He’s the man who said no to The Stones, helped turn Rory Gallagher into a guitar godhead and at various times managed some of the biggest names in rock `n’ roll. Now music agent and artist manager Paul Charles has put his long and eventful life in sound down in a new book.
Adventures in Wonderland is the Derry native’s memoir, and it looks back on his time managing the careers of Van Morrison, Ray Davies of The Kinks, The Waterboys and Dexys Midnight Runners, as well as launching Tanita Tikaram - the teenage star whose debut album sold almost five million copies.
Throw in his friendships with the likes of Robert Plant, Tom Waits, Crosby, Stills and Nash, John Prine, The Undertones, The Blue Nile, and Buzzcocks, and Charles’s battered rolodex reads like a who’s who (and why they’re a who) of the last fifty years of music.
It all began for him in Magherafelt one faithful day in 1963 when he first heard a new band from Liverpool exploding from the big Bush speaker in his mother’s kitchen.
The 14-year-old schoolboy wasn’t that much of a music fan back then but when he heard the brash and buoyant sound of Please Please Me by The Beatles his life changed forever.
"It was a very pleasing sound," he says on the phone from his home in Primrose Hill in London. "Listening to them made you feel good about yourself, not just them and their music. They had this combination of the music and their personalities.
"The sound they created was so infectious, so melodic. If you’d only heard the songs once, you thought you’d been listening to them all your life. It made me feel good about myself, I felt ten foot tall."
Within a year, Charles was managing his first band, local act Blues by Five, and later he would print up business cards reading `Author Agent and Beatles Fan.’
"I’ve always thought that the music business is a wonderland and more the music side than the business side." he says.
He’s seen it all from both ends of the telescope. He co-founded the Asgard agency in the early seventies and has booked and promoted shows by The Police, U2, Dire Straits, David Gilmour, BB King, Emmylou Harris, and John Lee Hooker.
The gentlemanly Mr Charles is also a prolific fiction writer and has published 19 crime novels, but music remains his first love. Adventures in Wonderland is a joy to dip in and out of.
Take the first time he met one Sir George Ivan Morrison.
"He came to my office," Charles recalls. "The secretary buzzed me and said `there’s a man out here calling himself Van Morrison.’ I came out and he walked up to me and said `hi, I’m Van Morrison’ and I literally could not get a word out of my mouth. It had never happened to me before and it certainly hasn’t happened to me since.
"It wasn’t just meeting my hero but that his musical genius had had such a bit impact on my life and being."
It turned out Van wanted to meet Charles because he was a fan of his music reviews in the Belfast press and in particular Charles’s two-line review of Van’s epochal 1968 masterpiece, Astral Weeks, an album that Charles quite rightly regards as a spiritual artefact.
"When you’ve lived in the time when Astral Weeks was released, it affects you in more ways than you can describe in words," he says. "It’s not a record you can't put on at a dinner party or when you’re reading the papers.
"I have found from the first time I played it to the last time, which was probably a week and a half ago, you have to be prepared to sacrifice everything else apart from breathing and if you do that, it will take you along."
And like many people who actually know the turbulent priest of Celtic soul and blues, Charles says that Van is really a cuddly bear underneath it all.
"I find him to be a gentleman and very, very professional, and extremely funny and very together. There were never any grey areas with Van," he says. "You knew exactly where you stood. There was always clarity on any of the deals we did. I found him to be great company, incredible sense of humour.
"If you do your gig as well as he does his gig, then everything’s ok, everything’s fine. However, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly and so if you are not doing your gig well than maybe you might think that Van is this that and the other.
"Van came from that school. He’s got the music business so well sussed; he knows how to work it and yet at the same time, he can go away and come up with the songs he comes up with. I find that people who can do one of those things can’t do the other and vice versa but Van has both angles very well covered."
It remains a cutthroat music world and sharks still patrol these waters. However, it is to Charles’s credit that his book is a zippy and mostly light-hearted read that makes the art - and the not the business - the centre of action.
From the outset he says Adventures in Wonderland is not about settling old scores, but he must have encountered some pretty rum customers over his long years at the heart of the music scene.
"Not on the stage, it’s the other side of the stage," he laughs. "My logic was that I would only take on artists that I loved. If I really loved their work and how they did it then I thought I could do a good job for them.
"If you find yourself taking on an act and thinking it’s not really for me but we might make a bit of money that’s when you’re on the road to disaster and working with the acts I’ve worked with, it’s always been a joy.
"I’m not naïve enough to think that there aren’t bad people in the music business, but I have been lucky."
Then there were his dealings with The Rolling Stones when he was asked to book their gig at Slane Castle in 1982. It was the first time the band had played Ireland since 1965 and it was the hottest ticket of the year. However, Charles had some reservations about the legendary band’s requests for the show.
"We turned down The Stones for the three reasons I outline in the book," he says. "I didn’t feel comfortable with putting on a huge gig in small town on a Sunday. But more importantly, because when I was going to school you were either a Beatles fan or a Stones fan and for some strange reason you couldn’t be both.
"No one said you couldn’t, but you couldn’t be both so if it had of been The Beatles playing at Slane, I would have come up with three compromises, three ways to keep both of us satisfied and happy but because it was The Stones, I didn’t care in the same way.
"I said `this is how I’d like to do it and if we can’t do it that way, that’s cool'. Jim Aiken did the show and did a brilliant job, and I went off and did something else."
The gig eventually took place on a Saturday but over forty years later Charles stands by his decision and principles.
"You answer to yourself at the end of the day," he says. "When you do things for money, it sadly ends in tears. Van and John Prine and Loudon Wainwright and Paul Buchanan from The Blue Nile, and Mike Scott don’t make music to make money. They’d make music even if they didn’t have a record deal or a publishing deal."
As 10cc once sang, arts for art’s sake money for god’s sake.
The business has, of course, changed utterly since Charles’s time scouting talent in sweaty clubs. Does he even recognise the industry from what it once was?
"You’d think from the outside that it would be unrecognisable, but the changes have all been organic, they haven’t been big overnight things," he says. "The days of looking for and finding a new Jackson Browne or Joni Mitchell or Van Morrison or Neil Young is regretfully over.
"If you found a new Paul Simon, you’d probably have a hard time getting a record deal unless their social media platform was being followed by billions but it’s still the music business.
"It’s my theory it’s still a business that no matter who you are, if you write songs and you are committed and confident in yourself then some way, some how if you persist with it you’re going to find a way of presenting your music."
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
Adventures in Wonderland is published by Hot Press Books.
Paul Charles book tour: Seamus Heaney HomePlace, Main St., Bellaghy, Co. Derry. Guest interviewer: Michael Bradley of The Undertones on 8 June. Doors 7.15pm for 7.30pm. Charlie Byrne’s Bookstore, Galway on 9 June. Guest interviewer: Ollie Jennings. Paul will also be speaking at the International Literature Festival Dublin on 26 May and at the Dalkey book Festival on 18 June.
