Siren Song_My Life in Music

by Gareth Murphy

  I remember one New Year’s Eve when Irving Azoff sent us tickets to a Bette Midler show only hours before it was to start. They were Irving’s tickets, and at the last minute, something had come up. Miraculously, we only arrived ten minutes late, exceptionally punctual by our low standards. Bette Midler was already onstage and saw us pushing past people to reach our seats. “Well, there they are, late as usual,” she announced midperformance, “that famous tag-team duo, Seymour and Linda Stein, better known as the Battling Steins.”

  Even long since divorced, our fights were still the talk of the town. Once, at the turn of the nineties, there we were again, the odd couple, sitting in the back seat of a cab, moving through some sunny New York afternoon. We’d been divorced for fifteen years, but bound by history and two daughters who’d become young women, I still had to endure Linda’s legendary nagging. The blow I did in those years probably didn’t help. The last thing you need when you’re nicely coked up is your ex-wife screaming in your ear.

  Linda was the psychological equivalent of a food blender. To be fair to the mother of my daughters, however, she never turned her back on me, even though I constantly did disappearing acts on the girls. Beneath her stormy skies, there was a homely loyalty that I objectively didn’t deserve. If I forgot Samantha’s or Mandy’s birthdays, Linda would order flowers and put my name on the card, and any time I was in hospital, she was always the first to rush in. At the end of the day, for a guy who’d reached the top, I was a resounding failure at simpler things. When Samantha and Mandy came bounding into the office, my assistants, who were all young ladies themselves, could see how much they just wanted to spend time with their father. Alas, time was the one thing I just did not have enough of. Sire ran on my complete devotion. It was my baby. I was like a long-departed father who had another family now.

  For thirty years, I’d been a professional music junkie. I craved the thrill of the game more than I craved anything else. The only people who could stand my foot-to-the-floor company were other record business characters, because all we wanted to do was get the freshest, purest new stuff into our ears. Thing is, as long as you stuck together and kept finding the goods, you were forgiven for your otherwise difficult personality.

  The big gathering of our species was Midem, the record industry’s largest trade fair, in Cannes, just outside Nice on the French Riviera. It took place in late January or early February, along the exact same stretch of hotels where the Cannes Film Festival was held three months after we’d gone. The action spilled out from the conference center—or the Palais des Festivals, as it’s called—down along La Croisette, Cannes’s spectacular beachfront. With its palm trees and landmark hotels overlooking the Mediterranean, it was a glamorous location for such a pack of badly dressed mutts as the music business. For me, it was like going to a bank and taking out cash. In the early days, deals made at Midem saved Sire’s ass on a number of occasions, and even in the Warner era, it remained the place to meet up, collect demos, and share news.

  It’s every A&R man’s fantasy to think he can keep catching lightning in a bottle by chasing distant thunder into the hills of Tennessee. Let’s be honest, if you do it twice in your entire life, you’re among the most privileged. The secret to my longevity was that I loved getting out of New York and catching up with my contacts. I felt happiest when I was on the move, new scenery flashing past, on the way to hook up with my brethren. Most of the time, you wouldn’t find the next Elvis, but by turning up and keeping your friendships alive, lucky breaks occasionally skidded out of a lunch or dinner conversation and spilled onto your lap.

  It always amazed me how few American competitors I’d bump into at Midem. It’s an indication of how insular the American record business was and arguably still is. You certainly never saw Michael or Mo Ostin there. Most years, it felt like only a few of us had first picks over the entire European harvest, both indie and major. The two hotels to stay in were either the Carlton or the Majestic, both big Edwardian buildings on the seafront. The slightly cheaper alternative was the Martinez, which had the funkiest bar and generally got the biggest crowd at night. Room 130 at the Carlton was often reserved for me; it was a suite with a balcony facing the sea. I needed a room big enough to serve as a private office, because getting through the lobby or down to La Croisette, I was constantly being accosted by demo-wielding indies.

