Читать книгу Simon Cowell - The Man Who Changed the World - David Nolan - Страница 9

Simon Cowell walked through the doors of EMI just as the company’s most notorious new signings were being thrown out of them. The Sex Pistols had been signed to the label on a two-year deal after punk exploded across the country in 1976. EMI was seen as a rather dusty, old-fashioned record label and the Pistols had been signed to help freshen up that image. Unlike so many of his peers, the young Cowell just didn’t get punk. Sounding like someone’s dad rather than a teenager, he told friends it was just a din performed by people who couldn’t play their instruments. Simon knew what he was talking about, of course: he’d tried this newfangled punk thing himself – and he didn’t like it. ‘I went to a very, very small Stranglers gig in this horrific venue and literally everyone was gobbing at each other,’ he later shuddered during an interview with NME. ‘That made me realise this was not for me.’

There was, however, one aspect of punk that did appeal: the way television played a vital part in its explosion. Few people had heard of punk or the Sex Pistols until they made front-page news in December 1976 after swearing at teatime on the Bill Grundy Thames Television show Today. The nation was appalled – even though the incident was shown only in London – and the Pistols were being seen as the most infamous band in Britain. They lasted only a matter of weeks before being chucked off EMI in the New Year with £40,000 in the back pocket of their manager, the late Malcolm McLaren. They would write a song about their short-lived experience with the company, called, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘EMI’. Cowell – whose musical tastes at the time were more along the middle-of-the-road lines of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles – recalls being mightily impressed by the hype the Grundy incident created, calling it ‘cynical and brilliant’.

The period of music history that was unfolding as Simon entered the industry was one of the busiest the UK would ever see. Despite his misgivings, punk would do Simon Cowell and the 1980s a great favour – music steered away from the album-dominated, adult-oriented scene of the 1970s towards a market dominated by singles and fun. Independent record labels began to pop up, aiming just to stick out a few singles rather than sign up acts on ten-album deals.

After punk came wave after wave of fashion-led music movements: new wave, mod, ska, New Romantics, electro pop, hi-NRG – it seemed to be out with the old and in with the new on a weekly basis. This was fantastic news for a music industry always on the lookout for a fresh angle to sell its products.

It would be while toiling away in the EMI post room for 15 quid a week that Simon Cowell would develop the thick skin that would help him shrug off the barrage of insults and criticisms he would receive over the next thirty years of his career. Not only was he on the very bottom rung of the ladder, but he was also regarded with suspicion thanks to dad Eric’s place on the EMI board – two perfectly good reasons to treat him like dirt. The man who would later shock the world with his rudeness was himself taken aback by the way he was treated by anyone higher up the ladder than he was – which was in effect, everyone. He didn’t care. Sorting post and pushing trolleys of mail across London may not have been the most challenging work ever, but at least he had a foot in the door.

Show business is full of tales of mail boys who get a shot at the big time after knocking on the right door, and the young Cowell saw no reason why this shouldn’t happen to him. Sadly, it didn’t, and 18 months down the line he began to lose heart, something that would happen a fair few times over the coming years. Indeed, what followed would be a period of great indecision in Cowell’s life. He knew what he wanted but he didn’t know how to get it. As a result, his employment at EMI would be something of a revolving-door affair, as he left and returned several times.

He started to look further afield than EMI. After getting knocked back for a job at Ariola Records (later part of Bertelsmann Music Group, or BMG, which Cowell would have so much success with), he decided he needed to earn some proper money and quit his post room job. Brother Nicholas was by now an estate agent and was on ten times the salary Simon was getting, so he turned to dad Eric and his seemingly endless Filofax of contacts. Eric came through for his son and got Simon a job at an estate agency. His first job was to open the post, so it didn’t exactly prove to be a giant leap forward. Rather bizarrely, back at EMI, they hadn’t seemed to have noticed that Simon had actually left. In his absence, his obvious ambition to get on within the company had paid off and he was offered a job in its international publishing division. He was able to tell the estate agency what they could do with their job and headed back into the music industry.

