From gun-toting gangsters to braving the wrath of Elton John, legendary British PR Alan Edwards has spent 5 a long time managing the crises of the largest names within the music enterprise. Now he’s written a jaw-dropping
memoir.
Having labored alongside it for the previous twenty years, my basic impression of public relations is that it’s not a life-or-death occupation. You would possibly get a consumer shouting down the cellphone about being misquoted. Perhaps they’re upset if {a photograph} reveals them in a very unattractive gentle. However you’re not going to get a gun to your head. How incorrect I’m. Just a few pages into his revelatory memoir, I Was There, Alan Edwards, PR of legend to David Bowie, the Spice Ladies and numerous others, finds himself pulled right into a recreation of Russian roulette with a horrifically scarred Hell’s Angel in a balaclava. And all within the title of getting punk reprobates the Stranglers a evaluate in The Solar.
“It was in Amsterdam, 1977,” remembers Edwards, a suave, quietly spoken 68-year-old with an air of supreme unflappability, which, you think about, has served him properly through the years. “This man, who had cosmetic surgery as a result of somebody threw acid in his face, held a revolver to my head and stated, ‘You want Russian roulette, ja?’ It was so terrifying; it didn’t appear actual. He pulled the set off, there was a click on, and I went off muttering, ‘Wager it wasn’t loaded.’ A couple of minutes later, the photographer walked in to say he had simply seen a person in a balaclava taking pictures bottles off a wall with a revolver.”
We’re within the snooker room of the Groucho Membership in London, an unquestionably safer place than an Amsterdam biker bar on the top of punk, and Edwards is reflecting on what the shadowy, fame-adjacent world of publicity has taught him. Rising up because the adopted son of a solicitor and a main faculty instructor in Worthing, West Sussex, he had a comparatively regular childhood interspersed with the odd bout of delinquency: masterminding the theft of devices from the varsity music room at 14; operating throughout a motorway throughout an LSD-inspired freakout. After leaving faculty at 16 and hitting the hippy path via Afghanistan and India, he moved to London and nearly scraped a profession writing live performance critiques for Sounds journal. That’s earlier than assembly Keith Altham, a louche former journalist who just about invented the rock PR recreation in Britain. And his life’s course was set.
“I met Keith at a Who gig at Bingley Corridor, Stafford, in 1975,” says Edwards, who shaped his PR firm, the Exterior Organisation, in 1995 and has been going robust ever since. “I used to be there to evaluate the live performance, and once I advised him I didn’t suppose it was an excellent gig he stated, ‘Would you like a job in PR?’ Nicely, not likely, as a result of all of the PRs I knew had been promoting dreadful pop bands I didn’t wish to learn about. However I used to be struggling to pay the £4 every week lease on my Islington flat, Sounds paid £5 per evaluate three months after publication, and I used to be dwelling on free drinks from document firms. So I stated sure. Three days into the job, Keith bought me to take crucial journalists in Britain to see The Who at Wembley and it virtually ended earlier than it even started.”
Not realising that critics within the Seventies anticipated the purple carpet therapy ― how candy these days should have been; now we’re fortunate to get away with sticking a meal deal on bills ― Edwards organized to fulfill the UK’s august critics at Oxford Circus Tube station. “I feel they had been anticipating a personal prepare. They had been definitely horrified at being squeezed on throughout rush hour. To placate them I promised unique interviews with The Who. So I knock on the door of the dressing room and earlier than I can say, ‘Hey, that is Alan Edwards from the PR workplace,’ somebody, Roger Daltrey I feel, shouts, ‘F*** off!’ and slams the door. After I open it once more, Keith Moon goes flying via the air. I am going dwelling and suppose, this PR enterprise is a bit a lot, actually.”
Nonetheless, Edwards caught with it. Seeing the potential of punk to achieve headlines and enter the general public consciousness in the best way that bands hardly ever did, he represented the Damned, Technology X and, after going backstage at a gig at Dingwalls in London whereas Debbie Harry was towelling down her hair, Blondie. “I’m nonetheless with them at the moment truly. And what I realised is that for actual artists it’s a full dedication, which doesn’t result in a simple, balanced life as a result of they don’t seem to be at peace with themselves. For instance, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers had been a implausible punk band, and in the midst of a gig on the Hope & Anchor in Islington their guitarist overdosed on heroin and was carried off stage whereas the remainder of them performed on. These persons are experimenting — not simply with music however with life, ideas, setting. So you may’t be a star for six months of the yr then spend the opposite half taking a look at non-public fairness. Actual stars dwell it.”
