Ed Bicknell

mean he actually kind of. He really changed the Australian music scene almost singlehandedly, and he was a great character. It was a really really funny guy. I made to spend time with him was great. He was just just hilarious. He was a complete music enthusiast, which can't be said of some promoters these days. And he got to live straight.

And condolences to his family, to his to say, his wife, and to everybody else in the Australian music business because he uh, he was definitely a one off, but the sadly beast for those who did meet him, he was really definitely a unique They broke the mold after that, and he always said, I said, what about spreading throughout the world. He said, no, I like being the King of Australia. I like being a big fish and a small And for those who didn't know, he literally did

it all. You know he had not only started. You started with a record company, Mushroom Records, at the age of twenty and ultimately became frontier touring and so much more. But ed, you've done so much yourself. But let's look at the landscape today. What is the few were an agent and you're involved in uh growing w M. Endeavor in the UK. What is the future of the agency business in a marketplace where there's such consolidation amongst promoters.

That's a tough one, Thanks very much, Bob. I think the big agencies, and I'm thinking particularly of William Morrison. Oh sorry, Endeavor. Let me curate myself and see a A. They're kind of too big to fail. They're the sort of they're the big banks at the time of the crash, and I think that they will keep going, but they will probably strip some of their activities. Back when I

was at William Morris, which was William Morris. Back then they had all these divisions corporate consulting as one I remember and video games and all these kind of things, and nobody seemed to know what they did, and if you if you ask the question, nobody could tell you. And there's this, there's been this voracious appetite for gobbling up everything. That's a bit like Live Nation actually as well.

They have this, these tentacles. I always compare them to that old Steve McQueen film The Blob, and the Blob basically gobbled up everything in its path, and these agencies are a bit like that. But at the same time, this pandemic has caused people to split off. There was a panel earlier today of the new agents and there were four people on it who have basically left where they were, including one gentlemen from CIA started their own businesses,

and that's inevitable, that's always happened, I think. But the the corporate agency, to me, it didn't work for me personally because I found, I suppose, in simple terms, I found being an employee after being an employer for thirty years very difficult. I couldn't adapt to the corporate culture as it was then, and I couldn't adapt to the they I'm going to say this from the perspective of somebody here in London. They could not leave it alone.

They were constantly micromanaging me in order to get to wherever they thought they wanted to get. Um. That's not a criticism of anybody, particularly although the management at the time nearly all of whom left very quickly after Arian Patrick came in. They were not I didn't think they were particularly competent. Okay, let's be very specific. You mentioned the consolidation of companies. Used to be the ten per centers, the movie agents and the live appearance agents. They were

the driving force of revenue for these agencies. Now it's sports. They're involved with these giant funds. One would think as a music agent you feel like a zip on the end of the rear end of the whole enterprise. Yeah, well you do. And that was one of the problems. And I think that if you if you come from the generation I come from, and I think you come from, and I'm not saying it doesn't happen with younger people coming into the game. Now, what inspired me was music.

That was it. It was just there was nothing more than that. I was just completely and totally entranced by music, and music have pretty much every genre it's it's that's something that you don't here played in an agency offices, you don't talk about Um. That's not saying that agents don't go out and see bands, you know, five five, six nights a week, probably four or five different venues

a night. But but you're you're right. Certainly, when you're in the in a management position in a company like that, you're you're talking about the elements that you're talking about, and what you're doing basically is clambering up through layer after later until you get to the person who signs the check. And under the William Morris management I worked with, the vain head of finance explained to me one day that his soul, he considered his sole job, was to

stop Jim and Dave's mad schemes. This was Jim Wyatt and Dave Workesch after so, which was very encouraging to me because we were I had a great team here. We managed to break even in the first year. They budgeted to lose money for seven years and it was impossible to get anything done. The reaction time was ridiculously long. We missed out on getting extra office space for that reason. They just didn't act quickly. Enough, and after about two

and a half years there was a particular incident. I was asked to sign a chit which gave us the right to have semi skim milk as well as full cram milk. This landed on my desk, and that happened to be the catalyst, and I just thought, you know, I didn't sign up for this, and and I left. And it was very shortly after that Endeavor merged with them, and then within about a week took them over. And okay, now you come from the era when the whole business

was built. This is one of the things that bothers me. They say, oh, music is the same as it ever was. It certainly is not now. I always analogize it to the internet. There was all this excitement starting in the mid nineties, certainly to about uh in the sixties we were developing the business. If you take about Peter Graham, Peter Graham flipped the touring business, said hey, the gig is going to sell out anyway, I might as well

take the lion. Sure of the money. The question becomes I always say, a great musician not only is a bad business person, but they couldn't even at the seven eleven because they couldn't show up on time. I say the great same thing about the Titans and the history of the music business. They literally couldn't work anywhere else. They could only work for themselves. Do you believe A this is still true? And be what can you tell us about the kind of personality that created and drove

this business? I'll take the second part of that first. Um. Of course my experiences UK and we were always following America, So the first thing really that happened here of any significance would have been a N seven when UM a little story for you, E M. I. Back in those days they had four A and R guys who sat on a committee, and back in those days, most of the UK labels just had kind of one off deals with American labels, so they had first refusal for an

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

something had stretched. So they call up the American company and said this record you've sent us, it's it's it doesn't sound right. And the American then said, no, no, that's the record. It's turning into a huge hit here. You should pick it up. Originally the vote was three votes against one vote four, which was George. George then set about, over a period of three or four weeks, brain busting the other three. Well, he only needed two

more votes. He brain busted, He got two of them to agree, and they put it and that record was Heartbreak, Hotel Wow, and it changed everything. So George Martin was not just the beat was producer. He was also the person who and that record would have come out anyway obviously, but we only had the only labels I can remember back then were Decca, Pie and E M I, and one of them would have picked it up. And when I came into the music business, first of all, it

wasn't called the music business. And secondly it wasn't a business. It was this completely chaotic thing which was full of some fairly dubious characters who had spotted that there was cash to be made and I emphasized the word cash in bags. And this was pre Brian Epstein. I'm talking about the period from about nineteen fifty seven to about nineteen sixty three, and there were there were there were guys,

people with names like Larry Palms. He was nervous Mr Palms, Shillings and Pence because he and he had the first boy bands as we now call them. All of his acts were basically guys who looked great and it didn't matter whether they could sing. We had a couple of very early and pretty primitive television show six five Special which went out at five past six on a Saturday, and a show called Oh Boy, and it was Oh Boy,

which had an edge to it. It had a producer called Jack Good who went on to do various of the things, and people like Cliff Richard and the Shadows Billy Fury out of a Faith got their start on that show. And that was a black and white TV show. And if you were thirteen years old, you made sure you you were at home on a Saturday at six o'clock to watch one of these two shows. The business

was full of characters. Of course. One of the things about working in music you don't actually need any qualifications. You are what you are what you say you are. So if you're a promoter, if you walk into it.

Back when I was in my early days as an agent, a promoter was somebody who walked in and said I'm a promoter, and within five minutes I'd be selling in deep purple dates and praying that they would earn that the the upfront ticket sales would be sufficient that they could pay the deposit, because of course nobody had escrow accounts back then. They just took the money and thought

of it as their own money. And I think that the music really followed the early American rock and roll singers, the Evely Brothers, Elvis, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, that Chuck Berry. Of course, that era, and that kind of metamorphosized into the Beatles era, and of course on the first Beatles record, or the first album that was released in the UK, there were a large number of covers, including a roll over Beethoven for instance, I can remember.

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

I should absolutely include this Radio Luxembourg. Radio Luxembourg, which was broadcast from Luxembourg, was played pop music from about seven o'clock in the evening to about midnight, and it had a fading signal and in the house I lived up in the north of England, the only place I could get the full signal was halfway up the staircase, so I would spend hours sitting on the staircase listening

to Roy Orbison whoever it happened to be. The BBC only played pop music on one show, which was directed, which was for the American gies who were posted in Germany, and they would send in rickly was called Two Way Family Favorites. They would send in requests and once in a while Perry Como would be put aside and you'd here, don't be cruel, all shook up or whatever happened to be, and you would you would listen to this entire to our program in the hope that they would play one

or two bona fide pop songs. And of course there were no categories. It was just pop music. We didn't have a rock and roll. There was no country, there was no heavy metal, there was no folk, none of that. Okay, maybe I'm interrupting, but let's go back to what circumstances do you grow up in? Well. I was born Yorkshire, which is up in the north of England. I my father was the principle of a grammar school. My mom

sort of my mom. I had a younger brother. We lived in a town halfway between Leeds and York until I was about eleven, and then we moved up to where they actually they built a brand new school, which was the largest in Yorkshire at the time, and we moved up there and lived at the school. It wasn't a private school, it was just a regular day school. When I was thirteen years old, that Christmas, my parents and I would love it if they were alive now because I would love to be able to ask them

why they did this. They bought me Elvis's Gold Records, Volume one, which were the principle of a grammar school in Yorkshire. In that was quite a stretch and I can remember on Christmas morning going down putting it on the old radio gram you know, when the record would fall down with a crash and the first track on that record on side one is hound Dog and two

minutes twenty six seconds later, my life had changed completely. Okay, many many years later, but many years later I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Scotty Moore and d J. Fontana, who played guitar and drums on that respectively, which was a complete trip. Oh yeah, when you meet your heroes from that era. Uh, but let's go back. One thing is as an American, I'm slightly younger than

you in that we grew up with television. I had New York markets, so there were off six TV channels, etcetera. But we get the impression that in the UK it was economically disadvantage and this impacted the music scene. What was it like growing up in that era. Well, you're correct, because that was the post war era, so we as the UK. I remember once asking my parents what was the most significant thing in their lives, and without a second hesitation, they both said, in unison, the war something.

