took a little small office up above Pink Floyd's office.
Steve O'Rourke, who managed them, was an old mate, old
mate of mine, and I took a small office up
above and almost I didn't have much, you know, and
I had I kept getting some calls from Pete Rudge,

(05:42):
who at that time was with the Rolling Stones, and
he said to me, Bill, will you do? Will you
put together this tour of Europe for the Stones? You know,
you know all the promoters, you'll get us the best deals.
I said, Peter, I can't, I'm too busy, nothing. And
he kept coming and in the end I got the
deal I wanted and did the did the put together

(06:07):
the tour for them, went out on tour with them
and Pete, who's always been a friend p Rudge and
did the Stones tour and then it all happened. Who
came to me and they said, you know we're we're
into litigation with Track Records. Would you manage us? I said, well,
the only way we can do it if you're in litigation,

(06:28):
you know, which I'm sad to here, but um, if
you are in litigation, the only way to do it
is to get some cash flow, and that means going
out on the road and working and getting some cash
flow because it's all going to be locked up. And
I should back track slightly, because the reason why I
left Trade Records and them was that after we did

(06:52):
the premiere of the Tommy movie in New York, we
did it in a subway in New York. I was
promised a percentage of that film, of the management percentage
of which I was going to split with my pal,
the boy who was paralyzed, and it was never thought.
Come in. You could never get the pair of them

(07:14):
to sign anything laments then, I mean, they were at
war with each other. You would never find them in
the right state of mind to sign anything. And so
as a result of that, I'm gone. You know, you're
not only didn't pay me, but I was going to
split it with Mike Chris. He was worth us all

(07:36):
away through score his our pal. So you're not only
sucked me, you're sucked him. And I left and he
never thought I was going to leave, but I did.
And that's that was the story. Okay, So who was
running the management company in the label after you left?
If these two guys were such druggius they weren't able
to run it. I mean Mike, sure, try it in
his own way. He tried the boy but it was

(08:01):
awfully difficult for him, and so it just collapsed really
And that's when they came to me the WHO and
I was in as I said, I was in that
little office. I was doing the stones to her and
they came to me and said, you know, would you
manage just And prior to that, because it was in
such a disarray, Daughtry had a solo album which I

(08:21):
went to Lambent Sam. I said, look, he's he's made
this solo album and all the songs were written by
a new young singer. Say, got a great story here,
so m I said. They said, oh, we don't want
don't know, We're not going to release. I said, listen,
if you release it and it's successful, it will help
tremendously because it will help Roger's self esteem in this

(08:45):
whole situation because Pete was the main man, the writer,
the guitarist, he was the main man. And it was
an attempt to get some sort of democracy going, you know,
and and for for Roger to feel he's for it.
And they said, well, if you want to do it,
you can, so I said, okay, I will so I

(09:06):
came over to Los Angeles. In those days, m c
A was run by Artie mogul So this seventy three. Okay,
Artie mogul Forest in the music business. He's now this
He's known as a legendary crook, a big gambler, show
keep going. So I came over and the people that
were running m c that m c A at that

(09:30):
time were Mike Maitland, Lu Cook, very very honest man,
and Artie mogul So. I had three I had three albums.
I had the Roger Adultery solo album, the Leo Sayer album.
Adam Faith had asked me to bring and an album
by a band, a Dutch band called Golden ear Ring.

(09:51):
Of course, so I played them the three albums. So
they said, yeah, we love for the Daultry album and
we really liked this new kid. He eventually went to warners,
but we really love this new kid. I'm not sure
about the Dutch band. I said, listen, they're fantastic. Come
when are you going to be in London? So they said,
oh so so time. I said, listen, they're playing the

(10:13):
Lyceum in the strand come see them because they're a
great life and they're all good looking guys. I didn't
tell them they were opening for somebody else. I think
it was mounting all one of those means. So comes
the night of the show at the Lyceum and they're
just ready to go on stage, and then it's clear

(10:35):
the theater. It's an ira I R a bomb scare.
There's a bomb in the building. Everyone out. So everyone's
out and they're all in the strand and we're waiting
industry and for like maybe an hour or so to
get clearance. Eventually we get clearance, We go back in,
earing go on stage. They played their set. There's no

(10:58):
one there from m c A. So I own the
next morning. I said, where the funk were you? They said,
where were we? We We couldn't get anywhere near that
theater for the crowds. We want that band. They thought
the crowds were all there for them. We want that band.
And so they took the album, which was an album
called Moonten had a huge hit on it called Radar Love,

(11:21):
and then it's a driving song and the rest is history.
You know that. That's so. And Roger had a successful
album with his solo album Mud Not to the Distress
of Kit and Chris. But to the bewilderment I think,
and I'll never forget Lambert. I saw Lambert in New

(11:43):
York and he was wasn't compassment as and he said
to me, when we're going to release the Golden Earring album?
And I said, it's number five in the charts? What's
wrong with you? So it was a bit of a shambles, bob,
you know, And so I went forward. Then who came
to me for management? Okay, just to go you quit

(12:04):
since they said they weren't going to put out the
adultry album? Were you putting it out by yourself or
as part of their bellage, part of their management? Then
the Tommy movie came along after that, and that's when
I quit. So all those albums came out before the time. Yeah,
And coming back from New York after the premier of
the Tommy Movie was when I quit. On the plane? Okay,

(12:27):
So what was your first album with the who Oh ship?
Now you're asking me who by numbers? Was still the
old guys? Yeah? No, no, no, no, it was us. Okay,
that's nine four, So that was it. Am Whistle did
the sleeve to it. Who by Numbers? They could have
been the first one, but I was with it at
the time in the studio. Through those years, I worked

(12:49):
with him on Quadraphenia in the studios, you know, UM,
and much much later UM. I produced the movie Quadraphonia
that I constantly going on record, I'm just not stroking you.
That's the best rock movie ever. When people talk about it,

(13:09):
that's it because it's not only Quadrophenia. It works as
a movie. I can literally tell you where I saw
it so longer, a theater in Westwood and phenomenal. Yeah,
well that do you want to jump to that now
because we can come back to Yeah, we'll go back
to it, but let's go so so yeah. So they start,
they needed to tour to get cash flow, and then eventually,

(13:31):
Um the litigation was resolved, and as I said, Kit
had a bad he felt understairs. It was sad because
he came to see me like two days before that.
He wasn't in great shape, and he said, Bill, he said,

(13:52):
you're doing a great job with them, he said, better
than we did together. I said, well, thanks, Kit, you know,
and he wasn't in great shape. So I gave him
some money and he went away. And then two days
later he had the accident. Okay, going back to the lawsuit,

(14:12):
the word on the street is that the Who had
a terrible deal, the managers were bad with money. What
was the truth there? The truth was, if you're heavy,
heavy into addiction, one of the overriding things that envelopes

(14:33):
your life is fear, fear of not having enough money
to feed that drug addiction. And that was one of
the problems. I'm not saying that they stole money. They
thought they borrowed it, but they didn't. In the end,
if you're borrowing money without any real possibility of repaying it,

(14:57):
that's not good. And so they were raid. In some
of the other accounts we had as well, the Hendlix
account some of the other artists, it was just grab
it for what they needed. But with the Who, what
what is true in fact is the Who will always
offer promised fort of track records ten percent each as

(15:21):
or Moon Daltry Towns in which they never got. They
just didn't get it to this day, never got it
to this day. And added to that, there was some
double dipping going on because um, their commission rate was
really high high was it other than the colonel I

(15:46):
don't know. Anybody's gone beyond twenty but okay exactly, so
it was um they had the publishing tied up, and
then it was a later day the pete discovered that
everything wasn't right within his publishing the income as well,

(16:07):
and that was it. That was the straw. Okay, So
how did the litigation resolve? It resolved in the sense
that the company basically eventually went bankrupt. They had to
repay the band all of the missing royalties, so they
did on which they found very difficult because they don't

(16:28):
have any money because they blown the money. Usually you
can get a judgment, but you can't have any money.
So what I was left to do was to renegotiate
a lot of their record deals and instead of the
amount that would usually go to track, you know of
profits and the overage after the artist's royalty, I made

(16:49):
sure it went to the WHO. So eventually, over a
long term, they got back as much, if not all,
of what they were rowed. But they weren't treated well
and it was completely unnecessary. I mean, I'm talking about
the whole friend of mine from Scooter, completely unnecessary. But
I knew, Bob, I knew that I was dealing with

(17:09):
a different person, the one who was my pal. He
was on heroin. He was a different person, you know.
And he was a good man. He had a good heart. Um,
but it all gets distorted, you know, it all gets changed,
and it was sad to see. Okay, before the drugs,

(17:33):
were they good managers? They were good. I don't think
they did lack in certain areas. I mean when I
came in and started doing the touring for the band,
for example, the first thing I saw was that they
were into taking a guarantee but not really really looking
at the back end. So what I did with the

(17:54):
band was I immediately changed that ship and I went
into the promoters and I took suffer guarantee, but I
wanted a nine deal. A lot of people give Peter
Grant credit for that. I was doing it way before Grant. Okay,
glad we're going on the record, because there were moth people.
I even I thought it was Peter Grant. No it wasn't.
I was doing nineties ten deals before Grant, head Zepplin

(18:17):
and so Um. I was earning them a lot more money,
a lot more money, and the band especially well Pete
says it in his book and Rogers always acknowledged that,
you know. And it was a simple leap of faith
on my part because I thought ship this band is

(18:37):
a great, great band. They can go into overage, and
I wanted to see them get the lion's share of
that overage. And that's how I've proceeded with them, with
them all my life, and everything is completely and absolutely transparent.
And I don't have a contract. Okay, let's got the
Egypt in America was Frank Barcelona, he was it was

(19:00):
Frank in Premier and who was in Europe? We were
great friends. We didn't have an agent in Europe. Initially
they put it again through their agency New Action. I
did it and in those days I used to do it. Oh,
I used to go I used to book them out
in Europe. I used to go out with him on tour.

