THE MANAGER
25 November 2006

Some weeks ago I got an email from a Rob Cotter. He reminded me that I had made soup at his and his partner’s home in Sale, Manchester last year. I remembered. And I remembered their house is also a recording studio where they took pride in the fact that none of the gear they used was digital. All analogue. Rob and partner Julie McLaren have a record label aptly called Analogue Catalogue. Julie produced and recorded the bands and Rob ran the label. I had no idea what sort of music they put out but I liked the vibe of the place.

In this email Robb Cotter wanted to know if I was still active as ‘the manager’ and if so, would I be up for dispensing some wisdom for the formerly agreed sum of £100? I received this email almost 20 years to the day when I made a short film called The Manager to which Rob was referring.

So back to 1986. After allowing hundreds of thousands of pounds of WEA’s (Warner Elektra Atlantic) money to be squandered on building Pete Waterman’s studio and the lack of success of Brilliant or any of the other bands that I had signed, I decided it was time for me to retire from the music business. Even at the time I recognised it had corrupted me to a point beyond what I liked to recognise as myself. I wrote the following, knowingly overblown, resignation letter to the industry at large and to me in particular;

I am now 33 and a third. Time for a revolution in my life…. Must find rest of text to go here.

I was going to get on with doing the thing that I had wanted to do ever since jacking in art school at the age of 20: write the great and sprawling American novel. Only not American.

But before I started to write I wanted to cleanse my soul of all the plastic pop I’d allowed myself to be embroiled in over the previous 12 months. So I decided to write and record a singer-songwriter type album. I wrote all the songs in a week, went into a studio in Dagenham, Essex and recorded the songs the next week, only using real musicians. And in the week after I went to see Alan McGee, who ran the then-hippest indie label in town, Creation Records, to see if he wanted to put it out. He did.

I did a photo session for the sleeve. I wanted to look like one of those also-ran singer-songwriters from New York in the early 1960s, before they grew their hair and never made it because they weren’t Bob Dylan. Basically I had Phil Ochs in mind. I had no idea what Phil Ochs sounded like but I loved the covers to his first two albums.

The album I did was called The Man. I chose that because I thought it looked like a Johnny Cash album title. The sound of the record was folk mixed with a bit of country and I sang it in a slightly exaggerated version of my own Scottish accent. This record was total indulgence. It was that need to get something out of your system before you can move on. I had no plans for doing anything to promote it. No live dates. No nothing. It was enough for me to hold the finished album in my hands and look at the cover.

Alan McGee seemed to like the record and gave me £1000 to go away and make a promo clip of one of the tracks so they could use it to promote the album. I took the grand and, with long-term friend and film-maker Bill Butt, went off and made The Manager. The Manager is a ten-minute film of me pushing a dust cart along a country lane and pontificating to the camera. The thing is though I have not seen the film since Bill Butt and I made it 20 years ago. This Rob Cotter wants to know if the offer I was making in the film still stands. I’ve no real idea what this offer is and since as I’ve kept hardly any copies of records, books, films I have done, there is no way I can check. ‘Why keep anything when it’s all on the internet?’ is my sort-of latter-day defence. I put ‘The Manager’ and ‘Bill Drummond’ into Google and up comes a link to YouTube. I click on it and within 20 seconds I am watching this substantially deteriorated film of myself, walking along a country lane pushing a dustcart, spouting all sorts of pompous stuff. But I am hardly listening to the words. What is holding my attention is how horrifically young I look, how lean I look and how stupidly I am behaving. I hit pause and rushed through to the bathroom to have a look at myself in the mirror. How the fuck did all that ageing happen? Who gave it permission? And the hair! I was never supposed to lose my hair. My 93-year-old father hasn’t. My grandfather didn’t. So why me?

Back in front of the screen, I press play and listen to what I’ve got to say. I’m going on about having left the music business to get on with the greater things in life and how I would never soil my hands in the grubby world of pop music again. But with the twisted logic of my new vantage point of being above it all, I have elected myself to be the manager of the music business. Of the whole thing. I’m overall in charge of every band, orchestra, record label, radio station, publisher, promoter, the Musicians Union, the Performing Rights Society, everything. I’m going to let them all get on with it just as they are doing already. But if anybody wants my advice, I will be willing to give it. All they have to do is to post their problem or query to me, The Manager, at PO Box whatever, enclosing a cheque for £100 and once the cheque has cleared I will respond with my advice.

The PO Box was a real address that I had already used. I don’t know if the film was ever used anywhere. Why would it be? It was shot on 16mm, fuck knows where it is now. And fuck knows how anybody has got a copy of it to put on YouTube. That said, the copy on YouTube looks like a VHS copy of a VHS copy and one that has corroded in quality over the years.

So, to the point. This Rob Cotter wants to know if I’m still in business as The Manager as he needs some advice on the record label he and his partner have. I emailed him back saying that I have long since retired from that role but the pair of them should drive over the Pennines and come to one of the Introduction To The17 events that I will be doing in Huddersfield in a few weeks’ time. Maybe what I have to say in the performance will answer their questions.

Last night the pair of them turned up, listened to what I had to say, took part in the performance and we chatted afterwards. Although they talked through some of the problems they were having with the record label the main focus of the discussion was that Julie was seven months’ pregnant but looked like she was going to drop any day, actually more like any second. We talked about the score that I had done to celebrate the birth of a newborn baby and how I had just been reworking it and it now has to have 17 generations for the performance to be complete. But more importantly I asked them if they would be up for being the first couple to start off a performance of this particular score. They were. So I hope before this book is finished I will have been up to their place and kicked off SCORE 9, WELCOME.

That was last night. This morning I’m writing this and worrying about ageing and loss of hair. But there is a new idea that is clamouring for attention. Maybe I should revisit The Manager idea. Do it online. themanager.com and .net have gone but themanager.tv seems to be still up for grabs. Get the domain name set up, a simple site and a Paypal account and off I go. Could be a money-spinner. I could do with some money-spinning. What do you think?