The king of PR who represented David Bowie and the Spice Girls
Alan Edwards has been named the No. 1 entertainment PR by the industry bible PR Week for the past ten years running. Now, he’s written a book looking back over his extraordinary career. Mick Brown meets him
In 1976, Alan Edwards, then 21 years old and working as a PR looking after rock bands, organised a trip to Birmingham for music journalists to see the heavy metal group Uriah Heep. It was a time when the gravy train in the music business was running at full steam. In this case, quite literally. A private train had been hired to ferry the party to the concert. By the time it arrived in Birmingham, much drink had been taken and a food fight had broken out, leaving Edwards with the remnants of a ham sandwich in his hair and ketchup all over his T-shirt. By the end of the evening one journalist had been arrested. Edwards remembers that he was ticked off by his boss “for not disciplining the journalists”.
Writing for a music paper, I had been on the train, although sadly I have no recollection of the concert or filing a review of it. Recently, I met Alan Edwards again, for lunch in an expensive restaurant in London’s West End (no food fights here). A trim, boyish figure, with a thick head of grey hair, he orders salmon and a salad and declines the offer of a glass of wine. He looks after himself. He does not own a car, preferring to take public transport and making sure he walks ten miles a day.
Edwards is now 68, and by some distance the most successful PR man in British entertainment. He has been named the No. 1 entertainment PR by the industry bible PR Week for the past ten years running. You’re only as good as your list of contacts, and Edwards has more than 10,000 names in his book. Over the years he has represented the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and The Who. In the celebrity era he worked with the Spice Girls, the Beckhams, Robbie Williams, a gamut of other pop acts, and in reality TV, as well as with a host of clients who prefer to keep their names, and their problems, out of the papers. The present client list of his company, The Outside Organisation, includes Janet Jackson, Blondie and Naomi Campbell. He has now written a book looking back over his career and it is, as you might expect, full of good stories about life on the road with the Rolling Stones, signing a million-pound contract for the Beckhams and playing football with Bob Marley.
Edwards grew up in Worthing, the adopted son of a solicitor and a teacher. At 16, he left school with three O levels and set off alone on the hippie trail, contracting dysentery and typhoid along the way. When he returned to England seven months later barely recognisable, he recalls, his father greeted him with the words,
“Hello! What have you been up to?” Music had always been his passion, and he went on to work as a messenger boy for an advertising agency while trying his hand at writing reviews for the music press, before taking a job with Keith Altham, then the leading rock PR, with clients including The Who, the Rolling Stones, Marc Bolan – and Uriah Heep.
Edwards answered the phone, arranged interviews and concert tickets, and got to know everyone who was anyone in the British music press and beyond. In 1977 he set up on his own, working out of a single room, representing the ultimate hippie group, Hawkwind, and the coming generation of punk bands, including Generation X, The Stranglers and Blondie. The music business in those days, he says, was “the Wild West”; dodgy managers, and drink and drugs flowing freely. One publicist, now dead, would have lines of cocaine ready on the desks before the staff came in. He was imprisoned for dealing. Edwards recalls an interview with the reggae singer Gregory Isaacs. High after freebasing cocaine, he passed out when asked a question. Edwards and the journalist carried on chatting, wondering what to do. After 45 minutes, Isaacs suddenly opened his eyes and answered the question.
“The music business in those days, he remembers, was ‘the Wild West’: dodgy managers, drink and drugs flowing freely”
In the early 1980s, Edwards was hired by the Rolling Stones to handle the media duties for a European tour. Mick Jagger demanded that he should provide a press briefing the morning after each show. At midnight, Edwards would be outside the railway station of whichever city they were in, waiting for the newspapers to be dropped off, then he would rush back to the hotel, cut out the reviews and bribe the receptionist with tickets to translate them into English, go back to the room to prepare a programme for the next day’s promotional events, make 30 or 40 copies on the hotel photocopier, staple them together and have them under the doors of everybody in the touring party by 6:30am. “At times I was hardly going to bed.”
Jagger had a thing for dossiers. Edwards once took him on a promotional jaunt around Europe, visiting two or three cities a day. “He’d want a dossier on all the journalists he was meeting, how the local football team was doing, the politicians, and how the new album was doing in the shops. And after each show he’d want to know what songs the journalists had liked. He’d look at the set list and say, ‘So they don’t like Under My Thumb? We’ll drop that.’ Or, ‘Move Get Off of My Cloud to later in the set.’”
David Bowie, with whom Edwards started working in 1982, was equally meticulous. “They’d both want to know where the journalists at a show were sitting – David would want them in the best seats so they got the best acoustics. And if they weren’t, there might be an inquisition… Same thing with the photographers. David would always come at things from a more creative side. With Mick it was, we could sell more tickets. They were two sides of the same coin. But both were 100% across everything.” Working with Bowie for 35 years was, he says, an education. Performers on tour usually like to be left alone before going on stage. “But I’d be hauled in – ‘David would like a word’ – and he wouldn’t talk about the show. He’d talk about books.”
