Ed Bicknell

The story of Dire Straits from their one and only manager.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left SATs podcast.
My guest today is manager agent drummer Ed mcnell ed.
Tell me about the first time you saw a dire street.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
That was on December the thirteenth, nineteen seventy seven. It
was just a small club in North London, in a
part of town called Camden, at a club called Dingwalls.
I had been I was at the time. I was
an agent. I was representing, amongst others, all of Seymour

(00:47):
Stein's acts bless him. And I had a Talking Heads
tour coming up in January seventy eight for which I
needed an opening act. I had fifty English pounds to
ben and which in current money would be about fifty
one pounds. And I had had a phone call from

(01:14):
a guy called John Stains, who was the A and
R guy at Phonogram in the UK, who I knew
just through you know, being in the agency business and
so on. And he called me up and he said
I've just signed a band called Diastraits, to which my
first reaction, instantly, spontaneously was what a terrible name. And

(01:39):
he says, how fucking hell be serious? I said, I
am being serious. It's a terrible name, but he's pushed.
He pushed me like a good an R guy should,
and long story shot, I ended up going with him
to an incredibly cheap and greasy kibab how in North London,

(02:01):
followed by walking across the road to ding Walls. I
walked into the venue, which was maybe a third full,
and they were playing down to the Waterline, which ended
up on the first album. And I the first thing,

(02:22):
I was able to stand quite close to them because
they were not very loud. At the time. I was booking,
amongst other acts, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and I
was used to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple volume levels
and Dastrets were pretty quiet. And the second thing I

(02:44):
noticed was that Martinoffler was playing a red Fender stratocastic guitar.
The same guitar had been played by a guitarist called
Hank Marvin who'd been in a band called The Shadows.
They were Cliff Richard's backing band and then they became
a band on their own. They had a whole string

(03:05):
of hits with instrumentals. I've always been very fond of
instrumentals for some reason, and a combination of that guitar,
the and the what what they were what they were performing,
I mean the songs basically almost immediately kind of got

(03:30):
me hooked. And remember I was looking for a support
band for the Talking Heads. I was not considering getting
into management, although I was dealing with a large number
of managers who were completely incompetent. So I thought, well,
if they can do it, I can do this. So

(03:51):
I went. I met them after the show, asked them
if they'd like to come into my office the next day.
I was sharing my office with another agent. I got
him to move out of the office. He thought I
just meant him. I didn't. I met his desk, his chairs,
filing cabinets and everything, and I arranged my rearrange my

(04:11):
office to make it look like it was extremely large
and I was very, very, very important. And when the
guys came in, I got the receptionist to keep buzzing me,
and I said, to whatever I say, you just keep
buzzing me until I tell you to stop. So the

(04:33):
three of them, because they picked the drummer, didn't come
to meetings. So the three of them, the two and
Offler brothers and John Illesley sat down on a kind
of seating thing, and my phone went and I immediately
grabbed it and I just there was nobody on the
other end, and I just said, tell him I want
ten grand and slammed it down. Oh. I should say

(04:56):
also that I was working at a company called NAMS,
which was Brian Epstein's old company he had long since past, unfortunately,
but it did mean that we had a lot of
Beetles and other type of golden platinum records in the basement.
So in the intermediate period, I'd gone downstairs and I've

(05:17):
got a whole load of these and put them up
on my wall, added a couple of purple discs and
some of the people we were representing to make it
look like I had something to do with them, when
in fact I didn't. And every time I took one
of these phone calls, I could see the guys looking
at these records and pointing to you know, a gold

(05:40):
disc for I want to hold your hand or something,
and whispering to each other. And I basically went through
series of questions, have you got any money? No? Have
you got a van? No? Have you got any gear? No?
Have you got a roadie? Kind of okay, talking Heads

(06:04):
tour fifty pounds a night, twenty three shows January next year.
Do you want to do it? And Mark, quite I
thought intelligently, did not immediately go yes and jump into it.
He asked if he could hear some of their music,

(06:24):
because at that point they had done one tour of
the UK and Europe, which I'd set up the previous June.
Excuse me and the talk with the Ramones. That's right,
So the Talking Heads were not known. They were known

(06:46):
to the people who were into the kind of new
wave thing, but that was really only starting. That would
have been seventy six, so this was late seventy seven. Anyway,
they took the record away. He called me up that
evening and he said, yeah, we'd like to do it,
and so I put them on that tour. I got
them guessed billing I had. I paid the Talking Head

(07:12):
sound man, who I'd hired anyway, for an extra five
pounds to do their sound. I we didn't have any lights.
We just had white light, which was what the Talking
Heads wanted anyway, and it was everybody rode in the
same van. They all met outside the hotel in London

(07:33):
on the first day and both bands got on really well,
and it worked musically really really well. That might not
be obvious to some of your listeners, but it did
blend together. And they're talking Airs of course weren't a
punk band. They'd been kind of thrown into that box

(07:56):
because they were on Sire Records, but they weren't really
they want thought of as a punk band, and we
hadn't really invented the words new wave at that point.
So they did twenty three shows in twenty four days,
which is how I always toured bands. They were still

(08:18):
doing twenty three in twenty four when they broke up.
Why they broke up? Had they got an on call
us every night? They got great press. The two bands
got on really great. They used to do a jam
on take Me to the River, the Al Green's song
at the end. And while they were on that tour

(08:42):
Phonogram John Stains, the A and R guy I mentioned
he'd set about trying to find a record producer for
the first Stars Traits album, and of course Darstrets were
completely unknown. There were two people who were interested. One
was a guitar player called Pete Gage who'd been with

(09:04):
a sol band, British sol band called Gina Washington and
the Ramjam Band, and the other was Muff Windward, brother
of Steve, as he would tell every girl who came
into the control room. And there was a funny little

(09:26):
thing went on. The way that the record deal was
set up, because it had been done before I came
into the picture by the band's then lawyer, was that
they got on advance, which was okay, nothing spectacular. The
rules is were not very good. They got seven and

(09:47):
a half percent in what were called the major markets,
and they got six percent in the minor markets. And
Phonogram paid the record producer. And I'll tell you a
short story which will embarrass Muff if he's watching this.

(10:08):
Muff did a deal with business affairs Phonogram for a
two percent royalty and twenty five hundred pounds advance. And
about two days before the record started, he called me
up and he said, I'm not very happy about my deal,

(10:29):
and I went, really, just you know, and he said,
I said, how can I make you happy? Muff? And
he said, well, you know, I'd like some kind of
an increase. I said, well, actually that's the responsibility of
the record company, but let me see what I can do.
So I put the phone down and without ringing the
record company. I waited for about ten minutes and I

(10:52):
called him back and I said, okay, you can have
I could get you either an extra half a percent
or five hundred pounds, and he took the five hundred
pounds and the record sold fifteen million. But I have
to say he was very gentlemanly about it. In fact,

(11:19):
he was actually on a two week break. He was
leaving Island Records, where it was running A and R
to move over to what was then CBS where he
was going to be running A and R there, and
he managed in that two weeks he did the whole
of the Dastrets record and half of an album for
somebody else.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
Okay, when you go to see Dire Streets to decide
whether they're going to be on the Talking Heads tour? A,
do they have a manager? B? How do you become
the manager?

Speaker 2 (11:53):
Answered the first half of that question. No, they didn't.
Robert Allen, who was the lawyer that they had at
the time, had approached the big name managers, Steve A.
Rock for instance, the late Steve A. Rook who was
managing Pink Floyd. I can't remember who the others were

(12:15):
and of course they all said, because anybody who approaches
a big name manager, the big name manager is a
big name manager because he has a big name act.
But that also means that he probably doesn't have very
much time, or he's got other baby acts that he's
trying to bring through. And that was the case with everybody,

(12:37):
and they all basically said to Robert, you know, bog Off, Robert,
we don't want your POxy little group. Because of their name,
because of the name Darstras, everybody thought they were a
punk group. They had done a demo of four songs
with a London DJ called Charlie Gillert. Sorry, they've done

(12:59):
the the demo themselves and Charlie had played it on
his London radio show. That was the only exposure they'd had. So, no,
they didn't have a manager. They were at the point
where they needed one. I mean they kind of in fact,
in some ways they could have. It would have been
better off if I got involved a bit earlier, but

(13:22):
that wasn't the way it worked. And they No, they
didn't have a manager and they were but the good
thing about them was that they everything was kind of
in place. They had a publishing deal with Almo Irving
or Rondo music as it's called over here, which although everybody,

(13:46):
all four of them, Robert had got them a published,
each one of them a publishing thing to keep the
politics good happy between them, but that really only meant
mark in practice. They had this record deal. They didn't
have a record deal for North America, which was quite important.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Hey, what motivated the record deal? This is a band
with no manager, no thing. How did they get the
record deal? And why was Warner Brothers not included in
the Phonogram deal?

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Okay, the record deal came about because the four track demo.
What happened was they made this four track demo in
a little studio in North London with an engineer called
Chas Herrington, who I later asked to become our lighting director,
and he became a lighting man and he's a fantastic

(14:39):
lighting guy. And John Illsley, the bass player, who was
very much the organizer of the band at that point,
he took that demo round to Charlie's house and delivered
it one morning and Charlie played it at home, thought

(15:01):
it was great. The songs on it were saltless, a
swing down to the waterline, wild West End, and a
song called Sacred Loving that they didn't record in the end,
and Charlie played it on his radio show. And Charlie's
radio show was a kind of arbiter of taste if

(15:21):
you like. It wasn't like Radio one, BBC or anything
like that. So a lot of people in the business
who were music fans, including John Stains, would listen to this,
and John heard it. Several other people did and on
the Monday we went out on a Saturday, and on

(15:41):
the Monday morning, Rob Allen starts getting phone calls from
A and R guys saying, who's this band you just played?
Everybody thought they were American. Nobody knew anything about them,
and it kind of got into something that I never
did as part of my practice, but it became a

(16:02):
bit of a bidding war. Chris Blackwell, who's quite a
good friend of mine, told me a great story about
how he was invited to see them because his A
and R guy was Chap called at Howard Thompson wanted
to sign them very badly. So Chris went to see
them at some other pub gig in London and halfway

(16:23):
down the staircase into the basement, he was stopped by
somebody he knew who dragged him to the bar, and
he never saw them and he missed out. Richard Branson
invited them to lunch, and during the kind of the
coffee and dessert bit, various personnel from Virgin came out

(16:46):
in this restaurant and presented the group with plates of
ready roll joints. And none of them smoked weed, and
in fact they were quite anti So that screwed it
for Vergin. It's amazing how little things like that and
what's happened at the time as the Phonogram once they

(17:12):
decided to go. The band had decided to go with Phonogram,
and Robert was brokering the financial details. Everybody, well not
the group guys because they didn't know, but everybody else
decided that the American the PolyGram operation in America was

(17:35):
not really happening, and a clause was put in of
which I was to make enormous play that if RSO
passed on the group, the rights to place the American
deal would revert to the band, which went me, who

(17:59):
had never read record agreement, done alone, done a record deal.
And RSO passed Because this was nineteen seventy seven and
they were right on the cusp of Robert Stigwood's you
know all of that, and thank goodness, that's what That's

(18:21):
what happened.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
I did.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
I was subjected some time later, before the Wallers deal
was actually signed. I was somebody dead attempt to bribe
me who had been sent by PolyGram, who took me
into a jacuzzie in Los Angeles and offered me one
hundred thousand dollars if the band would quote forget about

(18:43):
that clause, and I just fled.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
Okay, So one thing at one time, RSO passes. How
do you end up at Warner Brothers as opposed to
Columbia or anything else?

Speaker 2 (19:03):
Well, well you're very close because the other competing label
was Columbia. What happened to this is such a long story.
There were two ladies, sadly both gone deceased now at
Warner Brothers, Karen Berg on the East coast and ROBERTA.

(19:24):
Peterson on the West coast. An unbeknownst to anybody, including
both of them, each of those girls heard this record
or heard about this band. Karen came over to London,
went to see them at a club we had here

(19:45):
called the Nashville and Roberta. I think Roberta. I don't
remember how Roberta got onto it, but they I didn't
know either of these people, and I didn't know that
they were interested. At that particular moment we started getting

(20:11):
interest from Columbia. I don't remember who the A and
R person was, and I think there might have been
some other labels for some reason. I've got A and
M in my mind, and they would have been a
very kind of A and M type of act, and
of course A and M. But I remember A and
M have of course had got picked up the publishing

(20:32):
or Jerry Boss knew of them through that.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
And.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
Mark and I flew over to Los Angeles in the summer,
must have been about they had after the Talking Heads tour.
I just kept them working for two reasons. One they
had no money and secondly, they need to play. They
needed to play live. So I had them doing stuff

(21:05):
that was ridiculous. I mean they opened for Sticks of
all People, which was just ridiculous, but didn't matter. They
got to play for an hour, and they started doing
their own shows, and in June of nineteen seventy eight
they did their first headlining tour of Britain, which was
college's kind of town halls, which held about two thousand people.

(21:28):
The Marquee Club in London got them a residency there
and they got a really good buzz going. In June
of seventy eight, that first album was released in the
UK and not at that point in the rest of
the world territories, and Mark and I came over to

(21:50):
the States in I think it was July seventy eight
to meet This whole thing was out of time with itself,
because by July seventy eight we were already looking at
album number two, because he'd already written a bunch of songs,

(22:12):
and there were one or two songs which had not
made it onto the first record. And Karen Berg was
working on the in the East Coast office of Warner Brothers.
And the person who, at least in his own mind,

(22:33):
was running the East Coast office, but he wasn't really
was Jerry Wexler. And Jerry Wexler heard this record being
played in the offices. And one thing I'll say about
Jerry Wexler is he could spot a dime at five
miles and he very quickly jumped onto this and Mark

(22:56):
and I went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for what for
us was an absolutely thrilling trip. I mean, we get
there and Wexler, we had not met, we meet him.
He comes and we're putt in a we're put in
a We're put in a motel that must have cost

(23:17):
one dollar fifty a night. I remember my bed was
padlocked to the floor. Each leg of the bed had
a padlock chained to a lump of concrete to stop
anybody pinching the bed. Wexler arrived the following morning, met
us immediately took us off to a southern road stop

(23:41):
where I remember that the waitress was wearing takeaway bags
on her feet, and he he took us off to
the studio and he was recording Mavis Staples and we
are like, holy shit shit, And of course the guys,

(24:03):
the musicians were the swampers. There was David Hurd, Barry Beckett,
Jimmy Johnson, and the next day Pop Staples flew down
from Chicago, and I remember going out to pick up

(24:26):
Pops at the airport with Wexler and Mark and we
went back to the studio and they were recording J. J.
Kale's Lies and Wexler, ever the opportunist bless him, invited
Mark to play with these guys. Mark had never done

(24:46):
a session in his life. I mean, he was completely, like,
totally gibbering with terror. And they didn't use court notes.
They had this numbers system, whether you know what that
is in muscle. In that studio, a number represented a chord,
So you might have six, five, eleven, twelve nine written

(25:09):
on the sheet of paper and given to you. And
Mark's looking at a set of numbers. He just look
what they are. But he knew the song obviously. And
I remember thereafter the couple of takes, Pops walked out
into the studio and he actually put his face within
about two inches from Mark's face and just stared at him.

