Where creativity meets connection
Let’s have a rare moment of candour. I’ve a soft spot for public relations people - despite the unimpressed persona I prefer to adopt when they’re around. They’re imbued with a special kind of enthusiasm, despite long days spent trying to convince ungrateful journalists that their client is the most revolutionary thing to bless society since the printing press. It takes a unique kind of person. Someone blessed with an ability to see beneath the surface and foster unrelenting faith in that client’s value. And energy; they’ve always got loads of energy. They can be exhausting, but also often good for a few hair-raising ‘off-the-record’ stories about famous faces. And this is an industry built around stories, whether those are huge sporting comebacks, ground-breaking stage roles or triumphant endeavours. We might exist in the moment, but our lived experience can last forever if shared with others.
“Look at David Beckham,” says Alan Edwards. “He’s got to be one of the most iconic footballers of all time. I don't know if he was as good as George Best or Pele, but it's not really about his football.” Edwards is, in no uncertain terms, the Godfather of PR. His recently published memoir, I Was There: Dispatches From A Life In Rock And Roll, charts 50-odd years at the centre of the storm. Essentially a potted history of modern entertainment, it brings together a cast of hundreds for an epic glimpse behind the headlines.
He and his company, Outside, have looked after the publicity needs for almost everyone, from David Bowie to The Spice Girls. It’s involved the crafting of some myths and, perhaps, keeping a few things under control. He’s propelled fashion icons and athletes into the headlines, creating a new breed of celebrity along the way. He was also lucky enough to be involved with Beckham, the former Manchester United star turned international sports mogul, from the beginning.
“He hadn't even fully broken into the main team. I had this meeting with him, and it was like being in the Hovis advert. He was living in digs on this cobbled street. It was snowing outside. I was thinking; ‘Oh, my God, this is good.’ He didn't have enough money for the meter and was cooking baked beans for dinner.” Even then, the future England captain already had ambitions about his impact on the game. There were aspirations to combat misogyny and racism, as well as promoting football in the United States.
“I couldn’t believe it. At this stage, he's still pretty much an unknown, yet he had that entire vision… Which he's kind of ended up doing in one way or another. He’s a remarkable man. He’s very shy, and not a natural talker, but the storytelling was everything.”
There’s arguably a correlation between Beckham and Elvis. Both found incredible fame at a young age, had a ‘sticky’ middle period in their career and were the first of a new breed of stars in their respective fields. “One of the very first interviews I remember David doing was with the Sunday Times style section. Before, he’d said he wanted a certain jacket, with a certain type of stitching, and to have his hair done like Elvis.’ It's funny to say that now. I don't know if his mum and dad were fans, but maybe he’d looked at Elvis more closely than I first realised.”
The anecdotes in Edwards’s book have all been drawn from his own diaries, which split between note taking as part of his job and just a way to break the tedium of being on extended tours on the other side of the world. “Often it was quite lonely. A lot of the time you're on your own, on buses or in hotel rooms. I was always just scribbling stuff down… on the back of programmes, on tickets or bits of paper. It occurred to me that I was sort of witnessing cultural history. So, I just wrote a lot, and I also kept work diaries every day.”
While the latter mostly contained mundane entries about getting a haircut or arrangements for a meeting with the Sex Pistols, they did provide an important framework for fitting all the tales together. Over the years, he’d already started telling these stories. There’d be long press trips, or he’d be stuck in a hotel bar somewhere, so Edwards would keep companions entertained with tales of the Rolling Stones or playing football with Bob Marley. When it came to pressing all these into a book, his first draft wasn’t quite long enough.
The solution was to revisit his time in Brighton. Taking the train down and checking into The Grand - The Who’s film Quadrophenia clearly playing in his mind. “It's so lovely and old fashioned. I retraced all my childhood steps around the town. I went over to the school which I used to go to, which was called De La Salle [now Cardinal Newman]. They were having building work done, so no one was there. I just walked in and sat down in the classroom where I remember getting caned. All these memories were coming back to me.” He says the city was quite rough in those days, still quite like the place detailed in Greene’s Brighton Rock.
Aside from the town’s reputation for shady character and dodgy shops, Edwards also remembers seeing Pink Floyd play the entirety of Atom Heart Mother at the Dome. “It just went on a bit to me. I went and sold my Floyd albums the next day! But I saw some great shows there and had some mad nights in a pub on the Steine.” So, a big chunk of the book was written while walking around the city and allowing the memories to wash over him.
Thematically, the book sits somewhere between Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods, the supposed diary of a raucous Led Zeppelin tour, and James Brown’s Animal House, which follows the Loaded founder’s equally colourful journalism career. The anecdotes in I Was There are admittedly less robust, but no less mischievous and intriguing.
One ludicrous misadventure involves Edwards flying a band and a large group of journalists out to a Swiss mountain for an album launch, only for it to collapse into drunken chaos. Fortunately for everyone’s wellbeing, the start of his career coincided with the demise of epic-scaled rock’n’roll excess.
