It was in 1974 that Danny Francis found his calling in life, and it happened due to an unexpected encounter with one of the most famous people in the world.
At the age of 24, Francis didn’t have anything even approaching a career plan. Born and raised in Camden Town, north London, he worked as a labourer in London’s fruit and vegetable markets. He also did odd jobs around the boxing gym in Highgate where his father George Francis trained his fighters – one of whom, John Conteh, a charismatic young Liverpudlian light heavyweight, had recently become George’s first World Champion.
On a chilly October afternoon, Conteh arrived at the gym and told Danny that he had a friend dropping by to check out the place, but wouldn’t say who. It was getting dark, around five o’clock, when Paul McCartney walked in through the door.
The former Beatle and the world light-heavyweight champion had become good friends in the year since Conteh had appeared alongside other famous faces on the cover of Band On The Run, McCartney’s latest album with Wings.
Danny was stunned when McCartney strolled into the gym; surprised, too, that someone so famous would arrive there alone, without a bodyguard to keep an eye on him. But the biggest surprise came when Conteh spoke to Danny about an upcoming event at a cinema in London’s West End – a live screening of Muhammad Ali’s world title fight against George Foreman, billed as The Rumble In The Jungle. McCartney asked if he could go with them. Danny was speechless. “Of course you can,” Conteh said, smiling.
A few days later, on October 30, the three of them sat together in a packed cinema, the atmosphere highly charged, and watched Ali come off the ropes, literally, to win by knockout and regain the world title. Afterwards, a chauffeur-driven car took McCartney to his house in north London – geographically, close to Danny’s family home in Camden; economically, a world away. During that drive home, McCartney told Danny: “I could use a guy like you.” And that’s how it began.
As it turned out, McCartney was not alone in thinking he could use a guy like Danny Francis. In the career he never planned on having, for 50 years Francis worked as protector and confidante to an array of stars including Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Bon Jovi, Cher, George Michael and Kiss.
His role on latter-day Kiss tours was listed as ‘Risk Management’, but there was so much more that he brought to an entourage. Rock stars loved Danny Francis for the sense of security he gave them, and the calm authority he emanated. It was also fun to have him around. Francis loved to tell a story, and he had many to tell.
He was born Michael Daniel Francis on August 16, 1950, the third of four children for George and Joan. It was on a rock tour in the 70s that he became known as Danny, to avoid confusion with two or three other Michaels who were on the payroll. The name stuck.
In the years before George Francis turned professional, the family lived in a modest terraced house with a tiny garden backing on to the main railway line into King’s Cross, where the young Danny would feel the ground shake when the trains rumbled past.
His academic record was poor; his dyslexia went undiagnosed until adulthood. What he had was physical size and strength – “a right hand that could knock out a horse,” he said. He also had a taste for adventure, which led him into low-level crime. But at 16 he had a rude awakening after a brawl in a Soho nightclub left a drug dealer dead. Charged with affray, he was locked up for eight months at a young offenders institute in Ashford in Kent. There, he taught himself to read and write. Freed after a trial at the Old Bailey, he made a promise to his family, and to himself, to stay out of trouble. To a large extent, he did.
There was a loose arrangement to his work with McCartney. For a year or two he provided extra security whenever Macca was in London. From this came his introduction to one of the most powerful figures in the music business in the 70s.
While accompanying McCartney to a launch party for Led Zeppelin’s new record label, Swan Song, Danny met the band’s fearsome manager, Peter Grant. He later recalled: “Peter had a thick, husky, nasal whisper that made him sound like Marlon Brando in The Godfather, only with a Cockney accent.”
At the Zeppelin party, Francis had to act fast to deal with someone drunk who was spoiling for a fight. “One punch,” he reported matter-offactly, “and the guy was out cold.” Suitably impressed, Peter Grant hired him on the spot.
Francis was at Grant’s side for Zeppelin’s final UK shows at Knebworth in 1979, and also when Grant met Elvis Presley and his manager Colonel Tom Parker in Las Vegas in a failed attempt to book Elvis for a UK concert tour.