(25:33):
And I said to Wexler, what's what's going on? And
Wesley goes, he likes him. So we did that record Mayvi.
This was great. Unfortunately Mayvis had a bit of a complaint.
She had a weak bladder, so she kept going to
the bathroom, and of course, being English, we assumed that

(25:54):
she had a massive cocaine problem, when in fact, as
she explained to the two of us, the law the
Lord gave me a problem in that department but we
did that record. I can't even remember if Mark's credited
on it. And we hung out with everybody for about
ten days. Fantastic fun. I remember Bobby Womac showed up.

(26:22):
I had done a tour with Bobby Womack about two
years previously of Europe, and he showed up with his
new wife, whose name was well, the way he pronounced
it was Vagina, and he meant Virginia, but he didn't pronounce.
He kept calling this as my new watch, She's called Vagina,

(26:45):
and everybody in the room was just it was everything
was a laugh. We were staying at a crap motel.
The swimming pool was empty and it was full of
shopping baskets had been thrown in there. But we love
the South, loved that part of the country, loved the people.

(27:07):
We got very friendly with Barry Beckett, and we flew
on to Los Angeles, stayed stayed at the Riot House,
and I Mark wasn't really he had he didn't have

(27:29):
much to do, but I was having meetings principally with Warners,
and I can remember going up there with one copy
of the album in the vinyl copy under my arm,
and I had bullshitted my way in to see ma Austin.

(27:51):
I'd never met Mo in my life, and I just
bbbbbing got in and he said to me, I'll never
forget it, and he was so I grew to really
have huge respect for great liking. He said, I don't
know anything about music, Go and see THEA and R Department,
which of course he definitely did know about music, but

(28:14):
it was probably a bit more Frank Sinatra and Dean
than it was, you know, although he'd been involved in
signing those acts from the Monterey Festival, like Jimi Hendrix
and some And he picked up the phone and he
rang somebody and that turned out to be Roberta. So
I was sent down to see Roberta. And there was

(28:37):
this little blonde girl sitting in an office which had
more palm trees and plants than I'd ever seen in
my life. She's got the requisite California tan. I give
her a record and it was kind of a bit

(28:58):
spinal tap because she put it on and cranked the
volume up to eleven and I'm sitting there and my
hair is kind of the wind and she played the
whole of the first side, flipped it over and played
the whole of the second side, and she told me
later that she was so excited by it, but she

(29:20):
didn't want to let on to me because she didn't
know anything about the deal or the politics or anything.
But the one thing that she forgot was that she
was tapping. I could see her feet tapping like mad
under her desk. And she said to me, where are
you staying? And I said, we're staying at the Hiat

(29:43):
and that caused a huge smile to appear, and then
she said, can I keep this copy? I'd like to
play it to some other people. I should point out
at this point that she didn't know that Karen Berg
was already onto this, and I didn't know that, so

(30:08):
I'm thinking, yeah, sure, of course you could keep it.
And I said, she said, how long are you in
town for? I said, how long do you need? You know, whatever?
And I went back to the hotel and Mark and
I went and celebrated in the Highat coffee shop, and

(30:33):
very quickly after that, it was like the snowball coming
down the mountain picking up snow. And all musicians are effected.
Anybody who plays an instrument is by definition to me
a musical snob. And we were musical snobs. Warner Brothers

(30:54):
had Van Morrison, they were just about to release that
first Ricky Lee Jones good. They just signed Van Halen.
I can't remember the other kinds of acts you were,
the kind of acts that Lenny Warneker would work with
or people like that. They were kind of like our
kind of thing. And Columbia, well, first of all, they

(31:20):
were based in New York and we didn't know any
plans to go to New York. And I had had
dealings with Columbia in the UK and this is back then,
and they were a pain in the arse. They were bureaucratic.
They were just difficult to deal with. Everything was signing

(31:43):
a bit of paper, getting a memo, doing all of
that kind of stuff. And the band. We had to
get back to England because the band were doing their
first trip to Europe, which turned out to be a
seminal event because we went to Holland. What how was

(32:07):
I got back And this is back in the days
of telex. I get telex in about September of that year,
seventy eight from the company in Holland who I'd never
spoken to, and it said album has entered chart at
forty three and I just looked at it, crumpled it

(32:28):
up and I threw it in the bin. The next
week I got another one. It said album has gone
up to seventeen, and I went wow, through that one
in the bin. The next week album has gone up
to eleven. They had released Songs of Swing as a single.

(32:49):
Would we go over to Holland and play their weekly
popsher called Top Pop very much like Top of the
Pops in the UK. It was a singles show, so
we went over. This was the original four piece and
during the show they represented with a gold album, which

(33:12):
none of us, including me, had any idea about. I
hadn't at that point got a handle on how to
use the record company. I wasn't.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
I was.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
Not totally inexperienced, but I didn't know the vagaries of
how it all worked. We ended up doing or the
guys ended up doing interviews from ten in the morning
till ten o'clock at night for two days, and they
were completely exhausted by it and I had to get

(33:53):
control of that. But having said that, it worked because
that record and appear us on that TV show got
us to number one. So we had our first number
one and Holland is quite interesting from a geographical point
of view because it's in right. The radio stations in
Holland could be heard in Germany, especially in North Germany,

(34:14):
in Belgium and in northern France. So it was a
bit like dropping a pebble in a pond and the
ripples went out and suddenly I'm getting similar tech tallexis
from Germany, this, that and the other. And we started
working those territories, by which I mean doing every possible

(34:36):
television show and every possible interview we could do. My
attitude to television and it's still the same is that
all popular music television is rubbish, so you might as
well do all of it. So we're starting to become
a bit of a we were getting hot and and

(35:00):
I was playing we were playing dates. The one thing
about dar Straits throughout their entire career, but certainly in
that first two or three years, was their their work
ethic was unbelievable. I mean you laugh every time I say,
you know, I put in twenty gigs without a day off.
That was absolutely common. I days off to me are

(35:24):
something you do for for Roady's.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
Okay, let's just go back. Got a couple of eyes.
How did you become the manager?

Speaker 2 (35:35):
Bullshit? Do you know? I don't really know. They came
into the office that time I was talking about I
did this whole act because that's what it was, sticking
up Beatles records on my wall, making the girl phone me,
all of this sort of stuff. And I think they've

(35:57):
they told me since when they were left the office
and they were walking up the road. David Knopfler, younger
Mark's younger brother, David and Martinofler never agreed about anything.
If Mark said the sun will come up tomorrow, David
would say, Nah, it's not going to happen. No. Mark

(36:22):
and John said, we like that guy. I mean, he's
a bit off the wall, but he knows what he's
talking about. And the thing I think that worked was
that we came from very similar backgrounds. We were the
same age, we had grown up listening to the same
kind of music, and we had most importantly the same

(36:46):
kind of humor. When I was going for drum lessons
in Leeds in my teens, Mark Knopfler was going to
the same music shop. At the same time. He would
turn left into guitars. Woodwinds were on the right, and

(37:08):
as always, the drum department was in the basement. But
when we got to know each other because we came
from within twelve miles of each other. He was actually
born in Glasgow, grew up in Newcastle on Tyne, and
then he moved down to Leeds when he was at college.
And I remember he said to me one day, he said,

(37:30):
did you used to go to the kitchens of Leeds? No? Yeah, yeah,
I said, I got my drums done and that's where
I had lessons. And he said, when I said about
nineteen sixty three, four or five, he said, that's so weird,
is is that I was going there at the same time.
So you have these kind of cosmic connections, I suppose.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
And.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
I think that it was a it was just a
feeling and I and it was exactly the right time
for me. I'd been an agent at that point for
about seven years. I'd represented some very big acts and
I was kind of I wanted to move on. I
wanted to get out of it. It was too it

(38:17):
wasn't like it is now. I mean there was no
Live Nations AG's nothing like that. And the promoters you
tended to be dealing with it was all a bit
crushy fingers and hope that they don't run off to
Brazil kind of thing. A Back then, a promoter was
anybody who walked into the office and said I'm a promoter.

(38:39):
People would walk in and I'd be selling the deep
purple dates within five minutes, just hoping that they'd have
enough money to pay the deposit. It was completely chaotic
and incredible fun, I mean ridiculously fun.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
Okay, you ultimately become the manager. Do you discuss percentage?
Do you sign a contract? Who just move forward?

Speaker 2 (39:04):
Well, this is where Robert Allen, the lawyer comes back
into play, because he's busily bringing up Steve A. Rook
and Steve A. Roake doesn't take collect calls, so we
can't find them a manager. And they said to him,
we've met this guy. We want him to be our manager.
And Robert had never heard of me, and he dragged

(39:26):
his feet, and one day, I don't remember who it was,
it probably would have been Mark, rang him up and
said Mark, Robert, go on with it. We're going to
have this guy. Either you do this or we'll get
somebody else to do it, or however it was phrased

(39:48):
so Suddenly Robert's attitude changes quite a bit and he
comes up with a deal, and I can tell you
what the terms were. It was ten percent of the
gross of publishing.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
It was.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
Fifteen percent of the gross of records. There was nothing
in it about soundtracks, there was nothing in it about
producer work. And the publishing was fifteen. That was the start.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
But you said the publishing was ten. In the publishing
was fifteen.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
I beg your pardon. The publishing started off at ten,
that's right. What was live live was fifteen. Now in
my head, I immediately saw a problem because if I
used an agent, if I switched hats and I became

(40:49):
their manager and I used a third party agent, that
was probably going to be another ten. So twenty five
percent off the top of live work was probably going
to push that live work into a loss if it
wasn't already in a loss. And if you've got a
loss going on, you've got a potential problem. I got

(41:16):
around the problem in a way by I didn't leave NAMS,
so I was using their phones, their staff, secretarial, their infrastructure,
and EMS was a big agency. They would be the
equivalent of back then, they would have been the William
Morris or CIA of London, and I was a big
shit there. So we started on that deal because I

(41:42):
didn't really he wasn't giving me a choice. I had
a lawyer do my end of it. But that was
really just crossing t's and dotting eyes when I as
time progressed, I'm just going to get ahead of myself
slightly in this ology. That deal changed and I did.

(42:07):
I did all the record deals myself, I did all
the publishing deals myself. I booked every show everywhere myself
except for the USA, and I did every merchandising deal myself.
I did every film soundtrack deal myself, on the basis

(42:29):
that nobody knows anything, so why not. And the deal
over the next couple of years changed so that the
publishing became twenty percent. Yes, yes, oh yes. The records

(42:58):
stayed at fifteen, but Mark started getting a producer chunk
and I got twenty of that.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
And the live.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Kind of wobbled up and down according to how profitable
the tours had been. But just before the Brothers in
Arms tour, which I'm sure you're going to get to,
Mark and John called me over to the rehearsal room
and Mark said to me, he said, you book all
our dates, don't you? And I'm thinking, God, is he

(43:32):
only just noticed? And I went yeah, and he said,
and we don't pay for it, do we? And I went, well,
it's just part of the package. He said, well, we
think you should get an extra five percent and I
went done. And that was the deal I ended up on.

Speaker 1 (43:58):
Okay, a couple of questions. When you were in Los Angeles,
did you finalize the deal with Warner Brothers?

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Pretty much? Yeah, pretty much?

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Okay, And in this agreement hang on.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Sorry to intruct you, we didn't finalize the commercial terms,
and we ended up with a better royalty rate than
we got we're getting from a phonograph. Because I was,
I was involved. This all sounds very grandiose, but I mean,
I just I mean, I came back to the what

(44:31):
I said to you a few seconds ago. Back then, No,
Don Passman hadn't written his book, bless him, so you
just could kind of make it up as you went along.
And what and I do. And for a manager, leverage
is everything, but leverage in part it is not just commercial.

(44:53):
It's your personality. It's the way you approach things. It's
knowing when to say no, went to say yes, my
Austin once said, not my Austin David Berman, who was
the head of his business affairs for many years. David
said to me, I'll tell you. I'll tell you this
to my own benefit. He said, you know your most
favorite manager. Well, well I am. That's very nice, I said,

(45:18):
any particular reason. He said, because whenever you ask us
for something, you give us something in return. He said.
There are people in this town, meaning Los Angeles, and
he said that I'm having a couple of lawyers, attorneys
in mind, who's who think that the best deal that
they can get for their artist means that we're making

(45:39):
a loss on every unit we sell. And I said,
but that's ridiculous, that's just stupid. You have to let
the other person have a fair crack. Some of the
big record companies don't believe in that philosophy. But I've
always believed in that philosophy. I've given promoters money back.

(46:02):
I actually I cut a merchant I readd a merchandising
deal with somebody. When the vat the sales tax rate
went up in this country by two and a half percent.
I rang the guy up and I said I'm dropping
your deal by two and a half percent. And when
he got off the floor, he said why, I said,
I don't want that to be passed on to the public.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
Okay, you made these deals at low royalty rates? Did
you renegotiate and when.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
Well, the Warner's deal wasn't that lower rule too rate.
But the original Phonogram deal, which I hadn't done, which
I told you about at the beginning, that was pretty low.
Although you know you have to put all this in
the context of the time. You can't in twenty twenty
four look back and say, well, Elvis Presley had a

(46:51):
crap record deal. Yeah, because I mean, I remember Wexler
saying to me, because Wexley was very proud in a
strange sort of way of the way that they exploited
the artists on Atlantic, particularly the black artists, and they
paid He said to me, I don't know how true
this is. He said to me one day that they

(47:12):
had paid Ray Charles thirty dollars flat to record. What
did I say? And then you look at they sold
Atlantic to Wea for I think seventeen million dollars, and
I was just astonished that it was so low and
Western's response was capital Games, Capital Games rubbish. So in

(47:40):
answer to your question, I reegotiated the record side with
the PolyGram countries the Phonogram deal every single time we
put a record out. Every time. I did not do
that with Warner Brothers. I waited. I just had a

(48:02):
sense that we were going to have one day a
humongous record in America, and since we weren't on a
bad deal, we were on sixteen percent. I think it
was I didn't feel the kind of almost sounds sounds

(48:25):
a bit pretentiousness. I didn't feel a kind of moral
pressure to be pushing them. And I have to say,
sort of the listeners to this may think this is
a very strange motivation. I really liked the people at
Warner Brothers, and somehow that crept into my I would can't.
I mean, they were a big corporation, et cetera. But

(48:47):
I really like mo. I love Lenny. I mean, he's
just he's just adorable, used to used to play some
terrible jokes on it. But and and all all the
people I dealt with, and one person in particular, Carl Scott,
who at the time was head of artist relations there.
He was a huge supporter of the band and of

(49:11):
me personally, and he and people in his department. Girl
called Ellen Darst, another girl called Karen Kaplan who went
on to She left and she worked for Paul McGuinness
and you too for many years. They were incredibly supportive
and I can't remember his name, but the guy was

(49:32):
head of merchandising had the best split in town.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
Okay, you talk about giving to get when you renegotiated
with Phonogram, what'd you give them for a higher royalty rate?

Speaker 2 (49:46):
Well, the only thing you can give them is extra records.
That's all they're I mean, you can say, oh, you know,
we'll do I won't, I won't be nasty to the
but it's basically you give them more product. So it's
very important when you're an at starting out that you

(50:08):
end up by chance or if you want to call it,
with the label that is right for you, because whatever happens,
and certainly now since nearly all record companies are essentially
corporate unless they're specialized specialty labels, the turnover in personnel

(50:29):
is an issue I got through in twenty five years
over twelve managing directors in the UK Phonogram Company, which
is a terrible way to run a business in the
States until the time Warner merger and the fallout from that.