  For those three or four days, the lobby of the Carlton was a crowded trading floor, and if you hung around and watched, you’d see major deals being struck between familiar faces. Everyone was swarming around in all directions, and because there were no mobile phones in those days, we were leaving each other messages with the hotel concierges or in a big letter box at the conference hall. Between your various meetings, you’d tour the stands and say hello to your favorite labels, but the actual trade fair was so noisy, you generally arranged to see your most important contacts in a hotel or at Felix, the popular lunch spot.

  In the hills behind Cannes, there was a beautiful medieval town called Mougins. On the road up, hidden among eucalyptus and olive trees, there was probably the Riviera’s best restaurant and inn, Le Moulin de Mougins. It was run by a famous chef, Roger Vergé, and was the place to have dinner during Midem. That’s where you’d bump into all the big players, including the likes of Atlantic president Doug Morris or Sony Music chairman Tommy Mottola or Elektra boss Bob Krasnow. The clientele during Midem, however, was mostly made up of European moguls and indie bosses, as well as Allen Grubman and well over a hundred other American attorneys and, in fact, lawyers from all over the world. We all table-hopped, and even those who would peel back the table linen and chop out lines of coke on the wood surface were not frowned upon. The waiters were used to high-tipping deviants like us, and with typical French indifference, they got on with their jobs and let us do ours.

  After dinner, everyone would slowly gravitate back down to the hotel bars along the Cannes seafront, especially the Martinez, where I could barely get a drink or sneak off to the toilet for the number of people trying to shove demos down my throat. The thing about Cannes is that as well as the huge film festival and Midem, there were other trade fairs around the year for TV production, advertising, duty-free products, and other prestige industries. That whole stretch of coast has long been a popular hangout in summer for the superrich, who’d moor their yachts and visit the high-class casinos and designer boutiques. It was like a French mix of Miami Beach and Las Vegas, with its own back line of drug dealers, escort girls, limo drivers, hustlers, and party people feeding off the nonstop action.

  If you were gay, Midem was like Christmas, because you were chatted up constantly by local guys, both gay and straight, usually artists, deejays, TV presenters, publicists, or other colorful showbiz characters, whose English was sometimes so limited they got to the point in about ten words. There’s nothing like a serious language barrier to cut straight through all the nonsense, and a few times, my evening plans cartwheeled off into some hotel room. Still, I generally managed to mix business and pleasure in the right order. Believe it or not, I was one of the best behaved at Midem. The more adventurous miscreants among us would actually stay in the handful of rooms they had in Le Moulin de Mougins. If you wanted to lose your mind on gourmet cuisine while burning holes through your pockets and nostrils, up in the hills was where you played.

  It was nearly impossible to get much sleep anywhere, so for all the jet-lagged, coked-up insomniacs, the last refuge was this hellhole of a nightclub called La Chunga, possibly the ugliest dive on the French Riviera. I was dragged in once or twice and avoided it like the bubonic plague. For three nights every year, all the record dons, with nowhere left to go, flocked inside like bats into a bell tower. There they’d keep drinking, snorting, and shouting in other’s ears until the fear of sunrise scared them back into their coffins.

  As a community, we were all half-nuts and constantly trying to outbrag each other, but I think our common ailment created an unspoken empathy. We may have been com
petitors, but we helped each other professionally, and even in personal ways, we were the only stepbrothers most of us would ever have. We knew each other’s struggles, we’d been playground rejects and failed husbands, we’d all been broke or had worse problems. We were all stuck in the game with no way back to normal civilian life, not that any of us wanted out. We all suffered from a similar personality disorder, which we could easily see in each other, but weren’t ready to face in ourselves.

  All of that glued us together as a community. Like a flock of squawking birds on a rock in the hostile Southern Ocean, we were safer together. It’s your long-standing personal relationships that’ll land you big fish and keep you out of court. I was never sued, which is surely amazing. My sword and shield were a telephone and a freshly updated address book. You needed ears to prosper, of course; the rest ran on your relationships.

