Barbara Charone is the legendary publicist to A-list stars including Madonna. Now she's revealing what it's really like to be up close and personal with the world's music legends.
My first question to Barbara Charone, PR of legend to Madonna, Keith Richards, Depeche Mode, Foo Fighters and many, many more, is a simple one. What are her three all-time favourite records?
"No 1: Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones," says Charone, known to everyone in the business as BC, in a singular Chicago rasp that remains unchanged after almost five decades in Britain. "It encapsulates everything I love about music – country, blues, rock – and Tumbling Dice is my all-time favourite song. It makes me cry. Then there is Want One by Rufus Wainwright, which just blew my mind. Neil Tennant [of the Pet Shop Boys] told me about it when we were in Tower Records – remember Tower Records? – and the moment I heard the line from Oh What A World, 'Why am I always on a plane or a fast train?' it got me. The third is Ray of Light by Madonna. Because it's a masterpiece."
It's a very BC answer: born of passion and enthusiasm, but with one eye on the professional expediency of citing albums by artists that she represents (everyone knows Exile is the most "Keith" of all the Stones albums) and, in Wainwright's case, managed for a period in the early 2010s. We're in St John's Wood in north London in the offices of MBC, the company Charone formed two decades previously with Moira Bellas, the record label WEA's former head of press. On the walls are signed tour posters for Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Rufus Wainwright and Kasabian, alongside gold and platinum discs for Depeche Mode, Mark Ronson and Robert Plant. This is the nerve centre of a woman who has dedicated her life to rock and pop, first as a teenage fan in the suburbs of Chicago, then as a UK-based journalist working for the NME, Sounds and the American magazine Crawdaddy, and then, after taking time off in 1979 to write a biography of Keith Richards, as the most powerful PR in the business: much loved, sometimes feared, never ignored.
I've known BC for as long as I've been doing music journalism – I began around the time she set up MBC, incidentally – and I'm very fond of her, although occasionally she has felt the need to pick up the phone and tear me a new orifice. "There was that time you did an interview with Robert Plant and there was a picture of Led Zeppelin on the cover," she recalls, cheerily. "It probably wasn't your fault…"
Charone has reason to be in ebullient form. She is part of a consortium that won the bid to buy her beloved Chelsea FC. "Me and [the Times columnist] Danny Finkelstein were asked to be non-executive directors because they wanted fans on the board," she says of the bid. "It's been approved by the Premier League and the government, so obviously that's really exciting." And she is about to publish her memoir, the appropriately titled Access All Areas. It is the story of how a girl from the Chicago suburbs ended up with a seat at the rock'n'roll table. I have to wonder, reading about this daughter of a lawyer father and a drama teacher mother from the suburb of Glencoe, who developed an obsession with Neil Young, the Faces and other Seventies rock legends her classmates had never heard of, what Charone was like back then.
"I was in sixth grade when the Beatles conquered America and that was it: I loved everything British, from the Kinks to Blow-Up to the red buses. My parents went to see Beyond the Fringe in New York and brought back the album and I just ate up that spiky British humour. That's where it all started."
Access All Areas details Charone's burgeoning journalism career, which began when she accosted the Chicago Sun-Times's music critic Al Rudis at a concert in 1970 and talked him into letting her write a piece about James Taylor, then the biggest thing in America after the massive success of his song about a friend who committed suicide, Fire and Rain. And an exchange programme with her college, Tufts University, Massachusetts, saw her dream of living in London turn to reality in 1972.
"London didn't let me down. America is such a new country that we have nothing like Buckingham Palace," says Charone.
After Sounds argued on her behalf that she needed a work permit because she would offer a uniquely American point of view to its British readers, Charone moved permanently in 1974 and began her career in earnest. She learnt the essential music journalist's lesson after landing her first major feature aged 22, a profile of Keith Richards: these people are not your friends. You are not there to hang out with them, or be like them. She posits in Access All Areas that she got the job of writing the official Keith Richards biography over the equally Keith-obsessed journalists Nick Kent and Pete Erskine because they were trying so hard to emulate his elegantly wasted persona and lifestyle that they would never have got the thing written in the first place.
