Pick a random page in Paul Charles’ new memoir, Adventures in Wonderland, and an eye-popping anecdote tumbles out. There was the time the music agent lost his backstage pass at Reading Festival and was rescued by a helpful Phil Collins, who ushered him past security. Or the occasion he arranged for Dexys Midnight Runners to open for David Bowie in Paris – only for Dexys’ frontman, Kevin Rowland, to insult Bowie in English and French.
“Just because we’re here today doesn’t mean we’re fans of David Bowie,” Rowland informed 65,000 fans of David Bowie gathered at the Hippodrome d’Auteuil, on the edge of Paris, in June 1983. He then compared Bowie “rather unfavourably to Bryan Ferry”, Charles writes. Quicker than you could say too-ra-loo-rye-ay, Team Bowie was yelling blue murder. “The promoter, along with Bowie’s very together PA, Coco, and Bowie’s head of security tracked me down and started screaming at me,” Charles recounts.
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It was rock’n’roll suicide. Fearing a riot, Charles agreed to cut short their set. But only after the promoter guaranteed the band would be paid in full. Did the Thin White Duke hold Rowland’s insult against him? Apparently not. “I met David Bowie,” Charles continues. “I found him totally charming.”
Bowie is one among a galaxy of rock’n’roll A-listers to appear in Adventures in Wonderland, the story of how Charles, a starry-eyed music fan from Magherafelt, in Co Derry, became a heavyweight of London music: booker for Van Morrison, manager of Tanita Tikaram, and friend and confidant of Rory Gallagher.
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“Writing a book is something that I’ve thought about a bit over the years,” he says. “It was always people who wanted me to dish the dirt. I don’t have any dirt to dish.”
The music industry tends to attract bruisers and egomaniacs. Charles is the rare nice guy who finished first. To his credit, he has always been aware of life beyond rock’n’roll; in recent years he has branched into writing enjoyably chewy crime novels. But he is still involved with music: his management company, Asgard, works with Joan Baez, The Kinks, Alison Krauss and Christy Moore, among others.
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Nor is he a pushover. One of the life lessons imparted in his memoir is that sometimes you have to say no. Among those he turned down were The Rolling Stones after it was suggested he arrange a concert for the band in Dublin in the early 1980s. One of the initial proposals was a show at Dalymount Park, where the venue’s representative was named George Harrison. “Asgard by arrangement with George Harrison presents The Rolling Stones – can you imagine Mick, Charlie, Keith and the boys arriving and seeing that banner?” he writes.
Alas, Dalymount was too small for the Stones. The next suggestion was Slane Castle. “Did Lord Mountcharles want to rent out his castle for a rock’n’roll show? Yes [he] was up for it with bells on.”
There were stumbling blocks, however. The Stones wanted to play on a Sunday, and Charles was reluctant to inconvenience locals on their way to Mass. The band also insisted on the same ticket price for Ireland as for the rest of the tour – which Charles felt was too high. And they pushed for just one support, The J Geils Band. Charles passed – and in 1982 the Belfast-based promoter Jim Aiken brought the Stones to Slane instead.
“Not that I dislike the Stones. But when I was at school either you were a Beatles fan or a Stones fan. For some reason I never understood, you weren’t allowed to be both. I was on the Beatles side of the fence – and proudly so,” Charles says.
“Years later the Stones wanted to do [Ireland]. They wanted me to compromise. And I didn’t want to compromise. And I didn’t because the Stones didn’t mean anything to me. There were a couple of great songs they did – you can’t deny that. They weren’t ‘my band’. If they were, maybe I would have gone that extra mile. But I wasn’t comfortable with it.”
Van Morrison is a recurrent presence in the book. Charles had recently moved to London when he acquired an import copy of Morrison’s 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks. (In those days a hit record could take six months to make its way from the United States to Europe.) He was smitten – and so delighted when, years later, Morrison’s management asked Charles to arrange a tour of Ireland for the singer. It turned into a tour of Ireland and Britain – and then Morrison asked him to look after his shows on the Continent too.
They worked together over the years. Even when they had parted, the aura of having been in Morrison’s inner circle followed Charles. He writes of meeting the Americana composer Ry Cooder in the late 1970s when promoting his show at the National Stadium in Dublin. Cooder got straight down to business: what, he wanted to know, was Van Morrison really like?
