MEMOIR
I Was There: Dispatches From a Life in Rock and Roll
Alan Edwards
Simon & Schuster, $34.99

“I was there” is a shocking confession for a celebrity publicist. Surely, the whole idea is to pretend you’re not. There’s Mick Jagger, say, and here’s us. There’s no strategy, no staging, no deals or spin or bullying or flagrant lies in between, just the authentic truth served up by our own eyes.

That was the broadly accepted illusion anyway, back when Alan Edwards was a junior London PR agent. One early campaign involved servicing UK music papers with photos of a car crash to explain Scottish pop wannabe Midge Ure’s cancelled 1976 tour. “Unbelievably,” he writes, “not one of the papers picked up on the fact that Midge had seemingly received immediate attention at the scene of the crash, and was standing there, bandaged up, in front of smouldering wreckage.”

The truth? Ure’s band, Slik, had been destroyed at the box office by the Bay City Rollers. As a former Sounds journalist-turned-fixer for the Stones, Bowie, Prince, the Spice Girls, Amy Winehouse and tons more pop icons, Edwards’ kiss-and-tell memoir is loaded with such cheeky reveals.

It’s all gleeful high jinks early on, as the starry-eyed music obsessive watches Keith Moon overturn his boss’s desk, or flies a pack of rowdy Fleet Street hacks to the top of a Swiss alp for a photo shoot with drunk and brawling hard-rock band Uriah Heep. Around the time he chances on the Sex Pistols tearing up a run-down West Kensington pub while some geezer named Malcolm McLaren jerks around deliberately spilling punters’ pints, the idea of public relations as an art form takes something of a quantum leap.

We follow Edwards’ eager learning curve as he works out what makes news, and who and how to finesse to make it go Billy Idol’s or Blondie’s way. His adventures at this perilous frontier escalate chapter by chapter, from gunplay with the Stranglers to footy with Bob Marley to his first blockbuster appointment with the Rolling Stones at the nadir of their early ’80s irrelevance.

“I reminded myself that a publicist is a bit like a garage mechanic,” he writes. “It’s our job to fix the engine, regardless of whether it belongs in a Mini or a Merc.” As expected, this mechanic comes a cropper between the pistons of micromanaging money man Jagger and strictly music-minded malcontent Keith Richards. “It took me months to get over the worst of it,” he writes of the ripping power struggle.

As per the chummy cover shot, his recurring work with David Bowie forms the main thread of Edwards’ book. Called in for several crucial turns on the Duke’s ever-morphing road, he mostly casts himself as an acolyte at the impeccably shod feet of a PR master, though he claims credit for Bowie’s late-career resurgence as a front-page cultural icon, as distinct from a music column heritage act.