Alan Edwards memoir as PR to Rolling Stones and David Bowie

Belsize Park PR guru Alan Edwards has myriad fascinating tales of an eventful life that has included a personal and professional relationship with David Bowie, and being hired, fired, and re-hired by The Rolling Stones.

As often the soberest guy in a room full of rock'n'roll debauchery, his memoir I Was There plays on the fact that he not only remembers events, but is a consummate storyteller with some insights into what makes rock stars tick.

Alan Edwards' most enduring professional relationship was with David Bowie and they worked together for four decades (Image: Courtesy of Alan Edwards)

Bristling with music industry anecdotes, the autobiography bounces from a scruffy, would-be journalist in 70s London, to working with music PR Keith Altham, before founding his own company.

With a gift for getting along with sometimes tricky customers, his roster of clients reads like a rock 'n' roll hall of fame including The Who, Led Zeppelin, Blondie, Prince, The Rolling Stones, Amy Winehouse, and The Spice Girls.

"I now realise what I have carelessly put all all those artists through all those years!" he says of doing interviews for his book.

But it wasn't all glamour. While he recalls lavish press junkets and epic parties, the hard-grafting Edwards would often leave a gig or celebration early to make phone calls or collate coverage.

"There were some extraordinary wild parties but I was often back on the bus, with the journalists, or in my room phoning the story over, or getting the pictures sorted.

Alan has worked with everyone from Blondie to Amy Winehouse and founded his own PR company The Outside Organisation (Image: Courtesy of Alan Edwards)

"Most of the time you are not hanging out at banquets with superstars, it's a bit Upstairs Downstairs, you are just the staff. You can be at a glamorous event with models and film stars and at the end of the night you have to find a McDonald's."

After single-handedly promoting The Rolling Stones' 1982 European tour, he had a minor nervous breakdown and suffered panic attacks.

The tour was beset by acrimonious media briefings between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and Edwards discovered he'd been fired midway through when he found someone else in his plane seat.

Alan at the launch of his book I Was There (Image: Dave Benett)

"I got dumped on the Tarmac in Vienna, it was like the scene from Casablanca, as the plane disappeared, I wanted to cry. I was really low, we didn't have mobile phones, you couldn't call up your mates, you were on your own. But then I thought 'I won't be fired if I get my job back'."

He caught a train to the next date in Cologne and spent three days performing his tasks as if nothing had happened, until Jagger said 'Oh alright you can have your fu**ing job back."

"You can't have any hard feelings," he says.

"Mick is incredible company, clever, charming, but ruthless. When you are done it's black and white."

"He was incredibly sharp at making money and ran a tight ship. He is a genius, maybe the best in rock'n'roll until Taylor Swift. Really forensic in his knowledge and detail.

"The Stones was a completely different level to what I had done and Mick was a mentor for me," says Edwards.

Alan Edwards says Debbie Harry was a true original who couldn't be media trained but was never boring (Image: Courtesy of Alan Edwards)

He would stay up all night, compiling a summary of reviews, getting the first newspaper editions from the railway station, persuading a hotel receptionist to translate them, then stapling them together into a "cool fanzine" and slipping them under the band's doors at 6.30am.

"I had a nervous breakdown at the end of it, which was pretty scary. Mental health wasn't a thing back in '83 and it didn't exist in rock'n'roll."

Edwards' collaboration with Bowie was much more zen. Not only was he in the studio with producer Nile Rodgers when the star recorded Let's Dance but he went on tour with Bowie just as he hit international success.

Like Jagger, Bowie had a keen intelligence and sharp eye for a media message, but was a gentler personality and formed a four-decade bond with Edwards until his death in 2016.

"Of all the people I worked with he was the most professional," he says. "He was like a guru to me and affected me in ways I can't really understand. He was extraordinary not just as an artist, but as a person. He could be so modest, turn up to our office and make coffee for everyone. He was self-effacing, except in his art."

Edwards recalls how Bowie "always carried a Greek newspaper under his arm so people didn't think it was him," and once held forth so knowledgably about Michelangelo in The Sistine Chapel that a line of tourists formed thinking he was a guide.

"I missed chunks of my education and hadn't been to university, and we often swapped book tips," he adds.

Edwards has started out as a journalist writing reviews for Sounds and Record Mirror.

"I don't think I would have made a good journalist. I might have made an OK one," he says.

"I loved the writing but it was really badly paid, £5 a review and I was living in an Islington bedsit at £4-a-week rent and spent my life ducking and diving going to record company gigs and events with free food and drink then getting a free T-shirt and living off that.

"A lot of the time it was the band's money and they didn't realise it - we didn't think about it but a lot of those artists were so broke they couldn't afford to pay their tax bill."

When Keith Altham offered him £25 a week to work in PR he thought he would do it for "a few months".

The book is full of stories, like the time he got Billy Idol photographed walking through an airport pretending he had just got back from a "big" American tour, attending a memorable 1975 Bob Marley gig at the Lyceum where they recorded a live version of No Woman No Cry, or seeing The Sex Pistols in "a half empty pub in West Kensington" and realising "it was "one of those times when music changes somehow".

His later career included moving into the pop world, finding "a family" with The Spice Girls, and working with Amy Winehouse.

He points out wryly that a PR can set up an interview, but can't control the artist .

"You get some very irritating artists who shoot the messenger," he says. "You can put them in a room with a journalist, but if they are boring or say something stupid there's not much you can do.

"Debbie Harry you couldn't media train for all the tea in China, she was completely unscripted and never on message but a genuine original who couldn't say anything boring if she tried, it makes her special."

He thinks about the icons he has known and says: "People try to analyse what makes a star but they all had these incredible life stories, and will be talked about for hundreds of years.

"Fans want to be on the inside of what is this person like. It's more than just making a great record, with certain artists like Amy Winehouse you feel that pain of what they have been through in their voice and relate to the story. She is one of the great British artists."

He adds: "My whole life is like a speeded-up piece of film."

"It went whizzing by but I hope I've captured the atmosphere as a storyteller. I didn't care who slept with who, lots of books do that stuff. I wanted to say what it was like to be there at that moment."

I Was There Dispatches from A Life in Rock and Roll by Alan Edwards is published by Simon & Schuster.