Everybody wanted a piece of Bowie. Tony
Blair was an enormous fan; and in 1995, the year after Blair became leader of the Labour Party, Edwards arranged for him to meet Bowie backstage after a gig. The following year, Blair, courting the youth vote, presented Bowie with an award at the Brits. Edwards was tasked with helping Alastair Campbell write Blair’s speech, scribbled together, he remembers, on the back of a fag packet, and designed to reassure the audience of well-heeled record-industry executives that they had nothing to fear from a Labour government. It was greeted with boos. In 2006, Edwards was representing Shakira, the Colombian pop singer. Her records were selling in their millions, but she wanted to be seen as a more serious artist. Edwards arranged a paparazzi picture of her coming out of the Dorchester hotel. Sticking out of her handbag was a copy of The Economist.
“It went everywhere.”
“David and Victoria had grown up in homes where tabloid papers were on the breakfast table. They liked the cat and mouse of it”
Eventually, in 2002, the demands of the job put paid to Edwards’s relationship, which had lasted more than 20 years. He has four children and 11 grandchildren. “You look back and think, I wish I’d gone to more piano lessons [with the kids] and all the rest of it. But I’d be gone for months and you couldn’t be thinking, I wish I was at home.” Shortly after meeting his current partner Chandrima, an NHS doctor, in 2012, he took her to a big showbiz event. “It was a bit of a revelation to her. She said, ‘Really you’re just staff aren’t you?’” He laughs. “And that’s exactly it. It’s upstairs downstairs. At these beautiful events, fabulous dinners, you’re on call, drinking Diet Coke and, if you’re lucky, getting a cheese roll afterwards.”
Just as all political lives end in failure, so do most PR-client relationships. He was fired by Elton John after a disobliging concert review appeared in a national newspaper, on the grounds he “should have taken more time choosing the reviewer”. “He called me in to give me a pasting,” Edwards remembers. “At the end of it, he gave me a hug, and I thought I was OK.” The next day, calamitously, the review was printed again by mistake.
“I got a call from his manager saying, ‘We’re going to let you go.’” He shrugs. “I didn’t feel it was unfair.” His relationship with the Stones ended in 1986. Relations between Jagger and Keith Richards were at such a low ebb that they would rarely be in the studio at the same time; Edwards was caught in the crossfire. He was also fired by Michael Flatley, co-creator of Riverdance, “two or three times”. The golfer Nick Faldo fired him via voicemail.
The fabled record executive Joe Smith, the man behind artists such as the Eagles, Queen and Mötley Crüe, once likened the human brain to a computer with microchips that govern its behaviour. Artists can write and record songs that please millions. “They’ve got chips we don’t have. But to make room for those chips, out falls sanity, reason, logic, gratitude…” “That’s pretty spot-on,” Edwards says. “If you’re working with them, you have to accept that from the beginning. But the biggest idiots are always the smaller acts. Fame goes to their heads. You can spot the signs. They get a new manager every half-anhour. If an album doesn’t work, they can’t fire the publisher, because the publisher owns their songs; they can’t fire the record company, so they fire the PR.”
In 1997, Edwards was asked to come to a meeting with the Spice Girls. More than a PR, he became the group’s de facto strategist. “I was almost like a father figure… And it worked pretty brilliantly, to be honest.” In no time at all, he says, he was representing every major pop group of the day – Boyzone, Westlife, Atomic Kitten, All Saints… In a way, he says, the Spice Girls were a bit like the Sex Pistols. “They were so tabloid, so British and so irreverent. I kinda loved it. They were all very nice, and they all had lovely families, which I liked. You’d go on a photo shoot and there’d be mums and dads and uncles. There might be 50 relatives there.” Edwards was instrumental in building “Brand Beckham” – “brand” not being a word, he says, you’d ever hear from Bowie or The Who. “It would have been anathema. Although Mick Jagger might have gone with it. But the Beckhams weren’t embarrassed by it; they owned it.”
One evening in 1999, Richard Desmond, the publisher of OK! magazine, brought Edwards in a chauffeur-driven car to his offices in Docklands to discuss a deal. He was offering £1m for exclusive world rights to the Beckhams’ wedding. Edwards took the risk of agreeing on the couple’s behalf – and the Beckham wedding issue of OK! sold 1.5 million copies. “David and Victoria with the thrones were almost like the unofficial king and queen. Beckingham Palace…” He laughs. “We had a complaint from Buckingham Palace that they were getting loads of letters for David and Victoria. They enjoyed it. They were very clever. They’d grown up in normal households where tabloid newspapers were on the breakfast table. It was part of the game… and they liked the cat and mouse of it.”
He was taken on to look after PR for a new reality show, Big Brother, and recalls a woman who’d come second being “very unhappy” to be offered “only” a quarter-of-a-million for an exclusive interview. “She was a hairdresser…” He pauses. “Nothing wrong with hairdressers, of course.”
Eventually, the circus got out of hand and collapsed on itself. “It was partly to do with technology. Everybody had a mobile phone and could take a picture of somebody coming out of a restaurant. People started to have stories on their own websites or social media. I was a bit like the gatekeeper without a fence.” We walk back to his office in Soho. Behind his desk is a collage of blownup photos and posters of punk acts. On the wall are pictures of Amy Winehouse, Edwards with Marc Bolan and David Bowie – the client he never let go, and who never let go of him. When he started out, his life revolved around the one square mile where we’re sitting, in pubs and clubs. The wannabe stars, the hustlers and chancers. All the colourful characters. “No one would say today is colourful. It’s all more disparate; there’s the internet, influencers. Everything’s more controlled…” He shrugs. “I don’t feel nostalgic, not often. I would if I spent more time sitting around, but there’s always something I need to get on with.” The telephone is still ringing. And he’s still answering it.