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November 14, 2024 139 mins

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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Lessner's Podcast. My
guest today is the one and only Simon Napier Bell, writer, producer, manager, author,
jack of all trades. Simon, good to have you on
the podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
You missed a filmmaker for ten years. That's all I've
been doing. Actually I almost.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Put that in one I'm talking, but we'll talk about that.
You live in Thailand. Why do you live in Thailand?

Speaker 2 (00:38):
It's very central, you know, I work in UK and
Australia and China and America. Look at the map, find
a central point and you'll low to be in Thailand
or Hong Kong or Singapore. You know, it's it's twelve
hours to LA but it's twelve hours to London, twelve
hours to Aucklands and New Zealand. And it's warm, comfortable.
I love being in La without without February, without without

(01:03):
Decembine over February.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
It's okay, you have to give me a little more.
Was it love? Was it money?

Speaker 2 (01:10):
I'm sure you know my husband, my boyfriend husband is tied.
Now you've got to You've got a choice. When when
you live with somebody you have lived in their country.
I live in your country. I mean, that's the sensible
choice choice. If I sudden, Spain would be nice if
I'd met a Spanish guy, but I didn't. I met
a tiger. We lived in England for five or six years.

(01:32):
It was good, but we had we kept a place
in Thailand, and eventually, eventually, whenever there was any free time,
I'd be in Thailand because it's warmer or pleasant, nicer,
And and then you'd have a holiday and you said
we'd better go to England to make sure the place
is okay. And you think that's not no longer to
start a place as the liability, you know, So we

(01:53):
got rid of that, and I would say, I'm here
three months a year. I mean, I just got back
yesterday from Indonesia. Five days week after next to be
back in London making films. I'm traveling the whole time, okay.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
So if you're entirely in three months a year, are
you anywhere else for that amount of time?

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Maybe the UK wouldn't come to that, but it would
be the next most I do. All of I make
films that I'm mainly in the UK. But then nowadays
the filming is literally only the filming I mean you
go to the UK, you got to interview people. You
may talk to the editor. You don't even need to
do that there. It is just when you're interviewing people
on the film. So the UK is probably kept down

(02:34):
to six weeks. Even have I making two films a
year America very little. I come often, but not for
a long time. I have a show running in Las
Vegas who's been going for ten years, Raging the Rockcord.
So I look in to make sure it's going. Okay.
Well I know it's going okay. I don't look into
make sure it's going. I looking because I like looking
in and to remind them I exist. Forget it, but

(02:56):
I'm part of it. And China, well that was a
lot before COVID. It faded away. It's just beginning to
come back again now.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Okay, if you dropped. I mean, Americans are really ethnocentric.
You draft the average American or English speaking person in Thailand,
whether they feel it's comfortable or whether they say, wow,
this is completely different.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
It's interesting. You see a lot of these things on
TikTok and people say, oh god, this is so amazing
and different. You've never been to a place like this,
and other people say, it just feels comfortable. This is
where your background is. America is very easy to generalize
about Americans, and I often do, which is unfair. Now

(03:42):
go for it, But you're so completely culturally different, you know. Well,
the first time I ever went to America, I was
I was eighteen, nineteen twenty out. We press a position
and I get a up and hitchhiked around America. And
I was brought up in an upper meddy class English family,
but my father had been a member of the Communist Party.

(04:03):
This is the diverse peculiarity you get in the upper
middle class in British. He went to Oxford University and
joined the Communist Party. He wanted to fight for the underdog.
So I was brought up to the upper middle class,
left wing, very left wing, atheist, very much part of
my culture. Not to believe I was color prejudice. I

(04:24):
preferred duck skinned people. I preferred anybody who could possibly
be prejudiced against. You know, they would immediately go up
in my estimation. I'd feel safe, for more comfortable with
people who were not white, middle class. They were people
I was uncomfortable with. And I went to America and
I was I'd been pre trained to not like Republican Christians.

(04:46):
This is the essence of what was wrong with America.
And I hit track around America, and everywhere I went,
I'd find really kind, nice, generous, humorous, well educated people
who would invite me home for the weekend and say, oh,
why you hitchhiking? Come home, spent a couple of days
of the family. And there were always white Republican Christians,

(05:06):
the nicest you can be. And I hated that because
it maybe have to think new things too complicated.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Since we're going that far and you live halfway around
the world, what is the assessment of the political condition
in the United States from afar?

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Well, the one thing many Americans, I think most Americans
don't understand you do because you're hugely cosmopolitan, you're traveling,
you talk with people, is America's president. As the world's president,
we're all in your hands. And it is absolutely no
good thinking in an isolated way that other people don't

(05:46):
care about your president. And you know, it's a stugget
staggering to us that fifty percent of America doesn't understand
that the entire world doesn't just like Trump. They just
think it's incredible. A man who should probably be in
an old people's home, probably is a criminal, may not be,

(06:08):
that's probably mentally disadvantage in his entire life. That don't
mean recently it could be president and then having men
PRIs that you'd wanted president again, it's it doesn't it doesn't.
It doesn't bode well for America in general or for
the world in general. And Americans failed to understand that
you you it's not your matter in taking a leadership

(06:31):
you you are in a leadership position, whether you want
it or not. So it's very difficult for the rest
of the world to respect America when when fifty percent
may vor for Trump, hopefully not three weeks, we will
go back to respecting them because you'll come to your senses.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
Just because we're this far. What's your assessment of the
UK Brexit labor Tories.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Well, brexits most of pouring stupid thing which ever happened,
but they again a great look. Where did I see this?
A man phoned up a talk show and he was
planning that the talk show host had aligned British by
saying half the people in England behalf below average intelligence. Well,

(07:20):
half the people in Britain do have a low average intelligence,
as they do everywhere else in the world, and it's
always a pity when they can be swayed and rerex
It was just an insane thing to do, utterly, totally insane,
and pretty even the people who voted for it now
pretty well know it was and slowly, slowly will edge
back into being part of Europe.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
So tell me about this show in Vegas.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
It was a great idea. I had it typical of
my NonStop travel. I was sitting in the Purple Haze
Rock club in Bangalore about one in the morning, the
end of a very nice bottle of champagne. IM sitting alone,
and I've been listening to the DJ players endless stream

(08:06):
of records and by you mustn't counter culturists. Sometimes in
life you sit there amazingly every time one of your
favorite rock records finishes exactly the one you would have
chosen to put the covers off, and you think, God,
this DJ, he's wired. We're in a word to each other.
I've got to go and thank him. So I got
up to go for a pe. As I got up

(08:27):
to go to be I looked across to the DJ,
who I was going to go across and thank him
for having such exquisite taste, and it was a covers band.
Now I was a bit pissed. I'm sure, Champagne, but
you are meant to know the difference between covers and records,
especially if you've been in the business or in your life.
So when I got back and sat down, I pondered
on this. It was one of those incredibly clever Filipino bands.

(08:49):
You can play hugely loud feedback at just incredibly quiet levels,
and you know that they know they know how to
do all these things. And I sat down and I thought,
do you know what's missing in the world is great?
It's two hours of all your favorite rock played by
the greatest rock positions in the world. It's just never

(09:09):
been done. There are tribute bands, but they're not the
greatest rock positions. And so I got this idea. We
would have a show where every one of the greatest
rock positions who are not that minute on tour would
their band would form a band. And we have fifty
musicians and they are all top positions from top groups,
and tenor and leven are in the band at any

(09:31):
one time. You know, if we had Doug old Ritch
are a long time White State would go on tour.
So Doug would have to go on tour, and Tracy
Gunns would come in and traveling McDonald on base and
Jovia go on tour, and so we have this absolutely incredible,
top notch rock group playing everybody's favorite rocksms, including theirs.

(09:51):
Because this was the interesting thing to begin with, I
thought they won't want to do this, and then they
took Tracy guns who took me aside one and said,
I've You've given me a chance to play all the
songs I ever wanted to play. He said, if you're
a La Guns or White Snake, you can't go play
any Rolling Stone songs. You know you don't want to
let you. But my favorite songs too, like there everybody

(10:12):
else's and now we can play them. And so it's
amazing two hours every night of everybody's favorite music played
as well as it can be possibly played. And we
often have visiting rock stars. You're come in and listen them,
they're amazed.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
But where does this play.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
At the moment? Is that the hard Rock Cafe. It's
been at four different venues. We opened originally in what
was the less Long Hill, you know where Elvison everybody
had played, and then we moved to the Tropicana and
then the hard Rock Hotel and that closed and somewhere
else or on our fifth venue ten years, ten years continuously.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Oh okay, so what are the economics? How many shows
a week?

Speaker 2 (10:55):
We're doing four shows a week. We started. We were
very we started, and we were Harry Carl, my partner,
and a couple of no old British managers. People gave
us lots of advice and we didn't take it, which
is good. That's what you have to do that you
don't want to take too much advice. Mistakes are lovely.
But everybody said, you know, you need a couple of

(11:19):
million in the reserved or the show in Vegas. You
can't sell any tickets the first six months, and we said,
yeah we will, We've got this amazing show over the company.
What we had is, you can't because everybody books their
holiday in Vegas six months ahead, and they booked the
tickets for the shows they're going to see. So when
they get to Vegas, even if they want to see
your show, they're already booked up with other tickets. So
your first six months are horrific. You've got to fill

(11:40):
the show because if you don't fill it, everybody knows
it's a failure. And to fill it you have to pay.
It's not like giving away ten seats a night. You're
giving away eight hundred seats a night and you want
people to fill them. So you end up paying a
corporation companies who do this, This is how they make
their money. They'll fill your seats for you, and so
you pay for those seats to be filled. So for

(12:03):
at the end of six months, we had a good
big debt, a couple of million dollars debt, the amount
of money we were told we should have had to
start with. But bit by bit by bit, it's been
ten years now it's come round to being a very
very successful shodow and the debts got paid off and
it's making money and it's full every night.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Okay, So if what is the deal with the hotel?

Speaker 2 (12:28):
Uh, the deal with the hotel printing as much we have,
we get, we get the space, and we have to
make the show profitable. That's everywhere in Vegas. Hotels are
not they're not entrepreneurs, they're not promoters. They give you
the space you've got to run your show and make
it profitable.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Okay, so let's assume it is profitable. They get a cut.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
This is how you cut the deal. Normally they get
a cup, but not always. Some of them are really
happy just to have the bar continually full. You know
that the bar from a rock show is good money.
And at the Tropicana, for instance, I mean they'd never sold,
they'd never sold made so much from the bar as
they did with our show, and then they change it
for like a strip show, a girly show that was

(13:10):
full every night too, but nobody went and rank. You know,
rock fans strength lot. So everybody makes different deals for
different reasons. But basically, you are going to have to
find your own way of making a profit out of
the show from the room they give you.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Okay, so all the ticket revenue goes to the producer
of the show.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
That's never the case anywhere with anything. That are people
who sell tickets.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
Well that's why I'm asking. I know some stuff about Vegas,
but I'm talking to somebody else. I'll let you tell
the story.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Well, I don't know the current dealing. Follow my partner
made the deal and he would know. But if you
when you say all that to get money, if you
mean what you get after the ticket agency has taken
their percentages. Yeah, yeah, pretty well, yeah, pretty well?

Speaker 1 (13:57):
Okay, So would you open another show in Vegas? Are
one and done?

Speaker 2 (14:02):
We had Raiding a Rock Vault was followed by Rating
a Country Book, which we did in Branson, Missouri. Again
it was very successful. But Harry, my partner, runs it.
I don't know. We had the concept together, we put
it on together, and then he was abow decided to
live there and run it. He found going to Branson
back to Vegas every week, just you know. He did

(14:22):
it for two years. It was just killing and so
we stopped that show and we probably will reopen it
in Vegas at some stage. But Vegas isn't good on
studying country music, and we are going to Raiding the
Latin Vault, which we've had a great demand for. So
we may do two shows in the same venue, alternating nights.
So we may have two different venues doing two different shows.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
So if you're doing four shows a night, what's in
the theater the other night?

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Four shows? Four shows a week? Do you know? It varies?
Sometimes sometimes there's nothing, Sometimes there just incoming one night shows.
There have been nights I noticed I've noticed groups coming
in and playing one night. It's a hard rock cafe,
so they they've got groups coming in, but it's not
a constant. They'll be changing what's on each night.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
Okay, where is your residence for taxes? And what are
the tax implications being a citizen of the world.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
You mean for me, not that show that shows that
number that shows an American show. For me a complex.
I'm a non resident brit which means that I have
If I earn money in Britain, I have to pay
tax on it. But I've earned money outside of Britain,
I don't have to pay tax, unlike Americans who have
to pay American tax of money they earned in any country.