(19:21):
I was met tour manager, accountant, the whole, the whole bundle.
So I used to settle after shows and do it all.
Let's talk about that now. This was the days when
you get paid in cash, right, because a lot of
it was because you didn't trust the promoter, didn't trust them.
I would want the I'd want the advance against the

(19:43):
guarantee into our account before we ever went and then
the balance in cash. Okay, so tell us some stories
about trying to collect the back end. I can honestly
say I never ever had a problem collecting that back end. Okay.
So that's one good thing. They at least had the money.

(20:05):
But I have been in the offices of promoters. Weren't
seen the two sets of books. They're said in the
set they show to the acts. So how do you know?
You know everybody stealing from everybody in this business, So
how did you deal with that? Well, one of the
things I've always said is I've always had a photober
figures really, and so I was very quick to be

(20:26):
able to do deals on foot on the bounce. But
also I would on a lot of those shows, I
would click people in and they have people on the
doors clicking them in. And in some instances I found
extra extra rose. In Germany, for example, I found extra rose.

(20:48):
You know, there was p and then instead of like
there was m N O P q Q. So you know,
got once they knew that you were into it, they
they stopped all that ship, you know. And ironically, when
I was doing when I made that shift um and

(21:09):
doing when ruddering me about doing the Stones to her,
you know, of Europe. I think that also set a
bit of a standard for me, because in my opinion,
I did some great deals for them, and I don't know.
I think the Stones were in a similar situation in
those days. It was early early days, that's as you know.

(21:30):
And some of those contracts and some of the promoters
were like give them the advance and ripped them. And
you have to be very careful. You have to look
at what the rule rent was on the hall, and
I used to go through it forensically. I wanted to
know how much a faultlift cast everything, because I was
my my aim. It was really to get this band

(21:54):
what I felt they deserved. And I guess if I'm
proud of anything, it's Townsend said in his book, from
the moment I took over, he was never in need
of money. It's their money. Without them, I wouldn't be here.
You wouldn't be here, that's for sure. It's the artist

(22:16):
comes first. I couldn't agree. What why is it called Trinifold?
It was the company I just picked off the shelf,
no other reason. I had a young accountant at that time.
I said I need to start a management company. He said, well,
he just took a company off the shelf four hundred
pounds and it was Trinifold. He's got no meaning. Okay,

(22:37):
let's go back to the beginning. So you're born where
I was born in London, in the East end of London,
in West Ham. Okay, So what was it like growing
up there? Ah? It was great. I mean it was
the East end of London. My father worked in the docks.
What do you do there? Well, my father was during

(22:57):
the Second World War. He was a chief injury near
on a submarine base in Salon and they called them
chief engineer artifica. Anyway, he came back after the Second
World War went into the docks and he was a
marine engineer in the docks. So it was ship repairs
and that's where we lived, around the docks. And then

(23:18):
your mother worked outside the home. She did um and
she sent me to school when I was four instead
of five so she could go to work. And she
did what she worked in various She was assistant cook,
she worked in a button factory. She did anything to
keep us alive. And I was say embarrassed later in

(23:42):
life because she altered my birth certificate to get me
into school, and you can't change a two into a one,
and it looked like there was a fucking hole in
the paper. So I passed what they had then the
day the scholarship in England called the eleven plant that
then if you pass that allowed you to go onto

(24:03):
a much more elite school, a grammar school or a
technical school or whatever. So I passed that at ten
instead of eleven. So when I had to go to
register to the school, I had to take this birth
certificate with me. A man, was I embarrassed? I mean,
you could see through it. I went down, I was
dreading it and they didn't even look at the So

(24:23):
so I went through school, all the way through school,
a year younger then I really should have been. Okay, So,
how many kids in the family? Six? And where are
you in the hierarchy? The oldest? You're the oldest. How
much older are you than the youngest? Uh? The youngest Paul,

(24:44):
here's eighteen years younger than me. Okay, what's your relationship
with the other five? Fantastic a live No one of
them is not the boy my brother who was the
next one down to me, Alfie. He sadly died like
ten years ago. Um, he was the next one down
to me. He was great. He was a good heavyweight boxer.

(25:07):
He was good. Then I had two sisters. One now
lives in New Zealand, then my other sisters still lives
in London. And then the two youngest brothers both were
soccer players, I have to say soccer soccer players. They
both played at west Ham, but one of them became

(25:27):
much much more famous than the other one. And so
the elder of those two Alan, he's sixteen years younger
than me. He had his first proper game in the
Premier League when he was sixteen and he played in
the England World Cup when he was fourteen. He was
a very great player and he's known very well in England.

(25:50):
He had he had nineteen years as a player, played
for west Ham. He played for West and Villa, Birmingham
Great Teams and Brighton and then he ended up at
a club Charlton, which was in the Second at the
end of his playing career Second Division, and he became
the coach there and took them up into the Premiership.

(26:13):
And he had nineteen years as a manager and he's
now a man of leisure. Now he's a pundit. But
the other thing about it, when he became a star,
salaries were much lower. Oh yeah, he he was top
of the tree as a player, and I guess he
was making then three hundred pounds five hundred dollars a week.

(26:36):
By the time he became a manager, he was making
two or three million a year. So he ended up
being in the game long enough to his rewards. And
his kids are growing up now and he was constantly
being poached at one time to be the national manager
you know, um, And he said, well at the moment now,

(27:00):
the way it is, he said, there's four or five
teams with money all the rest want you to work
a miracle. He said, I've had like thirty eight years
of it. I'm chilled. And he goes and does quite
a bit of punditry from um. He goes to Qatar
and does it for around. I mean, you might see
him over so we were in America, we'd see it's

(27:21):
a broadcaster a college. Yeah, he's a pandit and a
broadcaster for the Premier League. And a lot of it
comes over here because it goes everywhere but the UK.
So I know lots of friends in America have seen
him pontificating after certain soccer slash woodball is getting bigger
and bigger. If Army Arsan was alive, it'd turn over

(27:41):
in his grave. I went to the World Cup with
Armored and Nessuy Hurtrican because Armored they were both manic. Well,
they brought the broad Pellade in New York exactly for
the Cosmos. And I went to the World Cup with
the pair of them, and we went down to Barcelona
for the semifinals and then into Madrid for the finals,

(28:04):
you know, and he was always and then he started
the Cosmos, and people thought, well, what's he doing. What
they didn't realize was that with the complete ethnic mixture
in America, you know, you had a sport there that
was appealing to them, whether they be Latin, American, Greek, this,

(28:25):
that Italian. But more to the point, it was a
sport that you had to be normal, normal higher. You
didn't have to be three hundred pounds, you didn't have
to be seven ft tall like basketball. It was for
normal size. So that's why it took off right me
out on the street. So going back to your five siblings,

(28:45):
did any of them ever work for you, well, my
younger brother. They did actually, but I only sold that.
I did a huge show in the football stadium in London,
and I had my brother, the one who who's deceased
healthy and the one Alan who was the soccer player.
They were selling programs and merchandise for me. And then

(29:06):
it was four or five weeks after that that he
got his first game, my brother for West Ham Um
and they played Newcastle and he scored the first goal
sixteen years of age, and he made the winner. And
that night they said on TV a star was born today.

(29:27):
Of course you would never come to work for me
again after course, after that. Okay, So you were a
good student. Yeah, I was a good student. I was
unruly and and disciplined, but I found a lot of
it easy. Okay. So you went to school and you
finished what we call high school here and then and

(29:47):
he thought of getting any more education, or you said
I'm done, I'm not going to school anymore. No, I
didn't know. I'm done. I had to get get out
and get a living. We were a very poor family.
We lived in a very poor area and it was
necessary to go to work, you know. So that's what
I did. Your whole you're seventeen and you're going to work. Well, yeah,

(30:08):
I was supposed to be seventeen, but I was really sixty,
and so for me it was work. And then I
went in of all things, I went into this boy
Mike sure I'm telling you about who was paralyzed. We
both decided we wanted to go in the merchant Navy.
We wanted to see a bit of the world, and
our plans were disrupted a little bit by the fact

(30:30):
that we had to go on different boats. So the
first time I ever came to America was as a
emergency seamen. When was that, oh funk that I was?
That was fifty nine, Okay, fifty nine, I was seventeen. Okay,
let's go. How long were you a merchant seamen? I

(30:52):
did one long five and a half months trip, which
took seven months because every time I got somewhere good,
I jumped right and I was what you would call
a distressed British seman. Okay, what did you actually do
on the boat? A mixture of things. I was originally
what you would call a comy waiter, but after that

(31:15):
it wasn't much else. I mean, I was scrubbing stuff. Um,
look picking up ship, you know it was it sounds
like hard work. It was hard work. Okay. So the
first time he came to New York, do you were
just on the border. You got to experience New York. No,
that's what I'm saying to you. I came New York.
You have a few days off. I got to Los
Angeles show days off. The big slap was from Los

(31:40):
Angeles to Tokyo. That was heavy. I remember it was
really heavy. Seas Um. I didn't come back to the
ship in Tokyo. I hooked up with a girl there
in Japan, and I was there for a week or two,
picked up another boat, and that's when I was classed
as a distressed British seman um. So I did that

(32:02):
in a couple of places. So let's go back to
the girl in Tokyo. This is a Japanese woman, of
course it was. You could have bet it, you could
have met it. No, she was Japanese, okay, and she
didn't speak English. I don't think only a little bit.
But I'm telling you, if you get a lot for
an Elvis Presley album in those days, and okay, you

(32:24):
you ever have any contact other than that week no, okay,
So now you ultimately make it back to the UK,
now you are seventeen, then what do you do? Well,
I did's various various work on building, science and ship
you know. And yeah, so then and it wasn't that long.

