Ed Bicknell

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to a live edition of the Bible
Left Nest Podcast. If I know him, my guest today
has done it all. He's been a promoter, he's been
an agent, a legendary manager. Please welcome Ed Bignell. Ed Hi,
thank you, thanks for having me. Okay, just a couple
of days ago, Michael Godynsky pass. What can you tell

(00:29):
us about Godynsky in Australia. He was like a lot
of people have said he was a one off. I
mean he actually kind of. He really changed the Australian
music scene almost singlehandedly, and he was a great character.
It was a really really funny guy. I made to
spend time with him was great. He was just just hilarious.

(00:50):
He was a complete music enthusiast, which can't be said
of some promoters these days. And he got to live straight.
And condolences to his family, to his to say, his wife,
and to everybody else in the Australian music business because
he uh, he was definitely a one off, but the

(01:13):
sadly beast for those who did meet him, he was
really definitely a unique They broke the mold after that,
and he always said, I said, what about spreading throughout
the world. He said, no, I like being the King
of Australia. I like being a big fish and a
small And for those who didn't know, he literally did
it all. You know he had not only started. You
started with a record company, Mushroom Records, at the age

(01:35):
of twenty and ultimately became frontier touring and so much more.
But ed, you've done so much yourself. But let's look
at the landscape today. What is the few were an
agent and you're involved in uh growing w M. Endeavor
in the UK. What is the future of the agency
business in a marketplace where there's such consolidation amongst promoters.

(02:01):
That's a tough one, Thanks very much, Bob. I think
the big agencies, and I'm thinking particularly of William Morrison.
Oh sorry, Endeavor. Let me curate myself and see a A.
They're kind of too big to fail. They're the sort
of they're the big banks at the time of the crash,

(02:23):
and I think that they will keep going, but they
will probably strip some of their activities. Back when I
was at William Morris, which was William Morris. Back then
they had all these divisions corporate consulting as one I
remember and video games and all these kind of things,

(02:44):
and nobody seemed to know what they did, and if
you if you ask the question, nobody could tell you.
And there's this, there's been this voracious appetite for gobbling
up everything. That's a bit like Live Nation actually as well.
They have this, these tentacles. I always compare them to

(03:06):
that old Steve McQueen film The Blob, and the Blob
basically gobbled up everything in its path, and these agencies
are a bit like that. But at the same time,
this pandemic has caused people to split off. There was
a panel earlier today of the new agents and there

(03:27):
were four people on it who have basically left where
they were, including one gentlemen from CIA started their own businesses,
and that's inevitable, that's always happened, I think. But the
the corporate agency, to me, it didn't work for me
personally because I found, I suppose, in simple terms, I

(03:50):
found being an employee after being an employer for thirty
years very difficult. I couldn't adapt to the corporate culture
as it was then, and I couldn't adapt to the
they I'm going to say this from the perspective of
somebody here in London. They could not leave it alone.

(04:11):
They were constantly micromanaging me in order to get to
wherever they thought they wanted to get. Um. That's not
a criticism of anybody, particularly although the management at the
time nearly all of whom left very quickly after Arian
Patrick came in. They were not I didn't think they

(04:35):
were particularly competent. Okay, let's be very specific. You mentioned
the consolidation of companies. Used to be the ten per centers,
the movie agents and the live appearance agents. They were
the driving force of revenue for these agencies. Now it's sports.
They're involved with these giant funds. One would think as

(04:58):
a music agent you feel like a zip on the
end of the rear end of the whole enterprise. Yeah,
well you do. And that was one of the problems.
And I think that if you if you come from
the generation I come from, and I think you come from,
and I'm not saying it doesn't happen with younger people
coming into the game. Now, what inspired me was music.

(05:19):
That was it. It was just there was nothing more
than that. I was just completely and totally entranced by music,
and music have pretty much every genre it's it's that's
something that you don't here played in an agency offices,
you don't talk about Um. That's not saying that agents

(05:39):
don't go out and see bands, you know, five five,
six nights a week, probably four or five different venues
a night. But but you're you're right. Certainly, when you're
in the in a management position in a company like that,
you're you're talking about the elements that you're talking about,
and what you're doing basically is clambering up through layer
after later until you get to the person who signs

(06:02):
the check. And under the William Morris management I worked with,
the vain head of finance explained to me one day
that his soul, he considered his sole job, was to
stop Jim and Dave's mad schemes. This was Jim Wyatt
and Dave Workesch after so, which was very encouraging to

(06:23):
me because we were I had a great team here.
We managed to break even in the first year. They
budgeted to lose money for seven years and it was
impossible to get anything done. The reaction time was ridiculously long.
We missed out on getting extra office space for that reason.

(06:45):
They just didn't act quickly. Enough, and after about two
and a half years there was a particular incident. I
was asked to sign a chit which gave us the
right to have semi skim milk as well as full
cram milk. This landed on my desk, and that happened
to be the catalyst, and I just thought, you know,

(07:09):
I didn't sign up for this, and and I left.
And it was very shortly after that Endeavor merged with them,
and then within about a week took them over. And okay,
now you come from the era when the whole business
was built. This is one of the things that bothers me.
They say, oh, music is the same as it ever was.

(07:31):
It certainly is not now. I always analogize it to
the internet. There was all this excitement starting in the
mid nineties, certainly to about uh in the sixties we
were developing the business. If you take about Peter Graham,
Peter Graham flipped the touring business, said hey, the gig
is going to sell out anyway, I might as well
take the lion. Sure of the money. The question becomes

(07:54):
I always say, a great musician not only is a
bad business person, but they couldn't even at the seven
eleven because they couldn't show up on time. I say
the great same thing about the Titans and the history
of the music business. They literally couldn't work anywhere else.
They could only work for themselves. Do you believe A
this is still true? And be what can you tell

(08:17):
us about the kind of personality that created and drove
this business? I'll take the second part of that first. Um.
Of course my experiences UK and we were always following America,
So the first thing really that happened here of any

(08:38):
significance would have been a N seven when UM a
little story for you, E M. I. Back in those
days they had four A and R guys who sat
on a committee, and back in those days, most of
the UK labels just had kind of one off deals
with American labels, so they had first refusal for an

(09:00):
instance on the records coming out of our C A
and I. In later the years of his life, I
became very very close friends with Sir George Martin, who
was a great He became almost like a second dad
to me. And he was on this committee with three
other A and OUR men, and a record arrived one
day and they played it and they thought there was

(09:22):
something wrong with it. They thought that the tape or
something had stretched. So they call up the American company
and said this record you've sent us, it's it's it
doesn't sound right. And the American then said, no, no,
that's the record. It's turning into a huge hit here.
You should pick it up. Originally the vote was three

(09:43):
votes against one vote four, which was George. George then
set about, over a period of three or four weeks,
brain busting the other three. Well, he only needed two
more votes. He brain busted, He got two of them
to agree, and they put it and that record was Heartbreak,
Hotel Wow, and it changed everything. So George Martin was

(10:06):
not just the beat was producer. He was also the
person who and that record would have come out anyway obviously,
but we only had the only labels I can remember
back then were Decca, Pie and E M I, and
one of them would have picked it up. And when
I came into the music business, first of all, it
wasn't called the music business. And secondly it wasn't a business.

(10:29):
It was this completely chaotic thing which was full of
some fairly dubious characters who had spotted that there was
cash to be made and I emphasized the word cash
in bags. And this was pre Brian Epstein. I'm talking
about the period from about nineteen fifty seven to about

(10:50):
nineteen sixty three, and there were there were there were guys,
people with names like Larry Palms. He was nervous Mr Palms,
Shillings and Pence because he and he had the first
boy bands as we now call them. All of his
acts were basically guys who looked great and it didn't

(11:12):
matter whether they could sing. We had a couple of
very early and pretty primitive television show six five Special
which went out at five past six on a Saturday,
and a show called Oh Boy, and it was Oh Boy,
which had an edge to it. It had a producer
called Jack Good who went on to do various of
the things, and people like Cliff Richard and the Shadows

(11:35):
Billy Fury out of a Faith got their start on
that show. And that was a black and white TV show.
And if you were thirteen years old, you made sure
you you were at home on a Saturday at six
o'clock to watch one of these two shows. The business
was full of characters. Of course. One of the things

(11:58):
about working in music you don't actually need any qualifications.
You are what you are what you say you are.
So if you're a promoter, if you walk into it.
Back when I was in my early days as an agent,
a promoter was somebody who walked in and said I'm
a promoter, and within five minutes I'd be selling in
deep purple dates and praying that they would earn that

(12:22):
the the upfront ticket sales would be sufficient that they
could pay the deposit, because of course nobody had escrow
accounts back then. They just took the money and thought
of it as their own money. And I think that
the music really followed the early American rock and roll singers,
the Evely Brothers, Elvis, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino,

(12:48):
that Chuck Berry. Of course, that era, and that kind
of metamorphosized into the Beatles era, and of course on
the first Beatles record, or the first album that was
released in the UK, there were a large number of covers,
including a roll over Beethoven for instance, I can remember.

(13:09):
So it was a very from about through to probably
about sixty sixty seven. It was a pretty it was
a bit wild West. We didn't have things like you
had in America. Like Paola and that kind of thing,
because we only had the BBC, and of course I can't.

(13:30):
I should absolutely include this Radio Luxembourg. Radio Luxembourg, which
was broadcast from Luxembourg, was played pop music from about
seven o'clock in the evening to about midnight, and it
had a fading signal and in the house I lived
up in the north of England, the only place I

(13:51):
could get the full signal was halfway up the staircase,
so I would spend hours sitting on the staircase listening
to Roy Orbison whoever it happened to be. The BBC
only played pop music on one show, which was directed,

(14:11):
which was for the American gies who were posted in Germany,
and they would send in rickly was called Two Way
Family Favorites. They would send in requests and once in
a while Perry Como would be put aside and you'd here,
don't be cruel, all shook up or whatever happened to be,
and you would you would listen to this entire to

(14:33):
our program in the hope that they would play one
or two bona fide pop songs. And of course there
were no categories. It was just pop music. We didn't
have a rock and roll. There was no country, there
was no heavy metal, there was no folk, none of that. Okay,
maybe I'm interrupting, but let's go back to what circumstances

(14:56):
do you grow up in? Well. I was born Yorkshire,
which is up in the north of England. I my
father was the principle of a grammar school. My mom
sort of my mom. I had a younger brother. We
lived in a town halfway between Leeds and York until

(15:17):
I was about eleven, and then we moved up to
where they actually they built a brand new school, which
was the largest in Yorkshire at the time, and we
moved up there and lived at the school. It wasn't
a private school, it was just a regular day school.
When I was thirteen years old, that Christmas, my parents

(15:40):
and I would love it if they were alive now
because I would love to be able to ask them
why they did this. They bought me Elvis's Gold Records,
Volume one, which were the principle of a grammar school
in Yorkshire. In that was quite a stretch and I
can remember on Christmas morning going down putting it on

(16:03):
the old radio gram you know, when the record would
fall down with a crash and the first track on
that record on side one is hound Dog and two
minutes twenty six seconds later, my life had changed completely. Okay,
many many years later, but many years later I had
the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Scotty Moore and

(16:24):
d J. Fontana, who played guitar and drums on that respectively,
which was a complete trip. Oh yeah, when you meet
your heroes from that era. Uh, but let's go back.
One thing is as an American, I'm slightly younger than
you in that we grew up with television. I had
New York markets, so there were off six TV channels, etcetera.

(16:46):
But we get the impression that in the UK it
was economically disadvantage and this impacted the music scene. What
was it like growing up in that era. Well, you're correct,
because that was the post war era, so we as
the UK. I remember once asking my parents what was

(17:06):
the most significant thing in their lives, and without a
second hesitation, they both said, in unison, the war something.
And I remember my dad saying our lives were put
on hold for seven years. So when we came out
of the war, for a certain age group, we still
had national service. You still had to go into the army.

