JUST REWARDS

EXCERPTED FROM MY BOOK 'SOUR MOUTH SWEET BOTTOM', PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND AND AVAILABLE FROM ANYWHERE THAT SELLS BOOKS.

In the early seventies I thought it was time I took a look at South Africa. I’d never been and part of me didn’t want to – I felt tourists shouldn’t help the Apartheid government in any way − but in another way it seemed an essential place to see and make my own judgement about.

I started in Johannesburg, where a friend had advised me to stay clear of the established five-star hotels and stay at Dawson’s, a hotel he referred to as showbiz friendly. On my first night there, having a drink at the bar, I met a young chap called Ralph who managed a rock group, the only one in South Africa that was mixed black and white.

Ralph took me to his home for dinner and introduced me to his management partner, Clive, and we got on pretty well. They told me about a problem with a current tour of American artists in South Africa.

For some time, American artists visiting South Africa had been insisting their audiences be desegregated. Usually this meant the theatre management dividing the auditorium down the middle,putting whites on one side and non-whites on the other. But that was when the visiting artists were white. This show was different – it was an all-black show.

The artists were Ben E. King, Judy Clay and a couple of other American soul singers. And it was playing to a totally desegregated audience. Even more important, the promoter was black – a local businessman who wanted to change things and prove a black promoter could handle a show of this type, and make a profit, too. But it wasn’t working out.

The promoter didn’t have enough experience and the day-to-day running of the tour was proving too much for him - the ticket sales were not efficiently handled and nor was the setting up and taking down of the equipment. He was in trouble and needed some experienced help. But the only people with experience were white South Africans and he refused point blank to let them in on his project.

Ralph and Clive were friends of his and asked him, ‘If it was a white guy but he wasn’t South African, would that be any better?’ And the promoter agreed it might be.

They meant me, but I wasn’t sure I could help. I knew nothing of the local conditions or theatres or by-laws. But Ralph and Clive’s idea was that they should tell him what had to be done under the guise of it coming from me.

So they took me along to meet him, which meant getting a pass for Soweto, at that time completely out of bounds to the average tourist.

It made a big impression. This was 1972; it was every bit as bad and ghetto-like as it was portrayed in the British media yet within its terrain there was also a posh end of town where the promoter had an expansive luxury villa, an aspect of South African life I’d never considered before.

Apartheid caused absurdities everywhere. Whites had devised it for their own benefit yet it was often they who were most inconvenienced. One of the rules was that you couldn’t drive in your car with your black maid or gardener and people often solved this by putting them in the boot. It was all so hideously horrible that as soon as things improved with the tour, I decided to move on at once.

Over a last dinner together I pressured Ralph and Clive about going to the UK. I told them, ‘Trying to do international business from South Africa won’t work. People in America and Europe see the country as not fit to be dealt with. Go to the UK and start there. You can come back here later if you still feel the need to.’

The next day I flew to Australia and on my flight I worried I’d been too aggressive with them; maybe I’d overdone it and turned them off the idea. But later I heard that Ralph and Clive had moved to London to start a new business – Zomba Music. And over the next twenty-five they built it into a successful international record company.

In the early 2000s Clive bought Ralph out, then continued to build the company until it became the biggest independent record company in the world with four of America’s bestselling artists – NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, R. Kelly and Britney Spears. He then sold it to BMG for $3 billion, by far the biggest deal of its kind ever done; an extraordinary contractual slight-of-hand that embarrassed BMG and forced them to pay an outrageous price. The music industry was thunderstruck by his audacity.

That was in 2003.

Eight years later, in 2011, out of the blue I received an email from Clive. ‘There’s something I should tell you,’ he said. ‘It was entirely because of you and your persuasion that Ralph and I went to the UK in 1976 and set up Zomba. And I want to thank you.’

I replied, ‘These days, when I do consultancy my contract gives me two per cent of benefits resulting from any advice I give.’

On that basis, Clive would have owed me sixty million dollars. And even if he were to knock it down to a mere .02 per cent, it would still come to a tasty six hundred thousand.

Who knows, I thought, maybe on a whim? But his reply was succinct…

‘I think thanks is enough.’

I decided he was probably right. During fifty years in the business, I’ve known several occasions when money has poured in. Thanks have been almost non-existent.

CLICK SUBSCRIBE AND LEAVE YOUR EMAIL. IT’S FREE