Ed Bicknell

one pounds. And I had had a phone call from a guy called John Stains, who was the A and R guy at Phonogram in the UK, who I knew just through you know, being in the agency business and so on. And he called me up and he said I've just signed a band called Diastraits, to which my first reaction, instantly, spontaneously was what a terrible name. And he says, how fucking hell be serious? I said, I am being serious. It's a terrible name, but he's pushed.

He pushed me like a good an R guy should, and long story shot, I ended up going with him to an incredibly cheap and greasy kibab how in North London, followed by walking across the road to ding Walls. I walked into the venue, which was maybe a third full, and they were playing down to the Waterline, which ended up on the first album. And I the first thing, I was able to stand quite close to them because

they were not very loud. At the time. I was booking, amongst other acts, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and I was used to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple volume levels and Dastrets were pretty quiet. And the second thing I noticed was that Martinoffler was playing a red Fender stratocastic guitar. The same guitar had been played by a guitarist called Hank Marvin who'd been in a band called The Shadows. They were Cliff Richard's backing band and then they became

a band on their own. They had a whole string of hits with instrumentals. I've always been very fond of instrumentals for some reason, and a combination of that guitar, the and the what what they were what they were performing, I mean the songs basically almost immediately kind of got me hooked. And remember I was looking for a support band for the Talking Heads. I was not considering getting into management, although I was dealing with a large number

of managers who were completely incompetent. So I thought, well, if they can do it, I can do this. So I went. I met them after the show, asked them if they'd like to come into my office the next day. I was sharing my office with another agent. I got him to move out of the office. He thought I just meant him. I didn't. I met his desk, his chairs, filing cabinets and everything, and I arranged my rearrange my office to make it look like it was extremely large

and I was very, very, very important. And when the guys came in, I got the receptionist to keep buzzing me, and I said, to whatever I say, you just keep buzzing me until I tell you to stop. So the three of them, because they picked the drummer, didn't come to meetings. So the three of them, the two and Offler brothers and John Illesley sat down on a kind of seating thing, and my phone went and I immediately grabbed it and I just there was nobody on the other end, and I just said, tell him I want

ten grand and slammed it down. Oh. I should say also that I was working at a company called NAMS, which was Brian Epstein's old company he had long since past, unfortunately, but it did mean that we had a lot of Beetles and other type of golden platinum records in the basement.

So in the intermediate period, I'd gone downstairs and I've got a whole load of these and put them up on my wall, added a couple of purple discs and some of the people we were representing to make it look like I had something to do with them, when in fact I didn't. And every time I took one of these phone calls, I could see the guys looking at these records and pointing to you know, a gold disc for I want to hold your hand or something, and whispering to each other. And I basically went through

series of questions, have you got any money? No? Have you got a van? No? Have you got any gear? No? Have you got a roadie? Kind of okay, talking Heads tour fifty pounds a night, twenty three shows January next year. Do you want to do it? And Mark, quite I thought intelligently, did not immediately go yes and jump into it. He asked if he could hear some of their music, because at that point they had done one tour of the UK and Europe, which I'd set up the previous June.

Excuse me and the talk with the Ramones. That's right, So the Talking Heads were not known. They were known to the people who were into the kind of new wave thing, but that was really only starting. That would have been seventy six, so this was late seventy seven. Anyway, they took the record away. He called me up that evening and he said, yeah, we'd like to do it, and so I put them on that tour. I got

them guessed billing I had. I paid the Talking Head sound man, who I'd hired anyway, for an extra five pounds to do their sound. I we didn't have any lights. We just had white light, which was what the Talking Heads wanted anyway, and it was everybody rode in the same van. They all met outside the hotel in London on the first day and both bands got on really well, and it worked musically really really well. That might not be obvious to some of your listeners, but it did

blend together. And they're talking Airs of course weren't a punk band. They'd been kind of thrown into that box because they were on Sire Records, but they weren't really they want thought of as a punk band, and we hadn't really invented the words new wave at that point. So they did twenty three shows in twenty four days, which is how I always toured bands. They were still doing twenty three in twenty four when they broke up. Why they broke up? Had they got an on call

us every night? They got great press. The two bands got on really great. They used to do a jam on take Me to the River, the Al Green's song at the end. And while they were on that tour Phonogram John Stains, the A and R guy I mentioned he'd set about trying to find a record producer for the first Stars Traits album, and of course Darstrets were

completely unknown. There were two people who were interested. One was a guitar player called Pete Gage who'd been with a sol band, British sol band called Gina Washington and the Ramjam Band, and the other was Muff Windward, brother of Steve, as he would tell every girl who came into the control room. And there was a funny little thing went on. The way that the record deal was set up, because it had been done before I came into the picture by the band's then lawyer, was that

they got on advance, which was okay, nothing spectacular. The rules is were not very good. They got seven and a half percent in what were called the major markets, and they got six percent in the minor markets. And Phonogram paid the record producer. And I'll tell you a short story which will embarrass Muff if he's watching this. Muff did a deal with business affairs Phonogram for a

two percent royalty and twenty five hundred pounds advance. And about two days before the record started, he called me up and he said, I'm not very happy about my deal, and I went, really, just you know, and he said, I said, how can I make you happy? Muff? And he said, well, you know, I'd like some kind of an increase. I said, well, actually that's the responsibility of the record company, but let me see what I can do. So I put the phone down and without ringing the

record company. I waited for about ten minutes and I called him back and I said, okay, you can have I could get you either an extra half a percent or five hundred pounds, and he took the five hundred pounds and the record sold fifteen million. But I have to say he was very gentlemanly about it. In fact,

he was actually on a two week break. He was leaving Island Records, where it was running A and R to move over to what was then CBS where he was going to be running A and R there, and he managed in that two weeks he did the whole of the Dastrets record and half of an album for somebody else.

But that also means that he probably doesn't have very much time, or he's got other baby acts that he's trying to bring through. And that was the case with everybody, and they all basically said to Robert, you know, bog Off, Robert, we don't want your POxy little group. Because of their name, because of the name Darstras, everybody thought they were a punk group. They had done a demo of four songs

with a London DJ called Charlie Gillert. Sorry, they've done the the demo themselves and Charlie had played it on his London radio show. That was the only exposure they'd had. So, no, they didn't have a manager. They were at the point where they needed one. I mean they kind of in fact, in some ways they could have. It would have been better off if I got involved a bit earlier, but

that wasn't the way it worked. And they No, they didn't have a manager and they were but the good thing about them was that they everything was kind of in place. They had a publishing deal with Almo Irving or Rondo music as it's called over here, which although everybody, all four of them, Robert had got them a published, each one of them a publishing thing to keep the politics good happy between them, but that really only meant

mark in practice. They had this record deal. They didn't have a record deal for North America, which was quite important.

lighting guy. And John Illsley, the bass player, who was very much the organizer of the band at that point, he took that demo round to Charlie's house and delivered it one morning and Charlie played it at home, thought it was great. The songs on it were saltless, a swing down to the waterline, wild West End, and a song called Sacred Loving that they didn't record in the end, and Charlie played it on his radio show. And Charlie's radio show was a kind of arbiter of taste if

you like. It wasn't like Radio one, BBC or anything like that. So a lot of people in the business who were music fans, including John Stains, would listen to this, and John heard it. Several other people did and on the Monday we went out on a Saturday, and on the Monday morning, Rob Allen starts getting phone calls from A and R guys saying, who's this band you just played?

Everybody thought they were American. Nobody knew anything about them, and it kind of got into something that I never did as part of my practice, but it became a bit of a bidding war. Chris Blackwell, who's quite a good friend of mine, told me a great story about how he was invited to see them because his A and R guy was Chap called at Howard Thompson wanted

to sign them very badly. So Chris went to see them at some other pub gig in London and halfway down the staircase into the basement, he was stopped by somebody he knew who dragged him to the bar, and he never saw them and he missed out. Richard Branson invited them to lunch, and during the kind of the coffee and dessert bit, various personnel from Virgin came out in this restaurant and presented the group with plates of

ready roll joints. And none of them smoked weed, and in fact they were quite anti So that screwed it for Vergin. It's amazing how little things like that and what's happened at the time as the Phonogram once they decided to go. The band had decided to go with Phonogram,

and Robert was brokering the financial details. Everybody, well not the group guys because they didn't know, but everybody else decided that the American the PolyGram operation in America was not really happening, and a clause was put in of which I was to make enormous play that if RSO passed on the group, the rights to place the American deal would revert to the band, which went me, who had never read record agreement, done alone, done a record deal.

And RSO passed Because this was nineteen seventy seven and they were right on the cusp of Robert Stigwood's you know all of that, and thank goodness, that's what That's what happened.

called the Nashville and Roberta. I think Roberta. I don't remember how Roberta got onto it, but they I didn't know either of these people, and I didn't know that they were interested. At that particular moment we started getting interest from Columbia. I don't remember who the A and R person was, and I think there might have been

some other labels for some reason. I've got A and M in my mind, and they would have been a very kind of A and M type of act, and of course A and M. But I remember A and M have of course had got picked up the publishing or Jerry Boss knew of them through that.

all People, which was just ridiculous, but didn't matter. They got to play for an hour, and they started doing their own shows, and in June of nineteen seventy eight they did their first headlining tour of Britain, which was college's kind of town halls, which held about two thousand people. The Marquee Club in London got them a residency there

and they got a really good buzz going. In June of seventy eight, that first album was released in the UK and not at that point in the rest of the world territories, and Mark and I came over to the States in I think it was July seventy eight to meet This whole thing was out of time with itself, because by July seventy eight we were already looking at album number two, because he'd already written a bunch of songs, and there were one or two songs which had not

made it onto the first record. And Karen Berg was working on the in the East Coast office of Warner Brothers. And the person who, at least in his own mind, was running the East Coast office, but he wasn't really was Jerry Wexler. And Jerry Wexler heard this record being played in the offices. And one thing I'll say about Jerry Wexler is he could spot a dime at five miles and he very quickly jumped onto this and Mark and I went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for what for

us was an absolutely thrilling trip. I mean, we get there and Wexler, we had not met, we meet him. He comes and we're putt in a we're put in a We're put in a motel that must have cost one dollar fifty a night. I remember my bed was padlocked to the floor. Each leg of the bed had a padlock chained to a lump of concrete to stop

anybody pinching the bed. Wexler arrived the following morning, met us immediately took us off to a southern road stop where I remember that the waitress was wearing takeaway bags on her feet, and he he took us off to the studio and he was recording Mavis Staples and we are like, holy shit shit, And of course the guys,

the musicians were the swampers. There was David Hurd, Barry Beckett, Jimmy Johnson, and the next day Pop Staples flew down from Chicago, and I remember going out to pick up Pops at the airport with Wexler and Mark and we went back to the studio and they were recording J. J. Kale's Lies and Wexler, ever the opportunist bless him, invited Mark to play with these guys. Mark had never done a session in his life. I mean, he was completely, like,

totally gibbering with terror. And they didn't use court notes. They had this numbers system, whether you know what that is in muscle. In that studio, a number represented a chord, So you might have six, five, eleven, twelve nine written on the sheet of paper and given to you. And Mark's looking at a set of numbers. He just look

what they are. But he knew the song obviously. And I remember thereafter the couple of takes, Pops walked out into the studio and he actually put his face within about two inches from Mark's face and just stared at him. And I said to Wexler, what's what's going on? And Wesley goes, he likes him. So we did that record Mayvi. This was great. Unfortunately Mayvis had a bit of a complaint.

