Elvis Costello writes the foreword for this memoir from the music PR legend Barbara Charone, and I have to smile when he praises it for capturing her “unmistakable voice”. Charone worked at WEA Records for nearly 20 years, before setting up the independent PR company MBC – still active today – with Moira Bellas; along the way representing Madonna, REM, Guns N’ Roses, Foo Fighters, Rufus Wainwright, Rod Stewart and many more. As for the voice, most who’ve worked in the music industry (I was on NME for a while) will be acquainted with Charone’s signature booming rasp, and how – warm, friendly, but also formidable – she protects her starry clients like Cerberus at the gates of Hades. However, as detailed in this entertaining memoir, there is more to her than that.
This is the woman whom the Financial Times dubbed “the closest thing the music industry has to Alastair Campbell”. As recounted here, pre-Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant gave her the nickname “BC”, back when he was deputy editor of Smash Hits. Wainwright, whom she once managed, wrote the song Barbara about her. Initially a music journalist in first her native US, then the UK, she worked for everyone from NME to Rolling Stone magazine. Then there is her fabled bond with Keith Richards: when Charone wrote Richards’s authorised autobiography, the famously guarded guitarist tossed her the keys to his West Sussex retreat, Redlands (scene of the infamous 1967 Rolling Stones drug bust), so she could write it there.