(32:47):
It was a number of years afterwards that I joined
by Track Records. But I hustled around a bit, had
various jobs. Well did you what were you thinking in
your head? This is going to be my whole life
for I'm gonna do something different. I'm gonna have a
big score. Uh not really because at that age, and

(33:09):
this is how I think about my my kids today.
You know, I didn't really focus too much on the
future and time. I never ever thought, I mean, to me,
people of forty years of age were old of course,
you know. So oh and I went to Jersey in
the Channel Islands. I had a great time there. For
a year. I was working with the divers and they

(33:30):
were widening the dock there. So they used to dive
with explosives because it was a very narrow inlet into
the into the docks in St Helier. So I worked
with them and they were like they used to clear it,
you know, detonate it. Get rid of the rock and
clear it. So I had a great year there with them.

(33:51):
Came back because in those days a lot of young
people used to go. That was the place to go,
the Jersey in the Channel Liners. Lots of fun, lots
of girls, lots of everything, you know. So I went
back for that year, came back for like five or
six months. Then I went back again for another six
months and had some great times, you know. And I

(34:13):
was a ski bum after carcind of thing. You're not
making any money, but you do what you want doing
what you're doing. Yes, So it traveled around a lot
and it was great, okay, and then you come back
and you start working with your buddy. Where is there
something else you want me to tell you? Yeah, when

(34:39):
I was twenty one, I was arrested for a crime, okay,
and it was a crime that I didn't commit. As
I sit here now and everybody knows, it's a bit
of a legend in the East End that I was
charged with an armed robbery along with four the guys

(35:01):
and I wasn't involved in it. Um so anyway they
put me onto it. And this can only happen in
nineteen sixty four. It wouldn't happen today. So they put
me on an identity parade. What do you mean is
that's a line up and if somebody chooses it. So

(35:21):
I'm in a lineup and I'm picked out by a policeman.
And this policeman said he was riding along on his
bicycle and he saw these guys Robin an armored vain
and the guy that he saw running away was five
ft eight with frizzy, bushy hair. The judge is a

(35:44):
wonderful man. I hope he's still fucking dying from cancer.
He said, Well, members of the jury, you might think
that curbishly. If he was running and stooped over, he
would look five for eight and with the wind rushing
in through his hair, it would look frizzy. That's ridiculous. Indeed,

(36:05):
So there was that, And there was one other woman
who said she saw somebody jumped from this land rather
and she said, when she saw me in the lineup,
she said maybe, But on eight previous identity parades she
picked out somebody definitely, and they were all innocent people.

(36:29):
And that's the evidence. That is the total evidence, right,
So other than the fact that two of the other
guys who were charged with the robbery. They were friends
of mine and known to be friends of mine, and
they did commit their they were part of him. Some
sentenced to fifteen years. You're a sentence. Well, let's go

(36:51):
a little bit slower. You don't have any money. What
do you do for a lawyer? You get what's called
legal aids. Okay, you get public defender here, but use
your public defender. Here's a million cases. And you don't
get such a good defense. You don't get such a
good defense. But the QC I had was really quite good. Okay,
just one more time. So they arrested you. Why because

(37:14):
they had already arrested four other guys, and two of
them were friends of mine, and I was a known
associate with them, so they thought, why not him. I
have to ask before this, this particular arm robbery, were
you involved in any illicit activities with those other two? No? No,
but I was a known friend, and that I'm just

(37:35):
trying to say the way you said non friend, Medis
had a sinister elevance, know, and we went we went
to drinking clubs and things like that, you know. So
so anyway, I was a known associate. Right, So now
you're in court you say you have a good public defender,
and you got fifteen years. So then what happened? I
went to prison and uh so, I mean, you couldn't

(37:57):
write all of this, It's just I went to prison.
So the first prison, I went to. Second prison, I
went to Hope I'm by the way. The other guys
who were convicted all made statements saying that I was innocent,
because they did before we do senses. Yeah, no, no,
they said you were innocent. Yeah, they said I was innocent,

(38:20):
but nobody took much regard of that. So we had
an appeal and obviously died. So did they also get
fifteen years or all of them? So I then went
to um one prison. Then I went to a notorious
prison called Dartmoor, which is in the moors and way
way in the wilderness in England. Whoever designed it must

(38:43):
have been a total mesochist, or say this rather anyway,
um I eventually I tried to escape from there. And
then now from watching the movies, they say, if you escape,
you know you don't get out early. That's right, So
what was going through your head? I just wanted to
get out, you know, I mean, I knew I was innocent.

(39:04):
I just wanted out and I thought, rightly or wrongly,
I thought, if I get out, I can try and
do something about this, prove it, or go missing. I
just to me at twenty one years of age, you know. So, Um,
I tried to escape with another guy and as a

(39:25):
result of that, they sent me to a very very
high security prison. Just so I know, did you actually
get outside the prison wall? No? No, we had keys.
A guy made keys for us, and um, somebody must
have said something because the next thing I knew was
the doors smashed open. I'm taken out at five am

(39:46):
in the morning, and I'm taken from the West Country
all the way up north past Newcastle to a place
called Durham. And in Durham they had a special special wing,
high high security. And when I tell you, I went
in there and there were twenty other prisoners and I
was the shortest sentence of fifteen years, and five of

(40:12):
them were great train robbers. Really, yeah, okay, did you
have was it like isolation or you so you so
you could talk to our these people? Yeah? We we
became great friends. We mixed together and we became great friends.
And I then a couple of years later, and you're

(40:35):
talking about my We were talking about my sister who
lives in New Zealand. She came to visit me because
she was leaving to go to New Zealand, and as
she was leaving, a little incident occurred. And the upshot
of that was the next day I attacked a prison
order as a result of what he said on my

(40:57):
visit and the insults and my sister. So I attacked
the prison mortar order and it was it was a
nice attack, really because it wasn't that physical. I just
put a whole pot of piss all over his head,
so I got them moved. But the key to the

(41:20):
story is that during all this time I had a solicitor,
a young man who was absolutely convinced by innocence, and
he was fighting to try and get me released, and
he came along to see me. As a result of
this thing in Durham with the prison guard, they moved

(41:41):
me to Lincoln in the Midlands, and he came to
see me and he was continuously trying to get something
done about my case. And then one day the governor
came into my cell. I was in isolation and he
came in is the government and the runs of prison. Yeah,

(42:01):
the governor, yeah, the chief warden. And he said, look,
he said, I've just been to London. His name was
Fred Owens. He said, I've just been to London. He said,
I met a couple of friends of yours. I said really,
he said yeah, he said, and they told me all
about what had happened to you. So I said, well, okay,

(42:22):
what are you going to do about it? He said, well,
I can't do anything really, he said, but if you
stay out of trouble for three months, I'll get your
moved to London so you can deal with your case
and your solicitors much more easily being in London. So
I said okay. So I stayed out of trouble, and
true to his word, he got me moved down to London,

(42:45):
and then I had access to my lawyer and other
people helping me on a much more daily basis. And
my lawyer was at that time solicitor, was friends with
a journalist and he was an independent journalist who wrote
for the Times, and so he um did a story

(43:08):
and it was front page on one of the Sunday papers.
This man is innocent. So as a result of that,
I got a re hearing in the in the Courts
of Law with not with a jury, but with three judges,
and they heard all the new evidence and everything, and

(43:31):
they refused it. And I was going back to the
prison and I never forget this. I was going back
to the prison in a vein. It was just before
Christmas and I'm on Tottenham Court Road and I saw
a bus and it was advertising the movie The Graduate,
and I think it was Jeremy or something, and he said,

(43:51):
this is Jeremy and he's worried about his future. And
it was great. Within Over the Christmas there was a
postal strike, so nothing much was getting through. Straight after
the Christmas, I was again, I've chosen at that time
to be a lot on my own, because you go

(44:12):
through cycles where you don't want to really mix too
much with people. You want to chill a bit more
on your own, you know. So I'm in the cell
and the doors opened and the guard said you're wanted
over at the parole at the parole office. I said,
go fuck off. I thought it was friends of mine playing.
I said, I'm not due for parole for another light

(44:32):
four or five years or even longer. He said, I'm
telling you get changed out of your working year. You're
wanted over, I said, I said, fuck off. So they
then sent up the principal officer and I told him
the same. So they dragged me over to the parole
office in the dressed in overalls and everything, and took

(44:55):
me in front of the parole board. So they said,
we've considered your case and we've think you're suitable for parole.
I said, well, how do you work that one out?
I said, I've got another five or six years to
do and I don't think I've been a model prisoner.
How about telling me I'm eligible for parole because I'm innocent.