She had a weak bladder, so she kept going to the bathroom, and of course, being English, we assumed that she had a massive cocaine problem, when in fact, as she explained to the two of us, the law the Lord gave me a problem in that department but we did that record. I can't even remember if Mark's credited on it. And we hung out with everybody for about ten days. Fantastic fun. I remember Bobby Womac showed up.

I had done a tour with Bobby Womack about two years previously of Europe, and he showed up with his new wife, whose name was well, the way he pronounced it was Vagina, and he meant Virginia, but he didn't pronounce. He kept calling this as my new watch, She's called Vagina, and everybody in the room was just it was everything was a laugh. We were staying at a crap motel. The swimming pool was empty and it was full of

shopping baskets had been thrown in there. But we love the South, loved that part of the country, loved the people. We got very friendly with Barry Beckett, and we flew on to Los Angeles, stayed stayed at the Riot House, and I Mark wasn't really he had he didn't have much to do, but I was having meetings principally with Warners, and I can remember going up there with one copy of the album in the vinyl copy under my arm, and I had bullshitted my way in to see ma Austin.

I'd never met Mo in my life, and I just bbbbbing got in and he said to me, I'll never forget it, and he was so I grew to really

have huge respect for great liking. He said, I don't know anything about music, Go and see THEA and R Department, which of course he definitely did know about music, but it was probably a bit more Frank Sinatra and Dean than it was, you know, although he'd been involved in signing those acts from the Monterey Festival, like Jimi Hendrix and some And he picked up the phone and he rang somebody and that turned out to be Roberta. So

I was sent down to see Roberta. And there was this little blonde girl sitting in an office which had more palm trees and plants than I'd ever seen in

my life. She's got the requisite California tan. I give her a record and it was kind of a bit spinal tap because she put it on and cranked the volume up to eleven and I'm sitting there and my hair is kind of the wind and she played the whole of the first side, flipped it over and played the whole of the second side, and she told me later that she was so excited by it, but she didn't want to let on to me because she didn't know anything about the deal or the politics or anything.

But the one thing that she forgot was that she was tapping. I could see her feet tapping like mad under her desk. And she said to me, where are you staying? And I said, we're staying at the Hiat and that caused a huge smile to appear, and then she said, can I keep this copy? I'd like to play it to some other people. I should point out at this point that she didn't know that Karen Berg was already onto this, and I didn't know that, so I'm thinking, yeah, sure, of course you could keep it.

And I said, she said, how long are you in town for? I said, how long do you need? You know, whatever? And I went back to the hotel and Mark and I went and celebrated in the Highat coffee shop, and very quickly after that, it was like the snowball coming down the mountain picking up snow. And all musicians are effected. Anybody who plays an instrument is by definition to me a musical snob. And we were musical snobs. Warner Brothers had Van Morrison, they were just about to release that

first Ricky Lee Jones good. They just signed Van Halen. I can't remember the other kinds of acts you were, the kind of acts that Lenny Warneker would work with or people like that. They were kind of like our kind of thing. And Columbia, well, first of all, they were based in New York and we didn't know any plans to go to New York. And I had had dealings with Columbia in the UK and this is back then, and they were a pain in the arse. They were bureaucratic.

They were just difficult to deal with. Everything was signing a bit of paper, getting a memo, doing all of that kind of stuff. And the band. We had to get back to England because the band were doing their first trip to Europe, which turned out to be a seminal event because we went to Holland. What how was I got back And this is back in the days

of telex. I get telex in about September of that year, seventy eight from the company in Holland who I'd never spoken to, and it said album has entered chart at forty three and I just looked at it, crumpled it up and I threw it in the bin. The next week I got another one. It said album has gone up to seventeen, and I went wow, through that one in the bin. The next week album has gone up to eleven. They had released Songs of Swing as a single.

Would we go over to Holland and play their weekly popsher called Top Pop very much like Top of the Pops in the UK. It was a singles show, so we went over. This was the original four piece and during the show they represented with a gold album, which none of us, including me, had any idea about. I hadn't at that point got a handle on how to use the record company. I wasn't.

of view because it's in right. The radio stations in Holland could be heard in Germany, especially in North Germany, in Belgium and in northern France. So it was a bit like dropping a pebble in a pond and the ripples went out and suddenly I'm getting similar tech tallexis from Germany, this, that and the other. And we started working those territories, by which I mean doing every possible

television show and every possible interview we could do. My attitude to television and it's still the same is that all popular music television is rubbish, so you might as well do all of it. So we're starting to become a bit of a we were getting hot and and I was playing we were playing dates. The one thing about dar Straits throughout their entire career, but certainly in that first two or three years, was their their work

ethic was unbelievable. I mean you laugh every time I say, you know, I put in twenty gigs without a day off. That was absolutely common. I days off to me are something you do for for Roady's.

would say, Nah, it's not going to happen. No. Mark and John said, we like that guy. I mean, he's a bit off the wall, but he knows what he's talking about. And the thing I think that worked was that we came from very similar backgrounds. We were the same age, we had grown up listening to the same kind of music, and we had most importantly the same kind of humor. When I was going for drum lessons in Leeds in my teens, Mark Knopfler was going to the same music shop. At the same time. He would

turn left into guitars. Woodwinds were on the right, and as always, the drum department was in the basement. But when we got to know each other because we came from within twelve miles of each other. He was actually born in Glasgow, grew up in Newcastle on Tyne, and then he moved down to Leeds when he was at college. And I remember he said to me one day, he said, did you used to go to the kitchens of Leeds? No? Yeah, yeah, I said, I got my drums done and that's where

I had lessons. And he said, when I said about nineteen sixty three, four or five, he said, that's so weird, is is that I was going there at the same time. So you have these kind of cosmic connections, I suppose.

Brazil kind of thing. A Back then, a promoter was anybody who walked into the office and said I'm a promoter. People would walk in and I'd be selling the deep purple dates within five minutes, just hoping that they'd have enough money to pay the deposit. It was completely chaotic and incredible fun, I mean ridiculously fun.

have this guy. Either you do this or we'll get somebody else to do it, or however it was phrased so Suddenly Robert's attitude changes quite a bit and he comes up with a deal, and I can tell you what the terms were. It was ten percent of the gross of publishing.

loss going on, you've got a potential problem. I got around the problem in a way by I didn't leave NAMS, so I was using their phones, their staff, secretarial, their infrastructure, and EMS was a big agency. They would be the equivalent of back then, they would have been the William Morris or CIA of London, and I was a big shit there. So we started on that deal because I didn't really he wasn't giving me a choice. I had

a lawyer do my end of it. But that was really just crossing t's and dotting eyes when I as time progressed, I'm just going to get ahead of myself slightly in this ology. That deal changed and I did. I did all the record deals myself, I did all the publishing deals myself. I booked every show everywhere myself except for the USA, and I did every merchandising deal myself. I did every film soundtrack deal myself, on the basis

that nobody knows anything, so why not. And the deal over the next couple of years changed so that the publishing became twenty percent. Yes, yes, oh yes. The records stayed at fifteen, but Mark started getting a producer chunk and I got twenty of that.

went done. And that was the deal I ended up on.

And what and I do. And for a manager, leverage is everything, but leverage in part it is not just commercial. It's your personality. It's the way you approach things. It's knowing when to say no, went to say yes, my Austin once said, not my Austin David Berman, who was the head of his business affairs for many years. David said to me, I'll tell you. I'll tell you this to my own benefit. He said, you know your most favorite manager. Well, well I am. That's very nice, I said,

any particular reason. He said, because whenever you ask us for something, you give us something in return. He said. There are people in this town, meaning Los Angeles, and he said that I'm having a couple of lawyers, attorneys in mind, who's who think that the best deal that they can get for their artist means that we're making a loss on every unit we sell. And I said, but that's ridiculous, that's just stupid. You have to let the other person have a fair crack. Some of the

big record companies don't believe in that philosophy. But I've always believed in that philosophy. I've given promoters money back. I actually I cut a merchant I readd a merchandising deal with somebody. When the vat the sales tax rate went up in this country by two and a half percent. I rang the guy up and I said I'm dropping your deal by two and a half percent. And when he got off the floor, he said why, I said, I don't want that to be passed on to the public.