And I remember my dad saying our lives were put on hold for seven years. So when we came out of the war, for a certain age group, we still had national service. You still had to go into the army. The economy, of course, had been completely ruined by the war effort we had. But my memory of that period is that everything was dark, everything was wet. It was always raining. It's raining now, but it's see different about then,

and it was a very It was austerea. We didn't have a lot of the modern things I think that you've got in America. Before us, we didn't have central heating, didn't have had coal fires. You would take a bath in a tin in a tin bath. You as the son of a school teacher, you did that. You didn't have senating. You took a bath in a tin bath. Yes, absolutely, Yeah, I still do yeah, no, but no, yes absolutely. I mean he was he when he passed. I remember you

going through your parents his things. He had kept every single pace lip he had ever received ever and when he passed, when she was in the mid seventies, sorry, in the wh he retired in the mid seventies. He was making a hundred pounds a week. That was a good salary back then. Well, okay, so are you the older brother the younger brother? I knew that, okay, So what was it like going to school? Were your father ro the head mask well fly enough. It was okay.

I didn't get any stick from the other kids, but there were a few teachers who thought that they would kind of try it on a bit. I was. It was interesting education period because when I look back on it, you know, I as I say, they bought me this record, and then we two Within two years, I had seen an old black and white movie on on Sunday's The BBC, which was then just the BBC used to show old black and white movies from the kind of swing era,

Buzzby Barkley kind of films. And they showed a movie called George White Scandals, which featured the American jazz drummer Jeane Crooper. And I'm watching Jane Crooper bash this white drum kit and light went on and I, instead of a bicycle, which would be the normal thing you'd want at that age, I decided I wanted to play drums, which got me to the point that I'm talking to you. And my dad we went into Leeds. We went to

a music store called Kitchens. And there's an interesting coincidence here because at the exactly the same moment in time, Martinoffler was going to the same shop. He turned left into guitars. If you turned right you went to woodwinds, And as always happened in music shops, if you went into the basement, there was the drum department. And I went down into the basement and we bought a snare drum, a pair of sticks, a pair of brushes for six pounds.

And the guy who was the salesman said, we give lessons, which was surprising to me because of course I thought you just hit them, which which you don't. And this was an excuse for him to sell my dad the body Rich drum Tutor, which is the drum tutter. All drummers know this drum tutor, which Buddy Rich just put

his name to. He didn't write the thing. It was written by a guy called Henry Adler, and for an extra thirty shillings we got the book and I was enrolled for drum lessons, which I took for four years. Okay this when you bought the drums, you'd already heard Elvis Presley. Yes, yes, okay, you remember the brand name of that snare drum. It was a a pretty cheap British in put in imitation of American drums, and it was a company called Olympic, who were eventually bought by

Premier Drums. Okay, so you start off with a snare drum, At what point do you get a complete kit? Wow? Like I had to save up money pocket money and basically got a bass drum next without a pedal, then got a pedal, and then got a symbol, a ride symbol, and then got high hats and probably took me eighteen months. And immediately, of course I got together with some pals at school who played guitar and bass and a singer. And of course back then you could be in a

band if you owned an amplifier. That was the qualification. You didn't have to play. So we formed a beat group, this is pre beatles, and we promptly learned every single number by a group called Shadows, who were Cliff Richards backing band. The equivalent in America would have been a

band like the Ventures. And we would play two and a half minute instrumentals and we learned probably eighty of them B sides, album tracks, and then we started about five the British blues boom was getting underway with people like Alexis Corner, very early rolling stones, pretty things, so we started we started to shift towards that, and of course, almost slightly before that, the Beatles are arrived, so we so of course, when the Beatles arrived, we did what

every other band in Britain did. We dumped the entire Shadows repertoire and started learning Beatles song. Okay, let's say once you learn those, mute those songs, you got gigs? Correct? Yes, yes, who booked those gigs? Parents? Okay, because usually the drummer is the business guy, we'll find that interest there. So many drummers would survived the bands and careers like you had. So what kind of gigs did he get? We just played in uh um youth clubs, played in played in

old people's hopes, played in St Patrick's night dances. There was a hole in the town I lived in which held about four people. We used to play there. We would play in leeds Um and we played in an area which was probably about fifty square miles and we would probably play Fridays and Saturdays and sometimes Sundays. And of course the parents also did the transport. We had very very giving parents. My parents traded in the car they had and got any state car so we could

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

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

we were hip and relevant. Um, there was the sex, drugs, and rock and roll came along a bit later, but at that point, no, I mean you you'd finished at eleven thirty at night, and your mom and dad would be outside with the with the car. You pat your gear up and put it in and then you'd be wished away and that was that. There was, but a lot of people, certainly the lead sixties British musicians, they were not that great verbally, and they said, well, I

got into music to meet girls. Yeah, so were you meeting girls? I was meeting them, yes, but that was it. I was meeting them. I mean I was, I was motivated by by I just found the whole thing incredibly romantic, just to be playing music. And yes, if yeah, but I mean I'm talking about I was fifteen years old, so I wasn't doing what your point you're into yet all people that we weren't any deeper than that. Now, the Beatles really hit in sixty three, and what was

that like being on the ground with the Beatles? Hire certainly an American happened very quickly in January six. What was it like? Okay, Well, their first single, of course was Loved Me Do, and that came out I think made sixty two probably, and it didn't make much of an impact. And I remember as the group, we would rehearse every week and we would start learning adding new songs, and we that record was so insignificant at the time that we didn't even bother adding it to our kind

of set list. But this endless set list, but not long after must have been the early part of sixty three or round about spring Please Please Me came out, which George Martin incidentally told me was originally recorded at half the tempo, as like a Royal Orbison ballad. I don't know whether you know this. So the way they recorded it it was like bum bum bum bump, dad bump bump bump like that. And he said double the

tempo and put the chorus at the beginning. And when they finished it, he said to them, you've just recorded your first number one. And I said to him, did you really think that? And he said no, no, I was just just trying to keep them around. But I went to see the Beatles on a package tour. It was on June three at the Odeon Theater in Leeds. They were on a show with Roy Orbison, Jerry and the Postmaker's Silla Black and a couple of other acts.

Orbison had originally started the tour as the headliner, and a dozen shows in they flipped it so that he opened the and half chosen. Those days had an interval because you could not hear yourself think or and the other thing I remember, which nobody ever talks about was the smell of girls urinating on velvet cinema seats with steam rising from the seats and you're looking as cancer

that But honestly, that was what it was like. The the artist that I saw in that period of time who got the biggest scream and undoubtedly this the largest volume of p was Del Shannon. He people went nuts for him. I say, why particularly, but the Beatle that Beatles show? What I remember about that Beatles Show? And I still got the program I've got the programs from all these shows. I would take a bio and I would write down the set list, and of course they

play twenty five minutes, and they did. I remember they started off when I saw her standing there, finished with twist and shout. They did a great version of you Really Got a hold on Me, that Miracles number, and they did Taste of Honey, which was quite unusual for the band of that time. But that was the period when they all had the same haircut, they were all

wearing the same outfits. They had the round collars on the jackets ties with pins through which we all immediately rushed out to get outfits like that, and they um the screaming was what I remember. You could barely hear a note of music. Were you caught up in the menia or were you like removed saying, well, that's the girls, that's not for the boys. Well I wasn't. I wasn't screaming, that's for sure. You couldn't help. But we swept along

by it. I mean, I was fifteen years old. I just had my fifteenth birthday, and I think the music that you hear between the ages of about twelve and sixteen, certainly for me or for my generation, was what fashions your taste thereafter. I think that just kind of because you're of an age where it's so it really gets into your kind of soul, into your being. And I had been collecting Elvis records and the other artist, the rock and roll artist. I just I mentioned to you

a few minutes ago. I happened to be a big fan of instrumentals, so I had a lot of Duane Eddie records people like that. But the fact that they were a British group, um completely, I think blew everybody away. It was it was the fact that they were home grown and that they were writing their own songs that that was a real leap. I remember George Martin again saying to me that, of course when he first saw them,

he I said to him, you didn't. I interviewed him four times and I remember saying to him that, I said, you didn't sign them because you thought they were any good, did you? And he said, know, they were terrible. I said you signed them because you liked them as people and he said yes. And I said did you signed them because of Brian Epstein's enthusiasm And he said yes. And I said, did you signed them because the E m I record deal back then was so bad it

represented no risk to the company. They got one old English penny royalty for the sale of an album in the UK, and they got half of one old English penny for the sale of an album outside of the UK. So and they had to use abbey Road em My studio. They had to do as an abbey Road producer of an EMI producer, which happened to be George who was making comedy records at the time. He wasn't doing music. And they had to use an engine A m I

engineers who wore white coats, had like surgical gloves. You had to do an A side and a B side in three hours. The music was never ever ever played back to the act ever. And if you didn't do the I side in the Bay side in three hours, it didn't matter. Whatever you've got recorded was what would come out. Don't no, so don't forget. Everything was very

compressed in the US. The Stones came very quickly after the Beatles, and then it would be a big thing on the radio Saturday Night battle between the Rock the Stones in the Beatles. In your particular case, you said you were playing music with your band influenced by the British blues scene. Was there that bifurcation in the UK where you were one or the other? Were you one or the other your Beatles restored, Uh no, not really a little you see, they were all lumped together. They

were pop groups. The Rolling Stones were not. We didn't know what blues music was. I mean, we were white, middle class kids. I've had this conversation with many musicians who were in the bands of that era, bands like the Searchers, Manfred Man and the rest of them, and Jimmy Page and Robert and so on, and of course they look back on it now as being pretty ridiculous. That white middle aged, sorry, white middle class kids from South London were trying to sound like John Lee Hooker.

It was just completely ridiculous, but they were all and everybody was slowing the records down by hand to try and grab what the lyrics were because American lyrics. I'll give you an example. Many years ago, I happened to be in Nashville with Martin Offer and we were having dinner with well On Jennings and the Evely brothers and Emmy Harris, and I remember saying, I've always wanted to ask you guys to don Phil what what's a bird dog?