No one extra so than Bowie. Edwards began working with the nice chameleon throughout the Critical Moonlight tour of 1983 — dubbed by some wag on the time the Critical Nosebleed tour — when Bowie was shedding his freakish picture of the previous and embracing the Eighties mainstream. He stayed with Edwards till his dying on January 10, 2016.
“David was on it relentlessly,” Edwards remembers. “He may be in contact 10 occasions a day. He was very thinking about writing, and writers, till he pulled away for the final 10 years of his life. If I stated we had 10 interviews this week he would say, ‘Can’t we do 20?’ “
It was pleasing to learn in I Was There about how a lot Bowie preferred and understood the press — uncommon in an enviornment the place journalists are seen so usually because the enemy, there to journey you up, expose the façade, typically not do what you need them to. Bowie realised that issues go incorrect — covers fall via, critiques usually are not all glowing — and, as Edwards writes in I Was There, “You’d be amazed how few artists get that and what number of fall for the parable that they’ve whole management, which in fact they don’t.” You additionally get the sense that Bowie preferred taking dangers, from holding a press convention for his unloved Nineties rock band Tin Machine on the runway at Los Angeles airport in 1991 as Boeing 747s took off throughout, to trying to crack the China market in 1997 with a drum ’n’ bass undertaking referred to as Tao Jones Index.
“David referred to as at some point to announce he wished his new document to be launched in China,” Edwards remembers. “So I went right down to Gerrard Road in Chinatown and requested a waiter to translate the lyrics. Then I found there was no document distribution in China or any worldwide music market in any respect, actually. Somebody on the label discovered a tailor in Hong Kong who distributed data. I bought just a few packing containers shipped out to him however I don’t suppose they ever left the again of the store. As soon as every week David would name to say, ‘How’s the document doing in China?’ ‘Nicely, they’re nonetheless understanding the advertising…’ “
Getting fired seems to be one other main side of the PR’s life. With beautiful ruthlessness, Mick Jagger sacked Edwards mid-tour after a live performance in Vienna in 1982 by getting another person to take his seat on the band’s non-public jet, a lot to the smirks and avoidance of eye contact of everybody else on board. Having had the foresight to carry on to his Entry All Areas tour go, Edwards duly travelled by prepare to the Stones’ live performance in Cologne in Germany three days later, the place Jagger checked out him and stated, “Oh, all proper, you may have your f***ing job again.”
The golfer Nick Faldo sacked Edwards after the Every day Specific ran a narrative about his having a caddy referred to as Fanny. Michael Flatley, in the meantime, fired him for no cause by any means. When the prancing grasp of Riverdance’s supervisor rehired Edwards for a brand new marketing campaign, Flatley checked out him and stated, “Didn’t I fireplace you earlier than?” Edwards replied within the constructive. Flatley declared, “Nicely, you’re fired once more.”
Even averting a serious disaster doesn’t assure loyalty. “When somebody has been caught sleeping with somebody they shouldn’t and their whole profession is about to break down, you’re crucial individual on this planet to them,” Edwards says with quiet, blue-eyed depth. “You must get the reality to defend them, so that you be taught essentially the most intimate particulars and for a second you’re extraordinarily shut. Two or three weeks later, though you could have saved their marriage, you end up surplus to necessities. I’ve lain awake at evening questioning how I offended them… Was it the jumper I used to be sporting? You then see them someplace they usually say, ‘Oh, I simply wished a change.’ You may’t take it personally. However you do.”
Additionally widespread is a misunderstanding of how the press works. In a single memorable incident within the e book, Elton John offers Edwards a dressing-down after a nasty evaluate of a live performance on the Shepherd’s Bush Empire as a result of he “ought to have taken extra time selecting the reviewer”. The suggestion is that it’s the PR’s job to ensure good press, reasonably than press per se.