(45:17):
So the head of the parole board said to me, listen,
I want you to go outside for five minutes and
consider what I'm saying to you. He said, whatever, if
you're out there on a working out scheme, you will
be able to do much more for yourself then you

(45:38):
will in here. He said, go outside and think for
a bit. So I came back in and he said well,
I said, okay. He said, well, we're moving you to
Penterville Prison, which was in North London. He said, and
as of we'll move you there in two weeks time,
and as of that time, you have to find a job,

(46:00):
You go out to work, you come back every night
to the prison, except that you have weekends at home.
So it's kind of like a half way house. Yeah,
that's where it happened. So where did I go to
get my interview? Mike? Sure track records? Okay, so what

(46:21):
year do you get it? Go on parole? Okay? So
you're in jail for how long? Six and a half years? Okay?
You know this is a bad analogy, but they say
in football, if you play one game, you're never the
same same thing like being if you're homeless for two weeks,
you're never the same. You're in jail for six and

(46:43):
a half years. How did that change it as a person?
I think it changed me tremendously. I've got to say
that for many years after that, I was fueled by anger.
We're out any doubts all. I was fueled by anger
when I drink on it, and but then that dissipated

(47:08):
after a while and when I was able to really
really reflect on it all, I think in some strange ways,
Although I wouldn't like to turn the clock back and
do it all again, I think I gained some intangibles,
intangible assets from that time, I mean, how to deal
with people, how to deal with myself and to deal

(47:31):
with people and to deal with their adverse situations. I
think that if you speak to most people that know me,
I'm a very calm person. I don't get dramatic. Nothing
phases me. Really, to be honest and nobody. So I

(47:54):
think I came out of it with a lot of assets.
To you think you're only calm because you went to prison.
I think I learned. Yeah, I think I learned how
to how to meditate on staff, how to how to
deal with it. Um ironically, I mean, as I said,
you couldn't write this script because I made a movie

(48:17):
not long after coming out about the prison I was in,
starring Roger Daltrey, called mc vicar exactly, and that was
the place I was in. So you know, who would
have thought two years, three years later on making this movie.
Of course, as they say, we're getting your story right here.
But you know, in today's prison movies were the reason

(48:38):
I mentioned it is because Roger mentions it in his books.
So I saw the movie when it came out. I
sided westbod Connecticut. He mentions the whole thing about me
being in prison and so on in the book. So
and I'm it's nothing that I'm ashamed of, you know
what I mean? Innocent? Yeah, in fact exactly, And so
as they all knew, and those periods, I've got people

(49:03):
who have been pushing me and pushing me for a
few years to either bank a movie or do do
a TV series around it. Um. I was quite reluctant
to do any of that when my children were younger.
I didn't want to embarrass them. And you know, our
cruel some children can be to others when they were
in store. But now that they're adults, they're pressing me

(49:24):
to do it. So I'm looking at seriously doing it,
you know. Okay, But I have to ask, what was
it like being in prison every day the same as
every other day. Well, they talk about men reaping and gangs,
and that wasn't any of that in those days. You
there was men being raped in those days, but it

(49:47):
was very tough. You didn't have the ship you got today,
you didn't have telephones. You've got one visit a month,
that's what you got. Um, And it wasn't so so orientated.
But also I was quite fortunate because I knew whatever

(50:09):
prison I went into, I knew a few people, now
you know, And as I said, I became very friendly
and Durham with five of the train robbers who remained friends. Um.
So I never had a problem in prison, m h.
And it's a bit different in when you're in what's
called a high category, top security long term prison. It's

(50:35):
a bit different. Okay, So why are you in prison?
Before you get out? You knew? Could you envision getting
out of prison at one time? And what you're gonna do?
When we were in Durham, the then Home Secretary was
the main called Roy Jenkins, and he he put us
under armed guard with machine guns and sam bags because

(50:57):
he said that he had heard from a good authority
that the train robbers were going to blow the wall
down to escape. And I used to walk around that
little yard convincing myself I would have as much good
luck as I as I've had bad luck. And indeed
God has been good. I've had more good luck than

(51:17):
bad luck, and I'm very very grateful. What was your
romeetic situation before, during and after prison? Before I went
into prison, I was with a girl, and when I
went into the prison, I said, you better forget about me.
I'm dead. And I didn't see her or anybody other

(51:41):
than my immediate family for all those years. And when
I was telling you about getting the retrial that was
on a front page news, I went downstairs to the
censor and I said, I don't want any letters coming
through here from crazy people, right because now it's in

(52:02):
the nose. I don't want that ship. I only want
letters from all the correspondents have been corresponding with me
for the last six years. And a postcard came through
from this girl and she had been married during that
period and divorced, and she had two children. So I

(52:24):
had her down to visit me, and then within a
couple of months I was out and we eventually married.
I adopted to two children, one of them lives here,
and we married and then we had She worked with
me all those years with the WHO, and we eventually

(52:47):
divorced after twenty five years, and then sadly she died
last year. Okay, two years ago. Why did you get divorced?
We just grew apart, we really did, you know? We
grew apart as people. Um, But it was good before that.
It was great before that. Yeah. It was good before that,
and we were soul mates and we were, but she

(53:10):
changed and I changed. Okay, so now you're working at
track Records. One of the things I did do just
I'm thirty one year sober, unclean, and that's when I
stopped drinking whatever. And then it changed everything I think.

(53:34):
And then in we divorced, you know, okay, I have
to ask it. Did she still drink? Yeah, but she
wasn't a big drinker. Okay, So when were you always
a big drinker? Oh? Yeah? And anything other than alcohol,
not really. I dabbled with I dabbled with marijuana. Um,

(53:56):
I had a little experiment with cocaine, but it wasn't
my drug. My my drug was alcohol. Okay, So how
did you go? Moivate you to get clean? I stopped,
But what motivated you? I had a young guy who
was an accountant who started with me when I first started,
and he was coming home from a party in the

(54:16):
early hours of the morning and he killed an old
lady on the crossing. And I was such a pig
in those days. Nobody could tell me not to drive
when I was drunk. And I stopped short and I thought,
what are you going to do. If it's someone's son,
someone's daughter, you know, you don't listen to people. And

(54:38):
I thought about it long and hard, and I stopped,
and I started getting fit and training, and I got
through the first Christmas because I didn't say this is forever.
But I stopped, and I got through the first Christmas,
and then before I knew it, I was into a
second Christmas. I had a similar situation. My life was

(55:01):
too crazy. I was arrusted for drunk driving and then
you get summary probation, which means within the two years,
if you get stopped at all with any alcohol, you
lose your license. This is l a. You have to
have a driver's license. And you know, the name of
the game is delay. So in the window for when
I was first arrested the night John Lennon uh was killed,

(55:23):
till going to jail, going to court, like eight months later,
I was stopped again on the freeway and I said,
so then once it was summary, I didn't get They
let me go, but I was stopped again. I said,
this couldn't happen. I said, you know, I'm not gonna
drive within eight hours, have a good drink. And then
I was I mean, I've told this story before I

(55:43):
one on one. I probably go on it fur the lake.
But I started to see this woman in there's the
beginning of sushi, so you would go, this is West Hollywood,
and okay, if I drank saki, I had to stay
at her house, which was a good thing until one
night she bit me. And there's a long story after that.

(56:04):
But uh then she said she would never do it again.
She did again. I said, my life is just too complicated.
I'm gonna stop drinking, you know, I gotta be able
to drive whatever. And I was not tending to quit forever,
just like you. And then all of a sudden, because
you know, the first couple of months is hard. It's
not the miss alcohol. So what you missed the lifestyle.

(56:26):
You know, it's a lifestyle. What's relevant, it's where did
she bite you? She didn't buy me where that's where
we go, and she bought me bit me on the Netflix.
So you understand where I'm coming from that because you know,
lots of other people whose names remained nameless now you

(56:48):
know they're famous answers or whatever, all stopped around that
same time or just after me, you know, and we
frequently see each other and they're clean and dry, and
why they're still alive. They really are well. I mean,
as they say, one thing, I know, you know because
l A you can. This is another thing. I ran
into somebody who wanted to be reasonable with and I

(57:10):
had had a couple of drinks and he didn't he
could tell. They said, whenever I'm in a situation, I
want to have all my marbles with me, and you know,
I don't really have the urge anymore. And sometimes when
you're a restaurant it's midnight and they've had a couple
of bottles that everybody's having a good time. But I
also remember what was wigging up was exactly and I
never I never do because honestly, our older wife, for

(57:35):
my wife and friends, it never occurs to me. It's
a different life. And my two kids. I've got a
daughter of twenty three with this current marriage, and a
boy of twenty one. And they've never seen me drunk,
which is great, right, right right. They've seen me grumpy,
they've seen whatever they've seen me in mood swings, but
never seen me like that, which is very very important

(57:56):
because it's not it's not do what I say is
do what I do you know. Well, that's what the
other thing you mentioned about driving drunk. I went to
college in Mark. This is on the dark era. That's
not ad whatever. That's what we used to do. You
get drunk and we're gonna go out driving. I remember
I lived in Utah sche Bump for a couple years.
I remember, and that's a pretty you know, dangerous road

(58:18):
driving back down to the canyon don the canyon. I
remember one morning I woke up and I had to
go out and look at my car and said, you know,
is my car really here? And intact I literally went
around the whole Guy said, I just can't believe I
lived in Spain. And the honestly, the road around the
mountain to where I lived was one car wide. He's
shaking his hits on the time hour survived. But you know,

(58:43):
there's another side to it all as well. I mean, um,
I know that some of the artists I was with
some but maybe two, I don't know, one of them
sort of resented it or couldn't understand it, or you know,
whether there's an element of I would like to be
like that in it, or little element you know, having
work with I don't know whether it's worse with English people.

(59:06):
But up until first of all, this was before mothers
against drum driving, but up until sometime in the nineties
when it became kind of cool not to drink. Oh
you actually get shipped. You got to a bar, hey
have one, and they exactly, well it's all like bring
them into the into the group, exactly, it makes them
feel better. But coming back to the the reasons as well,

(59:29):
is that this young solicitor I was telling you about
who fought for me and for me, I saw him
when I was released, and I didn't see him for
a while after that, and then lo and behold, it
moved to San Francisco and I saw him in San
Francisco in seventy three. He had two little baby girls, twins,

(59:52):
and he came with me to the count Palace, which
was the infamous night when the fake drummer Keith Moon
falls off the drum right right. And so I never
saw him after that for all those years, and then
I saw him two years ago. He's now a rebi

(01:00:15):
in Israel. That's a crazy story. That is crazy, really crazy, okay,
But he was not the person who killed somebody. That
was somebody else in your office. Oh yeah, that was
an account. Okay, I just want to make sure I
got the story this. This is a solicitor who understand
who who defended me? Right? I understand through. Okay, So

(01:00:35):
a different question. Um, you said it earlier that you
were always a big music fan. Yeah, so what did
that look like? Did your parents play music in the house?
How did you be going? Oh? Yeah, my mom was
a singer. She used to sing in pups. My dad
used to drink and she used to sing, and she
was a good singer, and and her her sister, my aunt.

