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Fact #169826

When:

Short story:

Always Guaranteed by Cliff Richard enters the UK albums chart where it will peak at No5 during a 25-week run.

Full article:


Mike Andrews (marketing Director, EMI) : I was at WEA, and then I joined EMI in 1984 as a senior product manager. That meant I was given a portfolio of artists to work with and I was very lucky to get a broad range of acts. I remember I begged for Pink Floyd and was told, ‘Yes, you can have them, but they’ll never make another album.’ Of course, that’s another story. I also got to work on the Food label and, of course, Cliff Richard.

He was coming out of a rather grey period, the last album hadn’t done spectacularly well, but it was the beginning of a long relationship over a lot of records, during which he hit a fantastic patch.

There was a guy at EMI back then, Andrew Prior, who introduced me to the concept of market research for a record, which I’d never done before. He believed everything in the business happens for a reason, so Cliff’s sales for example wouldn’t just drop off for no reason. So we went out and did an amazing piece of qualitative research, a huge book, massive, 200 to 300 pages, and they sat down with focus groups and Cliff, to his credit, listened to what people had to say, he cared what they thought. I’ve worked with artists who just don’t want to know about market research because they don’t want the public to tell them what to do.

But the research showed, for example, that 45 year old men all hated him, largely because their wives all thought he was great. They didn’t like their wives asking why Cliff didn’t have a beer gut and they did. Oddly enough, though, that meant 45 year old men were in the market to buy Cliff records as gifts for their wives. So that led to Cliff starting to get a bit of stubble and just loosen up a bit – but that’s secondary to the fact that his voice just kept getting better and better.

I was fortunate enough to get promoted quite rapidly, because the erosion process ahead of me was quite speedy, so I got to Marketing Director quite fast, and the first Cliff record I actually worked on was Always Guaranteed, which I think is still his biggest-ever selling studio album. It was a fantastic album and it took me off the fence.

Sometimes it all just comes together. The artist delivers a great record and the company has employed exactly the right group of people to work on it, and that’s what happened with Always Guaranteed.

One of his management team at the time was David Bryce who looked after the AAndR side of things for Cliff, and Bill Latham was around, kind of helping Cliff manage the spiritual side, or that’s my understanding of it. Malcolm Smith was more of a business manager.

Alan Tarney produced that album, and they brought it in to me and I just thought it was absolutely fantastic.

For me, the great tracks off that album were Some People, My Pretty One and Two Hearts, so it was full of great songs, but all the stars lined up on that album. The market research helped define the look of the sleeve and the videos, and we had a great team of people working on it.

That was one of the happiest times of my life, working on a great record with a great singer.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, August 2008, for Music Week)