Simon Says

“Any artist coming into the music industry now who dreams of being the next U2 or Michael Jackson should just forget it,” declares the legendary Simon Napier-Bell. “That isn’t going to happen anymore. You’re going to find artists finding their own audiences. I’m sure you’ll get audiences of up to a million, maybe, but I think audiences of 20 million will be very, very rare. Because that only ever happened because record companies were focusing everything onto the one artist to make their own promotion and distribution of records more cost-effective.”

When it comes to the business of music, very few individuals have been there, done that, and sold the t-shirt as thoroughly and as often as veteran player Simon Napier-Bell. A band manager, promoter, journalist and author, he’s looked after everyone from Marc Bolan, Boney M and The Yardbirds to Japan, Sinitta and Wham! After five decades of involvement, he doesn’t necessarily see the current travails of the music business as being a bad thing.
“There’s a lot of talk about the demise of the music industry, but who wants a music industry anyway?” he says. “There’s no demise of music – there’s just a demise of the record industry. Which is splendid! Nobody wants to buy records anymore – they want MP3s and downloads and so on. I don’t hear anybody complaining except for record company people, and they’ll all be gone in a few years. And then we’ll be in this beautiful new music industry which will be rather like the music industry at its very beginnings. It’ll be much more diffuse, much smaller audiences, but artists can go online and find an audience for their own music.”
Now aged 71, Napier-Bell mainly lives with his boyfriend in Thailand. “I’m in Pattaya, which is an hour-and-a-half from Bangkok. It’s a mad town – it’s a seaside town like Bournemouth with a red-light district like Toyko. Most excellent!”
He’s still working for a crust, but no longer manages bands. “No, I don’t manage acts any more. I do a lot of consultancy work, so I meet a lot of managers who don’t know quite what to do – or who have a good act but haven’t a lot of managerial experience. So I do that, and I give talks, write books. I’m working on a book at the moment. It’s taken me four months so far, and there’s four months to go. I do it about every five years, and it eats up an awful lot of time.”
His most successful book remains 2001’s Black Vinyl, White Powder – a 50-year history of pop’s relationship with illicit substances that made a fairly convincing argument that ‘drugs are sometimes as important as talent’.
“This new one will be a lot bigger and broader than that. It’s very ambitious. I realised about three months ago that I’d bitten off more than I could chew, but I’m not very good at giving up on things. I’m trying not to choke! It doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s about the music business but in a broader sense even than Black Vinyl. So it’s a lot of work and a lot more to do, but that’s alright. I’m passed the stage where you keep thinking you’ll never get it done.”
As a former boy-band manager himself, how does Napier-Bell rate our own Louis Walsh?
“Louis? He’s done very well. He’s a splendid chap. Boy groups have always been best managed by people who understood exactly what boy groups should look like and Louis has a great eye for that. Is he still doing new groups or what?”
His latest proteges are Jedward.
“Oh, he took on Jedward did he?” he laughs. “I’ve gotta say, I’ve never understood why anybody ever objected to Jedward. You had stupid Simon Cowell saying, ‘look this is a singing contest!’ No, it wasn’t! The X-Factor is about X-factor – and Jedward had the X-factor. Something you couldn’t quite put your finger on, but which was gonna make them stars. Nobody cares about all this stuff about singing and writing songs – all that can all be done for you.”
Does Napier-Bell still keep a close eye on the pop charts?
“Now and again, when I go away to give a talk about music at something, as I’ll be doing at the Electric Picnic, I have to go through the Top 20 and listen to every song because I haven’t a clue. And if I haven’t done it for three months – which is what happens when you’re writing a book – then there’s not a single one I know. There’s not even an artist I know.”
Finally, any words of advice to aspiring band managers out there?
“Just try to keep your wits about you, and make sure you enjoy yourself. If you’re not enjoying it, what’s the point?”