I Was There by Alan Edwards review – the rock gods’ right-hand man
Memoirs by music publicists have potential for the access all areas inside track. Especially when it’s a PR on the level of Alan Edwards, founder of public relations company the Outside Organisation. He is described on the dust jacket of his new memoir as “the godfather of British music PR” and his clients have included David Bowie (with whom Edwards worked for nearly four decades), the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Blondie, Prince and the Spice Girls.
The book opens with a meeting with Bowie two months before he died in January 2016, Edwards going on to muse about his own eventful professional journey. Briefly a music journalist in the 1970s, with as much interest in soul as rock, he was 20 when hired for PR work by Keith Altham (who advised Jimi Hendrix to set fire to his guitar). Gaining a reputation as “the punk PR”, Edwards also looked after the Buzzcocks and the Stranglers.
There’s an element of pop-culture archaeology to the earlier passages: a time when music PR was barely considered a job and rock excess and flamboyant, costly, hedonism-fuelled campaigns were the norm. However, the memoir’s true currency is the stellar roster, and Edwards doesn’t stint on anecdotes.
He plays football with Bob Marley and hangs out at his house (“The ganja smoke in the room became so thick that we could no longer see him”). He’s offered publishing rights to U2 for £4,000 but is unable to raise it. Hired by the Stones in the 1980s, he encounters colossal egos and warring factions: “It was a bit like a medieval royal court with everyone jostling for influence and favour.”
Related: Bowie and Spice Girls PR Alan Edwards: ‘Through punk I found another family’
Along the way, there are humiliations, including brutal public chastisements from Bowie. Prince would confer with Edwards only via his bodyguard – even though they were standing 2ft apart. It’s particularly disconcerting to read of Edwards running alongside Mick Jagger on his daily jog to give him press briefings (it verges on This Is Spinal Tap’s self-flagellating promo rep Artie Fufkin).
Occasionally, Edwards’s overprotective PR instincts kick in. Recollections about artists he reveres (he views Bowie and Jagger as mentors) sometimes seem overly careful. When it comes to Posh and Becks’s 1999 wedding (the rights sold to OK! magazine for a record £1m), it’s amusing to hear of Victoria pouting about an untrue story concerning a John Lewis wedding list (“John Lewis! It could be fucking Gucci at least!”), but where’s the real dish on the actual nuptials? (There’s nothing either on those deliciously appalling “thrones”.)
By this time, Edwards is at the centre of a changing media universe: paparazzi, reality stars, fame for fame’s sake, bands as brands (“I watched the celebrity bubble expand and explode”). One grim interlude involves an emergency meeting to help a struggling Amy Winehouse. There’s also phone hacking: “I learned that at one stage I was one of the top 10 most hacked people in the UK.” Edwards’s clientele are, shall we say, varied. One minute, he’s taking issue with Macca about being let go (“I had to pinch myself. Here was I having a full-on personal row with a Beatle”); the next, he’s being fired by Riverdance’s Michael Flatley.
While Edwards is interesting about the ever-evolving entertainment landscape, a key part of the story is his own. His adoption, mental health difficulties, proud fatherhood and a workload so punishing he barely notices plush hotels. Considering taking on Robbie Williams, Edwards observes: “I was stretched thinner than a Rizla paper.”
Sometimes, Edwards becomes emotionally invested in clients only to be sacked, devastated and left wondering if being adopted makes rejection hurt more. Stars, he writes, are often “totally out of touch with reality. That doesn’t make them bad people. They’re just in need of careful handling sometimes.”
Overall, I Was There makes for an absorbing read: raw, warm and packed with incident. With Edwards running with the big beasts of rock and pop, it gives insights into worlds that have vanished, or are even now vanishing into the mists. In a way, it’s also about a man falling in love and getting his heart broken again and again. The heartbreakers just happen to be music’s greats.
• I Was There: Dispatches from a Life in Rock and Roll by Alan Edwards is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
