Exclusive digital cover: The fascinating life & times of Strat winner Peter Loraine

Over the past 30 years, Peter Loraine has built a career that has changed the course of pop music. As the launch editor of Top Of The Pops Magazine, he was responsible for naming the Spice Girls, one of a litany of achievements that prompted a call from Sir Lucian Grainge to persuade him to join his Polydor revolution. He was soon right at home, working on S Club 7, ABBA and more before launching pop imprint Fascination Records, through which he steered the careers of The Saturdays and Girls Aloud, among many others. In 2010, he formed Fascination Management, initially looking after The Saturdays before building a roster including All Saints, Steps, Jessie Ware, Will Young and Goldfrapp. Always an innovator, Loraine continues to move with the times and, three decades in, it’s the perfect time to salute his incredible career with the biggest honour Music Week can bestow, The Strat. Here, following a memorable celebration at the Music Week Awards 2024, we delve into the life and times of Peter Loraine… WORDS: ANNA FIELDINGPHOTOS: JACK GRANGE In Peter Loraine’s house, there is a room that is ostensibly a study, but it’s also a perfect collection of pop music artefacts. “What you see here is not necessarily representative of my work,” he says. “These are my personal bits of pop memorabilia.” He picks up one frame and says, “This is the record shop, Probe Records in Liverpool, that I used to hang out in when I was a teenager.” He picks up another. “These are Dusty Springfield’s false eyelashes," he smiles. "A friend of mine was her make-up artist and gave them to me.” There are posters showing Kim Wilde, Fun Boy Three, The Go-Gos, The Belle Stars and Blondie. There's also a framed disc of The Smiths’ Hatful Of Hollow, a jukebox that’s currently stuffed with classic disco seven inch records ("It's great for parties," Loraine notes). And floor-to-ceiling shelving holding yet more vinyl, books and magazines. Anyone who loves pop music could happily spend several hours in here. “I think of all the things I wanted as a kid, but couldn’t afford,” says Loraine. “Now, I can go on eBay and find them for £1 or whatever.” This is also the room that Fascination Management started out in. “It was me and Adam Klein [initially] and then Sarah Jackson joined us,” says Loraine. “We were quite squeezed in, with three desks, until we could get ourselves a nice little office space.” His work with Fascination, which includes playing a key role in the Girls Aloud reunion and masterminding the sell-out Steps comeback tour – not to mention Jessie Ware's pop and podcast renaissance, the continued success of Goldfrapp or Jake Shears' solo rise – is part of the reason Peter Loraine is the winner of The Strat at this year’s Music Week Awards. But The Strat is a whole-career honour, given for an outstanding contribution to the UK music business over a sustained period of time, in this case 30 years. And Peter Loraine has contributed outstandingly in several areas. He started as a journalist and rapidly became the launch editor of Top Of The Pops Magazine, hitting staggering circulation highs of 500,000 copies per issue and forever branding the Spice Girls as Scary, Sporty, Baby, Posh and Ginger (he still has a bound copy of the magazine with a picture showing the Girls’ faces superimposed on Schwartz spice jars). From there, he moved to Polydor, at the personal request of Sir Lucian Grange, where he worked on launching S Club 7 and the initial development of Mamma Mia!. Still at Polydor, he became the label head of Fascination Records where he turned Girls Aloud from a reality TV show act to an enduring pop juggernaut and launched the multi-million selling career of The Saturdays. To those he has worked with, his importance cannot be overstated. "I had this brainwave and I thought, ‘Peter Loraine is exactly the kind of person that a record company needs, and he was certainly what Polydor needed," says Lucian Grainge, speaking in tribute to Loraine in a video aired at the Music Week Awards. "He was really the beginning of the transformation to what Polydor became in the late ’90s." "Peter was such an important part of making Polydor the No.1 label at that time, so it just very natural and the right thing to do to give him his own label," adds David Joseph, now Universal Music UK chairman and CEO. “I don’t think people realise how instrumental Peter has been in a huge part of what the Spice Girls went on to become," says Melanie C. "Him giving us our nicknames was a game changer for the Spice Girls.” Cheryl Cole notes that, when he started Fascination, Loraine was one of the first people to pursue Girls Aloud. "Without him, I daresay we wouldn’t even be here today,” Cole says. Of course, Loraine was also instrumental for a slew of acts that he didn't work directly with. Take That's contribution to our collection of tributes is to say that Loraine's early support is "part of our DNA", while Kylie also speaks fondly about her memories of TOTP Magazine. “Well, it was the ’90s and I was on the cover, which was a huge thrill, covering Jarvis Cocker in kisses," she says. "So it was a good day at the office, thank you Peter Loraine!” “There’s one thing that I feel is really special about this,” says Loraine of his win. “And it’s that I’m an out-and-out pop person. And there can be a lot of snobbery around pop music and I think this is a really lovely acknowledgement that it matters and it's important. I've managed to make a proper career out of what was just a bedroom hobby as a child. And so I think that this is an acknowledgement that pop music, within the music industry, is important