"What I was good at," says Charone, "was putting the fan worship and romanticism into the feature while retaining some professionalism and objectivity along the way. You have to remember that there was no Instagram, no social media. The only way kids could find out about artists was through the music magazines and to an extent the national press. I was completely obsessed with the Stones, so I wanted to convey to the fans the excitement I was feeling about meeting Keith Richards."
As it turned out, the working relationship with Richards ended up with Charone being on the receiving end of the kind of admonishment she would later dish out every now and then herself. The Sounds article contained the line she is most proud of – "When Keith Richards walks into a room, rock'n'roll walks in after him" – but a year later she wrote a cover story on the Stones for Crawdaddy, which she ended with the pay-off: "Time, however, waits for no one, not even the Rolling Stones. 'This could be the last time/ Maybe the last time/ I don't know.' " A couple of months later, she went to see the Stones at Madison Square Garden in New York. After the concert, an angry Richards was waiting in his hotel to ask her, "Where do you get off writing that we're gonna break up?"
"He completely gave me shit about how I ended the piece," remembers Charone, when I bring this up. "Remember that this was back in 1975 and this summer the Stones are playing Hyde Park. I used a cheap word play on the Stones song The Last Time, and he had bothered to read the article so he was right to call me out. That was the communication between artists and journalists that is lacking today. It was a smaller world."
What is Richards like? "Incredibly smart, funny and a little bit shy, which gets misconstrued with people thinking he's on drugs or whatever. There is a softer side to him too, which you can hear on some of the Stones songs. The Stones work because of the yin and yang thing between him and Mick. Having two creative people in the band means you don't have a dictatorship, you have someone to disagree with, and when they were both on fire it drove their best work."
How about Mick? "I have tremendous respect for him as an artist, but I don't see him backstage when I go to Stones shows because it's a separate world… and I'm on Team Keith."
So much so that when Charone was writing his biography Richards lent her Redlands, his Sussex farmhouse that became the scene of a famous drugs bust in February 1967. "Talk about inspiration. I was in Keith's house by myself because he was living in America at the time, and each day I would transcribe tapes, write after that, make dinner, smoke a few joints, have a glass of wine and watch TV. The stressful moment came when the book went to the printers and Keith still hadn't signed it off, which he had to do because it was an authorised biography. In the end the only changes he asked for were a date I got wrong and the removal of the name of the guitarist who didn't get the job of replacing [short-lived Stones guitarist] Mick Taylor. That's an illustration of what a kind man he is. He didn't want to embarrass the guy."
The early chapters of Access All Areas portray a Seventies world where rock stars and the people who write about them are essentially in the same club; where Charone might go round to Eric Clapton's house to witness him drinking Special Brew at ten in the morning, but there was an unspoken agreement that she wouldn't write about it. The book does feature a lot of cocaine. Most of it, however, appears to have been taken by Charone herself.
"Yes, I took cocaine, I smoked pot, just like normal people," she says. "And after writing the Keith book, when I stopped hanging out with the Stones and didn't want to go back to working for the music papers, I ended up owing £10,000 ($19,500) to the bank. I was really good at talking people into things. I still am. Turns out I was a little too good at talking my bank manager into giving me money. At one point I was actually thinking of suing the bank for giving me such a big overdraft."
Not everyone is wonderful. There is a "never meet your heroes" moment early on when, having grown up loving Crosby, Stills & Nash, Charone interviews Stephen Stills in a faceless Midwestern hotel and discovers him to be less than charming: "Just plain nasty. Seemed to have a chip on his shoulder so big it was a surprise he could get in the room." An interview for a 1976 cover story on the Eagles for Crawdaddy, during which the band's leaders, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, kept nipping off to the bathroom for cocaine breaks and an employee from the label taped the interview as a marker of lack of trust in the journalist, was illustrated with a tasteless drawing of the mellow country-rock superstars dead in a crashed car; a reference to their hit single Life in the Fast Lane. It led to a lifetime ban on Charone doing so much as turning up to an Eagles concert.
