From gun-toting gangsters to braving the wrath of Elton John, legendary British PR Alan Edwards has spent five decades managing the crises of the biggest names in the music business. Now he’s written a jaw-dropping memoir.
Having worked alongside it for the past two decades, my general impression of public relations is that it is not a life-or-death occupation. You might get a client shouting down the phone about being misquoted. Maybe they’re upset if a photograph shows them in a particularly unattractive light. But you’re not going to get a gun to your head. How wrong I am. A few pages into his revelatory memoir, I Was There, Alan Edwards, PR of legend to David Bowie, the Spice Girls and countless others, finds himself pulled into a game of Russian roulette with a horrifically scarred Hell’s Angel in a balaclava. And all in the name of getting punk reprobates the Stranglers a review in The Sun.
“It was in Amsterdam, 1977,” recalls Edwards, a suave, quietly spoken 68-year-old with an air of supreme unflappability, which, you imagine, has served him well over the years. “This man, who had plastic surgery because someone threw acid in his face, held a revolver to my head and said, ‘You like Russian roulette, ja?’ It was so terrifying; it didn’t seem real. He pulled the trigger, there was a click, and I went off muttering, ‘Bet it wasn’t loaded.’ A few minutes later, the photographer walked in to say he had just seen a man in a balaclava shooting bottles off a wall with a revolver.”
We’re in the snooker room of the Groucho Club in London, an unquestionably safer place than an Amsterdam biker bar at the height of punk, and Edwards is reflecting on what the shadowy, fame-adjacent world of publicity has taught him. Growing up as the adopted son of a solicitor and a primary school teacher in Worthing, West Sussex, he had a relatively normal childhood interspersed with the odd bout of delinquency: masterminding the theft of instruments from the school music room at 14; running across a motorway during an LSD-inspired freakout. After leaving school at 16 and hitting the hippy trail through Afghanistan and India, he moved to London and just about scraped a career writing concert reviews for Sounds magazine. That’s before meeting Keith Altham, a louche former journalist who pretty much invented the rock PR game in Britain. And his life’s course was set.
“I met Keith at a Who gig at Bingley Hall, Stafford, in 1975,” says Edwards, who formed his PR company, the Outside Organisation, in 1995 and has been going strong ever since. “I was there to review the concert, and when I told him I didn’t think it was a great gig he said, ‘Do you want a job in PR?’ Well, not really, because all the PRs I knew were selling dreadful pop bands I didn’t want to know about. But I was struggling to pay the £4 a week rent on my Islington flat, Sounds paid £5 per review three months after publication, and I was living on free drinks from record companies. So I said yes. Three days into the job, Keith got me to take the most important journalists in Britain to see The Who at Wembley and it almost ended before it even began.”
Not realising that critics in the Seventies expected the red carpet treatment ― how sweet those days must have been; now we’re lucky to get away with sticking a meal deal on expenses ― Edwards arranged to meet the UK’s august critics at Oxford Circus Tube station. “I think they were expecting a private train. They were certainly horrified at being squeezed on during rush hour. To placate them I promised exclusive interviews with The Who. So I knock on the door of the dressing room and before I can say, ‘Hello, this is Alan Edwards from the PR office,’ someone, Roger Daltrey I think, shouts, ‘F*** off!’ and slams the door. When I open it again, Keith Moon goes flying through the air. I go home and think, this PR business is a bit much, really.”
Nonetheless, Edwards stuck with it. Seeing the potential of punk to gain headlines and enter the public consciousness in the way that bands rarely did, he represented the Damned, Generation X and, after going backstage at a gig at Dingwalls in London while Debbie Harry was towelling down her hair, Blondie. “I’m still with them today actually. And what I realised is that for real artists it is a complete commitment, which doesn’t lead to an easy, balanced life because they are not at peace with themselves. For example, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers were a fantastic punk band, and in the middle of a gig at the Hope & Anchor in Islington their guitarist overdosed on heroin and was carried off stage while the rest of them played on. These people are experimenting — not just with music but with life, thoughts, environment. So you can’t be a star for six months of the year then spend the other half looking at private equity. Real stars live it.”
Nobody more so than Bowie. Edwards started working with the great chameleon during the Serious Moonlight tour of 1983 — dubbed by some wag at the time the Serious Nosebleed tour — when Bowie was shedding his freakish image of the past and embracing the Eighties mainstream. He stayed with Edwards until his death on January 10, 2016.
“David was on it relentlessly,” Edwards remembers. “He might be in touch 10 times a day. He was very interested in writing, and writers, until he pulled away for the last 10 years of his life. If I said we had 10 interviews this week he would say, ‘Can’t we do 20?’ "
It was pleasing to read in I Was There about how much Bowie liked and understood the press — rare in an arena where journalists are viewed so often as the enemy, there to trip you up, expose the façade, generally not do what you want them to. Bowie realised that things go wrong — covers fall through, reviews are not all glowing — and, as Edwards writes in I Was There, “You’d be amazed how few artists get that and how many fall for the myth that they have total control, which of course they don’t.” You also get the sense that Bowie liked taking risks, from holding a press conference for his unloved Nineties rock band Tin Machine on the runway at Los Angeles airport in 1991 as Boeing 747s took off all around, to attempting to crack the China market in 1997 with a drum ’n’ bass project called Tao Jones Index.