crap record deal. Yeah, because I mean, I remember Wexler saying to me, because Wexley was very proud in a strange sort of way of the way that they exploited the artists on Atlantic, particularly the black artists, and they paid He said to me, I don't know how true this is. He said to me one day that they had paid Ray Charles thirty dollars flat to record. What

did I say? And then you look at they sold Atlantic to Wea for I think seventeen million dollars, and I was just astonished that it was so low and Western's response was capital Games, Capital Games rubbish. So in answer to your question, I reegotiated the record side with the PolyGram countries the Phonogram deal every single time we put a record out. Every time. I did not do

that with Warner Brothers. I waited. I just had a sense that we were going to have one day a humongous record in America, and since we weren't on a bad deal, we were on sixteen percent. I think it was I didn't feel the kind of almost sounds sounds a bit pretentiousness. I didn't feel a kind of moral pressure to be pushing them. And I have to say, sort of the listeners to this may think this is

a very strange motivation. I really liked the people at Warner Brothers, and somehow that crept into my I would can't. I mean, they were a big corporation, et cetera. But I really like mo. I love Lenny. I mean, he's just he's just adorable, used to used to play some terrible jokes on it. But and and all all the people I dealt with, and one person in particular, Carl Scott, who at the time was head of artist relations there. He was a huge supporter of the band and of

me personally, and he and people in his department. Girl called Ellen Darst, another girl called Karen Kaplan who went on to She left and she worked for Paul McGuinness and you too for many years. They were incredibly supportive and I can't remember his name, but the guy was head of merchandising had the best split in town.

but it's basically you give them more product. So it's very important when you're an at starting out that you end up by chance or if you want to call it, with the label that is right for you, because whatever happens, and certainly now since nearly all record companies are essentially corporate unless they're specialized specialty labels, the turnover in personnel is an issue I got through in twenty five years over twelve managing directors in the UK Phonogram Company, which

is a terrible way to run a business in the States until the time Warner merger and the fallout from that. It was basically Moe Austin's company, and he ran it in a very particular way, and he was incredibly accessible. His staff loved him. I mean most of his staff would have crawled over broken glass, you know, Romoe. And he was an infinitely interesting person to spend time with if I got him on Frank Sinatra anecdotes, Wow, fantastic. So I had a different philosophy with the American company

than I did with the rest of the world. Now I should just explain that we were signed to Phonogram UK. Phonogram was part of PolyGram, which at the time was owned by Phillips and Semens until Phillips bought Semens out, and Phillips being a Dutch company, they were based in Eindhoven. They had an operation in a place in Holland call barn baa Rn, which was a bit like going to prison, a prisoner of war camp in the Second World War.

This was the worst atmosphere. It was a whole lot of buildings connected by tunnels underneath, except it wasn't Las Vegas, and they were supposed to coordinate, coordinate all of their territories. They had companies in most parts of the world, but not everywhere. For instance, they didn't have a company in South Africa. They had a licensee. They were so totally hopeless at coordinating these people. I couldn't even get sales figures. So I started dealing with all of these companies direct.

I just went round this operation in. Of course, the people in Holland were extremely ticked off, but the managing directors and marketing heads of all of the other companies just thought this, Wow, this is great. Why because politically within that setup, the fact that they were dealing direct with the manager of one of the biggest acts, which became the biggest act, and they became my friends, you know, so they would It was almost like I was giving

them political ammunition for their own personal ambition. But he got the job done. That was all I was concerned about. I wanted to know what I used to make them give me. Marketing plans, sales projections, weekly sales figures, the whole lot. Not so much because I'm sitting at home every weekend reading all this stuff, but because many many this She's got nothing to do with what we're talking about,

but really a really quick story. I did a deal many many years later for Mark to do a piece of music for a film called Color of Money that was Martin Scorsese film that was being distributed by Disney. And I got into a huge row with the lawyer at Disney because their attitude was we will own everything and you will own nothing, and my attitude was, no, you will own nothing and we will own everything, which

is how it ended up. And somebody there who was head of script development who I happened to know go called Jane Rosenthal. She works, She's run some Tribeca studios for Robert de Niro now it has for many years. She called me up after a particularly how can I put it vicious email to this guy in the legal department and she said, are you having a problem with sounds? And I went, no, nothing I can't handle. And I said,

how do you know about that? She said no, At Disney, every head of department is copying in on every ingoing and outgoing communication every day. And Michael remind me of his name, head of Disney, Eisner, Right, Michael Eisler is copying in on everything. And I just started laughing. I said, Michael Eisner can't possibly read everything that's going in and out every day, and she said no, but nobody knows what he does read, so it has the same effect.

So anyway, I was basically but this is by album two, certainly by album. By making movies, I was dealing with all the Phonogram companies direct everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I dealt with the company in Israel, say, or a company in Malta or New Zealand. To me, every country was as important as every other one. And Brothers in Arms sold over four hundred and fifty thousand copies in

New Zealand. The soundtrack to Last Exit to Brooklyn, one of our more obscure items, sold over one hundred and fifty thousand in South Korea, So don't overlook everywhere. My philosophy was, I'm going to make this act huge and they're going to be huge worldwide, and they're going to have a long career because I considered myself to be one of them, and in fairness, they felt the same about me.

The problem, the problem with all first releases by any act is if you get your first record away, it might seem fantastic at the time, and it is, and it jumps a lot of barriers in one go. But then you've got this situation that you're alluding to, which is the second one. I have Alanis Morrissette in mind actually at this point, so we had Wexler, had got his claws in. We go off to and he and he's set, you know, he's laying out. We're going to

go to the Bahamas. I mean, none of us have been to the Caribbean.

the Warners people were not gagging for it. They wanted to release at least they wanted to release Down to the Waterline as an aside single and probably another track. And it all led to a very embarrassing meeting in London. Moe was there, rush Thyret was there, the Polyglots were there, I don't remember which, and myself, And as this meeting was progressing, I suddenly realized that the casting vote was coming down to me. And of course I had the band.

When a band's made a record, they want the record out. Well not in Brian Ferry's case, but everybody else wants it out. And I could see both sides of the equation. I'd already booked or put in place, or I could have changed it all a whole British and European tour to push this second record, you know, off along and that meeting we made a mistake and I absolutely take responsibility for it. It doesn't matter now, but we should have waited. But the band now now we have to have it out.

They were already playing most of the songs on it. A good number of the songs on the second record were played on the first American tour because interesting thing about America, I don't know if it's still true, but the audiences were completely to do stuff that they'd never heard. You know, in Manchester they want to hear the hits, but they didn't care about that in Chicago. And we decided to go with that second record in the autumn of seventeen.

experience at the time. I didn't I had never worked with an act or a record that had been a multiple singles record. In the UK, if you put out an album, if you got one hit off it, you were doing really well, and if you got two, that was a miracle. Most acts didn't. Everybody was recording much more quickly than they are now, and stuff was coming out faster in this marketplace.

the hour, the amount of time. You know, this is all boxed in with shows, rehearsals, It's boxed in by interviews, Telly's videos, and it was very much boxed in by the personal relationship situation that was going on in the group off the back of this huge first record. Because that record, that first one, none of us quite knew

how to deal with it. It was and the way it led to the issues between Mark and his younger brother, which were already pretty fragile, really became quite difficult during that period.

or whatever. And the next day was quite interesting to us because we had never been worked with an American record company person, let alone a you know, famed legendary producer and where's the saying to Mark, what strings did you use on the first album? How tar did you use?

What amplifier, what amplifier settings? All of this kind of stuff, And it suddenly occurred, I think, to most of it, well, certainly to Mark and I that he was trying to copy the first one, but he wanted the sound to be, as he put it, we're going to make a record that's you know, good for American radio. So what he was trying to do was kind of chip off the the rougher edges and that's how it sounded. Yeah, which gave the first one it's kind of spirit. And that's what happened.

the first one, but it was. It sold in its lifestyme lifetime eight eight million copies, first one in its lifetime fifteen, so about half. And within the band myself, we all understood that there was a danger of being a one hit wonder kind of thing, and that record, the second record, didn't have have a hit single on it, and back then, hit singles were what you needed, so we didn't have a songs of swing on it. I can't even remember what the single was that came off.

It was it Once upon a Time in the West, I can't remember, and it kind of I mean, we were touring it and we were selling out shows, partly because I always tried to keep the shows at the right level for the time. So by that time we were starting to do arenas, we were up from doing big theaters. If you like David Knopfler, I'm picking this up from interviews i've seen him do since he said

to John Ellslie one day, I remember this. He said something like, it wasn't supposed to be like this, and what he meant by that was he wasn't supposed to be as successful. And I remember getting into a bit of a fight with him about this. I said, well, what the fuck do you want? You want me to make it less successful. He got really pissed off about the amount of money that Warner Brothers were spending on independent promotion, and he's saying stuff to me, like in

front of the others, like they're criminals. And I went, yeah, So he says, you should be trying to stop you should stop it. I said, I'm trying to get them to spend more. And we got into a really and in the background I can hear Mark going shut up, shut the shut up. So David's philosophy about what dire straits could would and could and should be, we actually

defined what that was. What it wasn't was to be successful, to have chart records, to be on the David Letterman Show, or whoever it was at the time, that kind of thing. And the two brothers. Some people in families get on great and some don't. And they didn't and don't as far as I know, they have not spoken to each other in thirty years. Wow, which is a shame. It's silly.

Landaut to produce that third record. And John, who I have to say I really like, showed up for the meeting on the wrong day, which did not auger well because his pa had put the diary entry in wrong, which apparently she regularly did. I guess she's not working for him now. So he shows So we sit and wait. We were staying at the Mayflower Hotel upon the Central Park West, and we sit and we wait. No John, So I ring the office and he comes on the phone and I said, John, we've got a meeting with you.

There's a silence, and then I hear a shit, she's done it again. He came the next day and he was making The River with Bruce and Chuck Blockin and twenty seven other producers and he was shattered. I mean he looked on he looked unwell, and we got him a cup of tea and a bun and I said to him, are you all right? Went I didn't get into I didn't get home till five am, and we had this conversation and basically he could not fit our record well. He didn't have a schedule, he had no

idea when the River was going to be finished. They'd already been working on it for about a year. And if I remember correctly, it's a double album. I think it was a double album. Yeah. So, and they were up at the power station, which is where we used to work. So he mentioned Jimmy Iven and when we were doing the Communicator, the play on music that the band used to bring them on stage was because the night which Jimmy of course had produced with Patti Smith.