The job he returned to EMI to do would involve a skill that Simon still uses today: matching American songs and songwriters to British artists and getting them to tackle the tunes over here. This involved the hard slog of going through thousands of songs available on the EMI catalogue that may have had success in America but hadn’t broken through in the UK. He then had to start knocking on the doors of other record labels, trying to get meetings with their artist and repertoire, or A&R, representatives. A&Rs are the people who represent and develop artists signed to their label. Simon Cowell’s view of these vital cogs in the music industry was slightly different: he described them at the time as ‘the biggest arseholes in the music business’.

But, from a standing start, Simon managed to start getting through the mire of record company politics and arseholes and was matching songs to artists at the rate of four or five a week. Flushed with this success, he figured that there clearly wasn’t too much to this music-publishing malarkey, and in 1981 decided to quit EMI – again – and set up his own firm with colleague Ellis Rich, perhaps thinking that his new partner’s surname was some kind of omen. Nearly 20 years older than Cowell, Rich had also started off as a post room boy and was experienced enough to have been involved in selling sheet music as well as having handled songs by the likes of Blondie and Queen.

The pair set up offices in London’s Soho, using their first names as a company name – E&S Music. By the end of the first day Simon realised they had bitten off far more than they could chew. He swallowed his pride and went back to EMI yet again to ask for his old job back. Unsurprisingly, EMI told him he’d had his chance and blown it – he was going to have to make a go of E&S whether he liked it or not. Ellis Rich has since painted a far more positive image of how the pair got on in the venture. ‘When I left EMI I took Simon Cowell with me,’ Rich later told RMC TV. ‘There was one point in our first year where we had five tracks in the Top 40 – Pointer Sisters, Boystown Gang – a nice selection of records and a good time was had by all.’

One good time that was had by Cowell at this time involved his dressing up as a canine superhero. It would often be claimed that the first and only time Cowell performed on a record was as Wonder Dog on the 1982 dance record ‘Ruff Mix’. In fact, the man behind Wonder Dog was German synthesiser pioneer Harry Thumann, who was an early champion of the then new-fangled technique of ‘sampling’ sounds and electronically distorting them. In this case, take a dog’s bark, make it go higher and lower and, bingo, you’ve got a ‘tune’. With song titles such as ‘Boney Boney’ and ‘Christmas Tail’, Wonder Dog was hardly high art – just another in the long list of novelty records that had graced the British charts since they first began. It would be a list that Simon would add to many times over the next two decades.

When the Wonder Dog single ‘Ruff Mix’ started to take off in 1982, a willing volunteer was required to act as a stand-in to do the rounds of Saturday morning kids’ shows that were the staple diet of the promotional process at that time. Armed only with a full-length dog costume and series of excruciating canine gags, Simon Cowell stepped into the breech and did the honours. ‘He made up all these names like his friend Al Satian,’ Ellis Rich later told Channel 5 (now Five). ‘The whole thing was just a list of puns.’

Playing the part of Wonder Dog, he listed his musical influences as ‘The Korgis and Bow Wow Wow’, though he drew the line at Cat Stevens, as he was ‘barking up the wrong tree’.

‘Ruff Mix’ reached Number 31 in the UK charts, high enough to warrant an appearance for Wonder Dog on Top of the Pops. The host of the show that night was Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell, the man who would later become Simon’s agent.

Perhaps inspired by his canine capers as Wonder Dog, Simon began to go cold on the idea of music publishing, believing that actually making records was where his future belonged. Although E&S were making money, he was having a problem handling the rejections that inevitably came with the job. He and Ellis had jetted off to America and managed to secure meetings with top publishing companies in Los Angeles – who never rang them back.

Again, Simon Cowell found an experienced partner for his next venture – setting up a record label. Iain Burton’s background was as a dancer, but by the early eighties he had gone into management, supplying dancers for pop videos and television shows. He had experienced huge success with the racy dance troupe Hot Gossip, whose choreographer was Arlene Phillips. Some 25 years later Phillips would be part of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing show, which would rival Simon’s The X Factor as a Saturday night ratings winner.

Hot Gossip had hit their peak in 1978, riding the disco craze with ‘I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper’. It was sung by Sarah Brightman – later Mrs Andrew Lloyd Webber. By the early 1980s, Hot Gossip’s appeal began to fade. They had undergone a variety of personnel changes and now included a teenage girl from Seattle called Sinitta Renet Malone, usually known just as Sinitta.