(17:27):
The economy, of course, had been completely ruined by the
war effort we had. But my memory of that period
is that everything was dark, everything was wet. It was
always raining. It's raining now, but it's see different about then,
and it was a very It was austerea. We didn't

(17:50):
have a lot of the modern things I think that
you've got in America. Before us, we didn't have central heating,
didn't have had coal fires. You would take a bath
in a tin in a tin bath. You as the
son of a school teacher, you did that. You didn't
have senating. You took a bath in a tin bath. Yes, absolutely, Yeah,

(18:12):
I still do yeah, no, but no, yes absolutely. I
mean he was he when he passed. I remember you
going through your parents his things. He had kept every
single pace lip he had ever received ever and when
he passed, when she was in the mid seventies, sorry,
in the wh he retired in the mid seventies. He

(18:34):
was making a hundred pounds a week. That was a
good salary back then. Well, okay, so are you the
older brother the younger brother? I knew that, okay, So
what was it like going to school? Were your father
ro the head mask well fly enough. It was okay.
I didn't get any stick from the other kids, but

(18:57):
there were a few teachers who thought that they would
kind of try it on a bit. I was. It
was interesting education period because when I look back on it,
you know, I as I say, they bought me this record,
and then we two Within two years, I had seen
an old black and white movie on on Sunday's The BBC,

(19:22):
which was then just the BBC used to show old
black and white movies from the kind of swing era,
Buzzby Barkley kind of films. And they showed a movie
called George White Scandals, which featured the American jazz drummer
Jeane Crooper. And I'm watching Jane Crooper bash this white

(19:42):
drum kit and light went on and I, instead of
a bicycle, which would be the normal thing you'd want
at that age, I decided I wanted to play drums,
which got me to the point that I'm talking to you.
And my dad we went into Leeds. We went to
a music store called Kitchens. And there's an interesting coincidence

(20:03):
here because at the exactly the same moment in time,
Martinoffler was going to the same shop. He turned left
into guitars. If you turned right you went to woodwinds,
And as always happened in music shops, if you went
into the basement, there was the drum department. And I
went down into the basement and we bought a snare drum,

(20:25):
a pair of sticks, a pair of brushes for six pounds.
And the guy who was the salesman said, we give lessons,
which was surprising to me because of course I thought
you just hit them, which which you don't. And this
was an excuse for him to sell my dad the
body Rich drum Tutor, which is the drum tutter. All

(20:49):
drummers know this drum tutor, which Buddy Rich just put
his name to. He didn't write the thing. It was
written by a guy called Henry Adler, and for an
extra thirty shillings we got the book and I was
enrolled for drum lessons, which I took for four years.
Okay this when you bought the drums, you'd already heard
Elvis Presley. Yes, yes, okay, you remember the brand name

(21:13):
of that snare drum. It was a a pretty cheap
British in put in imitation of American drums, and it
was a company called Olympic, who were eventually bought by
Premier Drums. Okay, so you start off with a snare drum,

(21:35):
At what point do you get a complete kit? Wow?
Like I had to save up money pocket money and
basically got a bass drum next without a pedal, then
got a pedal, and then got a symbol, a ride symbol,
and then got high hats and probably took me eighteen months.
And immediately, of course I got together with some pals

(21:58):
at school who played guitar and bass and a singer.
And of course back then you could be in a
band if you owned an amplifier. That was the qualification.
You didn't have to play. So we formed a beat group,
this is pre beatles, and we promptly learned every single
number by a group called Shadows, who were Cliff Richards

(22:21):
backing band. The equivalent in America would have been a
band like the Ventures. And we would play two and
a half minute instrumentals and we learned probably eighty of
them B sides, album tracks, and then we started about
five the British blues boom was getting underway with people

(22:46):
like Alexis Corner, very early rolling stones, pretty things, so
we started we started to shift towards that, and of course,
almost slightly before that, the Beatles are arrived, so we
so of course, when the Beatles arrived, we did what
every other band in Britain did. We dumped the entire
Shadows repertoire and started learning Beatles song. Okay, let's say

(23:12):
once you learn those, mute those songs, you got gigs? Correct? Yes, yes,
who booked those gigs? Parents? Okay, because usually the drummer
is the business guy, we'll find that interest there. So
many drummers would survived the bands and careers like you had.
So what kind of gigs did he get? We just

(23:32):
played in uh um youth clubs, played in played in
old people's hopes, played in St Patrick's night dances. There
was a hole in the town I lived in which
held about four people. We used to play there. We
would play in leeds Um and we played in an

(23:56):
area which was probably about fifty square miles and we
would probably play Fridays and Saturdays and sometimes Sundays. And
of course the parents also did the transport. We had
very very giving parents. My parents traded in the car
they had and got any state car so we could
put the seat down and put the drums in. And

(24:18):
what kind of money were you making? Two or three
pounds show? Okay, many people when they start having gigs
like that, never mind within a fifty mile area, they
start to experience, shall we call it, the perks of
the road, the sex, the drugs, the last we are
appearance along and nothing happened, or you know what was

(24:40):
tree inspiring? Well, first of all, Bob, we were thirteen fourteen, fifteen,
so and I can tell you in that part of
Britain at the time, people couldn't spell drugs alone access them.
There were there were no drugs. I mean we would
when I got to college, we would smoke grass cuttings.
We would smoke lawn cuttings, and and and and to

(25:01):
listen to the Moody Blues first album and think that
we were hip and relevant. Um, there was the sex, drugs,
and rock and roll came along a bit later, but
at that point, no, I mean you you'd finished at
eleven thirty at night, and your mom and dad would
be outside with the with the car. You pat your
gear up and put it in and then you'd be
wished away and that was that. There was, but a

(25:23):
lot of people, certainly the lead sixties British musicians, they
were not that great verbally, and they said, well, I
got into music to meet girls. Yeah, so were you
meeting girls? I was meeting them, yes, but that was it.
I was meeting them. I mean I was, I was
motivated by by I just found the whole thing incredibly romantic,

(25:52):
just to be playing music. And yes, if yeah, but
I mean I'm talking about I was fifteen years old,
so I wasn't doing what your point you're into yet
all people that we weren't any deeper than that. Now,
the Beatles really hit in sixty three, and what was

(26:13):
that like being on the ground with the Beatles? Hire
certainly an American happened very quickly in January six. What
was it like? Okay, Well, their first single, of course
was Loved Me Do, and that came out I think
made sixty two probably, and it didn't make much of
an impact. And I remember as the group, we would

(26:36):
rehearse every week and we would start learning adding new songs,
and we that record was so insignificant at the time
that we didn't even bother adding it to our kind
of set list. But this endless set list, but not
long after must have been the early part of sixty

(26:57):
three or round about spring Please Please Me came out,
which George Martin incidentally told me was originally recorded at
half the tempo, as like a Royal Orbison ballad. I
don't know whether you know this. So the way they
recorded it it was like bum bum bum bump, dad
bump bump bump like that. And he said double the

(27:20):
tempo and put the chorus at the beginning. And when
they finished it, he said to them, you've just recorded
your first number one. And I said to him, did
you really think that? And he said no, no, I
was just just trying to keep them around. But I
went to see the Beatles on a package tour. It
was on June three at the Odeon Theater in Leeds.

(27:45):
They were on a show with Roy Orbison, Jerry and
the Postmaker's Silla Black and a couple of other acts.
Orbison had originally started the tour as the headliner, and
a dozen shows in they flipped it so that he
opened the and half chosen. Those days had an interval
because you could not hear yourself think or and the

(28:08):
other thing I remember, which nobody ever talks about was
the smell of girls urinating on velvet cinema seats with
steam rising from the seats and you're looking as cancer
that But honestly, that was what it was like. The
the artist that I saw in that period of time
who got the biggest scream and undoubtedly this the largest

(28:34):
volume of p was Del Shannon. He people went nuts
for him. I say, why particularly, but the Beatle that
Beatles show? What I remember about that Beatles Show? And
I still got the program I've got the programs from
all these shows. I would take a bio and I

(28:56):
would write down the set list, and of course they
play twenty five minutes, and they did. I remember they
started off when I saw her standing there, finished with
twist and shout. They did a great version of you
Really Got a hold on Me, that Miracles number, and
they did Taste of Honey, which was quite unusual for

(29:19):
the band of that time. But that was the period
when they all had the same haircut, they were all
wearing the same outfits. They had the round collars on
the jackets ties with pins through which we all immediately
rushed out to get outfits like that, and they um

(29:40):
the screaming was what I remember. You could barely hear
a note of music. Were you caught up in the
menia or were you like removed saying, well, that's the girls,
that's not for the boys. Well I wasn't. I wasn't screaming,
that's for sure. You couldn't help. But we swept along
by it. I mean, I was fifteen years old. I

(30:02):
just had my fifteenth birthday, and I think the music
that you hear between the ages of about twelve and sixteen,
certainly for me or for my generation, was what fashions
your taste thereafter. I think that just kind of because
you're of an age where it's so it really gets

(30:26):
into your kind of soul, into your being. And I
had been collecting Elvis records and the other artist, the
rock and roll artist. I just I mentioned to you
a few minutes ago. I happened to be a big
fan of instrumentals, so I had a lot of Duane
Eddie records people like that. But the fact that they
were a British group, um completely, I think blew everybody away.

(30:52):
It was it was the fact that they were home
grown and that they were writing their own songs that
that was a real leap. I remember George Martin again
saying to me that, of course when he first saw them,
he I said to him, you didn't. I interviewed him
four times and I remember saying to him that, I said,

(31:13):
you didn't sign them because you thought they were any good,
did you? And he said, know, they were terrible. I
said you signed them because you liked them as people
and he said yes. And I said did you signed
them because of Brian Epstein's enthusiasm And he said yes.
And I said, did you signed them because the E
m I record deal back then was so bad it

(31:33):
represented no risk to the company. They got one old
English penny royalty for the sale of an album in
the UK, and they got half of one old English
penny for the sale of an album outside of the UK.
So and they had to use abbey Road em My studio.

(31:54):
They had to do as an abbey Road producer of
an EMI producer, which happened to be George who was
making comedy records at the time. He wasn't doing music.
And they had to use an engine A m I
engineers who wore white coats, had like surgical gloves. You
had to do an A side and a B side

(32:16):
in three hours. The music was never ever ever played
back to the act ever. And if you didn't do
the I side in the Bay side in three hours,
it didn't matter. Whatever you've got recorded was what would
come out. Don't no, so don't forget. Everything was very
compressed in the US. The Stones came very quickly after

(32:40):
the Beatles, and then it would be a big thing
on the radio Saturday Night battle between the Rock the
Stones in the Beatles. In your particular case, you said
you were playing music with your band influenced by the
British blues scene. Was there that bifurcation in the UK
where you were one or the other? Were you one
or the other your Beatles restored, Uh no, not really

(33:04):
a little you see, they were all lumped together. They
were pop groups. The Rolling Stones were not. We didn't
know what blues music was. I mean, we were white,
middle class kids. I've had this conversation with many musicians
who were in the bands of that era, bands like
the Searchers, Manfred Man and the rest of them, and

(33:24):
Jimmy Page and Robert and so on, and of course
they look back on it now as being pretty ridiculous.
That white middle aged, sorry, white middle class kids from
South London were trying to sound like John Lee Hooker.
It was just completely ridiculous, but they were all and
everybody was slowing the records down by hand to try
and grab what the lyrics were because American lyrics. I'll

(33:48):
give you an example. Many years ago, I happened to
be in Nashville with Martin Offer and we were having
dinner with well On Jennings and the Evely brothers and
Emmy Harris, and I remember saying, I've always wanted to
ask you guys to don Phil what what's a bird dog?