And they burst out laughing and they said, well, you know when you go hunting, do you have you have a dog? And I said, oh, you mean a retriever and they said, no, no, it's a bird dog. For years we had wondered what a bird dog was, and there were many many examples of that. And I remember Whalon saying to market myself, he said, you you know more about us than we know about us. And I said, well, you have to understand that when we were growing up,

everything American was magical. Our introduction to America was through the early Westerns, like raw hide Wagon Train. Then it moved on to the crime shows like Dragnet s Unset Strip, and then through music, through rock and roll music. And I suppose there was a slight overlap with maybe the big band swing era just before that. So on the radio you would hear um maybe the Ellington band or the BASSI Band, probably quite late at night, and the whole I can't overstress the romance of it to us.

And I remember saying to them, Mark can recite the the entire sleeve note from Elvis is Gold Records Volume one, and Mark probably started reciting it and I won't, no, no, no, you don't. But we that we would read, we would memorize the sleeve notes. And the other thing that was mystifying to us, because they were never credited, was who played on these records. This became something of an adventure

to try and find out. And it was only really when Phil Spector's Wall of Sound came along that you heard about people like Hal Blaine or Carol Kay or whoever. We didn't know who Scotty Moore and d J. Fontana were who or what, or that there was a horn section in Fat Domino's band. I remember when I met Roy Orbison years later I said to him one of my memories about him was that he played a show in Leeds in this venue I was talking about on a later tour, and he had four violinists. They were

playing white violins sitting on white cane chairs, unamplified. But because you knew the records so well, when they were sawing away, you could imagine the sound even though you couldn't hear the sound well articulated. Now, when the Beatles hit in the US, everybody picked up the guitar. People were forming bands left in the right. What was like in the UK? It was the same, It was the same. There was a there was a magazine in Liverpool called

Mersey Beat, which gave Rise and the other music. I'm going to call them trade papers, but they weren't really trade papers like billboards. There were two in particular. One was called the New Musical Express Enemy and the other was Melody Maker, And the Melody Maker was really a jazz paper, and it kind of quite rapidly became Beatles. Stones and another band that people forget who were huge here and I know huge in your country, the Dave

Clark five. They were big, but for a shorter period of time period, right, um, Once again the drummer was the business guy. Well, yeah, an interesting story about Dave Clark. Tell you a little story here. So Dave from the from another drummer nearly all the rather like in your country at the time, we had a very strong musician Miss Musicians union here at the time, and most pop records, which you and I would consider to be the hits of that whole period from about sixty three through to

about sixty six, the bands didn't play on them. Studio players played on them, and Dave Clark didn't play on any of his own records. I didn't know that they were all done by a drummer, a drummer called Bobby Graham, and Bobby Graham was one and it was a bit like the Wall of Sound guys, the Wrecking Crew. There

were three guys who did all the drums. There were two piano players, there were four bass players, six guitarists and song So Bobby Graham is doing a session for bits and pieces to follow up to Glad all over. I can hear, and he's down in the studio and Dave Clark is up in the producers box and Bobby is playing buff buff into the song and Dave Clark preciously into commen. He says, I need you to play that simpler. So he goes, no, no, no, no, You've got to play it simpler, and he goes, you can't

play it. He's just playing four in the bar exactly as you say. And finally Bobby, in exasperation, hits the talkback and says, why have I got to play it like this? And Dave Clark says, because I've got to mind to it and all those records were covered one of my dearest friends. He's getting on in use now. It's a drama called Clem Cotini, who played with the Tornadoes on Telstar, which was the first British record to

get to number one in the US. I think and um, he played on number one hits in the UK, all of the all the all of the key stuff, for instance, and he doesn't have a dime. Uh correct correct all these legends. Okay, so you're playing drums. The scene goes thermonuclear A. Most of the players from the English world don't go to university. Yet you go to university. Was there any thought, as you say in the UK of

turning bro and not going to university. I wanted to do that, but uh, I kind of came to a sort of this is my first deal, if you like, a deal with my parents. But I would go to university. I would hopefully get a degree and then I would go to London and try and be a professional musician. Now, of course I had ah an idea of my own talents that was considerably greater than they actually were, because I was eighteen years old. But a very very strange

thing happened. I go up to university in Hull, in Yorkshire, in city very like Liverpool on just on the other side of the country. And on the first night I was there, or the second night, they were having a dance in the students union, which is where girls would dance around their handbags and boys would look at them and wonder if they could cut in. And I walk into the front of the student union and something happened

which brought me to this place. There's a Tanoi message going out if anybody in the building can play drums, would they please come to reception. And I was standing at reception and I can see the woman who's speaking into the microphone, so without thinking what this might be, I said to her, I can And this guy shot out, who I later learned was a chap called Malcolm Haig, and he said to me, are you any good? I said, well, yeah, quite good it he said, well, how good are you?

I said, well quite good? He said, the drama with the band tonight can't play sick and we haven't got any records. We don't have a like a DJ thing. He said, so can you play with them? And I went, uh, well, yeah, I don't know what do they play. So anyway, he starts leading me off to the dressing room and it turned out, now you won't know this band, but it turned out they were a band called the Victor Brox

Blues Train. Victor Brox later went onto a little bit of success because he sings on the first cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar, but at the time he was the frontman of a six piece blues band playing blues covers. And there was a coincidence because the previous week this group had played in my hometown. I hadn't gone, but I'd seen the posters up everywhere. So I go into

the dressing room. I'm into used to them and there's another student who said this message and he's got in there before me, and I think to myself, sad him, I'm going to get rid of him. So I did a bluff. And one of the things in management you have to learn how to do is bluff, bluff like mad and I said to Victor Brox, I said, ah, I saw your band last week in Tadcaster. I know all of the songs you do. The other guy immediately turned around and left, and then I said to them

how much are you going to pay me? And they won't pay you. I said, yeah, how much are you gonna pay me? And we settled on five pounds. They were getting forty pounds. When I've done the deal for the money, I said, listen, there's something you need to know. I didn't see you last week. I just saw the posters, which they thought was hilarious. And I said, what do you play? And they did knock on wood, hold on, I'm coming. You don't know like I know Motown Stacks

James Brown, which I had played dozens of times. I just said to the bass player, can you count me in? And just signal when you come into the end, because in rock music you only have to know the beginning in the end. What happens in the middle doesn't matter. And I got through two minutes, said kept it simple, didn't screw it up. Big hugs at the end, get

my five pounds and I go into the bar. I'm going a drink, and a tall blonde girl called Trudy comes up to me and says, I really enjoyed your playing, And I went, did you? And I bought her a larger in line or something, and she said, would you like to come back to my student house for coffee? Which was which was the sign? So I said, yeah, sure,

love love to. So I'm coming out of the student union and a flash gun goes off in my face and a little guy cop pops out and he says, I'm the I'm the editor of the student newspaper, talked, we'd like to do a front page feature on you next week. What's your name? What course are you on? Where did you come from? Were you nervous? How did you know all those songs? So I do an interview

with this guy. At the same time the chap who had come up to me when I got into the place, who turned out to be the social secretary as we call them here. It was leaving and he came over to me and he said, I'm a I'm a pianist. Do you want to be in my group? And I said, yeah, sure. I said who else is in your group? He said nobody, it's me and you will. But I know a flute player and he happened to be running the entertainments committee. He said, do you want to be on the entertainments committee?

And I said that what does that do? I don't know what that is. He said, well, we run all the entertainment. We run a dance every Saturday. We do a union ball once a year. I also run the jazz club and the folk club. Okay, so on my first night, I've played a eg, have made five pounds of pulled a bird, I'm on the front cover of the student in newspaper paper, and I've joined the entertainments committee. And at the end of my first year he stepped down to do his finals exams and he said to me,

you take over. And I said we're supposed to have an election and he went, as are you stupid? So I took over entertainment. Okay, let's go back to the beginner. Where did you get the Hudspur asked for five paths. I've always had hutspur. That's That's why I'm on your show. But exactly that, where does that come from? Your parents? Where did you learn that? Actually? I was quite shy

at that point. I mean, having gone through the school experience I had, which was, you know, living at the school that I went to and kind of putting up with a bit of ribbing from certain teachers, and that I don't know, I just I don't know just what makes you the man you are. But since you mentioned her name, we have to ask what happened with Trudy? Oh truly went the way of all ladies of the time.

You know. She we we used to, we used to, we used to have a dreadful cut coffee with you know, those chemicals sprinkled on the top, and she I dually. I mean, this was like being let into a sweet shop for me. I mean I had one girlfriend back in Yorkshire and here I am, and I'm suddenly in a sweet shop. And when I took over the entertainments, I was just by default the best known person in the university because I had the most glamorous gig if

you like. And I made one decision which stood me in very good stead then and I have kept right up to now. I decided I would only put on bands that I liked, and somehow I would sell them to my audience. And I had including the teacher training college down the road, in the technical college next door, I had twelve thou students to draw and who had a student union card. I had a hall which was the third largest in the UK, held a thousand people.