And we're sitting there and so again, long story short, I got hold of Jimmy on John's recommendation, and a small man dressed entirely in yellow with a yellow cap and yellow shades in a yellow car arrives and hops out and starts talking like he's been swimming in shark infested waters. And one of them's got his balls. Hi, how you doing, Jimmy, And he's like, I mean, I thought he was on speed.

liked the studio, Jimmy was available. I managed to do a deal with a manager who I'm not going to mention, who was a complete chump. And it was Jimmy who recommended Roy Bitten from the Eas Street Band, who couldn't have been better. It was absolutely ideal and he was fast and he got it straight away. He understand exactly. Roy understood exactly what was needed. He had he wasn't. He had a break that was sufficiently long to do the tracking and so on. So we started. We booked

in there in That was January. We booked in there and I think it was something like April, May, June, something like that. And when I got back to England, the guys got together and started rehearsing up the songs that became the Making Movies record, which and I generally did not attend rehearsals because why you know, that's a rehearsal. And I remember very clearly John Elsey rand mid day one day and he said, right, we're ready for you,

which was me being summoned. And I went down to this tiny rehearsal studio in by the Cutty Sark the ship on the Thames place called the wood Wharf, which probably wasn't twenty foot square, and they played Tunnel Love Love and Romeo and Juliet with another keyboard player, Alan Clark, who we'd found somebody in my office had found and he'd come in and they played it like there were ten thousand people in the room and we when he got to the end of Romeo and Juliet, I knew

that we were back, artistically speaking, and I was totally blown away by it. I thought that I thought Romeo and Juliet was just fantastic lyric. There's a line in that song you and me babe, how about it?

of course Bruce. I can't remember who else, but he was. He was. He was always worried Jimmy. I hope he isn't now because he's got so much money and a very beautiful wife. But then he was desperately insecure, desperately and every night he would we would walk up the street and he would ask me the same question, what's going to happen to me? And I used to use that line, Charles Dickens line from mister Micawber. I said,

now something will turn up. Something did turn up. But he was He and Shelley Yakas, who did the engineering on that, were great, But the problem was that they approached it from the perspective of the American hit record producers. So, for instance, we had a drum kit in there made up of other people's drum kit. We had Max Weinberg's snare drum, and we had Steve Gadd's floor tom tom, and we had somebody else's whatever and so and so, and picked with us was getting that. Our drummer was

really ticked off with this. And we spent eight days doing the drum sound. And on the ninth day we took a lunch break and Pitch stayed behind and he retuned and reset every piece of that drum kit, and we came back and Iven literally produced an austri egg.

He went absolutely nuts. The funny thing about those two guys was that every day they would they had two dog dog bowls that you would feed a dog, your pet dog with, and Shelley would empty an entire bottle of bee pollen tablets into each one, and then he'd mix it up with some alfalfa sprouts and they'd eat

the whole lot. Now, bee pollen is a very very effective but very powerful vitimin, and you're supposed to take one or two a day, and they were taking bottles so and it had the effect, the speed effect, but it wasn't speed, it was out. It was bee pollen. And the two of them were like And in the end I just had to disconnect the phone because we could. We didn't have that much money then it hadn't flowed through. And you know, the pastage was expensive. Jimmy was fairly expensive.

And they went the way they went about. Everything was full on. You know, it's like this, We've got to get this done. There's no fucking about, you know, you can't go and have a break now all this, and Jimmy got very frustrated with David Nofler. David was arguing constantly, this is not the way it's supposed to be and all this kind of stuff. Why are we staying at the Mayflower? We should be staying at Missus Miggins's guesthouse

down the street. We're spending too much money. And this was really starting to get on everybody else's you know, as we say in England, everybody else's tits, and in particular it was really starting to bug Mark. I mean, it was already pretty the relationship was just not working. And there came the famous occasion or infamous occasion where Mark said to him, I wasn't there for this particular episode. Thank god. Mark said to him, right, he said, I

want you to go back to the hotel. I want you to rehearse your part on Romeo and Juliet and come in tomorrow and we'll do it. And David just rolled his eyes, and then we all went off for the evening to do whatever we were doing, which might be just having a meal or going to a club, or I'll tell you a short aside. It might be interesting to you just going back to communicate because it just came into my mind. Jerry Wexler took Mark and I out one night clubbing, but I don't mean disco clubbing,

I mean music clubbing. And we went and we saw James Blood, Olma and Cindy Lauper, and Cindy was singing with a group I think they were called Blue.

off the pot. And David turned round and used a word I can't say on your podcast, and Mark just stood up, took his coat off the hook on the back of the door, put his coat on, and turned round to this room of people who had their mouth literally open, and said, I'm not working with him anymore. I'm going back to the hotel and walked out, so

everybody Ivan laid another egg. Everybody went back to the hotel and Mark sorry, David and John Illslie had a conversation and basically John said, look, you got a choice. You can either make up with Mark and stay or leave and because and David said, I'll leave. And that was when I got on the phone call. I was on the West coast at that point, David's leaving the group and actually I just went, oh, great, thank god for that, because I knew that if he had stayed,

it would have fallen to bits. I'm not saying it wouldn't have reconstructed, but at that moment it was very close to just collapsing because Pink our Drama was ready to go because of David.

going great guns for us. So the Communicate record and because of the touring off the back of it and keeping them in front of their fan base which was growing. When the third one came out, the decision was made the record companies. I never tried to impose singles on record companies because they have to do the work. I only did that once, and we're going to come to that. But I thought Romeo and Juliet as a song was utterly brilliant, and I did kind of push for that

to be the single. And it was one of those things. And I'm going to tell you something which even the band members don't know. Of course, the record company wanted an edit, and I said to the guy from Phonogram in London. I said, we didn't have this conversation. If I ever hear about it, I will deny you and I spoke about it. Do you have you got the message? And he said I think so. So we put out an edited version because I knew radio was going to edit it anyway, and it became it went well in

the UK. It got up to about number three, and and again we were off touring again. I mean, it was just the touring was relentless. And about a year later, John Nilsey said to me, took me aside somewhere, He said, did you tell Phonogram that they could edit Romeo and Juliet? And I went, He said, well, obviously you did. I said, have you mentioned that to Mark? He said no, and I'm not going he did exactly the right thing. So and the unlikely event Mark's watching this, that's why anyway,

it didn't matter. So that became a hit. A Tunnel of Love became a hit as parts one and two. It's like Big Noise from Winnetka Part one kind of thing. There was a song on that album I thought was a hit song. It was not released, and that was a song called Hand in Hand. Had a good chorus. But anyway, that record got us back for sure.

two shows a night there. This was in end of March seventeen, end of March eighty. I think I got my caronology might be wrong.

course Bob is Mark's biggest influence. Stroke call him an idol exactly, but you know, Bob to Mark was what Elvis was to be kind of thing or Buddy Rich to me. And they met and went for a huddle, and the next thing I know is that Dylan is doing an album in Muscle Shoals. Jerry's going to produce it. This is taking place in April May of seventy nine, and we conveniently had a gap in touring, and it's

agreed that Mark's going to play on this record. And Mark recommends pick with us our drummer, quite rightly, absolutely ideal for that. I didn't go down there, I had I was also managing Jerry Rafferty at the time, who was pretty big, and I had quite a lot of stuff to do in La. So they went off down to two Muscle Shoals. Tim Drummond played bass, There were a couple of backing girls. I can't remember who else was on that record. It was oh and what happened

was that's right. So I was in LA or New York wherever, and Mark called me he'd been there about three days. Nah, sorry, got this wrong. He went to Santa Monica to Bob's place to routine the songs, and I was in New York and he rang me and he said, he said, all these songs are about God. And I went what he said, They're about odd when but he's Jewish, isn't he? And Mark went, Mark's whispering to me like there's other and I said, why are you whispering? He went, oh, well, he said, he said yeah.

And this was because Bob's Born Again record. So they went down there and I had arranged to go down to join them. And this was probably eight days, right Mark, I said, I'll be down tomorrow. He said, don't bother coming And I said, but why, He said, we're done, We're finished. I said, you've on him been there eight days and he said, Bob only plays a song twice. So they did that record in eight days. And I don't think. I don't think anybody got paid for it.

Seemed utterly redundant to be seeking payment. And it came out and it did as Bob Dylan records do it for the time that it did pretty well, I think from what I recall. I mean, I've met Dylan several times, but if I you know, if I walked up to him now, he wouldn't have a clue who I am. And that's fine, no problem. And that was that was that,

and then and then we were all. Mark had to come back to Europe because we were starting a German tour around about mid May, so they fitted it into that gap that they Of course, there was a different situation with the Infidels record, which came along later on. And Mark and Bob are good friends as far as I know, Yeah, well, I know they are, Yeah, they are, Okay.

I remember I was in the back of a car about the cost this is a ship that we had to deal with back then, the cost of cardboard for a double hours album, the cost of inner bags, lyric sheets, the pricing, retail pricing. I've always been very conscious of that. I always lean towards don't bleed people money wise. I mean, it's a separate subject. But the whole ticketing thing at

the moment is I think it's completely bonkers. It's sort of it's sort of almost surreal, but the public seemed to put up with it.