(15:47):
So if I earn money here in Asia, or if
I earn money anyway which is paid to me through
an Asian company or even direct to me, I'm not
liable for UK tax on that. But a lot of
money I owned the UK because I have a corporation
in the UK. That's really the biggest source of income.
I didn't when I first moved here. I thought I
have a corporation here and keep on my income out

(16:09):
of the UK, but it's difficult. People want to work
with the UK company. It's comfortable. Bank transfers go through easily,
and so in many ways, I don't really have much
tax money from being here. I'm pretty much paying UK tax,
but it's my choice. And if I do want to
make independent financial deals here with myself as a consultant,
when I work as a consultant, which I do quite often,

(16:31):
I get that paid directly to Thailand and then I
don't have to pay tax in the UK. If I
bring too much into Thailand, I would then have to
pay tax on that. But I have the advantage that
I'm old, and therefore Thailand sees me. It gives me.
I live here on a retirement visa, not at work visa,
and they want retired people to bring money in, so

(16:52):
they don't question much what money I'm bringing. I'm retired,
That's what they like. Old rich retired people bring in money.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
But there is tax to the country of Thailand.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
There is if I do the work in Thailand, but
I'm not doing any right. I've stayed really clear of
working in Thailand because that does bring up another thing.
Then I'm going to be subject to their tax and
I mean that's not I'm trying to avoid tax so much.
It's just another complication, another set of falls, another to
muddle up your life, you know.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
Okay, As a result of streaming, it is much more
a worldwide business than ever before. And it's not dominated
I'm talking about music here, not dominated by American acts.
Let's talk about movies. For a long time, big business
for Hollywood was export in China. Now it's more domestic

(17:50):
pictures in the rest of the world. Asia is your
area of focus. What do Americans in the rest of
the world not understand about what's going on in the
entertainment business.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
Americans understand less than Europeans, that's for sure. Though in China.
I mean, if you talk to people in the film
industry in America about China, of course they understand because
they got so close, they got so involved for a while.
They know to make a movie of success in China,
they have to have they have to bring in a
Chinese co producer or associate producer to consult with to

(18:26):
get the thing right. They've did that a lot. Two
or three years ago, they were doing it in every movie.
Now there's rather started to say let's forget Chinese market
for the moment, but you can't. It's vast. I mean,
the Chinese market alone will pay for your film. And
it's more looking the other way around. Can we fathom

(18:47):
what the Chinese really want from the American market? And
you know, if the economies are so huge and so
hopelessly interweld, it's ridiculous to think of Chinese as an enemy.
I know, it's the American way. You know, you're either
you're other part of us, or we're fighting with you.
But and there's it's always extraordinary in that you read

(19:09):
about the animosity between two countries, and you know the
violent disagreement about this and that, And also you're going
to find there are committees and people working between the
two countries very amicably and sensibly at exactly the same time.
And there's no doubt at all in my mind, I
don't have any fear at all. And there's been some

(19:30):
ultimate American Chinese conflict. You're intertwined enough with each other
in all in every aspect of all industries, manufacturing industries,
but essentially more important anything in the entertainment industry, that
you have to stay involved. And if you're intertwined in
the entertainment industry. You have a cross culturalization going on

(19:51):
the whole time. You understand each other better and better.
And I would say, you know, I still go to
China quite a lot, and it's increasing. Again. The problems
are over Chinese young people, even though they're pretty well
prevented from accessing Google and all the American ways of
finding out what's going on, they're very offa with what's

(20:14):
going on in America. They understand American culture very much
better than American kids understand Asian culture.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
This may be a little bit off your radar, but
there's a burgeoning electric car business in China. They recently
went into in Indonesia and own the market. You know,
there's taxes now in Europe and in the US trying
to keep these people out. Once you leave China, to

(20:44):
what degree do you feel the presence of China, whether
it be ownership, business or whatever.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
The company is doing the only way the ordinary person
feels it is the majority of cars on the road
in Southeast Asia, and not the majority.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
A large number, but it's gone from a very small
number to a very large number. I think it probably
be only a year before the majority are Chinese built
and the same in Europe. It doesn't shock us because
we remember when all the cars and iron became I'm
very old, when all the cars in the road and
ignorant were British, and then the Japanese cars started coming in.

(21:23):
So now we're just being shocked. To my god, you know,
the Chinese. Who ever thought they'd build a car, there's
just a set of Japanese. You have Chinese, and we're
permanently frightened. Told we ought to be frightened because they
could suddenly turn off every car or you know, they
have a switch where they could make all the cars
drive off cliffs or die or whatever. But that's science

(21:47):
fiction and stuff, because you know that this sort of
this sort of communal every time you see people believe
that a huge number of people can get together secretly
and do something. You know, it's about anyone who's managed
a group. You know, you can't get five people degree
to do one thing. You don't get hundreds of people
around the world to do something dastardly deed, all at

(22:09):
once in total secret. So I doubt very much that
we have much to fear from Chinese cars other than
competition to the current industry, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Okay, to people starting out who want to be managers
in the music business, what would your advice.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Be, Well, don't go to a school and learn how
to be a manager. I give talks a lot at universities,
and one of the first questions I asked is, you
know how many people here will actually want to go
in the music industry, because half the people in the
lecture will be taking it, of course, as a second course,
because they're actually going to be doctors or something had
about you know, twenty thirty people have put their hand
that would say how many want to be managers? And

(22:50):
ten five ten, and I SI, you're wasting your time
sitting here. Even listening to me today is a waste
of time. You just get up or leave this room
and find someone to manage. Doesn't matter who they are,
they can be the worst, most untalented person. Ever. You
won't learn anything about management until you start managing somebody.
You find out that it's a relationship between two people.

(23:11):
A great manager with a great artist might move on
to find he never manages a good artist again. And
you manage. It's a relationship. It has to work, and
you have to learn how to do how to have
that relationship with somebody. There's nothing a manager has to
do in terms of the business for his artist which
somebody else couldn't do for you. If you're a manager

(23:33):
and you don't know this, you don't but that you
may need to consult a lawyer or a publisher, an
expert in it. But that's what managements about. Management isn't
about knowing it, and management is about having the relationship
with the artist and taking from the artists the pressure
of dealing with an industry. And the sooner you start
doing it, the sooner you'll learn about it. And there's

(23:55):
nothing you learn about getting on with somebody other than
being with that person and finding out about it. So
first of all, go and find someone to manage good
or bad.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
Okay, you've managed household nme acts. Some acts stay with
the same manager their entire career. Some acts have had
multiple managers. To what degree when you manage an act,
are you worried about the act leaving you and to
what degree are you proactive to make sure that doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Well, everybody's different, So there's no generalization here because managers
have as many different personalities as there are people I've
never managed an act ever who I cared if they
left me, because managing an artist is a very, very
time consuming, emotional consuming thing. It's twenty four or seven.
It's not like any other job. I'm the person I

(24:45):
prefer projects. You know. The problem with management is it's
exactly that marriage. It doesn't stop. So you're never going
to get out of this until they leave you. And
so anytime an actor's left me for whatever I lose.
By them leaving me, I gain freedom. So it's never
bothered me any actors left me if thought, oh how lovely.

(25:07):
Now along with lovely, there's lots of income, loss of precision,
all those things. You have to balance them. But this
is me, it's not everybody else. And I do know
managers who are who go to great lengths to try
to make sure their groups can't leave them. By intertwining
their earnings together with the manager's earnings, that becomes difficult
to extract one from the other. By well, the classic

(25:31):
rock and roll one was to get hooked on drugs,
which you supply. That's a very tall true one. Nowadays,
it'd be more like to be a business involvement. Each
person's different. I just feel that if a group wants
to leave you, then you're not going to be able
to manage them. You know that the management contract can't
be held in law. I mean it's a personal services agreement.
Any personal services agreement can be broken. If you can

(25:53):
just establish their relationships, you can super damages. But if
you can establish the relationship is broken, you can walk
out out of a manager contract. Private side can walk
out of the other and then just super adapt for
damages the money which would have been earned that keep
the thing going. If you want to keep it going,
just make sure you keep it going. You know. Managers

(26:13):
start usually is almost saying the fingali sort of way
the artist comes to them and worship, saying, oh God,
this guy's wonderful. He's going to help you with this
and that, and he knows so much, and he's introducing
me to people, and he's getting me doers. He's making money.
But in the end of two or three years, the
manager will be a little more of the tea boy.
He may present to himself as something else. But as
the artist grows and makes money, and if he's been

(26:34):
well looked after by the manager and has good income,
the familiarity grows and the lack of necessity of that
manager grows. You know, the key, absolutely important thing a
manager does in their artist's life is break them. And
once the artist has broken, they can pretty well get

(26:55):
by without managers. They can hire key people, booking agents
and accountants, business advisors of all sorts, not have to
pay a percentage to sort of just pay the fees
required by those people. I'd only enjoy management at that level.
Every time I've broken a group, and to the very top,
I become bored because the fun is the challenge to

(27:16):
how you take this group into the industry, make the
industry work for the group, make the group successful. When
was excellent? Example once once they're the biggest group in
the world. What are you doing, You're just you're just
maintaining something. It's it's the difference between building a car
and driving a car. I like building them.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Okay, some managers have contracts. Some managers don't. What's your
philosophy there.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Well don't don't. I'll tell you why you agree. What's
going to It's a change of email saying I'm going
to get twenty percent just that and put down seven
or eight key points that's enough. Don't have a contract.
You have a contract one day sometime with anybody you're
with the whole time. Remember you, if you're managing a

(28:05):
group mup before or five, you only got to have
a conflict with one of them. And this will happen
if they go to the lawyer. We don't like Simon.
He made us nasty joke yesterday. He farted when im
golfriend was present, some stupid little thing. Just get rid
of my I hate him. And the lawyer says, well,
you can't get rid of the marriage because he farted.
You know you fart too. Think of something. Oh, I'll

(28:26):
say he was rude to my mother. That's not right.
Say he stole some money. Oh okay, we're saying sells
some money. And so the lawyer makes up some incredible,
terrible thing, because that's the lawyer's job to get the
artist out of the management contract. And the letter comes
and that insenses the manager. This is a complete lie.
I didn't do that. So he goes to his lawyer.

(28:46):
Within two days, during a conflict which will never be resolved,
you now hate each other, and the lawyers are very actress.
You continue to hate each other because there any money
from you. If you don't have a contract, they don't
have to do that. They just say you're fired and
they go home to bed. But next day they wake
up and think it's a bit difficult about Simon. I'll
call them up and see if I can make up.

(29:07):
So they call up and you say, sorry about last night.
That's okay, no contract, no conflict.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
Okay, but what about sunset clauses and collecting revenues for
your percentage on things you're involved in.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
Get on with something else. I'm not a normal This
is very American, but it is true. Americans are far
more concerned with money than Europeans, but plenty of Europeans
are too. I love money. Who doesn't have money. It's
great to have money, but I've never done anything to
make money. Money is that money is a lovely bonus

(29:44):
and doing things I enjoyed doing. And you know, if
people leave you say actually going your an initial little
agreement looking email the exchange. If you leave you I'll
take ten percent of our half the commission for the
next year. Thing I've fixed and I said, don't pay you.
They don't pay you. You know when people cheat me,

(30:04):
I don't go to court. I just say, is somebody,
don't do it again the rest of your life. There's
other things you can do.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
Let's go back to the beginning of what you said
about management relationships. Is that something DNA? Is it something
you can work on to what degree is that involved
with who to choose to manage or is it come
after that? Tell me more about establishing the relationship.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
I think it comes after that. You know that there's
an instinctive thing because it's music to want to manage
somebody who makes music you like. You know, if you
if I go to a club and sometimes guys playing
brilliant piano like oscapedis cross up. I'll have to manage
this guy. But I'm also you know, a business guan.
I look at it, well, you're not going to make

(30:58):
your money. You know, I need some teenager can hard
this thing, but looks straight and attracts girls. So see,
it isn't the immediate attraction musically. It's something more complex
than that. And often it's not not an immediate traction
in personality. I mean, if there's ammsia, dislike or revulsion insary,

(31:21):
it's not going to not going to work. But if
someone is a bit cool, a bit bland, a bit uninteresting.
But the project looks good, the music looks good. It's
worth getting to know that there are very few people
who really are uninteresting. I mean, you know, if anywhere
in the world you get the taxi and talk, you're
going to find something interesting to talk about with anybody.
They're always going to have some experience you haven't had.

(31:43):
So it's proactive you need to learn. The other thing
is no major performing artist ever. I used to say
ninety percent, but no, it have never come across it.
Every major performing artist was driven to become that by
some sort of trauma, some sort of traveler in their childhood,
some sort of angst which happened when they were young.

(32:04):
It might be the death of a parent or sibling,
or even a pet if they weren't given enough sympathy
for it. Or it could be much worse. It could
be some sort of child abuse. Something drives them into themselves,
makes them lonely. They didn't get love at a point
in their need, didn't get loved to someone they needed
it from a point in their life when they needed it,
and they were retreating to themselves. Being creative. It sort

(32:29):
of helps a permanent, nagging, mental upset in them, and
they're desperate for the love of an audience, and that's
that's what it's about. And there's no everybody you see
who's successful on stage. You go into their past, you
look at it, and that happened. I used to say,
it's ninety percent. I've never come across the ten percent
I'm allowing. Isn't like that. It's always there once you

(32:51):
look at it, and the manager is taking that on.
You know, don't think you're going to be a manager
and avoid that. That angst to upset and permanently unsettled
mental state the artist has is going to be given
to you to deal with, and you have to accept it,

(33:12):
enjoy having that problem. I suppose, I mean to some degree.
I suppose managers who are good must have some aspect
of what analysis has. There must be something in the
knownergy's background which which makes them sympathize and understand that
where it's not so acute. So perhaps even by being managers,
we're giving ourselves some sort of therapy. Possibly I haven't

(33:34):
delved into that too much, but it's very likely and
the best, the best managers. It's very interesting, you know,
you look at Roger who managed, who managed Tina Turner?
Roger Davis, Roger Davis man he managed three other major artists.
Everyone has the same background. Do you think Roger Davis
doesn't have the same background? I never even looked. Every

(33:55):
one of them had divorce spirits. I'm sure Roger Davis
had difficult and at least parents who fought. You know
that there must be some similarity. The pain or the
hurts or the room the results of the pain isn't
so acute and the manager, but I'm sure that understanding
of that emotional distress must be their managers successful managers.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
Okay, I one hundred percent agree with you on the acts,
but I take it one step further. The act is
looking for the love that they didn't get from their
family unit. Usually they become ultra successful. They have money,
they have relationships, they have houses, they have cars, but

(34:44):
they're still not happy. And once they realize that they
can never make another hit record. Can you comment on that?