The on-the-road exploits of Led Zeppelin were swiftly being replaced by a new sense of professionalism. At least that was the intent. There was always scope for a clever bit of reality-tweaking. One fabulous anecdote in I Was There reveals how Edwards staged photos of a young Midge Ure (then a member of a promising boyband) posing bandaged, but curiously cheerful, after a supposed car crash. A pop star cheating death inspired captivating headlines for the next day’s editions. Few editors paused to question why the singer had received such prompt medical attention, then returned to the still-steaming wreck.
Reading between the lines of the bright and breezy autobiography, it reveals an industry entering a golden age. Rising from a world still dominated by pipe-smoking chaps in three-piece suits, who used the postal service, it became a fast-paced landscape where almost anything could be turned into column inches.
He got into the game in 1974, having previously worked for a laundry company. “I’d do collections from the back of all the big hotels, like The Dorchester. Unbeknown to me, years later, I'd be going in the front door. But I was still dealing with dirty washing!” He then started writing for the music paper Sounds, which eventually brought him into the orbit of legendary publicist Keith Altham; receiving a job offer due to his plain-speaking and obvious enthusiasm for music.
Public relations in the music industry was still a nascent resource. Instead, you’d have pluggers getting records played on radio and advertisements spreading the word about tours or new releases. Few people specialised in getting their clients (intentionally) into the pages of the daily newspapers. There were a few mavericks like the Stone’s iconic manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and to some extent David Bowie, who knew what kind of story would excite and enthral the general population. But in the 50s and 60s, the sector was more geared up to promote movie stars. “Really, it all came over from America and Hollywood. But it was a tiny thing. I always say there were about five or six people doing this. It seems like you knew everybody. But, over the years, it became this big sort of corporate beast.” He tells me the industry became very process driven in the 90s and 00s, but in other ways the roots of what he does can be traced back through history.
The job is reasonably simple, if someone has the appropriate skillset. You meet a client, and establish what makes them interesting. “But what are your hobbies? What was your inspiration? I try to find out something off the wall, And that's the angle. We bring that story to life. In one way, the role has changed beyond imagination, with all the different platforms, but the essence of it remains the same.” He says the best PR people are often ex-journalists, because both roles involve looking at huge amounts of information and understanding how to render it compelling.
Born in South London, Edwards was adopted by a lovely couple in Worthing. “My brother, Tony still lives there with his wife, and I went to school in Brighton. So that became where I hung out. And I obviously went to gigs there. I saw so many great bands. Steve Miller, Dr John… I mean, there was a credible band every week at the Dome.”
Brighton & Hove is a very different place to what he remembers, but it turns out Worthing was an equally interesting place to be during the late 60s. “I saw loads of bands there. Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin… It's unbelievable. Laurel & Hardy did their last ever proper gig in Worthing. They split up outside the Pavillion.” As with everything, the touring scene has hugely changed over time. Now, bands will book 10 nights at London’s O2, rather than venturing into the provinces. It almost seems inconceivable that the industry’s biggest names would travel the length of the country.
“I saw Bowie at the Assembly Hall with 150 people. If you look at the Ziggy Stardust tour dates, he starts in Worthing and ends in Aylesbury.” Out on the road used to be where bands would get musically tight, develop their audience and establish an identity. One of Edwards’s clients, punk legends, The Stranglers, famously performed over 350 shows before getting a record deal.
“Nowadays, it can be a problem when an act gets on a TV show, and the next day they're playing Wembley Arena. I think that's a shame.” There’s obviously lots of cool, grassroots music going on in towns across the country, but it’s medium-sized venues which are suffering due to the downturn in nationwide touring.
“I was talking to Serge from Kasabian about this. He started talking about Can, the German group, saying they were one of his favourite bands. I mentioned I’d seen them at Sussex University, and he couldn’t believe it. I remembered it because everyone was lying on the floor, clearly stoned out their minds! But the band were great. The funding was taken away for a lot of that sort of stuff. So many great British music acts came through universities and colleges, but that circuit doesn't really exist anymore.”
Now being prepared for release in paperback form, I Was There is also providing the basis for shows of his own. Heading to Hove’s The Old Market on Fri 7 Feb, I Was There: In Conversation With Alan Edwards builds on his hugely successful talks at Cheltenham Literature Festival and The Victoria and Albert Museum.
“It's not just my story. It's a story of the media and photographers, and how all this came to be, and what really happened behind the scenes. There'll be some great stuff involving Keith Moon or Keith Richards, which is really funny. But I talk about mental health in music as well. It kind of gave me a breakdown in the early 80s. That was scary to deal with, because you couldn't talk about it then. It's quite relevant, especially with what happened to Liam Payne.”
He also discusses his experiences of adoption, echoing the themes across the book. Edwards spent years contemplating his own heritage. He knew his father was American, which brought poignancy to numerous stateside work trips. “I'd invent different backgrounds and ethnicities for myself. Some days I'd be Cherokee, some days I'd be Italian, some days I'd be Jewish. It just changed all the time. Although, I do feel at one with who and what I am. I have invented my own life and career, and it's all merged in. But of course, I didn't know that I was doing it. You wouldn't consciously do that.”