So the first band I bought was the Moody Blues. Okay, well, well let's slow down a little bit. You were a drummer. Now you got the gig in to use the line from Let It Be, you passed the audition? Yes, at what point do you bring your drums to university? Within two weeks of that? So, at what point do you say I'm a businessman as opposed to a drummer. I've never said that. Um. That was later when I got

down to London. Okay, so all this time that you're ahead of the entertainment program, in the back of your mind, the dream is still alive. You're gonna be a drummer. Yeah, absolutely, And what happened. I never had any aspirations to get onto the business side. I didn't know what the business side was. I was, as I was saying earlier, there really wasn't a defined music business like we know it now. I had no clue what anybody did. I knew I had heard of Colonel Parker, I'd heard of Epstein. I

didn't know what they did, the mechanics of what they did. Okay. So while you were in university, were you also playing in the bands, whether it would be the pianist or somebody else, Yes, yes, and I and I also I got a jazz group together, playing kind of I'm going to call it modern jazz. It was really just rubbish, but that's what we did. Okay. So you booked the Moody Blues. How do you even do that? How do you know who the agent is? How do you know

what's going to call? My predecessor as the social secretary, this guy Malcolm, when he said decided to step down and to do his finals, he said, oh look, here's that. He wrote them down. He wrote a list of the agencies that he dealt with. Now, the agency business in London at the time was small. I mean they were probably six five six agencies, and there weren't that many bands either. I mean we didn't have you know, there

were maybe playing on the student circuit. There were probably a hundred hundred and fifty bands, and that they might range from a pound a night local group to the most I ever paid for an act was four hundred pounds for Jethro Toll and they had a top three single when I had them. Okay, would you come up with the band and then find the agent or would

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

Friday and Saturday, because that would pay more. They could make maybe get anywhere between a hundred and twenty five to fifty pounds for a net for a name act, a decent name, and um, those same bands might play on a Sunday night for fifty pounds somewhere, and and everybody was kind of on a wage sort of thing, and typically a musician might make pounds a week back then I'm talking or sixty six through to sixty nine. How did you have time to do your school work? Well? Um,

just worked hard. I mean I got a decent degree. And what did you study? I did, Well, it was

a new course. It was called social studies and in fact the group I was part of was as I found out when I got there, um because I went for an interview and the professor who interviewed me, she was so grateful I'd applied because this was a brand new course and we were the experiment, this group that I was part of, which was probably about thirty five students they were going to we were going to start this course, and I just and it included sociology, philosophy, economics,

things like that at British Social history since since the Industrial Revolution eighteen and I just I got stuck into that. But my real thing was was doing doing the entertainments. And then a couple of questions, how many gigs would you do a year? How many shows? Are you talking about me personally? And probably be about okay, And there was a fund that you drew on or were you starting at dollar zero, I were starting with the ticket

money that came in. Okay, so there are certain acts that are instant sellouts, but a lot of acts are not. How did you promote the shows? I learned some very good lessons very quickly, which stood me in very good stead for my later career. The first was that if you if you can't read a poster from the top of a double decker bus, it's not worth ship. So I just used to do a black background with day glow green, day glow, pink, day glow orange. It would say who it was, where it was, when it was,

and how much I got. I got an entertainments committed together, and I delegated two different people. They would go and they would put a flyer under the door of every single room in every single hall of residents. I would put flyers on every dining table for a week. I would try. I would have the music played over the student union p A. And also I had the biggest thing I had going for me was that this was a Saturday night and the students, the male and the

female students. Basically, Saturday night was the night where you got together and you know that you ended up with a knee trembler by the end of the evening. And if you don't know what that is, Bob, I'll send you a text. So so but but but you know lust they are now was a big driving force, and certainly in a student environment. And but one, but just a little side story. When I bought the Moody Blues at that time they had had what they had had one number one hit in the UK with a Bessie

Banks song called go Now. Danny Lane was the singer who later went onto Wings and they were essentially an R and B group from Birmingham. In between the time I bought them and the time they came, Denny and the bass player left the group and Justin Hayward and John Lodge, who are now very dear friends of mine,

ironically had joined the band. They had played a show in a cabaret club in the north of England where they were basically doing go Now three times in the set and some covers, and they played this particular place

up in Newcastle or somewhere. Justin told me this story and after the show they're in the dressing room and they were all wearing matching suits, shirts, ties, looking very smart and a guy and his wife came by and banged on the door, and they opened the door and the guy said, he said, it's really great of your lads to come all the way up here, but I got to tell you you were crap. You're absolutely shiped. You're the worst band I've ever seen in my life.

Nice to meet you by and left and the movie Blue was got in their van to drive back to London in total silence. They didn't speak for about four hours, and as they getting close to London, one of them said that guy's right, and they all went yeah. They dumped everything they were doing justin and John Lodge got the biggest bag of weed they could lay their hands on.

They went to Belgium and they wrote Nights in White Satin Tuesday Afternoon and all of the songs that were on the Days of Future Past record, which they recorded not with the orchestra that was dubbed on afterwards, because Decca had a new stereo system thing and they wanted that record to be the demonstration disc for this particular format that they were going to go with, so they hired Tony Clark to do all those arrangements and it was wasn't until the record was released that the Moody

Blues heard them, because back then nobody's consulted the act. So anyway, I booked them. When they arrived, I go up to the dressing room and back then nobody had a rider. So you gave them some sausage rolls and to create a beer and they were grateful. And I had written on a piece of paper and felt tip pen Moody Blues eight thirty to nine fifty to ten thirty,

because everybody did to forty five minutes. And John Lodge and I'm going to attempt to Birmingham Accent now came and stood behind me, and he's looking at this thing, and he says, we don't do to forty four minutes anymore. We do a concert. And I said, what he should a concert? We do a concert. Now we do seventy four minute still left to sit down, and I said, we haven't got any chairs lift to sit on the floor.

We don't do forty four minutes. We do we do a concertitute a concert, And to my astonishment, students sat down and they played a concert complete with melotron. They did the whole of that first album, and they did two songs off the next one, one of which had the amazing lyrics Timothy Leary is dead, No he's yeah, you know the legend of a mind. Yeah, And I a little light went on and I thought, well, if I put I had two refectories that I would put

things on. I thought, well, if I put on something in the East refectory which they can dance to, I can put concert song here. And so the next band I bought was Pink Floyd four a hundred fifty pounds, and they came up and again I thought I was getting Sid. No, said David Gilmore walked in. They had they had got rid of? Said well, actually what happened was they were going to play gig in Oxford and

they got to the and they had to pick him up. Last, they went to his mum's house where Sid was living. They pulled up outside his house and they sat in the car for twenty minutes in silence, and then Roger, who was driving, drove off without Sid, because David was already in the group covering for Sid. And that's how said Barrett left Pink Floyd. He simply wasn't picked up, and they m they came up to home and they played the whole of the source of Full of Secrets record,

and I was totally blown away. I thought they were amazing so on, and I'm on a roll at this point, so then I think, okay, I'll put the Who. So I bought the Who had the Who three times and that was staggering. The only band I've ever worked with where at the end nobody applauded and nobody left. People were stunned. They smashed everything, everything, The entire drum kit came off the front of the stage and landed in the audience. There were bombs going off. That's why, right.

I interviewed Roger three years ago and I realized halfway through the interview he couldn't hear a word. I was saying, he's completely deafening. What he calls his end whist leah, because they back then is you know, all of the sound came off the back line. It was a piddling little p a and Roger had to over sing. He

had to basically shout and scream to be heard. And I was standing on the stage right next to Pete's Marshall stacks, two of them, one of which had no speakers in it, so he could spear his guitar through because he possibly going to pay for speakers. And the noise was the sound. Well, I'll call it a noise because Roger said to me we were trying to recreate the sounds of war, and I said to you were entirely successful. They were fantastic, life, fantastic. You have this

incredible run. But then you graduate with well when I graduated. Of course, by this time I got to know quite a lot of the booker's agents in London because they were constantly ringing me trying to sell me their crappy bands. I had a fantastic last week. We had a charity thing, charity week and I put on John Male's Blues Breakers Jethro Tull with led Zeppelin as the opening act, booked

as the new Yardbirds. And I've still got the contract and it had been crossed out and it written in was led L E. A D. Polin which Peter had written in um we had The Kinks and Family Family were the best band I put on in the entire two years. They didn't make it in America. True incredible band, fantastic band. So July four, with a hundred pounds, my mom and dad I get on the train. I've got one telephone number. I come down to London. One of the groups I put on in the last week as

a support band was a group called Gingerbread. Their bass player was John Wetton, the late John Wetton, who went on to join King Crimson and Asia founded Asia with Carl and I went down to London and within a week I've got a band together, of which John was the bass player and singer. And we found a rehearsal place in South London. Lets go a little bit were you're in the hall, how do you get your drums to London? Or how do you find a new kid

in London? With difficulty? I got one of the bands that I booked to stick them at the back of the van and take them down to London. That's it, just improvise. And I slept on a floor for about eighteen months. Joined this group. And whose floor was it? This was just some people I knew, I mean I knew this. This was the one telephone number I called up. They said, well, we don't have any rooms, but you can sleep on the floor. So I took a sleeping

bag slept on the floor. Did they charge you for that. No, no, Bob, they didn't judge me for that, and I um That group within a few months metamorphosized into what became the Average White Band. Wow, we got this horle type of their bags of question begs how good a drummer was Robbie mcintogh great, it's really good. He replaced me. I was sacked along with John for not being Scottish. They wanted to have an all Scottish band. We were rehearsing,

we hadn't. We played one show at the Marquee Club, which was pretty disastrous, to be honest, And in January of v I was summarily sacked, which was fine because I was sacked from what I was sacked from. Nothing. Really, they changed their name. They were called Mogul Thrash. Believe it or not. They changed their name to the Average White Band, got a deal with Yeah it was it yea Atlantic of course ya, And off they went. And

then John left and he joined King Crimson, he joined Family. Actually, all those eighteen months, are you doing things in you think other than drumming with the future weight average weight? Not in the professional money earning sense. I mean, I was going to see bands constantly I was completely I was in London. I had not been to London before I was. I would go to the Marquee Club five nights a week. It didn't matter what night you went, there would be somebody good on What were you doing

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

what's your next move? Total acts. Everything in my life or professional life, certainly has been luck. It's been absolutely the biggest factor. I get sacked from the average white band or mugul thrash as they were. The next morning, I'm walking down Oxford Street and I bump into one of the agents who used to call me when I was at university. Guy called John Sherry, sadly no longer

with us, and he said, what are you doing? And I said, I've just been sacked from the average white band for not being Scottish, and he said words which ring down to me over the years. I can't pay you anything, but would you like to come and work in the office and I'll give you half of everything you earn. I had nothing else going, so I go the next morning to the office, which turned out to

be one room with one desk and two telephones. Uh. And when I get there, he says to me, by the way, I forgot to tell you I don't have any acts. You don't have any acts, he said no. So I started booking colleges as the buyer if you like, of which Holy University where I went was one. I got picked up card off the university and several others, and they would be on split commission deals, which don't happen now. So typically a college would have a dance on a Saturday night. They had a budget of a

hundred and fifty pounds. They wanted a stripper, a steel band, and a band they could dance to, and I would ring around the way way they would really want a stripper. That would not happen now, Yeah, you didn't. You didn't have those in the gigs in the UK US either okay, but back then I mean that was quite Yeah. We want a stripper and we want to deal band, and we want the band that can dance to So I would have a budget. I'd ring around all the agencies.