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Well, still, as long as they're not happy, they'll probably
gone making hit records. The problem is that they get happy.
You know, I mean your blobby to manager, why don't
you help your artists? Why don't you centered a psychiatrist, Well,
we do, and they're nearly all bipolar are They're given
medication and the medication helps me. But you know, by
the time an artist is twenty five or thirty, he

(35:12):
is used to his is a disability. It's like being
partly blind or not having a limb. Learn to live
with it. They enjoy their disabilities. You know, many blind
people don't want to be given sights. You know, it's
extraordinary for people like us to believe that, but you know,
there are people who are deaf who don't want to
be given hearing, and people who are blind who don't
want the sight to be given to them, and people

(35:33):
live with it. Learn to love their disabilities. We have. Look,
we've all got some sort of disability as some sort
if you look into yourself and own up with some quirk,
something which you makes you a better person if you
didn't have it, but you like it. You learn to
live with it. And they enjoy their mental distress if
you like. They enjoy being able to deal with it.
They get medication for the help their bipolarism, but they

(35:55):
take it. They're not very creative, so they don't take it,
and then they have creative periods and then they're out
of their heads, so they do take it. Yeah, a
lot of people stop taking their bipolar medicine to be creative,
and then once they've created the basic outline of what
they want to do song wise or whatever it is,
they go back to taking it so they can now

(36:16):
edit it and polish it in a calmer form. The
difficulty for managers. If you really went to work improving
the mental health of your artists until they were completely
completely boring, they would be completely boring. There would be
no music. So I think you're wrong about that. As

(36:37):
long as they're still unhappy, they'll still make music. You know,
when you creating two artists is like taking an aspirint
or something ball stronger than harassment. It is at the
moment it soothes the distress.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
Okay, let's go to the half of what I said.
Only musical trends can change. But why do most acts
have a active, successful career and don't have a recording
hit thereafter?

Speaker 2 (37:12):
I think that's the public. I think the public like
artists at a certain point, a certain projection. You know
what when you create, when you create a record and
it's a huge shit ah, it's very this instance, quite

(37:35):
a long time ago that twenty years guys asked back
to work for Shelly Bassy, and I thought it's a
great idea. Yes, times she made another record and I
went off and found a couple of records. You want
to make a record. But it was very clear, very quickly,
that nobody wanted to record for her. But this was
an artist who went out for one hundred thousand pounds

(37:56):
a night, and I'm talking a long time ago. This
is huge, huge money. And continue to she could get
many many months or years ahead as you wanted. And
yet it was quite clear nobody was going to make
another record, but a successful record with so we buy.
We fall in love with an artist with a certain imagery,
a certain moment, a certain pain or aura which surrounds them,

(38:20):
and that's what we want, that's what we like. We're stuck.
We don't think of you name anassist to most of them.
We think of only only in that period. Very very
few transcend it. Some do, some do, at least for
life work they do. I mean, we love Mick Jagger
being eighty, it's extraordinary, but we do. I actually like

(38:42):
watching Mick Jagger at eighty now that I used to
love him when he was twenty five or thirty, but
I actually enjoy watching this old man is so utterly
brilliant on stage, and Bruce Springsteen the same mid seventies.
I like him at that. You're saying, now, can he
make a successful record? It's very difficult because that the

(39:03):
market which wanted that successful record as a market for
the same age as he was when you made it,
and we're not. It's the market which is the problem.
We're not receptive to a record by an old man.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
Okay, let's go back once again to the relationship. I
know of household name acts who fired their manager because
the manager didn't come out on the road, didn't come
out on the opening gig. To what degree? As a
manager you thinking that, you know, there's some act you're
connecting with multiple times a day. Other acts, you say,

(39:39):
I better call them or email them text in these days,
I better maintain the relationship otherwise is going to be
a bad result.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
It's a difficult one, Bob. If you if you want,
if you once start going to every gig by an artist,
that's what you're going to do the rest of your life,
you know, And and you don't be on the road.
Is that you've got tour manager for that, and that's
a waste of a manager's time. The same you know,
an artists on has complained why you've got two acts. Well,

(40:08):
every single contact I have anywhere in the world, through
any means, is a benefit to my management of you.
And you're going to benefit from you having two or
three or four us a'smare contact. But not to go
to an opening night, not to go with an a
portant event, not to turn up say once every five
or six gigs, that's really stupid too. And of course
they want to see you there. They're like you, they

(40:29):
support you, they feel more confident when you're around. They
want to tell you what problems they've had since you
were last around. I think not to go at all
is completely foolish, and to go all the time is
just it's not a benefit to anyone and it or
where you are and it will be an over familiarity
they don't want you will end up as a tea boy.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
Then, But how about other means of communication? Do you say, oh,
I haven't heard from so and so in three days,
I better make contact.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yeah, Well, assess them all you know, if you think
he's really happy that he hasn't heard from you for
three days, perhaps you leave alone for a bit. But look,
it's now different from a marriage, is it. You know,
you go away for two days and normally you don't
like to travel together, and know you're going to go

(41:19):
where somewhere on business two days, and actually you realize
you're both going to enjoy it. She's going to go
off with her girlfriends or do something. You're going to
be doing something different, and you make a judgment. Shall
I call the next day? Oh that's just too much?
Come on, we're together three hundred and sixty five days
a year. Surely two days apart will be nice. Enjoy
it and how many days do you let that go?

(41:39):
It's no difference. It's exactly the same group. And this
is the next Really a thing about managing a group
is you're managing four or five people and they're completely different.
One person in that group is going to be the
real classic artist type we're talking about who's driven the group,
who creates a group has got this huge angst hanging

(42:00):
over him, who's mentally disturbed, who has driven to be
performed because of something that's happened in Chanted. The other
three or four may be nothing more than just very
good craftsmen who surround him well and give him company,
who plays superbly well and wouldn't play so well without
him there. But they're not the same type of personality.
And you usually get one person in the group who

(42:21):
is an incredibly difficult mona, I mean, who dislikes everything
and grumbles. They may not be that important musically, but
they might be important glue to the group, and you
have to deal with all of them and say you're
dealing with their internal conflicts or thinking what's best for
each of them. You know, it's not as simple as

(42:43):
go and see the group five people. It may well
be talking to each one of them separately, some of
them more often than others.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
Okay, you've traveled the world, You've written books, you have
a great number of relationships. Did you consciously establish those
or is it just a matter of the people you
worked with that you maintain the relationships? How did you
hate to use this term? How did you grow your network?

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Wow? Travel eating out to me? I mean, you know,
I wrote a book. I'm coming to take you to lunch,
And I've often said that I did I think for
twenty or thirty years, I thought lunch was the key
thing to the music industry. Not eating. I mean, you know,

(43:34):
it's being in a restaurant. It's it's you go to
lunch and you're with somebody, you discuss something, very amicable surroundings,
you see other people, You call over to the other tatorle, hello,
you know what's going on? We must get together, we
see each other. It's the most casual way to expand
your relationship without without you know, being introduced to someone

(43:55):
is too is too sincere, too difficult to Now we've
got to sit down and talk because he's that man
just introduces. We've got to say something meaningful. You know,
I don't much like this guy, or maybe I could
like him in other sectences. But lunch, talking across for it,
talking across the restaurant, going to table or table, being
with the person you're with, it is to me it's

(44:17):
a finitive way of growing networks. It's not quick. You
can't do it for two weeks and suddenly have a network.
But you've done it for fifty years, you end up
knowing an awful lot of people. And I would have
thought half of all the people I know in the
music industry, I first met somewhere at a meal or
a dinner, and I probably wasn't having that dinner with
them through somebody I was there. Other people do it

(44:40):
by going to music business events, but I don't like
music business events. I've often actually said I don't quite
mean it, but I do mean it too. I've never
felt part of the music industry. I think what I
mean is I often haven't felt part of the music industry.
But the music industry is it's very split into two things.

(45:01):
Anything I've gone to a record I've said, anything I've
gone to a record company, I felt I was visiting
the music industry. When I left the record company, I
thought I was leaving the music industry. I've always felt that.
You know, the music industry is really two, two completely
different sections. So there is the corporate section, and the
corporate section would be the majors with Sony and Water
and Universal. Probably the collection Society is probably William Morris CIA.

(45:28):
And that is they're always like the government. That's that's
the civil service, that's the government. They set the rules,
this is how they do things. All they're interested in money. Yes,
they talk about music. But actually they don't give a
damn about music. They get about money, about making it work,
about huge amounts of money generates, and that's that's fine,
because that's the money we all need. That's the money

(45:48):
that the industry has and generates, and we other creative
forty percent can use. So they like the government. And
who wants to work for the government. It's not that
you don't need a government. We need a government. We
want a government, but there are there are an unelected
government unless you choose to wiegle you away and become
part of it. And the creative part of the industry
is what I love, the scams and the fun and

(46:09):
the music. But you know, the music and the scams
are equally fun because no major artist has ever been made,
or built or created without scams. The idea that the
Rolling Stones would have had hits just with the music,
without the imagery and things Andrew who Golden did with them,
or the Beatles could have had their hits without the
look and their hairstyle and the suits. Every major artist,

(46:32):
even the ones you think are the most austere or unscammed,
where a combination of image and music. That is how
the industry works. And I can't think of any act
I've ever seen where the music alone solved the act.
It was always the image with the music, and where
you think it wasn't the image, you think again, as
it was the lack of obvious flamboyance in the image

(46:54):
which made it, or always as a combination.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
Okay, you're a manager, what can you tell us about
the personality of someone who works for a label or agency?
The soul called myr quotes government.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
Well, usually their dream of leaving and getting their independence
and using what they've learned to work as an independent
outside of it. And often they do and they don't
get more interesting. They they either were boring to start with,
or the corporation has taking the edge off their soul.
Within the corporations, there are always one or two people who, really,

(47:41):
in my use of we don't belong in corporations. They dominate,
they take over, They run corporations in a way which
is so flamboyant that they really should have belonged to
the forty percent, you know, the water yetnikov or the God.
I'd leave us some people that they they're huge personalities
and they didn't need to be corporate. But the bulk
of the corporation are corporate, and they're dull, and they

(48:04):
depend on salaries, and they're not if they're cast off
from that their own functional world and tomorrow function well
within the corporation. It's either I find it very difficult
to get any joy from being in a corporation. At
the same time, I don't dislike them. We use them.

(48:24):
And the outside of the managers, the ultimate outside, goes
into the corporation to raid it. I mean, you go in,
you have to learn to manipulate it. A half of
your artists. And the other interesting fact, of course is
whereas managers never join the corporate world, the artists do.
The artists sign a contract with the corporate world, agreeing
to enter into it, become a part of everything they

(48:48):
ostensibly don't like. So the artists get tied into the
corporate world and the way the managers don't and compromise
every big artist. The idea that the artists don't compromise,
it's absurd. The bigger the artists is, the more they've compromised.
Because the artist needs the industry to make them what
they are, they're not going to get that audience they

(49:10):
need and crave so much without the industry doing it
for them. So the artists are the people who compromise.
There are many, many great singers and players and musicians
who are not big stars because they didn't compromise. So
it's the idea. The artist doesn't compromise, it's disrupt The
manager's there to oversee the degree of compromise, to help
the decrease the compromise, to keep them away from going

(49:33):
too far, and helping them get into it when they
don't want to.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
You talk about not feeling like you're a part of
the music industry, is that a result of the role
the manager independent or is that your personality which comes
from your background.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
My personality, for sure, I like being an outsider, you know,
I felt that about everything. You know. People say, is
it because you're gay? No, because it's going to help
feel part of the gay world. I mean I don't
like being part of it. Well, I don't like parties,
as you know. Well, when when Live Aid took place,

(50:13):
George was going to go and sing there, Andrew's going
to go and stay singing with him. All the managers
were told they could come. Everybody had to go by
helicopter because the roads are going to be blocked up
to Wembley all day. We had all been a helicopter
at ten o'clock in the morning and it would go
on till ten in the evening. And I just thought,
what an absolute fucking notemare I'm going to be stuck
for ten hours with all these people, can't go anywhere,

(50:36):
and you're backstage and they're going to be talking rubbish
and taking a caine and they'll be ghastly catering. You know,
I'm not. I'm not going there. I want nothing to
do with it. So I didn't go. That sort of
titrifies because you know, I missed something which is an
incredible occasion. I should have been it, but it just
looked horrible to me.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
Okay, in the book about your career, sour Mouth Sweet Bottom,
you talk a lot about Armed, Armed or it again.
Can you tell us some stories there.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
I loved the guy and he was not a corporate guy,
and it was extraordinary how he got dragged into the
corporate world. But he didn't. I mean he really he
worked within it and stayed out of it. He was
just he was as unusual for Americans in the music industry.
He was bilingual, he knew art books, was the most

(51:32):
sophisticated European style person. And that made him very agreeable
to me. And and he loved music, and he loved
the scam and the and the difficulty and that. You know,
he was more interested in going out with Mick Jagger
every night for a year to persuade him to sign

(51:54):
with the label than he was with having him on
the label. If you see what I mean. It was
the chase, it was the fun. There were more stories
revolving around the army was what's that wonderful story when
arm it one night and he calls up Mick and says, Mick,
I'm going to a party and mix it up. But

(52:16):
he'll come on, Mick, come to a party with me,
and so mix it okay? Is this after midnight? I'll
go to a party with you. There isn't a party,
so it's got to creative party, you know. So he
calls up Share and Shares and says, Share, we're going
to come around and see you. And Shares just started
an affair with with with David. What's not God? Wasn't
it gay? David? Please tell me the the.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
Well I'm thinking of Greg allman, I'm thinking of you know.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
The guy, and Share has just started an affair with
David Geffing is something in the straight period?

Speaker 1 (52:49):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (52:50):
Absolutely, And so arm It calls up to Share and says,
we're coming round. We're coming around for a drink and
Shares where it's two in the morning. I says, yeah, well,
what's wrong with that. Let's go around, And so Arbit
takes Mick around and some drunken countess he's found somewhere
else in the restaurant and they all turn up at
Shares place, and Shares somehow got herself together and come down, says,

(53:10):
and David gifts and say're looking very grumpy because they
just got into bed, and Army says. Arvid says to David,
uh get the champagne out, And David said, we hadn't
got there, and hit says, well, we never had that
problem where Sonny was here? Is there a sums up Arbit?