and it's recognised. And I find it incredibly overwhelming and special and I'm so touched and delighted.” Loraine, however, is very much a team player and points out on several occasions that many other people have played significant roles in things that are listed as his achievements. “I don't like acknowledgement for things that weren't just me, because so many people work so hard,” he explains. “I want to acknowledge the fact that wherever I've worked, I've always been so lucky to have amazing people that have become friends, people with the same pop brains. You make each other laugh and you build with each other's ideas, and I've always had that, whether it's Top Of The Pops, throughout Polydor, through Fascination Records, to now.” And so, in a room decorated with pop history, Music Week sits down with Peter Loraine to talk about his own outstanding contribution to the world of pop. You’re from a working-class background in the North West of England, what did pop music mean to you growing up? “I grew up on a diet of pop music. I saw someone post an old cover of Smash Hits [online] recently and it was an issue I’d bought. The date on the front was 1982, so I would have been 10. I used to buy Smash Hits and Record Mirror and, the following year when it came out, Number One magazine. I spent all my pocket money. In 1984, when I got a paper round, I started buying Music Week too." You bought Music Week as a teenager? “I wanted to keep up to date with what was going on. I’d look at the job adverts in the back. Obviously, it had the charts in it and that was important. A lot of it went over my head, and I didn’t buy it every week, but it was quite often. Record Mirror had a gossip column about what was going on in different clubs and where pop stars were hanging out and it mentioned PRs and stuff like that. It was this whole other world that existed, although at that point London felt miles away. I had also realised that you could look on the back of a record and it would say, in Bananarama’s case London Records, so I would phone up and ask when a band was going to be on TV and they’d put me through to the promotions department. I would phone up Smash Hits and someone on reception or the news desk would humour me. People would say, ‘What are you going to do when you leave school?’ I would always say, ‘I'm going to move to London, I'm going to be friends with Bananarama. I'm going to work at a magazine or a record company.’ And that was all I wanted to do." How did the people around you react to those ambitions? “Try to explain that to a careers officer or a teacher! My careers report to my parents recommended I do a youth training scheme at the video library. My O-Level English report said that too much Smash Hits was ruining my work and they told my parents they needed to knock my stupid ideas on the head. When I won the BSME award as the editor of Top Of The Pops [in 1997], there was a picture of me and my dad took it into my old school and found the teacher. I think his comment was, ‘Well, I got that one wrong’. My dad only told me afterwards.” You were also producing a Bananarama fanzine at the time. Tell us about that... “My history teacher leant me £100 to get the first one printed. That’s a real 'Sliding Doors' moment in my life, it could have unfolded quite differently. I had little reviews in Smash Hits and Record Mirror and people would send a pound for a copy. Smash Hits invited me in for a meeting, thinking I was an adult. I got the train from Liverpool and went to Carnaby Street. I met [editor] Barry McIlheney and I really wasn’t what he expected. But they said, ‘Come in for four weeks the next time you have a school holiday.’ I hated school. I was unconfident, I was frightened and it was aggressive. But when I got to London I had this drive, everything was amazing and I wasn’t intimidated. “Bananarama’s management also really liked the fanzine and sent me a train ticket for a meeting. I’d written something about London Records being rubbish because they didn’t know how to market the records. They said they’d like to make my fanzine the official fanzine, but I couldn’t say that about the record company and the fanzine would need to be approved. They also wanted me to deal with the fan mail. There were sacks and sacks of mail in the room and they wanted me to take it all away and reply to it all. They said, ‘We’ll pay you £40 a week’ and at that point I was making about £2 doing a paper round. I’d won the jackpot. And all these letters were from people just like me.” You’ve previously said that you would lie awake worrying about the marketing campaigns for your favourite artists from the age of 13. Which is an extraordinary level of knowledge and concern for someone that age... “I was just so genuinely into it and so interested. It wasn’t even just the acts I liked. I'd wonder why a record company was doing [certain things]. Why are the band on this programme? They don't have a record out. When Love In The First Degree came out [in September 1987], it was Bananarama’s biggest, biggest record and it was No.3. And the week that it was still No.3, nothing happened. And I thought, ‘What are you doing to get this to No.2, to No.1, next weekend?’ I knew Siobhan [Fahey] was in America, they weren't on Top Of The Pops, there wasn't any special formatting. With Robert De Niro's Waiting [in 1984] there were all these different coloured 12”s to collect and stuff. So they knew what to do. But this particular week, they didn't. My mind was working like that all the time. So yeah, I had sleepless nights about it. But I didn't know what midweeks were then…” Rolling back a bit, how did those Spice Girls nicknames come about? “Virgin Records asked us, at Top Of The Pops magazine, to come and have lunch and meet this new band. And, at the time, they didn’t really have anyone big, maybe Shaggy. But me and Susie Boone, who was the deputy editor, went to Portobello and met them. We were there first and sat on a rooftop. I remember the sound of a car screeching up and the noise of them getting out and charging up the wooden stairs. They were so loud and funny and amazing. We were with them for a few hours. During that lunch, I said, ‘We're going to give you your own Top Of The Pops names. So our readers can have their own ownership of you.’ It was based on two things. The Belle Stars used to use their band name as their surname. And, in the ’80s, Fuzzbox had their own personal nicknames in Smash Hits. So it was a combination of the two. “Fast-forward a few weeks and Wannabe had just come out and they were in Top Of The Pops and we didn’t know what we were going to call them, so it was us in the office saying, ‘The posh one in the dress’. I didn't think of all five of the names. There were a few of us, but there was no real time spent because it was only meant to be in our magazine. Then a columnist from the Daily Star phoned and said, ‘It’s so funny, do you mind if we use them?’. It was mentioned in a Sunday Times article. And it started to creep up. Simon Fuller phoned me from LAX and said, ‘We've landed in LA, everyone's going nuts, but no one knows their real names.’” You seem to have an instinctive understanding of how fandom works. How has that influenced your career? “I think fans are the most important people in the whole of our industry. Because if you don't have any fans, you've got nothing. I used to send fan letters to Bananarama when I was around 12 and they would write back to me. And it blew my mind. So at Top Of The Pops we had someone, as I used to do, to answer all the mail. Because if you are 11 and you get a handwritten postcard with Top Of The Pops on it, then chances are you are going to tell your friends at school and you’re going to buy the magazine again. So, by the time I got to Polydor, it was crucial that those fanbases were nurtured. If we were with a band doing CD:UK or whatever then you would absolutely, if it was safe, take them out the front and do autographs and have them meet people.” How do you think the nature of fandom has changed over the years? “I think people expect more now. And that makes me feel a bit sad, because of the pressure to keep up with social media and what is expected is pictures at home of your family and your friends, a lot more personal stuff. And I think that's a bit of a shame really, you can look on her Instagram and see what Madonna's loo looks like.” So, you started out in publishing, then went to a label and now you work in management. You’ve proven yourself to be a triple threat in music, which is one of the reasons we think you’re such a worthy winner of The Strat. How do you reflect on your moves across the business? “I had initially imagined my career would be in publishing. I was at BBC magazines and there was always this thought in my mind that maybe one day I might be able to edit the Radio Times. And then when Spice-mania became such a huge thing, I got a phone call from Lucian Grange who had quite recently become the head of Polydor… At that time they had Shed Seven, they had Cast, Silver Sun, Ian Brown, they’d signed Peter Hook’s band Monaco. We were just coming out of Britpop and The Spice Girls were massive, Simon Cowell was launching 5ive and Lucian thought they needed a pop person or a pop division. I kept saying, ‘What’s the job?’ and he kept saying, ‘Just come’. It was an agonising decision. It was a different world for me and, at Top Of The Pops, I had my own version of Smash Hits and it was selling half a million copies. But Lucian was calm and Boyzone were signed to Polydor and he told me to just watch and get involved… It took me a while to find my feet, but I became an artist development manager. We were all in this long corridor and A&R was on one side of me and marketing on the other. When we did S Club it was great. Simon Fuller was their manager and he knew me from The Spice Girls and Lucian was friends with him too. Then we had David Joseph who had come in as the marketing director. It was a dream team. And for David and I, it was our first thing and so David was like, ‘This needs to be magnificent, we need to be big, we need to be launching the new Spice Girls’… How quickly did your instincts as a label exec develop? “When David was promoted I went into marketing full time and worked across the whole roster. There were many people in that department working very hard, I was overseeing them, but I don’t want to diminish their contributions at all. We had an absolutely phenomenal team of people… Sometimes we’d have a quiet week and David would say, ‘Oh, we won’t have a record in the Top 10 this week’ and I would say, ‘Well, what about if I make a new TV ad for ABBA?’ We did one once with people lip-syncing and the slogan, ‘Everyone in the UK loves ABBA’ and it went to No.1. I also worked on Mamma Mia! from when it was first an idea and Polydor were the official soundtrack partners.” What has been the hardest moment of your career and what did you learn from it? “When I was marketing manager at Polydor, David Joseph came to me and said, ‘We’d like to offer you your own label.’ It turned out to be Fascination Records and Polydor’s pop imprint. I was asked to pick some things to go through Fascination and employ teams. It was a really huge moment. Girls Aloud came with me, Sophie Ellis-Bextor came with me and ABBA and we did the deal with Mamma Mia! We sold millions of copies of the soundtrack right off the bat. I’m proud I’ve been a part of keeping ABBA going, because there was definitely a time when people were a bit sniffy about them. But it felt very pressurising, because suddenly you're responsible for what's coming next and signing new things. I wouldn't say that I'm not an A&R person, but it’s like a machine, you’ve got to keep churning stuff [out]. And it's not good enough that something is doing well. It's like, ‘What's next?’ Looking back, we did really well because we launched The Saturdays. But the pressure of coming up with the next thing, I found that really hard. And then we did a deal with Hollywood Records and we launched Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers and Selena Gomez in the UK, so I did the strategy and the releases of all their first UK releases and that was fun. Looking back, it was good.” Can you outline the transition from Fascination Records to Fascination Management? “We did really well with The Saturdays and they were managerless and looking for someone new. We had a conversation and I thought, ‘Okay, this could be my next move. If this is my next move and I can get it right, then probably it would be my last move, the road ahead’. With a management company, I was only going to work with acts that I really love and acts that I understand… That’s what I wanted to create with Fascination. I wanted it to be the management version of what London Records was in the 1980s: they weren’t an indie label, but they behaved like an indie label. They had a pop roster of successful acts and a small team that killed it and were very focused. But it was more about the collective of people that were signed to them. It felt like they all fit together. If, 10 years ago, someone had shown me now and said, ‘This is where you’ll be’ then I would have been pleased.” Among many successes, the company has been instrumental in the Steps reunion... “I could talk for hours about all of our artists, but I think what we've been able to help Steps achieve is so special. If you were to pay attention to most people in the music industry, Steps shouldn't perform how they perform. They receive streaming cheques, they sell out arenas, the last record was No.1, they’re A-listed on radio, with better radio play than they had in their heyday. It's defying everything that probably should happen with them. And it’s with the five of them, and a team at Fascination, a very, very small team of people that completely understand it and completely get it… We went to meet labels and we were able to say, ‘We want to make a new album, and when we do we have a 20-date arena tour and we have financial backing for that’. And not one person at any label was interested. So we did it ourselves with Absolute and I think we sold around 100,000 albums.” You manage Girls Aloud now. Nicola Roberts told us about how she remembers you being so dedicated that you went over to her and Cheryl's flat to teach them how to use the thermostat... “I don’t actually remember that, but I do remember them calling and saying they had no electricity. I asked if it was working in the flat next door and it was. I asked if they had paid their bill… They were teenagers, they had no idea. They’d just been cut off, but they were very young. I also remember that Tuesday mornings at Polydor were very busy because that’s when the midweeks came in. There was a big meeting and I wasn’t there because I was buying Cheryl a Hoover on my way to work because she was having a breakdown about the state of their flat.” How do you reflect on the period when Sarah Harding passed away? “We’d all stayed in touch over the years and they weren’t performing as Girls Aloud at that point. But it was just after Covid and I thought I hadn’t heard from Sarah in years, so I just sent her a message and we got chatting again. Then one day she called and said, ‘I think I might need your help.’ She said, ‘I've found out that I have breast cancer and I don't want anyone to know, but obviously they might find out and I don't have management, I don't have a publicist.’ At that point, she’d decided she didn't want to do it anymore. And then one day, someone tweeted that they’d seen Sarah Harding in the oncology ward. So we prepared for what would happen when it did come out, which included me going to see the other four girls to tell them. We decided to beat the press to it. So we did a story on her Instagram about her being unwell. We went away for a couple of days, as did the four of them, just to spend some time together… I feel that as fast as her cancer was dealt with, it popped up somewhere else. She didn’t get a break with it at all. It was so sad. She’d learned to play guitar in lockdown and she first thought the lump was caused by pressure from the guitar strap.” And now you're working on the Girls Aloud reunion... “Sarah’s death was what brought everybody back together. And, surprisingly, from there they said, ‘Yes, we would like to do it and we'd like to do it for her.’ She’d said she would have been first in the line, I think. And she did say, ‘If I'm not here, you should’. And then the outpouring of love they received, I think they were amazed that anyone was still interested in their songs, but I don’t know how they could possibly think that. It's exciting that the four of them are in a really good place. Sarah will be embraced and acknowledged and applauded and appreciated in the show. Will it be the same without her? No, not at all. It will be brilliant, but it won't be the same. It is lovely to be working with them again.” What's your most interesting story from your years working in the industry? “There are lots to choose from, but a really special moment occurred when I’d only been at Polydor for a few weeks. Lucian asked me if I would like to spend Sunday afternoon with him – he was going to meet Björn Ulvaeus. To spend the afternoon with one of ABBA was one thing, but to find myself in a situation where he was asking me my thoughts on things and seemed generally interested in my ideas was mind blowing. At the end of the meeting Björn shook my hand, said it had been great to meet and asked if I could lend him a tenner for a cab back to his hotel.” And what is the biggest mistake you've ever made? “The Saturdays spent months in America recording a reality show for the US network E!. The production team were the team who made Keeping Up With The Kardashians and I somehow found myself persuaded to be on camera. Reality TV is definitely not for me. Never again.” Finally, Nicola Roberts said to us that if you could sing, you would have been the biggest pop star of all. Do you think that’s true?“No, I wouldn’t! I don’t think she’s heard me sing, but I absolutely cannot. I 100% love being on this side and there is no part of me that would want to be on the other. When artists aren’t pleased with a performance on the day, or how they look in a particular photo, well, I would be terrible at that too. I haven’t chosen to do it and I wouldn’t do it. It is a funny and nice comment though.”

Exclusive digital cover: Strat winner Emma Banks tells her music industry story

As a trailblazing agent and co-founder of CAA’s UK operation, Emma Banks has played a key role in changing the face of the live industry as we know it. This year, her groundbreaking work was honoured before the industry at the Music Week Awards, as the agent for Katy Perry, Kylie Minogue, Muse and more was crowned winner of The Strat. Here, in celebration of everything she has achieved, Music Week meets Banks for an in-depth account of her story so far and to talk secondary ticketing, grassroots venues and the secrets of dealing with superstars… WORDS: ANNA FIELDINGPHOTOS: LOUISE HAYWOOD-SCHIEFER “It’s very grown-up,” says Emma Banks of winning the Strat, the highest honour at the Music Week Awards that was created in 1987 in honour of industry icon Tony Stratton-Smith. Past winners include Barbara Charone, Kanya King, Max Lousada, Darcus Beese, Sarah Stennett and many more. “It feels like a bit of a freak [thing], being on a list with the previous winners,” continues the CAA agent, who was introduced on stage by her BRIT Award-winning client Becky Hill, while her winners' video featured tributes from Katy Perry, David Joseph, Lucy Dickins, Rob Stringer and many more. “They’re people you’ve heard of before you meet them, and I think our natural state is always to be looking for the grown-up in the room. Then, suddenly, something like this will make you realise you are the grown-up in the room. And that’s terrifying, because I feel the same as when I started, well, perhaps I’ve got more of an idea [of where things are] geographically.” One particular mistake in this area occurred early in Banks’ career and, speaking from her company’s London office, she smiles as she gives us a potted history. “It wasn’t a catastrophic trans-continental mess up,” she says. “But I did look at two places, think they were close together and didn’t realise the Alps were in the way.” Her early phase was spent at the agency Wasted Talent, where she first met her longterm colleague Mike Greek (“He’s my work husband, a brilliant agent and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him”). By the time the booking agency became known as Helter Skelter, Emma Banks was at the top of the tree. Then, in 2006, she and Greek co-founded the London outpost of US firm Creative Artists Agency. Her client list now includes global stars and arena fillers like Muse, Kylie Minogue, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Katy Perry. Winning The Strat stands out for Banks, who won the Music Industry Trusts (MITs) award in 2018 and was honoured by The Cat’s Mother earlier this year. “Winning this is not just about live music, it represents the whole spectrum of the music industry,” she says. “Everyone who has something to do with contemporary music, be it labels, publishers, streaming services, live, everyone reads Music Week. And Music Week thought I was good enough to be awarded this, so it really is a great honour. There haven’t been as many women who’ve won it as men, and there haven’t been many people from the live sphere. So all of that makes it very special, to be honest.” Banks feels the live side of the music industry can be overlooked, particularly by outsiders. “If people, like a researcher on a BBC programme, for example, is looking for someone to talk about stuff, they generally go to record labels,” she says. “Because if you’re on the outside looking in, then it’s record labels who have their logo associated with artists… They’re big and they have big corporate communications teams who are pushing for people to get recognition. A lot of them are public companies now too, so if you’re on the stock market you need to be out there and talking about your results and your projections and what you’re doing. I don't know whether we've all just been a bit more head down, getting on with it.” Ultimately, Banks says, live is more of a backroom job: “Look, no one goes to see a show because I booked it.” But while the Alps are still in the same place, the live business has altered during her time in the industry, and winning an award like the Strat gives you cause to take stock. “Part of your understanding is practical and comes with time,” she says. “You learn which counties are easier to traverse, or where you’ll be held up if it snows. But