(01:00:58):
So it was music. Music. And then as a young man, Um,
we were mods. So we would go out what quadraphenia
is all about. Really, we would go out on a
Friday night and we'd come back Monday morning and go
to work. I mean, we were industrious, the MUDs. We
weren't living off Social Security. And I would go out,

(01:01:22):
go to wherever we were going, where the MUDs went,
and then a lot with a couple of pals, we'd
go down to what was then a notorious black area,
Cable Street in Stepane, and they had all these small
sabines and clubs, and that's I don't know what shebine
is a word for a club, and it was all

(01:01:43):
blue beat reggae, and that was it for me, you know.
And it was all about Prince baster King pleasure all
those songs that were coming in and a lot of
that stuff was brought in by American g ias after
the Second World War, you know, and and then brought
crossed through from from the Caribbean, from Jamaica. So music

(01:02:05):
was very much in my blood. And then I gravitated
a bit from that to jazz, became a real real
aviad jazz fan, you know, all the way through. And
so it was in my blood, okay, And I never realized.
Um so when you're saying about what did I gain

(01:02:25):
from that? I found something that hopefully I'm reasonably good at.
And I'm forever grateful for that because I found something
in my life that I think I'm pretty good at.
And the people I work for and I stressed for

(01:02:47):
and with I feel the same. So it worked out
certainly from our viewpoint. Um, you know, we only heard
about it, we ultimly the movie Quadraphenia and Elite seven,
but we read about the Margin rockers what was really
going on there? Well, I'm doing it. I'm working on
a TV series at the moment, just going to explore

(01:03:09):
the whole cultural change. Is going to be three series,
the whole cultural change after the Second World War in England,
and it's quite phenomenal because what happened was I went
to meet some people at a C a m C.
And they said, how would you sum this up? You
mean like AMC movie theater. Okay, So they said, well,

(01:03:32):
how would you sum this up, this thing you're talking about?
I said, Well, when I was a boy, my parents,
if anyone came through the door wearing a suit, it
was yes, sir, yes sir, I said, and everybody followed
their father into whatever profession he was in. I said,
But without generation Second World War, there was a reaction

(01:03:55):
to it and instead of yes sir, we said, funk
you and we wanted something more and that's what happened.
So with the evolution. I remember when I was fifth
in NFT eight, when I was sixteen, when we were
not we were murdered. It was all about the clothes,
you know, being like a peacock wearing those clothes. We

(01:04:17):
worked as hard as we could to make the money
to buy the clothes. But the changes were. It was
a revolution, the changes in advertising, fashion, design, music. You
know what happened. You've got the invasion of English and
that's incredible that you've got an invasion of English music

(01:04:40):
right as a result of the Second World War, not
French or German or Dutch. I mentioned one Dutch being.
But it was all English right coming to America, and
everybody's saying in American right right, that was wed You
noticed that exactly, we didn't see yeah, we didn't sing

(01:05:00):
in English, right right. And so all of that was happening,
and from there came people like Riddy Scott, Alan Parker,
David Partner, movie greet movie directors, movie executive from from
advertising through there. So the TV series that I'm doing
embraces more than just Quadrophenia, because Couadrophenia was three days

(01:05:23):
in the life of a Mud. What we're doing is
it's starts in with the wind wind rush generation coming
in from the Caribbean and from Jamaica into England immigrants,
and it takes us through the sixties and through the seventhies.
So we go through that all those cultural changes, all

(01:05:46):
that color, because after the Second World War everything was gray.
So all that Color, Carnaby, street pop, arts, advertising, fashion.
Then we've got Margaret Thatcher, Industrial Strikes, Punk which came
and went through to the end of it, and it

(01:06:07):
takes us up to the end of the seventies maybe
early eighties. Okay, did you have a scooter? No? Do
you know what we had? We had a funeral hearse.
We had a funeral hearse. We used to go down
to Brighton where the riots were in a funeral hearse,
eight or ten of us and um, oh yeah. And

(01:06:29):
when we first did the movie Quadrophenia, the first scenes
we had to shoot with the riot scenes because it
was very late in the year and we had to
simulate summer and it was like the end of September
and it was freezing down now. And I went to
my youngest brother's school with two buses to big coaches
and got all the kids out of there for extras

(01:06:51):
for the riot scenes. Know, so we never know. We
didn't have scooters. We had Okay, the others? Was the
mart tell me about the Rockers? Were the Rockers again
in the first series. In the movie of Quadraphine, You've

(01:07:11):
got the fantastic scene when Jimmy's in the bath and
he's singing, and someone's singing in the other bath and
it's Kevin, his pal. And when they come out, Ray Winston,
when they come out, he looks at him and he goes,
what the funk you're wearing? Because he's a rock He's
a rocker. So yeah, the rockers they were in weirdly enough,

(01:07:35):
their their music appealed to me as well, you know.
I mean, I can remember the first time I saw
a rock around the clock, the Bill Haley movie, you know,
And um, all of the rock music appealed to me
to a great extent, but the dress didn't so much.
The leather gear and the big bikes and to what

(01:07:56):
degree with their battles between the bids and the rockers
a lot. And I was involved in a lot of that,
going down to Brighton and Margate and getting involved in
in the fights down there. It was it was all
the time, It was there all the time. Um. And
it's I guess everything we can ever talk about is

(01:08:19):
in Shakespeare anyway, So it's all Romeo and Juliet in
the end West Side stories, Romeo and Juliet. The modern
rockers are to a great degree, you know, so um,
but you get those tribes. It's all tribal. We have
tribal in America right now. It is, of course, And
on that subject talking about tribal you know, and and

(01:08:40):
and some of the things that happened. I mean, it
was quite extraordinary for me because I was born in
this working class area and I'm telling you they were
pretty rigid in lots of ways, and there was a
lot of discrimination. But having said that, one of my
best friends was a black boy who lived next door
to me. But more than that, there was this prejudice everywhere.

(01:09:05):
But for me growing up, my role models, my icons
were all the black blues musicians and black athletes, you know,
Joe Louis Sugar, Ray Robinson, Mohammed Ali, Cassis Clay, Mohammed Ali.
So I guess I was strange in a way because
I was devoid of that prejudice, but it was around

(01:09:27):
me all the time. And so when you talk about tribes,
you know, I fully I was bewildered a bit by
America and the prejudice and the fact that someone like
Cassius Clay could come back from the Olympics and not
going into a restaurant of his choice, you know. Um,

(01:09:52):
But thankfully the world has changed. It was changed to
a certain degree. But what do you think of brexit?
Oh for funk saying, how long have you got? Okay,
I haven't got an hour for brexit, but I got
a few minutes from Brexit. Okay. Brexit I think is
essential for one real reason. It started off as a

(01:10:14):
trade in family, just purely for commerce the EU, and
it started off as a trade in family, and it's
been distorted and distorted over the years to the point
where the other twenty seven countries involved have lost their

(01:10:35):
ability to pass their own laws to even increase interests
in the banks. They're governed by Brussels. And I think
it's to me it's doomed. It will not survive in
the Union in my opinion the EU. Is it more
about the currency or more about the laws. Well, firstly,

(01:10:57):
we as England have your own currency. We would ever
have survived the two thousand and eight economic disaster without
having our own currency because we were able to fluctuate
the interest rates and go with with you know, currency
eas in which they in Brussels refused the other countries
to the way. And what they've got now is they've

(01:11:18):
got these dependent countries Portugal, Italy, Spain, you know, Greece, Greece,
and what they did to Greece I think is abominable.
If you read there's a finance minister who was the
finance minister for Greece at the time, and they maligned
him and said he was an idiot. In fact, he's

(01:11:38):
a highly intelligent man, Yannis, and the way he describes
what they did to them is like punitive and repugnant.
So for me, Um, I would like to see us out.
I would like to see us trade in with the
rest of the world and free of those sheckles, because

(01:11:59):
I consider of the EU is corrupt. It really is.
It's a corrupt machine. There's been many books written. One
body X finance minister who's a woman who is um
half argentinean half American and she was a head of
head of funds there and what she So we're better
off out of it, Okay, So what about I mean,

(01:12:21):
I know in our world, I had experience with Richard
Griffith's manager, and I've been with his partner at a
gig and we were getting together the next day and
I emailed hearing I didn't hear back from him. I
texted her email Richard, and he got back to immediately said,
I know, I thought you were in I think he
was an Amsterdam with one d okay whatever. They said, No,

(01:12:44):
we took the private jet home. I'm home already, and
it's like at twelve o'clock at night. Because of all
the relaxation under the EU, they don't have all the
customs and all that other stuff. Now in your world
there's a direct you know, interference customs wise. Yeah, I
guess so, but it will ease. I mean, my daughter
said to me, dead dead when if we leave, will

(01:13:07):
I be able to go clubbing in Germany? I said,
you do you think Canadians and Americans don't go clubbing
in Germany? Do you think they turn them away when
they've got their money in their hand? Come on, So
it's all about money, Bob. Everything that happens in this
world is driven by money. The wars that we look

(01:13:27):
at that so fucking awful. Money. Money. Money. Just to
go one step further, there are a lot of European
companies who have built factories and held up propped up
a lot of low income communities in England, and those
companies will go, won't there? Be fewer jobs. No, not really.

