'Grumblers Grumble, Happy People Are Happy'

UK entrepreneur Simon Napier-Bell has been at the musical coalface now for over five decades, whether writing hit singles, penning tomes on the music industry, producing hit musicals or directing documentary films (among many other pursuits). But it's through his long-serving role as a manager that Napier-Bell has made the most impact, having helmed the careers of an amazing array of artists including The Yardbirds, T Rex, Ultravox, Asia, Wham!, Boney M, George Michael, Sinead O'Connor, Japan and countless others.

Incredibly - despite these years of battling the art versus commerce dichotomy on behalf of his clients - Napier-Bell still harbours a personal love for music as a form (although it's inevitably viewed through a lens of commercial viability).

"It's really difficult to listen to any new music ever without thinking of its potential," he admits. "If I listen to old music, it's just what you do as a fan and you can appreciate it for what it is. But when I listen to new music, really, I'm not just wondering whether I like it but also where it sits in the current trend of what things are, and how commercial it is, and what people should be doing with it and so on. I'm sure if you're an architect you can't walk past a building without thinking, 'Who designed that rubbish?' or, 'How beautiful!' It's business and you need to analyse it, but I still love music."

Strangely, Napier-Bell believes that the role of the manager hasn't changed substantially in recent years, even as technology has inexorably changed the way that music is both disseminated and monetised. "A manager is still a manager," he tells. "A manager still has a relationship with an artist and needs to learn about that artist and how they work and think and develop and their problems — and there are plenty of those with every artist — and you have to coordinate that with the industry and the current method of selling music and making money from it and promoting it.

"It's always changing and while it seems that the landscape is so different right now, it really isn't: instead of selling records you sell downloads or impressions on a streaming service, but you still have to deal with the industry high-ups at the record company — if that's the way you're going — or perhaps directly with the people at Spotify. You have to learn a few new things, but the basis of the work is dealing with an artist and knowing how to deal with creative people and break them within the commercial industry, and that hasn't changed at all."

Napier-Bell's management ethos has always been that it's not his job to make the artist happy, he's there to make them successful. "Well, an artist comes to you because they want a manager, because they want to be successful in the music business," he reasons. "If they weren't really chasing that they'd be singing in the dark to the birds - they want something and your job is to get that for them. And what they want is what you could call 'commercial success', although what they really want is to be adored by the public and get up on stage to get all that love or whatever it is that they missed in their earlier lives (because nearly all artists come from some sort of childhood trauma or lack of something in their lives).

"Now they've decided that they want this success in this industry to make them happy, so you shouldn't be sitting around thinking, 'Oh my artist is really unhappy, I'm not serving my purpose,' because that's not your job; they've come to you to make them successful. They've made the decision that this is what they want for their lives. So I feel that the manager shouldn't get too involved in trying to cure the artist of whatever ills caused them to want to be an artist in the first place." 

So is fame all it's cracked up to be? Do his clients who hit the big time usually find happiness at the top? "No. Well they don't often say 'thank you', that's for sure," Napier-Bell laughs. "Every person is who they are - they don't change. If somebody grumbles because they're not a star, they're going to grumble when they are a star — it will just be about something else: they don't like their hotel or they're not being paid enough or, 'Why do we have work so hard? I thought being a star you didn't have to work hard.' Grumblers grumble, happy people are happy - who you meet the day you meet the artist is who they're going to be when they're successful."