I Was There by Alan Edwards review – the rock gods’ right-hand man

The ‘godfather of British music PR’ delivers a raw, warm and anecdote-packed account of sometimes bruising encounters with Bowie, McCartney, Jagger et al

Memoirs by music publicists have potential for the access all areas inside track. Especially when it’s a PR on the level of Alan Edwards, founder of public relations company the Outside Organisation. He is described on the dust jacket of his new memoir as “the godfather of British music PR” and his clients have included David Bowie (with whom Edwards worked for nearly four decades), the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Blondie, Prince and the Spice Girls.

The book opens with a meeting with Bowie two months before he died in January 2016, Edwards going on to muse about his own eventful professional journey. Briefly a music journalist in the 1970s, with as much interest in soul as rock, he was 20 when hired for PR work by Keith Altham (who advised Jimi Hendrix to set fire to his guitar). Gaining a reputation as “the punk PR”, Edwards also looked after the Buzzcocks and the Stranglers.

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