(50:54):
It was basically Moe Austin's company, and he ran it
in a very particular way, and he was incredibly accessible.
His staff loved him. I mean most of his staff
would have crawled over broken glass, you know, Romoe. And
he was an infinitely interesting person to spend time with

(51:20):
if I got him on Frank Sinatra anecdotes, Wow, fantastic.
So I had a different philosophy with the American company
than I did with the rest of the world. Now
I should just explain that we were signed to Phonogram UK.

(51:42):
Phonogram was part of PolyGram, which at the time was
owned by Phillips and Semens until Phillips bought Semens out,
and Phillips being a Dutch company, they were based in Eindhoven.
They had an operation in a place in Holland call
barn baa Rn, which was a bit like going to prison,

(52:06):
a prisoner of war camp in the Second World War.
This was the worst atmosphere. It was a whole lot
of buildings connected by tunnels underneath, except it wasn't Las Vegas,
and they were supposed to coordinate, coordinate all of their territories.

(52:29):
They had companies in most parts of the world, but
not everywhere. For instance, they didn't have a company in
South Africa. They had a licensee. They were so totally
hopeless at coordinating these people. I couldn't even get sales figures.

(52:50):
So I started dealing with all of these companies direct.
I just went round this operation in. Of course, the
people in Holland were extremely ticked off, but the managing
directors and marketing heads of all of the other companies

(53:11):
just thought this, Wow, this is great. Why because politically
within that setup, the fact that they were dealing direct
with the manager of one of the biggest acts, which
became the biggest act, and they became my friends, you know,
so they would It was almost like I was giving

(53:32):
them political ammunition for their own personal ambition. But he
got the job done. That was all I was concerned about.
I wanted to know what I used to make them
give me. Marketing plans, sales projections, weekly sales figures, the
whole lot. Not so much because I'm sitting at home

(53:53):
every weekend reading all this stuff, but because many many
this She's got nothing to do with what we're talking about,
but really a really quick story. I did a deal
many many years later for Mark to do a piece
of music for a film called Color of Money that
was Martin Scorsese film that was being distributed by Disney.

(54:15):
And I got into a huge row with the lawyer
at Disney because their attitude was we will own everything
and you will own nothing, and my attitude was, no,
you will own nothing and we will own everything, which
is how it ended up. And somebody there who was
head of script development who I happened to know go
called Jane Rosenthal. She works, She's run some Tribeca studios

(54:39):
for Robert de Niro now it has for many years.
She called me up after a particularly how can I
put it vicious email to this guy in the legal
department and she said, are you having a problem with sounds?

(55:00):
And I went, no, nothing I can't handle. And I said,
how do you know about that? She said no, At Disney,
every head of department is copying in on every ingoing
and outgoing communication every day. And Michael remind me of

(55:21):
his name, head of Disney, Eisner, Right, Michael Eisler is
copying in on everything. And I just started laughing. I said,
Michael Eisner can't possibly read everything that's going in and
out every day, and she said no, but nobody knows

(55:41):
what he does read, so it has the same effect.
So anyway, I was basically but this is by album two,
certainly by album. By making movies, I was dealing with
all the Phonogram companies direct everywhere. And when I say everywhere,
I dealt with the company in Israel, say, or a

(56:08):
company in Malta or New Zealand. To me, every country
was as important as every other one. And Brothers in
Arms sold over four hundred and fifty thousand copies in
New Zealand. The soundtrack to Last Exit to Brooklyn, one

(56:28):
of our more obscure items, sold over one hundred and
fifty thousand in South Korea, So don't overlook everywhere. My
philosophy was, I'm going to make this act huge and
they're going to be huge worldwide, and they're going to
have a long career because I considered myself to be

(56:52):
one of them, and in fairness, they felt the same
about me.

Speaker 1 (56:59):
Okay, now it comes time for the second album. How
do you cut it in the South? And you know,
in America, the albums came out almost back to back. Yes,
So what was the experience of the second record from
the inside?

Speaker 2 (57:17):
Very good question. Because of this split record deal, by accident,
we ended up with a situation where the second record
was recorded with Wexler and Barry Beckett at Compass Points

(57:39):
Studios in Nasaw Chris Blackwell's place, before the first record
had come out in the US. So we were in
this time lag as far as the US was concerned,

(58:00):
and having had an album that was very, very hot.
The problem, the problem with all first releases by any
act is if you get your first record away, it
might seem fantastic at the time, and it is, and
it jumps a lot of barriers in one go. But

(58:21):
then you've got this situation that you're alluding to, which
is the second one. I have Alanis Morrissette in mind
actually at this point, so we had Wexler, had got
his claws in. We go off to and he and
he's set, you know, he's laying out. We're going to

(58:44):
go to the Bahamas. I mean, none of us have
been to the Caribbean.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
We hadn't.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
We hadn't we hadn't been to the south coast of England.
We're going to be there, you're going to live here,
You're going to be We're going to brew on the
whole thing. And we fell for it hookline, and so
we went off to Compass Point and we made that.
You see, the Dye Strikes records were made very quickly.

(59:10):
First one twelve days including mixing, second one three weeks
including mixing. So we had a record ready to go
and the PolyGram territories were gagging for this record. Meanwhile,
the Warners people were not gagging for it. They wanted

(59:31):
to release at least they wanted to release Down to
the Waterline as an aside single and probably another track.
And it all led to a very embarrassing meeting in London.
Moe was there, rush Thyret was there, the Polyglots were there,

(59:53):
I don't remember which, and myself, And as this meeting
was progressing, I suddenly realized that the casting vote was
coming down to me. And of course I had the band.
When a band's made a record, they want the record out.
Well not in Brian Ferry's case, but everybody else wants
it out. And I could see both sides of the equation.

(01:00:16):
I'd already booked or put in place, or I could
have changed it all a whole British and European tour
to push this second record, you know, off along and
that meeting we made a mistake and I absolutely take

(01:00:38):
responsibility for it. It doesn't matter now, but we should have waited.
But the band now now we have to have it out.
They were already playing most of the songs on it.
A good number of the songs on the second record
were played on the first American tour because interesting thing
about America, I don't know if it's still true, but
the audiences were completely to do stuff that they'd never heard.

(01:01:04):
You know, in Manchester they want to hear the hits,
but they didn't care about that in Chicago. And we
decided to go with that second record in the autumn
of seventeen.

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
Was it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
I can't remember when it came out, yes, late seventy nine,
which and we had to do it worldwide because of
what we're called parallel imports. Back then, the Europeans would
deliberately try and import records into the US and I

(01:01:43):
just wish we hadn't done that. It just it created
a bad atmosphere with the senior management owners, which took
quite a bit of recovering, and I just instinctively was
thinking this is wrong. But I didn't really have enough

(01:02:04):
experience at the time. I didn't I had never worked
with an act or a record that had been a
multiple singles record. In the UK, if you put out
an album, if you got one hit off it, you

(01:02:25):
were doing really well, and if you got two, that
was a miracle. Most acts didn't. Everybody was recording much
more quickly than they are now, and stuff was coming
out faster in this marketplace.

Speaker 1 (01:02:41):
Okay, from my personal experience, I didn't like the second
record as much as the first. Not that it was bad.
You had this release thing. It wasn't really like a
downhill slide, but there wasn't any increase in career momentum.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
Correct.

Speaker 1 (01:03:01):
What was it like from on the inside.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
Yeah, well you've yeah, that's the that's the nail that
you've squarely hit. Like many second albums by acts that
have big first albums, there was a I can't speak
for Mark personally, but he was using material that he

(01:03:28):
had rejected for the first one. He was being forced
not the right word, but he had He was having
to write on the tour bus in the hotel room,
the hour, the amount of time. You know, this is

(01:03:49):
all boxed in with shows, rehearsals, It's boxed in by interviews,
Telly's videos, and it was very much boxed in by
the personal relationship situation that was going on in the
group off the back of this huge first record. Because

(01:04:09):
that record, that first one, none of us quite knew
how to deal with it. It was and the way
it led to the issues between Mark and his younger brother,
which were already pretty fragile, really became quite difficult during

(01:04:36):
that period.

Speaker 1 (01:04:38):
And I.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
So so that record, and that record was when we
got there was quite an interesting little thing which might
address what you just asked me. When we got out
to Compass point, Uh, Distraits did not generally do demos,

(01:05:05):
so Jerry Wexler didn't know what the songs were. So
when we got there, I remember Mark and Jerry and
I must have been there, Mark kind of running the
songs down, just plunk in on a guitar, acoustic guitar
or whatever. And the next day was quite interesting to
us because we had never been worked with an American

(01:05:28):
record company person, let alone a you know, famed legendary
producer and where's the saying to Mark, what strings did
you use on the first album? How tar did you use?
What amplifier, what amplifier settings? All of this kind of stuff,
And it suddenly occurred, I think, to most of it, well,

(01:05:50):
certainly to Mark and I that he was trying to
copy the first one, but he wanted the sound to be,
as he put it, we're going to make a record
that's you know, good for American radio. So what he
was trying to do was kind of chip off the

(01:06:12):
the rougher edges and that's how it sounded. Yeah, which
gave the first one it's kind of spirit. And that's
what happened.

Speaker 1 (01:06:34):
Okay, So before the next album, David is no longer
in the band.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
No, no, sorry, you're wrong. He left during the recording
of the third one.

Speaker 1 (01:06:46):
Okay, how does that happen?

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
Well, the momentum of this thing, I mean, notwithstanding what
you made your comment about the if you like the
artistry of the second record, the second record just certainly
over here and in Europe and Australasia and so on,
just came out of the you know, like a shot
out of a cannon. I mean, we had that record

(01:07:11):
went straight in at number one in Germany and the
first album was at number two. That kind of thing.
So the Communicate record was successful, not as successful as
the first one, but it was. It sold in its

(01:07:32):
lifestyme lifetime eight eight million copies, first one in its
lifetime fifteen, so about half. And within the band myself,
we all understood that there was a danger of being

(01:07:54):
a one hit wonder kind of thing, and that record,
the second record, didn't have have a hit single on it,
and back then, hit singles were what you needed, so
we didn't have a songs of swing on it. I
can't even remember what the single was that came off.
It was it Once upon a Time in the West,

(01:08:15):
I can't remember, and it kind of I mean, we
were touring it and we were selling out shows, partly
because I always tried to keep the shows at the
right level for the time. So by that time we
were starting to do arenas, we were up from doing

(01:08:39):
big theaters. If you like David Knopfler, I'm picking this
up from interviews i've seen him do since he said
to John Ellslie one day, I remember this. He said

(01:09:01):
something like, it wasn't supposed to be like this, and
what he meant by that was he wasn't supposed to
be as successful. And I remember getting into a bit
of a fight with him about this. I said, well,
what the fuck do you want? You want me to
make it less successful. He got really pissed off about
the amount of money that Warner Brothers were spending on

(01:09:24):
independent promotion, and he's saying stuff to me, like in
front of the others, like they're criminals. And I went, yeah,
So he says, you should be trying to stop you
should stop it. I said, I'm trying to get them
to spend more. And we got into a really and
in the background I can hear Mark going shut up,

(01:09:46):
shut the shut up. So David's philosophy about what dire
straits could would and could and should be, we actually
defined what that was. What it wasn't was to be successful,
to have chart records, to be on the David Letterman Show,

(01:10:10):
or whoever it was at the time, that kind of thing.
And the two brothers. Some people in families get on
great and some don't. And they didn't and don't as
far as I know, they have not spoken to each
other in thirty years. Wow, which is a shame. It's silly.

Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
Was David pushed or did he jump? And if he
was pushed, who told them?

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):
You did say this was going to be deep, right,
So we go into the making movies record and I
one very single thing happened Mark Mark expanded the lineup
of the group to include keyboards. Now in the first instance, well,

(01:11:12):
he and I went to New York in January of
nineteen eighty and we were going to meet with John
Landaut to produce that third record. And John, who I
have to say I really like, showed up for the
meeting on the wrong day, which did not auger well

(01:11:35):
because his pa had put the diary entry in wrong,
which apparently she regularly did. I guess she's not working
for him now. So he shows So we sit and wait.
We were staying at the Mayflower Hotel upon the Central
Park West, and we sit and we wait. No John,
So I ring the office and he comes on the

(01:11:57):
phone and I said, John, we've got a meeting with you.
There's a silence, and then I hear a shit, she's
done it again. He came the next day and he
was making The River with Bruce and Chuck Blockin and
twenty seven other producers and he was shattered. I mean

(01:12:21):
he looked on he looked unwell, and we got him
a cup of tea and a bun and I said
to him, are you all right? Went I didn't get
into I didn't get home till five am, and we
had this conversation and basically he could not fit our
record well. He didn't have a schedule, he had no

(01:12:43):
idea when the River was going to be finished. They'd
already been working on it for about a year. And
if I remember correctly, it's a double album. I think
it was a double album. Yeah. So, and they were
up at the power station, which is where we used
to work. So he mentioned Jimmy Iven and when we

(01:13:09):
were doing the Communicator, the play on music that the
band used to bring them on stage was because the
night which Jimmy of course had produced with Patti Smith.
And we're sitting there and so again, long story short,

(01:13:32):
I got hold of Jimmy on John's recommendation, and a
small man dressed entirely in yellow with a yellow cap
and yellow shades in a yellow car arrives and hops
out and starts talking like he's been swimming in shark

(01:13:53):
infested waters. And one of them's got his balls. Hi,
how you doing, Jimmy, And he's like, I mean, I
thought he was on speed.

Speaker 1 (01:14:06):
It wasn't.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
That's just his personality to Blessing and the two of them,
we all got on. He recommended the power station. We
went up to the power station to have to check
it out, which ironically was where Mark met his wife,
his first wife Lords And it was funny because when
we got there, I just told me later that she
thought that I was Mark and Mark was me, and

(01:14:29):
I was going, how how could that be? Anyway, we
liked the studio, Jimmy was available. I managed to do
a deal with a manager who I'm not going to mention,
who was a complete chump. And it was Jimmy who
recommended Roy Bitten from the Eas Street Band, who couldn't

(01:14:51):
have been better. It was absolutely ideal and he was
fast and he got it straight away. He understand exactly.
Roy understood exactly what was needed. He had he wasn't.
He had a break that was sufficiently long to do
the tracking and so on. So we started. We booked

(01:15:13):
in there in That was January. We booked in there
and I think it was something like April, May, June,
something like that. And when I got back to England,
the guys got together and started rehearsing up the songs
that became the Making Movies record, which and I generally
did not attend rehearsals because why you know, that's a rehearsal.

(01:15:36):
And I remember very clearly John Elsey rand mid day
one day and he said, right, we're ready for you,
which was me being summoned. And I went down to
this tiny rehearsal studio in by the Cutty Sark the
ship on the Thames place called the wood Wharf, which
probably wasn't twenty foot square, and they played Tunnel Love

(01:16:00):
Love and Romeo and Juliet with another keyboard player, Alan Clark,
who we'd found somebody in my office had found and
he'd come in and they played it like there were
ten thousand people in the room and we when he
got to the end of Romeo and Juliet, I knew
that we were back, artistically speaking, and I was totally

(01:16:26):
blown away by it. I thought that I thought Romeo
and Juliet was just fantastic lyric. There's a line in
that song you and me babe, how about it?