  In February 1990, I was in Cannes for our annual gathering when I bumped into Jill Sinclair, the wife of British superproducer Trevor Horn, a great team. While chatting in the aisles of the Palais, we decided to meet up a few days later in my London office to listen to Trevor’s latest creations. Midem was great for collecting demos from overseas producers who you’d only get to meet once a year, but it was not an ideal place to listen to music.

  Jill and Trevor, whose imprint was ZTT, were probably the most successful husband-and-wife production team in pop music. Trevor Horn was the genius of “Video Killed the Radio Star” fame, but as a producer for acts such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Grace Jones, he’d become a notorious perfectionist who always spent months, sometimes up to a year, sculpting his pop masterpieces into surefire hits. On paper, he boasted one of the highest batting averages in the game, but considering the amount of time and money he’d spend on each production, people in the business used to joke that he had to score smash hits just to recoup.

  His perfectionism might have driven him insane had it not been for his wife, Jill, who added discipline and business drive. She was tough, she was respected, and she always made sure Trevor’s hard work paid the bills. Whether it meant negotiating on his behalf, screaming at Trevor to stick to deadlines, or chasing up money from labels, she was the great woman behind the great producer.

  At Midem, Jill played me a track from one of their techno-pop groups, 808 State. It just wasn’t my cup of tea, but I had the perfect excuse. I knew 808 State was a studio group from Manchester whose U.S. rights had previously been licensed to Tommy Boy, a New York hip-hop label that had recently joined the Warner group. Tommy Boy founder Tom Silverman was a colleague of sorts, so to let Jill down easy, I explained as politely as I could, “I’m pretty sure Tom Silverman already played this for me. Isn’t he putting it out?”

  “No,” she hit back firmly. “We don’t want to do business with Tommy Boy anymore. It’s available.”

  “Well, Jill, it’s a bit of a tricky situation for me,” I said and pointed to her big bag. “Surely, you must have something else in there. Can you not play me something new?”

  “Well, there is something Trevor’s been working on, but it’s nowhere near completion. It’s actually for our new deal with Rob Dickins, and I know Trevor would kill me for playing it. Even Rob hasn’t heard it yet.”

  As any A&R man worth his weight in gold discs will tell you, you can often smell an important demo just from the sparkle in someone’s eyes. It’s the one they don’t want to play you. Whatever tape Jill had at the bottom of that bag was probably Trevor Horn’s latest all-in gamble to pay off an advance he might have already spent in the studio. Trevor was a perfectionist. I had to hear it, but convincing an iron lady like Jill Sinclair was going to require more than just begging. “You do realize,” I began, “that Rob Dickins has serious problems in the Warner family right now. Bob Krasnow at Elektra hates him. So does Mo. It’s even worse at Atlantic, where Doug Morris can barely speak to Rob.”

  “Really?” said Jill, looking concerned.

  “Yeah, it’s not his fault, but it’s getting very messy. If you ask me, the Americans can’t handle an A&R man running the British office. They used to be able to sign up British acts directly. The London office never had anyone that good, and now they’re all upset. Anyway, listen, Jill, I love Rob Dickins. We go back to 1979 when we set up the Echo and the Bunnymen label. I know how he thinks; if he hasn’t heard your tape yet, it’s not committed to anyone, and he won’t mind me hearing it. And under the current circumstances, I might even be the solution to his American problems. And yours.”

  A seasoned dealer like Jill Sinclair knew I was twisting her arm, but she had the instincts to know I wasn’t lying. In America, where radio promotion costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, boardroom politics often decided the fate of many a great record. She reached into her bag and handed me a tape, which I slid straight into the deck. “I can’t leave this with you,” she warned. “It’s nowhere near finished, but it’ll give you an idea of what Trevor’s doing right now.”

  As the intro rolled into its killer groove, it was like one of those scenes in a James Bond movie, where a mountain opens up and Blofeld’s rocket appears. It was an early mix of “Crazy” by Trevor Horn’s latest discovery, Seal. Everything screamed success; the synth riff, the panoramic space-rock sound, Seal’s suave voice, the spooky melody, but most of all, it was the message of the chorus that sent a shiver down my spine on first listen. We’re never gonna survive unless we are a little crazy? Yes, sir, I’ll toast to that. L’chaim!