(01:13:48):
I think that's a lot of it is scare mongering.
I think we're going to find markets. I don't. I'm
not saying it won't be tough in the beginning, but
you see, you've got a lot of young people who
don't remember it before that. I can remember what we
were before we joined the EU. Digor never wanted us
there anyway, he said, we're in island, We're not landlocked.

(01:14:11):
We shouldn't be in Europe. Don't start me, under Gaul.
I remember, I mean without America, we wouldn't be a
free nation. Of course, I'm telling you. And I remembered
the Gal and I think it might have been Foster,
that is, who was then the American ambassador, and the

(01:14:32):
Gore said to him, I want every American military personnel
out of France within six months. So he said, does
that include the ones that are buried here? Okay, let's

(01:14:52):
jump back, you nourball, you've got a track records. What's
happening at track Records? When you get there? When I
get there, they, as I said, I was quite naive.
I didn't realize what they were into, et cetera. On
how much the drugs were part of their life. But

(01:15:13):
I started learning incredibly quickly, and it wasn't long before
I was taking the band out on the road. And
then I went to Lambert Stamp with the old contracts
and I said, listen, these don't look great to me.
I think I could do these better. Well, they couldn't

(01:15:34):
be bothered, you know. They said, well, if you think so,
I see what I can. So I took them out
on one tour, and I think I made them in
those days could have easily been five or six hundred
thousand pounds more. So in essence, Lamber and Stamp made

(01:15:54):
a lot more, and I got a little bit of
a bonus, a little bit of a bonus, but I
thought I've proved something here, and and I went forward
on that basis, you know. And then what happened was
the more and more I did with the band, the
more and more I suppose we became family. You know.
It was a bit slower with Pete than Roger. Roger

(01:16:15):
was always my champion, always, especially once I did his
solo album. But Pete is slow to take two people.
But eventually he came round, and now we're really really bonded,
you like let's talk about Pete and Roger. How do
they get along? Well, someone asked me that the other day,

(01:16:37):
and I said, they're a little bit like Richard Burton
and Elizabeth Taylor. I'm not telling you who's Elizabeth. It's
a it's a love hate thing in a sense, I
mean all it is. It's not love hate, that's wrong,
it's love irritability. They were just like having a brother

(01:16:57):
and since, yeah, they irritate each other. Okay, Now, whatever
happened with Speedy Keeen Thunderclap Newman. I was a huge
fan of that initial album, Hollywood Dream Speedy. I gave
him the title ironically because I got it now because
I just come home Previous Convictions that was his album,

(01:17:20):
and boted I got it. And we were great friends
and I spent time with them, and Speedy was a good,
great friend. And Speedy was with a girl, Janet, who
used to work with us in track records. She eventually
married Asthlete Right Janet Astley Right, don't no. Lesley was

(01:17:42):
one of the She was one of the family that
Pete married into. Her name was Jen Jen. It'll come
to me in a minute, but anyway, she ended up
marrying Phil Daniels from the movie. Okay, now, um, how

(01:18:03):
about Jimmy McCullough, who ultimately went to play with Wings.
He went to Wings, Jimmy and his brother they were
on track. I got on great with them. You know,
he was phenomenal, little Jimmy. They were they were great guitarist.
So we had so much great talent coming through our hands.
You know, it was phenomenal. Really in those days it

(01:18:26):
was so vibrant. Who owns all those masters? Now, because
of the debts and the money that was missing, we
sold all the masters to PolyGram in order to pay
the artists there ortists. Okay, Now, also in seventy two,
I think at the end of seventy two, and you know,
Pete produced something in the course, I know that. And

(01:18:48):
then but he put out a solo album who came first?
Now that wasn't available on CD until right go sometimes
like now that wasn't that on track records? Though? That
was on track records absolutely, So how did that get
excluded from the deal with Poley Graham? It was When
you say excluded in what way? It was? Wounds it

(01:19:11):
today they do, Oh yeah, just like when I took
an album much much later that Pete did called Empty Glass,
and I did a deal with Doug Morris Echo, much
to the chagrin and Mo Austin and and Jerry Mars
soon chasing me. Um. There's a little story involved there

(01:19:31):
where I really felt that Doug Morris was so hungry
for it. He just started at CO and I thought,
this is a guy who's going to die for this album,
which he did, and he's He often says the two
albums that set him on his career were Pete towns
As Empty Glass and Stevie Nick Solo. Listen I Empty Glass.

(01:19:52):
I just put it the other day. You know, a
little is enough in the title track, unbelievable, especially Empty
Glass when I used to drink. He likes a mess.
You know, I hold an empty glass. Okay, but let's
go back. You're still with m C. A quadrophenia comes
out with m C and m C A. This is
a question you may may not be able to answer.

(01:20:13):
Roger and Pete. What do they prefer a quadrophenia or Tommy.
That's very difficult for me to answer for them. But
because there obviously for Peter as a writer, they relate
to two different periods of his thinking. And I often

(01:20:34):
say that Tommy is the hippie opera and Quadrophenia is
the industrial opera. UM. In their own ways, they've had
several incarnations, you know. UM Tommy was was the stage
production and the movie. Ironically, the movie came first UM

(01:21:00):
and Quadrophenia. Incredibly, I still can't believe it, but we
celebrated the fourties anniversary of the movie Quadrophenia earlier this year.
All of the cast turned up Sting Ray Winston, all
of them. We had a great night, raised money for charity,
and it's still being shown on TV. HOWU. It's just insane. Now,
that's a movie that you know, it's not deated whatsoever.

(01:21:23):
Certainly it's a period movie to begin with. But yeah,
but the only thing that stated, Bob are the uniforms,
the dilemma, the problems, the whole core of the film
are the same your kids, My kids. They get to
their teenage years and they're faced with a minefield and
they've got to walk across that minefield and it's full

(01:21:45):
of ship. You know, it's full of all kinds of
real big problems, whether it be what we deal with
with teenagers with cancer, is they come through their teenage
years and don't get anything like that. You praise God.
There's other stuff out there on the streets, the drugs
and everything. So the teenage years are a minefield, and
every teenager thinks his problems are unique. He won't go

(01:22:09):
to Dead Willie because dad says, I know all about that.
I went through that you couldn't have done. They go
to their peer group to look for answers, and the
answers I'm afraid and not with the peer group. So
so um yeah, I think that in Tommy is a

(01:22:29):
metaphor deft, dumb and blind. It's a metaphor of uh,
you're you know, being not having your senses. They're are reawakening, etcetera, etcetera.
Quadrophenia is totally different. Quadrophenias are coming in of Age
movie A Journey, And so for me, if I had

(01:22:51):
to have a choice, my choice it's quadrophenia. I can't
say about Pete and Roger. I mean, you've got great
songs in Birth. Well, the only thing is switching give
us a little bit. When I was in college, we
used to have a thing name a better album than
Who's Next from beginning to end and all that stuff
is held up. But how did you end up switching

(01:23:11):
from mc A to Warner Brothers with who? Um? I
think that was the advent of it, that we didn't
switch really until I did the Townsend deal with Glass
And on that subject you're talking about when you were
at college. I made a movie two years ago called

(01:23:33):
The Railway Man, and it's a true story about a
guy who was a Japanese prisoner of war. And it's
basically a movie about forgiveness. It's a true story and
he's tortured terribly by the Japanese and he was on
the Death Railroad railroad, you know, the Burma Railroad. So

(01:23:56):
it starts Colin Firth and Nicole Kimmon. You should go see.
It's a good movie. I'm very proud of it. Anyway,
during location, Colin Firth said to me, listen. He said
a lot of these musicians, he said, they collect things,
don't They said, there's this guy who collects ferraris. I said, no,
that's Nick Mason pink Floyd. So I said, um, I said,

(01:24:24):
you know a lot of them clicked things. I said,
you collect anything, which I knew he did, he said,
because my partner told me. He said, well, I suppose
you could say. He said, I'd collect guitars. I said,
can you play them? He said, well yeah. After a fashion,
he said all right, he said cards on the table.
He said, my favorite album of all time is Quadrophenia.

(01:24:47):
I said, Colin, don't give me that ship. Tell me
a song from it. He told me every song on Quadrophenia.
So I said, well, where did you get into that?
He said when I was at university. I said, okay.
So I went home the next day, so I phone Pete.
I said, Pete, you don't have a guitar, do you
that I could give Colin Firth. You know I'm making

(01:25:08):
this movie with him. He said yeah, he said I do. Actually,
he said, I've got the guitar that I wrote Quadrophenia on.
I said what, he said, I've got the said you're
not going to give that. You won't give that way?
He said, yeah, yeah, I will for it for you
for him, So he signs it. I'll go back on location.
I said to him, Colin, we need to see you tonight.

(01:25:29):
Andy and I over at the hotel. Got to have
a talk with you. He said, it's not about this mustache.
Is it you had a mustache in the movie. So
I said no, but come over the hotel. So he
came over the hotel. So I gave him the guitar.
He said, what's that? I said, open it? He said
ship He said for Gibson. I said, it's more than that.