Neil Dorfsman. I think we met Neil Dorsman during the making of the Local Hero movie soundtrack, which just preceded the Love of a Gold record, and no sorry, Love of a Gold Sorry. Local Hero came after, just right after, and by this time David had left the group. I didn't know it at the time, but Pick had decided to do that record and leave the group, which he

did immediately after he'd finished his parts. Quite a crafty little economic decision on his part, and they made a record, as I say, which had quite a number of more songs than the ones that finally ended up on it. And I had heard bits and pieces. The Telegraph Road first appeared on the first Australian tour we did. I remember being in the venue in Perth with just the crew guys, actually probably just the sound guy, and they

played it the whole thing. I was just sitting in the stalls and I just ran onto the stage and I went, what on earth is that? And that was Telegraph Road incidentally, is in Detroit. It's the name of

the Ring road that goes around Detroit. And I had been sitting next to Mark on the bus as we were making our way to a venue in the pouring rain, and we were stuck in a traffic jam, and he had a piece of paper and he wrote down on the piece of paper six lanes of traffic, three lanes moving slow, and folded it up and put it in his pocket. And I heard it coming back at me months later. So we did that record, and you would

ask me about the length of things. By this time, the way that people dealt with me had markedly changed. I don't mean that I was I didn't. I wasn't one of these shouters and screamers and all of that. But the you know, this was a big thing for the phonogram companies, particularly Phonogram had a not Phonogram, PolyGram UK Phonegram is one of the labels, had a wonderful president,

guy called Ramon Lopez, Spanish guy. And I took that record into play to Ramon, just me and him, and he put it on and he played the whole album through, and I'll never forget what he said to me. He said, I want to do a Spanish accent. He said, ed, this is not pop me sick, this is classical music. And I went and he said, we are going to make this the most successful record we have ever had. And I'm like because he fucking loved it and he could see that it represented a kind of very different,

you know, not many bad. It had been a long time since Aguarda di Vida, so having this mega track. I then went up to Scotland where Mark was. We well, actually we both went up for the We went to the set of Local Hero, which David Putnam was producing and on the first so we got up there, staying in this poky little hotel with the cast and crew, and at breakfast the following morning, Mark said to me, I'm going to ask you to do something you don't

want to do. And I said, we are not having sex anyway, no, no, no, no no. I said, you want me to get the record companies to put Private Investigations out as the first single without an edit. And he said, how do you know, I said, because it is fucking brilliant. It's totally brilliant. If you're a manager, you work with what your artist gives you. And if Heaven, Thank Heaven. You love it as a fan, almost not commercially, you just love it as a piece of music. And

I thought it was utterly, absolutely brilliant. And he said yes, he said, can you do that? I said yes, I said, but there's going to be some pushback on it. When I finally got back down to London and I took the record into play to the London Phonogram company and it was then that I played it to ram On. I just got the chronology wrong. The head of radio promotion, who I won't name, said to me. I said to them, I said, I'm going to ask you to do so you're not going to want to do. Said, I want

you to put that second track Private Investigations out. It's the first single without an edit, and it's seven minutes long. And the head of radio promotions said to me, we can't do that. People will ring up their radio stations and think that something's gone wrong. And I went, what why. He said, because it stops. I said, yes, those are called rest periods. Because I was an it's a bit sip teeny bit ticked the managing director. Then one of

this endless literally of managing directors I was. He said, okay, we'll do that. I said, I know, it's a risk. I said, this that will be as big as MacArthur Park, or it will die death. So they put it out.

So this thing was picked up by the rest of the world radio, no edit, whole thing. We did a pretty crappy video to go with it, but didn't really matter.

And the next week, to give you an idea of my own belief and the amount of bullshit I can talk, I call up the charts used to come through on a Tuesday back then, So I call up Phonogram on a Tuesday, and I get the cleaner of somebody on the phone and I tell him who I am, and I say, have you got this week's radio chart, the Music week Charts, which would be equivalent to the Billboard, And there's a scrabbling of papers and he said yes, And I said, can you look between numbers fifty and

seventy five and see if a song called Private Investigations has gone in? And he looks and he said, nah, no, it's not there, and I'm thinking, fuck, we haven't even made the top seventy five. And then he said to me, he said, what's it called again, I said, private Investigations. He said, oh, there's a song called Private Investigations that's gone in at number two. And I went wow, wow, because I just didn't know. And that record became an

absolute classic. In the Dos Traits Repertoire Live Repertoire, Big Big fan favorite Carl Scott blessed him, who was at this point in a totally unenviable position, brings me up and he says, the A and R Department have done an edit on Telegraph Road and I have they? And he said it's two and a half minutes long, and I just burst out laughing. I said, Carl, don't be silly. We can't put that out, so we weren't able to

put out a radio friendly length single In America. The album did quite well, I mean I can't remember what it's sold over two million in the end.

unbelievably where these things go. He'd married my first secretary, Linda. They divorced and then they remarried. Go figure, So he'd married Linda. Linda was still working for me this was not a very good arrangement because they'd go you know, she'd go home and she'd tell him everything that was going on in the office, and how do I do this diplomatically. There were some aspects to the way that the band was going which Pick was not happy with.

The first of all, it was, first of all, it was getting considerably louder on live shows, and he did not like battling with the guitars basically because it was not deafening, but it was getting loud. And he's not you know, he couldn't do Phil Rudd's job in ac DC. He's not that kind of player. There were just personal issues arising really between him and Mark, because Mark by then had emerged as happens in many, many, many bands that start off as democracies, Mark had become a dictator.

I mean he was right in everything. Now. He was producing, he was singing everything, he was arranging everything, and he wasn't exactly telling people how to what to play. But Mark's very precise about how he hears his songs kind of in his head. He's not the kind of musician who goes into the studio and like say the Stones might from time to time and jam and hope that something arises. He goes in and he's got a very clear idea. That's not to say he doesn't like let

other people put their ten cents in. He does, but at the end of the day he'll basically dictate if you like, how the thing's going to go. And Pick was not happy with that aspect. He and his Linda my secretary, his wife, my secretary, they just had their first baby. He was on one core water of albums one and two, had one third on albums three and four and plus whatever the tours have produced, because by

this time the tours were profitable. So he did the record and there was a big row about something in New York. I can't remember what it was. It was something to do with kind of the domestic arrangements. I mean a lot of people listening to your You did a fantastic podcast some time ago with Bill Kirbishly. It was one of my absolute heroes. I love Bill, and what struck me about that because I've listened to it

about three times. Bill was open enough about his personal life and the impact that that has had on his career. And also Bill said something which absolutely I totally totally. If he was here now, i'd give him a hug. He was talking about why he and Robert Plant split up, and he said that for him, it was a matter of principle, and in a strange kind of way. I think for Pick it was a bit of a matter

of principle. And I was very sad to see him good because he came to me to tell me, and I was very sad to see him go, But I didn't try to talk him into staying. In my experience, if you try and talk creative people into doing things they don't want to do, it's not going to work. It'll backfire. And I remember that John Remark and myself had lunch with Pick, and I said, I said to Pick when he told me, I said, you're going to have to You're going to have to tell the other

and he went, yeah, I know. So he told them and it was logistically inconvenient because I already had of course, I had a tour already set up, already to go. I think the thing was on sale and suddenly we needed another drummer. Now I need to go back to my days as an agent. I used to work with a guy called Barry Marshall, who's one of the absolute best promoters in this country that we've ever produced, and probably one of my along with his wife Jenny, one

of my dearest friends. At the time Barry was managed. This is back in the seventies. Barry was managing a Welsh jam band a bit like the Dead or Dave Math more like the Dead really, and they had a drummer called Terry Williams, who, of course I became very good friends with. And Terry eventually left Man and joined Dave Edmunds Rock Pile and was on all of those Dave Edmund's records. And Terry is the king of the shuffle as we drummers call it, kind of boogie kind

of playing. So when so so, when Pitt left, Mark said to me, and sometimes I wonder where where Mark's brain is, because he says to me, do you know any drummers?

kit going like that. Terry became the drummer. And what was significant about that was not only could he play the catalog if you like the stuff, but we were moving into bigger arenas and we were on our way to stadiums for better or worse and day and Terry was what we needed. He was an absolute powerhouse and he has a quality which a lot of your audience

might not understand. But the drummers in your audience will he swings, count Bezi swung, Ellington swung, Oscar Peterson swung and the people who drove those swinging units were the drummers. Uh and Terry Williams was By this time we already had two keyboard players, Alan Clark and Guy Fletcher, and then we had Mark and we and we ended up we needed a saxon. No, the saxon came a little bit later. So we did that tour and we recorded a live album the Alchemy record, which amazingly sold over

five million copies, which is pretty good for a live record. Uh. And Terry became a full time member of the band. And the other great thing about Terry, and it's true, I think of you really need this with musicians. He was easy, He didn't he didn't have a drug problem, he didn't have a woman problem. He didn't get silly, he didn't collapse, he was ready. He never missed a gig. He put one hundred percent into every performance. He was used to get along with. He never complained. I never

heard him whining or minging about anything. Fantastic.

acts of a simp. Sorry, same kind of level. So I used to ring Roger Forrester who was managing Eric Clapton. I used to ring Steve or Roger was managing Pink Floyd. I used to call Tony Smith who was managing Genesis and probably somebody else, and I would find out what they were paying their side men, and then I would average it and I would increase it, and that was the basis on which they were paid, and then we were the straits because it's their money, not mine. Were

very generous with bonuses to our crew. We weren't kind of quite at the tailor swift level with our crew, but the money we would have been. I got to give her eleven out of ten for what she did for her truck drivers, people who if the truck drivers don't care, there, you'll fucked. You know, these people make the thing happen. So we basically had people on what I'll call what you call a flat fee salary, whatever you want to call it. With a bonus at the end,

and if they did. For instance, when Terry played on the twisting by the pool ep which was a bit of a throwaway, he got a royalty on that and still does. And the others did that kind of thing. I ran a very I like to think. I mean, there are people who probably would disagree with this and say he's a hard nosed bastard, but I like to think that we ran a pretty fair ship. And that's why the people that we had stayed with us for so long. I mean, Alan Clark gave up at one point.

He gave a pretty solid gig with Clapton to come back to the streets, and I got him a big gig prior to that when we were off with Tina Turner. Good musicians are good musicians are generally, but not always, but generally they're pretty bright. They're pretty intelligent. I mean they're not you're not. You don't become whoever by being stupid.

so forth. And he was down Phil Man's and Era from Roxy Music has a really nice studio outside of town. And I was down there one day doing some soundtrack work, I think, and I popped down and we drove back up to London and he just said to me, this would have been this must have been in late eighty four. He just said to me, I've got some songs together.

Can you get the guys back together for me. I will say that between the records, I never ever asked him about the next Diastraates record, And I have to be absolutely fair, the record companies didn't either. Now maybe because they were terrified, I don't know, but they never did. Nobody ever said are we going to get another record? Or when are we going to get another record, which you might have expected them to, but they didn't, and so that's what happened. We got the we got the

basic group back together. They went down to Phil's place and started working up the songs and I remember going down there one day and I had money for nothing for the first time. And one thing that struck me about it was that I had done the first tour of UK and Europe as an agent for zz Top, a band that I love guys, I mean, Dusty's passed away sadly, but the best guys, I mean the best guys, especially Billy, fantastic bloke, because they have a sense of humor.