Burton and Cowell had decided to name their new label Fanfare – and the label’s first single release would be Hot Gossip’s ‘Don’t Beat Around the Bush’. It didn’t chart, but it would prove to be a starting point for both Simon’s later success with Fanfare and his extended relationship with Sinitta.

Sinitta had been living in London since she was a child and had proved herself a versatile performer. Whether she was on stage in Cats or writhing around as a backing dancer with the sexy soul trio Imagination on the TV show The Tube in 1982 (despite claiming she was born only in 1968) she clearly had ambition and ability. She also had a family history in music – her mum, Miquel Brown, was a singer and actress and, at the very time Simon was meeting Sinitta, Brown was scoring UK hits of her own with songs such as ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’ and ‘He’s a Saint, He’s a Sinner’. Brown’s brand of pumped-up electro-camp was from the hi-NRG school of music that included Boystown Gang, with whom Simon had scored hits as a publisher.

By this stage, Cowell needed to prove himself as someone who could discover and nurture talent as well as make money from matching up artists and songs. He decided Sinitta would be his first signing; by his own admission, he didn’t know what he was doing, but the two got on so well that it would certainly be fun trying.

In Sinitta, Simon had an artist who could sing and dance and looked the part; what the would-be Svengali now needed was a song. He asked songwriter and producer George Hargreaves – whom he’d met at EMI – if he had anything suitable. Hargreaves was in the throes of writing a new song that had come to him after he had been working with the singer Princess. She’d ad-libbed a line during a recent recording session in which she’d described someone as being ‘so macho’. ‘I heard Princess sing those words and I thought: that’s my next song,’ Hargreaves later told the Scotsman newspaper. ‘I wrote it that same evening. It was a caricature of the medallion man. It was for women to dance round their handbags to and for the gay scene to go mad to on poppers.’

Hargreaves – to say the least a colourful character – later became a fundamental Christian and used the money he earned from the song to fund his religious and political ambitions to be a Euro MP.

His opponents made great capital of the fact that the man behind such a gay disco classic would later campaign that homosexuality was a sin. ‘It says in the Bible that so long as Earth remains there shall be seed time and harvest,’ he later said, by way of an elaborate explanation. ‘You could say that “So Macho” was the seed I sowed and now I’m reaping the harvest.’

‘So Macho’ certainly proved to be manna from heaven for Simon and Sinitta – but it took time. The record initially stalled at Number 40 in the charts and would need to be re-released twice more before it finally took off and peaked at Number 2. The super-cheesy video to accompany it – featuring Sinitta as a psychiatrist’s patient – was shot for £2,000. The hit saved Simon’s job, launched his career and stopped Fanfare from closing down after Simon’s partner Iain Burton began having second thoughts about the viability of the label.

As they worked to further Sinitta’s career, the teenager and her boss became closer and closer. The young singer also became very friendly with Simon’s parents, even living at their house for a time. But Sinitta would later paint a devastating picture of Cowell’s behaviour towards her during the 1980s. In an interview she gave to the People in August 2003, she described a relationship in which sex was nonexistent.

‘It didn’t feel right,’ she said of the night that Cowell first initiated sex with her. ‘I don’t think he ever forgave me. I was always trying to attract him but he never laid a hand on me again.’

She went on to describe how Cowell would tell her that he didn’t find her sexually attractive and would tell her he was sleeping with her friends. ‘I walked into our bedroom and he was there in bed with two blonde girls and they were all naked,’ Sinitta said. ‘They were quite ugly and quite fat; I couldn’t understand what he would see in girls like that … they were in my bed doing this.’

The interview has since come back to haunt both Cowell and Sinitta and their reactions to it have been very different. Simon’s response when the issue is raised is a very Cowell-esque dismissal. ‘Oh, people say things,’ he told the Daily Mail, batting the issue away. ‘If I thought they really meant them – well, let’s just say that Sinitta is genuinely one of the most important people in my life, and always will be.’

When the same interview is quoted back at Sinitta, her reaction now is bafflement: ‘We did have a proper physical relationship,’ she later claimed in an interview with writer Natalie Clarke. ‘I don’t know how this idea we didn’t has come about. We didn’t at first, because I was underage; but later on, yes, absolutely.’