Speaker 1 (01:16:38):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:16:39):
A great, great line, how many times have we all
said that and all been told now fuck off? So
we made we went off to New York made that
record with Roy. I did have a bit of a
problem with Jimmy because I had to have the phones

(01:17:00):
cut off into the studio because Jimmy would produce in
between the phone calls. So he was trying. He had,
he had, he had this, he had, he was spending
these plates he'd got Stevie NICKX was one plate. Bob Seger.
I think he was sort of checking in discussions with

(01:17:24):
of course Bruce. I can't remember who else, but he was.
He was. He was always worried Jimmy. I hope he
isn't now because he's got so much money and a
very beautiful wife. But then he was desperately insecure, desperately
and every night he would we would walk up the
street and he would ask me the same question, what's

(01:17:47):
going to happen to me? And I used to use
that line, Charles Dickens line from mister Micawber. I said,
now something will turn up. Something did turn up. But
he was He and Shelley Yakas, who did the engineering
on that, were great, But the problem was that they

(01:18:10):
approached it from the perspective of the American hit record producers. So,
for instance, we had a drum kit in there made
up of other people's drum kit. We had Max Weinberg's
snare drum, and we had Steve Gadd's floor tom tom,
and we had somebody else's whatever and so and so,

(01:18:32):
and picked with us was getting that. Our drummer was
really ticked off with this. And we spent eight days
doing the drum sound. And on the ninth day we
took a lunch break and Pitch stayed behind and he
retuned and reset every piece of that drum kit, and

(01:18:52):
we came back and Iven literally produced an austri egg.
He went absolutely nuts. The funny thing about those two
guys was that every day they would they had two
dog dog bowls that you would feed a dog, your

(01:19:13):
pet dog with, and Shelley would empty an entire bottle
of bee pollen tablets into each one, and then he'd
mix it up with some alfalfa sprouts and they'd eat
the whole lot. Now, bee pollen is a very very
effective but very powerful vitimin, and you're supposed to take

(01:19:33):
one or two a day, and they were taking bottles
so and it had the effect, the speed effect, but
it wasn't speed, it was out. It was bee pollen.
And the two of them were like And in the
end I just had to disconnect the phone because we could.

(01:19:54):
We didn't have that much money then it hadn't flowed through.
And you know, the pastage was expensive. Jimmy was fairly expensive.
And they went the way they went about. Everything was
full on. You know, it's like this, We've got to

(01:20:14):
get this done. There's no fucking about, you know, you
can't go and have a break now all this, and
Jimmy got very frustrated with David Nofler. David was arguing constantly,
this is not the way it's supposed to be and

(01:20:36):
all this kind of stuff. Why are we staying at
the Mayflower? We should be staying at Missus Miggins's guesthouse
down the street. We're spending too much money. And this
was really starting to get on everybody else's you know,
as we say in England, everybody else's tits, and in

(01:20:57):
particular it was really starting to bug Mark. I mean,
it was already pretty the relationship was just not working.
And there came the famous occasion or infamous occasion where
Mark said to him, I wasn't there for this particular episode.

(01:21:17):
Thank god. Mark said to him, right, he said, I
want you to go back to the hotel. I want
you to rehearse your part on Romeo and Juliet and
come in tomorrow and we'll do it. And David just
rolled his eyes, and then we all went off for
the evening to do whatever we were doing, which might

(01:21:37):
be just having a meal or going to a club,
or I'll tell you a short aside. It might be
interesting to you just going back to communicate because it
just came into my mind. Jerry Wexler took Mark and
I out one night clubbing, but I don't mean disco clubbing,

(01:21:59):
I mean music clubbing. And we went and we saw
James Blood, Olma and Cindy Lauper, and Cindy was singing
with a group I think they were called Blue.

Speaker 1 (01:22:16):
Yeah. That was when she had her deal with PolyGram.

Speaker 2 (01:22:18):
And she did a fantastic version of a Gene Pitney
song called I Want to Be Strong. Absolutely blew us
out of our chairs. And we went back to Wexler's
apartment and he said, which one of those do you
think I should sign and Mark and I both went,

(01:22:39):
you gotta sign that girl. That girl is ridiculous singer.
And he goes, no, No, I'm going to sign James
blood Olma, which he did, so Cindy got to go
with whoever it was anyway, Sorry, So coming back to
what you were asking.

Speaker 1 (01:22:55):
The name of the band was Blue Angel.

Speaker 2 (01:22:57):
Thank you Blue Angel. Yes. So the next day arrives
and Mark David shows up and Mark says to him,
did you practice your part like I told you? And
David goes no, and everybody in the room went So
he goes into the studio and he starts tuning his guitar,

(01:23:21):
or rather he doesn't tune his guitar. And this has
gone on for about half an hour. I got all
from John later on, and finally Mark hit the talk
back and he said to him, David, shit, I'll get
off the pot. And David turned round and used a
word I can't say on your podcast, and Mark just

(01:23:45):
stood up, took his coat off the hook on the
back of the door, put his coat on, and turned
round to this room of people who had their mouth
literally open, and said, I'm not working with him anymore.
I'm going back to the hotel and walked out, so
everybody Ivan laid another egg. Everybody went back to the

(01:24:09):
hotel and Mark sorry, David and John Illslie had a
conversation and basically John said, look, you got a choice.
You can either make up with Mark and stay or
leave and because and David said, I'll leave. And that

(01:24:31):
was when I got on the phone call. I was
on the West coast at that point, David's leaving the
group and actually I just went, oh, great, thank god
for that, because I knew that if he had stayed,
it would have fallen to bits. I'm not saying it
wouldn't have reconstructed, but at that moment it was very
close to just collapsing because Pink our Drama was ready

(01:24:55):
to go because of David.

Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
Absolutely, Okay, that album comes out with not gigantic expectations
in the US. Once again, the Europe is a different market.
It's got a more vibrant, impactful, direct sound. If you

(01:25:21):
bought the record when it came out, you were quite stunned,
especially with Romeo and Juliet, and from my perspective, it
percolated slowly to become bigger and bigger and bigger. What
was your perspective on the inside.

Speaker 2 (01:25:35):
You pretty much described it. I mean, we didn't have
the Communicate setback in the rest of the world territories.
And when do you talk about Europe, I don't want to.
I'm not trying to correct you, but I only I
think of the rest of the world, because it wasn't
just Europe. It was Australasia, it was Japan, it was Canada,

(01:25:56):
all of these territories, parts of South America were always
going great guns for us. So the Communicate record and
because of the touring off the back of it and
keeping them in front of their fan base which was growing.
When the third one came out, the decision was made

(01:26:21):
the record companies. I never tried to impose singles on
record companies because they have to do the work. I
only did that once, and we're going to come to that.
But I thought Romeo and Juliet as a song was
utterly brilliant, and I did kind of push for that

(01:26:45):
to be the single. And it was one of those things.
And I'm going to tell you something which even the
band members don't know. Of course, the record company wanted
an edit, and I said to the guy from Phonogram
in London. I said, we didn't have this conversation. If

(01:27:05):
I ever hear about it, I will deny you and
I spoke about it. Do you have you got the message?
And he said I think so. So we put out
an edited version because I knew radio was going to
edit it anyway, and it became it went well in
the UK. It got up to about number three, and

(01:27:31):
and again we were off touring again. I mean, it
was just the touring was relentless. And about a year later,
John Nilsey said to me, took me aside somewhere, He said,
did you tell Phonogram that they could edit Romeo and Juliet?
And I went, He said, well, obviously you did. I said,

(01:27:56):
have you mentioned that to Mark? He said no, and
I'm not going he did exactly the right thing. So
and the unlikely event Mark's watching this, that's why anyway,
it didn't matter. So that became a hit. A Tunnel
of Love became a hit as parts one and two.

(01:28:17):
It's like Big Noise from Winnetka Part one kind of thing.
There was a song on that album I thought was
a hit song. It was not released, and that was
a song called Hand in Hand. Had a good chorus.
But anyway, that record got us back for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:28:33):
Before we go forward, let's go back. How did Knappler
end Mark Knopfler end up working with Bob Dylan? And
what was your experience there?

Speaker 2 (01:28:47):
Sorry, okay, this is welcome to Comedy Hour Central, Jerry Wexler.
We are playing in at the Rocks See in La
on the first American tour, which is packed wall to
wall with faces I believe you call them. I remember

(01:29:11):
Stevin Nix getting up and doing her Rihanna dance and
being pelted with plastic cups and sit down, yes, silly cow,
and all of this, and I remember all of the
members of the band, Robbie and all of them been there,
and all of these other characters. And we were doing

(01:29:32):
two shows a night there. This was in end of
March seventeen, end of March eighty. I think I got
my caronology might be wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:29:46):
I think a little before that.

Speaker 2 (01:29:48):
I was seventy nine. Sorry, you're right. And we went
up to on the Rocks upstairs for a drink in
between the shows, and there was Bob or as we
call him, rambling, and with wait.

Speaker 1 (01:30:05):
Wait, wait, wait, why do you call him rambling?

Speaker 2 (01:30:09):
In the sixties, anybody of my generation who listened to
British radio would have listened to a satirical radio show
on a Sunday called Round the Horn, which featured a
spoof folks singer called Rambling sid Rumpole. You can find
this stuff on YouTube or whatever, and Rambling sid Rumpole

(01:30:31):
was played by a wonderful actor called Kenneth Williams, Who's
Who's who would vocalize everything like a person from the
West Country of England.

Speaker 1 (01:30:40):
So what are right?

Speaker 2 (01:30:41):
Or like that? You know, what are you mean? I'm
going to sing you a song now. It's called the Toymes.
They are a changing. He would do a spoof. So
Mark and I just started calling Bob Rambling. Bob had
no idea. He thought we were talking about rambling Jack
Elliottly I bought him a box set of the cassettes

(01:31:03):
of this show, but it just went straight over. So anyway,
we go upstairs and Wexler's there with Bob, and of
course Bob is Mark's biggest influence. Stroke call him an
idol exactly, but you know, Bob to Mark was what
Elvis was to be kind of thing or Buddy Rich

(01:31:25):
to me. And they met and went for a huddle,
and the next thing I know is that Dylan is
doing an album in Muscle Shoals. Jerry's going to produce it.
This is taking place in April May of seventy nine,

(01:31:47):
and we conveniently had a gap in touring, and it's
agreed that Mark's going to play on this record. And
Mark recommends pick with us our drummer, quite rightly, absolutely
ideal for that. I didn't go down there, I had

(01:32:10):
I was also managing Jerry Rafferty at the time, who
was pretty big, and I had quite a lot of
stuff to do in La. So they went off down
to two Muscle Shoals. Tim Drummond played bass, There were
a couple of backing girls. I can't remember who else

(01:32:31):
was on that record. It was oh and what happened
was that's right. So I was in LA or New
York wherever, and Mark called me he'd been there about
three days. Nah, sorry, got this wrong. He went to
Santa Monica to Bob's place to routine the songs, and
I was in New York and he rang me and
he said, he said, all these songs are about God.

(01:32:56):
And I went what he said, They're about odd when
but he's Jewish, isn't he? And Mark went, Mark's whispering
to me like there's other and I said, why are
you whispering? He went, oh, well, he said, he said yeah.
And this was because Bob's Born Again record. So they

(01:33:18):
went down there and I had arranged to go down
to join them. And this was probably eight days, right Mark,
I said, I'll be down tomorrow. He said, don't bother
coming And I said, but why, He said, we're done,
We're finished. I said, you've on him been there eight
days and he said, Bob only plays a song twice.

(01:33:42):
So they did that record in eight days. And I
don't think. I don't think anybody got paid for it.
Seemed utterly redundant to be seeking payment. And it came

(01:34:04):
out and it did as Bob Dylan records do it
for the time that it did pretty well, I think
from what I recall. I mean, I've met Dylan several times,
but if I you know, if I walked up to
him now, he wouldn't have a clue who I am.
And that's fine, no problem. And that was that was that,

(01:34:24):
and then and then we were all. Mark had to
come back to Europe because we were starting a German
tour around about mid May, so they fitted it into
that gap that they Of course, there was a different
situation with the Infidels record, which came along later on.
And Mark and Bob are good friends as far as

(01:34:46):
I know, Yeah, well, I know they are, Yeah, they are, Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:34:51):
How does Mark end up as the sole producer of
Love of Gold? And is there a pushback from the
label over the length of the song? Certainly opening track
Telegraph wrote.

Speaker 2 (01:35:07):
It became the sole producer because he said, I'm going
to be the sole producer. That record was originally going
to be a double album. There were a ton more
songs that were recorded, and I can remember in the

(01:35:30):
world sometimes you when you're a manager, you have to
save the act from themselves. I'd say that's quite a
prominent part of the job. I don't mean artistically, but
in this case, there was a whole conversation that went on.

(01:35:50):
I remember I was in the back of a car
about the cost this is a ship that we had
to deal with back then, the cost of cardboard for
a double hours album, the cost of inner bags, lyric sheets,
the pricing, retail pricing. I've always been very conscious of that.

(01:36:12):
I always lean towards don't bleed people money wise. I mean,
it's a separate subject. But the whole ticketing thing at
the moment is I think it's completely bonkers. It's sort
of it's sort of almost surreal, but the public seemed
to put up with it.

Speaker 1 (01:36:31):
Okay, just go sideways for a second. Your take on ticketing,
Arthur Fogel.

Speaker 2 (01:36:40):
I also do interviews like you, well, not like you.

Speaker 1 (01:36:45):
Arthur Fogel, who basically runs the international touring of big
acts for Live Nation.

Speaker 2 (01:36:51):
Correct. Yeah, he said to eat something up beautifully. I
interviewed him a few years ago. He said everything at
the top is underpriced and everything else is overpriced, which
I thought was quite a good thing. I think that
ticketing is this is a this is a very long conversation, Bob.

Speaker 1 (01:37:13):
Okay, let's let's move on, because I want to get through.

Speaker 2 (01:37:17):
You were asked me about Love of a Golden Production.
They by this time, we were we had basically become
the biggest act as on the PolyGram label, certainly at
that moment in time, or well on the way to
becoming the only act I can think of who might
have been a bigger record seller back then would have

(01:37:39):
been Elton John who was a label mate of ours,
and I just made the decision that he was going
to produce it. He I can't remember how we met
Neil Dorfsman. I think we met Neil Dorsman during the

(01:38:00):
making of the Local Hero movie soundtrack, which just preceded
the Love of a Gold record, and no sorry, Love
of a Gold Sorry. Local Hero came after, just right after,
and by this time David had left the group. I

(01:38:27):
didn't know it at the time, but Pick had decided
to do that record and leave the group, which he
did immediately after he'd finished his parts. Quite a crafty
little economic decision on his part, and they made a record,

(01:38:48):
as I say, which had quite a number of more
songs than the ones that finally ended up on it.
And I had heard bits and pieces. The Telegraph Road
first appeared on the first Australian tour we did. I
remember being in the venue in Perth with just the

(01:39:09):
crew guys, actually probably just the sound guy, and they
played it the whole thing. I was just sitting in
the stalls and I just ran onto the stage and
I went, what on earth is that? And that was
Telegraph Road incidentally, is in Detroit. It's the name of
the Ring road that goes around Detroit. And I had

(01:39:32):
been sitting next to Mark on the bus as we
were making our way to a venue in the pouring rain,
and we were stuck in a traffic jam, and he
had a piece of paper and he wrote down on
the piece of paper six lanes of traffic, three lanes
moving slow, and folded it up and put it in
his pocket. And I heard it coming back at me

(01:39:55):
months later. So we did that record, and you would
ask me about the length of things. By this time,
the way that people dealt with me had markedly changed.

