For many years, British bands like The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Wham! and even the Spice Girls dominated the music industry and made countless millions for themselves, their record companies and their managers.

For behind each of those bands was a guiding hand, a Svengali, protecting, promoting, persuading and occasionally punishing on the band’s behalf. Some of those managers became almost as famous as the bands themselves. Brian Epstein was a household name, while Malcolm McLaren, Don Arden and Peter Grant became infamous.

Others, such as The Clash’s Bernie Rhodes and Pink Floyd’s Steve O’Rourke, were happier out of the limelight, but they shared the same strange devotion to their upstart charges.

Guns, Cash and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Managers celebrates this special breed - often flawed low achievers but true believers, hard-nosed wheeler-dealers and schemers who were as at home talking to drug dealers and the Mafia as they were to corporate lawyers. Of the twelve managers featured, at least five of them were drug enthusiasts and four of them liked having guns to hand. Four of them died young - one committed suicide, one may have been murdered. Two others escaped a premature death by the skin of the teeth.

Although times have changed and Simon Fuller has given us a master class in twenty-first-century band management, one thing remains the same: like the bands they ran, the managers were all world class.

Book courtesy of Mainstream Publishing.
www.mainstreampublishing.com

James Henderson

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