  “Jill, this is a monster! Sign it to me and you have my absolute promise I’ll make sure it gets a major push in America.”

  “Okay, listen, I’m going to make you a conditional promise that you can get first call when Trevor’s finished. But it’ll need Rob’s blessing first.”

  “Can I talk to Rob? I’ll tell him I forced you to play me something new.”

  “Okay, do that, but go softly.”

  “Don’t worry, Jill, I’ve been in this game a long time.”

  When I got hold of Rob Dickins, he heard my enthusiasm bubbling down the telephone line. In the back of his head, I knew he was weighing up Sire’s cool factor with whatever headache he was experiencing with the bigger American label bosses in the Warner group. The alternative to letting little ol’ Sire release Seal was to run the risk of Mo, Bob Krasnow, or Doug Morris burying the record or just doing a halfhearted job. Stranger things happened in that era of big suits and even bigger egos. Bob Krasnow and Doug Morris had ears, but they didn’t particularly foresee or even welcome the electronic sound bursting out of England, certainly not in the way that Rob Dickins did. Of all the Warner labels, Sire was objectively the best imprint to break such an unfamiliar UK sound.

  “Okay, Seymour. I’m good with that,” replied Rob, “but it’s ultimately Jill and Trevor’s call.”

  As was his way, Trevor Horn took almost a year to finish the whole album, by which stage guess who was stirring it up in the background? None other than Mo Ostin, of course. When the following Midem rolled around, “Crazy” had just been released in England and was making a storm. Its American license hadn’t been signed yet, because as far as I was concerned, it was a done deal. On the promenade in Cannes, however, I bumped into Chris Wright, the cofounder of Chrysalis. Chris happened to be a good friend of Trevor’s and Jill’s and ran over to me.

  “Jill Sinclair’s been looking all over for you,” he said. “She’s really upset. Mo Ostin’s pushing her hard to give Seal to Irving Azoff’s new label, Giant, which she absolutely does not want to do. Go find her immediately. If you can’t find her, she told me to tell you that she gave you her word and she needs you to keep yours.”

  My head went into a rage. Los Angeles was waking up, so I called Mo and asked him straight out, “Why are you trying to screw me like this?” In his best nice-guy voice, Mo started pleading with me not to pursue Seal. “Look, I’ve just lost Geffen,” he said in reference to MCA’s purchase of Geffen Records from right under his nose. “So, I thought that signing a dea
l with Irving Azoff would be the solution. Please don’t fight me on this, Seymour.”

  “Mo, I heard that demo a year ago and fell immediately in love with it. I’m not giving this up.”

  “Please, Seymour, I’m just trying to give Irving a break. We’ve got to pull together and do what’s best for the whole group.”

  “Are you suggesting that Irving Azoff can’t find his own hits? Right now, he’s far more successful than both of us.”

  I was so pissed off. Not only was it seriously rude to conspire behind my back, Mo’s meddling made no financial sense. Warner owned all of Sire but only 50 percent of this new Giant Records venture. I had nothing against Irving Azoff, but if Mo didn’t believe in his talents to make Giant as successful as Geffen Records, he should have never invested in the first place. Needless to say, Mo kept being nice while not budging an inch, and because he was my superior with the power to torpedo the deal, I eventually made up my mind that if I couldn’t have this record, I’d figure out a way to get back at him.

  I called Bob Krasnow and arranged for Jill to play Trevor’s record. He called me back saying he liked the record and would pursue, and then a couple of days later, he called again cursing. “What the fuck did you just get me into, Seymour?”

  “What, is Mo’s leaning on you, too?”

  “No! You told me this was Trevor Horn’s record. Why didn’t you tell me it was from Rob Dickins?”

  “Hang on, Bob. Surely you know Rob’s done a license deal with Trevor and Jill for ZTT, but only for England. Jill and Trevor decide who gets it for the States. Forget Rob Dickins—it’s a Trevor Horn production.”