(34:11):
And they burst out laughing and they said, well, you
know when you go hunting, do you have you have
a dog? And I said, oh, you mean a retriever
and they said, no, no, it's a bird dog. For
years we had wondered what a bird dog was, and
there were many many examples of that. And I remember

(34:32):
Whalon saying to market myself, he said, you you know
more about us than we know about us. And I said, well,
you have to understand that when we were growing up,
everything American was magical. Our introduction to America was through
the early Westerns, like raw hide Wagon Train. Then it

(34:56):
moved on to the crime shows like Dragnet s Unset Strip,
and then through music, through rock and roll music. And
I suppose there was a slight overlap with maybe the
big band swing era just before that. So on the
radio you would hear um maybe the Ellington band or

(35:18):
the BASSI Band, probably quite late at night, and the
whole I can't overstress the romance of it to us.
And I remember saying to them, Mark can recite the
the entire sleeve note from Elvis is Gold Records Volume one,

(35:39):
and Mark probably started reciting it and I won't, no, no, no,
you don't. But we that we would read, we would
memorize the sleeve notes. And the other thing that was
mystifying to us, because they were never credited, was who
played on these records. This became something of an adventure
to try and find out. And it was only really

(36:00):
when Phil Spector's Wall of Sound came along that you
heard about people like Hal Blaine or Carol Kay or whoever.
We didn't know who Scotty Moore and d J. Fontana
were who or what, or that there was a horn
section in Fat Domino's band. I remember when I met
Roy Orbison years later I said to him one of

(36:21):
my memories about him was that he played a show
in Leeds in this venue I was talking about on
a later tour, and he had four violinists. They were
playing white violins sitting on white cane chairs, unamplified. But
because you knew the records so well, when they were

(36:41):
sawing away, you could imagine the sound even though you
couldn't hear the sound well articulated. Now, when the Beatles
hit in the US, everybody picked up the guitar. People
were forming bands left in the right. What was like
in the UK? It was the same, It was the same.
There was a there was a magazine in Liverpool called

(37:04):
Mersey Beat, which gave Rise and the other music. I'm
going to call them trade papers, but they weren't really
trade papers like billboards. There were two in particular. One
was called the New Musical Express Enemy and the other
was Melody Maker, And the Melody Maker was really a
jazz paper, and it kind of quite rapidly became Beatles.

(37:30):
Stones and another band that people forget who were huge
here and I know huge in your country, the Dave
Clark five. They were big, but for a shorter period
of time period, right, um, Once again the drummer was
the business guy. Well, yeah, an interesting story about Dave Clark.
Tell you a little story here. So Dave from the

(37:51):
from another drummer nearly all the rather like in your
country at the time, we had a very strong musician
Miss Musicians union here at the time, and most pop records,
which you and I would consider to be the hits
of that whole period from about sixty three through to

(38:11):
about sixty six, the bands didn't play on them. Studio
players played on them, and Dave Clark didn't play on
any of his own records. I didn't know that they
were all done by a drummer, a drummer called Bobby Graham,
and Bobby Graham was one and it was a bit

(38:32):
like the Wall of Sound guys, the Wrecking Crew. There
were three guys who did all the drums. There were
two piano players, there were four bass players, six guitarists
and song So Bobby Graham is doing a session for
bits and pieces to follow up to Glad all over.
I can hear, and he's down in the studio and

(38:55):
Dave Clark is up in the producers box and Bobby
is playing buff buff into the song and Dave Clark
preciously into commen. He says, I need you to play
that simpler. So he goes, no, no, no, no, You've
got to play it simpler, and he goes, you can't

(39:19):
play it. He's just playing four in the bar exactly
as you say. And finally Bobby, in exasperation, hits the
talkback and says, why have I got to play it
like this? And Dave Clark says, because I've got to
mind to it and all those records were covered one

(39:40):
of my dearest friends. He's getting on in use now.
It's a drama called Clem Cotini, who played with the
Tornadoes on Telstar, which was the first British record to
get to number one in the US. I think and um,
he played on number one hits in the UK, all
of the all the all of the key stuff, for instance,

(40:01):
and he doesn't have a dime. Uh correct correct all
these legends. Okay, so you're playing drums. The scene goes
thermonuclear A. Most of the players from the English world
don't go to university. Yet you go to university. Was
there any thought, as you say in the UK of

(40:23):
turning bro and not going to university. I wanted to
do that, but uh, I kind of came to a
sort of this is my first deal, if you like,
a deal with my parents. But I would go to university.
I would hopefully get a degree and then I would

(40:44):
go to London and try and be a professional musician. Now,
of course I had ah an idea of my own
talents that was considerably greater than they actually were, because
I was eighteen years old. But a very very strange
thing happened. I go up to university in Hull, in Yorkshire,
in city very like Liverpool on just on the other

(41:07):
side of the country. And on the first night I
was there, or the second night, they were having a
dance in the students union, which is where girls would
dance around their handbags and boys would look at them
and wonder if they could cut in. And I walk
into the front of the student union and something happened

(41:29):
which brought me to this place. There's a Tanoi message
going out if anybody in the building can play drums,
would they please come to reception. And I was standing
at reception and I can see the woman who's speaking
into the microphone, so without thinking what this might be,
I said to her, I can And this guy shot out,

(41:51):
who I later learned was a chap called Malcolm Haig,
and he said to me, are you any good? I said, well, yeah,
quite good it he said, well, how good are you?
I said, well quite good? He said, the drama with
the band tonight can't play sick and we haven't got
any records. We don't have a like a DJ thing.

(42:14):
He said, so can you play with them? And I went, uh, well, yeah,
I don't know what do they play. So anyway, he
starts leading me off to the dressing room and it
turned out, now you won't know this band, but it
turned out they were a band called the Victor Brox
Blues Train. Victor Brox later went onto a little bit

(42:34):
of success because he sings on the first cast recording
of Jesus Christ Superstar, but at the time he was
the frontman of a six piece blues band playing blues covers.
And there was a coincidence because the previous week this
group had played in my hometown. I hadn't gone, but

(42:55):
I'd seen the posters up everywhere. So I go into
the dressing room. I'm into used to them and there's
another student who said this message and he's got in
there before me, and I think to myself, sad him,
I'm going to get rid of him. So I did
a bluff. And one of the things in management you
have to learn how to do is bluff, bluff like
mad and I said to Victor Brox, I said, ah,

(43:18):
I saw your band last week in Tadcaster. I know
all of the songs you do. The other guy immediately
turned around and left, and then I said to them
how much are you going to pay me? And they
won't pay you. I said, yeah, how much are you
gonna pay me? And we settled on five pounds. They
were getting forty pounds. When I've done the deal for

(43:39):
the money, I said, listen, there's something you need to know.
I didn't see you last week. I just saw the posters,
which they thought was hilarious. And I said, what do
you play? And they did knock on wood, hold on,
I'm coming. You don't know like I know Motown Stacks
James Brown, which I had played dozens of times. I

(44:00):
just said to the bass player, can you count me in?
And just signal when you come into the end, because
in rock music you only have to know the beginning
in the end. What happens in the middle doesn't matter.
And I got through two minutes, said kept it simple,
didn't screw it up. Big hugs at the end, get
my five pounds and I go into the bar. I'm

(44:23):
going a drink, and a tall blonde girl called Trudy
comes up to me and says, I really enjoyed your playing,
And I went, did you? And I bought her a
larger in line or something, and she said, would you
like to come back to my student house for coffee?

(44:43):
Which was which was the sign? So I said, yeah, sure,
love love to. So I'm coming out of the student
union and a flash gun goes off in my face
and a little guy cop pops out and he says,
I'm the I'm the editor of the student newspaper, talked,
we'd like to do a front page feature on you
next week. What's your name? What course are you on?

(45:05):
Where did you come from? Were you nervous? How did
you know all those songs? So I do an interview
with this guy. At the same time the chap who
had come up to me when I got into the place,
who turned out to be the social secretary as we
call them here. It was leaving and he came over
to me and he said, I'm a I'm a pianist.

(45:26):
Do you want to be in my group? And I said, yeah, sure.
I said who else is in your group? He said nobody,
it's me and you will. But I know a flute
player and he happened to be running the entertainments committee.
He said, do you want to be on the entertainments committee?
And I said that what does that do? I don't

(45:47):
know what that is. He said, well, we run all
the entertainment. We run a dance every Saturday. We do
a union ball once a year. I also run the
jazz club and the folk club. Okay, so on my
first night, I've played a eg, have made five pounds
of pulled a bird, I'm on the front cover of
the student in newspaper paper, and I've joined the entertainments committee.

(46:08):
And at the end of my first year he stepped
down to do his finals exams and he said to me,
you take over. And I said we're supposed to have
an election and he went, as are you stupid? So
I took over entertainment. Okay, let's go back to the beginner.

(46:33):
Where did you get the Hudspur asked for five paths.
I've always had hutspur. That's That's why I'm on your show.
But exactly that, where does that come from? Your parents?
Where did you learn that? Actually? I was quite shy
at that point. I mean, having gone through the school
experience I had, which was, you know, living at the

(46:53):
school that I went to and kind of putting up
with a bit of ribbing from certain teachers, and that
I don't know, I just I don't know just what
makes you the man you are. But since you mentioned
her name, we have to ask what happened with Trudy?
Oh truly went the way of all ladies of the time.

(47:15):
You know. She we we used to, we used to,
we used to have a dreadful cut coffee with you know,
those chemicals sprinkled on the top, and she I dually.
I mean, this was like being let into a sweet
shop for me. I mean I had one girlfriend back
in Yorkshire and here I am, and I'm suddenly in

(47:37):
a sweet shop. And when I took over the entertainments,
I was just by default the best known person in
the university because I had the most glamorous gig if
you like. And I made one decision which stood me
in very good stead then and I have kept right

(47:59):
up to now. I decided I would only put on
bands that I liked, and somehow I would sell them
to my audience. And I had including the teacher training
college down the road, in the technical college next door,
I had twelve thou students to draw and who had
a student union card. I had a hall which was

(48:19):
the third largest in the UK, held a thousand people.
So the first band I bought was the Moody Blues. Okay, well,
well let's slow down a little bit. You were a drummer.
Now you got the gig in to use the line
from Let It Be, you passed the audition? Yes, at
what point do you bring your drums to university? Within

(48:45):
two weeks of that? So, at what point do you
say I'm a businessman as opposed to a drummer. I've
never said that. Um. That was later when I got
down to London. Okay, so all this time that you're
ahead of the entertainment program, in the back of your mind,

(49:06):
the dream is still alive. You're gonna be a drummer. Yeah, absolutely,
And what happened. I never had any aspirations to get
onto the business side. I didn't know what the business
side was. I was, as I was saying earlier, there
really wasn't a defined music business like we know it now.
I had no clue what anybody did. I knew I

(49:27):
had heard of Colonel Parker, I'd heard of Epstein. I
didn't know what they did, the mechanics of what they did. Okay.
So while you were in university, were you also playing
in the bands, whether it would be the pianist or
somebody else, Yes, yes, and I and I also I
got a jazz group together, playing kind of I'm going

(49:50):
to call it modern jazz. It was really just rubbish,
but that's what we did. Okay. So you booked the
Moody Blues. How do you even do that? How do
you know who the agent is? How do you know
what's going to call? My predecessor as the social secretary,
this guy Malcolm, when he said decided to step down
and to do his finals, he said, oh look, here's that.