When Simon and Sinitta did finally split up, Simon was far more heartbroken about the separation than he let people think, according to his half-brother Michael. ‘When they split it was actually the first time you could tell he was genuinely upset about a girl,’ Michael later told the Mirror. ‘It hit him really hard. I met Sinitta several times. She was beautiful. She was one of the family. Mother loved her. I would go over for Sunday lunch and she would be there. She was very chatty and good fun. Everyone was upset when it ended.’

To cheer himself up, Simon went on a ‘lads’ holiday’ in Majorca and invited his half-brother along, something Michael would later regret: ‘We we were in lap-dancing clubs. We were drinking, smoking, meeting women. I had never really been involved in this life before. Simon was really very wealthy already and was leading the high life. We met lots of women and drank cocktails. The memory is hazy but we had a great time. I was a respectable married man and when I got back to the UK my wife found out about it. We ended up getting divorced.’

By this time another key player had entered Simon’s life. Initially, his relationship with her would be short to the point of being virtually nonexistent – but it would create another unbreakable friendship. Jackie St Clair, also known as Jackie Marinetti, managed to develop quite a racy tabloid profile in the eighties and nineties, with her name being romantically linked to famous names including pop star Prince, the Duke of Northumberland and Andrew Ridgeley of Wham!. A regular Page Three girl for the Sun and a former Miss Nude UK, she had also appeared in men’s top-shelf magazines. Indeed her association with Ridgeley allowed Oui magazine to run a naked centrefold of her under the headline WHAM! BAM! THANK YOU MA’M! If you look up the expression ‘sultry brunette’ in the dictionary, there is a picture of Jackie St Clair. Or at least, there should be …

Despite her high profile, St Clair has always been a model of discretion when it comes to her friendship with Simon Cowell. She now lives next door to his London home. In turn, Simon has painted a picture of St Clair as a woman who lived on ‘the other side of the fence’ like the glamorous folk he saw as a kid back in Elstree. Confident, worldly, vivacious – and, essentially, way out of his league. When they met she operated a policy of ‘treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen’, and Cowell admits he fell for her big time. Their physical relationship seems to have been replaced by a strong friendship that baffles outsiders. The mystery has added spice to the Simon/Sinitta/St Clair story that it would otherwise lack. Whatever the true nature of the bond is, there’s no denying it’s a strong one. ‘Sinitta and Jackie are my family now,’ Cowell recently told the Mirror. ‘I don’t think of them as ex-girlfriends any more. They are an extension of my life … It must be infuriating, but I’d never change because my ex-girlfriends are so close I couldn’t imagine life without them.’

Back at Fanfare, Simon was doing the sums for ‘So Macho’: they’d turned an outlay of just a few grand for studio time and a cheap-as-chips video into a million-pound hit. Easy. But a follow-up would prove elusive – Sinitta’s next release six months later was ‘Feels Like the First Time’, and it scraped only to Number 45. If he was to secure a future for the label and for Sinitta, Simon would need more songs that were as ludicrously catchy as ‘So Macho’ – and he would need a mentor to help guide him.

Enter former Mecca club DJ, ex-manager of the ska band The Specials, one time A&R man and now a record producer, Coventry-born Pete Waterman, whose CV made Cowell’s look very slight indeed. By 1984 he had started producing hits under the Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW) banner with Mike Stock and Matt Aitken. Again it would be the hi-NRG style that would reap them rewards, with hits often moulded out of what would at first seem to be unpromising raw materials.

After modest success with varied artists such as the cross-dressing actor Glenn Milstead (better known as Divine) and former Eurovision Song Contest hopeful Hazell Dean, SAW hit gold in December 1984 with Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’, somehow turning gobby Liverpool punk Pete Burns into a bona fide pop star.

As blunt as a lump hammer, Waterman was a man who had never knowingly shown the world his modest side; Cowell believed him to be a genius. Simon wanted him on board and employed a technique he would use repeatedly over the years – harassment. ‘He used to follow me everywhere,’ Waterman told Trevor McDonald in 2007. ‘Literally, I’d turn round and there was Simon. He used to pester me like mad to work with him. But it was always obvious Simon had got … it. He wouldn’t be deflected. What I liked about Simon was his energy and his drive. His determination was phenomenal. If you are a record producer or a songwriter you need someone to sell your record – and there wasn’t anyone better at selling a record than Simon Cowell. Nobody.’