What have you got available on the fifth of May five pounds? They would tell me they pick it either sell them on this act or they'd pick an act. And I would go back to the agent and then say they can only afford a hundred and you've done the deal, and I'd get five five pounds on that. So that went on for a bit and then in March of one of the two phones ran and this was a bit like the fastest gunfighter in the West,

who could get the phone fastest. I grabbed the phone and a voice came on and I won't do his accent, and he said, this is Miles as Copeland the Third And I went, holy shit, Miles ax Copeland the Third Wow. And he said, would anybody they ever interested in booking

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

I said yes. Long story short. I go up to a house and St John's Wood in North London, which was a very posh area of London where the Copeland family lived when his dad was in the CIA was or he'd retired from the CIA at that point, and I went down that I was going to go and see them play in this house. And I come down the drive and there are a group of about half a dozen Arabs in full ceremonial s going up the front stairs, and I thought I must be at the

wrong house. So I walked back down the drive and I suddenly heard from coming out of the basement, and I realized what happened was that Myles's father was advising various oil companies on the political situation in the Middle East as his post ci CI a job, and down in the basement which Bone Ash were rehearsing. So I went down met the band. They played me the whole of their first album sitting in armchairs, which was the first I've never seen a band player a gig sitting

in an armchair. And I asked Miles if I could use the phone to call John, and he led me to a pay phone. They had obviously read John Paul get his biography because they had installed a pay phone for guests, and I had to borrow tenpence off him to use the phone. And I called John up and I said we should take this band on. They're really good. And they were in London College that following Saturday and we went to see them. Miles was doing the lights.

He didn't have any overhead lights. He had a run of foot footlights and he had a green boulbon orange bowl of red bulbon pint bulb and he had four things and he was just doing this on the side of the stage and we took them on and then short order Miles came into the business. We all went into business together. They kind of took off a bit. They signed to m c A. Within within eighteen months we had like the third or fourth biggest agency in London.

I've just just work just working at it. What happened are your drumming career? Well, to make up my money, I joined a fantastic soul band. They were called Patrick Dane and the front line we had a four piece brass section, great layers, and we played four or five nights a week. We played American basses, colleges, around London clubs, everything, and we would get all of the London clubs then

paid twenty pounds. That was the maximum you could get in any one of the famous This was just post the Swinging sixties, so called the Swinging sixties didn't actually get started in London until about nineteen sixty five sixty six, and it kind of rolled over to about nineteen seventy three four. We would play those anywhere between a Monday and a Thursday, and on a Friday and Saturday. If we played an American bass, we would get a hundred and fifty pounds. If we played a college we would

get probably about the same. And when we played the American bassis, because we had to play for dining as well as dancing, we've learned the whole catalog of Duke Allington and big band stuff, which that's what they what they wanted, and we always got rebooked always, so you

have this flurishing agency. How did you become a manager? Well, I I traveled through several agencies um in the next let's see five years, sorry, five or six years, and I ended up at Names, which was Brian Epstein's old company, although he'd long gone, and I was working with Steve Barnett recently retired retired president with Capitol Records. We haven't seen him many years. And if you're watching this, hello Steve and m We And that was when I kind of hit I'm going to loosely call it the big

time because we had big acts. We had deep Purple Black, Sabbath, Nazareth, Alex, Harvey, band Elton. I did the first British stroke European tours with Steely dan Um and then I had oh sorry, just before that, the person who kind of had was my I would call him my mentor. We all need a mentor in life was Barry Marshall, who now runs Martial Arts. And when I went to work with Barry and his wife Jenny, and they're probably one of the most successful and certainly one of the best promoters in

UK and Europe. Um We. He was managing a Welsh group called Man who were a bit like a British kind of grateful dead in the sense that they played numbers that lasted for several days and I think, I think I've been there a week and I put twenty eight gigs in in a month for this group. Man um. I just had a sense of how to do it. If I went about something, I think, if you're enthusiastic about something, you can communicate that to people. And we

were doing we we were doing. It was the first place I've been where we were doing American acts, and we did people like Jimmy ruffin lou Christie if you remember him, of course, Lightning Strikes, Trightening Strikes. And I got a real feel for working with black American artists, which was quite a I mean, I remember he sent

me off to Europe. I think this was about the nineteen seventy three or four with the con Tina Turner review, which was my first encounter with Ike Turner, which was okay, actually no problem, and I got I've known Tina since then. And then I moved to names and as I say, we were looking after what were big acts at the time. But again coming back to something I said earlier, they didn't tour they gigged. Everybody gigged. Nobody had a beginning

in the middle of an end. It was just continual, and they didn't go into the studio for a period of time. They went in for a few hours at a time and cobbled together records and it was all pretty kind of it's kind of primitive, but it was. It was huge fun, definitely fantastic fun. And then how does that turn into the management. Well, I had no aspirations to do management, but I of course I was dealing with at this point quite a lot of managers. And I have to say that back then managers were

not quite as skilled as they've become. Um. In fact, some of them were. I mean I can remember with Deep Purple, h this was the Mark two with Richie and In Squabbling and Roger and in Pace and John Lord bless him. I remember their manager coming into the office and saying to Steve and I write, Deep Purple, who have got a new album coming out next week. Now, this was the first time that we've been informed that they had made a record. They want to go on tour.

So we got our notepads and we're ready to go. And I said to him when do you want to start? And he says next week and I said next week, Yeah, next week. That's how it was. How it was, and um what happened was that through a convoluted set of circumstances, I had got to know a guy called Ken Kushnick, who was the general manager at Sire Records in seventy six. I think it was the Sex Pistols clash and the

British punk's scene got underway. I might have my chronology slightly wrong, uh, And Ken called me up and asked me if I would put a tour together for the Ramones, who I had never heard of, but given the way things were, I just said yes. And then he said to me there's another act on with them, and I'm thinking, well, it's going to be hard enough to get the Ramones attorney. I said, who's that? He said, they're called the Talking Heads,

and I said, wow, what's weird name. Anyway, he sent me a single It's called Love Ghost Building on Fire and it only had a photograph of three of them on the front. Jerry Harrison wasn't in the group at that point, and I remember putting it on the record player at Names and I thought it was great. I loved it, so I I agreed to set up a tour for the two those two acts, which I did, and it was a hard sell. Was six weeks mostly

around the UK, few dates in Europe. Just before that tour happened, the Sex Pistols went on British TV and disgraced themselves by swearing on a six thirty live slot, and this caused tabloid fury, but it turned the punk new age thing from being like a really underground thing into being very kind of prominent. Now that all of the Pistol shows pretty much got canceled because every town hall, every council said we're not having them, their filthy revolution

and all this, but it meant that. It meant that the Romans talking heads to Her suddenly sold out everywhere, so they came over. I remember we started in Geneva and I immediately bonded with the talking heads as people, and they asked me to leave the ends and manage them. And I didn't have enough courage to be honest. I couldn't. I just think I knew enough. What happened then was

another piece of luck. I happened to be out at Heathrow airport picking up a friend, a girlfriend who worked at United Artists Records, and she was and she had just been on a promo johnt to Holland with Jerry Rafferty and Baker Street was becoming a big hit. So I got got a lift and I got in the front of the car with the driver, and she and Rafferty got in the back of the car and I was just rattling awhile like I am to you and we're coming into London, and Rafferty tapped me on the shoulder.

I've never met him before and he said, ed, would you be my manager? And I just turned around and I said, you don't know me. He said no, but I like you, so okay, So I became Jerry Raffort's manager. Okay, that's a question. Did he have a previous manager? What had happened? Well, yes, he had had when he was in Steeler's Wheel that had led to law suits at all the rest of it, and the Baker Street song happened to be the street where his lawyer's office was,

and he was constantly coming down from Scotland. And if you listen to the lyric, and you know that that song is about his trips to London, sitting in lawyers meetings for hours on end while they tried to dissolve because what happened was the management company had gone bankrupt. That had to be a liquidation process, and this all took two years and he couldn't he could word live, but he steamers Will broke up and he wrote the songs which became the City to City record, one of

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

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

him for about five or six years. But sadly he was an alcoholic and it killed him in the end, and we had a very bumpy time because he canceled five American tours on me, one of which was on sale, that kind of thing. So but it was all a learning exercise. All of this. I was learning as you as you go along. You could even out of every negative situation, you can come out of it. You'll have learned something. You were also booking bands while you were

managing jury. I was still at ends Um And what happened was that I was working with him and I had a Talking Heads tour coming up in January, which was the first time they were going to headline on their own in the UK, some Bits and Pieces of Europe, and I needed an opening act. And it was December ninth, and it was a Friday afternoon. I remember my phone rang and a guy that I had met at Phonogram because PolyGram or Phonogram originally were distributed side records until

they until Seymour switched to Warner Brothers. So I got to know the people at Phonogram and I bailed bailed them out on a couple of things, saved them quite a bit of money because Seymour was quite good at extracting money from and this guy came on. His name was John Stains, and he said to me, I've just signed a band called Dire Straits. And I immediately said, what a terrible name, and he said, be serious. I said, I am being serious. It's a terrible name. He said,

would you be their agent? I said, well, I'm only handling American acts, I said, but in the back of my mind I needed an opening act for this Talking Heads tour and it was coming up quite soon, and I was in a bit of a panic, and I said to him, what are they like? And he said, well, I've got a tape here. Why don't you come over

and listen to it. Now their officers were very close to where NAMES was, so I packed up for the day, walked over and he played me the demo tape that had originally got them the record deal, the one that a DJ called Charlie Gillett had played on British on his British Radio London radio show. And on that record on that tape were Sultans have Swing down to the Waterline while west End and a song called Sacred Loving.