(01:40:15):
I don't mean that I was I didn't. I wasn't
one of these shouters and screamers and all of that.
But the you know, this was a big thing for
the phonogram companies, particularly Phonogram had a not Phonogram, PolyGram
UK Phonegram is one of the labels, had a wonderful president,

(01:40:39):
guy called Ramon Lopez, Spanish guy. And I took that
record into play to Ramon, just me and him, and
he put it on and he played the whole album through,
and I'll never forget what he said to me. He said,
I want to do a Spanish accent. He said, ed,
this is not pop me sick, this is classical music.

(01:41:03):
And I went and he said, we are going to
make this the most successful record we have ever had.
And I'm like because he fucking loved it and he
could see that it represented a kind of very different,

(01:41:26):
you know, not many bad. It had been a long
time since Aguarda di Vida, so having this mega track.
I then went up to Scotland where Mark was. We well,
actually we both went up for the We went to
the set of Local Hero, which David Putnam was producing

(01:41:53):
and on the first so we got up there, staying
in this poky little hotel with the cast and crew,
and at breakfast the following morning, Mark said to me,
I'm going to ask you to do something you don't
want to do. And I said, we are not having
sex anyway, no, no, no, no no. I said, you

(01:42:17):
want me to get the record companies to put Private
Investigations out as the first single without an edit. And
he said, how do you know, I said, because it
is fucking brilliant. It's totally brilliant. If you're a manager,
you work with what your artist gives you. And if Heaven,
Thank Heaven. You love it as a fan, almost not commercially,

(01:42:44):
you just love it as a piece of music. And
I thought it was utterly, absolutely brilliant. And he said yes,
he said, can you do that? I said yes, I said,
but there's going to be some pushback on it. When
I finally got back down to London and I took
the record into play to the London Phonogram company and

(01:43:08):
it was then that I played it to ram On.
I just got the chronology wrong. The head of radio promotion,
who I won't name, said to me. I said to them,
I said, I'm going to ask you to do so
you're not going to want to do. Said, I want
you to put that second track Private Investigations out. It's

(01:43:29):
the first single without an edit, and it's seven minutes long.
And the head of radio promotions said to me, we
can't do that. People will ring up their radio stations
and think that something's gone wrong. And I went, what why.
He said, because it stops. I said, yes, those are

(01:43:53):
called rest periods. Because I was an it's a bit
sip teeny bit ticked the managing director. Then one of
this endless literally of managing directors I was. He said, okay,
we'll do that. I said, I know, it's a risk.

(01:44:16):
I said, this that will be as big as MacArthur Park,
or it will die death. So they put it out.

Speaker 1 (01:44:27):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:44:27):
I I had, you know, two or three ladies working
for me at the time, well for nearly the whole time,
and they would have the radio on downstairs, and I
was upstairs in my office and I kept hearing this song,
and I buzzed Gene, my American PA, whose voice would

(01:44:49):
strip chrome off a bumper, and I said to her,
will you please stop playing that bloody record. Wow, it's
it's not us, it's Radio one. I said what I said,
But they're playing the whole thing, and she said yes.

(01:45:11):
So this thing was picked up by the rest of
the world radio, no edit, whole thing. We did a
pretty crappy video to go with it, but didn't really matter.
And the next week, to give you an idea of
my own belief and the amount of bullshit I can talk,

(01:45:35):
I call up the charts used to come through on
a Tuesday back then, So I call up Phonogram on
a Tuesday, and I get the cleaner of somebody on
the phone and I tell him who I am, and
I say, have you got this week's radio chart, the
Music week Charts, which would be equivalent to the Billboard,

(01:45:56):
And there's a scrabbling of papers and he said yes,
And I said, can you look between numbers fifty and
seventy five and see if a song called Private Investigations
has gone in? And he looks and he said, nah, no,
it's not there, and I'm thinking, fuck, we haven't even
made the top seventy five. And then he said to me,

(01:46:16):
he said, what's it called again, I said, private Investigations.
He said, oh, there's a song called Private Investigations that's
gone in at number two. And I went wow, wow,
because I just didn't know. And that record became an

(01:46:37):
absolute classic. In the Dos Traits Repertoire Live Repertoire, Big
Big fan favorite Carl Scott blessed him, who was at
this point in a totally unenviable position, brings me up
and he says, the A and R Department have done
an edit on Telegraph Road and I have they? And

(01:46:58):
he said it's two and a half minutes long, and
I just burst out laughing. I said, Carl, don't be silly.
We can't put that out, so we weren't able to
put out a radio friendly length single In America. The
album did quite well, I mean I can't remember what

(01:47:19):
it's sold over two million in the end.

Speaker 1 (01:47:27):
When do you find Pick is going to leave the band?
What's going on there? And frequently in the history of groups,
you'll lose one member, you change the chemistry. I mean,
Rim the drummer quit after an illness, and it was
never really you seem being very successful.

Speaker 2 (01:47:47):
And you're the same.

Speaker 1 (01:47:48):
Yeah, what do you think when Pick says I'm done?

Speaker 2 (01:47:51):
It's the same thing in this situation. I mean, I
played drums. I'm not a professional drummer level, but I
played drums well enough that I could play with the
not Hillbillies, etc. And Pick was a really, really good player,
and he was absolutely right for the music they were

(01:48:12):
making at the beginning of their career, and more particularly,
he was right for the level of venues we were doing.
We had not got up to mega venues. He had
unbelievably where these things go. He'd married my first secretary, Linda.

(01:48:35):
They divorced and then they remarried. Go figure, So he'd
married Linda. Linda was still working for me this was
not a very good arrangement because they'd go you know,
she'd go home and she'd tell him everything that was
going on in the office, and how do I do

(01:48:58):
this diplomatically. There were some aspects to the way that
the band was going which Pick was not happy with.
The first of all, it was, first of all, it
was getting considerably louder on live shows, and he did
not like battling with the guitars basically because it was

(01:49:22):
not deafening, but it was getting loud. And he's not
you know, he couldn't do Phil Rudd's job in ac DC.
He's not that kind of player. There were just personal
issues arising really between him and Mark, because Mark by

(01:49:44):
then had emerged as happens in many, many, many bands
that start off as democracies, Mark had become a dictator.
I mean he was right in everything. Now. He was producing,
he was singing everything, he was arranging everything, and he
wasn't exactly telling people how to what to play. But

(01:50:06):
Mark's very precise about how he hears his songs kind
of in his head. He's not the kind of musician
who goes into the studio and like say the Stones
might from time to time and jam and hope that
something arises. He goes in and he's got a very

(01:50:29):
clear idea. That's not to say he doesn't like let
other people put their ten cents in. He does, but
at the end of the day he'll basically dictate if
you like, how the thing's going to go. And Pick
was not happy with that aspect. He and his Linda

(01:50:50):
my secretary, his wife, my secretary, they just had their
first baby. He was on one core water of albums
one and two, had one third on albums three and
four and plus whatever the tours have produced, because by

(01:51:16):
this time the tours were profitable. So he did the
record and there was a big row about something in
New York. I can't remember what it was. It was
something to do with kind of the domestic arrangements. I

(01:51:38):
mean a lot of people listening to your You did
a fantastic podcast some time ago with Bill Kirbishly. It
was one of my absolute heroes. I love Bill, and
what struck me about that because I've listened to it
about three times. Bill was open enough about his personal

(01:51:59):
life and the impact that that has had on his career.
And also Bill said something which absolutely I totally totally.
If he was here now, i'd give him a hug.
He was talking about why he and Robert Plant split up,
and he said that for him, it was a matter

(01:52:21):
of principle, and in a strange kind of way. I
think for Pick it was a bit of a matter
of principle. And I was very sad to see him
good because he came to me to tell me, and
I was very sad to see him go, But I
didn't try to talk him into staying. In my experience,

(01:52:42):
if you try and talk creative people into doing things
they don't want to do, it's not going to work.
It'll backfire. And I remember that John Remark and myself
had lunch with Pick, and I said, I said to
Pick when he told me, I said, you're going to
have to You're going to have to tell the other
and he went, yeah, I know. So he told them

(01:53:03):
and it was logistically inconvenient because I already had of course,
I had a tour already set up, already to go.
I think the thing was on sale and suddenly we
needed another drummer. Now I need to go back to
my days as an agent. I used to work with
a guy called Barry Marshall, who's one of the absolute

(01:53:24):
best promoters in this country that we've ever produced, and
probably one of my along with his wife Jenny, one
of my dearest friends. At the time Barry was managed.
This is back in the seventies. Barry was managing a
Welsh jam band a bit like the Dead or Dave
Math more like the Dead really, and they had a

(01:53:46):
drummer called Terry Williams, who, of course I became very
good friends with. And Terry eventually left Man and joined
Dave Edmunds Rock Pile and was on all of those
Dave Edmund's records. And Terry is the king of the
shuffle as we drummers call it, kind of boogie kind

(01:54:08):
of playing. So when so so, when Pitt left, Mark
said to me, and sometimes I wonder where where Mark's
brain is, because he says to me, do you know
any drummers?

Speaker 1 (01:54:23):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:54:24):
Loads, he said, can you find us a drummer? Oh, yeah,
I'll tell you, I said, I'll tell you who you want.
You need. Terry Williams, who's Terry Williams told him Terry
comes up, goes to what I suppose you'd call an audition,

(01:54:44):
which wasn't really about an hour after he's got there,
Illy rings me up. He says, great, fantastic, and I
said what you want him? He went absolutely. He said
he hasn't walked around his drum kit once, which is
what Pick would do. Pick would walk around his drum
kit going like that. Terry became the drummer. And what

(01:55:09):
was significant about that was not only could he play
the catalog if you like the stuff, but we were
moving into bigger arenas and we were on our way
to stadiums for better or worse and day and Terry
was what we needed. He was an absolute powerhouse and

(01:55:29):
he has a quality which a lot of your audience
might not understand. But the drummers in your audience will
he swings, count Bezi swung, Ellington swung, Oscar Peterson swung

(01:55:51):
and the people who drove those swinging units were the drummers.
Uh and Terry Williams was By this time we already
had two keyboard players, Alan Clark and Guy Fletcher, and
then we had Mark and we and we ended up

(01:56:11):
we needed a saxon. No, the saxon came a little
bit later. So we did that tour and we recorded
a live album the Alchemy record, which amazingly sold over
five million copies, which is pretty good for a live record. Uh.
And Terry became a full time member of the band.

(01:56:35):
And the other great thing about Terry, and it's true,
I think of you really need this with musicians. He
was easy, He didn't he didn't have a drug problem,
he didn't have a woman problem. He didn't get silly,
he didn't collapse, he was ready. He never missed a gig.

(01:56:55):
He put one hundred percent into every performance. He was
used to get along with. He never complained. I never
heard him whining or minging about anything. Fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:57:08):
I wish, okay, you bring a new member in the band.
The others have been working together a better part of
a decade. Most bands they pay him a flat fee
and if anything, maybe they'll wait yours and make them
a full member. Now you only have two original members

(01:57:29):
forgetting the songwriting. You know, what do you decide?

Speaker 2 (01:57:33):
You know, well, yeah, good question. The other guys were
on a fee. I do believe that if you should
pay everybody the same, they're riding on the same bus,
they're going on the same plane, they're playing the same show.
For two and a quarter rounds whatever it is, and

(01:57:53):
we used to pay what I used to do just
as a tip for any managers who might be listening.
I used to ring my friends who were managing the
acts of a simp. Sorry, same kind of level. So
I used to ring Roger Forrester who was managing Eric Clapton.

(01:58:13):
I used to ring Steve or Roger was managing Pink Floyd.
I used to call Tony Smith who was managing Genesis
and probably somebody else, and I would find out what
they were paying their side men, and then I would
average it and I would increase it, and that was
the basis on which they were paid, and then we

(01:58:34):
were the straits because it's their money, not mine. Were
very generous with bonuses to our crew. We weren't kind
of quite at the tailor swift level with our crew,
but the money we would have been. I got to
give her eleven out of ten for what she did

(01:58:55):
for her truck drivers, people who if the truck drivers
don't care, there, you'll fucked. You know, these people make
the thing happen. So we basically had people on what
I'll call what you call a flat fee salary, whatever
you want to call it. With a bonus at the end,

(01:59:16):
and if they did. For instance, when Terry played on
the twisting by the pool ep which was a bit
of a throwaway, he got a royalty on that and
still does. And the others did that kind of thing.
I ran a very I like to think. I mean,

(01:59:38):
there are people who probably would disagree with this and
say he's a hard nosed bastard, but I like to
think that we ran a pretty fair ship. And that's
why the people that we had stayed with us for
so long. I mean, Alan Clark gave up at one point.

(01:59:58):
He gave a pretty solid gig with Clapton to come
back to the streets, and I got him a big
gig prior to that when we were off with Tina Turner.
Good musicians are good musicians are generally, but not always,
but generally they're pretty bright. They're pretty intelligent. I mean

(02:00:21):
they're not you're not. You don't become whoever by being stupid.

Speaker 1 (02:00:29):
Which brings us to brother in arms. What do you
think going in? How does Sting get on the money
for nothing? Although he'd worked with Deil Dorsman previously, and
do you know what's about to happen?

Speaker 2 (02:00:45):
Okay, let's go to back to the beginning of that tale.
After after Love Over Gold and Alchemy, Mark did a
couple of movies. He did al with Helen Mirren and
he did The Princess Bride with whoever was in the

(02:01:12):
Princess's Pride of My dam Mental blank. Andre the Giant
was in it, I know. And and he started he
was doing a bit of producing with other people. He
did a record with Aztec Camera and so on and
so forth. And he was down Phil Man's and Era

(02:01:35):
from Roxy Music has a really nice studio outside of town.
And I was down there one day doing some soundtrack work,
I think, and I popped down and we drove back
up to London and he just said to me, this
would have been this must have been in late eighty four.

(02:01:56):
He just said to me, I've got some songs together.
Can you get the guys back together for me. I
will say that between the records, I never ever asked
him about the next Diastraates record, And I have to
be absolutely fair, the record companies didn't either. Now maybe

(02:02:19):
because they were terrified, I don't know, but they never did.
Nobody ever said are we going to get another record?
Or when are we going to get another record, which
you might have expected them to, but they didn't, and
so that's what happened. We got the we got the
basic group back together. They went down to Phil's place

(02:02:40):
and started working up the songs and I remember going
down there one day and I had money for nothing
for the first time. And one thing that struck me
about it was that I had done the first tour
of UK and Europe as an agent for zz Top,

(02:03:00):
a band that I love guys, I mean, Dusty's passed
away sadly, but the best guys, I mean the best guys,
especially Billy, fantastic bloke, because they have a sense of humor.
You'd have to if you're in Zeezy. I'd taken Mark

(02:03:23):
to see them. And the guitar tone of that lick
is not a I'm not saying. I'm not saying because
I don't know, but it was not a million miles
away from you know, because when the first time they
came over, they weren't doing I'll tell you a little aside.