You'd have to if you're in Zeezy. I'd taken Mark to see them. And the guitar tone of that lick is not a I'm not saying. I'm not saying because I don't know, but it was not a million miles away from you know, because when the first time they came over, they weren't doing I'll tell you a little aside.

They came over here to do an old gray Whistle test showing London at the Apollo, which is thirty three hundred seats, and another show in Germany and the Big Two in Germany, and they were on the album is Ombree I think it was called, and that.

That Dusty said to me, I want the hottest thing that they make. And I said, no, you don't. He said no do I said no, you definitely don't. So when they were the guy came out to take the orders, he said to the waiter, he said, what's the hottest curring you make? And the guy looked at him and he said, it's called a Bangla file. If any of your listeners do not have the So he orders the Bangla file and the entire kitchen staff came out to

watch him eat it. It took one mouthful, it turned a completely different color that human beings are supposed to be. And he literally ran to the bathroom and for two and a half hours he remained in the bathroom and we could hear through the door gurglings and plops and groaning, and finally a kind of called to prayer. And when he came out, he was half the size of the person who had gone in. And they had a gig the next day, and poor Dusty had he had very

short say, he had contact lenses. He forgot to put his contact lenses in because he was in such a panic that something was going to happen on stage. And every time he walked up to the microphone, he hit the microphone hit him on the head with an incredibly loud donk through the PA and Billy could pardly play for laughing, and uh, well there's no more to the story, really, but that's my little Easy's top story because he couldn't. He absolutely thought he was going to die. So funny,

So don't have the bang of file. Sorry, what was your question before?

with them, was that they were great songwriters. You had Paul Brady on your show a few weeks ago, I mean another of my clients. Fantastic writer and a great guy, I mean, a really great guy. And people like Brian Ferry, I mean, is Brian's a genius songwriter to me? So I wasn't. Particularly the song on that album which I heard in rehearsal, which I just loved was the title song, the Brothers and Arms song, And at the time, we were going through the Falklands War, which is what that

song was about. It was very I mean, Dostras hardly be called a political group, but that was quite a moving song given that we had troops out there being blown up and the Argentinians were getting blown up as well, and one song nearly didn't make it onto it. That was Walk of Life. I walked into the studio in New York and Mark and Neil Drsman were mixing it.

I hadn't heard it. And as I think I might have mentioned earlier, Mark was a big fan of the animals and he happened to like Alan Price's far Feasta organ sound and he'd got this deed did he did? Did? He did lick at the beginning. And I was listening to it and I said, what's this and Mark said, oh, it's a B side, because back then we had B sides. And I said that's a hit song. No it's not. And we had a bit of a debate, not an argument, and Neil Drsman's going, yeah, it's right, and Mark went no,

I said, listen, he said. I said, so it's good enough to be a B side and people can hear it, but it's not good enough to go on the record. And he went, oh, all right. Then that song outsold money for nothing worldwide, and it's used in all these football commercials in America and what have you. Sometimes, I mean, I don't think of myself as being credited with anything other than my personal musical taste. That's the only thing that I bring to this. I don't listen to pop

radio and I haven't in years. I don't know. I'm not thinking, oh, we need hits. One of my closest friends is a songwriter called Nikki Chin who wrote most of those glam rockets with Mike Chapman. And had dinner with him last night and he said to me we had fifty hits. Really, I said, I can only think of five of them. And he's like, because I always introduced him to people, Britain's worst songwriter by far is terrible. I mean, who could write? Can they can? Forkingness sake?

So we had that record. As always happens in these situations, the album cover was a complete accident. Somebody's waving that National steel about and I can't remember the lady who took the pictures, but stuck a shot and we delivered it. And I had this whole world tour set up because by this time I had a pretty good idea of where we could play, the level we could play, and where we needed to go where we hadn't been before.

Because one of the things you have to do with any band is keep it interesting and when you go. We were the first really big band to go and play in Israel. I mean sadly we couldn't do that obviously at the moment, but we played to a quarter of the population over three shows and they were going gaga, I mean completely bonkers, because nobody went and played in Israel. And yea, I used to find these promoters, mostly under a stone somewhere and they would we playing on that tour.

We played that. We started in Israel, and then we went to Greece, then we went to the old Yugoslavia and worked our way up and so on and so forth. And we had my partner, Sadie doesn't believe in the idea of luck. She calls it perfect alignment. And I always think yeah, and we that was a wonderful piece of perfect alignment, which was not intended to be so. And that was doing live aid when we had money for nothing out with Sting. Oh you asked me how

Sting appeared on that record. He was on the island surfing. Well, not on the island. He went in the sea for that. And the best place to eat on the island was the studio. There was a great chef up at George Martin studio, and one night he showed up in Monsrat Yes and Mark said, Tom, I've written I've written this really stupid song about MTV. You fancy playing on it?

And Gordon as we call him, said yeah. So they went downstairs into the studio and just came up with the idea of sticking I Want my MTV on the front to the tune of Don't Stand So Close to Me and we had a we had How long did that take? Half an hour? I don't know, It's just one of those things. Sorry. I was just going to say that in pop music, spontaneity it's very difficult. You can't engineer spontaneity because of the definition of the word.

But spontaneity is often produces a great result. And that was one.

various tax things and so on and so forth. We had to leave the country by March the thirty first of nineteen eighty five, so we had to make the video while we were on tour, and we had contacted Steve Barron, who had, amongst other things, shot Beat It for Michael Jackson, and we were looking for somebody to play the role of the redneck guy in the store.

And I tried to think of the two biggest American rednecks I could come up with, and one of them was Buddy Rich and the other one was very dry comedian you've got when he's passed on what was his name, can't remember, and they both of course flipped it back and Steve came up with, well, he didn't come up with it, but he showed us that computer stuff, which was brand new then, which got around the problem of having somebody a redneck in it, because we could have

a cartoon redneck, which is what we had. So we basically said yes, and he went off and he made that clip and the live sections were all shot at a sound check and a gig in Budapest, and the girl who's in it was Miss Hungary. Can't write this, can you?

it's not a comedy record. But and it was written because he went into an electronics store down in Greenwich Village that's going to place down there, and there were these guys having this conversation and he just he got up a piece of Off Blokes notepad and he went and sat in the window display and he just listened.

And he said to me he couldn't quite remember he thought of the band that was on the TV at the time, because of course they had fifty TVs all played on TV and he thought it was Motley Crue, something that my dear friend Dot McGee was very chuffed about. And so we had this tour that's totally sold out

before we've even started. We've got this record, we've got some reasonably good art work, I suppose from dastress point of view, and we had this video which was, as you say, a bit of it was the first one ever played on MTV UK when they opened the station, and we had radio going nuts for it. So everything that had happened previously kind of got us to there, and the tour just took off. I mean it just took off.

I I was too detail oriented. I mean, don't forget I wasn't using an agent anywhere except the US, so I was doing all of that, dealing with all these promoters. But yeah, we had. That was an amazing experience. I mean, in terms of my life today, that would be top That's the greatest experience of my life other than you know, the birth of my kids. Things like that, and it and it was and it was so it was a very joyful experience. Everybody was getting on, everybody loved what

they were doing. We had a fantastic crew, well the same people we always had, great front of our sound, great Chas. Herrington's lights were super. Every show was an event. I think if you're a manager, one of the best things you can do is try and create an event for the audience. And every one of our shows was an event. And when we got to Australia where we ended up for three months, which is ridiculous, and we sold over a million tickets and only little Ed Sheeran

has managed more. He sold five tickets more than us. The biggest show we ever did was one hundred and two thousand people in Auckland with no support act. The actual capacity of the place was sixty thousand. And when we got there Gary van Egmund, the promoter who sadly passed away about two months ago, he came up running up to me because it had taken ages to get into the actual vein because of the people outside. He said, can you hold a show for a couple of hours?

I said sure. He said, we've found all of these rolls of cloakroom tickets in the back of this place. It was a stock car racing stadium. We sold thirty nine, six hundred and thirty two cloakroom tickets to the people outside.

figure out, how can I do this? And they went looking around and they found all of these little they're just little paper tickets. So they sold those. So we in the two hours and it was an amazing, amazing show, because of course it is. I mean when you're when you're doing something like that, and I would go in the dressing room and I'd say to the band, you're not going to believe this, And there was quite a lot of you're not going to believe this in their career.

You know, Princess Diana wants to wants to just do a concert for her. Okay, So Hewitt, that's Jim. It was king chance as he is now. And we did I mean every where we went. The mistake we made, but it wasn't mistake. We should have come back to the States, but people we'd been We've played two hundred and forty eight shows in twelve months, and people were at a point of caving in. So we didn't.

I'm just sitting there going this is just ridiculous. So and Mark was doing bits and pieces and I'm going to say something here which if he was sitting in front of him, he might well disagree with me. I don't know. I think for any artists when you have an app when you have one of those big single records, Dark Side of the Moon, the Saturday Night Fever is a really bad example, but Back in Black would be

another one. They're great to have in every sense. And I don't mean the income, I mean just but they create this expectation and I'm stating the obvious right now, and I think that I got a bit intimidated by that. I think anybody would, because what happens when you have a big record like that is, first of all, your audience changes a bit. People start coming to shows who are not necessarily distraates music fans. They're becoming because it's the hip and relevant thing to be doing. They want

to be seen. You start selling tickets in catered skyboxes. All of that element comes in. And what am with the on every Street record? Do you know? I'm trying to remember how that even got underway? Oh, I know what happened. We were having a conversation. There were some people in the organization and I'm including somebody in my office who were deciding to sort of leave. And the line was I kind of there's nothing going on I'm

wasting my life and I was getting a bit. But on the other hand, I had things like the chet Atkins record and you know, to go to Nashville to meet chat Atkins and end up having you know, dinner with Scottie Moore and DJ Fontana and the whole thing that goes with that. And I'm a groupie at the end of the day, I'm a groupie for the stuff I grew up listening to. I mean, when I met Buddy Rich, I didn't I couldn't speak, which is just

as well because he couldn't stop. And so there was a camera point when one particular person basically said I'm leaving, and I said, you need to tell Mark and John.