But thankfully they didn't record and I can remember. It's funny what you remember later on, because I can't remember listening to Sultans of Swing and saying to him this, this guitar player is pretty good. And then he's playing me Wild West End and I said, wow, these lyrics, this is really good lyrically. He said that's the guitar player and I said, Doug, tell me he's the singer as well, and he went, yeat and he gave me the lineup of the group and the mark younger brother

David was in the group. John Ellsley and picked with us and they were playing a gig the following Tuesday at ding Walls, which is a little club in North London, and he said typical record company said I'll take you out for a slap up meal and we'll go and see them. So the following Tuesday I find myself in a kibab house in North London watching gobbits of fat fall off this spinning piece of meat. And we went over the road to ding Walls and we walked in

and there were two things I noticed straight away. First of all, they weren't very loud, so I could stand quite close to the stage. Secondly, and most importantly, Mark was playing a red Fender Stratocastic guitar, which was the guitar that Hank Marvin the guitarist and the Shadows had played. Now I've told this story to Jeff Beck and um They've Gilmore and all the rest of them, and they all instantly get it. Because the red strap was an

iconic instrument for us in Britain. The first stratic caster any of us had seen was on the cover of the Chirping Crickets album and Buddy Holly is holding a strap which looked to us like something from outer space. So Mark's playing this red strato caster. And I turned to this an our guy after the second song and I said to him, he's got a red strat just like Hank Marvin's. Who's managing this band? And he said nobody on on the basis of the red strat, I said,

I'd like to manage them. And it changed my life. But there was a there's a kind of you know pattern there. There was a sort of just a sequence of events that led to that moment. Okay, now we know that they were on Warner in the US and Phonogram the rest of the world, certainly from the US viewpoint. First album comes out, Sultan's a Swing uh, and then the second album is not as quite as successful that all of a sudden, making movies that starts to blow

up from the inside. What is going on? Well, the first record, like many many many bands throughout history, Market spent considerable amount of time writing those songs. He I can't remember what year it was, seventy five or seventy six, but he bent to America and he'd got on a Greyhound bus try trip across the South, and as he said to me later, he fell in love with every

waitress that he saw. And he wrote a lot of those songs either in the U s or when he got back to the UK, and a lot of them, as as has always been the case with his writing, were sort of semi biographical. So for instance, songs of swing, they were that that was the name of a band playing in a little pub just down the road from this dreadful apartment that he and John was sharing, David was sharing, uh, And he went down to see them and they were like a little swing band, like the

Panama Francis Saltons and swing the American band. And there was nobody in the place, but he was impressed with their enthusiasm and went back to the flat and he wrote the song. So he had these songs. And what happened was that after I had seen them at Dingwalls, I put them on this Talking Heads tour, which, like most of my tours, was like twenty seven gigs without a day off, because I don't believe in days off.

They're just days days off one of those and I went on a lot of these dates, A because I was looking after both bands, and B because I wanted to get to know my kind of new charges. So I became very familiar with those songs. And right in the middle of that tour, Um John Stains the Air and R guy I'm talking about I was talking about, came up with a couple of possible producers, one of

which was Muff Winward and Steve's elder brother. Elder brother, and Muff was working at Ireland Records at the time. He was about to leave. He had a two week window and then he was starting as head of an R at CBS as they were, so he came to see them at a show in a place called Aylesbury north of London, agreed to produce them and fitted them into that gap. There's a lot of kind of synchronicity going on here. So he he did that record in ten days. And what he basically did was he recorded

their lives just bashpreash, bash breash brash. We got. Of course the album cover took way longer and was and was and was. The was the was the source of many, many many arguments and fights and stuff, particularly between the two brothers. And I realized actually at that point that rather like the Kicks and the Gallaghers and others, the sibling thing was going to be a bit of a headache, which it turned out to be. But so they made that record, and I and they finished it, and I

had them. I just kept them working because that was how they were making money. The record deal was not a particularly good deal. The royalty rate was pretty poor, but it was for the time, I suppose it was okay. And they so I and I put them on I got them a residency at the Marquee Club and I put them on a kind of club college tour for the whole of June of that year, and the record came out in May. Sultan's came out in May, dribbled into the bottom of the UK chart and fell straight out.

The album did okay, we didn't have the American deal at the time. There was an unusual thing in their recording agreement that the PolyGram one the phonogram one, which said that if R s O passed on them the rights to place the record, the deal in America would refer to the group which went Me and I had never done a record deal in my life. I had never read a recording agreement. I had never been in a recording studio. I didn't know anything about any of that.

R s O passed because they were in the middle of Saturday night fever at al and uh So the band did a club college tour in June, and then uh Mark and I came over to the States. We went to Los Angeles and I we had some interest from Colombia, but we wanted to be on Warner Brothers because we were musical snobs and they had Van Morrison and just Ricky Lee Jones was just about to come

out and things like that. And I went up to uh I managed to get somebody got me, got me an intro to Mo Austin, and I'm like, I don't know what the I really didn't know. I'm not know what I was doing and I went up to Warner Brothers and I got I was ushered into Moe's office, which was the most intimidating physical space I've ever been in. I mean, he's it's part from anything else that was enormous, and his desk was so far away that you had to sort of it took you five minutes to get

from the door to his desk. And anyway, he he said something great to me. Actually, I always I love MO and he's still with us, thankfully. He said to me, I don't know anything about music, go and see the A and R Department, which of course was not true at all, but he did come from the Sinatra reprise background, and he sent me down to see the sadly late ROBERTA. Peterson. When I went into Roberta's office, she had more pot plants in there than I've never seen in my life.

And and this is a little girl with the kind of required l a tan and blonde hair sitting amongst all of these palms and pot plants. And I remember giving other record and she put it on and like a lot of A and R people cranked it was spinal tap up. It went to eleven and I'm sitting there and this thing's thundering out. And she told me later she was so excited by it that she tried to pretend she tried to be cool, but I could see her at her foot tapping madly underneath the desk.

And when it when she played both sides, she said to me, where are you staying? And I was sadly we were staying at the high at the Riot House. And I remember she was vastly amused by that, and she asked if she could keep that copy because she'd like to play it to some of the people in the department. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, sure, why not. Wow. So I go back to the hotel, and by this time there were a couple of other

companies who started chasing me. The American PolyGram Opera Asian had realized what a do do they've made by putting this clause in and they and actually that was the first time I was ever offered a bribe. I was offered a bribe in a sauna in somewhere in Los Angeles by some guy from PolyGram in New York. He offered me a hundred thousand dollars to get the band to forget about that clause in the contract, and I

thought he was offering us an advance. I kept saying to him, you mean for the band, and he said, no, it's for you. They kept winking at me, and we're in a sauna and I was sitting on the slatted and he was on top of me, and we were getting further and further back, so we were he was lying on top of me, and I managed to wriggle out from under him make a dash for the door. Never heard from them again. Unfortunately, Warner's decided to sign us.

And what I didn't know there was another lady who was also sadly passed on, called Karen Burg, who was in the in our department in New York, who worked alongside Jerry Wexler, and she had been to England and she'd seen them at a little club gig and was also pursuing them, and being a big company, they hadn't actually spoken to each other, so they didn't realize. Roberta

didn't realize that Karen was already onto it. But anyway, we ended up doing the deal with them, and it turned out to be a very happy and a very fruitful relationship. Okay, how does the essence of dire Streets end up working with Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, okay, we do the first American tour in February March April of seventy nine. The albums at number two. The Doobie Brothers kept us soft number one with Michael McDonald. Sultan's gets

the number two, I think it was. And I had decided one of the things I was trying to do with them live or any act I've worked with, was create an event one and we were being offered I remember Ron Del's and had got hold of my home phone number and offered as Madison Square Garden and I turned it down flat. And there were two reasons. I knew the band were not ready to play a place that big. They hadn't played anywhere bigger than three thousand

capacity at that point. And I also knew that as the line up existed at the time with David K. Nofler in it, it wasn't what they didn't really perform. If you understand, they would kind of a bit rooted to the spot mark would throw off mount sense of sweat, which is where the head band came from. But uh so, I what I did was I stuck with a club, small theater. So we played, for instance, The Bottom Line in New York for four nights, and we played The

Roxy in l A. At the end. When we were at the Roxy, we'd already moved on to selecting a producer for album number two and who should step forward because he could certainly recognize a dollar bill when it appeared in front of him. But Jerry Wexler, and Jerry who was going to m sorry, he'd already done the second record. That's right, we did the second record before we came to America. He brought Dylan to one of the shows, and of course Marks huge puge Dylan fan.

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

came into play a little while later. So anyway, we finished that tour and Jerry had got Mark and our original drama pick with us to go down to Muscle Shoals to make Slow Train Coming. Now, just before that, Mark was rehearsing out in Santa Monica at Dylan's place and he called me up in London and he said, ed, He said, all these songs are about God, and I suddenly remembered the guy at the rock scene. And of course Bob had become born again, which which Jerry, being Jewish,

couldn't get his head round at all. Jerry would constantly spit. That was his thing, was spitting. So I didn't go down there. I was too busy with the next phase of what was going on. But they went down to Muscle Shoals and I flew over to New York. I called Mark up and I said, oh, I'll be down tomorrow. He said, don't bother coming. I said why not. He said, we're finished and I said, but you've only been there five days. He said, Bob only plays a song twice.

