Power broker Barbara Charone has helped guide the careers of Madge, Rod and the Stones – and now she is spilling the beans (well, sort of...) The guru who helped Madonna become the Queen of Pop
Access All Areas: A Backstage Pass Through 50 Years Of Music And Culture Barbara Charone
White Rabbit Books £20
★★★★★
In 1983, one of Barbara Charone’s first jobs for WEA’s press office was looking after an emerging US club singer visiting London. ‘I picked her up in a minicab at her bed and breakfast hotel,’ recalls the author. The singer is running late for a photo shoot but still insists on going shopping for shoes at Kensington Market. ‘Before I could protest, she jumped out of the car and ran into the market. I had no choice but to follow.’
Madonna hasn’t changed much in the ensuing four decades, according to Charone. Even then she was ‘whip-smart… outspoken, opinionated and outwardly very confident… She had buckets of belief and gave off the air of someone who would not be messed about’.
As it happens, Charone could be talking about herself. As co-director of British public relations company MBC, she is one of rock’s premier power brokers. If you’ve read an interview with Madonna, Rod Stewart, Keith Richards, Elvis Costello, Foo Fighters or REM in the past few decades, Charone will have facilitated it. She has gone far on what she calls her ‘bulldog personality’: brash, ballsy, ebullient.
She was born in 1952 into a liberal, comfortably middle-class Michigan home. A family trip to Europe in 1971 sealed her Anglophilia. ‘I practically cried when walking over Waterloo Bridge.’ In 1974 she secured a staff writer’s job at music paper Sounds and moved to London, entering the ‘exclusive fraternity’ of rock hacks and rock stars.
Stephen Stills teaches her the valuable lesson that idols have feet of clay: ‘He was just plain nasty and seemed to me to have a chip on his shoulder so big it was a surprise he could get in the room.’ Roger Daltrey bursts into tears discussing his struggles with Pete Townshend. She visits Eric Clapton at home, watching him ‘drink Carlsberg Special Brew at 10am’.
Keith Richards becomes a friend, letting her write his official biography and stay at his house. While he is awaiting trial in Toronto for heroin possession in 1977, Charone is in the hotel suite next door – much to her parents’ consternation. ‘It’s going to be a really great book, I promised them.’ She is winningly matter-of-fact on the allure of the lifestyle. By the mid-1970s cocaine ‘was everywhere, the quality was great, it wasn’t too pricey and it… fuelled all sorts of mischief’.
When she swaps journalism for public relations in 1981, her salary (£8,000) is less than the sum she owes the bank (£10,000). ‘I thought I would sue Barclays Bank for letting me get such a big overdraft.’ She probably should have sued the Stones.
Nobody’s idea of a soft touch, Charone plays tough but fair. She keeps a blacklist of writers who said they would come to Madonna’s concert at Camden Palace in 1983 but didn’t show. Years later, when the same press pack is clamouring for access to the biggest star on the planet, ‘it made me laugh to exact some long overdue revenge’.
In 2000 she formed MBC with friend and colleague Moira Bellas. The company’s continuing success partly explains why this book isn’t the triple-A pass the title promises. The confidences of clients are, unsurprisingly, respected. When Madonna celebrates a birthday with a private party at the Groucho Club in Soho, we are told only that ‘it was quite a night’.
Still, accounts of A-list dinners at The Ivy and San Lorenzo, the swirl of powders, pills and parties, build up a gossipy head of steam. Rod Stewart crank-calls when Charone’s beloved Chelsea FC are badly beaten. Rufus Wainwright writes the song Barbara for her as their friendship begins to founder. She is sent flowers by Guns N’ Roses – ‘gentlemen’ – and gains her nickname, BC, from Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant, her regular theatre companion. ‘If we didn’t like a play, we’d flip a coin at the interval to see if we’d stay for the second half. Sometimes we’d stay just for the interval drinks as we’d already paid for them.’
She is astute on the rules of good PR, as
well as the etiquette of parting company. As a goodbye gift, James Blunt gives her an ‘engraved Tiffany letter opener with a lovely note’. Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie sent ‘a gorgeous bunch of flowers with a card that said: “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll”.’ Whereas REM, the bounders, not only fail to let her know that the band are splitting, but Michael Stipe gives her the silent treatment when they change representation. ‘We’d worked together for a quarter of a century… so it was not unreasonable to expect a call, a text or an email to say a personal thanks. But it never came… It still hurts.’
Short and frothy as a classic Madonna single, with an affectionate foreword by Costello, Access All Areas offers a series of glimpses behind the curtain of the pop circus. In subtext, the book acts as a chronicle of changing times, from unfettered access and debauchery to a world that has become tamer, more structured, less exciting.
Though there is zero sex – Charone is as tight-lipped about the private lives of others as she is about her own – there’s plenty of drugs and even more rock ’n’ roll.
The real secret to her success, it’s clear, is her enthusiasm for the latter. ‘You have to keep that excitement and wonder in your life,’ she concludes. ‘The magic really is in the music.’