(02:03:44):
They came over here to do an old gray Whistle
test showing London at the Apollo, which is thirty three
hundred seats, and another show in Germany and the Big
Two in Germany, and they were on the album is
Ombree I think it was called, and that.

Speaker 1 (02:04:03):
Was the first Warner Brothers reckord.

Speaker 2 (02:04:05):
Yeah, was it okay? And there was a track on
it called I Thank You, which I think is an
old day thank you. Yeah, and uh, I remember, I
remember they they wanted to go. They were constantly going

(02:04:30):
on about how they came from Houston and they could
eat the hottest food known to man, and they wanted
to go. They wanted to know what Indian restaurant in
London served the hottest curry. So I took them to
Funny Enough, a place that Freddie Mercury used to go.
So I used to see fred In there all the time.

(02:04:51):
That Dusty said to me, I want the hottest thing
that they make. And I said, no, you don't. He
said no do I said no, you definitely don't. So
when they were the guy came out to take the orders,
he said to the waiter, he said, what's the hottest
curring you make? And the guy looked at him and
he said, it's called a Bangla file. If any of

(02:05:14):
your listeners do not have the So he orders the
Bangla file and the entire kitchen staff came out to
watch him eat it. It took one mouthful, it turned
a completely different color that human beings are supposed to be.

(02:05:37):
And he literally ran to the bathroom and for two
and a half hours he remained in the bathroom and
we could hear through the door gurglings and plops and groaning,
and finally a kind of called to prayer. And when

(02:05:59):
he came out, he was half the size of the
person who had gone in. And they had a gig
the next day, and poor Dusty had he had very
short say, he had contact lenses. He forgot to put
his contact lenses in because he was in such a
panic that something was going to happen on stage. And
every time he walked up to the microphone, he hit

(02:06:19):
the microphone hit him on the head with an incredibly
loud donk through the PA and Billy could pardly play
for laughing, and uh, well there's no more to the story, really,
but that's my little Easy's top story because he couldn't.
He absolutely thought he was going to die. So funny,

(02:06:41):
So don't have the bang of file. Sorry, what was
your question before?

Speaker 1 (02:06:45):
Well, we're making the Brothers and Arms album.

Speaker 2 (02:06:51):
Yeah, so they basically went down rehearsed. I heard money
for Nothing. I didn't. I never listened to records from
a commercial point of view, honestly. I mean maybe as
a manager I should have done, but I didn't. I
just listen. Do I like it. I like to work
with artists that I liked. The most important thing to

(02:07:12):
me about all the artists I worked with, other than
the fact that I liked them enough to get on
with them, was that they were great songwriters. You had
Paul Brady on your show a few weeks ago, I
mean another of my clients. Fantastic writer and a great guy,
I mean, a really great guy. And people like Brian Ferry,

(02:07:34):
I mean, is Brian's a genius songwriter to me? So
I wasn't. Particularly the song on that album which I
heard in rehearsal, which I just loved was the title song,
the Brothers and Arms song, And at the time, we
were going through the Falklands War, which is what that

(02:07:57):
song was about. It was very I mean, Dostras hardly
be called a political group, but that was quite a
moving song given that we had troops out there being
blown up and the Argentinians were getting blown up as well,

(02:08:20):
and one song nearly didn't make it onto it. That
was Walk of Life. I walked into the studio in
New York and Mark and Neil Drsman were mixing it.
I hadn't heard it. And as I think I might

(02:08:41):
have mentioned earlier, Mark was a big fan of the
animals and he happened to like Alan Price's far Feasta
organ sound and he'd got this deed did he did? Did?
He did lick at the beginning. And I was listening
to it and I said, what's this and Mark said, oh,
it's a B side, because back then we had B sides.

(02:09:04):
And I said that's a hit song. No it's not.
And we had a bit of a debate, not an argument,
and Neil Drsman's going, yeah, it's right, and Mark went no,
I said, listen, he said. I said, so it's good
enough to be a B side and people can hear it,
but it's not good enough to go on the record.

(02:09:27):
And he went, oh, all right. Then that song outsold
money for nothing worldwide, and it's used in all these
football commercials in America and what have you. Sometimes, I mean,
I don't think of myself as being credited with anything
other than my personal musical taste. That's the only thing
that I bring to this. I don't listen to pop

(02:09:50):
radio and I haven't in years. I don't know. I'm
not thinking, oh, we need hits. One of my closest
friends is a songwriter called Nikki Chin who wrote most
of those glam rockets with Mike Chapman. And had dinner
with him last night and he said to me we
had fifty hits. Really, I said, I can only think

(02:10:14):
of five of them. And he's like, because I always
introduced him to people, Britain's worst songwriter by far is terrible.
I mean, who could write? Can they can? Forkingness sake?
So we had that record. As always happens in these situations,

(02:10:39):
the album cover was a complete accident. Somebody's waving that
National steel about and I can't remember the lady who
took the pictures, but stuck a shot and we delivered it.
And I had this whole world tour set up because
by this time I had a pretty good idea of
where we could play, the level we could play, and

(02:11:01):
where we needed to go where we hadn't been before.
Because one of the things you have to do with
any band is keep it interesting and when you go.
We were the first really big band to go and
play in Israel. I mean sadly we couldn't do that
obviously at the moment, but we played to a quarter
of the population over three shows and they were going gaga,

(02:11:22):
I mean completely bonkers, because nobody went and played in Israel.
And yea, I used to find these promoters, mostly under
a stone somewhere and they would we playing on that tour.
We played that. We started in Israel, and then we
went to Greece, then we went to the old Yugoslavia

(02:11:43):
and worked our way up and so on and so forth.
And we had my partner, Sadie doesn't believe in the
idea of luck. She calls it perfect alignment. And I
always think yeah, and we that was a wonderful piece
of perfect alignment, which was not intended to be so.

(02:12:07):
And that was doing live aid when we had money
for nothing out with Sting. Oh you asked me how
Sting appeared on that record. He was on the island surfing. Well,
not on the island. He went in the sea for that.
And the best place to eat on the island was

(02:12:30):
the studio. There was a great chef up at George
Martin studio, and one night he showed up in Monsrat
Yes and Mark said, Tom, I've written I've written this
really stupid song about MTV. You fancy playing on it?
And Gordon as we call him, said yeah. So they

(02:12:54):
went downstairs into the studio and just came up with
the idea of sticking I Want my MTV on the
front to the tune of Don't Stand So Close to
Me and we had a we had How long did
that take? Half an hour? I don't know, It's just
one of those things. Sorry. I was just going to

(02:13:15):
say that in pop music, spontaneity it's very difficult. You
can't engineer spontaneity because of the definition of the word.
But spontaneity is often produces a great result. And that
was one.

Speaker 1 (02:13:40):
Okay, the record is done. At what point do you
decide to make a video for money for nothing? And
how does it become the video? It is one of
the most iconic videos of the empty.

Speaker 2 (02:13:53):
Right, Okay, Well, it was pretty obvious to everybody. And
I remember right at the beginning when I very first
played that album to the record company people, and first
it would have been the UK company. Everybody, you know,

(02:14:15):
everybody jumped on that particular track, and we were because
the whole thing, because everything had overrun. We were in
a real time jam we had and we were doing
various tax things and so on and so forth. We
had to leave the country by March the thirty first

(02:14:40):
of nineteen eighty five, so we had to make the
video while we were on tour, and we had contacted
Steve Barron, who had, amongst other things, shot Beat It

(02:15:03):
for Michael Jackson, and we were looking for somebody to
play the role of the redneck guy in the store.
And I tried to think of the two biggest American
rednecks I could come up with, and one of them
was Buddy Rich and the other one was very dry

(02:15:25):
comedian you've got when he's passed on what was his name,
can't remember, and they both of course flipped it back
and Steve came up with, well, he didn't come up
with it, but he showed us that computer stuff, which
was brand new then, which got around the problem of

(02:15:49):
having somebody a redneck in it, because we could have
a cartoon redneck, which is what we had. So we
basically said yes, and he went off and he made
that clip and the live sections were all shot at
a sound check and a gig in Budapest, and the
girl who's in it was Miss Hungary. Can't write this,

(02:16:13):
can you?

Speaker 1 (02:16:14):
Okay? I bought the album day came out. I knew
money for nothing before it hit MTV. But this kick
as big as Dire Streets was. They kicked the whole
thing into the stratosphere. So what was it like on
your red.

Speaker 2 (02:16:39):
I'm going to say something that you It was funny.
It was really funny. We'd been slogging away and climbing
up the greasy pole and each step and suddenly we
have a hit record with a lyric which is basically

(02:17:02):
it's not a comedy record. But and it was written
because he went into an electronics store down in Greenwich
Village that's going to place down there, and there were
these guys having this conversation and he just he got
up a piece of Off Blokes notepad and he went

(02:17:22):
and sat in the window display and he just listened.
And he said to me he couldn't quite remember he
thought of the band that was on the TV at
the time, because of course they had fifty TVs all
played on TV and he thought it was Motley Crue,
something that my dear friend Dot McGee was very chuffed about.

(02:17:43):
And so we had this tour that's totally sold out
before we've even started. We've got this record, we've got
some reasonably good art work, I suppose from dastress point
of view, and we had this video which was, as

(02:18:06):
you say, a bit of it was the first one
ever played on MTV UK when they opened the station,
and we had radio going nuts for it. So everything
that had happened previously kind of got us to there,
and the tour just took off. I mean it just

(02:18:30):
took off.

Speaker 1 (02:18:31):
Well, people don't realize because of course, you know, this
was by time we hit eighty five. It's no longer
the advent of MTV. People had certain things. You spend
the money, you have looked, you have outfits. We people
didn't realize in America then and for a few years after,
the Dire Strait was the biggest band in the world

(02:18:55):
that could sell more tickets in anybody else around the world.

Speaker 2 (02:19:02):
Yeah. Probably no, I mean.

Speaker 1 (02:19:05):
You would see the stadium grosses. Let's not forget. Dire
Streets didn't tick the boxes of the emptyv era when
most of their success was No, it wasn't about flash,
it wasn't about good looking guys. It wasn't about you know,
syndromes or et cetera. So to have this, I mean,
we should have such a thing today.

Speaker 2 (02:19:28):
Yeah. Yeah, but I'll tell you something, Bob, it's funny.
And I don't know how many other people like me
you've I know, you've interviewed a lot. When you're in
the middle of it, you don't really you can't stand back.
You're thinking more about tomorrow or are the trucks gonna

(02:19:49):
break down? If you're a warrior or a very hands
on person, which I am, and I don't consider that's
the plus. By the way, I think that the biggest
mistake I did. I didn't delegate enough. I was too
I I was too detail oriented. I mean, don't forget

(02:20:16):
I wasn't using an agent anywhere except the US, so
I was doing all of that, dealing with all these promoters.
But yeah, we had. That was an amazing experience. I mean,
in terms of my life today, that would be top
That's the greatest experience of my life other than you know,

(02:20:39):
the birth of my kids. Things like that, and it
and it was and it was so it was a
very joyful experience. Everybody was getting on, everybody loved what
they were doing. We had a fantastic crew, well the
same people we always had, great front of our sound,

(02:21:01):
great Chas. Herrington's lights were super. Every show was an event.
I think if you're a manager, one of the best
things you can do is try and create an event
for the audience. And every one of our shows was
an event. And when we got to Australia where we
ended up for three months, which is ridiculous, and we

(02:21:22):
sold over a million tickets and only little Ed Sheeran
has managed more. He sold five tickets more than us.
The biggest show we ever did was one hundred and
two thousand people in Auckland with no support act. The

(02:21:44):
actual capacity of the place was sixty thousand. And when
we got there Gary van Egmund, the promoter who sadly
passed away about two months ago, he came up running
up to me because it had taken ages to get
into the actual vein because of the people outside. He said,
can you hold a show for a couple of hours?

(02:22:04):
I said sure. He said, we've found all of these
rolls of cloakroom tickets in the back of this place.
It was a stock car racing stadium. We sold thirty nine,
six hundred and thirty two cloakroom tickets to the people outside.

Speaker 1 (02:22:30):
Explain to the American audience what a cloakroom ticket is.

Speaker 2 (02:22:33):
Oh, if you put your coat in, If you come
in a coat, give it to somebody and they'll hang
it on a hook. And in exchange for your incredibly
expensive mink coat, you'll get a small piece of paper
with a number on it which you can claim when
you leave.

Speaker 1 (02:22:51):
So where were these people They were in the cloakroom.

Speaker 2 (02:22:54):
No, no, no, the audience I'm talking about were outside.
They hadn't got tickets. They'd come along on the chance
they could get a ticket, and ticket touting secondary ticketing
was not known in Australia New Zealand at the time.
So these forty people had shown up on the off

(02:23:14):
chance they could get in or they could hear it
from outside because it was an outdoor show. And I
had a promoter, one of the best we worked with,
by far, who had the intelligence and creativity to go
figure out, how can I do this? And they went
looking around and they found all of these little they're

(02:23:37):
just little paper tickets. So they sold those. So we
in the two hours and it was an amazing, amazing show,
because of course it is. I mean when you're when
you're doing something like that, and I would go in
the dressing room and I'd say to the band, you're
not going to believe this, And there was quite a
lot of you're not going to believe this in their career.

(02:24:01):
You know, Princess Diana wants to wants to just do
a concert for her. Okay, So Hewitt, that's Jim. It
was king chance as he is now. And we did
I mean every where we went. The mistake we made,
but it wasn't mistake. We should have come back to
the States, but people we'd been We've played two hundred

(02:24:25):
and forty eight shows in twelve months, and people were
at a point of caving in. So we didn't.

Speaker 1 (02:24:34):
Okay, you make another album on every street. Artistically very strong,
nothing could sell as many copies, you know, Michael Jackson,
you know, failed to constantly try to reach the peaks
of Thriller. But it was both artistically in a commercial success.

(02:24:54):
What was that experience and why was that the last record? Right?

Speaker 2 (02:25:00):
I'll just preface that by saying that up to now,
I don't know the streaming numbers, but the Brothers in
Arms record as a physical product sold about thirty six million.
And after it and after that tour, there was a
hiatus which lasted about six years. Now, with hindsight, which

(02:25:26):
is a blessed thing, indeed, that was too long for
a lot of reasons, and one was that the music
scene had changed quite drastically, and if I simply mentioned
Nirvana and Pearl Jam, that really.

Speaker 1 (02:25:47):
So.

Speaker 2 (02:25:48):
But we had a very big and a very loyal
fan base, and I with hindsight, as I say, in
a way, I wish we'd stopped with the Brothers record,

(02:26:09):
But that's with hindsight. What we did do to fill
that gap was complete a contractual requirement. It wasn't contractual,
nobody was forcing it, and certainly we were in a
position to choose the timing. But we put out a
best of the Greatest Hits which sold fifteen million. And

(02:26:34):
I'm just sitting there going this is just ridiculous. So
and Mark was doing bits and pieces and I'm going
to say something here which if he was sitting in
front of him, he might well disagree with me. I

(02:26:55):
don't know. I think for any artists when you have
an app when you have one of those big single records,
Dark Side of the Moon, the Saturday Night Fever is
a really bad example, but Back in Black would be
another one. They're great to have in every sense. And

(02:27:21):
I don't mean the income, I mean just but they
create this expectation and I'm stating the obvious right now,
and I think that I got a bit intimidated by that.
I think anybody would, because what happens when you have

(02:27:42):
a big record like that is, first of all, your
audience changes a bit. People start coming to shows who
are not necessarily distraates music fans. They're becoming because it's
the hip and relevant thing to be doing. They want
to be seen. You start selling tickets in catered skyboxes.