So I kicked my heels for a few days and went back to England and he followed fairly quickly after that, and that became the Slow Train Coming record, and that was you know, Bob's kind of born again announcement if you like, but a great record irrelevant of the guy. Yeah, yeah, So how do you get rid of of the other? Why? You got some good questions? And the thing that the situation between the two brothers was difficult from the get go. It became increasingly difficult as the band got bigger, um

because Mark was emerging as a dictator. And I don't say that in a negative way. I think all bands needed dictator. Basically, the democracies and bands just don't work. And David, who of course well as David said, I remember in an interview afterwards, he said, it was pretty tough having my brother constantly telling me what to do. And the problem also was that Mark was Mark and Pick with it us were equally matched in their talent

on their instruments. Pick was probably the best drummer we ever had and they and John was very solid as a bass player. And John did all of the band's business with me, and he stopped them breaking up certainly in the earlier years because he was always very sort

of sensible, as that's his personality. We got to doing the making movies record in New York at the Power Station with Jimmy Iven and Shelley Akas and there was a they were recording Romeo and Juliette and there was just a huge row, I mean like a total nuclear mega row. And it ended up with David leaving the group. He wasn't fired, it just wasn't working. So he came back to England and Mark finished up the guitar parts and said mcguinnis who was on that with the Paul

Schaefer band on Letterman Show. He did a bit of guitar work on it as well. It just ran out of steam. If if he not left, the group would have disintegrated, and he was cool with what he missed out on. I can't answer that question. I mean, I haven't really had much to do with him. It was a situation where I couldn't. I couldn't carry on working with him. The first of all, I didn't consider he was talented enough, and secondly, the sibling thing meant it

just in part it was just impossible. But I don't know, I don't know whether he regrets it. I said he received one quarter of the royalties on the first three albums, first two albums, so he did okay financially okay. Ultimately the band is going up. Meanwhile MTV becomes role Lide phenomena. The band cuts money for nothing before the record is released. Do you know you have this monster? And how do you end up making the video? And also how do

you get stinged on the intro? Right? Okay, um, The answer to the first part of that question is that you never know anybody who says they can spot ahead. To me, it's they've got their heads up their backsides. Nobody knows what is going to be successful. They only know what has been successful. So people do sequels, and they do copies and so on. What happened with that one was that after the Love of Gold record, which was huge everywhere except the US because it only had

five tracks on it. And I must tell you there's a song on they called Telegraph Road, which I think runs from about fifteen minutes one of yeah it is and Warn Brill has actually did a two and a half minute edit that said to me, can we put this out? And I remember saying to Carl Scott bless him. I said, it's Carl that be silly. So we didn't

have a hit single of that. Private Investigations was a huge hit all over the rest of the world, I must say, to my considerable surprise since that's seven minutes long. And what happened was we did another great long tour. All these records, all these albums were accompanied by huge tours, yes, but there was a point where you literally were playing stadiums and you were literally the biggest touring act in the world. And just a just coming to that in

your your chronology. What happened was that Mark started to do a couple of other things. I mean, we did the soundtracks for Local Hero and cal around about the time of Love Over with gold Um with producer David Putnam, who was an absolute delight to work with, and Um. Somewhere in all of that we had a live album out called Alchemy, and he was started producing other people Um, and we got to a point. I remember he and I we were in a car. We've been at film

Man's and Era's studio. We were driving back up to London and he said, I've got some songs together. This would have been in late eighty four. He said, can you get the band back together? And those turned out to be the songs that became the Brothers in Arms record. And I remember going down to a rehearsal and I

heard money for Nothing for the first time. What what struck me about it was I've done the first ever European tour with zz Top and I remember thinking that he probably had I don't know this, but I kind of detected a bit of Billy Gibbons guitar sound on that particular song. Did I think it was going to be a big hit? I thought it might be do well, but I had no I did had no idea it was going to do that. Records done about that album

has done about thirty six million physical sales. So UM, we've we we decided to go to Monsterrat to Georgea's studio. UM made it mainly for the Sun and I remember going over there and we didn't know even though Sting

was on the island now Mark and Stein. We've all known each other for many many years when the Straight started out the place he started out, and of course I've known Miles Fat Miles is fact checking fact checking his book with me and a couple of months ago because you've got a book coming out soon, and uh, we we didn't know Sting was on the island, and one day he just the best chef on the Island

was the guy at the studio, Michael George. One day, Sting showed up and um with Trudy and because he wanted he wanted something decent to eat and we're having dinner and Mark said to him and he said, I've written this really stupid song about MTV. Do you fancy singing on it? So they went downstairs and they came up with the idea of putting I Want my MTV on the front to the tune of Don't Stand So

Close to Me, and that became the record. And um, I remember there was a there was a big headache about that song because of the lyrics see the little faggot with the earring and the makeup. Warner Brothers some not everybody, and I have to say not not more Austin. There were some people in Warner Brothers who wanted to edit that there was a reference to American Express, which people were, you know, this is going to be so

and so forth, but that everybody went with it. Although funny enough that the first single off that record, which people have forgotten, was Walk of Life, and that didn't do anything until it came out on the back of Money for Nothing, and then it became a big hit. It actually outsold money for nothing, So that was that's basically the story that it wasn't okay then that the video was classic too with the animation. How did you

come up with a video? Well, that was done by Steve Barron and he had done Michael Jackson's beat It, the one with the lights under his feet, and he basically came up with that idea. We tried. We did have a moment where we were trying to find somebody who would appear in that as a kind of redneck sort of person, and I approached Buddy Rich and Rodney Dangerfield and they both passed on it. There you go,

So we ended up. So we ended and this that that that digital thing had just just literally just kind of arrived. So we were shown, we were shown an example of that, and we were already on tour on the we were already started to turn that record that all of the live footage that the band are in on in that clip was shot in in Budapest in Hungary, Okay. As we referenced earlier, record comes out far beyond anybody's

conception worldwide. Smash. What does it feel like? And how you then decide to play stadiums and what's it like being the biggest act in the world. Um ye, I that's an almost unanswerable question. When you're on the roller coaster, you're just hanging on. I mean, you don't realize what what you just said until you can look at it with hindsight. I knew we didn't actually play stadiums. We played some outdoors, but we didn't. I preferred doing multiple arenas.

I think it's fairer on the audience. Did you play stadium in in Israel? Though? Oh well that was the part. Yes, Sorry, we're just mixing up your fragile Yeah, we played. We played to a quarter of the entire population of Israel over three shows. One was in a Roman amphitheater in the middle of Jerusalem that was the closest to a riot I've ever been involved in. And the other two were in the Park, which would be the equivalent of

Central Park in New York, and we played that. We filled that for two days and we played big outdoor shows. In Australia, we did play. We played to eighty nine thousand, six d and thirty two people in Auckland, which is the largest gathering of people ever in the history of the Islands of New Zealand, things like that. I could rattle off silly statistics for age, okay, But interestingly, in that era mid eaties, the biggest being in the world.

How much production did you curry and what we was at a factor or was it still just the music? It was the music really. I mean we had a We had a great, great lighting man, Chas Harrington. Now Chaz had started out as the engineer at the Demo studio where they did the first demos. And one day he was fiddling, he was doing monitors for us, and he was fiddling with the lighting board and we didn't have a lighting man. This is very early on, and I said to him, do you want to do the lights?

And he became one of the world's leading lighting designers. Um, we had the same crew we kept. We've always been very low. We used the same trucking company lights, sound, all the rest of it, and I kept Obviously the crew had to grow, but the core of it sound front of the house, UM Robert Collins who now does whose sound? People like the monitor guy. They all the

core people. And by this point the band had metamorphosized into a situation where we had really Mark and John and the others were I'm going to call them side men, but they were rather more than side men, and we compensated them on a basis that was more than side men. So they were a very That lineup on that Brothers and Arms tour, in my view, is the best lineup we ever had, and they consistently did two hundred and shows in twelve months. It's amazing people are still alive.

But interesting, interestingly enough, Mark said to me once he came in the office and he was looking at the date sheet that I put together, and he pointed at this day off. He should what's that for? I said, that's for the crew. The band went and played a think reception in a hotel on that day. Wow, okay, what did you do with the money? There are issues of tax, there's issue spending. Where did you put it? What do you do with it? Are you talking about

me personally or to the degree you overtaking? Wow? Well, the first thing is none of them actually no artists have been involved with but certainly none of dire Straits has acquired. Nobody's got a private plane, nobody's got a yacht. Mark has a collection of classic cars we have. Everybody ended up with nice homes, but I wouldn't say particularly exotic. U. We yeah, we paid, we paid a lot of tax. We decided to stay resident in the UK. Nobody he

went overseas or did any of that kind of stuff. Um. It's interesting because you're saying that in the context of now, because you've got to remember that everything was less than Ticket prices were less, merchandising was less, record royalties were actually record realties were better the Newtube. I mean, if the bogey men back then with the record companies. Now it's the internet providers on question. And you know, when I do the thing with Irving tomorrow, I know this

is going to come up. Um. And I think that the the money changes you, but what it really changes is people's attitude towards you. Um, it's a long time since I didn't pick up the bill in a restaurant, so you have that. But you know, I mean, it's churlish to complain about being successful. It did. It does have an impact on your on your psyche definitely, apart from anything else. You can't quite grasp it if you could.

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

pension funds. You would shove it all into pension fund because they because they were they were very good tax wise in this country, and because there's always this fear all these all creative people are essentially insecure, and some of them desperately so so you stash it away kind of under the bed almost because you think it's going to stop tomorrow. So I would say, and we all had very good business advice. I did not use lawyers. I did all the record deals, all the publishing deals,

and all of the tours outside of the US. I did myself well. Obviously you were an expert in touring, but especially even in that day, record deals were very comprehensive in retrospect. Was but I just but my thing was I had I had huge leverage, so I just used to invent things. I just used to stick closes in that were I used to tie record companies up

in knots. For instance. Give an example in the UK m then not now, television advert sizing for records was a big thing, but it was expensive, so the record companies would want to recoup of the TV costs. So I put them in as I put in clauses in the deal that were so complicated they didn't know what they were doing. And right now I can't say how much straits technically, Oh what was polychrome now universal? But it's saved hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds.

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

this sounds I mean, it sounds grandiose. But I had leverage if I had no you only get leverage through commercial success if you're one of the things I also realized was that the staff in record companies, not so much at Warner Brothers, but certainly in the phonogram companies and PolyGram. I got through seventeen managing directors in twenty five years in the UK company. Nobody knew what the previous lot had done. They lost all of our paperwork fantastic.

So they would ring up and they would say, we can't find your contracts and I say, oh, hours is in storage, it's in a it's in a box under the Thames. I can't get it, which is total bullshit. We did. We went for long periods with no contract. We just had deal memos and I and I stole somebody out of the royalties department at Phonogram to be my in house accountant, so he knew exactly what that was going to be. My next question, to what degree

did your audit frequently and you always found money? Nobody's ever audited a record company and not found money. Okay, Ever, in terms of Sunset deals, are you still getting paid personally from these records? Now? I sold those rights like rather like Irving's buying up publishing and Mecuri artist is buying up anything that's warm. I sold those rights about

three or four years ago. But I was getting commission in perpetuity on records and I had a very long post term on publishing and again I got that after managing them for about eighteen years. Why did you decide to sell some personal reasons, m h and because I could see that the catalog was I mean, it's still doing well, but it's been a long time since Brothers in Arms. I liked to be honest with you, I was kind of I was still I was a bit fed up having to administer it and so and so forth.

