BY JOHN JACKLIN
Six years as the manager of the former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney was ‘not all roses and champagne’
A SHOW business manager who lives in Henley has told how he fell out with the former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney in a book that reveals his six decades in the music industry, rubbing shoulders with the elite of the music industry.
Richard Ogden was Sir Paul McCartney’s manager from 1987 until 1993 during which McCartney undertook one of his biggest world tours performing in front of 245,000 people in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
It was in Brazil that McCartney spoke the words that have given rise to the title of his memoir, Bigger Than The Beatles. “Bigger than The Beatles is what Paul McCartney shouted at me when I was his manager when he came off stage at the Maracanã stadium in Rio in April 1990,” says Ogden, who spent 60 years in the music industry. But six years managing McCartney “wasn’t all roses and champagne. I can assure you,” Ogden, 76, says.
“We fell out. After three years, we fell out. I don’t know why. It’s a mystery to me. I pursue that in the book, trying to understand why it happened. We parted on very bad terms.
“It was a great shame because I did great work with him. Why it ended the way it did, you’d have to ask him. I’ve never been really sure.” He added: “I had two, three-year contracts.
The second of the three-year contracts ended in May 1993.
“You could say that he just didn’t renew my contract. But we had a bit of a to-do. At one point this was the title of my book, but I changed it. I said to him, ‘All you want around you is yes men.’ But he said, ‘I tell you what I don’t want. A no man like you.’ My book for a while was called No Yes Man.”
That came in a heated final meeting with McCartney in June 1993. But as a title for a book, his literary agent found that “my intentionally self-deprecating title wasn’t playing all that well with the commissioning editors, although they were enthusiastic about having a bona fide quote from a Beatle.
Ogden, who grew up near Hartlepool, was educated at The Nautical College in Pangbourne and has lived in and around Henley since 1973, says: “Bigger Than The Beatles: Sixty Years in Showbusiness is not a typical autobiography, it is more of a ramble through my life-long involvement in popular music: from my chorister childhood in the Fifties singing along to musicals like South Pacific and Oliver! right up to promoting Jean-Michel Jarre at the Municipal Stadium, Radom, Poland on June 19 this year.
“It begins in London in 1971 with Shirley Bassey and continues through The Rolling Stones,” Black Oak Arkansas, Black Sabbath, Ted Nugent, The Motors & Bram Tchaikovsky, Paul and Linda McCartney, Michael Jackson, Jean-Michel Jarre, Ricky Martin, Aerosmith, Mariah Carey, Van Morrison and ends in Sao Paulo in 2009 with Tony Iommi’s Heaven & Hell.
“Along the way I recall encounters with a host of stars of stage, screen and even sport, ranging (randomly) from Cliff Richard to 50 Cent; from Joe Cocker to Celine Dion; from Ian Kilmister to Andrew Lloyd Webber; from Michel Platini to Neil Warnock and from Stanley Baker to Kevin Costner.
“I digress and I ruminate and I discover some curious juxtapositions: from the smallest show in which I was ever involved, when my school group played at a party in Sunningdale in 1967 to the biggest, 30 years later in 1997 when Jean-Michel Jarre performed for three-and-a-half million people in Moscow; and from 1965 when I paid 30 shillings for two tickets to see Stevie Wonder in Stockton-on-Tees, to 2012 when I paid him $1,000,000 to perform on Copacabana Beach. And I even got to work with Billy Fury, my first musical hero in those distant times before The Beatles.”
‘Bigger Than The Beatles: Sixty Years in Showbusiness is not a typical autobiography, it is more of a ramble through my life-long involvement in popular music’
In his book Ogden recalls his time at school in Pangbourne, where he tried to nurture his own musical talent. “At the naval school cum reformatory near Reading where from April 1963 to July 1967 for eight months of every year I lived as boarder I found Adrian ‘Fred’ Birch, a like-minded boy but who unlike me was talented enough to call himself a musician and he and I practised for every hour we could find, which wasn’t many in an institution dedicated to depriving its boys of as much free time as possible.
“We had an hour off in the evenings and Sunday afternoon was also free, but the minute ‘we went electric’ we were banned from the school music room despite the fact that we were the only boys who ever went anywhere near it.”
Ogden received his primary education at schools on Teesside and he was sent “down south” to the college at Pangbourne, and was destined for a career in the Royal Navy. In 1967 he joined as planned, but after only ten days at Britannia Royal Naval College, in Dartmouth, Devon, he took the option to leave and go to university. After graduating from Leicester University in the summer of 1971 he became a press officer at Liberty-United Artists Records before moving to Atlantic Records.
Ogden joined McCartney, who turned 84 years old last month, after releasing the songs from the musical Phantom of the Opera as an album while at the record company Polydor. He recalls that Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the music for phantom, was very happy at the album’s success. He adds that Lloyd Webber’s manager was Brian Brolly, who had managed McCartney in the seventies.
“He was leaving Lloyd Webber’s group, the Really Useful Company, and he approached me to say, ‘Would you be interested in taking over from me?’ I loved artist management and I’d wanted to do it again but I don’t think the theatre and Andrew Lloyd Webber [was right for me]. I needed something more rock and roll.
“Three weeks later I got a call from McCartney’s lawyer John Eastman (Linda McCartney’s brother). He said, ‘I hear you’re interested in returning to artist management, would you be interested in meeting Paul McCartney?’”
Ogden says: “The funny thing about it was my boss at Polydor was like, ‘What would you want to do that for? You must be nuts’.” Ogden was McCartney’s manager when he linked up with Elvis Costello for the album, Flowers In the Dirt.
“When I started managing Paul, I asked him, ‘What do you want me to do? What’s your idea of what a manager does?’ He was a bit vague about it. I worked out a plan. The first part of the plan was to write with somebody exciting, so that’s why he started writing with Elvis Costello.”
Despite the fallout with McCartney it was during the gig in Rio De Janeiro that Ogden — who also managed Linda McCartney’s projects such as her vegetarian food brand — met his wife, who was “working for the concert promoter”.
Ogden got a job at a record company with Sony Music Europe after parting ways with McCartney and insists there is no bitterness between the two.
In a very honest assessment of his life and work in the music business, he says: “The career in that field just landed on my plate while I was at university. I had no idea you could have a career in the music industry. It was news to me until I had one.”
Bigger Than The Beatles: 60 Years in Showbusiness is available now on TheGreatBritishBookshop.co.uk, The Bell Bookshop, Life Interiors (Nettlebed) and on Amazon