(53:32):
You know, he was out every night all night and
what he what he liked when anything else was being
able to walk into a corporate meeting at Warners at
nine in the morning or nine thirty in the morning,
a big meeting something you know, the monthly really important meeting,
and he'd been out all night drinking, drugging, listen to music, dancing,
and he could walk in and be as sharp and

(53:53):
as effective as all the others he enjoyed. He enjoyed
that more than anything else.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
And what about yetnikov.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
Look if I knew less well, manual quite well, but
he was less. He was just so he was just
so explosively. He loved his Jewishness and throwing out and
I always liked that. So, you know, I've got this
deficiency that I wasn't Jewish. I would loved to have

(54:27):
added the whole Jewish culture to all the things I am.
They have been gays great, but to have been Jewish,
imn have to be black and crippled and any anything
which will give you another another view of life. But
I was brought up, you know. I went to the
film Inustry when I was eighteen, and to everybody in
the film store, I was working with the Jewish. So
all day you were hearing Yiddish and Jewish jokes and

(54:50):
Jewish humor. And it seemed to me the way music
show business should be rung, you know, So I like that,
so very felt very comfortable around around Walter, and because
he's spent a long time with Alan Grabman, who was
another another person saying they'd spend hours on the found
together just just talking bullshit together, swearing and just saying.

(55:13):
And he talked in that he talked in a way
it wasn't really him, which so many people in that
position to, you know. He said, yeah, we got to
fuck the artists. We've got you know, we fucked the
artists before they fuck us. We've got to get this
go that. And of course he wasn't inside. He wasn't
like that at all. He loved artists. It was just
marcho businessman talk, but he was. He did get mad.

(55:38):
He out of control for years. I'm like, go to
New York and have a meeting, and after as I
go upstairs and see his water around there, said yeah,
go and just walk in and see water. And he'd
be putting cocaine in his vodka and it's only eleven
in the morning, and he'd sit there and say, who
can I know? You know, who can I and who
can I call up? Bloody David Gef And I don't

(56:00):
like that. I got to call him out. He him
called people up and just say things out of the
blue to absolutely infuriate them. You know, David, we were
pulling the record. We're not putting it out. You know.
He held the phone out. Let me hear David explain,
and he said, as okay, we'll put it out. He
had he was a wicked schoolboy, he really was.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
Okay, let's go back to the beginning. You're born in
the late thirties. Are you aware of World War two?
And what degree does the war in the aftermath affect
you as a person.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
Very late thirties, ninety thirty nine. Before the war started,
it started shortly afterwards. I was worried war because from
the age of two we were shipped out of London
because it wasn't safe, and so my mother and my
sister and I went to dev just quiet little Enclaven

(56:56):
by the sea, and my mother, both my mother and
my father had been orphans. Both in both cases they
were brought up by my mother by aunts and my
father by by justice mother, and they didn't know how
to be parents. So I don't be in that in
a bad way. It's a wonderful work. There was no costting,

(57:17):
there was no over control, and two or three I
look back and think, this really couldn't be possible. It
was possible because it had to be that year, because
it was in that place, which meant it was ninety
forty two or forty three. I could go out by
myself and go for walks at two or three years old,
and my mother tells stories about how it would come

(57:38):
to this. We were staying in a boarding house. You know,
boarding houses, Lunch is one till one point thirty. If
you're not there, there's no lunch, and this is wartime.
If you don't eat lunch, there's no food, el sweat,
that's it. You know, they've got rations. And it come
to one o'clock and I wasn't there, and she'd run
outside to see where I was, and she couldn't find me.
She'd run down the road around and then she would
get to the beach, which was ten minutes away, and

(57:58):
I'd be sitting on the further out rock, sitting gazing
out and see dreaming. You know, couldn't have been more
than three years old. This is acceptable in those days.
Parents allowed their children to wander off and fend for themselves.
So I was doing that by three or four. You
can imagine how independent I was for the time I
was five or six. They gave me a when the

(58:19):
war was over. I think it was my sixth birthday.
I was given a bicycle for my birthday and I
cycled to school and at weekends I could go out
all day at six years old. So after breakfast I'd
take the bike as long as I was back by
six o'clock in the evening, so I had ten hours.
So I worked out how far I could cycle in

(58:39):
five hours, and I go there. I'd be given a
sandwich when I got there and eat my sandwich and
cycle back again and so over the next year. The
time I was six or seven, I've been everywhere around
London where you could cycle in five hours and seven
years old eight years old doing this nowadays prison. I
think parents would go to prison for allowing that to happen.

(59:02):
There was a very funny situation when I was I
think I was eight, and I really wanted to go further.
I was bored with the five out limit, and one
day I just started out cycled Waxford, which is well
over the limit, and I didn't get there to four
in the afternoon. It was really going to be in trouble,
and so I went to the local police station and

(59:23):
I walked in very sweet, and I was eight year
old boy pushing his bike and said, excuse me, I've
been a very naughty boy. And the policeman looked at
what have you done, sonny, And I said, well, I'm
allowed to go cycle five hours and I've become too
far and it's four o'clock and I can't get home.
And he said, oh, well, my colleague is driving down
to London half an hour. He'll take you. And they

(59:44):
put the bike in the truck of the car and
they drove me down and then he stopped at the
end of my road so my parents wouldn't see the
police car. I'd be home by six o'clock. That's coercion.
Everybody loved little kids in those days. There was no
There was no feeling that I needed, but protection left
people get out and live their lives. By eleven or twelve,
I was going to jazz clubs in London and allowed

(01:00:07):
to go.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
Okay. America in the fifties was burgeoning. Of course, there
was racism, etc. But economically burgeoning. You talk to people
in England there were still rations. There might not be chocolate.
Were you feeling that lack? Were you envying America? Would

(01:00:29):
you do only realized it was bad when it got good?
What was your mindset back then in the fifties.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
I don't think America came into our thinking much. That.
Having said that, I remember in my scenes, I got
quite good at making money when I was eleven or
twelve the music business. I started in the music business
at eleven. I joined the church chop. The local church
had a choir, and if you sang in the church

(01:00:58):
service on a Sunday you got penny. You could be
the morning service or the evening service, you got one penny.
But where you made money is when there were weddings.
And on Saturdays there were weddings, and if you were
in the choir for the wedding, you could get a shilling.
And I was quite good, and I got to sing
the solo one week, and for singing the solo at

(01:01:22):
the wedding, you've got two shots, and they gave me
six months tips. So I want to put it in
new money because it's still in his sense, but it's
quite good money then. And I remember one time, so
I sang this out as well. So let me sing
the sellar. So now I was thinking weddings. There was
the there's two weddings on a Saturday. You had to
go to the Sunday service to be allowed to do

(01:01:42):
the wedding. So it was an hour and Sunday at
the service for a penny, and then two weddings of
a Sunday for four shillings, and then you get a
little bit tips, so five shillings. This is good money.
This is double what most kids would get for pocket money.
And then one day I had a cold and the
choir master was very strict. If you had a cold,
you must tell him and you you wouldn't be allowed
to sing. Everybody get the cold. And I didn't tell him,

(01:02:05):
and the solo sang it was the Lord's My Shepherd,
the Stanford version, which ends on a high note. Little
chorus to boy goes up to this very high note,
and I got my voice cracked with then some network
pulled off the high note despite the crack, and everything's
finished beautiful, and no mag the young couple getting married,

(01:02:28):
you know, thought, oh God, a beautiful solo at our
wedding's going to be terrible, and then no, it wasn't.
It was beautiful. I finished with the lovely note, and
they gave me five shillings tip. That's a double a
whole week's pocket and just for the tip. So every
time I sang the solo in Future, I always cracked
on the last note and then brought it right. So

(01:02:48):
I made a lot of money and then my voice broke,
So that was the end of that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
Okay, you were going to school, Were you popular? Were
you a lonerre you're a good student? Were you involved
in sports? What was that like?

Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
Nah? I wasn't. I wasn't popular or unpopular. I'd been
my parents because of my father's precumia politics. Income had
gone up and down. He was a documentary film director
and that was a pretty left wing sort of job,
so it didn't matter that he was passionately Communist, and
of course he confusably he talked posh. I mean, he

(01:03:24):
sounded like, you know, he just came out of Oxford University.
But things went up and down a bit financially, and
I started off after the war. Who came up to London.
I went to a very prosh private prep school and
then after a year the money ran out, so I
was sent to the local government school, which was horrific

(01:03:44):
for me. It was horrific, and I ride with the
wrong accent, because accents in England at everything, you know,
way more important than America. So they said, you know,
what's your what's your name? And I said that Napier Bell.
And that was after the toilet with me head down,
the toilet kicked my ass flash of the toilet until
I could so I was not your bell, Simon, not
your bell. But then everything's all right then for a while.

(01:04:09):
And then my dad made some more money and they
decided I ought to go to a private school again
because my education was getting had so arrived at the
private school and they say, what's your name? I said, Simon,
not your bell, and back off the toilet. You know,
posh kids is just as nasty naster kids. And very
soon I'd managed to become Simon Napier Bell. Okay, so
you change your accent all the time. So the time

(01:04:30):
I got to public school, I'd done that four times.
Public school being of course private school, the boarding school,
and so I'd learned to fit in. So I was
never liked or disliked. I was not aware of friends
being naturally friends in the most cases, just you knew

(01:04:51):
how to I knew how to avoid having my butt kicked.
And that's sort of about being nice to people but
not really liking them. And I think I didn't have
much of who I liked or disliked it. There's just
who might kick my butt and who wouldn't you know,
and then the ones who would how to avoid them,
making them do it and make them like the actual friends.
I probably only had two of three that I said

(01:05:13):
were real friends, and we're still friends after school when
I left, And I guess sure surely set me in
a good stead for being a manager. You know where
you've got to give the absolute middle ground between the
record company, which is rapacious corporate money making and the
artist who sort of wants to have a more delicate

(01:05:33):
sensitivity and create music was excellent training. The best managers
all seemed to come from some sort of training in
being middle ground. I mean, being gay too, is something
where you learn to present to faces just for your
own security. And or Miles Copeland, who is wonderful background
because his dad was the guy who invented CIA and

(01:05:53):
you said all over the world. So Miles every single
year found himself at a new school and a new
country with a language, and so he was so good
at making sure kids accepted him and you could get
in without getting hurt. It turned out to be a
brilliant manager.

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
What came first, Your career is a trumpeter or your
career in the film business?

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
Trumpeter. I was obsessed with jazz. I got a trumpet
for Christmas month. My brother got a trumpet for Christmas
and couldn't learn it, didn't even try to learn it.
Gave it to me. And at pop music we're talking
nineteen fifty one, pop music was appalling. It was all
it was all Mitch Mitchell's stuff. It was dreadful. You

(01:06:46):
know how much is that doggy in the window? And
I've known you were coming out of bakeder cake and
it was horrible, sentimental, gimmicky music. And I hated it,
but sort of like music, and I didn't know what
to like. And then someone turned me onto jazz, and
I can the same time I was given this trumpet,
so I completely fell in love with jazz, which was

(01:07:07):
then trad jazz. So you know Larry Louis Armstrong hot
five what seven classic jazz records, And then at that
stage in England, there was a big boost in traditional jazz.
There were amongst all this terrible American style sentimental pop
and its English cover versions, there were three jazz mans

(01:07:29):
who were doing very well in the popular music Chris
Barbera aka Built and Kenny Ball three Bees. And I
like that. I like jazz and kids, if they liked
music at all, really that's what they liked, because the
sentimental music wasn't for them. But there was no There
was no music amongst teenagers and those. It wasn't something

(01:07:52):
teenagers felt. A part of music was that for adults,
apart perhaps from the trad jazz. So I fell in
love with that. I learned everything was to learn about jazz.
Dozens of jazz records and books, and I read more
than anything else. I probably read as much as I listened.
I just loved the books on jazz. I had every

(01:08:12):
book there wasn't jazz, and I could tell you anything.
I mean I can't remember anything now that I could
tell you know what? What? What? What? The engineer at
the session when Louis Orstone's Hot five recorded this that
I was wearing and knew all about it. And then
bit by bit got to like modern jazz and liked

(01:08:32):
it even better and completely passionate about modern jazz. So
by the time I left school, my idea was to
be a jazz musician. I figured to be a jazz position,
that I had to come to America. Somehow I get
to America as the first problem, and then I had
to become black. I wasn't sure how I was going
to do that, but you know, I had this idea,
and I was a good teenage idea. I was going

(01:08:54):
to America. I was going to come a top black
jazz position. Then I got to America, it wasn't so easy.
I couldn't actually work in America, so I had to
go work in Canada because we couldn't get a green
card in America for that. But I managed to emigrate
to Canada, and I used to come every weekend come
down to New York if I when I was in

(01:09:15):
Toronto and listened to jazz and jazz pubs in New York,
and it was my whole world was obsessed with jazz.
And I had found the sad truth that to earn
a living as a trumpet player or any other musician,
it wasn't jazz. They didn't earn the living there that
even the great jazz editions I'd worshiped and had their

(01:09:36):
records in my room. While as a kids, most of
them that was a hobby. Most learned their money playing
in other bands, apart from very few, and so I
worked in a dockside tabn much like the Beatles didn't
have it. I worked in a strip club, and I
learned all the pop songs of the day because that's
what had to be played. And then this was an

(01:09:57):
extraordinary thing. Ten years had passed since I first introduced
at pop and how bad it was. I learned that
the pop songs of the day, now we're talking nineteen
sixty were very good, very well constructed, very interesting songs.
You listened to Frank Sinartis type someone kind of fly
with Me, you listen to Fat's Domino bluesy, jazzy influenced,

(01:10:21):
and I rather fell in love with pop.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
Okay, how did you get in the film business?

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Well, my dad was a documentary film director. So when
I went back to Indian when I finally gave up
trying to be a musician and realized I was not
going to be the greatest jazz position in the world.
Could only just earn a living playing average trumpet. I
got back to England and films seemed to be the

(01:10:49):
obvious thing to get into because because of what he'd done,
I know how to I knew how it worked, you know.
Even when I was a kid. I used to go
out on location with him and do the clapperboard or
even the film in the magazine camera. And I've worked
a bit the cutting rooms with him. So I went
back to England and managed to get a job in
the film industry as an assistant film editor. And that

(01:11:14):
was good because it was well paid and it put
me amongst affable, nice, intellectual thinking people.