Mark and John John. John had done a couple of solo records which were so so, and we went to a little a burger place called Tutsis in Holland Park in London, and my colleague said to Mark, I'm done, I'm going to go, and Mark said, he says, I don't want you to leave, and this guy said, well, you know, there's nothing happening, and and Mark suddenly said, completely out of the blue, you could have you could have literally locked me over with a feather. He said, well, actually,

I've got some songs together. Why don't we get the band back together and do it with the band? And I remember saying, no disrespect to so and so, but that is a ridiculous reason for doing a record, to get somebody to stay. And he said, to please the other guy much and Mark said yeah, he said, but you know, it's what I do best, It's why I enjoy doing the most. So he told we got everybody back together, and they went into rehearsals. And by this time he had been seduced, if you like, by the

Nashville scene, which I had very mixed feelings about. I have no issue at all with musicians making money professionally, that's what they do. But it was quite apparent to me that the amount of stroking that was going on in Nashville from people there in Mart's direction was not because they thought his music was great. But he was a big rock star who'd come to town and it was very possible that they could probably hitch a ride, and quite a lot of them did, and they're great

people and great players. But he was very I think a little bit naive about that. And anyway, that influence, and particularly in the form of Paul Franklin, who was playing pedal steel guitar extremely well, am I add at not in Hillbery sound checks. He and I used to play just we'd just go on the stage together, just me and and play Orange Blossom Special as fast as we could possibly play it, and every sound check it

would get faster and faster and faster. So Paul came into the group and they made that record which had this sort of bit of a country flavor to it, and on a personal level, I didn't think that it was not that it wasn't as commercial as Brothers and Arms. I didn't think it was as good an album as some of the ones we've done in the past. I thought there were some tracks on it that were fault fillers. Calling Elvis to me is a lazy song. I love

the guitar sound on that, Yeah, yeah, hang on. There's a qualification to that, which is that that which was saved by Jeff Paccaro bless him, I r I p and by Mart's guitar playing on it, but doing a song, you know, waffling on with Elvis's song titles. It's a bit lazy to me. I really liked the title track. I thought You and Your Friend, which is the one

with the Doughbra solo on it was brilliant. But well, that's what I had to work with when you're a man, and you know we're talking relative here, because most managers don't get a record like that in their lives to work with. And we and I made a mistake, and it was it was made in good faith. I over egged the size of the venues and night and multiple night things that we were planning to do. And in

some countries it worked. UK, Europe no problem. Australia was okay, but it was we've kind of left it too long in a way, and the US was not good. I mean we were okay in on the two coasts and in Canada, but the middle, it was the middle was a you needed a hit single kind of thing, get

over in Kansas. But that's you know, I mean, it sold seven million tickets, so people would say, oh, what are you moaning about, But it's just I think that's to do with the pride that you have in your work and trying to get things right in what is an incredibly speculative kind of thing. And what a lot of other people. A lot of people don't realize, and certainly the audience didn't realize. When you're working with a band at that level, you're planning at least a year ahead,

probably eighteen months. And there was one thing, of course, that I could never have anticipated, and that was the outbreak of the goal, for which totally stuffed us because I had to I had done put nearly the whole thing together, and I had to dump it all and start again. I put that tour together twice.

think i'd have a band to do it. Inter Band relationships were fraught in the extreme because because our leader was not a happy bunny, and he was, there was an awful lot going something that people who are fans of popular music and love their particular act, be it Coldplay or whoever, can never know the impact that personal relationships outside of a band and marriage is what I'm thinking of the impact that they have on the artistic side.

It's huge, and it was huge in that case. It was a very very very difficult period because people's personal lives were in tatus.

Franklin was so miserable. When I went out to Barcelona at the end of that time, and I took Peter Grant with me, led Zeppelin's manager the last gigs, I think Peter ever went to him. And when I got there, the guys were having a day off before doing six nights in Barcelona, I think it was, And I asked our tour manager where Paul Franklin was. He said, oh, one days off, he said. He takes a load of sleeping pills and goes to bed and sleeps through so

that he doesn't have to mix with anybody else. Ah, So it's like that. It was awful. The things I could tell you, not because I'm not not telling you because they're private, but because they're they're so awful that you and your audience would just go, oh, this guy's

making this out. This is out. This starts straight. So I love their music, you know, just it was just I have worked over the many years of my career with bands which were I remember years and years ago, years and years ago, when Richie was still in the group Deep Purple, five cars, five dressing rooms didn't speak to each other, and Richie would frequently refuse point blank to play any guitar solos, so John Lord had to hunt the Hammond organ back was forwards across the stage.

Uh black Sabbath who I happened to laugh. And they were great guys because they were so off the wall, but they were everybody's fighting and squabbling. I did a tour with an American band called War, who Eric Burdens sang with for a while. War could not have been more aptly named. They would regularly throw furniture at each other. There was always a bill for broken chairs and tables

and crockery. I don't know what it is. I mean, somebody once said to me, if you got back into management, and that's not going to happen, no, But if you did, I said, I try and find a folks singer. It's just on their own who's unmarried. Just trust trust them, Ed Sheeran come and you know it just and the fact that the record, you know, there's a difference, a huge difference in our game between a hit record and

a hot record. Brothers in Arms was on fire and on every street somebody had come along with a fire bucket and tipped it over it he didn't have And we were in Adelaide. The previous time in Adelaide on the Brothers and Arms tour, we played to fifty five thousand people in a stadium. On this tour, I had completely miscalculated. And I'm going to share the blame with the promoter, Gary because unfortunately he's passed on. But you know, we had broken all these records in Australia, so you

have certain assumptions planted in your mind. Oh, we can do this again. Set the thing up. I arrive in Australia a few days after the guys because they've gone there to rehearse with the local equipment, and that Gary picks me up at the airport and I'm getting ticket counts all the time, and I noticed that these ticket counts are not It's like it's like a movie, you know,

in the movie world. They know on the first night and I'm looking at this figure for Adelaide and it's like, we sold fifty five thousand tickets last time, and we've sold six thousand tickets this time. Holy, So we move it into another venue and we sell eight thousand tickets, which fills the other venue. So that you could say that the fault was my fault because I put them

in a venue that was too big. But in defense of myself, what would have happened if I'd put them in an eight thousand seater and fifty five thousand people had wanted to come? So you're in a no win. And I remember after that show, Mark and I were having a drink in this hotel and there were two ladies there from the record company, entirely professionally, I should add, and he suddenly said to me, he said, I made a crap record in front of the record company people.

And I went, no, you didn't. I said, you didn't make a commercial record. There's a difference. And I'm thinking these two girls are going to go back and repeat. This conversation is going to go right round them, and he just kind of got up and went to bed. That comes with the territory, you know, if you there there are ants out there that have had a lifetime

of god knows how many decades. The Stones Bruce Springsteen when they were going to Floyd, uh, and I sometimes look at them and I think, I mean, good for good for you. You've managed somehow, you've managed to keep the plates spinning. And the interesting thing to me about the Stones, for instances is that they don't make particularly good records. I mean, sometimes they come out with one that's better than the others, but they've turned the big

outdoor stadium into an art form. Pink Floyd turned that into an art form. But then then then you've got these two characters, Roger and David, who just don't get.

partly don't take the strong way. But things that I probably shouldn't tell you about, personal stuff, you know, that was going on, and the band just it wasn't even spoken about. That was what was so strange. Nobody sat around, nobody gave it six months and just said, you know what a war hand. How do we feel about this?

Because because you've got a lot of very tight relationships that have gone on at that point for nearly twenty twenty plus years, and there are people who were just completely not speaking to each other and haven't to this day. And Mark decided, and he was propelled at least in part by the Nashville connection. If you like that he was going to he was obviously going to record the songs that he wrote and what he wanted I think, and this is me being an amateur psychiatrist, which I'm not.

He wanted to get himself into a position where he was completely in control. He wasn't having to everybody who's played in the units he's had since, and they've really been pretty much the same people are. Essentially, you're a division Nashville studio players, and studio players by definition essentially play what they're told. I mean Richard Bennett, who plays guitar with him. Was with Neil Diamond for nineteen years playing I Am, I said, for nineteen years and Sweet

Caroline and soon it's great stuff. But so he did the Golden Heart record, and I spent quite a bit of time out in Nashville, which, if you're not a player, is not a town which is incredibly stimulating to be in. And I'm not having a pop at Nashville. And as that record was taking form, I was starting to have doubts.

It's a strange thing when you go into a situation with the belief and passion and love that I had for them from for the first ten years, from seventy eight to eighty eight, and suddenly find yourself just not liking it, not liking the music as much. And that's not to say I don't use terms like good and bad, because it's so personal the music I listened to personally, people would probably be quite surprised because I don't listen to rock and pop music except the stuff I grew up.