I suggest that these experiences might have manifested as a fascination with stories or been a factor in his gravitation towards outlying stars and tribes. Perhaps he’s always been subconsciously carving out his own place in the world. “I suppose I have, but I still have the insecurities that relate to it…”
He tells me he never managed to meet his birth mother, who was living only a couple of stops along the tube line. They’d spoken on the phone before she passed away, but this didn’t offer much detail. “It left quite a lot of unanswered questions. But I’ve created my own life. I've now got my own family.” With a beam, he reveals he welcomed his 12th grandchild into the world only this morning. “It's kind of a big family. Big and spread out. But it's still a thing.”
One of the more intriguing, and perhaps problematic, sections in both the book and his shows concerns the media’s indifference towards diversity. Edwards details trying to get images of Teddy Pendergrass into the papers – only to be bizarrely informed that the legendary soul singer’s skin tone would cause issues in the printing process. “All the excuses were coming out about the colour levels and stuff… I remember being on tour with Teddy, and he was big. He'd sold out five Hammersmith Apollos, but I couldn't get him in the newspapers.”
The attitudes ran on both side of the division. Edwards recalls flying out to Jamaca with a large group of journalists to meet a promising reggae act. Their label’s ambition was to promote the band with a ‘One World’ ideal, but the musicians had other thoughts. “They were like: ‘No, no, no, we don't want to live together. We want black people to live separately to white people.’ And I'm thinking that it was not the message the record had in mind!”
He says he’s seen a lot of progression in how black music acts or events are written about. He’s long been involved with the immensely successful MOBO Awards. But the media environment is still far from perfect. “I really made a point of working with artists like that. Now we work with Usher, but before had Janet Jackson, and reggae groups like Jimmy Cliff, Gregory Isaacs and Bunny Wailer; but it was considered a bit odd in the 80s. ‘Shouldn't you just be doing pop or rock music...?’ I’ve also represented Naomi Campbell for 30 years. You can imagine some of the conversations there, because she was very stereotyped as an angry black woman. I do hope, in some way, I've managed to influence a few people in their thinking.”
In its ability to shape wider conversations, Public Relations has seemingly seeped into almost every sector of society. Not even politics is safe from public opinion being nudged in certain directions. If you look at certain politicians, their rhetoric is no longer driven by ideology, but instead a keen sense of marketing.
“Whatever you think of Trump's politics, he's a fantastic communicator. He comes out with a line a minute. What's the latest one...? He's worried about showers! He says the water strength isn't strong enough, and that's one of the things he's gonna do. You couldn't make it up. He’s in permanent PR mode. Whereas Kamala Harris, who clearly had serious intent, just didn't have that touch, and couldn’t break through to people.”
We all have busy lives now so, whether we like it or not, the power of the soundbite has become extraordinary. The new breed of politicians understands this. It echoes back to the image of a young Midge Ure standing beside a fake crashed car. It cuts through the static and grabs our attention, which is a fascinating phenomenon.
The tidal wave of PR can be traced back to New York’s Madison Avenue in the 50s, when everyone is encouraged get a washing machine in the post-war period. Then, in the 60s, Hollywood stars start becoming heavily promoted. Actors like Rock Hudson are having their image heavily crafted. Come the 1970s, and music has stepped into the frame, with masters like Malcolm McLaren dictating the headlines. “He was a wonderful storyteller. I mean, he took this band who were fairly regular and made them into this global thing that we still work with today.” Forward to the 90s, and you’ve got the age of celebrity, where the Beckhams could secure substantial sums for the image rights at their wedding (in a groundbreaking deal which Edwards secured), while New Labour sharpened its image for a less combative relationship with the tabloid press.
“Harold Wilson had done it a little, as had Thatcher, but Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell took it to another place. Then again, the roots of Trump are in entertainment. PR, really. We live in a world where every issue you listen to on the news or on the Today program is about the perception. Like with the NHS; we don't really know if it's in crisis or not, or how many beds there are. But it only needs someone to come out and use a catchphrase, and suddenly that's what's debated in Parliament today. But surely it was always thus. If we went back 400 years, some people would be communicating better than others.
“A journalist is maybe sifting through thousands of bits of information every week. So, you need to be able to present yourself in an exciting way. People like Mozart or Handel were certainly good at that. Because this is all about creativity. A PR, to me, is a storyteller. It's about identifying what's entertaining… What is interesting?”
I Was There: In Conversation With Alan Edwards comes to Hove’s The Old Market on Fri 7 Feb 2025 (6.45pm). Find tickets HERE. His book, I Was There: Dispatches From A Life In Rock And Roll, is available now via Simon & Schuster.
Stuart Rolt
Featured What's On
Stay in the loop
Keep up to date with latest news, guides and events with the SALT newsletter.