"Actually, I'll see the Eagles at Hyde Park because Robert Plant and Alison Krauss are supporting them. Can I hide behind you? The interview was a bit snarky, but the cover wasn't my fault. Nonetheless, my name was marked and their manager, Irving Azoff, went nuclear. Don Henley came to London and kept complaining about me to other journalists. But those encounters are good because when people ask me what famous people are like, the answer is: they're like everyone else. They can wake up in a bad mood. The more I got to know Stephen Stills, the more I saw a person who wasn't very likeable – I still can't listen to his records – but sometimes people are not likeable."
The late Lou Reed, whom Charone worked with after taking up her new job as a press officer at WEA in 1981, is a case in point. "Lou had a love/hate relationship with the press. They loved him; he hated them. He liked to make people feel ill at ease, which is the worst thing you can do. We went to New York for an interview with the NME once. After making us hang around for two or three days we eventually got the interview done over a very expensive dinner at Nobu, just under US$1,000. He ordered a really expensive bottle of wine, knowing the label would pay, and then he was shocked when it was written about. The manager called me, shouting, and I had to explain: it's not brain science. If you do something in front of the press, they will write about it."
As for Madonna, whom Charone took on in 1983 when she was a complete unknown with two flop singles to her name, she was a force of nature from day one. "The best image for any artist is the one that is you, and Madonna had the whole package: the way she dressed back then was the image she had on stage. The first time she played in London was before 1,000 people at Koko [formerly the Camden Palace]. The next time she played in London was at Wembley Stadium. That kind of rise will never be replicated."
Reading about Charone's various triumphs and mishaps, her tears and joys, you realise how much the relationship between artist, PR and publication, however professional, is one based on diplomacy, with negotiations internecine enough to match those of global espionage. "That's because, once you decide what interview to do, the responsibility falls on your shoulders," she explains. "It means that if it's a success, you're a hero. If anything is wrong, like a misplaced photograph, it is your fault, even if it isn't your fault, because you're the one who said the artist should do it."
There is an innocuous incident in the book that shows how the smallest detail can lead to a crisis. In 2000, just as Charone and Moira Bellas went independent with MBC, Madonna gave an interview to The Sun for which she agreed to be photographed; a rare thing indeed. She was promoting her new album, Music, getting hitched to Guy Ritchie, and becoming an honorary Brit, and all she asked is that a necklace bearing the legend "Mum" was cropped from the photograph. The interview went well, everyone went home happy, and the following day Charone woke up to every PR's nightmare: an article and accompanying photograph they know will make their day hell. The "Mum" necklace was in shot.
"I have no idea why Madonna wanted it cropped, but she was nice enough to do the photo and made one request, so when I picked up the paper my blood ran cold. When a paper calls up, you have to ask: why do they want to interview this person? And with someone like Madonna, positioning is way more important than circulation. In 2000 she did an interview with [the dance magazine] Mixmag. All these broadsheet editors were calling up, going, why didn't you do it with us? Because at that time it suited her more."
Of course, it's not always the newspapers or magazines to blame when things go wrong. Nobody could have predicted Madonna would almost be garrotted during a 2014 performance at the Brit awards when her cape was yanked back by her dancers but failed to release, sending her flying backwards down a flight of stairs. There was a photoshoot with Aerosmith at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles for Q magazine in 2002, where the manager insisted on a Moroccan-themed room filled with food that nobody ate, two photographers were flown out from London but only one turned up after the other overdid it on the first night, and a hugely elaborate set-up featuring semi-naked women climbing out of a swimming pool turned out to be a massive waste of money after the resulting photographs were out of focus and unusable. Two years later, Charone was told to go to the Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler's hotel room and tell him what would happen when he turned up at that year's Brit awards. "I mean, they had done a lot of red carpets by that point. I had to go there and say: you will get out of the car, you will step onto the red carpet, there will be a bank of photographers… It was madness."
As for Charone's scary side, she says she has calmed down a lot over the years. What about bad reviews? "Reviews are always contentious. I have to remind the artist that it is only one person's opinion, but sometimes when you're working with someone you get carried away and lose sight of a record that might not be very good. REM always got five-star reviews, and then in 2004 Q gave their album Around the Sun three stars. I called the editor to give him a hard time… before all the other reviews came out and they were three stars too. Then you think, you know what? I was wrong. You have to be honest."
