Paul McGuinness: How To Take Over The World With A Phone
I first met Paul McGuinness (who I interview in today’s paper) in 1978, when he was 27 and I was 16. Which meant, of course, that he seemed impossibly old and I wondered what he was doing hanging around with Bono in the Mount Temple school gymnasium. My band, Frankie Corpse and the Undertakers, were about to support U2 at a gig. I got a firsthand taste of his managerial ruthlessness when he cut our set from thirty minutes to fifteen. Our guitarist, Frankie himself, was philosophical. “We’ll just have to play faster,” he decided. It was punk rock. Fast was good.
I always believe McGuinness made the difference with U2. They had all the potential locked up in those four personalities, but it took someone with a business mind and a vision to even believe that a young Irish band could make it outside of Dublin. You have to remember that, back then, you could count the Irish rock stars with an international profile on the fingers of one hand (without recourse to your thumb). Van Morrison, Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy…and The Boomtown Rats were just starting to make an impression on the minor reaches of the U.K. charts.
And no, I am not counting the Nolan Sisters and Dana. They weren’t really much of an inspiration to us.
McGuinness was always slightly disdainful of people who felt the need to set themselves up with offices and equipment, the paraphernalia of business, in order to get a band on the road. He once remarked that all a manager needed to start up was access to a pay phone and a stack of ten pence pieces. I asked him if he thought there was still truth in that today.
“It probably still applies, in the sense that all you really need is a phone,” he laughed. “Of course, you can make a call anytime you want now. I remember the early years of touring, when we used to spend months on busses, it was something you really planned. We would pull into a truck stop, and while everyone was eating I would rush to a pay phone and make six or seven calls and then get back on the bus. Nowadays, I think people are a little less strategic about their use of the phone.”
He acknowledge’s that the business is getting more complex, and that a band really needs a manager to thrive, but says “I think it was ever thus. That hasn’t changed really. What artists want remains the same: the public to pay attention to what they are doing. The way you go about that is different in every generation, it is changing all the time. But with every innovation in technology, opportunities for creativity increase. It is part of the artist’s responsibility to make that work for them.”
His advice to start up managers is: “Get as much information as you possibly can, an enormous amount of it is available on the internet. And study the environment in which business is being done nowadays. There’s no secrets, the information is readily available from newspapers, trade publications, textbooks, and indeed from talking to people. I have always found people in the music business are very happy to share information, and I hope this is true of myself. It’s not a closed shop. But that is not to say it is equal opportunities for all. It is, I suppose, a meritocracy. People who make better music and better records attract more listeners. What’s wrong with that?”
And, in this rapidly changing business environment, where physical sales are collapsing and downloads are being traded for free, will we ever see a world beating phenomenon like U2 again? “Absolutely,” insists McGuinness. “I always think somewhere down the road, in a garage somewhere, there is a band practising today who, in a couple of years time, will have a number one record all over the world. I don’t think that’s going to change.”
If they are really going to get lucky, however, they probably need to be practising next door to a fellow megalomaniac fascinated by accounting and business practises, whose instrument of choice is the phone.
Not sure about the stack of ten pence pieces, however.
- Neil McCormick, Telegraph Media Group Limited 2006 - 2008.
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Paul McGuinness: How To Take Over The World With A Phone