And I managed to get an extremely good deal. I mean, if can you tell us sold into a company called Royal to Exchange in Denver, and I got a very very high multiple. Okay, so you have this band, it's the biggest band in the world. Yet the band is barely together. You know, most managers are doing everything to keep the band together. So one thing in your mind and own this is shaky what was going on in

your mind at that point. But when we got two Brothers in Arms and the work that we did on the back of that, which basically lasted for a year, that level of success that you're talking about, I would take issue with the biggest band in the world because that's a bit like being the no No. I think if you look, I remember the tour grossest, literally the largest in the world. We can, but I can't quantify all these other things perception when it comes to hard dollars.

That's a bit like being the fastest gunfighter in the West. You know one day somebody's going to come around the corner and shoot you. Yes, but you have a band with no sex symbol from not saying you know trendy music. So and you're as we stated earlier, it's not like you're selling the show. You're selling the music. That's why it was so noteworthy. I'm not blow and spoke up your ass. For those of us were outside, it was pretty astounding. It was pretty starting. For those of us

on the inside. I didn't think of it like that, and honestly, a lot of people will when I'm watching this will be surprised. I literally ever thought about the money coming in. I constantly thought about the money going out, because when you're running a thing like that, the overhead starts. I mean, I've got white hair. I started off with him with black hair. Um, you've had two people on the road I had. I can't, I can't. I can't remember the number of trucks, planes and all the rest

of it. They What happened was that when we got to the end of that, which was eighty six April May, no sooner as we finished. The mark was he was like a greyhound out of the box. Straightaway is producing Tina Turner, then he's doing something else, then he's doing another film. It never stopped. He had an incredible work ethic. I mean absolutely, it was hard to keep up with him. And I had expanded my management company and I was looking after Brian Ferry. Jerry Rafferty had gone by this time,

long long gone. We had a great Irish singer songwriter called Paul Brady, and I was managing Scott Walker, from whom I made three fifty pounds commission in seven years. And Scott's no longer with us. But if he walked into this room now and asked me to do it again, I do it like a shot. You let's stop with Brian Ferry for a second. You know, he's a very debonair guy artistically at ten successful in America. But we're constantly reading these stories how he's one of the richest

musicians in the UK. Rubbish. How did you know? That? Is complete rubbish? I would say he's that's complete rubbish. Well then let me ask you, since you were the manager, how successful was he in the UK? He wasn't as successful a both within Roxy Music and on his own. But if you're talking about physical record sales, for instance, on the record I worked on, that record would have done maybe a hundred hundred it up on this end, No,

it's that's complete rubbish. I don't know who's writing that crap, and that's no disrespect to Brian. I did a deal for him, or I have finished off a deal in fact, his previous management we're doing with virgin Um, which was an extremely but he that they didn't presume they I think, I hope I could be corrected on this. I think they dropped him eventually. I mean he and I we it didn't work. It just didn't gell because because he'd been whether management company before me, who had a totally

different style to me. I don't do personals, I don't do mortgages, I don't get people's cars repaired, I don't get book their granny's on holiday. And I don't do divorces. Okay, but talking about what you do do they're very hands on creative managers like the two guys A C. Prime. Yeah, there are there are I know, I know Peter very well. Yeah, And then there are other people say, you go to the studio, I'll make the record, but when it comes out,

I'll do I'll sell whatever. But the creative thing is totally yours. You make decision even what's going to be on the record. Where do you sit in there? Continuing? I think because I had been a musician, or at least I've been a drummer, because that's not necessarily the same thing, um, and because the guy's industrates in particularly when I talk about death strates, I really mean Martin Offer and John Ellslie, and I really mean Mark. I

suppose we are roughly at the same age. We're from the same background, we grew up in very similar parts of the UK, and most significantly, we grew up listening to the same stuff, all the stuff I was talking about at the beginning. So when Mark and I went started going to Nashville a lot and chet Atkins Blessing opened the door for us to meet everybody. We were like school kids. I mean, meeting the Everly Brothers for us was like you couldn't it was. It was kind

of dream like and going. And remember he called me one morning, pretty early in the morning, and he said, what are you doing And I said, I'm ranking and he said, we'll stop doing that. He said, We're going to go and meet Scotty Moore. So I'm in the lobby in five minutes. I mean, you know, this was and I remember we went to Chech took us to Studio B where Elvis had recorded, and I said to check where did Elvis used to stand? And he pointed, and Mark and I went and stood and hugged each other.

It was that kind of It was the romance thing that was talking about earlier. And I think that one of the things about Mark Noveler is that he was very generous in including me a little bit, because obviously I'm doing a different area of the job in the creative process. So he would on more than one occasion come into the office brandishing a guitar, sit down in front of my desk, can play a song to me

and say what do you think of that? And I can remember not in the office, but he remember him when he the first time he played Robbio and Juliet to me and I just stared at the floor I had no idea what to say. And there's a line in that song you and me babe, how about it? I thought, what a great line, what fantastic lyric. And I imagine John Landau has the same kind of I know John's actually played guitar with Bruce and his band

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

very comfortable with fame and celebrity. And in the same way, when Bruce did is Nebraska record, there was a bit of a I think it's a subconscious desire to take the heat out of the situation, to try and get it down from the stadiums that you're talking about, and the two road crew and we didn't know their names, that sort of stuff. And he's always been a fan of I'm loosely going to call Americana roots music, blues folk,

all of that. And one day, um, he has a little studio in a newshouse not not that far from here, and and somebody said to me, somebody who worked for me, said Mark, Mark's doing an album. I said what He said, He's doing an album And this turned out to be the first nothing Elbudis record. And he called me up one day and he said, where are your drums? I

said there at the house. He said, I'll send Ron, that's one of the roadies, round to get them and we set them up in the downstairs bedroom, trail the microphone out from the upstairs bedroom out of the window, down the side of the building in and hung it off the light. Then he played me Bewildered, which is one of the songs on that record. He said, can you play that? I said yeah. He said can you play it with brushes? This is this is why he got me in, because he doesn't know anybody who can

play brushes and I said yeah, I said yeah. So I played it one take. He said, okay, next one, played the next one, jud finished, did that, the sampled me as well. I'm not saying I'm on every track. And then a couple of nights later we were but wine Bar and he said, okay, we're going to go on tour him you're the drummer and I went no, no, no, and I hang on a minute, Hang on a minute, and said, I haven't played in a while. He said, now,

don't worry about that, is it just play time. Well, of course, when we got into rehearsals, we rehearsed for forty two days without a day off, from noon until nine o'clock at night. We had one day off and we played forty three shows without a day off, two and a half hour set. And I'll tell you an interesting thing. You'll be interested in this, Bob Mark because

he was a school teacher. At rehearsals, he'll have an enormous blackboard and a piece of chalk and he draws a grid on it, and in the in the left hand side here there's this song list getting longer and longer and longer. And if you don't get at the end of the day, you have to play the songs. And if you don't get a ticket in the box, you don't go home. You play it until you get a tick in the box. And I've seen dast rights rehearsals when the road crew have been going because they

hadn't taken the box. Okay, So I had it in with you and Mark well after they the last straights tour that they on every street record, which I have to say was a difficult period. That was the kind of divorce tour. I will leave it at that, and we sold it on. We just ran out of gas. We litterally. I mean, we're good friends, we have a respectful relationship. I have a good relationship with John and some of the road crew in my office staff. But

we kind of it just ran its course. And I think one of the tricks in life, especially if you have the wherewithal to do this, is to recognize when you've got to the cell by day, speaking of which you've been married how many times? Twice? And I'm in the middle of getting divorced. It'll probably come through tomorrow fully enough. Did it reach its sale by date? Yes? Okay, Um, yeah, that's yeah, that's that's a bit of a raw subject. Yes, I mean, I mean, I think that no disrespect to

me the lady. Um, yeah, it's we put it in a different way. Do you have someone in your life now? Okay, because otherwise getting older it can be kind of amazing being I have somebody who unfortunately is marooned in your country and I have not seen her since March. As they say that will end hopefully within you know, months, but in any event, well not or not if not, if the governor of Tech excess as his way, you know,

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

I think if you're twenty years old and you're coming into it, it's probably just as exciting as it was for me. For me, I find the process of it. You asked why Mark and I split up. It wasn't just between me and him. I had become bored with the process of it, the bureaucracy of it, if you like. It seemed to me that the business part was, if you had a kind of graph, the business part was going up and the musical bit was coming down. But

that's a generational thing. You know. I was watching a couple of panels of the panels today, and you know, I've been doing interviewers for the ISLMC now for some twenty years or so. It's been quite interesting because every time I look at from the stage, the audience is getting younger, obviously, and what they're interested in is what applies to them now and in the future. They're not that interested in the history of it, which I think is a bit sad, but that's just the way it is.

So for instance, I'm into viewing Irving days off tomorrow and rather than talk about the Eagles, because I don't think I could stay awake. Um, we will have to tackle some of the current stuff that's going on. And he and I had a chat last night. Within two minutes we've both fallen into exactly what we're going to do tomorrow, and I stopped him. I stopped him because I wanted to be spontaneous, right. But of course, with Irving, unlike many people like MTV itself for the Internet killed it,

he kept changing with the generation. Oh yeah, a lot of people get stuck in there are Okay, I think we've come to the end of the feeling we've known. I think some of the audience either needs to get up and eat something or urinate. So I think we've come to a natural stopping point here and anything. We have a weekend, we can do what we can do. Part two another time absolutely drilled down on one of

these areas. Anyway, this has been wonderful. Thanks thanks to all the audience from I L m C. This is a Bob left That's podcast signing on. Thank you. Thanks,