As for avoiding the pitfalls of a career in dealing with famous people, it is simple: don't take yourself too seriously. "At the end of the day we are not solving famine. We are letting people have a little bit of light into a world they wouldn't otherwise see."
Charone's own life is dominated by music, Chelsea football club and games of tennis. She lives alone in Maida Vale.
For the rest of the time, she can be found at her office, a concert or a restaurant, enthusing about a new artist over a glass of rosé and a steak. As for her spiritual home, it all comes back to Keith Richards.
"There was a concert at Wembley in 1982 when they featured Exile on Main Street," Charone concludes. "That afternoon I went to see Chelsea, they won, and directly from Stamford Bridge I went to Keith's dressing room at Wembley. Ronnie Wood and [the Stones' touring keyboardist] Chuck Leavell came in, they ran through a few songs from Exile, and I was sitting on the couch, drinking red wine. Life doesn't get any better than that, does it?"
Extract: Toronto 1977 — 'Keith was in big trouble'
In 1976 I asked Keith Richards if I could do a book on him, and much to my surprise he said yes. Keith lived outside Chichester in a magical house called Redlands in West Wittering. The house had an actual moat around it ("my best friend he shoots water rats" from their classic song Live With Me is a quite accurate description of Keith). The main open living room is surrounded by an upstairs gallery, and the wooden beams give it a really comfy feel.
I'd been down to the house a few times and on one of those visits Keith suggested that I come to Toronto early in 1977 for the Rolling Stones shows at the El Mocambo club. It was the only thing on the band's schedule that year so it made sense to start the book then. I flew to Toronto at the end of February, on the same BA flight as Charlie Watts, though not in the same section of the plane. I had taken all of Sounds' petty cash float with me, for expenses, not knowing that I would never return to the office. Little did I know what lay ahead.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reached the 32nd floor of Toronto's Harbour Castle hotel before I did, arresting Keith for possession of heroin. Days earlier his partner, Anita Pallenberg, had been arrested at the airport for possession of hash and a mysterious blue pill when she and Keith landed with their seven-year-old son, Marlon. She was later fined $400 and let off for the blue Tic Tac.
But Keith was in big trouble. Suddenly rehearsal time for the upcoming club shows was cut short by meetings with lawyers and court appearances. Keith was no stranger to the law but this was his most serious drug charge yet, with a prison sentence a very real possibility. Back in 1967 he was infamously arrested at Redlands along with Mick Jagger and the month before he left for Canada he appeared at Aylesbury Crown Court for cocaine possession.
The shows at the El Mocambo (capacity 300) were the first the band had done since playing to 200,000 in England the summer before. The first night was exceptional but the second night was one of those "you had to be there" moments. Keith particularly was on fire, playing one out-of-this-world guitar solo after another. Sweat poured from every audience member, along with Margaret Trudeau, wife of the then Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whose appearance at the shows grabbed even more headlines, managing to knock Keith off quite a few front pages.
But by the time Monday dawned, the grim reality of the situation hovered like a very dark cloud. Keith and Anita appeared in court. Anita was fined and Keith was given bail, his passport confiscated. They returned to their home for the foreseeable future, the 32nd floor of the Harbour Castle hotel. Outside Lake Ontario was frozen. It would melt by the time they left.
The future for Keith and indeed the Rolling Stones was uncertain. A couple of days after the court appearance, Mick Jagger flew to New York and soon after the others followed. Within days the Stones party of 48 had dwindled to just 10. I was moved to the suite next door to Keith, Anita and Marlon. I'm sure Keith felt alone and quite possibly betrayed, but no doubt my staying helped forge a tremendous bond between us.
God knows what my parents thought. I called home and reassured them I was fine, but it must have been a massive worry, knowing their daughter was living for a month in a Toronto hotel alongside a Rolling Stone out on bail for heroin trafficking. It's going to be a really great book, I promised them.
When Keith finally got back to his day job and returned to Stones action, he had guitar picks made that read, "I'm innocent". And when the band recorded Some Girls later that year, he wrote the classic Before They Make Me Run about his troubles with the law.
The one time the family strayed further than Toronto was for a day outing to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls – prompting Keith to quip, "Shall I jump?" – before returning to the prison-like confines of the hotel.
