Michele Hewitson interview: Garry Van Egmond

Garry Van Egmond goes to every concert of acts he's promoting, which he says is "taking care of business". Photo / Dean Purcell

AC/DC’s promoter in his sensible blue suit keeps his success and the glamour of showbiz well in the background.

The Dutch-born Australian promoter Garry Van Egmond was in town this week, fleetingly. He had just flown in from Shanghai. Shanghai was a Harry Potter exhibition; Auckland was the announcement of AC/DC's December tour dates; the next night would be Singapore and a Dreamworks exhibition. Such is the life of a very successful promoter. It sounds exciting and of course, like most business travel, it mostly isn't. Still, showbiz! Showbiz must be a bit exciting. I wrote that hopefully. I was rather relieved to learn that he flies business class - because despite everyone's best efforts to impose a veneer of the glittery and exciting show business world upon proceedings, we all failed miserably.

The promoter's publicist arranged the use of a swanky enough hotel room - its second-best suite, I think - for the interview. I don't know who arranged the clutch of flunkies to escort us to said suite and fluff about with bowls of nuts and for some unknown reason, fruity lollies, or to have the hotel manager on hand to shake hands. Anyone would have thought the promoter I was about to meet was royalty, or a rock star, and that I was somehow glamorous and terribly important by association. The promoter's publicist is also Australian and has an Australian sense of humour, so who knows what she told them about the status of the promoter. Someone was having a laugh because the second-best suite wasn't actually the promoter's room.

So much for the glamorous life, I said, a bit huffily. "Yes, well," he said, smiling in a way which suggested he might be in on the joke. I supposed he was staying in some much smaller room, the size of a shoebox and, I thought but didn't say, with an equivalently sized room rate. "Yeah, that's right. Ha, ha. I do an enormous amount of travelling and I prefer smaller rooms. Oh, just easier to manage," he said, meaning the packing and unpacking of suitcases which is resolutely unglamorous no matter which room you are staying in.

He says people do think that being a promoter of rock bands is a glittering and glamorous business and: "Certain parts certainly are". Which parts? I asked, dubiously. He was wearing a very nice and no doubt expensive blue suit but you would not look at it and think: There goes a man who leads a glittering and glamorous life. He is in a business known for its showmen (he got his start with Harry M. Miller, the New Zealand promoter, whose life was at least as colourful as some of the acts he represented.) He says he's shy. The best description of his personality I could find I came across in an article only after having met him. It made me laugh aloud. It is: "He has the style of the Dutch." He is, in other words, as flamboyant as his suit. He does have a swish watch - a Rolex, of course - but you have to ask to see it. He does have a "nice" car, a Mercedes. What colour? "Grey."

He is very rich but wasn't about to tell me just how rich, now was he? In 2010, in what was generally held to be a lean year in the Australian entertainment business, he made more than A$2 million. He lives with his wife, Rosie, in an apartment in Melbourne. It is on Toorak Rd which is very posh Melbourne. They also have a beach place on the Mornington Peninsula and a "little farm" outside Melbourne where he runs a few cattle. He said that his one real extravagance was playing golf. I thought that was a little joke but the club he plays at costs about seven and a half grand to join and $3000 in annual fees, so he likely does count golf as an extravagance.

He is 68 and has been married to Rosie for "about 45 years"; they have two grown-up children; his son works in the family business. Oh, yes: What were those certain parts of the family business which were glittering and glamorous? "Oh, you know, the success of it ... for instance, in the last AC/DC tour we did over 720,000 tickets in Australia and New Zealand." He keeps all of the big numbers in his head - Jesus Christ Superstar, 1992, over a million tickets; Dire Straits, 800,000 tickets; Harry Potter in Singapore, 420,000; AC/DC's last tour, grossed $4 billion. The inside of his head must look like a ledger. "Well, they are great figures to have." He later said he'd show me some top secret documents about the AC/DC tour but I wasn't to write about them. They were long lists, of personnel, including truck drivers. Another figure: In his long career he's sold 30 million tickets. I don't know what that translates into in dollars but not, he said, $30 million. "No, but I'm very comfortable and money is not the most important thing for me." But it's nice to have money, isn't it? "That is true."

He has a reputation for doing deals on a handshake and he says that this is also absolutely true. No doubt the handshake is followed up with watertight legal documents, but the story says a lot about his reputation. He has been AC/DC's promoter for more than 30 years. He says they are very loyal but so is he. He goes to every concert. He doesn't wear earplugs. He doesn't get bored. "No!" I asked if he did head-banging by trying to do a bit of head-banging myself. I put my neck out. He has a few years on me so maybe his loyalty doesn't extend to the head-banging.

