The First Artist founder on overcoming family tragedy and a stutter to revolutionise the business of football
During my early years, I suffered from a terrible stammer and could hardly speak. I left school at 16, in the same year my mother died. My father decided that I needed to lose my stammer and sent me to a treatment centre in Jersey, where a man called Bill Kerr was ‘curing’ people of their speech impediments.
He believed stammering was caused by a fear of words; he replaced this with a fear of stammering. If we couldn’t speak we got punched, slapped and deeply intimidated. It worked, as we were all too afraid to stammer. It would never be allowed today, but it was certainly successful, and at the age of 17 I could talk properly.
There are times now – when being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, for example – where I think about Bill. He was far scarier than any interviewer. Today, I’m a patron of the British Stammering Association.
After being cured of my stammer, I went to drama school for two years, simply because I could. I was a terrible actor, but it proved really useful later when I was making deals in the football world.
After drama school, a friend and I started a record production business, Greenlight Productions. It was 1969 – an amazing time to be young and involved in the music business. We started by putting together football records, which we sold outside the grounds.
Later, we produced a lot of Northern Soul and had several top 20 hits. In those days, publishing rights were as good as bricks and mortar as you owned them in perpetuity. It was a great business to be in.
We sold the company in 1981, but I was hardly involved, as my wife was very ill with leukaemia and I was with her in hospital. She died the same week that the sale of our business went though, and I retired and lived in the bottom of a whisky bottle for a while.
Eventually, I left the UK and went to live in Los Angeles, where I found the inspiration for my current business. In the US, sport was viewed as entertainment. I saw that it was big business and sportsmen were superstars. Things in the UK were so different. After Arsenal player Alan Skirton retired from the game in the mid-1960s, he had to get a job as a milkman, and the ground was on his round.
The business I set up in 1986, First Artist, set out to change this. At that time, you had to pay to interview someone like Bryan Robson. I made it so journalists could interview him for free, but the newspaper would have to use our pictures and the player would be wearing a sponsor’s T-shirt.
We found other ways of getting sponsors into the game and on to televised matches, and transformed football. Some people think we went too far, but I believe football is one of the UK’s greatest exports.