Speaker 1 (01:11:23):
So what drove you into the music business?

Speaker 2 (01:11:29):
Well drove me I prior to going to America, I
had had a job after I left stool Them. Before
I went to America's position, I'd got a job as
Johnny Dankworth's band. And Johnny Dankworth was a big band,
and in the ninety fifties the equivalent of rock groups
were big bands. I mean there were probably thirty or

(01:11:49):
forty quite well known big bands, twelve to fifteen musicians, trumpet, brass,
sack section touring round UK, and one of the best
known Wasjohnny Dank, which was the most jazz influence band,
and I'd got a job as band boy, which is roady.
But they had a tour manager and a band boy.
See he had infected one roady at one tour manager

(01:12:11):
and you did all the hard work. You carried the
drums up three flights of stairs to a flat no empire,
and you set them up on stage and packed it
to when the bus rolled the joints. So what I'd
loved about that job, and they were never I was
hopefully they're going to let me play trumpet in the band.
Of course that didn't happen. But what I loved about

(01:12:32):
the job was in the bus every night going home,
they gossip and the music business gossip, which I really liked.
I thought, this is I want to be part of this.
So when I came back and worked in the film industry,
I was always thinking how nice it would be to
to somehow involve that get involved with that music business
gossip i'd heard. And when I started making quite good

(01:12:54):
money in the film industry, I started going to the
trendy clubs. It was middle of swinging London, and I
started meeting a lot of music business people and two
or three in the morning, I'd have to go home
because I had to be up and be in the
cutting rooms the next morning. And they'd all stay on,
you know. I'd say, how come you even stay on?
And they say, oh, the music business, you can go

(01:13:15):
to work when you want. And I thought, that's this
is a good business. I'm going to have to get
into this. And so I was looking for opportunities and
I've met this girl. We had a hugely good relationship
with Vicky Wickham. She was one of the booking agent
the booking producers for Already sterdy Go, which was the

(01:13:36):
television teenage program in the UK the music and we
have enormous good friends and one day she one day
she turned up and said, Dusty Springfield, who was a
friend of hers, has just come back from Italy with
a with a song she wants to record in English.
It's an Italian song and how does she get lyrics
for it? And I said, why don't we write them?

(01:13:59):
And Vicky he said, well, because we've never written lyrics
before as well throwing ever bothersly let's do. And so
we sat down and wrote the lyrics. Took an hour
or two and that was you don't have to say
you love me. So suddenly I was sort of in
the music business. The number one hit. And then the Yardbirds,

(01:14:20):
who were the third biggest group in the world after
the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, got fed up with
their manager because they never made their money or he
never gave them any money, and they asked VICKI, who
would she recommend to manage them? And she recommended me,
And so suddenly I had a call one day saying,
this is the Yardbird said, would you like to manage us? Yes? Please.

(01:14:44):
I love doing things I haven't done before, trying new things.
So suddenly, completely in over my head, I was managing
the Yardbirds, who've all been in the business five years,
were brilliant musicians, had four or five hit records, three
number one records, and I was their manager. It's really
flying by the city of pants, But I did, you know,

(01:15:07):
sometimes not knowing what you're doing, it's a big advantage.
Because they wanted money. That was the first thing I
went out and had done with them. They said, we've
got no money, but had four number ones. We haven't
got any money at all. We drive around to gigs
and this terrible old car and we're all living with
our parents still, which is absurd. And so I went

(01:15:30):
off to EMI, which is their record company, and I
told them very arrogantly, and I was I was twenty four,
twenty five. I was full of myself, quite quite sort
of appity, nasty, nasty, young chap. And I went into
EMI and I told them, your contract's not valid with
the others because it was made through their manager, and

(01:15:51):
so when they stopped being managed by him, he signed
a contract with you, not them, so it's not valid.
And I'm not sure if they thought that was right.
They talked with their lawyers, but they were sufficiently afraid
that I might be right. But they said, well, we're
negotiating a new contract. And I had no idea what
do you negotiate? I mean, this is the advantage of
not know. I didn't know what the parameters were. If

(01:16:14):
I had done, I have asked a lot, but not
beyond the parameters. But I didn't, so I just sort
of worked out my head what a records cost, having it?
Did they sell? Just take a percentage of that? And
I asked for a ridiculous amount of money and a
high percentage, way beyond anything they could possibly play and
they paid it. So I got the yard bloods. I mean,

(01:16:38):
it's only twenty five thousand pounds, but they'd only ever
paid the Beatles five thousand pounds. And I got a
royalty higher than the Beatles royalty because I didn't know,
and they didn't know. I didn't know, so they thought,
you know, the kid's come in here and get a stirrus.
Of course, later on I love they were only giving
us an advance on our own pipeline money. It was

(01:17:00):
you learn, but I did well, so the others are
pleased with that. So suddenly I was quite a good manager.
But then you know, I made a terrible mistake coming
home from a gig from we were in Paris. We
were walking back from the gig with Paul sam Smith,
who was the base player, and Paul said to me,
you know the thing I hate most of the whole

(01:17:21):
I really hate life work. I just can't stand it.
I hate traveling, I hate hotels, I hate being on stage,
I hate the girls screaming. I hate it. And I
didn't know that. Absolutely the first principal, most important job
of manager has is to keep your group together. There's
nothing more important. That's the one first golden rule of

(01:17:43):
being a manager keep your group together. I didn't know
that rule. So when he said he hated her, I said, oh,
you poor chap Pell for doing something you don't like.
You know, you should leave. We'll find somebody else. Don't worry,
and off he went. So I now I was managing
the third biggest rock group in the world. World was
no bass player, and what an idiot I was, Except

(01:18:06):
it worked out all right because I talked to the
group and they suggested a guitar player. They knew who
I happened to know because I'd been making demos of
songs I've been trying to write, and when I use
session musicians, I always booked this guitarist and he was
called Jimmy Page. But he was a session guitarist. He
played pop music. He played on all Herman Simon's records.

(01:18:28):
He played them the guitar servers you know from pop records.
And they all say he's a good guitar guitarist, bring
him in, And I said, you know, he is good.
And Jeff Beck and him were quite good friends. And
Jeff was yardless guitarist, brilliant, the brilliant rock guitarist in Britain,
and they all said bring him in and I said,

(01:18:48):
but he won't play bass, and they said, yes he will.
He's a good guy. So I went and talked to
Jimmy and he said, yeah, I come in. I'll play bass,
but I knew he wouldn't. And the second or third
gig in, he walked across the stage and handed his
bass to Chris, the rhythm guitarists, and took the Chris's
guitar and that was it. Now we had two lead guitarists.

(01:19:12):
And for a while or sometimes I would say, and
some nights this was totally brilliant. They stood either side
of the stage. There were no mixing desks in those days.
What you heard when you went to a gig came
off the stage. You were listed for the amps coming
off the stage with no mix And so they stood
either side of the station and they played all the
solos they already knew Jeff solos from the records. They
played them in unison, which gave a stereo effect which

(01:19:36):
you couldn't get any other way than actually have two
guitarists because there were no mixing desks, and it was
enormously impacted. I mean two they had stature, they knew
how to stand and play a guitar, push themselves into
the audience. And I booked them a tour with the
Rolling Stones, so the Stones supported by the Yards, and
there were many nights on the tour when the Yardbods

(01:19:57):
stole the show. They really had a tremendous force and energy.
But at the same time, they weren't happy because, you know,
Jimmy was having to play Jeff's solos, so he wasn't
his own thing, and Jeff was now sharing the limelight
with Jimmy, so they were There were good nights and
bad nights, and they got they got less and less

(01:20:18):
happy with it. And then I got them into a
movie blow up which was seen all over the world.
And I pulled that off by a stroke of you know,
I'm just a blagger. Really, I'm just I talk about scams,
but that's how music industry works. I was having dinner

(01:20:39):
one night with my friend Kit Lambert, who managed the
Who My Now Who had come up and they were
probably the fourth or fifth biggest group, and he was
a film but kid had also been in the film industry.
He worked in the cutting rooms and as a director,
and I was having dinner one night with him, and
he said, Antoni and his town and an Tonieri was

(01:20:59):
just hugely famous Italian film director. And I'd seen all
his films because my dad when I was a kid,
had maybe go and see all these Italian films. And
Kit said, he wants the Who to be in it's
a film about Swinging London. He wants the Who to
be in the film. And I was jealous. I mean
I wanted to go and Santierny. I want my group

(01:21:20):
to be in the film. And so Kit said that
he loves them because he lies to the destroyer equipment.
It's kneehelistic and that's going to go with this. Well,
how he sees Swinging London's niehelistic image. And so I
said to Kit, look that only the Who can do this,
So don't undersell. You've got to ask for ten thousand

(01:21:40):
pounds minimum. Remember I was talking about a shilling a
week for pocket money. Ten thousand pounds is like asking
two hundred three hundred thousand pounds now asked for ten
thousand pounds. And tell him this is your group. You
want editing control of that sequence. And Kit was all
fired up. He said, I will I will, and he did,

(01:22:02):
and Antoni only just threw him out of the meeting
just like that. And I was on the phone. However, Spantoni,
only you know what about my group, the Yardards. So
I went along to see him with his suite in
the Savoy Hotel and I explained that this smashing equipment,

(01:22:22):
which the who did really that was the Yardbirds did that.
The Yarbords did that. Originally they were the absolute masters
of smashing equipment. And then who stole it and it
became their actor. We thought, oh, well, if they wanted
to do it, we've done it for long enough. Now
we'll move onto something else. But actually, when it comes
to smashing equipment, we really we know, we know that
we taught them. And he said, oh, that's that's pretty good. Okay,

(01:22:44):
I'm interested in And he said how about money? I
said money. I said, we don't, we don't want paying
you're you know, you're the greatest film direction in the world.
Appear in one of your films. We can't ask for
money for that. And then he said editing. And I said, editing,
you be ashamed to even talk about with you. I
saw your films when I was eleven years old, you're

(01:23:07):
the master of filmmaking, and so we got the part,
and that was really good for all of the world.
Of the Yards were seen as playing in the Marque Club,
being the big group of three another. Okay, how did.

Speaker 1 (01:23:21):
This affect your relationship with Kit Limbert?

Speaker 2 (01:23:24):
Do you know where? You were best friends all our
lives and everything I did is what he would have
done to me, you know, and we did we we
did things to each other like that. After that. I
had a group later on called John's Children, and I
went on tour with them with the who we we

(01:23:46):
enjoyed doing. I mean, that was all part of being
a manager. He was the most extraordinary, vital, crazy guy
I ever knew. I'm probably the most intelligent. And I
can't remember it affecting a rusship at all. I mean
we probably had dinner again the next week. I don't
remember if we did, but we certainly never fell out.

Speaker 1 (01:24:17):
Okay, let's go back. What was your line of bs
that The Yardbirds, who were established act had a guy
Georgio who had been a club owner, so you could say, okay,
it was music business adjacent, but you're nowhere. How did
they decide to.

Speaker 2 (01:24:35):
Go with you? Well, I jumped a story the hard
time We've got. But after I met Vicki and we
wrote the words so you know how to say it up.
She said you ought to be a manager, and I
thought that's a good idea. So I put together a group.
I invented a group. It was a young girl, very cute,

(01:24:58):
eighteen nineteen year old, a black girl who was from Jamaica,
who I I'd used I was working in films that
I had to find a girl to sing a television commercial,
and I'd interviewed or auditioned a whole lot of kids,
and she was one of the ones I auditioned. So
she sang beautiful and I had kept her name. And

(01:25:18):
there was a young guy I knew who was about
the same age and the same height. He was blonde
and a very pretty looking and he danced awfully well.
You'd see him in clubs or was around town dancing
and moving really really well, very cute. And I thought,
if I'd put these two people together, it would be
an amazing image. A very blonde, pale skinned guy and

(01:25:40):
he's just black girl, and they're the same height. They
always black brothers and sisters or twins or something and
he'd be a very striking image. I knew that image
was going to be striking, But what I didn't know
is there had never been a mixed race act in England. Ever.
There had been black singers who sang with white dance fans,
but there had never been a actual mixed race act.

(01:26:02):
It just never occurred to me. I presume they hadn't
been in America either, I don't know, but England they hadn't.
And so I put this act together and it was
definitely a striking image just because of it. They looked
so great and a black and white thing looked and
I got a top photographer, I don't know it was,

(01:26:23):
but one of the top photographers to take a beautiful
portrait of them, and it was this is absurdity and
how you can play games with people. It was naked
from the shoulders up, so it was from there, literally
from the shoulders up, and there was only flesh to
be seen, but just below there was normal clothes. But

(01:26:45):
what you saw was a black and a white face
with shoulders black and white shoulders. And it was a
couple of beautiful pictures and I picked the best one,
and I had a big four by what the big
A five size which is double you know, the big
the big size picture twenty eight twenty by sixteen, and

(01:27:07):
I had this blown up, had one hundred of them
blown up on hard card and put into a big
envelope and then I went made a record with them,
which is a silly song which I wrote myself. I
was ready, I was already taking everything. I actually got
some good people and I didn't. I did it myself,
wrote my song, wrote this on myself, got a good
arranger in made an arrangement of it, made a record

(01:27:28):
with them, and it had a sort of nice, noisy,
brassy effect. In fact, I pinched the baseline of get
Off My Cloud and put it onto Trombones and it
was a good bouncy record and went along to EM
I persuaded them to release it, and then I put
that record into an envelope with this huge photograph and

(01:27:49):
sent it to every DJ and producer and everybody in
the country who had a show anything. And records were
sold on television and not on radio shows. Radio didn't
play many records. There was Parrot radio, but the BBC
didn't play records, and so you dependent on television performances

(01:28:09):
and I knew because we had a postal service in
those days that at six o'clock the next morning, every
single one of those people I said it to would
get woken up by the post because it wouldn't go
through the postposts because the thing was too wide, and
you know, everyone to get woken up. Sorry, GUF wouldn't
go through the let's sorry to wake you up. But
that was it. They were going to get that, they're
going to look at it. And then I just behaved despicably.

