The golden age of the pop PR

How mythmakers shaped the music scene.

The life of a Premier League pop music publicist is never easy. Sometimes it involves your band dragging you to their van in the early hours of the morning, opening its doors to reveal a dead sheep, bought hours earlier from a Northampton slaughterhouse. “There were several buckets of blood,” recalls Mick Houghton in his book Fried & Justified. His charges at the time (1992) were the KLF, the electronic two-piece of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. Nominated for best British group and best album at that years Brit Awards, the KLF had planned to carve up the animal on stage and throw its blood over the front rows. Houghton leaked their plan to the Daily Star and the Sun; on the day, they fired blank bullets from a machine gun instead, and dumped the sheeps carcass outside the post-awards party. “I died for you,” said a note next to them. “Bon appetit!”

“I could see Bill was cracking up,” Houghton adds, with winning nonchalance. “With Jimmy it was harder to tell.”

Two excellent new books tell us what it was like to work behind pops shiny curtain in the halcyon days before the internet: Houghtons Fried & Justified and Phill Savidges Lunch With the Wild Frontiers (the title references the first, long-forgotten band Savidge was tasked to meet).

The last decades of the 20th century were the golden age of the pop PR: Houghton and Savidge were gatekeepers and mythmakers, powerful forces shielding nascent stars. Not that these men represented shiny, malleable pin-ups: as the sheep incident details all too well, they dealt with oddballs and eccentrics who somehow broke through.

These men held the reins: they invented histories and rumours that were impossible to check. They controlled access to their artists, information about them and the music itself. The internet has revolutionised music culture – pop stars can now present themselves directly to fans, who can access music any time; democracy has taken over down at the disco. But these books remind us how much fun it could be when other tactics prevailed. After all, pop musics power is about seeking attention in creative ways.

Houghton realised this in his early career as a music writer, spotting that British punk was all about media manipulation. (Not that he was a fan himself – his true love was folk. “[I hated] the boorish behaviour and snotty attitude of British punk,” he writes. “At 26, I was in danger of thinking, Im too old for this.”) When he switched to PR, he looked after acts on the artier fringes of the genre, such as the Ramones, Talking Heads and the Undertones, who were from Northern Ireland. With this band particularly, he discovered how the press worked out its angles. “As hard as I tried not to exploit it… it became a standing joke… that almost every feature about [them] began with the phrase: From the war-torn streets of Derry.”

Houghton learned quickly. Looking after Liverpudlian post-punks Echo & the Bunnymen in early 1983, he encouraged them to play at the Royal Albert Hall later that year. “No rock band had played there in over a decade. I had a vague recollection that the last to do so had been Mott the Hoople, so I ran with it, everybody repeated it, and nobody challenged it.”

That same year, the Bunnymen also played at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Houghton had the idea of getting an actor to recite the bands lyrics like a Shakespearean soliloquy. “The jobbing actor in tights,” he tells us, “was Hugh Laurie”, then 24. Ben Elton was there too, and wrote a joke about Echo & the Bunnymen into the second series of The Young Ones. Job done.

As you follow Houghtons career in minute, entertaining detail, you realise how much he wanted to help pops eccentrics enter the mainstream. After the KLF, he looked after Welsh psychedelic band Gorkys Zygotic Mynci: “I was convinced,” he writes, “that Gorkys would be huge and the only comparable group was Genesis.” Being drawn towards curious characters also has risks. While Houghton was in charge of Julian Cope after his first top-20 hit (1986s “World Shut Your Mouth”), Cope “finally flipped” during a gig at Hammersmith Palais in London. “From high above the stage,” Houghton writes, “where hed climbed into the rafters, he poured a pot of Gales honey over himself.” Here are pop people as extravagant cartoons, far removed from their fans mundane lives. They pay the price with drink, drugs and madness; we are left with nostalgic memories and songs to sing.

Phill Savidges pop PR career also began around this time. An early job involved looking after Roy Orbison during his 1988 comeback. Savidge secured a big interview with former NME writer Nick Kent for The Face. A week later, Orbison died. Savidge heard the news on his car radio and pulled over in tears. He quit his job at Virgin Records 18 months later to become a poet (and to watch the Italia 1990 football World Cup). “Music was one of the things I used to love before life became too complicated,” he recalls.

In this moment – as in many similar moments in Houghtons book – one thing is clear: these PRs adored their bands. “Their music mattered,” Houghton writes with fervour about the Jesus and Mary Chain. “It still matters.” Savidge eventually became half of Savage & Best, the Camden-based PR firm that were the kingmakers of Britpop, looking after Suede, Pulp, the Cranberries and the Verve (as well as acts with less longevity, such as Menswear). His antics included biking the third Suede single to the NME on a purple velvet cushion, with a note saying “another great disappointment” (it became single of the week).

He also encouraged the formation of Britpop band Elastica, simply because frontwoman Justine Frischmann used to be in Suede (with her then boyfriend Brett Anderson), who were becoming big, and was dating Blurs Damon Albarn. Elastica had great songs as well – but the best pop requires more than that. Savidge once told Frischmann that she looked “so cool most girls are going to want to be you; shit, I want to be you”.

Savidge is a striking figure in Britpops story: a committed androgyne in slingbacks and earrings (when Anderson is “accused” of androgyny he says “you should see my PR”). A few years later, when Britpop was in full Oasis-leaning, laddish flow, Jarvis Cocker gave an interRead More – Source