“David called one day to announce he wanted his new record to be released in China,” Edwards recalls. “So I went down to Gerrard Street in Chinatown and asked a waiter to translate the lyrics. Then I discovered there was no record distribution in China or any international music market at all, really. Someone at the label found a tailor in Hong Kong who distributed records. I got a few boxes shipped out to him but I don’t think they ever left the back of the shop. Once a week David would call to say, ‘How’s the record doing in China?’ ‘Well, they’re still working out the marketing…’ "
Getting fired appears to be another major aspect of the PR’s life. With exquisite ruthlessness, Mick Jagger sacked Edwards mid-tour after a concert in Vienna in 1982 by getting someone else to take his seat on the band’s private jet, much to the smirks and avoidance of eye contact of everyone else on board. Having had the foresight to hold on to his Access All Areas tour pass, Edwards duly travelled by train to the Stones’ concert in Cologne in Germany three days later, where Jagger looked at him and said, “Oh, all right, you can have your f***ing job back.”
The golfer Nick Faldo sacked Edwards after the Daily Express ran a story about his having a caddy called Fanny. Michael Flatley, meanwhile, fired him for no reason whatsoever. When the prancing master of Riverdance’s manager rehired Edwards for a new campaign, Flatley looked at him and said, “Didn’t I fire you before?” Edwards replied in the positive. Flatley declared, “Well, you’re fired again.”
Even averting a major crisis doesn’t guarantee loyalty. “When someone has been caught sleeping with someone they shouldn’t and their entire career is about to collapse, you are the most important person in the world to them,” Edwards says with quiet, blue-eyed intensity. “You have to get the truth to defend them, so you learn the most intimate details and for a moment you are extremely close. Two or three weeks later, even though you may have saved their marriage, you find yourself surplus to requirements. I’ve lain awake at night wondering how I offended them… Was it the jumper I was wearing? Then you see them somewhere and they say, ‘Oh, I just wanted a change.’ You can’t take it personally. But you do.”
Also common is a misunderstanding of how the press works. In one memorable incident in the book, Elton John gives Edwards a dressing-down after a bad review of a concert at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire because he “should have taken more time choosing the reviewer”. The suggestion is that it is the PR’s job to guarantee good press, rather than press per se.
“The UK is the home of newspapers. The basis of our democracy is that you can say what you think, and a lot of American artists are nervous of the UK media for that reason,” Edwards says. “Regularly they’ll want someone sitting in on an interview and I’ll have to say, ‘That’s not how we do things here.’ It backfires anyway because then the PR becomes the story or the article is so boring that it achieves no purpose whatsoever.”
It happens less in the music world but every film journalist knows the banality of the junket: five or 10-minute interviews with a star or director in a hotel before moving on to the next one. “The thing is, the public isn’t stupid. We know when something is real and when it is just a bit of advertising, so it is a mistake for artists only to engage on that level. OK, things got a bit out of hand when journalists went on the road with bands and reported on the most lurid behaviour, but I know that if I read a really good interview, I’ll want to know more about that person and probably spend a load of money on their back catalogue.”
The thing is, the public isn’t stupid.
Edwards saw, through working with the biggest names in music, how the game has changed. In the early days it was the Wild West: he shared an office with The Who’s manager, Bill Curbishley, a former associate of the Kray twins, and men walking in with sawn-off shotguns was not unknown. During a meeting with the Damned, the band’s guitarist, Brian James, made his feelings known about the latest PR campaign by punching Edwards in the face. It was Mick Jagger, in fact, who first realised that a rock band could move out of the world of semi-criminality and be run like a corporation.
“I was with the Stones in 1982, when nobody had done a tour of stadiums before, and there were 60-70,000 tickets to sell each night,” Edwards says. “So Mick did a presidential tour where he would be at a press conference in Munich in the morning, Düsseldorf at lunchtime, Paris in the afternoon, and he would learn the names of the local footballers, the local politicians and how much the record was selling. Artists didn’t think like that back then. It was uncool to have a marketing mind. Now everyone does it, but Mick was taking sponsorship for Rolling Stones tours back in 1981.”
Another major change came with the arrival of the Spice Girls, ushering in a new era of celebrity culture in which getting into the papers became as important as the music itself. “These girls had grown up with tabloids,” Edwards says. “They read them at the breakfast table and it was second nature to them. All five Spice Girls loved the media, at least in the early days, and understood the art of it. Geri in particular was remarkable. I’d call her and say, ‘I’m getting called up about rumours you’ve joined All Saints.’ ‘Oh yeah, I put that one out there yesterday.’ That sort of thing.”
Celebrity culture really took off, Edwards explains, the moment Hello! magazine realised people no longer wanted to know about, say, minor royals in Schleswig-Holstein and embraced pop stars, television presenters and footballers instead. Even Bowie, in an indication either of his knack for predicting the future or how low his stock had fallen at the time, sold the photo rights for his marriage to Iman to Hello! in 1992.
