CHERRY BLOSSOM

ABRIDGED FROM A CHAPTER OF MY BOOK 'I'M COMING TO TAKE YOU TO LUNCH', AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON, AND MOST OTHER PLACES TOO.

Sometimes my life seems to have been one long ramble of rootless hedonism. Not that I’ve made it a frantic search for illicit pleasure, it’s been more aimless than that, which is why I call it a ramble.

I left school with no desire to do anything more than wander round the world and see what was going on. I hitchhiked round America, played the trumpet in strip-joints in Canada, sold magazines door-to-door in Mexico City and finally came back to London to work as a film editor. And It was only then that I found something that suited my talents.

Having got enough money together to make a down payment on an American convertible, I drove it one night to the Ad Lib Club (a sixties joint that throbbed with music and alcohol and sexually provocative people). My arrival was seen by an aspiring pop group who so coveted my car that they approached me (well after midnight, when I was sitting in a corner of the club with my eyes half-closed, nodding vacantly to ‘Gloria’ by Them), to ask if I would be their manager. Only vaguely aware of their presence and unable to hear a word they said, I continued to nod to the beat, which they took to mean ‘yes’.

That first group was not too successful but by the time the second and third came along I’d got the hang of it and we were getting hits. Aspiring pop stars, it seemed, while knowing where they wanted to go, had little idea of how to get there. All that was needed was some common sense to point them in the right direction. It was like riding a horse in a race – the artist did the running, the manager did the riding and together we ended up at the finishing post. Not only did I get an enjoyable ride round the course, I also collected twenty per cent of their winnings.

Surprisingly, social commentators of the day viewed the management of pop singers as a profession of some importance, and having made myself vaguely competent at it I found myself being written about and even admired. Although I found this rather silly I saw no reason not to take advantage of it, so for the next eight years I lived in style, travelled around Europe and America, ate in the best restaurants, put money in the bank, managed a pop group here and there, and had lots of sex.

Well, who wouldn’t?

Then I developed a dangerous passion – it was Kit Lambert’s fault, the Who’s manager, an old friend of mine. One sharply cold April morning in 1972, in search of coffee and a chat, I dropped in to see him at his house in Egerton Crescent, where the trees had just burst into flower.

‘Isn’t the cherry blossom marvelous,’ I commented.

Kit, in a strangely one-uppish mood, was rather snooty. ‘The only place worth looking at cherry blossom is Japan.’

It rankled. He’d made me realise – despite having enjoyed a decade of living it up in the music business, swinging my way round America and Europe, feasting and boozing and finding new partners to take to bed every night – there was still an enormous hole in my education: I’d never been to the Far East.

I heard myself saying, ‘In that case, I’ll go there at once,’ and that very same evening I was on a plane to Tokyo.

I didn’t really care about cherry blossom, it was just an excuse; I’d reached a moment in life when the excesses of the rock business were boring me. My mind was ready for something new and in Tokyo I found it.  Outwardly, most things looked much the same – the buildings, the clothes, the cars, but everywhere you looked, there was unusual imagery – for instance, outside the airport a Harley Davidson whizzed past, on the pillion seat a Buddhist monk dressed in saffron robes wearing a crash helmet.  

But it was when I got to the hotel that I became truly hooked. In Japan it was the custom not to invite foreign visitors to a company’s offices but to go instead to their hotels. Here, among gleaming mirrors and pink marble floors, over coffee and patisserie served by doll-like waitresses and impeccable waiters in bow-tie and tails, Japanese businessmen sat listening impassively as visiting foreigners pitched their deals. Silk- shirted Filipinos, dark-suited Taiwanese, clove-smoking Indonesians, soft-smiling Thais – this lobby was not just Japan, it was the whole of South East Asia. I remembered all the books I’d read about it by Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and James Clavell. Why on earth had it taken me so long to get here?

Throughout the rest of the seventies I flew from West to East and back again, trying to find business projects that could tie the two together. I wrote songs in Indonesia and produced them in London, opened a publishing company in Hong Kong and managed a singer in Spain who was also a Filipino film star. Towards the end of the decade, someone in London introduced me to Japan, a new group searching for success, and their name hooked me at once.

In the middle of the punk era, when everyone else was walking round London in black leather and safety pins, the lead singer came to see me wearing full make-up and pretty clothes. Presuming he’d received advance warning of a new fashion trend, I rushed to sign his group. But I was wrong. He had no insider knowledge of things to come and when I launched Japan in the UK they flopped miserably. However, when their records were released in the country whose name they’d adopted, they became huge. Japanese teenagers liked the idea of a group named after their country and unlike their British counterparts they preferred their pop stars clean and neatly dressed. And Japan (the group) had great success.

Financed by an annual tour of Japan (the country), I worked with them for five more years until we eventually found success in Britain. And then they broke up.

It was difficult not to be annoyed. Bloody groups! What was the point of putting in all those years of work if they just threw it away when everything finally went right for them? So I made the decision…

Definitely. Absolutely. Categorically. There’d be no more groups. I was tired of being tied to prima-donna pop stars. I’d move to South East Asia and write books.

But before I could do so, Jazz Summers turned up on my doorstep and persuaded me we should manage Wham!. And to be honest, I’m glad he did.

But I’m equally glad to have lived in Asia ever since.

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