(50:11):
He wrote them down. He wrote a list of the
agencies that he dealt with. Now, the agency business in
London at the time was small. I mean they were
probably six five six agencies, and there weren't that many
bands either. I mean we didn't have you know, there
were maybe playing on the student circuit. There were probably

(50:32):
a hundred hundred and fifty bands, and that they might
range from a pound a night local group to the
most I ever paid for an act was four hundred
pounds for Jethro Toll and they had a top three
single when I had them. Okay, would you come up
with the band and then find the agent or would
you call the agency when he had available both? And

(50:57):
of course I was also fielding calls constantly the all
of the agents in London, and they weren't really agents,
that they were bookers. We were no, we didn't call
them agents the bookers. Uh. And nobody did tours. Then
everybody gaved and and you try to get bands, would
try and get, you know, a student date on a

(51:17):
Friday and Saturday, because that would pay more. They could
make maybe get anywhere between a hundred and twenty five
to fifty pounds for a net for a name act,
a decent name, and um, those same bands might play
on a Sunday night for fifty pounds somewhere, and and
everybody was kind of on a wage sort of thing,

(51:38):
and typically a musician might make pounds a week back
then I'm talking or sixty six through to sixty nine.
How did you have time to do your school work? Well? Um,
just worked hard. I mean I got a decent degree.
And what did you study? I did, Well, it was

(52:01):
a new course. It was called social studies and in
fact the group I was part of was as I
found out when I got there, um because I went
for an interview and the professor who interviewed me, she
was so grateful I'd applied because this was a brand
new course and we were the experiment, this group that

(52:22):
I was part of, which was probably about thirty five
students they were going to we were going to start
this course, and I just and it included sociology, philosophy, economics,
things like that at British Social history since since the
Industrial Revolution eighteen and I just I got stuck into that.

(52:45):
But my real thing was was doing doing the entertainments.
And then a couple of questions, how many gigs would
you do a year? How many shows? Are you talking
about me personally? And probably be about okay, And there
was a fund that you drew on or were you

(53:06):
starting at dollar zero, I were starting with the ticket
money that came in. Okay, so there are certain acts
that are instant sellouts, but a lot of acts are not.
How did you promote the shows? I learned some very
good lessons very quickly, which stood me in very good

(53:27):
stead for my later career. The first was that if
you if you can't read a poster from the top
of a double decker bus, it's not worth ship. So
I just used to do a black background with day
glow green, day glow, pink, day glow orange. It would
say who it was, where it was, when it was,
and how much I got. I got an entertainments committed together,

(53:51):
and I delegated two different people. They would go and
they would put a flyer under the door of every
single room in every single hall of residents. I would
put flyers on every dining table for a week. I
would try. I would have the music played over the

(54:12):
student union p A. And also I had the biggest
thing I had going for me was that this was
a Saturday night and the students, the male and the
female students. Basically, Saturday night was the night where you
got together and you know that you ended up with
a knee trembler by the end of the evening. And

(54:33):
if you don't know what that is, Bob, I'll send
you a text. So so but but but you know
lust they are now was a big driving force, and
certainly in a student environment. And but one, but just
a little side story. When I bought the Moody Blues

(54:54):
at that time they had had what they had had
one number one hit in the UK with a Bessie
Banks song called go Now. Danny Lane was the singer
who later went onto Wings and they were essentially an
R and B group from Birmingham. In between the time
I bought them and the time they came, Denny and

(55:17):
the bass player left the group and Justin Hayward and
John Lodge, who are now very dear friends of mine,
ironically had joined the band. They had played a show
in a cabaret club in the north of England where
they were basically doing go Now three times in the
set and some covers, and they played this particular place

(55:40):
up in Newcastle or somewhere. Justin told me this story
and after the show they're in the dressing room and
they were all wearing matching suits, shirts, ties, looking very
smart and a guy and his wife came by and
banged on the door, and they opened the door and
the guy said, he said, it's really great of your

(56:00):
lads to come all the way up here, but I
got to tell you you were crap. You're absolutely shiped.
You're the worst band I've ever seen in my life.
Nice to meet you by and left and the movie
Blue was got in their van to drive back to
London in total silence. They didn't speak for about four hours,

(56:20):
and as they getting close to London, one of them
said that guy's right, and they all went yeah. They
dumped everything they were doing justin and John Lodge got
the biggest bag of weed they could lay their hands on.
They went to Belgium and they wrote Nights in White
Satin Tuesday Afternoon and all of the songs that were

(56:43):
on the Days of Future Past record, which they recorded
not with the orchestra that was dubbed on afterwards, because
Decca had a new stereo system thing and they wanted
that record to be the demonstration disc for this particular
format that they were going to go with, so they

(57:04):
hired Tony Clark to do all those arrangements and it
was wasn't until the record was released that the Moody
Blues heard them, because back then nobody's consulted the act.
So anyway, I booked them. When they arrived, I go
up to the dressing room and back then nobody had
a rider. So you gave them some sausage rolls and

(57:25):
to create a beer and they were grateful. And I
had written on a piece of paper and felt tip
pen Moody Blues eight thirty to nine fifty to ten thirty,
because everybody did to forty five minutes. And John Lodge
and I'm going to attempt to Birmingham Accent now came

(57:47):
and stood behind me, and he's looking at this thing,
and he says, we don't do to forty four minutes anymore.
We do a concert. And I said, what he should
a concert? We do a concert. Now we do seventy
four minute still left to sit down, and I said,
we haven't got any chairs lift to sit on the floor.
We don't do forty four minutes. We do we do

(58:08):
a concertitute a concert, And to my astonishment, students sat
down and they played a concert complete with melotron. They
did the whole of that first album, and they did
two songs off the next one, one of which had
the amazing lyrics Timothy Leary is dead, No he's yeah,

(58:30):
you know the legend of a mind. Yeah, And I
a little light went on and I thought, well, if
I put I had two refectories that I would put
things on. I thought, well, if I put on something
in the East refectory which they can dance to, I
can put concert song here. And so the next band

(58:52):
I bought was Pink Floyd four a hundred fifty pounds,
and they came up and again I thought I was
getting Sid. No, said David Gilmore walked in. They had
they had got rid of? Said well, actually what happened

(59:13):
was they were going to play gig in Oxford and
they got to the and they had to pick him up. Last,
they went to his mum's house where Sid was living.
They pulled up outside his house and they sat in
the car for twenty minutes in silence, and then Roger,
who was driving, drove off without Sid, because David was

(59:33):
already in the group covering for Sid. And that's how
said Barrett left Pink Floyd. He simply wasn't picked up,
and they m they came up to home and they
played the whole of the source of Full of Secrets record,
and I was totally blown away. I thought they were

(59:53):
amazing so on, and I'm on a roll at this point,
so then I think, okay, I'll put the Who. So
I bought the Who had the Who three times and
that was staggering. The only band I've ever worked with
where at the end nobody applauded and nobody left. People

(01:00:14):
were stunned. They smashed everything, everything, The entire drum kit
came off the front of the stage and landed in
the audience. There were bombs going off. That's why, right.
I interviewed Roger three years ago and I realized halfway
through the interview he couldn't hear a word. I was saying,
he's completely deafening. What he calls his end whist leah,

(01:00:36):
because they back then is you know, all of the
sound came off the back line. It was a piddling
little p a and Roger had to over sing. He
had to basically shout and scream to be heard. And
I was standing on the stage right next to Pete's
Marshall stacks, two of them, one of which had no
speakers in it, so he could spear his guitar through

(01:00:58):
because he possibly going to pay for speakers. And the
noise was the sound. Well, I'll call it a noise
because Roger said to me we were trying to recreate
the sounds of war, and I said to you were
entirely successful. They were fantastic, life, fantastic. You have this
incredible run. But then you graduate with well when I graduated.

(01:01:23):
Of course, by this time I got to know quite
a lot of the booker's agents in London because they
were constantly ringing me trying to sell me their crappy bands.
I had a fantastic last week. We had a charity thing,
charity week and I put on John Male's Blues Breakers

(01:01:45):
Jethro Tull with led Zeppelin as the opening act, booked
as the new Yardbirds. And I've still got the contract
and it had been crossed out and it written in
was led L E. A D. Polin which Peter had
written in um we had The Kinks and Family Family

(01:02:09):
were the best band I put on in the entire
two years. They didn't make it in America. True incredible band,
fantastic band. So July four, with a hundred pounds, my
mom and dad I get on the train. I've got
one telephone number. I come down to London. One of

(01:02:31):
the groups I put on in the last week as
a support band was a group called Gingerbread. Their bass
player was John Wetton, the late John Wetton, who went
on to join King Crimson and Asia founded Asia with
Carl and I went down to London and within a
week I've got a band together, of which John was

(01:02:53):
the bass player and singer. And we found a rehearsal
place in South London. Lets go a little bit were
you're in the hall, how do you get your drums
to London? Or how do you find a new kid
in London? With difficulty? I got one of the bands
that I booked to stick them at the back of
the van and take them down to London. That's it,

(01:03:15):
just improvise. And I slept on a floor for about
eighteen months. Joined this group. And whose floor was it?
This was just some people I knew, I mean I
knew this. This was the one telephone number I called up.
They said, well, we don't have any rooms, but you
can sleep on the floor. So I took a sleeping

(01:03:36):
bag slept on the floor. Did they charge you for that. No, no, Bob,
they didn't judge me for that, and I um That
group within a few months metamorphosized into what became the
Average White Band. Wow, we got this horle type of

(01:03:59):
their bags of question begs how good a drummer was
Robbie mcintogh great, it's really good. He replaced me. I
was sacked along with John for not being Scottish. They
wanted to have an all Scottish band. We were rehearsing,
we hadn't. We played one show at the Marquee Club,

(01:04:19):
which was pretty disastrous, to be honest, And in January
of v I was summarily sacked, which was fine because
I was sacked from what I was sacked from. Nothing. Really,
they changed their name. They were called Mogul Thrash. Believe
it or not. They changed their name to the Average

(01:04:41):
White Band, got a deal with Yeah it was it
yea Atlantic of course ya, And off they went. And
then John left and he joined King Crimson, he joined Family. Actually,
all those eighteen months, are you doing things in you
think other than drumming with the future weight average weight?

(01:05:05):
Not in the professional money earning sense. I mean, I
was going to see bands constantly I was completely I
was in London. I had not been to London before
I was. I would go to the Marquee Club five
nights a week. It didn't matter what night you went,
there would be somebody good on What were you doing

(01:05:25):
for money? I was living off this hundred pounds that
my parents had given me, which was which was a
substantial sum. Then, I mean when I when I know
you're going to come to it in a second. But
when I started in the agency business, I was making
five pounds a week and you could live on five
pounds a week quite comfortably. I mean, I don't mean
going to restaurants or anything like that, but you could survive. Okay.

(01:05:55):
So you get sacked in January of seven, you say,
what's your next move? Total acts. Everything in my life
or professional life, certainly has been luck. It's been absolutely
the biggest factor. I get sacked from the average white
band or mugul thrash as they were. The next morning,

(01:06:15):
I'm walking down Oxford Street and I bump into one
of the agents who used to call me when I
was at university. Guy called John Sherry, sadly no longer
with us, and he said, what are you doing? And
I said, I've just been sacked from the average white
band for not being Scottish, and he said words which
ring down to me over the years. I can't pay

(01:06:37):
you anything, but would you like to come and work
in the office and I'll give you half of everything
you earn. I had nothing else going, so I go
the next morning to the office, which turned out to
be one room with one desk and two telephones. Uh.

(01:07:00):
And when I get there, he says to me, by
the way, I forgot to tell you I don't have
any acts. You don't have any acts, he said no.
So I started booking colleges as the buyer if you like,
of which Holy University where I went was one. I

(01:07:21):
got picked up card off the university and several others,
and they would be on split commission deals, which don't
happen now. So typically a college would have a dance
on a Saturday night. They had a budget of a
hundred and fifty pounds. They wanted a stripper, a steel band,
and a band they could dance to, and I would

(01:07:42):
ring around the way way they would really want a stripper.
That would not happen now, Yeah, you didn't. You didn't
have those in the gigs in the UK US either okay,
but back then I mean that was quite Yeah. We
want a stripper and we want to deal band, and
we want the band that can dance to So I
would have a budget. I'd ring around all the agencies.

(01:08:05):
What have you got available on the fifth of May
five pounds? They would tell me they pick it either
sell them on this act or they'd pick an act.
And I would go back to the agent and then
say they can only afford a hundred and you've done
the deal, and I'd get five five pounds on that.

