Fact #34532
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Carlo Little : On my fourth gig (as drummer for The Rolling Stones] Brian Jones took me aside and said the boys wanted me to stay. I replied, 'I'm sorry. I have to earn a living; I can't sponge off my mum.' The boys got £10 a gig and my share was £2. They were living in a really grotty flat and, after they'd paid their expenses, they weren't making much profit.
I said, 'Why don't you try Charlie Watts?' The most stupid thing I've ever said.
Of course, I didn't realise that a few years later they'd all be multi-millionaires and I was turning down the chance to be part of a world-changing band.
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Carl Leighton-Pope (promoter / entrepreneur) : If you look at the origins of our business, in the 50s everything was a flat fee deal. If you wanna play, you’ll get £10, or if you’re bigger maybe £25. It didn’t matter how many people came in through the door, or how much the tickets cost, that was your fee. And those deals were done on a handshake, there was no paperwork. Right up until the 1970s I spent my life doing all my deals on the phone, because we had no faxes or e-mails or any of that. Even if you turned up at the gig and there were 10,000 people there, you didn’t even think to ask the promoter for more than the flat fee. If you were lucky you might get a bonus. There was one famous club where, if you got a second encore, they’d give you a bottle of brandy, and you thought that was great. Nobody spoke in terms of percentage deals.
I was very lucky in the early sixties because I was working in a club with a load of great bands, but really we all just lived for the weekend. Friday night you took a handful of pills, which kept you awake til Monday, then you’d go into the West End to The Flamingo, The Scene, The Marquee, The Roaring 20s. This was when The Who were just starting out, they’d only lately changed their name from The High Numbers, and only 35 people came to see their first night at The Marquee.
If you went to the Gioconda in Denmark Street at lunchtime everybody would be in there talking. If you walked down the street you'd bump into a music publisher and he'd be looking for a boy-girl duo because he had a hit song that was perfect for that combination. It was our equivalent of the Brill Building in New York.
Denmark Street was on the east side of Charing Cross Road, then Shaftesbury Avenue was the theatres, Oxford Street and Regent Street was the shops, and Soho was in the middle of it all. It was like a square which was our village.
So many people who started then went on to become huge figures in the music business. Harvey Goldsmith, Barry Dickins, Tony Smith, Neil Warnock, and myself, we started this business and we’re still here.
By the end of the seventies and the beginning of the 80s, agents were starting to ask the promoters questions about these deals, like, "How many people?" "What’s the capacity?", "What’s the ticket price?" People suddenly wanted to see ticket manifests, legal stamped documents, showing exactly how many tickets were sold. Then we started to count what we called "deadwood" which was every unsold ticket, and if you deducted that from the venue capacity you knew how many tickets had been sold.
All that started in the early 80s. We wanted to know what the expenses had been, for things like putting up posters, stuff like that. This all happened because the acts became more powerful, and we took the power away from the promoters. We were in charge of the deal.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, for Audience magazine, Feb 2019)
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I said, 'Why don't you try Charlie Watts?' The most stupid thing I've ever said.
Of course, I didn't realise that a few years later they'd all be multi-millionaires and I was turning down the chance to be part of a world-changing band.
———————————————————————————
Carl Leighton-Pope (promoter / entrepreneur) : If you look at the origins of our business, in the 50s everything was a flat fee deal. If you wanna play, you’ll get £10, or if you’re bigger maybe £25. It didn’t matter how many people came in through the door, or how much the tickets cost, that was your fee. And those deals were done on a handshake, there was no paperwork. Right up until the 1970s I spent my life doing all my deals on the phone, because we had no faxes or e-mails or any of that. Even if you turned up at the gig and there were 10,000 people there, you didn’t even think to ask the promoter for more than the flat fee. If you were lucky you might get a bonus. There was one famous club where, if you got a second encore, they’d give you a bottle of brandy, and you thought that was great. Nobody spoke in terms of percentage deals.
I was very lucky in the early sixties because I was working in a club with a load of great bands, but really we all just lived for the weekend. Friday night you took a handful of pills, which kept you awake til Monday, then you’d go into the West End to The Flamingo, The Scene, The Marquee, The Roaring 20s. This was when The Who were just starting out, they’d only lately changed their name from The High Numbers, and only 35 people came to see their first night at The Marquee.
If you went to the Gioconda in Denmark Street at lunchtime everybody would be in there talking. If you walked down the street you'd bump into a music publisher and he'd be looking for a boy-girl duo because he had a hit song that was perfect for that combination. It was our equivalent of the Brill Building in New York.
Denmark Street was on the east side of Charing Cross Road, then Shaftesbury Avenue was the theatres, Oxford Street and Regent Street was the shops, and Soho was in the middle of it all. It was like a square which was our village.
So many people who started then went on to become huge figures in the music business. Harvey Goldsmith, Barry Dickins, Tony Smith, Neil Warnock, and myself, we started this business and we’re still here.
By the end of the seventies and the beginning of the 80s, agents were starting to ask the promoters questions about these deals, like, "How many people?" "What’s the capacity?", "What’s the ticket price?" People suddenly wanted to see ticket manifests, legal stamped documents, showing exactly how many tickets were sold. Then we started to count what we called "deadwood" which was every unsold ticket, and if you deducted that from the venue capacity you knew how many tickets had been sold.
All that started in the early 80s. We wanted to know what the expenses had been, for things like putting up posters, stuff like that. This all happened because the acts became more powerful, and we took the power away from the promoters. We were in charge of the deal.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, for Audience magazine, Feb 2019)