“The UK is the house of newspapers. The idea of our democracy is which you could say what you suppose, and plenty of American artists are nervous of the UK media for that cause,” Edwards says. “Recurrently they’ll need somebody sitting in on an interview and I’ll should say, ‘That’s not how we do issues right here.’ It backfires anyway as a result of then the PR turns into the story or the article is so boring that it achieves no function by any means.”
It occurs much less within the music world however each movie journalist is aware of the banality of the junket: 5 or 10-minute interviews with a star or director in a lodge earlier than shifting on to the following one. “The factor is, the general public isn’t silly. We all know when one thing is actual and when it’s only a little bit of promoting, so it’s a mistake for artists solely to interact on that stage. OK, issues bought a bit out of hand when journalists went on the street with bands and reported on essentially the most lurid behaviour, however I do know that if I learn a extremely good interview, I’ll wish to know extra about that individual and doubtless spend a load of cash on their again catalogue.”
The factor is, the general public isn’t silly.
Edwards noticed, via working with the largest names in music, how the sport has modified. Within the early days it was the Wild West: he shared an workplace with The Who’s supervisor, Invoice Curbishley, a former affiliate of the Kray twins, and males strolling in with sawn-off shotguns was not unknown. Throughout a gathering with the Damned, the band’s guitarist, Brian James, made his emotions identified concerning the newest PR marketing campaign by punching Edwards within the face. It was Mick Jagger, the truth is, who first realised {that a} rock band might transfer out of the world of semi-criminality and be run like an organization.
“I used to be with the Stones in 1982, when no person had executed a tour of stadiums earlier than, and there have been 60-70,000 tickets to promote every evening,” Edwards says. “So Mick did a presidential tour the place he could be at a press convention in Munich within the morning, Düsseldorf at lunchtime, Paris within the afternoon, and he would be taught the names of the native footballers, the native politicians and the way a lot the document was promoting. Artists didn’t suppose like that again then. It was uncool to have a advertising thoughts. Now everybody does it, however Mick was taking sponsorship for Rolling Stones excursions again in 1981.”
One other main change got here with the arrival of the Spice Ladies, ushering in a brand new period of superstar tradition wherein entering into the papers turned as essential because the music itself. “These women had grown up with tabloids,” Edwards says. “They learn them on the breakfast desk and it was second nature to them. All 5 Spice Ladies liked the media, not less than within the early days, and understood the artwork of it. Geri specifically was outstanding. I’d name her and say, ‘I’m getting referred to as up about rumours you’ve joined All Saints.’ ‘Oh yeah, I put that one on the market yesterday.’ That type of factor.”
Movie star tradition actually took off, Edwards explains, the second Hey! journal realised folks not wished to learn about, say, minor royals in Schleswig-Holstein and embraced pop stars, tv presenters and footballers as an alternative. Even Bowie, in a sign both of his knack for predicting the longer term or how low his inventory had fallen on the time, bought the picture rights for his marriage to Iman to Hey! in 1992.
“You then had the Beckhams promoting the world rights of their marriage to OK! for one million quid. It’s 9 o’clock at evening and Richard Desmond [the owner of OK!] sends a Bentley with a chauffeur to take me to his workplace in Docklands. He supplied £1 million on the proviso that I signed the contract proper there. I knew the Beckhams had been on a aircraft to America, so I took a danger and signed it and the next morning I needed to break the information to Victoria. She stated, ‘Please inform me you signed the f***ing deal!’ Movie star got here alongside and I liked it as a result of it was like punk: it blew the cobwebs away. The previous order was overturned and the Spice Ladies had been just like the Pistols: working class, knew the way to play the media. There was a whiff of republicanism within the air and David and Victoria had been the brand new royalty.”
Not that Posh Spice was fairly as posh as her moniker steered. When The Solar ran an incorrect story that the marriage checklist was at middle-class John Lewis, Victoria exploded, “It may very well be f***ing Gucci not less than.” All this coincided with the rise of Large Brother, Oasis turning into the largest band on this planet — within the early Noughties Liam Gallagher attacked Edwards in Camden Marketplace for causes he by no means bought to the underside of — and it was a complete new world.
“It was how I imagined the Sixties to be: a brand new technology taking up,” Edwards says of the Nineties on the top of Cool Britannia. “The UK was awash with cash, optimism, creativity… But it surely turned a monster in a short time. When 1 / 4 of one million kilos was paid for an interview with somebody who had been on Large Brother [Helen Adams, a hairdresser from Wales, 2001], you knew it needed to crash.”