“Then you had the Beckhams selling the world rights of their marriage to OK! for a million quid. It’s nine o’clock at night and Richard Desmond [the owner of OK!] sends a Bentley with a chauffeur to take me to his office in Docklands. He offered £1 million on the proviso that I signed the contract right there. I knew the Beckhams were on a plane to America, so I took a risk and signed it and the following morning I had to break the news to Victoria. She said, ‘Please tell me you signed the f***ing deal!’ Celebrity came along and I loved it because it was like punk: it blew the cobwebs away. The old order was overturned and the Spice Girls were like the Pistols: working class, knew how to play the media. There was a whiff of republicanism in the air and David and Victoria were the new royalty.”
Not that Posh Spice was quite as posh as her moniker suggested. When The Sun ran an incorrect story that the wedding list was at middle-class John Lewis, Victoria exploded, “It could be f***ing Gucci at least.” All this coincided with the rise of Big Brother, Oasis becoming the biggest band in the world — in the early Noughties Liam Gallagher attacked Edwards in Camden Market for reasons he never got to the bottom of — and it was a whole new world.
“It was how I imagined the Sixties to be: a new generation taking over,” Edwards says of the Nineties at the height of Cool Britannia. “The UK was awash with money, optimism, creativity… But it became a monster very quickly. When a quarter of a million pounds was paid for an interview with someone who had been on Big Brother [Helen Adams, a hairdresser from Wales, 2001], you knew it had to crash.”
Before that happened, Tony Blair reached a groovy future prime minister peak when he and Cherie attended a Bowie concert at Wembley Arena in 1996. “Tony arrived an hour early and it was me and him in a room, drinking a bottle of wine and talking, and it was so easy, like hanging out with Mark Ellen of Q magazine,” Edwards says, citing a much-loved music journalist, editor and former bandmate of Blair in their college group, Ugly Rumours. “Normally with famous people you notice that their seats are empty after a few songs, but Blair stayed for the whole show and came backstage to meet Bowie afterwards. When the stadium was empty apart from the guys in the hi-vis jackets, he went round and said goodbye to each one. There was no press, no members of the public to impress, and I thought: he’s got my vote. David wasn’t political at all but he ended up with this really nice relationship with Tony Blair, all because of Tony’s genuine love of music.”
Edwards thinks we are in a corporate period of the music industry cycle, when superstars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have tightly controlled images, and social media can be employed to, using that awful PR term, control the narrative. But cycles, by their very nature, move on.
“I feel like we’ve been at this stage before. Then something like punk comes along and suddenly the music is back in the hands of the people,” he says. “Hip-hop was the same: real people with something to say. It will happen again.”
All of this comes at a personal cost. At the height of the Stones madness of the early Eighties, when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards did not like each other one bit and were embroiled in a power battle over the band, Edwards got so exhausted by the situation that he ended up having a nervous breakdown. At one point in the book he asks himself — should I be attending my daughter’s birthday party or dealing with Mick Jagger’s latest demand? You have to wonder if it is worth it.
“Back then, you couldn’t do a Zoom call with the kids before they went to bed, so if you were in Denver you might as well have been on the moon,” he says. “Of course you wish you spent more time going to ballet lessons with the kids. My relationship fell apart and I found — still do find — that I got very, very lonely. It is a Tuesday in Milwaukee, it is raining, you’re stuck in some motel and you can definitely understand why people take drugs on tour, because it can be so boring. But I was never one to play pool with the guys until 3am. I’d rather go to my room and read a book.”
Back then, you couldn’t do a Zoom call with the kids... if you were in Denver you might as well have been on the moon.
Edwards’ job is not for everyone: dealing with other people’s crises, staying invisible throughout, rarely being thanked once it is all over. He says he understood early on that the PR cannot be a friend to the artist. And he thinks being adopted made him mentally equipped for it all.
“It is a dysfunctional life, spent on your own in weird places and weird environments,” he says. “Because of my own dysfunctional childhood I was perfectly happy spending a week on my own in, say, Curitiba in Brazil, waiting for David Bowie to turn up with Nine Inch Nails. Intimacy can be a problem with me, but I’ve never found it hard to make friends with promoters, journalists and agents. Maybe I learnt to be a PR in the first few weeks of my life. Before I was properly adopted, I was sent to lots of people’s homes. I had to survive with all kinds of people in all kinds of environments.”
In other words, Edwards’ formative experiences of instability made him equipped to deal with Bowie, Prince, the Stones, the Spice Girls and the rest of them. “Sounds a bit philosophical, doesn’t it? But it’s true.”
I have one final question. What makes a great artist?
“Great artists are curious,” he replies. “When David Bowie found out I was into football, he wanted to know everything about it, even though he had no real interest. One evening I ended up at Boujis [club in London] with Prince at four in the morning and he spent the whole time talking about the Egyptian pyramids. With lesser artists, the ego gets in the way because they think they’re interesting already. The greats, on the other hand, never stop learning.”
He thinks about this for a while.
“They can’t help themselves.”
- I Was There: Dispatches from a Life in Rock and Roll by Alan Edwards (Simon & Schuster)
Written by: Will Hodgkinson
© The Times of London