“I find him to be a very intelligent man. Very, very together. Very professional,” Charles says. “With Van you always knew where you stood. If you’re a musician’s agent or promoter and you do your gig well, he’s happy with that. However, you equally have to say that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. So maybe this reputation of being whatever comes from some of the fools he doesn’t suffer gladly.”
Charles is generous towards the many artists with whom he has collaborated. But his memoir doesn’t pull punches. He is, for instance, quietly critical of U2’s 2011 set at Glastonbury (where he for many years programmed the acoustic stage). “With all U2’s experience at their massive outdoor shows, I thought they would have done much better,” he writes. He wasn’t the only one to be underwhelmed by the Dubliners at the festival. The London Independent said they “almost spoiled the party”. “A bit iffy,” the NME reckoned.
“Because it was Glastonbury they wanted to do a great show,” Charles says. “Most of their shows at that stage would have been where they controlled the vertical, the horizontal. Here, you had this space and you had this amount of time to get on stage and this amount to get off for the next act. The mistake they made, which they might not have made if they had done many of these [festival] shows, is that they played to their hardcore fans on the front of the stage.”
He says their focus should have been on the rest of Glastonbury.
“There were 120,000 behind [the U2 diehards]. McCartney, Springsteen and Coldplay connected with [Glastonbury] in a big way. I’m talking off the top of my head: I don’t know anything about U2’s dynamics. But I thought, if they had played closer together on the stage, physically – and played to and with each other – [it] might have been different. Sure, they’ve done okay, though, haven’t they?”
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Music has changed since he started in the 1960s. The touring business is increasingly dominated by Live Nation and its ticketing arm, Ticketmaster.
“I’ve always worked with promoters who I like, who are real, who are fans, who are not interested in taking over the world,” he says. “Obviously, they are interested in profit; otherwise, they couldn’t run an organisation. Around the world, those are the promoters I’m preoccupied with.”
There is still the question of ticket prices, which seem to get higher and higher. My ticket for Paramore at 3Arena in Dublin recently had a face value, “excluding fees”, of €71.65, yet I paid Ticketmaster €96.10. Which was ironic, as on stage that night the band told Ticketmaster to “get its s**t together”. Does Charles think that live music risks becoming unaffordable?
“It’s difficult. If you’re someone like Tom Waits you do something about it. When we worked together, the tour before last, Tom saw on the internet that fans were being asked to pay £1,000 a ticket. That wasn’t a promoter’s price, that was a scalper. He decided to do something about it. We came up with this scheme that whenever you bought a ticket, you had to produce a driver’s licence or a passport. When you came to the concert, you might be asked to produce that identification. Anybody who wanted to sell a ticket could only sell it at face value back to the promoter. That’s somebody being proactive.
“The problem with the bigger promoters [is that] they’re not interested in things like that. They want to charge what they can get. If somebody comes in and they do 3Arena and they sell 10,000 tickets at €100, or whatever... next time they’re already planning that ‘We can get a wee bit more’. Whereas the people like Tom Waits will go, ‘We have to be careful here. We need our fans – we have to protect and take care of them.’”
He doesn’t want to be unfair to musicians. The overheads have gone through the roof since the pandemic. “Artists’ costs have gone up. They’re paying more for their PA and lights, more for their travel, more for their hotels. To keep on the road they have to increase their fee – and the fee must be in proportion to the ticket price. That has to be brought into it. But if everybody is realistic, it should be fine.”
That said, if prices continue to rise, the music business could be in for a rude awakening.
“People have to be very careful, whether it be the band with what fee they’re charging, or the promoter with what ticket price they’re charging, or the agent with what deal they’re doing. What will happen before we know it is that people will start to say, ‘Well, you know what? I just saw Bruce last time he was in – I went twice because he was so good. Maybe I’ll give it a miss next year.’ If more than 20,000 people say that, it impacts the box office and the touring viability.”
Adventures in Wonderland is published by Hot Press Books; Paul Charles is in conversation with John Connolly at Dalkey Book Festival on Sunday, June 18th
