Simon Says
Simon Napier-Bell is one of the most successful managers in UK pop history. In preparation for his appearance in Mindfield at Electric Picnic, he talks to Olaf Tyaransen.
Olaf Tyaransen, 06 Sep 2010
“Any artist coming into the music industry now who dreams of being the next U2 or Michael Jackson should just forget it,” declares the legendary Simon Napier-Bell. “That isn’t going to happen anymore. You’re going to find artists finding their own audiences. I’m sure you’ll get audiences of up to a million, maybe, but I think audiences of 20 million will be very, very rare. Because that only ever happened because record companies were focusing everything onto the one artist to make their own promotion and distribution of records more cost-effective.”
When it comes to the business of music, very few individuals have been there, done that, and sold the t-shirt as thoroughly and as often as veteran player Simon Napier-Bell. A band manager, promoter, journalist and author, he’s looked after everyone from Marc Bolan, Boney M and The Yardbirds to Japan, Sinitta and Wham! After five decades of involvement, he doesn’t necessarily see the current travails of the music business as being a bad thing.
“There’s a lot of talk about the demise of the music industry, but who wants a music industry anyway?” he says. “There’s no demise of music – there’s just a demise of the record industry. Which is splendid! Nobody wants to buy records anymore – they want MP3s and downloads and so on. I don’t hear anybody complaining except for record company people, and they’ll all be gone in a few years. And then we’ll be in this beautiful new music industry which will be rather like the music industry at its very beginnings. It’ll be much more diffuse, much smaller audiences, but artists can go online and find an audience for their own music.”
Now aged 71, Napier-Bell mainly lives with his boyfriend in Thailand. “I’m in Pattaya, which is an hour-and-a-half from Bangkok. It’s a mad town – it’s a seaside town like Bournemouth with a red-light district like Toyko. Most excellent!”
He’s still working for a crust, but no longer manages bands. “No, I don’t manage acts any more. I do a lot of consultancy work, so I meet a lot of managers who don’t know quite what to do – or who have a good act but haven’t a lot of managerial experience. So I do that, and I give talks, write books. I’m working on a book at the moment. It’s taken me four months so far, and there’s four months to go. I do it about every five years, and it eats up an awful lot of time.”
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