But Waterman hasn’t always been quite so complimentary about Simon Cowell. The older man’s bluff manner and no-nonsense approach clearly struck a chord with Simon, and he seems to have used Waterman as something of a role model: This is how a music-biz mogul acts – I’ll copy him. ‘If I’m ever cruel,’ Simon reasoned in an interview with the Daily Mail, ‘It’s because show business is cruel. But I learned much over the years, from people like Pete Waterman – real tough love. He once said to me, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re bloody useless. Come back when you’ve got a hit.” I took it as a challenge.’

The song that Simon harassed from the SAW team was ‘Toy Boy’. It featured a girlie rap and a chorus catchier than swine flu. They even splashed out on a proper video this time around. Given that Sinitta was only just out of her teens herself when the promo film was shot, schoolboy model Felix Howard – best known for appearing in Madonna’s ‘Open Your Heart’ video – was cast as her ‘love interest’. The song also set something of a template for SAW: listen to it alongside the following year’s ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ by Kylie Minogue, and you will see how unwilling the team had become to change a winning formula. Although ‘Toy Boy’ reached only Number 4 in the UK charts, it sold well across worldwide markets. To many, ‘Toy Boy’ is the quintessential piece of eighties pop fluff; Simon Cowell believes it’s the song that made people take him and Fanfare seriously.

In fact, Simon was taking himself pretty seriously by this stage. He had the lot: the job, the looks, the Porsche, the posh pad in Fulham. He was, by his own admission, a ‘walking, talking eighties cliché’. Perhaps to bring him back down to earth, his brothers hatched a plan to let Simon know what they thought he was in danger of turning into. While he was on holiday they redecorated the front of his home to look like a Chinese restaurant, complete with sign over the door. When he returned, Simon was greeted to the sight of an establishment called the ‘Wan Kin’.

‘It was a time where everything was gonna be great – a real sense of optimism, greed is good,’ he confessed twenty years later to the Mirror. ‘You have a Porsche. You should have a Chelsea house. I was very much part of that. I wasn’t earning enough to sustain that kind of lifestyle and I was borrowing a lot of money from the bank to buy shares which I was told would quadruple over a period of time.’

However, in true 1980s fashion, after the boom came the bust. Cowell was living beyond his means and, despite the success he was having, there was more going out than coming in. When the parent of his record company Fanfare went bust, shares that Simon had ploughed his money into went too. He was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and owed the bank almost £400,000; everything had to go. He admitted to the Daily Mail that he had nobody to blame but himself: ‘I lived this life of excess: out every night, partying. I had all the material stuff – the big house, flash cars – but all of it had been bought on credit. None of it was really mine. On one level, going bust didn’t bother me. It was the eighties, and there wasn’t the stigma about bankruptcy that you might think. My mates weren’t bothered. My dad was in business – he knew that it happened, too. He loaned me the money to bail me out, and I got a loan from the bank to pay him back. It was £1,000 a month, I seem to remember.’

He spent the last few pounds he had on a taxi to his parents’ home. With their children now grown up, Eric and Julie Cowell lived in an apartment in London and Simon moved back in with them to lick his wounds. ‘It was shattering for him to have to move back in with his parents again at the age of 30-something,’ Julie told ITV twenty years later. ‘He never ever felt sorry for himself; he was determined to do something about it. And he did.’

Cowell recalls that his mum was delighted to have him back home. And dad Eric didn’t preach to or criticise his son. He just told him to start from scratch – and this time do it properly. ‘In a way it was exciting to start all over again because I did it on such different terms,’ Cowell said. ‘Every penny I earned was, well, mine – and no one was going to take it away again. It made life so much sweeter.’

The old Simon Cowell – the indecisive one who knew what he wanted but couldn’t work out how to get it – was gone. The new Simon Cowell – the one who’d flown too close to the sun and had his wings scorched – would do things very differently. And he’d change the world.