(01:28:31):
I really was revolting. I called every one of them, so,
are you going to play the record? And they said no.
And of course there were hundreds of singles coming out
every week. There were new records every week, just the
major artists alone, that people are having hits, the stones
and people were enough records to fill every possible slot
in every TV show and airwave, and so they always
made their polite comments that I'm terribly sorry and love

(01:28:54):
the song beautiful picture I haven't got and I just said,
you're racious, isn't it? Because she's black and he's white,
and and most TV producers and DJs, we've got pretty
liberal people. And I doubt if you'd have found one
racist amongst the whole bunch of them. But so I said,
I was very pretty nasty, and they all denied they were,

(01:29:15):
and they all played it. We got five television shows
and it went in the charts, and that's where the
Arbor said, oh, we want this guy to managers.

Speaker 1 (01:29:25):
How did it end with the yard Birds?

Speaker 2 (01:29:27):
Not? Well, what happened is in America. After they'd done
the tour of the Rolling Stones, they went off to America,
Jeff and Jimmy began not to get on very well,
and Jeff left halfway through the tour, and and so
that left four piece group who totally capable of playing

(01:29:48):
all the music because they didn't really Jeff and Jimmy
are playing in And so we had a four piece group,
and Jimmy began to exert himself very much what he wanted,
how he wanted to be. He wanted to change the
name of the group. The new yard Birds didn't seem
to matter much. But I also couldn't release the point
of it, and he wanted to bring in different people,

(01:30:12):
and bit by bit I could see this was going
to be Jimmy's group. And I didn't really mind. I mean,
it was I'd done the stupid thing of getting rid
of the key person. Paul Sammlesworth may have only been
the best player, but he was the original person behind
the group, and once he'd gone, despite Jeff being a

(01:30:32):
wall of a guitarist, it was Paul who drove the group.
And I was so stupid, you know, that I'd let
him go and Jimmy was now the dominant person in
the group and it was going to be Jimmy's group,
And that was the way it went. I mean, I
just decided I didn't want to bother with it. It
was too much fighting and arguing, so so I went

(01:30:54):
along to Mickey Well. I discussed it, but it was
quite amicable because at the time I just got with them.
If I don't manage you, who's going to produce you?
Because I've been producing them as well. It's the other
thing i'd done when I started managing was I went
straight and produced their first album, and I didn't know
much about that either, but I was lucky it turned
out turned out pretty good. But then they knew how
to produce themselves, so I said, well, at List, I

(01:31:18):
better get your producer, and they all thought Mickey most
would be a good idea because he produced the animals,
and Jimmy liked Mickey Most because Jimmy had made all
the Home and Silence records with him. So we went
up to see Mickey Most and Mickey said, yeah, he'd
like to produce the art buds. Who's going to balage you?
And I said, I'm quite happy to give it up
if you want someone else to manage them. And Nick's

(01:31:39):
business partner, well, I guess his protection was Peter Grant,
and he's well, Peter could do it, and so Peter
did it. And that's was Liz Zeppelin. So in terms
of managing the yard person the fact that they ceased
to exist at the end of my management, so I
was a failure. On the other hand, led Zeppelin wouldn't

(01:32:01):
have existed without this, so perhaps as a plus and
a minus there. And I kept Jeff Beck. I was
going to manage Jeff Beck and that went all right
for a bit, but that was difficult too because he
Jeff was not Jeff was never interested in the commercial
side of the music business. He just wanted to play

(01:32:22):
his guitar. And I like commerce, I like the Hols
and strap to the music bersins. I like the idea
of making a record and trying to make money and
promote it, making some of the just start and he hated.
Mickey also made his record High Host silver first single,
High Host silver Lining, which I thought was a brilliant record.
I still do today. I love the record, and Jeff

(01:32:44):
wouldn't sing it, So you think you have separated Jeff
from the group. We've got a hit record and Jeff
refused to perform it. These are very difficult people. Time
for life to get easier, so I moved on.

Speaker 1 (01:32:58):
Okay, this is all happened subsequent to the breaking of
the Beatles. To what degree did the Beatles change the
music industry, life and attitudes in the UK? And to
what degree were you conscious.

Speaker 2 (01:33:13):
Of that the Beatles created the music industry. The music
industry was a little a small business. Part of that,
you know. You have to remember until nineteen fifty five,
the music industry thrives. It made us money selling sheep music,
not records, and the top ten every week was the

(01:33:35):
top ten best selling pieces of sheet music. The idea
being you played them a home on the piano and
the lyrics you sang in the pub, and records were
secondary to that, and when rock and roll came along,
sheep music you couldn't make rock and roll playing sheep music.
And for the first time, records became more important. The

(01:33:56):
sound became of the record became more important than the song,
and so very quickly, within two years, the charts, both
in America and UK changed from being the top ten
pieces of sheep music to the top ten records. And
once the charts were the top ten records, the industry
completely changed because whereas previously, music publishers would try to

(01:34:19):
get as many people many recording artists as possible to
record their best songs so they had more and more
chances of selling the sheep music. Now when the chart
was the records, the publishers wanted only one person to
record each song because if there were two versions of it,
it would distill. It would diffuse the amount of records
being sold. Lets's like to get the chart. So the

(01:34:40):
artist became incredibly important. The great a good song was
taken to one artist, Will you record the song? Nobody
else can to record it, and that very quickly meant
that the artist was more important than the song. An
artist who'd had a big hit with this last record
would probably get a hit with his next record, even
if it wasn't a very good song. And very quickly

(01:35:00):
you didn't say what songs number one this week? You
say who is number one this week? And who? Rather
than what was the moment the industry changed. So by
the time the sixties came along, who was at the
top of the charts was the most important question. So
when the Beatles broke and became so huge and had

(01:35:21):
so many hits, often at the same time their name,
it was not the songs which were talked about. Was
the Beatles, the Beatles, the Beatles, Who was the key question?
And them being so huge really meant that the business
shifted from being not just a sheet news business but
to being a record business, but a business where you

(01:35:42):
sold people. You know, Suddenly people the record industry understood
that it wasn't even selling It wasn't any sheep news,
It wasn't even sell any records. It was selling artists.
And that's never changed since then. The record business is
about it's an artist business. It's a hit record hit
artist driven, But record business companies are about artists. Many
record companies won't even take a one off hit record anymore.

(01:36:05):
If they think you're going to one off hit, there's
nothing to support it in terms of artists. To stop
worth spending the money promoting it and making it a hit,
you haven't got something to continue with afterwards. So the
Beatles were there at that moment, but there were five
other groups waiting in the wings. You know, something had happened.
In ninety fifty five there was a record by a

(01:36:25):
guy called Nonnie Dolligan called Rock Island Line, which was
by a skiffle group. A skiffle group was the trad
jazz bands I mentioned earlier in the intervals. They had
to have intervals because they blew their lips out in
forty minutes of playing. So they waved their rhythm sections
forward and told the rootin section to sing a few songs.
And the songs they'd sing, because there were New Orleans

(01:36:46):
jazz bands, would be New Orleans songs that they sing,
the songs of Lead Belly and Big Bill brunsee the
Southern black blues songs. And they call these interval groups
skiffle groups, and one of them eventually had a hit record.
And whereas rock and roll from America, kids in England
like rock and roll, it was like movies. You liked
a good movie, you saw it, you listened to it,

(01:37:09):
but you didn't dispi to it. You didn't think you
could become that. It was too American, and it was
too produced, it was too wound up with a huge industry.
But skiffle was different. Skiffull was just a banjo player
who played acoustic guitar for the record, and a double
bass player and somebody banging on a washboard, just one
of those boards your women used to scrub their clothes

(01:37:29):
before washing machines. And when that became a hit, every
teenager in Ingland wanted to do the same thing. Everyone.
It was extraordinary. There was a moment of empowerment for
British teenagers because they had a very drab life. For
you mentioned that it was rationing and you couldn't get
chocolates if you wanted it. There was no teenage fashion,
there was no love of popular music. But suddenly here

(01:37:50):
was a British guy who couldn't sing very well. Singing
with virtually grew. Anyone could form a skiffle group. If
you could find a guitar, You could make a double
bass by shoving a broomstick and a box and putting
a nail on either end and putting one string on
it and plucking it. You can borry your mother's washboards.
You had a skiffle group. It was estimated. Within a

(01:38:12):
year of that record, it was estimated there were fifty
thousand teenage skiffle groups in England, and the year before
that record came out, only five thousand acoustic guitars were
sold in England and the year after two hundred and
fifty thousand, five thousand sat increase. And all these posicians
who later became famous, whether it was where it was

(01:38:35):
Rick Waitman and John or Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton,
every one of them started at thirteen fourteen years old
in akroup. The Beatles were the first. When Paul McCartney
joined John John already had a skiffle group and that's
what they called. And a skiffle group was pretty much

(01:38:55):
anybody who could play anything or had an instrument, you
can join great. They were just pick up groups of
fourteen fifteen run kids playing whatever they had. And by
the time the Beatles happened, the best of these groups
have been together for four or five years and they
some of them made some money and they swapped their
washboard for drum kits, and their homemade bass guitar for

(01:39:16):
an electric for electric bass, acoustic guitar for electric guitar,
and they music had morphed from country, southern black blues
to rhythm and blues, and so by the time you
got to nineteen fifty eight fifty nine sixty, rhythm was
a wash with incredibly good rhythm and blues groups, I mean,

(01:39:36):
playing absolutely as good as American groups, the difference being
instead of Black American cast you know, cast away from
society Black Americans, these were teenagers, were white post war
British teenagers. They were singing American songs. They weren't writing

(01:39:56):
their own. But lyrics made something different. With Eric Burdens
with the animals saying I'm a man, you know, he
didn't mean you know, I'm maybe black, but I'm still
a human being. He meant I'm eighteen and I'm horny.
You know that all the lyrics were given new meanings
just by different people singing them. And then they started
writing their own songs. And when they started writing their
own songs, that was when rock music started. That was

(01:40:18):
the beginning of rock music. You know, rock music is
a totally English thing. It didn't come from America. Rock
music came from America in the sense it was the
influence of rhythm and blues and black music, but it
was British teenagers that turned it into rock music. And
the Beatles were the first of those groups. But when
they happened in America wanted more. They were waiting them,
and there was the Rolling Stones and the Animals and

(01:40:41):
the Yards and Manfred Mann who drugs and the Kinks
just waited all ivn't ready five years of plain to go.

Speaker 1 (01:40:52):
Okay, going back to the lyrics for you Don't Have
to Say You Love Me and producing the first Yard
Brewers album, those generate royalties, did you get paid? And
where are those royalties today?

Speaker 2 (01:41:09):
Well they've long been eaten and splashed away, is what
I do? Do you? No?

Speaker 1 (01:41:15):
My question is do you still own those interests? No?

Speaker 2 (01:41:20):
Actually, Vicky and I sold our share to BMG about
seven or eight years ago, as people are doing these days.
But yes, Look it was a lousy deal because that
deals were lousy in those days. So the deal we
got was twelve and a half. The British publisher paid
us twelve and a half percent of their income the

(01:41:44):
song was published in Italy, they made a deal fifty
to fifty with the British publisher. The British public goers
twelve and a half percent of work they get, so
we got twelve and a half cent to fifty to fifty.
That was the normal deal in that says and then
Bricky and I split that twelve and a half percent
and then that never got changed. I mean, that was
the deal went around the world. It was still quite
a lot of money. I mean, it was nice money

(01:42:04):
to have coming in every month. On the good side,
it never changed and it's still paid. On the bad
side today we'd got four times as much money. Every
time you Don't Have to Say You Love Me was
sung in English anywhere in the world. The writer of
the Italian lyric got twice as much money as we
did for the lyrics just being sung. So that's how

(01:42:28):
these things go. But about ten years ago we sold
our share to EMI. And you know when you read
about people selling their catalogs, and every week we read
it SOMEDI are selling a catalog and they said they
sold their rights. They're not selling their rights. Their rights
are already with the publishing companies who rouginally signed them.
What they're selling is their flow of income, the flow

(01:42:50):
of the writer's income, the income they get from the
publisher for the writer's ship. That's what they sell, and
then thereafter the publisher doesn't have to pay money income.
And we sold that. We did quite a good deal
for it, about what it was worth we at the time.
For what we got, i'd said we'd have to live
another twelve years to regret it. We've got as much

(01:43:13):
as we'd definitly get in twelve years after that we'd
wish we hadn't sold it. Well, we've both lived another
twelve years, so hopefully we'll die soon and then we
won't have to regret it.

Speaker 1 (01:43:22):
Was it BMG or EMI?

Speaker 2 (01:43:24):
BMG?

Speaker 1 (01:43:26):
Okay, So how did you ultimately get involved with WIAM?

Speaker 2 (01:43:33):
Ultimately? Uh, WHAM came after Japan. I'd spent seven years
managing Japan, taking them from completely impossible to get a
deal with to probably being the most influential important group
in rock in Europe for British and Europe, not America.

(01:43:55):
And then they broke up and I thought, as enough,
I don't think I really want to do much more.
I don't I don't want to manage the other group.
But it's time to write books. I'm get to go
to Asia and write books. And before I could go,
I was a knock on the door and a guy
called Jazz Summers, who was also a manager was there.

