Their first chats took place on the school playground and were the typical conversations of seven-year-olds about football, playtime and what games to play next.<\/p>\n
But the next time Mike Jones and Marcus Russell get together, it will be in front of a live audience to talk about how the latter became part of pop history as one of the UK\u2019s most successful artist managers, working with the definitive Britpop act, Oasis.<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s Tung Auditorium is set to present \u2018Before Oasis: In Conversation with Marcus Russell\u2019 on May 8.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s a story of music and memories and, above all, friendship as the now \u2018Dr\u2019 Mike Jones from the University of Liverpool\u2019s Department of Music and Marcus talk about growing up together in Ebbw Vale in South Wales and reflect on Marcus\u2019s formative music industry experiences as a young gig promoter and his management of Mike\u2019s band Latin Quarter, which became a springboard to an incredible 40-year career.<\/p>\n
Mike said:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s strange. Marcus is very good at remembering my birthday and he\u2019d got two tickets for a Liverpool game in October, and the event came about from a conversation we had after that.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarcus knows a lot of people and they\u2019re always asking him to go and talk to students about the music industry.\u00a0 I teach music industry because I went through it, but Marcus really doesn\u2019t like doing it.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarcus organised the biggest gig in British history, Oasis at Knebworth in August 1996. I think Robbie Williams went one better, but when that happened one in 20 people in the UK applied for tickets and it was a quarter of a million people over two nights.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is someone I have known since I was seven years old and someone I used to organise gigs with when I was 17 \u2013 he was the manager of my band!<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd to go from someone you knew at seven to someone who organised the biggest gig in history \u2013 now that\u2019s a story!\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike goes on:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we started talking about it along those lines, he suddenly became interested. So I said why don\u2019t we sit down and talk about how you get from being a kid in an unfashionable town to doing that?<\/p>\n
\u201cI want people to understand how tiny, how small, valley communities are. You were locked in a little bowl and that\u2019s the beginning and the end of everything. And in a way that encouraged us both. You think you\u2019re in the world and you\u2019re going to make an impact because it\u2019s there in front of you.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt around 16-17 we both got into music and ended up organising gigs in a local ballroom built in about 1959. It was a ballroom and a theatre but ballroom dancing, then, had died a death so the last time the local council ran an event there 11 people showed up.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fire limit was 350. We had a gig one night with over 600 people in it (you couldn\u2019t do that today)! So it\u2019s that kind of thing, that because the world began and ended where you lived, you could make an impact on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike went on to write songs and had a massive hit with Radio Africa in 1986 with his band, Latin Quarter.<\/p>\n
And even though he went on to great academic success after researching his experience as a PhD student in the Institute of Popular Music at Liverpool University, being appointed programme lead for the first ever MBA in Music Industries and\u00a0developing an MA degree in Music Industry Studies (as well and its MA Classical Music Industry course in partnership with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and contributing to the MA in The Beatles: Music Industry and Heritage) it still saddens him that his playing career came to an end.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m really sad it didn\u2019t last,\u201d he admits. \u201cI mean, we went from playing the main stage at Glastonbury and a year later not being able to get a gig in a pub.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was traumatic, which is why I teach my students about being prepared; the pressures are formidable and you have to figure out a way to survive.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut Marcus was the organiser, the entrepreneur, and it\u2019s a bit like being a football manager. If you don\u2019t win, there\u2019s another game, another season.\u00a0 It\u2019s different.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marcus wasn\u2019t just manager of Oasis. His early promoting career in the \u201870s, alongside Mike, included gigs by bands like Mott the Hoople and Supertramp. In the late \u201870s he worked with XTC, Steel Pulse, and The Stranglers and, after managing Mike\u2019s band in the mid \u201880s, went on to manage many more.<\/p>\n
Alongside and after Oasis, he managed Mercury Rev, Crowded House, Catfish and the Bottlemen, and Noel Gallagher\u2019s High Flying Birds among others.<\/p>\n
Mike says:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I wanted to do was write songs, what he wanted to do was organise things.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMarcus was so good at it. And that\u2019s what I want to unpack on the night.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am really proud of him and he has always gone under the radar. Given that he managed one of the biggest bands in Britain, he never wanted the spotlight on him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat he\u2019s done is quite remarkable. I\u2019m not going to say Oasis\u2019 success was all down to him, but I think had they not had the manager they had, it could have been very different, because you can see how volatile they are.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarcus had a vision and could see things in people others couldn\u2019t \u2013 many had turned down Oasis.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember being in Sheffield with a friend when they were playing the Octagon, Sheffield\u2019s Mountford Hall, and Marcus asked my friend what the arena was like \u2013 to which my friend replied that Oasis weren\u2019t big enough to play the arena.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd to which Marcus replied \u2018no, but if I put them on there, people will think they are\u2019!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was his talent. Of course people are going to want to talk about Oasis, but it\u2019s just as interesting before that too.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarcus has great instincts. He has courage. And that\u2019s what\u2019s given him the edge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Oasis: In Conversation with Marcus Russell\u2019 is on at The Tung Auditorium: Thursday, May 8 at 7pm. (\u00a35 + booking fee).<\/p>\n
Book tickets on The Tung Auditorium website<\/a>.
\nFind all the latest Liverpool news here<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Their first chats took place on the school playground and were the typical conversations of seven-year-olds about football,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8815],"tags":[748,393,126,4884,179,14205,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-22181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-liverpool","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-features","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-liverpool","13":"tag-tung-auditorium","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114342423650290325","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}