Exclusive interview

It is in a Bethnal Green cafe the Krays used to frequent, and where Kevin Rowland, lead singer of Dexys Midnight Runners, eats beans on toast at a table in the back, that Eric Hall describes how he went from organising the Sex Pistols’ infamous Thames Television appearance to negotiating a £9,000 goal bonus for Dave Beasant, not realising he was a goalkeeper.

Rowland briefly interrupts our interview to wish 73-year-old Hall well on his way out of E Pellicci, as football’s original super agent, who refused to pay for his Football Association licence, barely pauses for breath between his “monster, monster” stories. There may be an occasional whiff of embellishment to some of the detail, and there will be those who doubt his claim that Freddie Mercury wrote Killer Queen about him, but Hall has always been unabashed in his willingness to discuss himself.

He does not believe the current era of football super agents, led by Mino Raiola, Jorge Mendes and Jonathan Barnett, would have evolved were it not for him transferring the showbusiness approach he developed in the music industry, which he entered as an office boy alongside a certain Reg Dwight. Hall, who grew up near E Pellicci in London’s East End, says: “I left school at 15 and a friend of the family got me a job as an office boy. There were two of us, me and a guy called Reg, who went on to become Elton John.” The pair worked together for about a year. Hall would later become a promoter for John’s Rocket Record Company, from which he was sacked following a disagreement over another band on the label called The Lambrettas.

Hall had grown up as a childhood friend of Marc Bolan and was with the former T. Rex frontman hours before his death in a car crash in 1977. It was at EMI that he promoted the likes of the Sex Pistols and Queen, and twice appeared on Top of the Pops – once dressed as a frog and the second time in a Womble outfit. “I was 15 or 16 when I got to know Marc, who was Mark Feld then,” Hall says. “We ended up working together when I was at EMI. I plugged him after T. Rex, when he was Marc Bolan, and I’m on the record New York City. The lyric is: ‘Did you ever see a woman coming out of New York City with a frog in her hand.’ He was going on Top of the Pops and I had the idea of having a frog dancing on stage while he sang. I asked the road manager, Mick, to be in the frog suit, but he said he was too busy, so everybody looked at me and I ended up as the frog on Top of the Pops. I went on once more as a Womble when they were playing. I can’t remember which one I was.”

These days, Hall limits himself to one of his famous cigars only on special occasions, but still lights up his anecdotes with the “monster” catchphrase he first used while promoting a group called Pilot. “I was plugging their new record, called January, and trying to get them on a television show called Supersonic,” Hall says. “I told a guy called Mike Mansfield, who ran the show, that it’s going to be ‘monster, monster’. From that day on, I just kept saying it.”

Two more of Hall’s notable claims to fame in the music industry were booking the Sex Pistols on to their expletive-ridden interview on Thames TV’S Today

show in 1976, which destroyed host Bill Grundy’s career and elevated the band to mainstream notoriety, and his insistence that Mercury wrote Queen’s 1974 hit Killer Queen

about him.

“I got a phone call from the producer of the Today show asking whether I had anyone for him because they needed to fill their ‘pop slot’,” Hall says. “I said, ‘I’ve