(01:44:15):
And still somebody suggested I come and see you, and
I think we get on well and we ought to
manage together. He had had a group called Blue Zoo,
not not big by Japan, but they'd had number one
record and they've broken up and he was a bit
pissed off with that. So we had something in common there,
but I immediately didn't get on with And this is

(01:44:36):
a guy who was not on my wavelength, you know
he was. He was very aggressive, very confrontational. He spoke
deliberately down market, so he sounded pretty you know in
London and rough Later on I found that was part
of an act from him. But someone had a friend

(01:44:57):
of mutual friend that suggested he come and see me
in I thought we just to beliked to our mutual friend.
Let's try, so I said, let's go and have lunch.
I went around the road to the corners, the local
Chinese restaurant, and then halfway through lunch, I found he
could speak Chinese, so I thought, well, okay, he's not
not quite the person I thought he wants already knocked

(01:45:18):
on the door. Cantonies and his father had been in
the army, so he was brought up in an army background,
and they'd lived in Hong Kong when he was a kid.
Learned Cantonese, and he was a pretty clever, knowledgeable, thoughtful,

(01:45:39):
well read guy and didn't really have to speak the
way he spoke. It was sort of like a defense
in a tough world, you know. And we became incredibly
good friends. I'm in extraordinary good friends, and really learned
to work together in a clever way because I'm really
somebody who have voiced confrontation will always find a way

(01:45:59):
to solve a problem and be diplomatic, and he is
a person who can't stand that waste of time. And
so we learned when to use each other to solve problems,
which was needed.

Speaker 1 (01:46:09):
Okay, Jazz, who I did not know, talk to a
bit whatever, did not have a good reputation. Jazz is
six feet under. I don't know whether they was cremated
or buried.

Speaker 2 (01:46:22):
What was the real story there, Jazz, Yeah, there's a
real story. His dad was tough, rerigically tough. His dad.
One day, Jazz was coming home from school when he
was six years old, and two guys, older boys forty
eight year old, came up to him with a bit

(01:46:45):
of trained partner started hitting him and beating him up,
and just at that moment, his dad cycled by in
his bicycle. He broke off from the army at four
o'clock after he just came back. Just happened to see
that moment. And at the moment he came by, Jazz
was running away from two boys and crying, and his
father hit Jazz for running away and crying and then

(01:47:10):
tied him too his bike and made him run home
behind his bike for a punishment for not fighting the
two boys. Now you can you can imagine that creates
quite a that creates quite a tough child. And so
Jazz spent his life being extremely aggressive. But he achieved

(01:47:30):
a lot of things by being aggressive. And for instance,
you're going to jump forwards, I'm going to jump forwards,
but you can go through it in a minute. After
WAM played in China and we managed to pull off
what we could. Whole purpose of WAM playing in China
was to jump the forwards and get them into stadium
tours without waiting any longer. And everyone in America said

(01:47:52):
they're not ready for stadium tours. And we were signed
with Frank Barcelona, and Frank Barcelona said no, you're not
ready for tours, and Jazz did, yes, we are, this
is what I want you to book. And Frank said, well,
I'm not going to and Jazz, well, we're walking away
from you. I don't care if we've got a sign contract.
If you won't do what we want, why not with you?
And Frank's did you can't to Jazz that I can,

(01:48:14):
and he did so Jazz walked away, went to another
promoter and when he tried to book stadium tours, he
find that Frank had booked every single stadium for three
months ahead. Every stadium American He just put deposits down
and made there were no stadiums anywhere in America.

Speaker 3 (01:48:29):
And.

Speaker 2 (01:48:31):
Jazz got round there. He went to people who had alternatives.
We paid la race course. Phil Graham didn't like Frank Barcelona,
so he put us enter the venues. He had a
bit by bit, Jazz got round that I couldn't have
done that, you know, I'm a compromise, right. I just
sat down with Frank and said, well, maybe we'll wait
another year. And that probably would have lost with the

(01:48:54):
group because George and Andrew were very definite. After we
played China, we're doing stadium tours a great value to Jazz.
But my god, he could be an angry man, but
a good angry man. There was a great story when
he went to EMI one day, this is just after
we finished Manager, when he went to EMI to see

(01:49:14):
the new head of a A and R of one
of the divisions. And when he went in, the guy
and and I were sitting behind the desk, and he said, grumbling.
He said to Jazz, he said, this business is getting
taken over by quairs. And jazz leapt up in a fury,
grabbed the guy by his lapels, smashed him against the

(01:49:38):
wall and shouted, well, my wife's and my partner's are queer.
And he pushed him in a cupboard, slammed the door shut,
locked it, and threw the key out of the window
as the third floor window. I like that story. The
guy who's found forteen hours later by the cleaning pagers
very well soiled. So that's a good side of jazz

(01:49:58):
I like that.

Speaker 1 (01:50:06):
Okay, how did you get and how did you lose? Wham?

Speaker 2 (01:50:10):
Well, we got Wam by going after them. We got
Wham by we After this lunch, we sat down and talked.
We made a list of groups we'd like to manage.
We did not want to go look for new groups.
There was a waste of two years of your life
for stunning new groups, trying to break them, failing to
get another one. We wanted a group who already had

(01:50:31):
a hit or two and whom we could then take
to real megastartum. And we made quite a good list.
There was a Culture Club, and there was the Rhythmics.
Three or four groups who were about at that level,
and one was Wham. And when we looked at the list,
we both knew Whams the one we both seen them
on Top of the Pops. We've seen their first Top

(01:50:52):
of the Pops. It was extraordinary performance, really brilliant performance
and quite out of the ordinary. This wonderful living, this
sort of you know, the two young lads around town
that Starsky in half Gymmetry the Romance Review call it,
and such slickness. And they knew how to work to
camera and a wage this is the first time they've
ever been on television. They look like they've been doing

(01:51:13):
it every week for the lads, and so he said,
let's chase after them. And we knew the publishers, Morrison Lee.
He went to see them, and they thought we'd be
a good idea. They knew Jazz, they knew his aggressiveness,
his absolutely desire not to fail, and he took on.
They knew me from my reputation, particularly with Japan. Sudden

(01:51:35):
the introducers to the group, and it was very interesting
because it's true when you saw WAM on television on
top of the Pops, they looked like a couple of twins.
I don't mean they looked physically alike, but they were
these two, you know, they were the lads around town.
They were out the club, the two club, two young clubbers,
best friends. And when they came in the apartment, came

(01:51:59):
into my part, they were the absolutely opposite of each other.
I mean they were not like that. Andrew was like that.
That image was Andrew. Andrew was the image for both
of them. George is absolutely not he He came in,
and Andrew came in and he said down. He put
his feet up on my coffee table and picked up
a book on the I've written my first first book,

(01:52:19):
I wrote. He was reading a bit, said, oh, George
is Simon. Look at this. Simon was drunk and has
sex all through the sixties. That's the guy we want,
you know, we want something like that. George is sitting
in a very uptight I want to know who you've managed,
what you've done, what you would do with us. He said,
you've got to We've got to have the best accountants.
And I said, well, of course you get the best,

(01:52:41):
and we want two lots of accountants. And I said,
what's the other lot for? What to keep an eye
on the first lot. I mean, he was a very
very cautious, untrusted, untrusting person, and I could see it
once he really had come from exactly the background talking
about an artist who has not trusted adults. He's had

(01:53:01):
a he has had in his childhood, definitely not the
costages surrounding which Andrew had had. It was a totally relaxed,
easy going, charming gun. But that was excellent. What a
great combination. I mean, Andrew who could provide this image
and this charm and George was so different A bit

(01:53:22):
like Chas Night. You know, it was very, very different
from each So we took them on and George said,
we went to dinner and George said the first night,
at the first dinner, were you're going to be the
biggest group in the world, and you've got one year.
I just laughed. I said, the biggest group in the
world has to be the biggest group in America, because

(01:53:43):
it's sixty percent of the world market. And no British
group's ever broken in America under three or four years.
Even the Beatles took three or four years. That's completely impossible.
MTV was just starting, but there was no national press,
there was no leak without a MPY. Prior to that,
there was no national word from merging group. It had
to be done piece, region by region. I'd done it

(01:54:06):
before the yardburs. It took time, and George so we'll
take it or leave it one year or don't manage us.
So of course we say, yeah, okay, one year. And
then as the dinner went on, Jazz or somebody had
the idea, why not make you the first group ever
to play in communist China, the first Western pop group
ever to play in communist China, and George like that.

(01:54:27):
He said, yeah, do that okay, great, fantastic settled and
that was it. And then two weeks later I was
in Beijing, sitting in a seedy hotel having just getting it.
Was amazing because you couldn't get visa for China in
the sense unless you were part of an organized group
invited by the government. But I someoney told me a

(01:54:51):
place in Hong Kong I could go and buy a
visa for a few hundred dollars and get across the border.
And if you take the train to guang Jo and
you go to the left hand gate immigration gate way
for the guy called Juan Joe and show him your
passport and he'll slip something in and watchur in the country.
So I got in the country. I got himself to Beijing,
was sitting in this hotel and thinking, I want Wham

(01:55:11):
to come and play in China. Who can give permission?
And why would they? And the only person I can
think of food give permission was just happened to be
the head of Shana Danshalping, chairman of the Commorts Party,
probably the second or third most important person in the world.
An absurd thing to try to be doing and why

(01:55:31):
would he let them in? But you know, I thought
a lot. I managed to get in touch with the minister.
I told him what I was doing. He told me
that China was opening up and they wanted to get
lots of foreign investment, and I said, you know, the
best possible way, the best possible way to get foreign
investment is to invite a teenage pop group to come

(01:55:55):
and play in China. Because everyone in the world knows
that teenagers are subversive like the older generation, they want
to change things, they want to do things to Harry,
they always work against the established order for China, to
invite at western group to come to China would really
show such confidence in yourself, such an ability to open

(01:56:15):
up and accept new ideas. Your foreign investment were absolutely pouring.
And he wasn't convinced. And I went back every month
for fifteen months, meeting more and more ministers and trying
to persuade them, and eventually persuaded them, and eventually I
was taken to an office where the minister got on

(01:56:38):
a red phone which went directly to Danshao being they
spoke and he told me, yes, you're invited to come
and play this gig, which was an astonishing thing to
pull off. I'm looking back now, I'm more amazed than
I was at the time. And yes, Wang got to
play those stadium tours as a result, and China got

(01:57:00):
its investment because I went back to Beijing a year
later and the drab, dull, old fashioned Beijing which was
there in nineteen eighty five when I first went, with
no modern buildings at all, and just a single level,
five story buildings on both sides of these wide avenues,
so the whole thing was like huge prison yards. I

(01:57:21):
went back a year later and everywhere it was like
a building, absolutely everywhere. And I went to see the
minister who invited me, and he said it started the meeting.
Within a month of that of your gig, the foreign
investments poured in and it's doubled and continued to double
every year. So that was quite fun to have been
part of creating modern Beaiging.

Speaker 1 (01:57:45):
So how did you lose Willem Well?

Speaker 2 (01:57:48):
George said to me one day, I'm coming back from
a CBS conference in Bournemouth. In the limousine, he said,
when I go, So we'd already agreed he was going
to go on for six or months that was always
that was always pre arranged. He bought the date forward,
he'd always wrenered it. George said to me, when I
go solo, I don't want Jazz to be part of

(01:58:11):
the management. I just want you. And I said, you
can't tell me that. I can't do that. I can't
go to Jazz and say you're not going to manage
what George with me. He's been half of this management.
Everything has happened has been half because of him. And
I can't do it anymore than if I told you
right now you had to get rid of Andrew. You're

(01:58:32):
planning to leave Andrew. But if I told you you
had to, you wouldn't do it. And George, it's quite
He's okay. He said, no, I understand you can't, but
if you don't, you can't manage it. I said, well
that's it. I won't manage it because I'm not prepared
to go and tell Jazz. I'm going to do it
by myself. And that was it. Really we became. We

(01:58:53):
were quite amicable about it. And then I went and
told Jazz that we would not be managing. Wow, because
I didn't say I didn't say. George said it was
him I said, he doesn't want us to manage it,
and so Jazz said, well, let's sell the company while
we're still managiner. And so we made a deal with
Harvey Goldsmith, who was the biggest promoter in the UK

(01:59:14):
and who promoted all of Wham's concerts in the UK,
to sell our company to Harvey Goldsmith. It was quite
a good deal and we get a capital son out
of it. But the problem was Harvey Goldsmith had just
sold his company to a guy called soul Kertzter who
owned Sun City in South Africa. I didn't really bother

(01:59:38):
as much because we were selling our company to Harvey
and he hadn't sold his company to sun City. He
sold his company to the guy who also owned sun City.
But when the deal went through, the Hollywood Reporter carried
a headline which said WHAM Management sell to sun City,
and George called me up. So I can't live with it.

(01:59:59):
I can't live with that headline. I'm going to have
to fire and again was quite amiable. It's strange people
like to think that these things are always huge routes.
But I went and had lunch with him and I said, well,
it's too late now, and I can't get rid of
the headline. It's there, And he said, I just wish
you'd done it more quietly, but I'm going to have
to fire. So he did. But we were actually at

(02:00:20):
that time, I, Jazz and I were also managing a
guy called David Austin, who was one of George's best friends.
And George said, don't I still manage I still managed
to work with you, and well, I'll produce David Austin.
So a week after he ostensibly farre us, you know,
I went up to em I to talk about David

(02:00:42):
Austin debit. David aside with George and everyone hear Min
was amazed, how can we fired you? Last week? He
was sitting here talking. But you know, he fired me
from being a manager. He didn't farm for being a friend.
You know, it's just completely different things. There were good reasons,
and he was right. I mean, he couldn't have headline
is going to just worry or destroy his career. And

(02:01:04):
so that was it. And then Harvey, I guess unsold
his company and we unsold it. That was it. They
didn't worry me. I couldn't have broken George in America
like he was broken I knew George was breaking up
WHAM really because he was gay and he couldn't face
the pressure of permanently having to dodge around and tell

(02:01:26):
semi lies about his sexuality. And once he left, once
he broke them up, the whole idea for me was
to become himself. And when he broke them up and
then created a new image for himself which was even
more non gay and even more heterosexual than the image
had had, I told him, and we were still talking,

(02:01:50):
that's going to kill you. You hate it. You can't
live with that image. And if I'd been managing him,
I just I wouldn't have gone managing it anyway, or
I just decided not to do it, and I could
see what was going to happen. I mean, a year
of huge success and I you know, the two managers
of the American Managers GOT did a brilliant job for
him and kept him going for that year Getting. He

(02:02:11):
was getting more and more unhappy throughout the whole period,
and by the end of the year. I mean, I
did tell the story in the film I made about it,
but at the end of the year he was he
was pretty I'm unable to go on with it. He
knew he'd done emotionally the wrong thing. But the other hand,
he had sixty million dollars in the back and that
was him secure for the rest of his life, which

(02:02:32):
is something he did want. So I had no regrets
because I don't look at him think I could have
done that. There's no way I could have gone through
that year with them in America.