(01:08:26):
So that went on for a bit and then in
March of one of the two phones ran and this
was a bit like the fastest gunfighter in the West,
who could get the phone fastest. I grabbed the phone

(01:08:46):
and a voice came on and I won't do his accent,
and he said, this is Miles as Copeland the Third
And I went, holy shit, Miles ax Copeland the Third Wow.
And he said, would anybody they ever interested in booking
a band called Wishbone Ash. Now, the previous week I

(01:09:09):
had read a letter on the back of the Melody
Maker on the letters page extolling the virtues of this
group Wishbone Ash, which I later found out Miles had
written under a pseudonym, so based entirely on that, I
said to him yes, and he was completely flummo. He
had been ringing everybody for weeks and he'd got and

(01:09:32):
I said yes. Long story short. I go up to
a house and St John's Wood in North London, which
was a very posh area of London where the Copeland
family lived when his dad was in the CIA was
or he'd retired from the CIA at that point, and
I went down that I was going to go and
see them play in this house. And I come down

(01:09:54):
the drive and there are a group of about half
a dozen Arabs in full ceremonial s going up the
front stairs, and I thought I must be at the
wrong house. So I walked back down the drive and
I suddenly heard from coming out of the basement, and
I realized what happened was that Myles's father was advising

(01:10:17):
various oil companies on the political situation in the Middle
East as his post ci CI a job, and down
in the basement which Bone Ash were rehearsing. So I
went down met the band. They played me the whole
of their first album sitting in armchairs, which was the
first I've never seen a band player a gig sitting

(01:10:37):
in an armchair. And I asked Miles if I could
use the phone to call John, and he led me
to a pay phone. They had obviously read John Paul
get his biography because they had installed a pay phone
for guests, and I had to borrow tenpence off him
to use the phone. And I called John up and
I said we should take this band on. They're really good.

(01:10:59):
And they were in London College that following Saturday and
we went to see them. Miles was doing the lights.
He didn't have any overhead lights. He had a run
of foot footlights and he had a green boulbon orange
bowl of red bulbon pint bulb and he had four
things and he was just doing this on the side
of the stage and we took them on and then

(01:11:22):
short order Miles came into the business. We all went
into business together. They kind of took off a bit.
They signed to m c A. Within within eighteen months
we had like the third or fourth biggest agency in London.
I've just just work just working at it. What happened

(01:11:45):
are your drumming career? Well, to make up my money,
I joined a fantastic soul band. They were called Patrick
Dane and the front line we had a four piece
brass section, great layers, and we played four or five
nights a week. We played American basses, colleges, around London clubs, everything,

(01:12:10):
and we would get all of the London clubs then
paid twenty pounds. That was the maximum you could get
in any one of the famous This was just post
the Swinging sixties, so called the Swinging sixties didn't actually
get started in London until about nineteen sixty five sixty six,

(01:12:31):
and it kind of rolled over to about nineteen seventy
three four. We would play those anywhere between a Monday
and a Thursday, and on a Friday and Saturday. If
we played an American bass, we would get a hundred
and fifty pounds. If we played a college we would
get probably about the same. And when we played the
American bassis, because we had to play for dining as

(01:12:51):
well as dancing, we've learned the whole catalog of Duke
Allington and big band stuff, which that's what they what
they wanted, and we always got rebooked always, so you
have this flurishing agency. How did you become a manager? Well,
I I traveled through several agencies um in the next

(01:13:19):
let's see five years, sorry, five or six years, and
I ended up at Names, which was Brian Epstein's old company,
although he'd long gone, and I was working with Steve
Barnett recently retired retired president with Capitol Records. We haven't
seen him many years. And if you're watching this, hello
Steve and m We And that was when I kind

(01:13:43):
of hit I'm going to loosely call it the big
time because we had big acts. We had deep Purple Black, Sabbath, Nazareth, Alex, Harvey,
band Elton. I did the first British stroke European tours
with Steely dan Um and then I had oh sorry,

(01:14:11):
just before that, the person who kind of had was
my I would call him my mentor. We all need
a mentor in life was Barry Marshall, who now runs
Martial Arts. And when I went to work with Barry
and his wife Jenny, and they're probably one of the
most successful and certainly one of the best promoters in

(01:14:32):
UK and Europe. Um We. He was managing a Welsh
group called Man who were a bit like a British
kind of grateful dead in the sense that they played
numbers that lasted for several days and I think, I
think I've been there a week and I put twenty
eight gigs in in a month for this group. Man um.

(01:14:56):
I just had a sense of how to do it.
If I went about something, I think, if you're enthusiastic
about something, you can communicate that to people. And we
were doing we we were doing. It was the first
place I've been where we were doing American acts, and
we did people like Jimmy ruffin lou Christie if you

(01:15:19):
remember him, of course, Lightning Strikes, Trightening Strikes. And I
got a real feel for working with black American artists,
which was quite a I mean, I remember he sent
me off to Europe. I think this was about the
nineteen seventy three or four with the con Tina Turner review,

(01:15:41):
which was my first encounter with Ike Turner, which was okay,
actually no problem, and I got I've known Tina since then.
And then I moved to names and as I say,
we were looking after what were big acts at the time.
But again coming back to something I said earlier, they

(01:16:01):
didn't tour they gigged. Everybody gigged. Nobody had a beginning
in the middle of an end. It was just continual,
and they didn't go into the studio for a period
of time. They went in for a few hours at
a time and cobbled together records and it was all
pretty kind of it's kind of primitive, but it was.

(01:16:24):
It was huge fun, definitely fantastic fun. And then how
does that turn into the management. Well, I had no
aspirations to do management, but I of course I was
dealing with at this point quite a lot of managers.
And I have to say that back then managers were

(01:16:46):
not quite as skilled as they've become. Um. In fact,
some of them were. I mean I can remember with
Deep Purple, h this was the Mark two with Richie
and In Squabbling and Roger and in Pace and John
Lord bless him. I remember their manager coming into the

(01:17:09):
office and saying to Steve and I write, Deep Purple,
who have got a new album coming out next week. Now,
this was the first time that we've been informed that
they had made a record. They want to go on tour.
So we got our notepads and we're ready to go.
And I said to him when do you want to start?
And he says next week and I said next week, Yeah,

(01:17:31):
next week. That's how it was. How it was, and
um what happened was that through a convoluted set of circumstances,
I had got to know a guy called Ken Kushnick,
who was the general manager at Sire Records in seventy six.

(01:17:53):
I think it was the Sex Pistols clash and the
British punk's scene got underway. I might have my chronology
slightly wrong, uh, And Ken called me up and asked
me if I would put a tour together for the Ramones,

(01:18:15):
who I had never heard of, but given the way
things were, I just said yes. And then he said
to me there's another act on with them, and I'm thinking, well,
it's going to be hard enough to get the Ramones attorney.
I said, who's that? He said, they're called the Talking Heads,

(01:18:35):
and I said, wow, what's weird name. Anyway, he sent
me a single It's called Love Ghost Building on Fire
and it only had a photograph of three of them
on the front. Jerry Harrison wasn't in the group at
that point, and I remember putting it on the record
player at Names and I thought it was great. I
loved it, so I I agreed to set up a

(01:18:59):
tour for the two those two acts, which I did,
and it was a hard sell. Was six weeks mostly
around the UK, few dates in Europe. Just before that
tour happened, the Sex Pistols went on British TV and
disgraced themselves by swearing on a six thirty live slot,

(01:19:24):
and this caused tabloid fury, but it turned the punk
new age thing from being like a really underground thing
into being very kind of prominent. Now that all of
the Pistol shows pretty much got canceled because every town hall,
every council said we're not having them, their filthy revolution

(01:19:46):
and all this, but it meant that. It meant that
the Romans talking heads to Her suddenly sold out everywhere,
so they came over. I remember we started in Geneva
and I immediately bonded with the talking heads as people,

(01:20:08):
and they asked me to leave the ends and manage them.
And I didn't have enough courage to be honest. I couldn't.
I just think I knew enough. What happened then was

(01:20:28):
another piece of luck. I happened to be out at
Heathrow airport picking up a friend, a girlfriend who worked
at United Artists Records, and she was and she had
just been on a promo johnt to Holland with Jerry
Rafferty and Baker Street was becoming a big hit. So

(01:20:52):
I got got a lift and I got in the
front of the car with the driver, and she and
Rafferty got in the back of the car and I
was just rattling awhile like I am to you and
we're coming into London, and Rafferty tapped me on the shoulder.
I've never met him before and he said, ed, would
you be my manager? And I just turned around and

(01:21:13):
I said, you don't know me. He said no, but
I like you, so okay, So I became Jerry Raffort's manager. Okay,
that's a question. Did he have a previous manager? What
had happened? Well, yes, he had had when he was
in Steeler's Wheel that had led to law suits at
all the rest of it, and the Baker Street song

(01:21:35):
happened to be the street where his lawyer's office was,
and he was constantly coming down from Scotland. And if
you listen to the lyric, and you know that that
song is about his trips to London, sitting in lawyers
meetings for hours on end while they tried to dissolve
because what happened was the management company had gone bankrupt.

(01:21:55):
That had to be a liquidation process, and this all
took two years and he couldn't he could word live,
but he steamers Will broke up and he wrote the
songs which became the City to City record, one of
which was Baker Street. So but but his concept of

(01:22:18):
what he meant by his manager was rather different to
what I thought it was. I never bet. I made
no money of him at all, except from some touring
that he did, and I didn't participate in the records
or song publishing. And I didn't have enough knowledge or
courage to even ask. And here anyway, he had a

(01:22:41):
lawyer who was famous. His lawyer was so slow that
he would do management agreements with people that might last
five years and they would have run out by the
time he'd finished the paperwork. So it was academic anyway.
But the thing about Jerry was he opened a lot
of doors for me, and I ended up working with
him for about five or six years. But sadly he

(01:23:01):
was an alcoholic and it killed him in the end,
and we had a very bumpy time because he canceled
five American tours on me, one of which was on sale,
that kind of thing. So but it was all a
learning exercise. All of this. I was learning as you
as you go along. You could even out of every

(01:23:23):
negative situation, you can come out of it. You'll have
learned something. You were also booking bands while you were
managing jury. I was still at ends Um And what
happened was that I was working with him and I

(01:23:44):
had a Talking Heads tour coming up in January, which
was the first time they were going to headline on
their own in the UK, some Bits and Pieces of Europe,
and I needed an opening act. And it was December ninth,
and it was a Friday afternoon. I remember my phone

(01:24:06):
rang and a guy that I had met at Phonogram
because PolyGram or Phonogram originally were distributed side records until
they until Seymour switched to Warner Brothers. So I got
to know the people at Phonogram and I bailed bailed
them out on a couple of things, saved them quite

(01:24:26):
a bit of money because Seymour was quite good at
extracting money from and this guy came on. His name
was John Stains, and he said to me, I've just
signed a band called Dire Straits. And I immediately said,
what a terrible name, and he said, be serious. I said,

(01:24:48):
I am being serious. It's a terrible name. He said,
would you be their agent? I said, well, I'm only
handling American acts, I said, but in the back of
my mind I needed an opening act for this Talking
Heads tour and it was coming up quite soon, and
I was in a bit of a panic, and I
said to him, what are they like? And he said, well,

(01:25:08):
I've got a tape here. Why don't you come over
and listen to it. Now their officers were very close
to where NAMES was, so I packed up for the day,
walked over and he played me the demo tape that
had originally got them the record deal, the one that
a DJ called Charlie Gillett had played on British on
his British Radio London radio show. And on that record

(01:25:30):
on that tape were Sultans have Swing down to the
Waterline while west End and a song called Sacred Loving.
But thankfully they didn't record and I can remember. It's
funny what you remember later on, because I can't remember
listening to Sultans of Swing and saying to him this,
this guitar player is pretty good. And then he's playing

(01:25:52):
me Wild West End and I said, wow, these lyrics,
this is really good lyrically. He said that's the guitar
player and I said, Doug, tell me he's the singer
as well, and he went, yeat and he gave me
the lineup of the group and the mark younger brother
David was in the group. John Ellsley and picked with
us and they were playing a gig the following Tuesday

(01:26:14):
at ding Walls, which is a little club in North London,
and he said typical record company said I'll take you
out for a slap up meal and we'll go and
see them. So the following Tuesday I find myself in
a kibab house in North London watching gobbits of fat
fall off this spinning piece of meat. And we went

(01:26:34):
over the road to ding Walls and we walked in
and there were two things I noticed straight away. First
of all, they weren't very loud, so I could stand
quite close to the stage. Secondly, and most importantly, Mark
was playing a red Fender Stratocastic guitar, which was the
guitar that Hank Marvin the guitarist and the Shadows had played.