(02:28:05):
All of that element comes in. And what am with
the on every Street record? Do you know? I'm trying
to remember how that even got underway? Oh, I know

(02:28:26):
what happened. We were having a conversation. There were some
people in the organization and I'm including somebody in my
office who were deciding to sort of leave. And the

(02:28:49):
line was I kind of there's nothing going on I'm
wasting my life and I was getting a bit. But
on the other hand, I had things like the chet
Atkins record and you know, to go to Nashville to

(02:29:13):
meet chat Atkins and end up having you know, dinner
with Scottie Moore and DJ Fontana and the whole thing
that goes with that. And I'm a groupie at the
end of the day, I'm a groupie for the stuff
I grew up listening to. I mean, when I met
Buddy Rich, I didn't I couldn't speak, which is just
as well because he couldn't stop. And so there was

(02:29:42):
a camera point when one particular person basically said I'm leaving,
and I said, you need to tell Mark and John.
Mark and John John. John had done a couple of
solo records which were so so, and we went to

(02:30:05):
a little a burger place called Tutsis in Holland Park
in London, and my colleague said to Mark, I'm done,
I'm going to go, and Mark said, he says, I
don't want you to leave, and this guy said, well,
you know, there's nothing happening, and and Mark suddenly said,

(02:30:29):
completely out of the blue, you could have you could
have literally locked me over with a feather. He said, well, actually,
I've got some songs together. Why don't we get the
band back together and do it with the band? And
I remember saying, no disrespect to so and so, but
that is a ridiculous reason for doing a record, to

(02:30:50):
get somebody to stay. And he said, to please the
other guy much and Mark said yeah, he said, but
you know, it's what I do best, It's why I
enjoy doing the most. So he told we got everybody

(02:31:12):
back together, and they went into rehearsals. And by this
time he had been seduced, if you like, by the
Nashville scene, which I had very mixed feelings about. I
have no issue at all with musicians making money professionally,

(02:31:37):
that's what they do. But it was quite apparent to
me that the amount of stroking that was going on
in Nashville from people there in Mart's direction was not
because they thought his music was great. But he was
a big rock star who'd come to town and it

(02:31:59):
was very possible that they could probably hitch a ride,
and quite a lot of them did, and they're great
people and great players. But he was very I think
a little bit naive about that. And anyway, that influence,
and particularly in the form of Paul Franklin, who was

(02:32:21):
playing pedal steel guitar extremely well, am I add at
not in Hillbery sound checks. He and I used to
play just we'd just go on the stage together, just
me and and play Orange Blossom Special as fast as
we could possibly play it, and every sound check it
would get faster and faster and faster. So Paul came

(02:32:43):
into the group and they made that record which had
this sort of bit of a country flavor to it,
and on a personal level, I didn't think that it
was not that it wasn't as commercial as Brothers and Arms.
I didn't think it was as good an album as
some of the ones we've done in the past. I

(02:33:05):
thought there were some tracks on it that were fault fillers.
Calling Elvis to me is a lazy song. I love
the guitar sound on that, Yeah, yeah, hang on. There's
a qualification to that, which is that that which was
saved by Jeff Paccaro bless him, I r I p

(02:33:28):
and by Mart's guitar playing on it, but doing a song,
you know, waffling on with Elvis's song titles. It's a
bit lazy to me. I really liked the title track.
I thought You and Your Friend, which is the one
with the Doughbra solo on it was brilliant. But well,

(02:33:55):
that's what I had to work with when you're a man,
and you know we're talking relative here, because most managers
don't get a record like that in their lives to
work with. And we and I made a mistake, and
it was it was made in good faith. I over
egged the size of the venues and night and multiple

(02:34:19):
night things that we were planning to do. And in
some countries it worked. UK, Europe no problem. Australia was okay,
but it was we've kind of left it too long
in a way, and the US was not good. I

(02:34:44):
mean we were okay in on the two coasts and
in Canada, but the middle, it was the middle was
a you needed a hit single kind of thing, get
over in Kansas. But that's you know, I mean, it

(02:35:04):
sold seven million tickets, so people would say, oh, what
are you moaning about, But it's just I think that's
to do with the pride that you have in your
work and trying to get things right in what is
an incredibly speculative kind of thing. And what a lot
of other people. A lot of people don't realize, and

(02:35:25):
certainly the audience didn't realize. When you're working with a
band at that level, you're planning at least a year ahead,
probably eighteen months. And there was one thing, of course,
that I could never have anticipated, and that was the
outbreak of the goal, for which totally stuffed us because
I had to I had done put nearly the whole

(02:35:47):
thing together, and I had to dump it all and
start again. I put that tour together twice.

Speaker 1 (02:35:54):
Okay, So how many dates were there on that tour.

Speaker 2 (02:35:56):
Two hundred and that one? I think it was about
two hundred and thirty five.

Speaker 1 (02:36:03):
Okay, you play the two hundred and thirtieth date. Everybody's
worn out. Yeah. Do you have a sense that this
is it? Or you do?

Speaker 2 (02:36:14):
I canceled South America and South Africa because I didn't
think i'd have a band to do it. Inter Band
relationships were fraught in the extreme because because our leader

(02:36:37):
was not a happy bunny, and he was, there was
an awful lot going something that people who are fans
of popular music and love their particular act, be it
Coldplay or whoever, can never know the impact that personal

(02:37:01):
relationships outside of a band and marriage is what I'm
thinking of the impact that they have on the artistic side.
It's huge, and it was huge in that case. It
was a very very very difficult period because people's personal

(02:37:22):
lives were in tatus.

Speaker 1 (02:37:31):
Okay, so the tour stops. Is there ever a conscious
decision to say we're done, we're not going to go
out as dire streets or it just never happened again.

Speaker 2 (02:37:41):
No nobody ever told me. When they finished in a
town in called Zaragotho or Zaragoza in Spain, they left
the stage, they got on the private plane back to
Barcelona where we were staying. Nobody spoke to each other.

(02:38:02):
There was no end of tour party, There was no
end of tour goodbyes. There were no hugs. Everybody went
their separate ways. Chris Whitten, who was the drummer on
that tour, who'd been with Paul McCartney up to that,
has never spoken to Mark since.

Speaker 1 (02:38:24):
Was there that level of dissension and the animosity in
the group.

Speaker 2 (02:38:27):
It was really bad. They might say that I'm completely
wrong or that I'm exaggerating. I can only tell you
that from my point of view, it was horrendous. We
had gone from being at the top of the pile,
as you've eloquently described. You See, the thing is that
people look at it and they say, when you sold

(02:38:48):
a lot of tickets and he made a lot of money,
and that record did twelve million physical more. So, all
of that statistically sounds great, but when when you're Paul
Franklin was so miserable. When I went out to Barcelona
at the end of that time, and I took Peter

(02:39:08):
Grant with me, led Zeppelin's manager the last gigs, I
think Peter ever went to him. And when I got there,
the guys were having a day off before doing six
nights in Barcelona, I think it was, And I asked
our tour manager where Paul Franklin was. He said, oh,

(02:39:29):
one days off, he said. He takes a load of
sleeping pills and goes to bed and sleeps through so
that he doesn't have to mix with anybody else. Ah,
So it's like that. It was awful. The things I
could tell you, not because I'm not not telling you
because they're private, but because they're they're so awful that

(02:39:53):
you and your audience would just go, oh, this guy's
making this out. This is out. This starts straight. So
I love their music, you know, just it was just
I have worked over the many years of my career
with bands which were I remember years and years ago,

(02:40:15):
years and years ago, when Richie was still in the
group Deep Purple, five cars, five dressing rooms didn't speak
to each other, and Richie would frequently refuse point blank
to play any guitar solos, so John Lord had to
hunt the Hammond organ back was forwards across the stage.

(02:40:39):
Uh black Sabbath who I happened to laugh. And they
were great guys because they were so off the wall,
but they were everybody's fighting and squabbling. I did a
tour with an American band called War, who Eric Burdens
sang with for a while. War could not have been

(02:41:00):
more aptly named. They would regularly throw furniture at each other.
There was always a bill for broken chairs and tables
and crockery. I don't know what it is. I mean,
somebody once said to me, if you got back into management,
and that's not going to happen, no, But if you did,

(02:41:23):
I said, I try and find a folks singer. It's
just on their own who's unmarried. Just trust trust them,
Ed Sheeran come and you know it just and the
fact that the record, you know, there's a difference, a
huge difference in our game between a hit record and

(02:41:46):
a hot record. Brothers in Arms was on fire and
on every street somebody had come along with a fire
bucket and tipped it over it he didn't have And
we were in Adelaide. The previous time in Adelaide on

(02:42:06):
the Brothers and Arms tour, we played to fifty five
thousand people in a stadium. On this tour, I had
completely miscalculated. And I'm going to share the blame with
the promoter, Gary because unfortunately he's passed on. But you know,
we had broken all these records in Australia, so you
have certain assumptions planted in your mind. Oh, we can

(02:42:28):
do this again. Set the thing up. I arrive in
Australia a few days after the guys because they've gone
there to rehearse with the local equipment, and that Gary
picks me up at the airport and I'm getting ticket
counts all the time, and I noticed that these ticket
counts are not It's like it's like a movie, you know,

(02:42:53):
in the movie world. They know on the first night
and I'm looking at this figure for Adelaide and it's like,
we sold fifty five thousand tickets last time, and we've
sold six thousand tickets this time. Holy, So we move
it into another venue and we sell eight thousand tickets,
which fills the other venue. So that you could say

(02:43:15):
that the fault was my fault because I put them
in a venue that was too big. But in defense
of myself, what would have happened if I'd put them
in an eight thousand seater and fifty five thousand people
had wanted to come? So you're in a no win.
And I remember after that show, Mark and I were

(02:43:36):
having a drink in this hotel and there were two
ladies there from the record company, entirely professionally, I should add,
and he suddenly said to me, he said, I made
a crap record in front of the record company people.
And I went, no, you didn't. I said, you didn't

(02:43:59):
make a commercial record. There's a difference. And I'm thinking
these two girls are going to go back and repeat.
This conversation is going to go right round them, and
he just kind of got up and went to bed.
That comes with the territory, you know, if you there

(02:44:22):
there are ants out there that have had a lifetime
of god knows how many decades. The Stones Bruce Springsteen
when they were going to Floyd, uh, and I sometimes
look at them and I think, I mean, good for

(02:44:43):
good for you. You've managed somehow, you've managed to keep
the plates spinning. And the interesting thing to me about
the Stones, for instances is that they don't make particularly
good records. I mean, sometimes they come out with one
that's better than the others, but they've turned the big
outdoor stadium into an art form. Pink Floyd turned that

(02:45:07):
into an art form. But then then then you've got
these two characters, Roger and David, who just don't get.

Speaker 1 (02:45:19):
On, okay, putting a bow on it. How much longer
do you work with Mark? And how does it end?
With Mark?

Speaker 2 (02:45:28):
Right? Well, after the on Every Street thing on every
Street to and record staggered literally like a very very
very drunk man towards the gutter, and then he fell
in it. It was quite clear at the end of

(02:45:50):
that well, he actually was quite clear from almost the
beginning of it that we were doing it for the
wrong reason, and that written were all reasons, partly monetary,
partly don't take the strong way. But things that I

(02:46:14):
probably shouldn't tell you about, personal stuff, you know, that
was going on, and the band just it wasn't even
spoken about. That was what was so strange. Nobody sat around,
nobody gave it six months and just said, you know

(02:46:37):
what a war hand. How do we feel about this?
Because because you've got a lot of very tight relationships
that have gone on at that point for nearly twenty
twenty plus years, and there are people who were just
completely not speaking to each other and haven't to this day.
And Mark decided, and he was propelled at least in

(02:47:02):
part by the Nashville connection. If you like that he
was going to he was obviously going to record the
songs that he wrote and what he wanted I think,

(02:47:25):
and this is me being an amateur psychiatrist, which I'm not.
He wanted to get himself into a position where he
was completely in control. He wasn't having to everybody who's
played in the units he's had since, and they've really
been pretty much the same people are. Essentially, you're a

(02:47:49):
division Nashville studio players, and studio players by definition essentially
play what they're told. I mean Richard Bennett, who plays
guitar with him. Was with Neil Diamond for nineteen years
playing I Am, I said, for nineteen years and Sweet

(02:48:13):
Caroline and soon it's great stuff. But so he did
the Golden Heart record, and I spent quite a bit
of time out in Nashville, which, if you're not a player,
is not a town which is incredibly stimulating to be in.

(02:48:35):
And I'm not having a pop at Nashville. And as
that record was taking form, I was starting to have doubts.
It's a strange thing when you go into a situation

(02:48:59):
with the belief and passion and love that I had
for them from for the first ten years, from seventy
eight to eighty eight, and suddenly find yourself just not

(02:49:20):
liking it, not liking the music as much. And that's
not to say I don't use terms like good and bad,
because it's so personal the music I listened to personally,
people would probably be quite surprised because I don't listen
to rock and pop music except the stuff I grew up.

(02:49:42):
I listened to a lot of film music. I'd listen
to a huge amount of jazz, especially from the sixties
and seventies, and not fusion stuff, but anyway, and that's
by the bye, and he did that record, and there
was I was a bit on. I think the impact,

(02:50:03):
one of the impacts of the on every street experience
was it had made me very unshure. That had a
big impact on all of us mentally and physically, not
in a good way. And I suddenly had lost my
confidence in my own ability to pitch the thing at
the right level. So when it came to live work,

(02:50:27):
those Nashville players are not cheap, or you could say
they're very cheap, because they they definitely it's how they
make their living. I don't have a problem with that.
And we had a very expensive band, and we had

(02:50:48):
quite a big production, and I didn't feel confident enough
to play big places. So it was break even time, really.
And the other problem is that he, by which I

(02:51:12):
mean Mark, he did not have the profile. This might
sound strange, but you've got to pitch this back to
that period of time two thousands. He wasn't. He didn't
have the profile that Sting had within the police, or
Eric had within Derek and the Dominoes, or he wasn't.

(02:51:39):
He came in the office one morning and I happened
to be downstairs talking to the girls, and he said
something quite interesting. He said, because he'd obviously been watching
Breakfast TV. And he said to me, don't you think
it's strange that people like Elton and Rod go on
TV and tell millions of strangers about the most intimate

(02:52:02):
things in their lives. Like I said, well, that's their personalities.
And I don't know whether you've read Elton's book. Elton's
book is about as open a book as you could
possibly find, and that's what Elton's personality is. And Rod

(02:52:23):
is a no. I'm just using these two examples because
he did. And Run Stewart knows the game backwards forwards
upside down. I interviewed Narl Rogers a couple of years ago.
It's brilliant because he knows what to do, he knows
how to do it, and he's not people like that are.