Speaker 1 (02:02:43):
Did you foresee his death at a young age?

Speaker 2 (02:02:47):
Yeah, I mean that's a very general question that's easy
to answer, yes, because he had that about him. He
had about him somebody who would. I think he forcedaw
And when people foresaw things, it's sort of like wanting it,
isn't it. I mean, you know, a large part of
an artist, an artist like George, he's not the only one.

(02:03:09):
He's an artist in creating songs, as an artist in
creating his image and his videos and the general look,
but he's also his artist in creating the overall arc
of his story life. And he saw the arc of
a life story and he was far too aware not
to be not to understand what a good a good

(02:03:30):
story arc for an artist is. And he's had two
bipolar relatives who'd committed suicide, and he was pretty obsessed
with the idea that he might get driven to suicide.
So whether he was suicidal or not, he did have
in mind that he might die not a natural death

(02:03:52):
at an old age. He always had that in mind,
and he was not He was quite forthcoming about talking
about it. He was a very perceptive person about himself,
and I think he foresaw himself as not getting very old.
Oh Gary old, being seventy or eighty. You know when

(02:04:13):
when his voice as he did that, when he did
that sympoonicatur, he looked at him and thought, you know,
he could be a Charles dazibor, he could be a
Tony Bennett. He could go out and sing other people's
songs almost better than his own songs. And going to
a town with the Rufus waynerright song, he sang it
so well that everybody thought it was his song. He
just he owned these songs when he sang. He sang

(02:04:36):
other people's songs quite magnificently, and he could have been
a very long term artist performing on their own. It
didn't appeal to him at all. He wasn't interested. He
wanted to create new music. We go back to one
of the first questions you asked me, why can't older
establish hugely skillful craftsmen still write hit songs. And the

(02:05:02):
fact is the public don't want hit songs from those
older people. They want them from the person they knew
as a young person. They're happy for the older person
to recreate the younger thing again, got was sing it.
They don't want to hear new songs from them. The
songwriting didn't just diminish because his ability to write songs
to themishes. The public stopped wanting them. They want the

(02:05:23):
young songs. That's my thing.

Speaker 1 (02:05:27):
Okay, how did you then segue into making movies?

Speaker 2 (02:05:31):
I just did what I should have done from the beginning.
Movies was what I was brought up with. I looked
at movies. I copped out of movies when I was
younger because they took a long time and I was
impatient and yan. And you know, when you make a movie,
if you're talking about feature films, not talkingmentaries from the

(02:05:53):
the concept, the first concept idea you have for a
movie to when the movie is finished just four to
five years. You have to get concept. You have to
get the script, you have to raise the money, you
have to make it promoted. You could make an album
in the ninety sixties in a day. You could make
an album today. Pick the best track out, have it
on radio two nights later. The speed was so youthful,

(02:06:16):
so energetic, as so much what I loved and wanted
to do. And once I was in the music industry,
I was trapped. It was the music industry is a
hugely enjoyable, fun, undisciplined world, and the film industry has
to be disciplined. You can't be undisciplined. Too many people
contribute to a film. I needed to contribute at every level,
both the dull ones and the creative ones. They're all needed.

(02:06:38):
And so I opted out and had my fun. But
by the time, by the time I got to the nineties,
I really wanted to make films. I wanted to do
what I'd sort of always wanted to do but hadn't done.
And it just fitted. It just fitted my personality and
how I wanted to live. And as much what I mean,

(02:07:00):
I'm work more fun than writing books because I went
to writing books first. I'd always thought I should be
a writer. I wrote books, and I wrote three or
four very well received, very good books. But writing books
is so tedious. I mean you sit for a year
and than a room by yourself and have all the
self doubts which you get with anything when you create,
but you have them all bottled apping yourself for a
year and not fun at all. Making movies is very relaxed.

(02:07:25):
It's communal, you're out with people, you're talking and discussing things.
You have to compromise a bit more than you do
with writing, but it's a pleasant life. And there's no
age barrier either. You know my age now in the
film business, in record business, it's incredibly difficult persuade people
that some of my age should have should be effective

(02:07:45):
in the record business. If you write down the top
grossing the top twenty grossing film directors in the world,
half of them are over seventy and five of those
are over eighty. So there's no age barrier to making films.
So it felt like and comfortable to get into for
the last lap.

Speaker 1 (02:08:04):
Okay, it is public knowledge you are eighty five. Ironically
you share my birthday a pl twenty second along with
Peter Frampton. Yeah, is someone who did not know that.
Listening to you, you are as sharp as anybody consciously there.
Do you still see runway do you still things you

(02:08:27):
want to achieve? Do you act like, Wow, I'm gonna
live for another fifteen years, or do you say, hey, man,
every day's a blessing. You know, how do you approach it?

Speaker 2 (02:08:38):
I've never managed to do that. I read people who
get ill, when they're recovered, they say, ah, every day's
a blessing. I can't think about that when every day
is nice and a pain in the ass all the
things that are us. Nothing has changed. Really, there are
good days and bad daysn't much more likely every day
has the good and the bad. I've read things in

(02:08:58):
your column time to time when you were really very ill,
and I thought, God, Bob, Bob, he's not gonna last
a bit longer, much longer. And then a couple of
weeks ago you were writing about how you like to
be perfect at all times, and you you're currently you
are they see you weren't so well after all. I've
got Listen, you get to eighty five when people say
how are you? The easiest thing to hand them a list?

(02:09:20):
You know there's going to be five or six things
wrong with me. If I was fifty and I had
those things wrong with me, I'd be horrified. With any
one of them. But you learn to live with them,
and you learn to cope with them, and they're just
just annoyances. But you have to be aware. I've got
a little chart I found in them online a few
weeks ago. At eighty five, your chances of living beyond

(02:09:43):
one year only fifteen percent. So there's an eighty five
percent chance eighty five percents I won't be live next year.
Funnily enough, each year you live longer, that chance gets greater,
because the average age of death is eighty three y four.
If you go past that, you're now into the people
who live longer.

Speaker 4 (02:10:00):
Even but as they say, the longer you live, the
longer you live, you might do. Yeah, it's like shows
in Las Vegas. There's an interesting go back to Las
Vegas show. Everywhere in the world, when a shows run
a long time, it's going to come off soon. And
in Vegas, the longer it runs, the more it becomes
a part of Vegas. And long term Vegas shows never
come off. And our shows hit that point, they've now

(02:10:22):
given us a Las Vegas day. We have a rating
a rock balled day in Las Vegas.

Speaker 2 (02:10:26):
Every day. That means they expect you to be there forever,
So I'd like a Simon Api bail day here forever.
I plan almost as if I'm going to be around,
But you know, I don't bother. I'm working on movies,
and I don't bother much with scripted movies, with that
sort of stuff, because it's about a five year prep time.

(02:10:48):
If I had the most brilliant idea and everybody agreed
that it's brilliant, and everybody says, we want to put
money and this is this is an amazing film, this
is going to happen, it'll still be five years before
it's on the screen. That seems to be longer than
it's worth getting involved at eighty five. So I go
for documentaries where you can have an idea now and
it could be you could be making it in a
few weeks. And I'm working on two films currently, you know,

(02:11:09):
just pretty good be interested to have two films at once,
So I'm pretty happy with it. One of those two films,
I'm making one about the Marquee Club. And my actually,
my feeling about the Marque Club was what would be
interesting is not to make a film just about a club.
I've seen a couple of American films about clubs, one
about the Go Go and Whiskey and Gogan, one about

(02:11:31):
the La Club. They get a bit boring, just endless.
People say, hey, way man, you know everyone was down there,
Brad Pitt was smashed. I looked at the Marque Club
and I thought, the story is how trad jazz turned
into skiffle turned into rock. The story I told you
earlier that all happened at the Marque Club. The Marque
Club was a trad jazz club which became a skiffle club,

(02:11:52):
which became the Rhythm of Blews Company. It became the
birthplace of rock, and then every major rock group played there.
So we're really looking at the story of the music
and the evolution. A two or three part series on that,
but all at the Marquee Club, because that is where
it happened. So that film's underway and we've got a
great number of people. I went into viewed Phil Collins

(02:12:13):
a couple of weeks ago. Great keep Phil Collins at
fifteen left school every day at three o'clock and took
the train into town and arranged the chairs and the
Marquee clubs so they'd let him in free. And he
could sit in the front row. He did that for
two years, so every single group is great. That's the

(02:12:34):
story we wanted more than the story of his stardom later.
Enormous number of people who went through this whole process.
It's a very exciting fun film to make. Fat They
come to La shortly and we're talking to Big Fleetwood
and Brown Auger and the other film I'm doing is
the Wham to China film and the story of taking

(02:12:57):
Wam to China. It's an amazing story because I glossed
over it with you when I was telling it tonight,
because it goes on a long time. But how I've
persuaded all those ministers to take Wan, and how the
thing evolved, and there was an extraordinary story. You know,
artists are very up and down. George not the least.

(02:13:19):
It took fifteen months ago into China, every single month,
and I fed ministers. That's why I got it. I'd
bought lunch in a Beijing which had no good foods.
There was one great restaurant and the only hotel foreigners
were allowed to stay up and they had a great
restaurant because it was paid for and dollars so they
could get an important good food. The food in Beijing

(02:13:40):
wasn't good. And every week I got more and more
ministers to come who were really coming just because they
loved the meal and didn't even want the thing to
come off because when it did, it at the end
of their dinners or under their lunches. And I'd report
back every month to George and Andrew and say what's
going on. I could see we were getting there, and

(02:14:00):
we finally pulled it off. And when I flew back
finally and I had the invitation, I got to London,
I told my secretary call a press conference tomorrow. We're
going to announce it. Caught up George Andrews had come
to dinner and tell um, we've done it. We're going
to play in China. And George said, I change your mind.
I don't want to do it, and he was serious

(02:14:22):
and absolutely don't want to do it. Just completely change.
It's not what I want to do. And Andrew and
I just sat and argument for an hour over dinner,
and finally George said, well, I'll do it, but no
journalists saw reporters, which was the whole purpose of doing it. Well,
of course, three weeks later he bounced out in the
stage and we're three hundred film crews, journalists, reporters, photographers,

(02:14:46):
and he didn't mind at all. You just like all artists,
they get nerves that one minute they're megalomaniacs. They're so
full of confidence. You wanted calm them and said, come on,
you know things can go wrong, be careful, and other
minutes they just collapse in a bundle of nerves. He
had those moments, like any good artist should.

Speaker 1 (02:15:08):
Just going back to the movies, how much money do
these movies cost and where do the money come from?

Speaker 2 (02:15:14):
Well, I made for I made one about Frank Sinatra
on what would have been his hundredth birthy. That was
a ninety minute film for Netflix, about three hundred and
fifty four hundred thousand. Then I made one called twenty
seven Gone Too Soon about the twenty seventh Club. Really
interesting because when I started it, I thought it was

(02:15:34):
just a load of rubbish, and when I studied it,
I found no load of rubbish at all. Twenty seven
is the age your frontal lobe becomes mature and frontal
low gives you cause and effect. And that's the moment
when people doubt themselves because they suddenly realize that giving
up their opportunity to be a doctor or a scientist
by leaving university to become a rock star, and is

(02:15:57):
it what I want? So this is a very good
reason for these high level of death sort of suicides
to happen. Then I made a film called fifty Years Legal,
which is to mark the fiftieth Ani versus Brittain, a
decriminized sol and sexiarity that costs about that costs about
half a million, and we've got every single gay personality
in Britain and David Hotney and Stephen Fryan just everybody

(02:16:20):
to talking that. And then this one about George George
Michael portrait of an artist, same sort of same sort
of money you're talking about it. Half the problem with
all these films is when you're interviewing. When you're doing
interviews and talking heads to us stars, they're not easy
to get. You have to go where they are, so
you end up on a lot of travel and a

(02:16:41):
lot of wasted time, you know, four days flying somewhere
to talk to one person's that's an extravagance. And the
one I'm doing now, the Marquee, we it's privately raised money,
but we've got the money for a ninety minute film,
but we're getting so much material we think it needs
to be probably a three three times one hour, even

(02:17:02):
a four times one hour, because when we get to
rock music actually happening, it fragments into so many different
areas to pro crock, punk, rock, golf rock, and it'd
be nice to follow the follow It could could snowball
into a bigger film, but again, a sort of a
half million pound budget for six hundred thousand dollars bout

(02:17:23):
it for a nineteen minute film and if it goes
into a three times one hour, probably going up to
two million.

Speaker 1 (02:17:31):
Okay, Simon, I think we're going to stop here. We
hit the outlines of your career. We hit a few
deep stories, the stuff about Skiffel. That's the best explanation
I've ever heard. Like I was riveted. I know you
have more insight like that. We'll have to continue another time,

(02:17:52):
but thanks so much for taking this time with my audience.

Speaker 2 (02:17:55):
Thank you. You're a great person to talk to. You
just sit and look and smile, but you know how
to get it out of people. Thank you, And just
to gravel a little bit. I love your writing. I
love your writing because it's not corrected. It's the complete
officer of my writing, which is very polished and corrected,
and yours isn't. And I can't do that. I'd have

(02:18:16):
to be able to do it, but I can't. It
reminds me of Kerallac and the Beach Generation, and you
write in a wonderful, flowing, impulsive way. You know.

Speaker 1 (02:18:27):
The funny thing I've learned, thank you very much, is
I used to explain this stuff that I really people
don't really want the explanation. They just want to read it,
so I won't explain it. But in any event, thank
you very much. We'll do this again. Until next time.
This is Bob Love Set
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Bob Lefsetz

Bob Lefsetz

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