Earlier than that occurred, Tony Blair reached a fab future prime minister peak when he and Cherie attended a Bowie live performance at Wembley Enviornment in 1996. “Tony arrived an hour early and it was me and him in a room, consuming a bottle of wine and speaking, and it was really easy, like hanging out with Mark Ellen of Q journal,” Edwards says, citing a much-loved music journalist, editor and former bandmate of Blair of their school group, Ugly Rumours. “Usually with well-known folks you discover that their seats are empty after just a few songs, however Blair stayed for the entire present and got here backstage to fulfill Bowie afterwards. When the stadium was empty aside from the blokes within the hi-vis jackets, he went spherical and stated goodbye to every one. There was no press, no members of the general public to impress, and I believed: he’s bought my vote. David wasn’t political in any respect however he ended up with this very nice relationship with Tony Blair, all due to Tony’s real love of music.”
Edwards thinks we’re in a company interval of the music trade cycle, when superstars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have tightly managed photos, and social media may be employed to, utilizing that terrible PR time period, management the narrative. However cycles, by their very nature, transfer on.
“I really feel like we’ve been at this stage earlier than. Then one thing like punk comes alongside and abruptly the music is again within the arms of the folks,” he says. “Hip-hop was the identical: actual folks with one thing to say. It is going to occur once more.”
All of this comes at a private value. On the top of the Stones insanity of the early Eighties, when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards didn’t like one another one bit and had been embroiled in an influence battle over the band, Edwards bought so exhausted by the state of affairs that he ended up having a nervous breakdown. At one level within the e book he asks himself — ought to I be attending my daughter’s celebration or coping with Mick Jagger’s newest demand? You must surprise whether it is value it.
“Again then, you couldn’t do a Zoom name with the children earlier than they went to mattress, so when you had been in Denver you would possibly as properly have been on the moon,” he says. “In fact you want you spent extra time going to ballet classes with the children. My relationship fell aside and I discovered — nonetheless do discover — that I bought very, very lonely. It’s a Tuesday in Milwaukee, it’s raining, you’re caught in some motel and you’ll positively perceive why folks take medicine on tour, as a result of it may be so boring. However I used to be by no means one to play pool with the blokes till 3am. I’d reasonably go to my room and browse a e book.”
Again then, you couldn’t do a Zoom name with the children… when you had been in Denver you would possibly as properly have been on the moon.
Edwards’ job shouldn’t be for everybody: coping with different folks’s crises, staying invisible all through, hardly ever being thanked as soon as it’s all over. He says he understood early on that the PR can’t be a good friend to the artist. And he thinks being adopted made him mentally geared up for all of it.
“It’s a dysfunctional life, spent by yourself in bizarre locations and bizarre environments,” he says. “Due to my very own dysfunctional childhood I used to be completely pleased spending every week alone in, say, Curitiba in Brazil, ready for David Bowie to show up with 9 Inch Nails. Intimacy generally is a drawback with me, however I’ve by no means discovered it onerous to make buddies with promoters, journalists and brokers. Perhaps I learnt to be a PR within the first few weeks of my life. Earlier than I used to be correctly adopted, I used to be despatched to plenty of folks’s properties. I needed to survive with all types of individuals in all types of environments.”
In different phrases, Edwards’ formative experiences of instability made him geared up to cope with Bowie, Prince, the Stones, the Spice Ladies and the remainder of them. “Sounds a bit philosophical, doesn’t it? But it surely’s true.”
I’ve one remaining query. What makes an excellent artist?
“Nice artists are curious,” he replies. “When David Bowie discovered I used to be into soccer, he wished to know all the things about it, though he had no actual curiosity. One night I ended up at Boujis [club in London] with Prince at 4 within the morning and he spent the entire time speaking concerning the Egyptian pyramids. With lesser artists, the ego will get in the best way as a result of they suppose they’re attention-grabbing already. The greats, alternatively, by no means cease studying.”
He thinks about this for some time.
“They will’t assist themselves.”
- I Was There: Dispatches from a Life in Rock and Roll by Alan Edwards (Simon & Schuster)
Written by: Will Hodgkinson
© The Instances of London