(01:26:58):
Now I've told this story to Jeff Beck and um
They've Gilmore and all the rest of them, and they
all instantly get it. Because the red strap was an
iconic instrument for us in Britain. The first stratic caster
any of us had seen was on the cover of
the Chirping Crickets album and Buddy Holly is holding a

(01:27:20):
strap which looked to us like something from outer space.
So Mark's playing this red strato caster. And I turned
to this an our guy after the second song and
I said to him, he's got a red strat just
like Hank Marvin's. Who's managing this band? And he said
nobody on on the basis of the red strat, I said,

(01:27:44):
I'd like to manage them. And it changed my life.
But there was a there's a kind of you know
pattern there. There was a sort of just a sequence
of events that led to that moment. Okay, now we
know that they were on Warner in the US and

(01:28:06):
Phonogram the rest of the world, certainly from the US viewpoint.
First album comes out, Sultan's a Swing uh, and then
the second album is not as quite as successful that
all of a sudden, making movies that starts to blow
up from the inside. What is going on? Well, the
first record, like many many many bands throughout history, Market

(01:28:31):
spent considerable amount of time writing those songs. He I
can't remember what year it was, seventy five or seventy six,
but he bent to America and he'd got on a
Greyhound bus try trip across the South, and as he
said to me later, he fell in love with every
waitress that he saw. And he wrote a lot of

(01:28:53):
those songs either in the U s or when he
got back to the UK, and a lot of them,
as as has always been the case with his writing,
were sort of semi biographical. So for instance, songs of swing,
they were that that was the name of a band
playing in a little pub just down the road from
this dreadful apartment that he and John was sharing, David

(01:29:14):
was sharing, uh, And he went down to see them
and they were like a little swing band, like the
Panama Francis Saltons and swing the American band. And there
was nobody in the place, but he was impressed with
their enthusiasm and went back to the flat and he
wrote the song. So he had these songs. And what
happened was that after I had seen them at Dingwalls,

(01:29:37):
I put them on this Talking Heads tour, which, like
most of my tours, was like twenty seven gigs without
a day off, because I don't believe in days off.
They're just days days off one of those and I
went on a lot of these dates, A because I
was looking after both bands, and B because I wanted

(01:29:57):
to get to know my kind of new charges. So
I became very familiar with those songs. And right in
the middle of that tour, Um John Stains the Air
and R guy I'm talking about I was talking about,
came up with a couple of possible producers, one of
which was Muff Winward and Steve's elder brother. Elder brother,

(01:30:19):
and Muff was working at Ireland Records at the time.
He was about to leave. He had a two week
window and then he was starting as head of an
R at CBS as they were, so he came to
see them at a show in a place called Aylesbury
north of London, agreed to produce them and fitted them

(01:30:43):
into that gap. There's a lot of kind of synchronicity
going on here. So he he did that record in
ten days. And what he basically did was he recorded
their lives just bashpreash, bash breash brash. We got. Of

(01:31:07):
course the album cover took way longer and was and
was and was. The was the was the source of many,
many many arguments and fights and stuff, particularly between the
two brothers. And I realized actually at that point that
rather like the Kicks and the Gallaghers and others, the
sibling thing was going to be a bit of a headache,

(01:31:29):
which it turned out to be. But so they made
that record, and I and they finished it, and I
had them. I just kept them working because that was
how they were making money. The record deal was not
a particularly good deal. The royalty rate was pretty poor,
but it was for the time, I suppose it was okay.

(01:31:51):
And they so I and I put them on I
got them a residency at the Marquee Club and I
put them on a kind of club college tour for
the whole of June of that year, and the record
came out in May. Sultan's came out in May, dribbled
into the bottom of the UK chart and fell straight out.

(01:32:14):
The album did okay, we didn't have the American deal
at the time. There was an unusual thing in their
recording agreement that the PolyGram one the phonogram one, which
said that if R s O passed on them the
rights to place the record, the deal in America would

(01:32:38):
refer to the group which went Me and I had
never done a record deal in my life. I had
never read a recording agreement. I had never been in
a recording studio. I didn't know anything about any of that.
R s O passed because they were in the middle
of Saturday night fever at al and uh So the

(01:33:01):
band did a club college tour in June, and then
uh Mark and I came over to the States. We
went to Los Angeles and I we had some interest
from Colombia, but we wanted to be on Warner Brothers

(01:33:24):
because we were musical snobs and they had Van Morrison
and just Ricky Lee Jones was just about to come
out and things like that. And I went up to
uh I managed to get somebody got me, got me
an intro to Mo Austin, and I'm like, I don't

(01:33:44):
know what the I really didn't know. I'm not know
what I was doing and I went up to Warner
Brothers and I got I was ushered into Moe's office,
which was the most intimidating physical space I've ever been in.
I mean, he's it's part from anything else that was enormous,
and his desk was so far away that you had

(01:34:05):
to sort of it took you five minutes to get
from the door to his desk. And anyway, he he
said something great to me. Actually, I always I love
MO and he's still with us, thankfully. He said to me,
I don't know anything about music, go and see the
A and R Department, which of course was not true

(01:34:25):
at all, but he did come from the Sinatra reprise background,
and he sent me down to see the sadly late ROBERTA. Peterson.
When I went into Roberta's office, she had more pot
plants in there than I've never seen in my life.
And and this is a little girl with the kind

(01:34:48):
of required l a tan and blonde hair sitting amongst
all of these palms and pot plants. And I remember
giving other record and she put it on and like
a lot of A and R people cranked it was
spinal tap up. It went to eleven and I'm sitting
there and this thing's thundering out. And she told me

(01:35:12):
later she was so excited by it that she tried
to pretend she tried to be cool, but I could
see her at her foot tapping madly underneath the desk.
And when it when she played both sides, she said
to me, where are you staying? And I was sadly
we were staying at the high at the Riot House.

(01:35:33):
And I remember she was vastly amused by that, and
she asked if she could keep that copy because she'd
like to play it to some of the people in
the department. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, sure,
why not. Wow. So I go back to the hotel,
and by this time there were a couple of other

(01:35:55):
companies who started chasing me. The American PolyGram Opera Asian
had realized what a do do they've made by putting
this clause in and they and actually that was the
first time I was ever offered a bribe. I was
offered a bribe in a sauna in somewhere in Los

(01:36:16):
Angeles by some guy from PolyGram in New York. He
offered me a hundred thousand dollars to get the band
to forget about that clause in the contract, and I
thought he was offering us an advance. I kept saying
to him, you mean for the band, and he said, no,
it's for you. They kept winking at me, and we're
in a sauna and I was sitting on the slatted

(01:36:38):
and he was on top of me, and we were
getting further and further back, so we were he was
lying on top of me, and I managed to wriggle
out from under him make a dash for the door.
Never heard from them again. Unfortunately, Warner's decided to sign us.
And what I didn't know there was another lady who
was also sadly passed on, called Karen Burg, who was

(01:37:00):
in the in our department in New York, who worked
alongside Jerry Wexler, and she had been to England and
she'd seen them at a little club gig and was
also pursuing them, and being a big company, they hadn't
actually spoken to each other, so they didn't realize. Roberta

(01:37:22):
didn't realize that Karen was already onto it. But anyway,
we ended up doing the deal with them, and it
turned out to be a very happy and a very
fruitful relationship. Okay, how does the essence of dire Streets
end up working with Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, okay, we

(01:37:49):
do the first American tour in February March April of
seventy nine. The albums at number two. The Doobie Brothers
kept us soft number one with Michael McDonald. Sultan's gets
the number two, I think it was. And I had
decided one of the things I was trying to do

(01:38:11):
with them live or any act I've worked with, was
create an event one and we were being offered I
remember Ron Del's and had got hold of my home
phone number and offered as Madison Square Garden and I
turned it down flat. And there were two reasons. I
knew the band were not ready to play a place

(01:38:31):
that big. They hadn't played anywhere bigger than three thousand
capacity at that point. And I also knew that as
the line up existed at the time with David K.
Nofler in it, it wasn't what they didn't really perform.

(01:38:52):
If you understand, they would kind of a bit rooted
to the spot mark would throw off mount sense of sweat,
which is where the head band came from. But uh so,
I what I did was I stuck with a club,
small theater. So we played, for instance, The Bottom Line

(01:39:13):
in New York for four nights, and we played The
Roxy in l A. At the end. When we were
at the Roxy, we'd already moved on to selecting a
producer for album number two and who should step forward
because he could certainly recognize a dollar bill when it
appeared in front of him. But Jerry Wexler, and Jerry

(01:39:38):
who was going to m sorry, he'd already done the
second record. That's right, we did the second record before
we came to America. He brought Dylan to one of
the shows, and of course Marks huge puge Dylan fan.
So they met and there was an interesting little aside

(01:40:00):
to this. While they were up we were in that
place on the rocks upstairs, and I was chatting to
Dylan's mate and I kind of said to him, I
said to him, well, what band are you in? And
he said, oh, I'm not in a band. I'm with
the Children of God. And I went, oh, really, I've
not heard of him. So this made no didn't. This

(01:40:21):
came into play a little while later. So anyway, we
finished that tour and Jerry had got Mark and our
original drama pick with us to go down to Muscle
Shoals to make Slow Train Coming. Now, just before that,
Mark was rehearsing out in Santa Monica at Dylan's place

(01:40:43):
and he called me up in London and he said, ed,
He said, all these songs are about God, and I
suddenly remembered the guy at the rock scene. And of
course Bob had become born again, which which Jerry, being Jewish,
couldn't get his head round at all. Jerry would constantly spit.

(01:41:06):
That was his thing, was spitting. So I didn't go
down there. I was too busy with the next phase
of what was going on. But they went down to
Muscle Shoals and I flew over to New York. I
called Mark up and I said, oh, I'll be down tomorrow.
He said, don't bother coming. I said why not. He said,
we're finished and I said, but you've only been there

(01:41:29):
five days. He said, Bob only plays a song twice.
So I kicked my heels for a few days and
went back to England and he followed fairly quickly after that,
and that became the Slow Train Coming record, and that
was you know, Bob's kind of born again announcement if

(01:41:54):
you like, but a great record irrelevant of the guy. Yeah, yeah,
So how do you get rid of of the other? Why?
You got some good questions? And the thing that the
situation between the two brothers was difficult from the get go.

(01:42:19):
It became increasingly difficult as the band got bigger, um
because Mark was emerging as a dictator. And I don't
say that in a negative way. I think all bands
needed dictator. Basically, the democracies and bands just don't work.

(01:42:41):
And David, who of course well as David said, I
remember in an interview afterwards, he said, it was pretty
tough having my brother constantly telling me what to do.
And the problem also was that Mark was Mark and
Pick with it us were equally matched in their talent

(01:43:03):
on their instruments. Pick was probably the best drummer we
ever had and they and John was very solid as
a bass player. And John did all of the band's
business with me, and he stopped them breaking up certainly
in the earlier years because he was always very sort
of sensible, as that's his personality. We got to doing

(01:43:27):
the making movies record in New York at the Power
Station with Jimmy Iven and Shelley Akas and there was
a they were recording Romeo and Juliette and there was
just a huge row, I mean like a total nuclear
mega row. And it ended up with David leaving the group.