I listened to a lot of film music. I'd listen to a huge amount of jazz, especially from the sixties and seventies, and not fusion stuff, but anyway, and that's by the bye, and he did that record, and there was I was a bit on. I think the impact, one of the impacts of the on every street experience was it had made me very unshure. That had a big impact on all of us mentally and physically, not in a good way. And I suddenly had lost my confidence in my own ability to pitch the thing at

the right level. So when it came to live work, those Nashville players are not cheap, or you could say they're very cheap, because they they definitely it's how they make their living. I don't have a problem with that. And we had a very expensive band, and we had quite a big production, and I didn't feel confident enough to play big places. So it was break even time, really. And the other problem is that he, by which I

mean Mark, he did not have the profile. This might sound strange, but you've got to pitch this back to that period of time two thousands. He wasn't. He didn't have the profile that Sting had within the police, or Eric had within Derek and the Dominoes, or he wasn't. He came in the office one morning and I happened to be downstairs talking to the girls, and he said something quite interesting. He said, because he'd obviously been watching

Breakfast TV. And he said to me, don't you think it's strange that people like Elton and Rod go on TV and tell millions of strangers about the most intimate things in their lives. Like I said, well, that's their personalities. And I don't know whether you've read Elton's book. Elton's book is about as open a book as you could possibly find, and that's what Elton's personality is. And Rod is a no. I'm just using these two examples because he did. And Run Stewart knows the game backwards forwards

upside down. I interviewed Narl Rogers a couple of years ago. It's brilliant because he knows what to do, he knows how to do it, and he's not people like that are. It's just they're happy to be stars. Mark's quite a private person. He's not particularly he doesn't enjoy he never enjoyed any of the ass the stuff that comes with

being a rock star, whatever that is. And you asked what happened with me and him, Well, we did the Golden Heart thing, And I mean commercially that was quite successful and the tour did okay given the level that we were doing it at, and but the relationship, the

relationship between us was shifting and we were both older. Obviously, it's very different when you're twenty six twenty seven and you meet somebody who's got a red fender and it makes you think that the shadows and by this time you're married or you're divorced, you've got children, you've got the responsibilities, and you think you think like a fifty year old person, not a twenty five year old person. And if you're not thinking like a fifty year old person,

then something's wrong. And it was quite obvious as I as I was alluding to with the Australian thing. You know, the music scene is ever changing, there's new things coming along. Getting marked man offer on television was difficult. There's a line of people trying to get those slots and how many slots are there and in this country not many. And so he ended up he's the guy who took over from me, had him on programs with a guy who was basically a market gardener. Yeah, I mean kind

of you end up. It's almost a sense of desperation sets in and everybody's coming along and the whole it's just even saying, really, the whole music industry changed. It became in the eighties and we were in the We were in the change. It went from being pretty chaotic to being corporate, and it's corporate now. So the last interview I did for the ILMC was with j Marciano from AG Great Guy, Lovely Man, and I actually said to him, I said, does AG have a sense of humor?

And he said yes. I just started laughing. He does the corporations have a sense of hum you know. I mean, I don't have any beef against this. What happened in the music interest to me, and particularly the live side, was totally inevitable. It was completely inevitable.

I'd been sacked or I'd quit. We had a conversation he had done the record that came out of selling to Philadelphia and we were talking about the promotion on it, and without giving away too many secrets, as it were, he had agreed to do a certain amount of promotion which I had then set up, which was principally our old favorites, video clip TVs gigs, but he didn't want to do more than four months touring, which was fun.

And I had put in all the TVs that you can get for somebody like him, because you can't get somebody like that or anybody of that age onto Saturday morning kids television shows. So it was the lettermans or whether the post is now Stephen Colbert, whoever it is, it was the other here Michael Parkinson, the kind of chat show format with musical guest, and having got the whole lot together in a very kind of odd way, he decided he didn't want to do any of them.

And his reason was that he did not want to be as public a figure as that would make him. And I was not best pleased because I'd spent quite a long time doing this and it wasn't a particularly easy thing to do, and I didn't want the record companies and someone to be demotivated, because when you go to Belgium to do, Telly, you end up doing a pile of interviews, so you have print going on, or

whatever the technology is of the time. And we had and his pa rang me up and told me, and I had him come into the office one evening, just me and him, and we had a very surreal conversation which ended with him, well, it ended with I don't know how honestly, if I could explain it to you, I would. I don't really know what happened. It was a bit like Bill's comment about Robert Plant. I just thought that he said something to me which was so upset. I just thought, I can't do this anymore. And you

have to put that in the context. And I would say that of Bill, and Bill would absolutely agree with me. It's a lot easier to be able to say that when you can, you know, and sometimes in life it's like marriages and all that. Everybody uses that example, and actually managing acts is not like being married. But things just have run their course, and it had run its course,

and it had probably run it. We were probably quite a bit by our cell by day, and I said to him, I mentioned somebody else who happened to be in the building at the time. For you know, who was working on the promo tool that we I thought we were going to do. And I said, if you pay him a salary, he knows how to get you from A to B and do you think he's funny? So that's what happened. And then the irony was that he went off and he did seventy television shows Europe

in the UK on that record. I have don't understand and our relationship now he lives literally one hundred and fifty yards from where I'm speaking to you from this apartment, and I don't see him. We have the occasional interaction which is usually something to do with which happened when we were together. I mean, when he went on tour with Bob Dylan, you know, a double bill thing. I got an email from him that in itself is amazing.

There was a wonderful interview some years ago with Charlie Watson Ronnie Wood, and Ronnie was telling Charlie Charlie was a wonderful man, fantastic guy. He mentioned that Keith Richards had sent an email and I thought Charli was going to have a comera, but Mars would send me an email and he sent me this email, I can do it for baiting for you. It said, Well, he hasn't spoken to me, he hasn't spoken to my manager, he hasn't spoken to my band, and he hasn't spoken to

any of my crew. He hasn't spoken to his band, and he hasn't spoken to his manager. Nothing changes, Boss. The love mark didn't even tell me who it was and it was straight away.

a few people. I think there's a kind of when you have such a when you have such a when you live your dream, when you get to live your dream. I never stopped being surprised about the financial end. Ever, I could never get my head around it at all. So sometimes you help people out. You certainly, of course help your kids out if you can. My kids are grown now. I mean I've got grandchildren. My grandson's fifteen and my granddaughter's thirteen, and I'm very proud of my kids.

My daughters are very high ranked lawyer at Meta for Better or Worse, driving her mad and my son teaches foreign students English on the web, and they're great. They're totally different. But I have I don't buy art or stuff, but I've got some nice antiques. But I'm not particularly

I think you go through phases. I always say that people in the rock and roll game, they go through their art New vaux phase, and then they go through their Art Deco phase and then they come out at the other end and get a sofa that's comfortable to sit on. And it's always like that, and there's a real pressure in our society, of course, because it's capitalist consumers. I might have said this to you was before. It's a long time since I didn't pick up the check at dinner.

on publishing which had a cut off date. It was long, but the cutoff date had passed and the publishing was about sixty percent of the total. And the record side, especially after streaming came in and the entire artistic community got stuffed, that had declined. And quite soon, of course there will be an Ai Nofler a little be even less. But I just then there were personal reasons, psychological reasons sometimes, you know, if you've had some of the stuff that

went down at the end was pretty awful. And I'm not saying I'm not saying I'm blameless.

lot from Peter Grant. Now, Peter Grant is if you mentioned Peter Grant's name and people and people who remember him, and people do remember him, tell you a funny little story because it came up last night. Full enough. Back in the late sixties, Peter shared an office on Oxford Street in London with Mickey most famed South African record producer Nicky Chin the songwriter I was mentioning had got had met a waiter at a club called Annabel's whose

name was Mike Chapman, who was serving him drinks. I love stuff like this, So somebody's told Mike. The disc jockeys told Mike that Nicky is a songwriter lyricist, and Mike's thick considers himself to be a melody writer. So Mike's sister NICKI, I write songs, and Nicky says I write songs, and that neither of them has written Diddley's Squit.

But they get together. Nicky finds out the name and phone of the phone number of Mickey most Pa, so he rings her up and he asks her out on a blind date and she goes and on the day he inveigels Mickey's home phone number out of her. This is this is our this is when it was fun. So he goes how it's the middle of bloody night, and he calls the number, and this very gruff voice because he's just been woken up, says she's Mickey most who's that? And Nicky comes on and Nicky says, this

is Nicky Chin. I'm a songwriter with Mike Chapman. We write hits. They haven't written a song. Sorry, they have written some songs, they've not had anything like it. And Micky mos did something which is probably what I would have done. Micky said to them, all right, my office eleven o'clock tomorrow morning, now fuck off. Puts the phone down.

So they turn up and it turns out that NICKI that Mickey is sharing an office with Peter Grant and it's about twelve feet wide by sixteen foot long, and there are two desks and Peter, at the time weighed over three hundred pounds and Mickey's like this little bloke. And it's a famous address in London called one five to five Oxford Street because below them were Chris Wright and Terry Allis being Chrysalis, and below then were the

Chrystalies agency booking out. So they go in and they give and they got some demos cut on forty five's No Sorry tape, Big Bum cassette tape. Ingo's the tape. Mickey plays the first song, stops it after ten seconds it's rubbish, rolls it on next one fifteen seconds, rubbish, Rubbish plays six songs, rubbish and he went, nah, nothing, nothing, there nothing. They can't do anything with any of that.

And he says, you got anything else, and Nicky says, well, we've got one other song and it was cool old believe it or not. It was called Tom Tom turn around. Puts it in, listens to the whole thing. He says, which one of you two twats called me last night? And Nicki goes, that was me and he says, you said you're the one who said you can write hits, and Nicky goes, yeah. He says, you're right, you can. That's a hit. I'll take it, and it's a big hit.

It's the number one for sweet groups when they go out. Nicky told Nicki this many years later, Peter says, I don't think you're going to get anywhere with those two. They're fucking newslet. And of course they had hit after hit after hit after it after it. What I learned from Peter was that the fuggy image was Peter was a shy man or not. He was quite private. He was quite shy, and it was all a bit of an act, helped by the fact that before he got into music he had been an amateur. He'd been a

professional wrestler. His wrestling name was Count Bruno Alisi of Milan, Italy, which in itself is hilarious. And when I got to know Peter, and he had stopped the drugs by then, I must and he wouldn't mind me saying that. I mean, his his desk was like the last scene of Scarface most of the time, and he was his persona. He'd become a country gentleman. He used to wear suits with ties.

And he lost. He lost. He said to me once, he said, ed I've lost a person in weight, And ARMED said to me once, he said, when I saw Peter Grant, I didn't recognize him, And he said, and the whole way you've spoken everything, and what Peter had done was he had decided. People constantly asking him to get back into the business, and would you manage this,

and Queen Queen he turned Queen down. He understood. He said to me, when you have an experience like the one I had with led Zeppelin and the one you've had with Diastreit, there is no point trying to repeat it. And I completely agreed with that. There's no point going back and trying to recreate something that you did when you were thirty two and your I'm seventy five now. So what I do now, Bob, is I go music conferences like CMW in Toronto, and I ring up Don

Passman and came to come and who else? Bill Silver and it'll be fun.

of them. It's the situation with Mark is just strange, and it's just you get to the point where you just accept the way things are. There's no point pushing against it. I've really enjoyed this. This has been great. I must say that you. I'm going to flatter you. I've been interviewed many times by many people. You're in a class of your own. Definitely, you've really know what happened makes makes somebody sweat.