A week after the first club show Keith booked some studio time, initially to listen to the live tapes but once there he started to record some incredibly moving versions of mostly country classics, the ache in his voice heartbreaking. These Toronto sessions showcased a musical side to Keith that hadn't been exposed much before, or since, save for the occasional track on Stones albums. Here he is, alone in the studio, playing piano on most of the downbeat songs and a bit of acoustic guitar, singing in a plaintive voice that could easily reduce one to tears, knowing his current predicament. If Keith ever made a solo album, this is what it could sound like.
I will for ever cherish the cassettes he gave me from those sessions, personally addressed "to Barbara", with an asterisk which noted "just piano and vocal, no overdubs" for some tracks.
In a weird hazy way the month sped by, and on April 1 Keith's passport was returned and he was granted a US visa on medical grounds and allowed to travel to the States for rehab.
Following a stint in rehab, Keith holed up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, living in the suburbs and eating local diner takeaway. He spent a lot of time listening to the tapes of what would become the Love You Live LP with some tracks from the El Mocambo shows. He eventually moved to a house in Westchester, Connecticut. I visited often.
Most of my days were taken up with research for the Keith book.
The bulk of the band interviews were done in Paris when they were recording what would become Some Girls in late 1977 and early '78. Keith stayed at his rue Saint-Honoré flat and I stayed at the Hotel Frontenac, a small five-star hotel off the Champs-Élysées, with Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and others in the party.
Before Christmas, Keith returned to Toronto and a trial date was set for February '78, though later moved to October. The band were in fine creative form but talk of "What if Keith goes to prison?" would not stop. The future remained uncertain, which added a massive sense of drama to everything the Stones did.
Keith very graciously let me stay at Redlands to write my book as it had been empty ever since he flew to Toronto. I spent the first part of 1978 ensconced in the house on my own, transcribing countless cassettes. I'd write all day, then roll a few joints, have a glass of wine and watch TV.
Some Girls came out in June 1978 and the band toured the US. They spent the first week of October in New York rehearsing for Saturday Night Live, which at the time was the biggest entertainment show in America. Rehearsals were total insanity. The SNL cast members then included John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Suffice to say, there were a lot of late nights. The show aired live on October 7 and the after-show lasted well into October 8.
Two weeks later Keith flew to Toronto for the trial – there was no jury, just a judge – and stayed at the Four Seasons. I flew up the night before. Keith retained his sense of humour throughout, but deep down he must have been incredibly scared. On hearing that Sid Vicious had slit his wrists (the week before he'd been charged with killing his girlfriend at New York's Chelsea Hotel), Keith joked, "He's trying to steal my headlines."
On the morning of October 23, dressed in a three-piece rust-coloured suit and shades, Keith left for court. His lawyer presented the case, which took most of the day. When Keith left for court the next day, he left jewellery and his prized Cartier lighter behind in the hotel room, just in case he didn't return. By 12.30 he was a free man. The prosecution pressed for a 6-12-month jail sentence but the judge gave Keith the most unorthodox sentence imaginable.
He was ordered to play a concert for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (a blind fan had testified at the trial) within the next six months. The London Evening Standard ran a cartoon with blind people proclaiming, "What did we do wrong?"
He was also ordered to continue a programme to stay healthy and meet regularly with a probation officer. A press conference was held and afterwards we flew by helicopter to New York. If I told you Keith Richards went to see Dave Edmunds' Rockpile at the Bottom Line and jumped on stage for two songs the very next night, would you believe me? Of course you would! He was given a hero's welcome by the crowd and by the NYPD, who were outside the venue. A new day had dawned and my book had a happy ending.
Having spent three years in the dream world of the Rolling Stones, I returned to London and thought nothing of spending £50 on a gram of cocaine. No wonder I had a big overdraft. Some mornings, having been up all night, still wired, I'd drive into the West End, go to one of the massive record stores and for the very princely sum of something close to £50, buy a video to watch. My perspective on the value of money had all but disappeared.
Access All Areas: A Backstage Pass Through 50 Years of Music and Culture by Barbara Charone, published by White Rabbit is on sale now.
Written by: Will Hodgkinson
© The Times of London