(01:43:54):
He wasn't fired, it just wasn't working. So he came
back to England and Mark finished up the guitar parts
and said mcguinnis who was on that with the Paul
Schaefer band on Letterman Show. He did a bit of
guitar work on it as well. It just ran out

(01:44:14):
of steam. If if he not left, the group would
have disintegrated, and he was cool with what he missed
out on. I can't answer that question. I mean, I
haven't really had much to do with him. It was
a situation where I couldn't. I couldn't carry on working
with him. The first of all, I didn't consider he

(01:44:36):
was talented enough, and secondly, the sibling thing meant it
just in part it was just impossible. But I don't know,
I don't know whether he regrets it. I said he
received one quarter of the royalties on the first three albums,
first two albums, so he did okay financially okay. Ultimately
the band is going up. Meanwhile MTV becomes role Lide phenomena.

(01:45:02):
The band cuts money for nothing before the record is released.
Do you know you have this monster? And how do
you end up making the video? And also how do
you get stinged on the intro? Right? Okay, um, The
answer to the first part of that question is that

(01:45:23):
you never know anybody who says they can spot ahead.
To me, it's they've got their heads up their backsides.
Nobody knows what is going to be successful. They only
know what has been successful. So people do sequels, and
they do copies and so on. What happened with that
one was that after the Love of Gold record, which

(01:45:48):
was huge everywhere except the US because it only had
five tracks on it. And I must tell you there's
a song on they called Telegraph Road, which I think
runs from about fifteen minutes one of yeah it is
and Warn Brill has actually did a two and a
half minute edit that said to me, can we put

(01:46:08):
this out? And I remember saying to Carl Scott bless him.
I said, it's Carl that be silly. So we didn't
have a hit single of that. Private Investigations was a
huge hit all over the rest of the world, I
must say, to my considerable surprise since that's seven minutes long.
And what happened was we did another great long tour.

(01:46:30):
All these records, all these albums were accompanied by huge tours, yes,
but there was a point where you literally were playing
stadiums and you were literally the biggest touring act in
the world. And just a just coming to that in
your your chronology. What happened was that Mark started to

(01:46:52):
do a couple of other things. I mean, we did
the soundtracks for Local Hero and cal around about the
time of Love Over with gold Um with producer David Putnam,
who was an absolute delight to work with, and Um.
Somewhere in all of that we had a live album

(01:47:14):
out called Alchemy, and he was started producing other people Um,
and we got to a point. I remember he and
I we were in a car. We've been at film
Man's and Era's studio. We were driving back up to
London and he said, I've got some songs together. This

(01:47:35):
would have been in late eighty four. He said, can
you get the band back together? And those turned out
to be the songs that became the Brothers in Arms record.
And I remember going down to a rehearsal and I
heard money for Nothing for the first time. What what

(01:47:55):
struck me about it was I've done the first ever
European tour with zz Top and I remember thinking that
he probably had I don't know this, but I kind
of detected a bit of Billy Gibbons guitar sound on
that particular song. Did I think it was going to

(01:48:16):
be a big hit? I thought it might be do well,
but I had no I did had no idea it
was going to do that. Records done about that album
has done about thirty six million physical sales. So UM,
we've we we decided to go to Monsterrat to Georgea's studio.

(01:48:40):
UM made it mainly for the Sun and I remember
going over there and we didn't know even though Sting
was on the island now Mark and Stein. We've all
known each other for many many years when the Straight
started out the place he started out, and of course

(01:49:01):
I've known Miles Fat Miles is fact checking fact checking
his book with me and a couple of months ago
because you've got a book coming out soon, and uh,
we we didn't know Sting was on the island, and
one day he just the best chef on the Island
was the guy at the studio, Michael George. One day,

(01:49:24):
Sting showed up and um with Trudy and because he
wanted he wanted something decent to eat and we're having
dinner and Mark said to him and he said, I've
written this really stupid song about MTV. Do you fancy

(01:49:47):
singing on it? So they went downstairs and they came
up with the idea of putting I Want my MTV
on the front to the tune of Don't Stand So
Close to Me, and that became the record. And um,

(01:50:09):
I remember there was a there was a big headache
about that song because of the lyrics see the little
faggot with the earring and the makeup. Warner Brothers some
not everybody, and I have to say not not more Austin.
There were some people in Warner Brothers who wanted to
edit that there was a reference to American Express, which

(01:50:30):
people were, you know, this is going to be so
and so forth, but that everybody went with it. Although
funny enough that the first single off that record, which
people have forgotten, was Walk of Life, and that didn't
do anything until it came out on the back of

(01:50:51):
Money for Nothing, and then it became a big hit.
It actually outsold money for nothing, So that was that's
basically the story that it wasn't okay then that the
video was classic too with the animation. How did you
come up with a video? Well, that was done by
Steve Barron and he had done Michael Jackson's beat It,

(01:51:14):
the one with the lights under his feet, and he
basically came up with that idea. We tried. We did
have a moment where we were trying to find somebody
who would appear in that as a kind of redneck
sort of person, and I approached Buddy Rich and Rodney

(01:51:37):
Dangerfield and they both passed on it. There you go,
So we ended up. So we ended and this that
that that digital thing had just just literally just kind
of arrived. So we were shown, we were shown an
example of that, and we were already on tour on

(01:51:58):
the we were already started to turn that record that
all of the live footage that the band are in
on in that clip was shot in in Budapest in Hungary, Okay.
As we referenced earlier, record comes out far beyond anybody's
conception worldwide. Smash. What does it feel like? And how

(01:52:20):
you then decide to play stadiums and what's it like
being the biggest act in the world. Um ye, I
that's an almost unanswerable question. When you're on the roller coaster,
you're just hanging on. I mean, you don't realize what

(01:52:46):
what you just said until you can look at it
with hindsight. I knew we didn't actually play stadiums. We
played some outdoors, but we didn't. I preferred doing multiple arenas.
I think it's fairer on the audience. Did you play

(01:53:07):
stadium in in Israel? Though? Oh well that was the part. Yes, Sorry,
we're just mixing up your fragile Yeah, we played. We
played to a quarter of the entire population of Israel
over three shows. One was in a Roman amphitheater in
the middle of Jerusalem that was the closest to a
riot I've ever been involved in. And the other two

(01:53:29):
were in the Park, which would be the equivalent of
Central Park in New York, and we played that. We
filled that for two days and we played big outdoor shows.
In Australia, we did play. We played to eighty nine thousand,
six d and thirty two people in Auckland, which is
the largest gathering of people ever in the history of

(01:53:51):
the Islands of New Zealand, things like that. I could
rattle off silly statistics for age, okay, But interestingly, in
that era mid eaties, the biggest being in the world.
How much production did you curry and what we was
at a factor or was it still just the music?
It was the music really. I mean we had a
We had a great, great lighting man, Chas Harrington. Now

(01:54:15):
Chaz had started out as the engineer at the Demo
studio where they did the first demos. And one day
he was fiddling, he was doing monitors for us, and
he was fiddling with the lighting board and we didn't
have a lighting man. This is very early on, and
I said to him, do you want to do the lights?
And he became one of the world's leading lighting designers. Um,

(01:54:37):
we had the same crew we kept. We've always been
very low. We used the same trucking company lights, sound,
all the rest of it, and I kept Obviously the
crew had to grow, but the core of it sound
front of the house, UM Robert Collins who now does
whose sound? People like the monitor guy. They all the

(01:55:00):
core people. And by this point the band had metamorphosized
into a situation where we had really Mark and John
and the others were I'm going to call them side men,
but they were rather more than side men, and we
compensated them on a basis that was more than side men.

(01:55:21):
So they were a very That lineup on that Brothers
and Arms tour, in my view, is the best lineup
we ever had, and they consistently did two hundred and
shows in twelve months. It's amazing people are still alive.

(01:55:41):
But interesting, interestingly enough, Mark said to me once he
came in the office and he was looking at the
date sheet that I put together, and he pointed at
this day off. He should what's that for? I said,
that's for the crew. The band went and played a
think reception in a hotel on that day. Wow, okay,

(01:56:06):
what did you do with the money? There are issues
of tax, there's issue spending. Where did you put it?
What do you do with it? Are you talking about
me personally or to the degree you overtaking? Wow? Well,

(01:56:26):
the first thing is none of them actually no artists
have been involved with but certainly none of dire Straits
has acquired. Nobody's got a private plane, nobody's got a yacht.
Mark has a collection of classic cars we have. Everybody
ended up with nice homes, but I wouldn't say particularly exotic. U.

(01:56:54):
We yeah, we paid, we paid a lot of tax.
We decided to stay resident in the UK. Nobody he
went overseas or did any of that kind of stuff. Um.
It's interesting because you're saying that in the context of now,
because you've got to remember that everything was less than

(01:57:14):
Ticket prices were less, merchandising was less, record royalties were
actually record realties were better the Newtube. I mean, if
the bogey men back then with the record companies. Now
it's the internet providers on question. And you know, when
I do the thing with Irving tomorrow, I know this

(01:57:34):
is going to come up. Um. And I think that
the the money changes you, but what it really changes
is people's attitude towards you. Um, it's a long time
since I didn't pick up the bill in a restaurant,

(01:57:58):
so you have that. But you know, I mean, it's
churlish to complain about being successful. It did. It does
have an impact on your on your psyche definitely, apart
from anything else. You can't quite grasp it if you could.

(01:58:19):
I mean, you you've got me to explain my background
earlier on if you come from a background like that
Mark Mark. Mark's dad was an architect, his mom was
a school teacher. John's parents were in were farmers. Um,
we weren't. It's frightening. There is an element to it

(01:58:42):
that is frightening, and you kind of stash it away
pension funds. You would shove it all into pension fund
because they because they were they were very good tax
wise in this country, and because there's always this fear
all these all creative people are essentially insecure, and some
of them desperately so so you stash it away kind

(01:59:05):
of under the bed almost because you think it's going
to stop tomorrow. So I would say, and we all
had very good business advice. I did not use lawyers.
I did all the record deals, all the publishing deals,
and all of the tours outside of the US. I

(01:59:26):
did myself well. Obviously you were an expert in touring,
but especially even in that day, record deals were very
comprehensive in retrospect. Was but I just but my thing
was I had I had huge leverage, so I just
used to invent things. I just used to stick closes

(01:59:47):
in that were I used to tie record companies up
in knots. For instance. Give an example in the UK
m then not now, television advert sizing for records was
a big thing, but it was expensive, so the record
companies would want to recoup of the TV costs. So

(02:00:09):
I put them in as I put in clauses in
the deal that were so complicated they didn't know what
they were doing. And right now I can't say how
much straits technically, Oh what was polychrome now universal? But
it's saved hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds.

(02:00:30):
We never paid towards TV campaigns, were never paid towards videos. Okay,
did at what point? Or did? You renegotiated streets record
deal on every single album, And I renegotiated it backwards
as well as forwards, So the first album ended up
on the same royalty as the next one. Wow. But Bob,

(02:00:54):
this sounds I mean, it sounds grandiose. But I had
leverage if I had no you only get leverage through
commercial success if you're one of the things I also
realized was that the staff in record companies, not so
much at Warner Brothers, but certainly in the phonogram companies
and PolyGram. I got through seventeen managing directors in twenty

(02:01:16):
five years in the UK company. Nobody knew what the
previous lot had done. They lost all of our paperwork fantastic.
So they would ring up and they would say, we
can't find your contracts and I say, oh, hours is
in storage, it's in a it's in a box under
the Thames. I can't get it, which is total bullshit.