(01:25:50):
I said, it's it's the guitar. The townsend wrote Quadrophenia
on he went. He said that means more to me
than you, Oscar I got for the King's speech. You know,
music sitting in the Sheridan Gibson okay, So how do
you are? How does the band okay moon dies? Did

(01:26:15):
you see that coming? Well, we always saw it coming,
but even so when it happens, it's a shock. And
the day that it happened is quite peculiar in a way,
because I went to PolyGram and the guy who was
the MP deer PolyGram at that time in England was
a man called Fred high On. He was from Holland

(01:26:36):
and he was the original manager of Golden ear Ring
and let's how I got the Golden ear Ring thing.
And he was always a raven her fan. And I
went to PolyGram and they agreed to give me the
money to produce the movie Quadrophenia. M mcvickor and I
did them that year, back to back, and I came

(01:26:57):
back to the office. I got there and my x
or I said to me, sit down. She said Moon's dead.
I said, what she said, Moon's dead? Fuck? You know.
And it was so hard to assimilate and to take
in because I was told by that doctor who gave

(01:27:19):
him those pills him and never in pills. They were
pills to combat shakes and detis and epilepsy if you're
because he was trying to come off the brose. And
I was told there were no side effects. But I
suppose if you take twenty three of anything, that's going
to be side effects. Um. So I've often said, you
know that if if Moon Moon's death was inevitable, then

(01:27:49):
John it was Yours was unnecessary. Okay, a little deeper,
you know, it was unnecessary because with John we all
knew he had a little bit of a hard thing,
but it was always played down. He was very flippant
about it. Nobody ever thought it was anything more than

(01:28:11):
something you just took a pillful, you know. So yeah,
but but coming back to Moon, Um, even though you
expect these things, and I don't know if Moon would
have would have if he would ever have made old bones.
He just wasn't that type of character to make old bones.

(01:28:31):
You know, how can you envisage an old Keith Moon?
I don't know. What I do know is if Moon
has had any discipline whatsoever, he could have been one
of our greatest character actors because he could sit with
you well, but he could sit with you and within
ten minutes he would have of all your idiosyncrasies, all

(01:28:52):
your body language. He was a great mimic, fantastic, but
no discipline. Well, one other thing, you know, remember I
saw the band performed Tommy at Fillmore East. This is
six and I've never seen a drummer like Moon. You know,
he almost it would take two people to replicate him.
It was just unbelievable the way his arms moved. Well,

(01:29:13):
he's dynamic and he's so unorthodox, you know. And my
tour manager, Rex King, he came to see us play
at the Hammersmith Odeon with John Bonham and as they
came out, Bonham said to him, We've just seen the
best band on the planet, the best band on the planet,

(01:29:34):
and I've had artists through my career. You know. I
was twenty six years with Robert Plant and fourteen of
those years Jimmy Page was with us and superlative musicians. Yes,
but when the Who are on, the Who are on.
I remember a headline we had we had from one

(01:29:54):
concert and it said, yes, Zeppelin, Zeppelin and the rest
of the good, but they can't kiss you good night
like the Who. Well, I just remember when they had
the Madison Square Garden concert after nine eleven and the
Who just blew everybody else off the stage. Were that
nine eleven? Things quite interesting because funnily enough they were

(01:30:16):
Pete and Roger were in my office. So I got
a phone call from Weinstein. So he said, what the
Who did the nine eleven thing? I said, Harvey, we're
not a cabaret action. I said, if we come and
do that, I want forty five minutes. He said, at least,
he said, you've got it. You got it, He said,
no problem. He said, but if the Who come on,

(01:30:38):
all the other artists will come on. So I said,
he said, where do you want to play on the bill?
I said anywhere. I just want that fifty minutes back anywhere.
And that day was fucking magic and I'll never forget
Elton John Old Power, but he came into that dressing
room to the boys and he were I've never seen

(01:31:01):
anything like it. And for me, I've been with them
forty nine years. The most moving experience I've had was
that we did nine eleven. And we've had some amazing stuff,
but we did nine eleven. And then some time after that,
we went to Washington for the Kennedy Awards, and Dave

(01:31:25):
Grohl spoke about how they were responsible for him being
in the music business, and we had all the other
artists up there would do songs, you know whatever, and
then right at the last song, I could hear require
on that last song, and the curtain opened and it
was all the police and firemen from New York. Fuck

(01:31:49):
the feeling. I can't describe to you what I felt like,
because to return that and to say there, thank you
was something else. You know. It was just such a
moving experience. And I'm not given to goose bumps or stuff,
but I'm telling you that was a moment. I you know,

(01:32:09):
I can feel it over here and I can't add
anything to that. So I'll go to a more minor point.
Why did it end with you? And plant? I was
with him twenty six years. We encouraged him to come
down to London and to get out from the Midlands

(01:32:32):
with all the old cronies. I think during that period
he was with me, we made some great albums Palms,
that album, Feed the Nations best solo album, incredible record,
Fate of Nations twenty nine, Palms, the two other albums
I gave him the title for Now and Zen and

(01:32:55):
No One. Zen was huge, and then he did the
album with Addison Krause, right, that was still when he
was you were managing him, yeah, oh yeah. So then
what happened. It came down in a way to a point,
a principle on my part, and the only way I

(01:33:15):
can really really explaining it to you is that we're
deal in different currencies. And my currency is that I
believe that the real wealth in life is what you've got,
is what you've got after they take away the money,

(01:33:38):
what you've got left, and that's family, friends and principles.
And I've always lived that way. And he deals in
a different currency. And if he's got any regrets now,
then he has to be honest with himself. But for

(01:33:58):
both those guys, I would like to think that I
did a really good job. And Jimmy bumped into a
friend of mine, an agent, a few months ago, and
he said, has Bill so Rod said, oh, he's great,
he said, send him my love. He said, tell him.

(01:34:19):
I've only just started realizing how much he really did
for us. But it's okay. But with Robert, I said
to him, it's going to come a time. And I
don't want to sound him modest here, but yet there's
going to come a time when you're going to realize
you've lost your best friend. I said, because I would

(01:34:41):
have stood in front of a train for you, but
not anymore. And it was about a point of principle.
And I don't wish him any ill. I wish him
every success. But there's a thing about artists, Bob, not
all of them, but the majority percent of them. They

(01:35:02):
don't have any friends from the past, very few of them.
What happens is they choose a career that takes them
away from their childhood and teenage friends, and so they
go on a different journey. And while they're on that journey,
they lose a sense of loyalty. And what takes over

(01:35:27):
and becomes more important to them is where's my album
in the chance this week, etcetera, etcetera, and they lose
their real sense of friendship and loyalty. And I'm big
on that. I'm sorry, I'm just really big on it.

(01:35:47):
And so that's what you find with lots of artists,
and we a lot most of us run away with
the idea of thinking that arts because they're artists, they're
nice and good people. They're not. They're not. Listen. I've
met some of the greatest artists in the world. I
want to mention them, and they're just unbelievably narcissistic means

(01:36:09):
of them. And it's like, you know, they're exceptions who
you know live up to them. But no, the other
thing about an artist, they'll funk over anybody for themselves exactly.
There are number one. So when you take out on board,
and I'm a personal manager and I give a bit
more than some other managers, they may get a contract

(01:36:31):
and they put it in their desk and that's it.
I don't live like that. I don't have a contract
with the who I haven't had one for forty nine years.
If they want to leave me tomorrow they're dissatisfied, they
can go. I don't want to go through any litigation.
I just want to be paid for what I've done.
But it becomes a friendship. Judas Priest have been with

(01:36:51):
me thirty seven years. Again, it's a friendship. You give,
you become friends. You give the it and I give
to them a promise. That's what I do. So and
I've got friends right back to my school days. I
still go see them in the East End. We're mates.

(01:37:12):
Sadly every year ago there's one less. But you know,
how about all these old people. I mean, obviously you're
very successful financially. Do these people your family members ever
come to you for money? Well? My other what my brothers,
sisters and people we're brothers and sisters are friends both. Yeah,
and how do you feel about that? I'm okay, okay,

(01:37:33):
you know what money is. Tell me, money is a
means to end. Money is a means for you to
help the people you love enjoy their life. And if
you can do that, that's all it is. It's a commodity.
That's funny because Cliff Bernstein said something very similar to me, like,

(01:37:54):
you know, be able to help people's lives, you know,
at the same time, So okay, yea, So Pete says
he can't play live anymore. Well, before that, who say
we're retiring? I remember making it too, Yeah, I remember
making said of my Nakamiti tape deck, you know, and
then they keep coming back. What's up with that? Well

(01:38:16):
in two that's when he said, he said, I want
to be with my kids. I don't want tour in him.
A couple of years ago we played Hyde Park and
Tom mzer Ardino, he was the promoter of the Cotton Bowl.
On that last tour, he said, I've got a T
shirt for you. He gave me. It was the Who's Fair.
But so Pete didn't want to do it. So from
A two two I think it was a tight. We

(01:38:40):
didn't do that interestingly enough. And that's when I picked up.
Someone said to me, you're interested in Judas Priest. I said, yeah,
they're good, Lfe Ben. Where are they down in Texas?
They want to see you? So I went down there.
And so you know, we had all those years where
they didn't her, which as have said loss in a way,

(01:39:01):
but um, and now it's turned full circle and Pezz
the one who wants to tour. He's really enjoying it
and he wants to tour. And I guess it's in
all of our minds that, you know, if life's a
three week holiday, we're on the third week and this Wednesday.

(01:39:22):
But what about his hearing issue? About what? I don't
know if you're saying that as a joke, but Pete
farm famously said he had tonight is and he couldn't play, etcetera.
And then he played acoustic guitar behind plastic you know,
whatever he did, he had the tonitus and he was
getting a lot of pain from it. But there are

(01:39:42):
lots of meds now today that can lessen that, you know,
and he's finding that. Okay, Pete. One of the problems
we've got is Roger uses ear monitors and Pete uses
stage monitors, you know. And I, I mean, I listened
to this ship and I think, am I really live
in here in the real world? Or is this the afterworld?

