Credit:
MEMOIR
I Was There: Dispatches From a Life in Rock and Roll
Alan Edwards
Simon & Schuster, $34.99
“I was there” is a shocking confession for a celebrity publicist. Surely, the whole idea is to pretend you’re not. There’s Mick Jagger, say, and here’s us. There’s no strategy, no staging, no deals or spin or bullying or flagrant lies in between, just the authentic truth served up by our own eyes.
That was the broadly accepted illusion anyway, back when Alan Edwards was a junior London PR agent. One early campaign involved servicing UK music papers with photos of a car crash to explain Scottish pop wannabe Midge Ure’s cancelled 1976 tour. “Unbelievably,” he writes, “not one of the papers picked up on the fact that Midge had seemingly received immediate attention at the scene of the crash, and was standing there, bandaged up, in front of smouldering wreckage.”
The truth? Ure’s band, Slik, had been destroyed at the box office by the Bay City Rollers. As a former Sounds journalist-turned-fixer for the Stones, Bowie, Prince, the Spice Girls, Amy Winehouse and tons more pop icons, Edwards’ kiss-and-tell memoir is loaded with such cheeky reveals.
It’s all gleeful high jinks early on, as the starry-eyed music obsessive watches Keith Moon overturn his boss’s desk, or flies a pack of rowdy Fleet Street hacks to the top of a Swiss alp for a photo shoot with drunk and brawling hard-rock band Uriah Heep. Around the time he chances on the Sex Pistols tearing up a run-down West Kensington pub while some geezer named Malcolm McLaren jerks around deliberately spilling punters’ pints, the idea of public relations as an art form takes something of a quantum leap.
We follow Edwards’ eager learning curve as he works out what makes news, and who and how to finesse to make it go Billy Idol’s or Blondie’s way. His adventures at this perilous frontier escalate chapter by chapter, from gunplay with the Stranglers to footy with Bob Marley to his first blockbuster appointment with the Rolling Stones at the nadir of their early ’80s irrelevance.
“I reminded myself that a publicist is a bit like a garage mechanic,” he writes. “It’s our job to fix the engine, regardless of whether it belongs in a Mini or a Merc.” As expected, this mechanic comes a cropper between the pistons of micromanaging money man Jagger and strictly music-minded malcontent Keith Richards. “It took me months to get over the worst of it,” he writes of the ripping power struggle.
At the centre of Edwards’ book is his friendship with David Bowie.
As per the chummy cover shot, his recurring work with David Bowie forms the main thread of Edwards’ book. Called in for several crucial turns on the Duke’s ever-morphing road, he mostly casts himself as an acolyte at the impeccably shod feet of a PR master, though he claims credit for Bowie’s late-career resurgence as a front-page cultural icon, as distinct from a music column heritage act.
He also recounts several terrifying episodes in which the Starman’s normally sweet temper explodes in crushing, sometimes public tirades. On one occasion, Bowie’s ire is sparked by Edwards’ dreadful spelling, a charge he accidentally illustrates when he mentions sneaking off for a joint with Australian promoter Michael Gidunski (sic).
By the time he starts fielding six-figure tabloid offers for exclusives with Big Brother contestants, the spin doctor has been hired and fired by the best and worst in pop and beyond. He’s managed crises ranging from David Beckham’s 1998 World Cup red card to (shudder) that time Victoria Beckham almost released a cover of Get Up, Stand Up.
He’s also become uncomfortably aware of a new media climate in which the appetite for celebrities is so voracious they’re created out of thin air. He’s game enough to wonder whether Robbie Williams, to choose one client, would have had a career at all under the old talent-first, fame-second system.
His tone grows darker, too, as he finds himself a pawn in the Murdoch tabloids’ phone-tapping scandal; dealing with the death of media-monstered Michael Jackson; and the insatiable pack-hounding that hastened the tragic demise of Amy Winehouse. In the midst of all this life-and-death drama are such flimsy coups as the time he arranged for Colombian pop singer Shakira to meet members of the British cabinet in a bizarre bid to correct her lightweight image. Seriously.
As a man who clearly relished the chase and the spoils of this unholy pact between celebrity and media as it spiralled into everyday toxicity, it’s rather galling when he opines that “perhaps as a culture we need to take a look at ourselves”. Fat chance.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.