you also have to consider more rules and regulations now. EU driving laws, UK driving laws, all of the driving laws. People used to do crazy things and stay up all night to get to the next location. And that’s all changed, with tachographs in lorries and so on. And it just means you have to be a little more knowledgeable.” So much of the live industry is based on getting the timing right and expectations there have also altered over the years. “We do things very far in advance now,” says Banks. “And you might think that would help with getting organised, but if anything it makes it harder.” The issue, she says, is that booking tours further ahead gives more time for unforeseen variables to sneak in. It also contrasts with the behaviour of the gig-going public. “LIVE, the live music industry body that formed through Covid, has just done some research and found that a lot of people are buying tickets a lot later than they used to,” she explains. “I do wonder if we are benefitting from going on sale super early. Are we spending money on advertising that isn’t translating into sales? But, then, if the news of a tour needs to coincide with album pre-orders, that means you’re putting tickets on sale before the album is out, and that could be over a year before the tour takes place.” When thinking through issues like this, Banks says she often forgets how deep and how specialised her knowledge has become, and that the statements that feel obvious to her might not be obvious to others, even people within the industry. And while she admits that her vast wealth of knowledge is “one of the good sides of getting older”, Emma Banks is still learning as the industry moves forward. That much is clear over the course of our lengthy conversation. Ostensibly, we’re here to celebrate everything she has achieved so far during a trailblazing career which continues to open doors for others, but that barely scratches the surface. And so we dive into a discussion that takes in everything from protecting the grassroots scene and railing against unfair ticket prices, to the secrets of unearthing new talent, keeping A-list stars on side and rowing a dinghy off the Italian coast with Bono... Firstly, what does it mean to join the list of executives to have won the award?“I'm really proud. It’s about being able to say to people that have put time and effort and energy into this brilliant business, ‘Well done, we see you and we see what you stand for.’ But while it's my name on the award, it's about saying, ‘You can't do it without everybody else around you,’ as well. I'm really proud of the fact that I lead an amazing team of people at CAA in London. And they also lead me, it's not that I sit on some throne, dictating, we're all in it together. I've come into my exceedingly messy office to do this interview, but 99% of the time I sit in the open plan office with everybody because that's how I want to work. That's how I love it. We have a laugh, we have a cry, we listen in on each other's conversations, we butt in and we have opinions. I need everyone else's opinion as much as they need mine. I'm really proud that, when I look around, there are plenty of women, there are plenty of men, too, and they're all doing different jobs. We've still got a way to go, it's not 50/50 yet. But as long as we’re aware of [the situation] and you're giving breaks to the people that deserve them, then we can't do very much more.” Now you have this platform, what’s your message to the rest of the music industry?“As the older people in the industry, we need to do as much as we can for the younger people. We need to leave this business in good shape for them, because they're starting to take it over. We also need to see what we can do to improve things like the grassroots scene. We need to mentor people, to make it easier for people from backgrounds where they perhaps haven’t had exposure to music because school curriculums seem to cut music before anything else. It’s about asking what we can do to help with things like that. How do we make sure that we have a really diverse population within the industry, be that women, people of colour, everyone. Those are the important things now that we need to look at, as well as making money and being bigger and better than anybody else.” You said that live is a “backroom” part of the business. Does that mean there’s less ego on your side of the industry?“Well, we all have egos and I haven’t seen the ego scoreboard! We are entirely dependent on our clients. If you’re a record label or in publishing, then you own IP. You may need to get sign-off on some things, but ultimately you can do what you want with that IP, within reason. But we don’t have that, we do what our clients agree to. If we don’t like the artwork for a poster, we can ask if they’re sure if it’s the best idea, but we don’t have the final say. So I suppose you have to have a bit less ego. We are reliant on an artist wanting to get out of bed in the morning, go somewhere and perform. Whereas if you put their song on a soundtrack, or on a compilation album, or you get someone else to cover it, they don't have to do anything. We deal in one-off experiences. Even on a tour that lasts two years and may have 3-400 shows, and even if each show was choreographed within an inch of its life, there are still slight changes every night. Every occasion is unique. Truly, though, I think agents have to have a level of ego because you have to sell yourself to an artist, their record label and their manager. You have to have enough of a personality to get your message across.” How do you retain the courage in your convictions when it comes to supporting an act?