UNDER THE CARPET

FROM MY RECENT BOOK ‘SOUR MOUTH, SWEET BOTTOM’. A PIECE ABOUT THE 1980S WHEN I WAS MANAGING JAPAN.

By some perverse piece of contracting, Virgin, Japan’s UK record company, had assigned US rights in the group to CBS America.

CBS America was a company with no understanding of the underground side of the music business; no knowledge of how to create fame and success through stealth and guile. They were a mainstream company. When something looked potentially breakable they threw all the money in the world at it. Otherwise they weren’t interested. But still, I had to try.

Dick Asher was the man I had to see, the head of Epic Records and probably the dullest man in the whole music industry. He was the man who got Clive Davis fired from CBS Records in the early seventies and since then he’d been fighting to stop payments for radio plays, which also meant fighting with Walter Yetnikoff, who’d taken over as overall head of CBS. Asher was dour and dull and not regarded as a true music man. For three months I tried to fix a meeting with him and finally he agreed. ‘OK – 10 a.m. tomorrow’.

Obviously, he hoped I wouldn’t be able to make it at such short notice.

I flew to New York by Concorde taking no luggage, planning to come back in the afternoon on the two o’clock flight. I arrived at Kennedy just after 8 a.m. The taxi into town was unusually quick and I reached the CBS building at a quarter past nine, with forty-five minutes to spare. So I went into a sandwich bar across the road to have a coffee. It was April and the weather was warm and pleasant but as I sat down it started to rain.

This wasn’t ordinary rain, nor was it April showers; it was monsoon stuff − raindrops like beads coming down in billions per square foot and there was no way I could get across the road in a fit condition for a meeting.

Miraculously, at ten to ten it stopped. The sun came out and the streets started steaming! I paid my bill and went outside. They were big puddles everywhere. Rather than walk twenty yards to the next intersection and cross at the traffic lights like a good New Yorker, I waited for a gap in the traffic and ran across English-style. But a motor scooter came from nowhere and forced me to swerve, plonking my foot in a large puddle.

It turned out to be more than a big puddle. It was one of those classic New York holes in the road, circa 1980 − about twelve inches deep and six feet square. I stumbled and fell and went flat on my face, literally underwater.

The motorcyclist swore at me and the oncoming traffic some thirty yards away didn’t look like it was going to slow down, so I leaped out and ran to the other side of the road.

Thus, I arrived at the CBS building at five to ten for my ten o’clock meeting on a sunny spring day looking as if I had just taken a bath with my clothes on − which is exactly what I had done.

I’d waited a long time for this meeting − it didn’t seem a good idea to cancel it − so I rushed into the toilet in the lobby, went into a cubicle, took off all my clothes and wrung them out. Then I put them on again and presented myself to the security guard.

Two minutes later I was upstairs being shown into Dick’s office by a puzzled secretary.

‘Dick will be a few minutes,’ she told me, and offered me a magazine. ‘I think you’d better sit on it.’

She was right. The wringing out hadn’t done a lot of good. When I walked my shoes squelched and when I sat my bum squelched. The air conditioning was going to freeze me to death.

Dick Asher walked into his office and was displeased with what he saw − a sodden Englishman messing up his pristine armchair.

I decided at once that apologies would be out of order. Dick Asher was too dull for that. He was a tall man with thickset features, a boring grey suit and those huge policeman-type black shoes that the dullest of American executives liked to wear. I decided to play the eccentric, make him think this is how I went to every meeting, dripping wet.

I opened my sodden document case and pulled out a wet record. ‘This is Japan’s new album. They finished recording it two days ago.’

Dick looked agonised about the wet marks on his carpet. It was a good, thick carpet, too, and when it reached the walls it ran all the way up them to the ceiling. I’d only ever seen anything like that in a place where they were trying to contain violent people.

Dick put the album on his turntable.

I looked round the room. ‘Where are the speakers?’

‘It’s clever, isn’t it?’ he grinned. ‘I had them concealed.’

‘Behind the carpet?’ I asked.

He nodded, and my heart sank.

What was the point of asking him to make a musical judgement if he covered his speakers with two-inch carpet? This was the type of executive who makes his judgements based on other people’s judgements. I shouldn’t have even bothered to come.

When the record started playing it sounded like it was coming through the walls from the next office. Dick didn’t look interested and I didn’t care − I was wet and cold and wanted to go home. So in the middle of the second song I simply stood up and left.

Eventually, in fact, CBS decided to release a Japan album, but the fact that Japan’s albums were conceptual, each one with an identity of its own, had completely escaped them. They picked a few songs from each and put them onto a single album.

Pure vandalism! Imagine releasing a French or Italian movie director’s first three films, a third of each, cobbled together to make a nonsensical gouache.

Even after twenty years, I’d still not worked it out - why were major record companies such crap?

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