APOLOGISING FOR BEING A LITTLE DUSTY this London morning, though he looks trim, tanned and appallingly healthy for someone who has worked at the low, high, and very high end of music public relations for more than five decades, Alan Edwards is set for work immediately, chat switched on through a scratchy throat.
Behind him is a wall of tour posters, several of them for the Sex Pistols, which is hardly going to be coincidental placement for such an experienced promotions man. The night before he’d been at a gig he’s involved with featuring – yes, you’ve guessed it - Sex Pistols, with Frank Carter stepping in as the not-Rotten frontman alongside the original lineup of Glen Matlock, Steve Jones and Paul Cook.
“It took me back to the original time I saw them, at the Nashville Rooms in 1976,” Edwards says. “This was extraordinary.”
As he explains in his freshly published memoir, I Was There – which isn’t officially titled The Godfather Of Music PR but might as well be – that 1976 night was pivotal for Edwards, already a few years into his career working with the doyen of music PR, Keith Altham. Edwards was a young man who’d already had his hippie moment and his skinhead days, was a roots/reggae fan and keen follower of the pub rock scene of Dr Feelgood, Kilburn And The High Roads (who would evolve in Ian Dury and The Blockheads), and wondering if there was something new for him.
“It was one of those seismic nights when everything changes and rock ‘n’ roll changes. I was actually in the back of the venue [a pub in west Kensington] and I would be in there almost every night of the week seeing different bands. This band, this weird name Sex Pistols or something, came on and I’m really not expecting much, and it was kind of electric,” he says enthusiastically, as his personal and PR side meld.
“From a PR point of view, it was this incredible thing with this guy – there were only 25 or 30 people in the room – this guy in a Mac, his hair all over the place, like a whirling dervish going all around the room bumping into people, spilling their drinks. People were turning around, starting to push each other and suddenly you’ve got this melee going with the Sex Pistols in the background. I didn’t know what was going on.
“Then a photographer turns up, takes a picture and next week, it’s on the front cover of the NME: ‘Riot At Pistols Gig: Mayhem.’ And the guy in the gabardine of course was [Pistols manager, marketing provocateur and master of self-promotion] Malcolm McLaren. That was an early lesson in PR for me: create the story yourself.”
And when you’ve got the story, work it! Edwards’ entertaining stories are legion and world-scale. They run from Marc Bolan, Blondie and The Who (drummer Keith Moon trashing Altham’s office, as you would expect), a spiralling Amy Winehouse, world-conquering Spice Girls, Naomi Campbell and the Beckhams (one of the clients who would sack him), to a long relationship with David Bowie (who brought him back for the penultimate album of his career, as he approached death), Usher, extended time with The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson and Prince, and hair-raising encounters with Tony Blair, the Mob and Hugo Chavez.
Oh yes, and that time he was seated, in an otherwise empty restaurant in Cape Town, near a negotiating Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk shortly before they announced the formal process ending apartheid. As you do.
Then you add the fact there was, as he likes to say, “no rulebook” in PR when he started in the early ‘70s: much of what was being done was being learnt as it happened, often enough doing the opposite of, or taking much further, what the enthusiastic amateurs and old school impresarios had done in the 1960s.
So readers can dive into taking journalists on booze-enhanced trips to New York or Amsterdam with just enough music involved to justify the expense when the stories began rolling out; ridiculous stunt after glorious stunt to make the front pages; trading scoops and exclusives for embarrassing stories that could then be killed; planning international schedules for the likes of Mick Jagger, who’d want to know every detail of each publication’s market penetration, editorial philosophy and the style of the reporter; fending off prime minister groupies.
Those stories are well worn in the telling now and Edwards can slip easily into the groove of retelling them. But as enjoyable as those are to hear or to read in the appropriately rollicking memoir – I grin every time I recall his story of the wild small-plane trip with Motorhead and journalists: food minimal/alcohol maximal and the absence of toilets seemingly eased by emergency plastic cups. At least until they hit turbulence – he is even more interesting when diverted.
For example, experiencing what was essentially a nervous breakdown in the middle of a Rolling Stones world tour in the early ‘80s – “Working for the Stones, it’s like working for five different people: it’s a mediaeval court in the way there’s politics and jousting” – while also juggling clients back home, but yet powering on as if it didn’t matter and no one would notice.
“I suppose I was driven by adrenaline and I was probably out five, six nights a week at that point and I wasn’t eating very substantially,” Edwards says. “I was smoking 30 or 40 cigarettes a day, living on coffee. Not healthy at all. So I guess something was coming.
“I got through it but suddenly at the end all these weird things are happening to me and everything was going out of sync, and the colours were wrong, and the sounds were wrong, and I was getting paranoid about being with people. It was very frightening and I didn’t have anyone to turn to.”
But really, who would he turn to? The crew? The band? His journalistic colleagues? His PR rivals? Not bloody likely. As he says, “In that very really male rock ‘n’ roll environment you couldn’t discuss mental health. If I had said I was having issues, I probably would have been fired.”
It took a year, Edward reckons, to get past the worst of it, “but it still sends a shiver up my spine”.
Even so, a sensible person might see that experience and say maybe I’ll slow it down, maybe move on out, but Edwards never did. Even when he could see his family suffering too. Why couldn’t he stop?
He loved music, sure, he loved the adrenaline, and he certainly loved the gratification hits of successful plans and winning, over and over. But behind the stories in I Was There is the subtext of an adopted kid who for most of his childhood and adult life felt an outsider needing to prove himself, to join, someone who was always looking for another family to become part of.
“That’s exactly it. I didn’t fully understand all of that at the time but as a kid I had a really tough first year or two where I was shunted around various homes – about seven in the first year, and they weren’t all good by any means – so I kind of felt I learnt about PR very early on,” he says.
“I went to the adoption society in the ‘90s and when I walked in the guy said to me, ‘oh Mr Edwards we’ve been expecting you’, James Bond style. He said we see you are really good communicator, we’ve looked you up, and if you weren’t a good communicator you probably wouldn’t be alive today.”
While he does wish he had done things differently with his children, maybe closer to what he’s been able to do with his grandchildren, Edwards still insists that he has no regrets. Come on, it’s been a great life. Still is: did you know he’s working with the Sex Pistols on some shows? Oh you did?
“I can’t really regret it because [citing his childhood interest in adventure stories taking the heroes around the world] it was my, kind of, destiny. I was a bit like a sailor and there is no point looking back and regretting it because it was as if I was programmed to do that.
“That’s life isn’t it? The sacrifices, you pay for everything.”
I Was There, by Alan Edwards, is out now through Simon & Schuster.
Comments