“If you don't believe in yourself, you won't be able to sign anybody and you won't be able to sell them to the promoters. And you can't say the same thing over and over again. If I said to every promoter, ‘This is the best artist ever,’ then at some point, they're gonna go, ‘Well, you said that last week, and the one before.’ We all know that this is real life and some acts work better than others, but I think we also have a good idea of those artists that have a big, obvious shot.” Back in 2018, you told Music Week that agents were “horrible”. Does this mean that you think about yourself this way?“I think when I said that I was talking about trying to book shows as a student promoter. At that point, agents could be a bit horrible, in terms of not understanding what it was to be a promoter on a budget. It very much felt like, ‘Send us your money and the act will turn up’. And those agents were not really horrible, some of them are still around and some of them are close friends. I think these days there’s more of a culture of service. It used to be that your Rolodex was the most valuable thing because no one else had those numbers. Now, if you know how to use the internet, you can find out what you need to know quite easily. Anyone can be a promoter, so I think all of us have had to do more to justify our positions.” What other significant changes have taken place in the industry since those days?“There are so many. You've obviously got way more countries to talk to. When I started, it wasn’t long after the Berlin Wall came down, so Eastern Europe was a new frontier and playing somewhere like Prague was uncharted territory. Brexit has clearly had an influence, Covid has had an influence. Then, specific to the industry, there’s the growth of Live Nation for a start. And global tour deals, which started probably in about 1993, or ’94, but were very, very rare and are now a conversation that everybody's having all the time. You've got way more festivals than ever before, so getting your timings right is harder. Then there’s the amount of sponsorship, not just for tours, but for venues, particularly the opportunities you get with O2 in the UK or Telecom in Germany. Selling tickets on the internet has clearly been a game changer, just because of the amount of tickets we can physically sell compared to 30 years ago.” Ticketing is perhaps the one area of the live sector that gets the most scrutiny. How do you see this part of the business?“There have always been secondary ticket sales, but it was on a much, much lower scale, so it didn't really matter. You know, four blokes wearing dodgy macs as you walk up to the venue, it added a little bit of glamour to the occasion. Whereas now, it's totally understandable that people are frustrated if they feel that within 30 seconds of something going on sale, the tickets have disappeared, but they're all on secondary websites for four times more money.” How can we stop online scalping?“It needs the big search engines to come on board and stop people buying up AdWords, so that when you search for Beyoncé tickets the first results are legitimate primary sales outlets. But I think we are slowly teaching people that there are places that are safer to buy tickets from than others. Another way to stop it would be to actually fulfil demand. We work in a business where we don’t actually want to fulfil demand because we all want to say our show sold out faster than any other. By selling tickets super-fast, you are allowing scalpers to get in, but if you are more stringent about it, not as many scalpers would be able to buy tickets. But there’s always two sides. I’ve heard it said many times that there’s more tickets on the secondary market selling for under face value than for over. But that’s not as interesting to talk about.” Where do you stand on ticketing fees, thinking about what’s happened recently in the US with The Cure and Taylor Swift?“I think what’s really important is transparency, and in the UK we are transparent. We show you the ticket fee and all the add-ons. But there are countries all over the world where the purchaser has no idea how much of the ticket is fees and how much is going to the show. As an agent, I find that very frustrating. We spend a lot of time talking about ticket pricing and thinking about the health of the overall business. Some people just want to extract as much money as humanly possible, but many artists want to feel that their fans are not being gouged. It’s very difficult for me to see how you can justify a percentage of a ticket price as a booking fee. There are some very expensive tickets and they’re often worth it. But if you've got a ticket for £150, it's the same amount of money to administer that ticket sale, as it is to administer a sale of a £15 ticket. That’s certainly my opinion, but I’m sure there's someone in ticketing that's going to tell me I’m completely wrong.” So are you saying prices aren’t fair?“I understand there needs to be a minimum service charge, which is the cost of employing people, having customer service and just the cost of all of the technology that goes into ticketing. But it's hard, there are so many prices, so many costs on top. Suddenly there's a heritage charge, a rebuilding charge or a save the roof charge that no one necessarily points out to you when you're planning the day. So a ticket that you thought was going to cost somebody £30, ends up costing them £40. It's a lot of money that the artist is getting. And we know that Ticketmaster and many other ticketing companies make a huge amount of money. But promoters alsof lose a lot of money on a lot of shows. When I started, you did deals that were a guarantee versus maybe 70% of the net revenue. There hasn't been a 70% deal done anywhere that I know for 20 years. And now, you know, at the very top end, you're looking at 90%, 92.5%, 95%, sometimes an even higher portion of the net revenue on a show being paid to the artist, which is great when it works.” The health of the grassroots scene has also been high on the agenda in recent years. Should the industry do more to support small venues?