I was talking to Clint Boge the other day. You know Clint, erstwhile lead singer of The Butterfly Effect, and now also frontman for the deliciously heavy Thousand Needles in Red, of whom more in the future. Anyways, TNIR are managing themselves, and the boy Boge was commenting on how much hard work it is getting that sort of thing up and running, even when you’ve made a bit of a name for yourself. I could only concur, having had a hand in managing a few in my time, but as we were meant to be discussing the more exciting aspects of his new band, I didn’t really have the time to go into just how mundane managing a band can be. So I’ll bore you with it instead.
Many years ago, I worked for a company called Brilliant. Brilliant owner, Mark ‘Spitty’ Walmesley, had many fingers in many pies; a successful merchandise company (visitors to his home might be billeted in the ‘Bad Religion’ extension or the ‘Napalm Death’ wing, both names a tribute to the number of shirts sold by both bands throughout the early ‘90s, the proceeds of which contributed to the purchase and improvement of his domicile) and a management company amongst them. Though I was brought on board to add to the merchandise empire, Brilliant was run so tightly (some might say ‘on a shoestring’) that one was often roped in on the management side. This might involve booking studio time for bands such as Huge Baby, or, as you’ll doubtless remember, spilling kebab juice all over priceless original album artwork by Saxon. What came as a surprise immediately was how little money there was available to do all this, even for bands that had supposedly ‘made it’.
Management turned out to be not one long round of champagne, cocaine and women of loose virtue, more an extended lesson in fibbing to creditors, testing people’s patience and explaining to the band why people were knocking on their doors at the most ungodly hour of 7.30 in the morning asking where the mortgage money was. It was forwarding on royalty statements to band members in America, the cost of which in stamps outstripped the amount on the cheque within (and I’ll come back to the price of stamps later), and then fielding the inevitable reverse charge call explaining that no, there hadn’t been a mistake – people just didn’t like your last record as much as we expected; then taking a boxload of that record down to the record ‘n’ tape exchange on a Friday afternoon so you had enough beer money to go out that night and schmooze on behalf of them for that dream tour support they’ve been banging on about for months.
But for all that, we were a good company who always did what we could for our bands. Years earlier even than that, a bespectacled figure approached me in the dressing room after a show I’d just done with my then band, Scit Scat Wah, promising us the moon. We’d heard it all before of course, but were tired of being a DIY outfit and thought it might be fun for someone else to do the hard yakka. The next week we turned up to our usual rehearsal space to find High Wycombe’s leading jazz funk outfit using our slot. Our ‘manager,’ Ruprecht, had forgotten to ring the studio to book out our usual Sunday morning four hours. The next time we saw him, he handed us an invoice for 79 pounds for ‘labour and stamps.’ He’s still in the business today, apparently – friends in the industry tell me you can tell it’s him by his odd, invoice-up-the-rectum gait…