He has never worked out how many concerts he's been to - "Phew! No, I haven't" - but it must be, he thought, hundreds. Going to every concert, which sounds way beyond the call of duty, is "taking care of business". He and the band have stayed together all these years because they are, as unlikely as it might sound, very alike in many ways. "Everything they do has to be professional." They are very sensible about ticket prices and won't pre-sell tickets which is clever and sensible because it endears them to their fans. I thought, though, that a promoter might have liked to have higher ticket prices because it would mean more money. This is why I would be as successful a promoter as I am a head banger. He said: "Yeah, but I once did a tour with Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits and he said to me: 'Garry, how many pairs of jeans can I wear? Enough is enough.'"

Sensible bands, like sensible promoters, survive. He has seen the excesses of the past, of course - the cliches of rock and roll which are the cliches of youth; the drugs, the booze, the parties, the girls. He has never found the trappings alluring. He has been married to one woman all these years. He has never had so much as a puff on a joint. He says he has never been asked to get a band drugs, and I believe him. He says he's not judgmental about all of that cliched behaviour. "No. I just feel very sad when people go too far. I feel sad when people do tremendous damage to themselves." I asked about AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd, who was in court last year for, among other things, possession of drugs, and who won't be touring with the band in December. Had he any inkling things were going haywire? "Well, I mean, I really can't comment on it ... Just have a look at him, at what he's done to himself." Did he like him? "He was always very nice. Very quiet. A great musician. But, yeah, he went the wrong way."

I asked if anything had ever shocked him, thinking of sex and drugs and booze, obviously. He said: "The waste shocked me." I thought he must mean as in the waste of lives, but he was talking about ham. "You know, some artists will insist on having a marquee set up with dinner for 40 people, with hams and all the foods and the wines. And some nights no one would turn up. Not even them. They'd go somewhere else." That offended him in some deep way. "Well, I think, you know, these artists are starting to wake up: We are paying for this, this is coming out of our money.'" It offended his sense of frugality; all of that excess and carelessness. "Yeah, just the ... waste. The dumbness of having all this and then not, you know ... "

I had to ask, looking at that suit: Can he really like AC/DC's music? "I think that music is fantastic. The atmosphere they create is just happiness. Everyone leaves happy." He also loves Dire Straits. That must make him just about the only person on earth who would own up to being an AC/DC fan and a fan of Dire Straits. "Ha, ha, ha. I don't know!"

He said: "I'm the straight guy!"

I'll say. He's the straight guy who spends his life promoting the careers of some very big egos and some very strange characters. There are those bonkers riders. AC/DC, I thought, requested oxygen tanks and masks. This was quite wrong. That is not in their rider (theirs has a chef, which is so ho-hum.) The oxygen tanks are the business of other people in the cast of thousands who run the tours. But what are they for? "Well, in case you haven't seen an AC/DC concert ... I think that when they get to a certain age ... " So, the oxygen is just because they're so old? "Yeah," he said. He does have a knack of making a rock band sound as exciting as a club for keen crocheters. I asked if the band had nurses to go with the oxygen tanks and he said: "Oh no! No, no. They're absolutely normal!"

Of course they are, I said, thinking of the guitarist, Angus Young, who, at the age of 60, still dresses up as a schoolboy. "Well, I understand that he goes into character. He's like an actor."

He is the straight guy who observes eccentricity for a living, which he quietly enjoys, I think. He's not quite so keen on enormous egos. "Really, if they've got those sorts of egos ... I don't try to avoid them on purpose but if that's what the story is, I wouldn't want to be involved." Oh, who? I said, because wouldn't we all like to know? He closed his mouth firmly in that way that tells you it is going to stay firmly closed. Then he said: "Barry Manilow!" He said: "He's very difficult to deal with." He said, dishing up a casually brilliant put-down: "And, actually, when I first met him he was Bette Midler's piano player."

He adores Bette Midler and she once came to dinner and went away with his wife's famous chocolate souffle recipe. Rod Stewart is "a fabulous guy". He's mean as a monkey, isn't he? "Yeah! But he's a fabulous guy." He met Prince recently and everyone wants to know what he's like, he said. He still has no idea what he's like, or if he liked him or not because: "He's very strange. And I'm still trying to work out what he was trying to say to me." What about Shirley Maclaine? She's a complete nut, isn't she? "She doesn't like women, that's what her problem is." I said a woman must have done the dirty on her in one of her previous lives. And he giggled in a most unexpected way - for a straight guy promoter in a sensible blue suit.