“That’s a tricky one isn’t it? When I was growing up, that was one of the relatively few things you could do. You couldn’t make music on your computer because you didn’t have one. But when you look at music that’s doing well now, how much of it has come through the grassroots scene? Or is [that scene] something that exists outside of the chart and the major streaming services? It’s expensive to play shows. You’re doing a gig in a 200-capacity venue, you charge £10 a ticket, you’ve got to pay VAT off that, PRS and rental. Petrol or diesel is the most expensive it’s ever been, even sandwiches from the supermarket. So I think quite a lot about how to help grassroots music venues and those who want to play them. And, also, how can we get people to go to those venues too. Because I’m not sure they’re packed all the time. I am full of admiration for Mark Davyd, the Music Venue Trust and everything they're doing to try and keep it alive, because it's clearly a really important part of the social fabric of the UK. But we also have to persuade people to want to go and enjoy these places. I think people have higher aspirations now than they used to. Again, upgrading facilities is expensive.” On a related note, what is the best way to break an unknown band?“The best way of breaking a band is for them to write amazing music. By and large, you have got to just write the best songs ever. And when you think that you've got your album’s worth of songs, write some more, and make them better. You feel like you’ve hit the jackpot when you find an act, hear them for the first time and there are five songs that you feel like you know already. They're interesting, they're clever, they're musical, then go and see them and they've got charisma. Artists can't be apologetic on stage, you've got to own it. And it's not about playing 1,000 shows. To win people over, you might need to play 10 shows to get better in front of an audience. But, actually, you can tour and tour and tour and tour and if you're not good enough, no one will come.” At the other end of the scale, how do you go about dealing with superstars?“I mean, they’re superstars and they’re normal human beings at the same time. Often, you've potentially known them since before they were a superstar, so you have a shared history and that can be helpful. You need to listen to them and to understand where their frustrations come from and how it cannot be easy to be constantly on display. Upsetting and hurtful things are said on social media, but you need to relate that to someone who has parents or children, who experiences divorces, relationships and death. They have been prepared to put everything about themselves out there and often the most vulnerable people are the most compelling to watch on stage. You need to be honest with people whilst also delivering what they want. I don’t think there’s a secret, you just try to treat people in the human way you’d like to be treated yourself. It's about being real.” You must have so many stories from the road. What’s the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to you on tour?“Early in my career, I was working with Ian Flooks on a U2 tour and I had gone to Naples to cover a show for him. The band were so charming and we ended up going to Positano for lunch in these little boats. I suddenly realised that I’m sitting in a tiny rowing boat with Bono and Paul Oakenfold and Bono is singing Irish sea shanties. And just two years before that, I was standing outside the Reading Hexagon trying to get tickets for The Joshua Tree tour. I had to pinch myself and think, ‘This is really happening, he knows who I am.’” What keeps the job fun after this long?“The buzz of a good gig, having an artist that you've worked with and their dream coming true, whatever it is. That's what keeps me going, it really is. I love it. How can you not enjoy that? How can you not get excited about being part of the journey? Agents are the helpers, basically, we're facilitators. We're lucky, because we can say yes. Someone can say, ‘Can we do this?’ And I'll go, ‘Well, I hope so. Let's go and try and do it.’ We're in a lucky position. Ultimately, you do good work, try hard, have good ideas and represent artists in the way they wish to be represented. What we want is to build a team around an artist that remains invested, not just financially. I have an emotional investment in the acts that I work with.” Going back to your Strat Award win. What do you think having your name on the list of winners will add to the award’s legacy?“Hopefully people will look at it and say, ‘Yes, she’s a decent person’. Honestly, I'd like to think that most people I've interacted with walk away going, ‘Okay, she's fair, she’s honest.’ To me that is really important. I know I've been incredibly lucky. I mean, as the old saying goes, the harder I work, the luckier I get… But you still have to have some luck, you still have to be occasionally in the right place at the right time. People spend so many hours away from their friends and their families doing this. We are our own community. The live business is its own world. So if you make people feel good about themselves, that's a good thing. I think my legacy can be, you don't have to be an arsehole to be an agent.”

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