(01:40:03):
Because sometimes they'll come off stage and Roger was saying,
funking on the stage, I can't fucking hear anything, And
I said, you told me that have the fucking silver
dome in right right right, you know. So they're all
getting different sales up there on stage. Um, And I
can't do anything about that. I said to them, Look,

(01:40:24):
I can do everything for you to help you with
what happens off the stage. I cannot do anything about
what's on that stage. I can't be where Pete is
when you're playing a song or where you are get
your ship together. You know you should be able to
do it. Okay, So moon dies, they play with different drummers,

(01:40:47):
then Entwhistle dies just before the tour, they continued to work.
Is the motivation? What is the motivation for them? If
it's in your blood, it's in your blood. I don't
know that you're going to go and do anything else.
Pete's got lots of sides to him. He's just finished
the book Age of Anxiety. He's a constant worker. But

(01:41:12):
what else are you going to do? You know, if
you're given that gift, and it is a gift, what
else are you going to do? So you do carry on.
It's got to be the same with Jagger and Richards.
They they don't need the money. But I've often believed
that God works in mysterious ways, and in a lot

(01:41:34):
of ways he's fair. So what he does is he
takes someone like these artists and he gives them a
special gift. He gives them a little bit extra more
than you, all right, But at the other end he
leaves something off unless where we fit in. Okay, how

(01:41:54):
did the deal with c S I come together? Oh?
That was I forget who who actually rang me in
the first place? It was Jack what's his name, Jack Rossman?
Jack slipped my mind at the moment, but it was.
It was either Brookheim or somebody who was who was
a raven Houfen and they were looking for somebody. But somebody,

(01:42:18):
as is usual, somebody who's an underling who never ever
probably got credit for it, said hey, listen to this stuff,
you know. And it was the synthesizer songs. And it
was amazing, wasn't it. Because so many people started coming
to concerts and saying, oh, at least the people who
do see it, you know. So that's how it came about. Okay,

(01:42:43):
but you know, they get the guy's name now. But
he was from CBS. Okay, But that was he. He
was one of the first artists of his era, Jack Sussman.
He was one of the first from his era to
license these songs. So was he reluctant for a credibility
did he say, hey, you know, if you're Peter three,
I'll make the deal. No, he came round to it.

(01:43:04):
I remember years ago. I went back and I said him, Pete.
It was with the advent of mobile phones, you know.
I said, Pete, I've got a fantastic deal for you
with a T and T for going mobile, the song
co Mobile. I said, I've got a great deal for you.
He said, Now, I'm not selling songs to that. I'm
not doing any of that. No, no, no. And then

(01:43:26):
a couple of years later he did a complete turn
around and they were picking up whose songs for all
kinds of I did a deal as well. I mean,
she worked these artists out. Bob. I did a deal
with GM Motors for rock and roll, right for led
Zepplin right. So, and it was a huge, huge amount

(01:43:49):
of money, I'm telling you so. Um. First thing, first
it was ken million, wasn't it more than that? Okay,
more than that. So I'm on the road with Robert
Plant and we're going to go to the jail. And
by the way, as part of the deal, I said
to them, can you give Robert Plant an escalade in

(01:44:12):
every city? So he picks up an escalade. When he
after he's done it, he drops it back at the airport.
We're going to get to Detroit. So I said to him,
when you get to Detroit, you've got to come to
the factory and sign people's albums, you know, I said,
the workers. He said, yeah, yeah, okay. So we go
to the factory and he's great. He's signing all their albums.

(01:44:33):
And then the CEO came down, who was a little
bit to me. The typical American maverick flies his own plane,
you know whatever, right, you know, So he says, Mr Plant,
He said, how are you enjoying the escalade? So Plant,
he looked at him and he went, I like the

(01:44:54):
fall better. I went, what he said? He's so the
guy looked at him. He couldn't believe it. So when
we get outside, I said, are you for fucking real?
I said, you've had all that money, You've got this.
He said yeah, he said, but you know, he said,
that commercial for the escalator it's on TV too much.

(01:45:17):
I said, what do you mean it's on TV too much?
That's what they paid for and that's why your kettital
has gone through the roof. So we get home, he
phoned me A few weeks afterwards, he said, Bill, he
said that guy GM. I said, yeah. He said, do
you think you can phone him up and see if
you can get us to escaladors one for me and

(01:45:38):
one for my son. I said, no, I fucking can't
tell me to go to forward exactly exactly. Work it out, Okay,
So that the actus ever get jealous of one another,
they don't have your time? Yeah, how do you manage that?
I think that it's difficult. I think that that was
one of the problems with Robert plant Um. I think

(01:46:02):
that he resented any time I spent with the who.
I tried to juggle it as best as possible, but
I think he resented that a bit. But I was
forever jumping off one to the other. Um and I'll
go there. Pete Townsend is the complete complete artist. He

(01:46:27):
writes everything, he sings it, he gives you a demo.
It's phenomenal. The Scoop albums. Yeah, he's the real deal.
A lot of the others need to partner with someone,
and I'm not potting them down. They're great artists. But
you know, for me, Elton John, I love him. We're friends.

(01:46:54):
The songs he wrote with Bernie Special songs, Jagger Knees,
Richards plant needed page. That's all I can say. So
there is a little bit jellously because Townsend is the
complete deal. He writes it all complete musician. Okay, So

(01:47:14):
what is it you do as a manager that makes
you so great? But it must be something because you're
you're actually talking about There are some managers were traffic cups.
They deal with the incoming. Then there's some managers were visionaries,
and you've put out some visionary thing. So are you
the type of guy who says, listen, I have a plan,
we're going to do this or that, or you're fielding

(01:47:35):
calls or what is it doing? I do a lot
of that stuff, but I often joke and say what
I do really really well is I do the unnecessary
for the ungrateful. But but yeah, I do I plan
with them. Um. But if I had to say to someone, now,

(01:47:58):
what are the essentials for management, I'd say, never be
afraid to say no, never be afraid to make a mistake,
Try as hard as you can to make more successful
moves than unsuccessful. So at least it's like, well how

(01:48:18):
many goals did they score? You know? So that your
your average, because everybody makes mistakes, everybody, and so you
have to sit between it. And if you've got four artists,
it's much easier. Well maybe it's not asked John Reid
and people like that who have had solo artists, but
it's usually a lot easier with a solo artist because

(01:48:42):
you're answering one person with one set of problems than
it is with three or four. And if those three
or four of really forceful characters like Daughtry Towns in
the Moon were and then and Whistle was in his
own right he could be quite forceful, then you're juggle in.
It's difficult. So I don't know really how I've totally

(01:49:05):
managed it. It's um okay, Well that's managing the people.
How many of the ideas will you say, oh, let's
play within an orchestra, or oh let's do an album,
or this is the way the yard should be. A
contribute quite a bit to that, but I mean it's
to give Rogery's dew. It was his idea to come
with the orchestra because it used the orchestra only solo

(01:49:29):
stuff and it sounded so great. I mean he recorded
this the concert from Bethel and it was great, and
when he put it to Pete, Pete was quite skeptical.
Now Pete sort of loves it. Not only is it
great and sounds great, but it's easy for him. He's
finding it easy up there, you know. So And and

(01:49:49):
for me it was a good move on Roger's part
because he he gave it another dimension, the who music.
Um what I think that if I've got a forte,
I think it's in projects, in coming up with projects,
you know. Um, like with the Quadrophenia movie, going back

(01:50:10):
all the way back again. There that guy Frank Roddon.
He never made a movie. He had made a couple
of TV movies and one of them was great. It
was this true story about a deaf and dumb girl
who was raped. She she kills the killer, and we
gave him I was so impressed with him. We gave
him the Quadrophenia film to do. I think he made

(01:50:33):
a masterpiece. He came over here and he made a
movie for Fox called The Lords of Discipline, great book.
They ripped the fucking film to pieces. He came back
so disillusion he said, I'm never making another film. And
he did a TV series which was huge in England
called r V the same pet didn't mean much in

(01:50:55):
the rest of the world, and then he did Master Chef,
So we don't need a benefit for Frank, right. So
what are you most proud of in your career? I
guess I can't really pick out a concert because there's

(01:51:16):
been so many superb and superlative concerts. But if I
had to pick out a concert, I'd have to fall
on the side of that of nine eleven for the emotion,
just a sheer emotion of it, although we've had such

(01:51:36):
wonderful concerts. But proud, Yeah, the Kennedy Award. But I'm
proud that I've got two people who trusted me with
their lives, because that's how I look at it. When
an artist comes to me, they're putting a life in

(01:51:57):
my hands because there are artistic endeavors and their dreams
are their life. And that's what I'm proud of that
I've managed to manage. I hope I managed to do
a good job for them. And you're gonna do it
till you drop. Yeah, because I wouldn't say I want

(01:52:21):
to do it at the same rate and pace. Because
I enjoyed doing projects as opposed to the band thing now.
Pete laughed the other day because I said to him, well,
I don't fancy going down to the pig and whistle
and listen to another young band's problems. I want to
do projects. I want to do films. I want to
do this. I want to do it. But it will
always be music. Um so yeah, I mean. And it's

(01:52:47):
about realizing dreams, isn't it. My two My two kids.
My daughter she's just come out from university. She got
a great degree in English lit and creative writing. She
wants to go into publishing novels. My boys termed professional
as a golfer. Um, it's allowing being able to help

(01:53:09):
people hopefully realize their dreams. And if the who had
dreams when I first met them, and I know they did,
then I think I've helped them get there and realize
a lot of them. Well, Bill, this has been fantastic.
We could go out for like five hours. We've really

(01:53:29):
got the essence of who you are. Thanks so much
for doing this, and well, it's been a pleasure to
be here. And what we've managed to do this afternoon
is to turn crumpy old Bob into nice Bob. Hey, listen,
I our side away personality til next time. If Bob
Wes

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Bob Lefsetz

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