(02:01:39):
We did. We went for long periods with no contract.
We just had deal memos and I and I stole
somebody out of the royalties department at Phonogram to be
my in house accountant, so he knew exactly what that
was going to be. My next question, to what degree
did your audit frequently and you always found money? Nobody's

(02:02:04):
ever audited a record company and not found money. Okay, Ever,
in terms of Sunset deals, are you still getting paid
personally from these records? Now? I sold those rights like
rather like Irving's buying up publishing and Mecuri artist is
buying up anything that's warm. I sold those rights about

(02:02:25):
three or four years ago. But I was getting commission
in perpetuity on records and I had a very long
post term on publishing and again I got that after
managing them for about eighteen years. Why did you decide
to sell some personal reasons, m h and because I

(02:02:52):
could see that the catalog was I mean, it's still
doing well, but it's been a long time since Brothers
in Arms. I liked to be honest with you, I
was kind of I was still I was a bit
fed up having to administer it and so and so forth.
And I managed to get an extremely good deal. I mean,

(02:03:14):
if can you tell us sold into a company called
Royal to Exchange in Denver, and I got a very
very high multiple. Okay, so you have this band, it's
the biggest band in the world. Yet the band is
barely together. You know, most managers are doing everything to
keep the band together. So one thing in your mind

(02:03:36):
and own this is shaky what was going on in
your mind at that point. But when we got two
Brothers in Arms and the work that we did on
the back of that, which basically lasted for a year,

(02:03:59):
that level of success that you're talking about, I would
take issue with the biggest band in the world because
that's a bit like being the no No. I think
if you look, I remember the tour grossest, literally the
largest in the world. We can, but I can't quantify
all these other things perception when it comes to hard dollars.

(02:04:20):
That's a bit like being the fastest gunfighter in the West.
You know one day somebody's going to come around the
corner and shoot you. Yes, but you have a band
with no sex symbol from not saying you know trendy music.
So and you're as we stated earlier, it's not like
you're selling the show. You're selling the music. That's why

(02:04:42):
it was so noteworthy. I'm not blow and spoke up
your ass. For those of us were outside, it was
pretty astounding. It was pretty starting. For those of us
on the inside. I didn't think of it like that,
and honestly, a lot of people will when I'm watching
this will be surprised. I literally ever thought about the
money coming in. I constantly thought about the money going out,

(02:05:06):
because when you're running a thing like that, the overhead starts.
I mean, I've got white hair. I started off with
him with black hair. Um, you've had two people on
the road I had. I can't, I can't. I can't
remember the number of trucks, planes and all the rest
of it. They What happened was that when we got

(02:05:30):
to the end of that, which was eighty six April May,
no sooner as we finished. The mark was he was
like a greyhound out of the box. Straightaway is producing
Tina Turner, then he's doing something else, then he's doing
another film. It never stopped. He had an incredible work ethic.

(02:05:52):
I mean absolutely, it was hard to keep up with him.
And I had expanded my management company and I was
looking after Brian Ferry. Jerry Rafferty had gone by this time,
long long gone. We had a great Irish singer songwriter
called Paul Brady, and I was managing Scott Walker, from
whom I made three fifty pounds commission in seven years.

(02:06:17):
And Scott's no longer with us. But if he walked
into this room now and asked me to do it again,
I do it like a shot. You let's stop with
Brian Ferry for a second. You know, he's a very
debonair guy artistically at ten successful in America. But we're
constantly reading these stories how he's one of the richest
musicians in the UK. Rubbish. How did you know? That?

(02:06:40):
Is complete rubbish? I would say he's that's complete rubbish.
Well then let me ask you, since you were the manager,
how successful was he in the UK? He wasn't as
successful a both within Roxy Music and on his own.

(02:07:03):
But if you're talking about physical record sales, for instance,
on the record I worked on, that record would have
done maybe a hundred hundred it up on this end, No,
it's that's complete rubbish. I don't know who's writing that crap,
and that's no disrespect to Brian. I did a deal

(02:07:24):
for him, or I have finished off a deal in fact,
his previous management we're doing with virgin Um, which was
an extremely but he that they didn't presume they I think,
I hope I could be corrected on this. I think
they dropped him eventually. I mean he and I we
it didn't work. It just didn't gell because because he'd

(02:07:46):
been whether management company before me, who had a totally
different style to me. I don't do personals, I don't
do mortgages, I don't get people's cars repaired, I don't
get book their granny's on holiday. And I don't do divorces. Okay,
but talking about what you do do they're very hands

(02:08:06):
on creative managers like the two guys A C. Prime. Yeah,
there are there are I know, I know Peter very well. Yeah,
And then there are other people say, you go to
the studio, I'll make the record, but when it comes out,
I'll do I'll sell whatever. But the creative thing is
totally yours. You make decision even what's going to be
on the record. Where do you sit in there? Continuing?
I think because I had been a musician, or at

(02:08:29):
least I've been a drummer, because that's not necessarily the
same thing, um, and because the guy's industrates in particularly
when I talk about death strates, I really mean Martin
Offer and John Ellslie, and I really mean Mark. I
suppose we are roughly at the same age. We're from
the same background, we grew up in very similar parts
of the UK, and most significantly, we grew up listening

(02:08:51):
to the same stuff, all the stuff I was talking
about at the beginning. So when Mark and I went
started going to Nashville a lot and chet Atkins Blessing
opened the door for us to meet everybody. We were
like school kids. I mean, meeting the Everly Brothers for
us was like you couldn't it was. It was kind

(02:09:13):
of dream like and going. And remember he called me
one morning, pretty early in the morning, and he said,
what are you doing And I said, I'm ranking and
he said, we'll stop doing that. He said, We're going
to go and meet Scotty Moore. So I'm in the
lobby in five minutes. I mean, you know, this was
and I remember we went to Chech took us to

(02:09:34):
Studio B where Elvis had recorded, and I said to
check where did Elvis used to stand? And he pointed,
and Mark and I went and stood and hugged each other.
It was that kind of It was the romance thing
that was talking about earlier. And I think that one
of the things about Mark Noveler is that he was
very generous in including me a little bit, because obviously

(02:10:02):
I'm doing a different area of the job in the
creative process. So he would on more than one occasion
come into the office brandishing a guitar, sit down in
front of my desk, can play a song to me
and say what do you think of that? And I
can remember not in the office, but he remember him

(02:10:25):
when he the first time he played Robbio and Juliet
to me and I just stared at the floor I
had no idea what to say. And there's a line
in that song you and me babe, how about it?
I thought, what a great line, what fantastic lyric. And
I imagine John Landau has the same kind of I
know John's actually played guitar with Bruce and his band

(02:10:46):
and drums. I played drums with the notting Hillbillies for takeing. Okay,
how did that come about? So that we finished the
brothers dance thing? And I think as a kind of
kind of reaction to Mark is not very he's not

(02:11:11):
very comfortable with fame and celebrity. And in the same way,
when Bruce did is Nebraska record, there was a bit
of a I think it's a subconscious desire to take
the heat out of the situation, to try and get
it down from the stadiums that you're talking about, and
the two road crew and we didn't know their names,

(02:11:32):
that sort of stuff. And he's always been a fan
of I'm loosely going to call Americana roots music, blues folk,
all of that. And one day, um, he has a
little studio in a newshouse not not that far from here,
and and somebody said to me, somebody who worked for me,

(02:11:54):
said Mark, Mark's doing an album. I said what He said,
He's doing an album And this turned out to be
the first nothing Elbudis record. And he called me up
one day and he said, where are your drums? I
said there at the house. He said, I'll send Ron,
that's one of the roadies, round to get them and
we set them up in the downstairs bedroom, trail the

(02:12:18):
microphone out from the upstairs bedroom out of the window,
down the side of the building in and hung it
off the light. Then he played me Bewildered, which is
one of the songs on that record. He said, can
you play that? I said yeah. He said can you
play it with brushes? This is this is why he
got me in, because he doesn't know anybody who can

(02:12:38):
play brushes and I said yeah, I said yeah. So
I played it one take. He said, okay, next one,
played the next one, jud finished, did that, the sampled
me as well. I'm not saying I'm on every track.
And then a couple of nights later we were but

(02:13:00):
wine Bar and he said, okay, we're going to go
on tour him you're the drummer and I went no, no, no,
and I hang on a minute, Hang on a minute,
and said, I haven't played in a while. He said, now,
don't worry about that, is it just play time. Well,
of course, when we got into rehearsals, we rehearsed for
forty two days without a day off, from noon until

(02:13:22):
nine o'clock at night. We had one day off and
we played forty three shows without a day off, two
and a half hour set. And I'll tell you an
interesting thing. You'll be interested in this, Bob Mark because
he was a school teacher. At rehearsals, he'll have an
enormous blackboard and a piece of chalk and he draws

(02:13:43):
a grid on it, and in the in the left
hand side here there's this song list getting longer and
longer and longer. And if you don't get at the
end of the day, you have to play the songs.
And if you don't get a ticket in the box,
you don't go home. You play it until you get
a tick in the box. And I've seen dast rights

(02:14:05):
rehearsals when the road crew have been going because they
hadn't taken the box. Okay, So I had it in
with you and Mark well after they the last straights
tour that they on every street record, which I have
to say was a difficult period. That was the kind

(02:14:27):
of divorce tour. I will leave it at that, and
we sold it on. We just ran out of gas.
We litterally. I mean, we're good friends, we have a
respectful relationship. I have a good relationship with John and
some of the road crew in my office staff. But

(02:14:49):
we kind of it just ran its course. And I
think one of the tricks in life, especially if you
have the wherewithal to do this, is to recognize when
you've got to the cell by day, speaking of which
you've been married how many times? Twice? And I'm in
the middle of getting divorced. It'll probably come through tomorrow
fully enough. Did it reach its sale by date? Yes? Okay, Um, yeah,

(02:15:19):
that's yeah, that's that's a bit of a raw subject. Yes,
I mean, I mean, I think that no disrespect to
me the lady. Um, yeah, it's we put it in
a different way. Do you have someone in your life now? Okay,

(02:15:42):
because otherwise getting older it can be kind of amazing
being I have somebody who unfortunately is marooned in your
country and I have not seen her since March. As
they say that will end hopefully within you know, months,
but in any event, well not or not if not,
if the governor of Tech excess as his way, you know,

(02:16:04):
it's just astounding. We're fighting between states here. You know,
they keep it, you know, taking ship to California and Texas.
As far as him dropping all restrictions, you might as
well shoot people. But um, okay, you came up in
an error. It was all being developed as we started.
It's all been consolidated today. What do you feel about

(02:16:25):
the business today, the opportunities today, the music and landscape today.
I think if you're twenty years old and you're coming
into it, it's probably just as exciting as it was
for me. For me, I find the process of it.
You asked why Mark and I split up. It wasn't
just between me and him. I had become bored with

(02:16:51):
the process of it, the bureaucracy of it, if you like.
It seemed to me that the business part was, if
you had a kind of graph, the business part was
going up and the musical bit was coming down. But
that's a generational thing. You know. I was watching a

(02:17:13):
couple of panels of the panels today, and you know,
I've been doing interviewers for the ISLMC now for some
twenty years or so. It's been quite interesting because every
time I look at from the stage, the audience is
getting younger, obviously, and what they're interested in is what
applies to them now and in the future. They're not

(02:17:37):
that interested in the history of it, which I think
is a bit sad, but that's just the way it is.
So for instance, I'm into viewing Irving days off tomorrow
and rather than talk about the Eagles, because I don't
think I could stay awake. Um, we will have to
tackle some of the current stuff that's going on. And

(02:17:59):
he and I had a chat last night. Within two
minutes we've both fallen into exactly what we're going to
do tomorrow, and I stopped him. I stopped him because
I wanted to be spontaneous, right. But of course, with Irving,
unlike many people like MTV itself for the Internet killed it,
he kept changing with the generation. Oh yeah, a lot

(02:18:19):
of people get stuck in there are Okay, I think
we've come to the end of the feeling we've known.
I think some of the audience either needs to get
up and eat something or urinate. So I think we've
come to a natural stopping point here and anything. We
have a weekend, we can do what we can do.
Part two another time absolutely drilled down on one of
these areas. Anyway, this has been wonderful. Thanks thanks to

(02:18:42):
all the audience from I L m C. This is
a Bob left That's podcast signing on. Thank you. Thanks,

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Bob Lefsetz

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