(02:52:46):
It's just they're happy to be stars. Mark's quite a
private person. He's not particularly he doesn't enjoy he never
enjoyed any of the ass the stuff that comes with

(02:53:08):
being a rock star, whatever that is. And you asked
what happened with me and him, Well, we did the
Golden Heart thing, And I mean commercially that was quite
successful and the tour did okay given the level that
we were doing it at, and but the relationship, the

(02:53:35):
relationship between us was shifting and we were both older. Obviously,
it's very different when you're twenty six twenty seven and
you meet somebody who's got a red fender and it
makes you think that the shadows and by this time
you're married or you're divorced, you've got children, you've got

(02:54:00):
the responsibilities, and you think you think like a fifty
year old person, not a twenty five year old person.
And if you're not thinking like a fifty year old person,
then something's wrong. And it was quite obvious as I
as I was alluding to with the Australian thing. You know,

(02:54:22):
the music scene is ever changing, there's new things coming along.
Getting marked man offer on television was difficult. There's a
line of people trying to get those slots and how
many slots are there and in this country not many.
And so he ended up he's the guy who took

(02:54:42):
over from me, had him on programs with a guy
who was basically a market gardener. Yeah, I mean kind
of you end up. It's almost a sense of desperation
sets in and everybody's coming along and the whole it's
just even saying, really, the whole music industry changed. It
became in the eighties and we were in the We

(02:55:04):
were in the change. It went from being pretty chaotic
to being corporate, and it's corporate now. So the last
interview I did for the ILMC was with j Marciano
from AG Great Guy, Lovely Man, and I actually said

(02:55:31):
to him, I said, does AG have a sense of humor?
And he said yes. I just started laughing. He does
the corporations have a sense of hum you know. I mean,
I don't have any beef against this. What happened in
the music interest to me, and particularly the live side,
was totally inevitable. It was completely inevitable.

Speaker 1 (02:55:55):
Let's go back to Mark. Yes, sorry, did he say
we're done or did you say we're done?

Speaker 2 (02:56:01):
Oh? It was one of the weirdest meetings I've ever
had in my life. And after it, after it, I
honestly didn't know what had happened. I didn't know if
I'd been sacked or I'd quit. We had a conversation
he had done the record that came out of selling

(02:56:25):
to Philadelphia and we were talking about the promotion on it,
and without giving away too many secrets, as it were,
he had agreed to do a certain amount of promotion
which I had then set up, which was principally our

(02:56:46):
old favorites, video clip TVs gigs, but he didn't want
to do more than four months touring, which was fun.
And I had put in all the TVs that you
can get for somebody like him, because you can't get
somebody like that or anybody of that age onto Saturday

(02:57:10):
morning kids television shows. So it was the lettermans or
whether the post is now Stephen Colbert, whoever it is,
it was the other here Michael Parkinson, the kind of
chat show format with musical guest, and having got the

(02:57:31):
whole lot together in a very kind of odd way,
he decided he didn't want to do any of them.
And his reason was that he did not want to
be as public a figure as that would make him.

(02:57:53):
And I was not best pleased because I'd spent quite
a long time doing this and it wasn't a particularly
easy thing to do, and I didn't want the record
companies and someone to be demotivated, because when you go
to Belgium to do, Telly, you end up doing a
pile of interviews, so you have print going on, or

(02:58:16):
whatever the technology is of the time. And we had
and his pa rang me up and told me, and
I had him come into the office one evening, just
me and him, and we had a very surreal conversation

(02:58:37):
which ended with him, well, it ended with I don't
know how honestly, if I could explain it to you,
I would. I don't really know what happened. It was
a bit like Bill's comment about Robert Plant. I just
thought that he said something to me which was so upset.

(02:59:01):
I just thought, I can't do this anymore. And you
have to put that in the context. And I would
say that of Bill, and Bill would absolutely agree with me.
It's a lot easier to be able to say that
when you can, you know, and sometimes in life it's

(02:59:21):
like marriages and all that. Everybody uses that example, and
actually managing acts is not like being married. But things
just have run their course, and it had run its course,
and it had probably run it. We were probably quite
a bit by our cell by day, and I said
to him, I mentioned somebody else who happened to be

(02:59:42):
in the building at the time. For you know, who
was working on the promo tool that we I thought
we were going to do. And I said, if you
pay him a salary, he knows how to get you
from A to B and do you think he's funny?
So that's what happened. And then the irony was that

(03:00:04):
he went off and he did seventy television shows Europe
in the UK on that record. I have don't understand
and our relationship now he lives literally one hundred and
fifty yards from where I'm speaking to you from this apartment,
and I don't see him. We have the occasional interaction

(03:00:25):
which is usually something to do with which happened when
we were together. I mean, when he went on tour
with Bob Dylan, you know, a double bill thing. I
got an email from him that in itself is amazing.
There was a wonderful interview some years ago with Charlie

(03:00:46):
Watson Ronnie Wood, and Ronnie was telling Charlie Charlie was
a wonderful man, fantastic guy. He mentioned that Keith Richards
had sent an email and I thought Charli was going
to have a comera, but Mars would send me an
email and he sent me this email, I can do

(03:01:07):
it for baiting for you. It said, Well, he hasn't
spoken to me, he hasn't spoken to my manager, he
hasn't spoken to my band, and he hasn't spoken to
any of my crew. He hasn't spoken to his band,
and he hasn't spoken to his manager. Nothing changes, Boss.
The love mark didn't even tell me who it was

(03:01:29):
and it was straight away.

Speaker 1 (03:01:32):
Okay, it's the it's.

Speaker 2 (03:01:35):
The sorry just to I know we're going to be
finishing up the It's the characters for the generation that
I belong to that has made it interesting. The people
who've got a sense of humor about themselves. Somebody who
was like that, who people would never imagine she was

(03:01:58):
like that, was Tina Toern. Tina was so funny. She
was such a gossip. Who's going out with so and so,
Who's was who's having sex with? Brilliant? Brilliant?

Speaker 1 (03:02:15):
Okay, Dire Streets was very successful. We went through your
various percentages. What did you do with all the money?

Speaker 2 (03:02:27):
Yeah, being from the North of England and having a
father who was the principal of a large grammar school,
I was careful put it into property pension funds because

(03:02:59):
we get a very good tax break thing in this
country on pension funds, had a great life. I'm in
traveled a lot because when you're traveling with bands, you're
not traveling. You're in a just You're in this just box.

(03:03:23):
I don't say this, should I say this? I helped
a few people. I think there's a kind of when
you have such a when you have such a when

(03:03:48):
you live your dream, when you get to live your dream.
I never stopped being surprised about the financial end. Ever,
I could never get my head around it at all.
So sometimes you help people out. You certainly, of course

(03:04:13):
help your kids out if you can. My kids are
grown now. I mean I've got grandchildren. My grandson's fifteen
and my granddaughter's thirteen, and I'm very proud of my kids.
My daughters are very high ranked lawyer at Meta for
Better or Worse, driving her mad and my son teaches

(03:04:37):
foreign students English on the web, and they're great. They're
totally different. But I have I don't buy art or stuff,
but I've got some nice antiques. But I'm not particularly

(03:04:57):
I think you go through phases. I always say that
people in the rock and roll game, they go through
their art New vaux phase, and then they go through
their Art Deco phase and then they come out at
the other end and get a sofa that's comfortable to
sit on. And it's always like that, and there's a
real pressure in our society, of course, because it's capitalist consumers.

(03:05:23):
I might have said this to you was before. It's
a long time since I didn't pick up the check
at dinner.

Speaker 1 (03:05:30):
But that's yes, let's just go one step further. You
were the one and only manager of dire streets, which
is not usually the case, and usually when they get
a new manager there's an argument over the sunset clause
and all this other stuff. In your particular case, are
you still a royalty participant on the stuff you were

(03:05:54):
involved with?

Speaker 2 (03:05:55):
No, but I chose not to be. I sold those rights.

Speaker 1 (03:05:58):
And how long agoing too?

Speaker 2 (03:06:00):
Oh, I told those about six years ago, seven years
ago to a company called Royalty Exchange in Denver. I
mean that that was partly to do with a divorce

(03:06:26):
that was looming. It was partly to do with I
just kind of got fed up running it all, and
it was partly to do with the fact that there
was a decline. Now I'm not saying that it's a
massive decline. And I don't know because I don't get

(03:06:46):
statements anymore, but I'm sure that the distracts catalogue that
I need to qualify this. I had a sunset clause
on publishing which had a cut off date. It was long,
but the cutoff date had passed and the publishing was
about sixty percent of the total. And the record side,

(03:07:09):
especially after streaming came in and the entire artistic community
got stuffed, that had declined. And quite soon, of course
there will be an Ai Nofler a little be even less.
But I just then there were personal reasons, psychological reasons sometimes,

(03:07:36):
you know, if you've had some of the stuff that
went down at the end was pretty awful. And I'm
not saying I'm not saying I'm blameless.

Speaker 1 (03:07:44):
Don't you talk about the end of the band or
just before you solved your royalty interest?

Speaker 2 (03:07:49):
No, the end of the relationship with that side of
the relationship with Mark. I mean, he and I perfectly
polite with each other. I don't listen to his music,
don't have I don't feel any connection with it. I mean,
I don't know whether you know Bill curvisly sits around

(03:08:11):
listening to Judas Priest albums when he goes home. Probably not.
I don't know. Yeah, I think you. I learned a
lot from Peter Grant. Now, Peter Grant is if you
mentioned Peter Grant's name and people and people who remember him,

(03:08:31):
and people do remember him, tell you a funny little
story because it came up last night. Full enough. Back
in the late sixties, Peter shared an office on Oxford

(03:08:51):
Street in London with Mickey most famed South African record
producer Nicky Chin the songwriter I was mentioning had got
had met a waiter at a club called Annabel's whose
name was Mike Chapman, who was serving him drinks. I

(03:09:13):
love stuff like this, So somebody's told Mike. The disc
jockeys told Mike that Nicky is a songwriter lyricist, and
Mike's thick considers himself to be a melody writer. So
Mike's sister NICKI, I write songs, and Nicky says I
write songs, and that neither of them has written Diddley's Squit.

(03:09:34):
But they get together. Nicky finds out the name and
phone of the phone number of Mickey most Pa, so
he rings her up and he asks her out on
a blind date and she goes and on the day
he inveigels Mickey's home phone number out of her. This

(03:09:56):
is this is our this is when it was fun.
So he goes how it's the middle of bloody night,
and he calls the number, and this very gruff voice
because he's just been woken up, says she's Mickey most
who's that? And Nicky comes on and Nicky says, this
is Nicky Chin. I'm a songwriter with Mike Chapman. We

(03:10:18):
write hits. They haven't written a song. Sorry, they have
written some songs, they've not had anything like it. And
Micky mos did something which is probably what I would
have done. Micky said to them, all right, my office
eleven o'clock tomorrow morning, now fuck off. Puts the phone down.

(03:10:39):
So they turn up and it turns out that NICKI
that Mickey is sharing an office with Peter Grant and
it's about twelve feet wide by sixteen foot long, and
there are two desks and Peter, at the time weighed
over three hundred pounds and Mickey's like this little bloke.

(03:11:01):
And it's a famous address in London called one five
to five Oxford Street because below them were Chris Wright
and Terry Allis being Chrysalis, and below then were the
Chrystalies agency booking out. So they go in and they

(03:11:22):
give and they got some demos cut on forty five's
No Sorry tape, Big Bum cassette tape. Ingo's the tape.
Mickey plays the first song, stops it after ten seconds
it's rubbish, rolls it on next one fifteen seconds, rubbish,
Rubbish plays six songs, rubbish and he went, nah, nothing, nothing,

(03:11:49):
there nothing. They can't do anything with any of that.
And he says, you got anything else, and Nicky says, well,
we've got one other song and it was cool old
believe it or not. It was called Tom Tom turn around.
Puts it in, listens to the whole thing. He says,

(03:12:11):
which one of you two twats called me last night?
And Nicki goes, that was me and he says, you
said you're the one who said you can write hits,
and Nicky goes, yeah. He says, you're right, you can.
That's a hit. I'll take it, and it's a big hit.
It's the number one for sweet groups when they go out.

(03:12:33):
Nicky told Nicki this many years later, Peter says, I
don't think you're going to get anywhere with those two.
They're fucking newslet. And of course they had hit after
hit after hit after it after it. What I learned
from Peter was that the fuggy image was Peter was

(03:12:58):
a shy man or not. He was quite private. He
was quite shy, and it was all a bit of
an act, helped by the fact that before he got
into music he had been an amateur. He'd been a
professional wrestler. His wrestling name was Count Bruno Alisi of Milan, Italy,

(03:13:20):
which in itself is hilarious. And when I got to
know Peter, and he had stopped the drugs by then,
I must and he wouldn't mind me saying that. I mean,
his his desk was like the last scene of Scarface
most of the time, and he was his persona. He'd

(03:13:49):
become a country gentleman. He used to wear suits with ties.
And he lost. He lost. He said to me once,
he said, ed I've lost a person in weight, And
ARMED said to me once, he said, when I saw
Peter Grant, I didn't recognize him, And he said, and

(03:14:11):
the whole way you've spoken everything, and what Peter had
done was he had decided. People constantly asking him to
get back into the business, and would you manage this,
and Queen Queen he turned Queen down. He understood. He
said to me, when you have an experience like the

(03:14:33):
one I had with led Zeppelin and the one you've
had with Diastreit, there is no point trying to repeat it.
And I completely agreed with that. There's no point going
back and trying to recreate something that you did when
you were thirty two and your I'm seventy five now.

(03:14:58):
So what I do now, Bob, is I go music
conferences like CMW in Toronto, and I ring up Don
Passman and came to come and who else? Bill Silver
and it'll be fun.

Speaker 1 (03:15:12):
Well, certainly two good friends of mine. I will see
you in Toronto soon. There's a whole other area that
we never even touched. Will do down the line, but
I think we got most of the dire stray.

Speaker 2 (03:15:26):
Give me a hint on the other area.

Speaker 1 (03:15:28):
I'm just well, I would like to know more about
Jerry Rafferty, who I'm a bit saying of. I would
also like to hear about your experience with Brian Ferry
and your experiences with a Blue Nile.

Speaker 2 (03:15:42):
Yeah, Taylor Swift, your.

Speaker 1 (03:15:44):
Favorite right, and how you promoted shows in college and
how you became.

Speaker 2 (03:15:50):
An I will say, just to sign off, that's there's
some great topics and stories there about everybody you just mentioned,
because they all the other artists I work with. Jerry
was difficult, but I loved Scott Walker, who you didn't

(03:16:11):
mention just there. I thought Jerry had a prodigious talent
which got wasted because of alcohol. I'm not going I
won't do the thing now. And Brian. Brian's a one off,
but I'm on good terms with everybody. I've represented most

(03:16:33):
of them. It's the situation with Mark is just strange,
and it's just you get to the point where you
just accept the way things are. There's no point pushing
against it. I've really enjoyed this. This has been great.
I must say that you. I'm going to flatter you.
I've been interviewed many times by many people. You're in

(03:16:56):
a class of your own. Definitely, you've really know what
happened makes makes somebody sweat.

Speaker 1 (03:17:07):
Well, on that note, and I'll see you in Toronto.

Speaker 2 (03:17:10):
You will. I wish you well, Bob.

Speaker 1 (03:17:13):
I wish you well. Until next time. This is Bob
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