The supergroup Bad Company was Grant’s second love after Led Zeppelin, and when Francis toured with them in ’79 his main job was the safekeeping of their singer Paul Rodgers. Given Rodgers’s taste for drinking and fighting, this was not an easy task. They once had to battle their way out of a Texan bar filled with guys in cowboy hats. “Like a scene from the Wild West,” Francis recalled, laughing.
Rodgers even had a sparring session at the Highgate gym with one of George Francis’s young proteges, a junior lightweight champion named Cornelius Boza Edwards. To the surprise of all present, Rodgers held his own with the young fighter. As Danny later acknowledged, Rodgers was “fairly tasty”.
In the years that followed, there were many other clients and many stories that went with them. In the early 80s, Francis had spells guarding the pop stars Gary Numan and Sheena Easton. He was at Live Aid in 1985, at the US leg in Philadelphia, assisting legendary promoter Bill Graham, and ended the night in a VIP room where Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were entertained by Jack Nicholson.
In the early 90s he worked for Cher as her livein bodyguard at her mansion in Malibu, California. He moved in immediately after there had been a break-in at her home by an intruder armed with a Samurai-style sword. Francis had great affection for Cher, and stayed with her for a year until the stalker was jailed.
Ultimately, two bands were most prominent in Francis’s working life: Bon Jovi and Kiss. In both cases he was hired by another of rock’s most famous managers, Doc McGhee. Francis hooked up with Bon Jovi in 1986 as the band began a world tour in support of their third album Slippery When Wet. By the time the tour ended 14 months later they were the biggest rock band in the world.
For five years, with singer Jon Bon Jovi by this time a superstar, Francis walked in his shadow. There were some tense moments along the way: Francis rescuing the band from a riot in a stadium in Mexico; delivering Jon to the stage of the Moscow Peace Festival from amid a crowd of 120,000 people. There was also a whole lot of fun, not least when Francis and the band kidnapped Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee, Bubbles, in revenge for Jackson pulling out of a promised guest appearance with them in Tokyo (Bubbles was safely returned to the King Of Pop after several hours in a hotel bar eating bananas while the band got plastered on sake).
During Bon Jovi’s tour for their 1988 album New Jersey there was the party of all parties, organised by Francis and dubbed The Lost Week, held in secrecy at a resort hotel on Australia’s semi-tropical Barrier Reef coast, where the band had fun in the sun with a coterie of exotic dancers and close friends.
Most significant of all, for Danny and for his father, was the night of February 25, 1989, when their two worlds came together in Las Vegas. British boxer Frank Bruno, with George Francis in his corner, fought Mike Tyson for the heavyweight championship of the world. At ringside, cheering for Bruno, were the five guys from Bon Jovi. Tyson won the fight in five rounds, but it was a night that Danny and his father would always remember.
In the end, Jon Bon Jovi dispensed with Francis’s services with a cold parting comment: “It’s not personal, it’s business.” But Doc McGhee, also fired by Bon Jovi, brought Francis on board for the Kiss reunion tour in 1996. And that was the start of the longest-running job that Francis ever had, and the last he ever had.
For the best part of three decades, he did whatever was required to keep the self-styled Hottest Band In The World on schedule, night after night, year after year. There were times when he had go above the call of duty. On August 16, 2000, Danny’s fiftieth birthday, he had to talk down a gun-toting S.W.A.T. team at a Texas hotel after lead guitarist Ace Frehley had accidentally shot himself during a hunting trip. But while Frehley and drummer Peter Criss were eccentric, the band’s two leading players were consummate professionals.
“Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley are two of the smartest people I ever met,” Francis said. “They drove the whole multimillion-dollar operation.” He also said the operation ran a little more smoothly after Criss and Frehley were replaced by Eric Singer and Tommy Thayer.
Francis remained loyal to Kiss until there was nothing more to be done. On December 2, 2023, when the band’s End Of The Road farewell tour concluded at Madison Square Garden in their hometown of New York City, it was Francis who led them to the stage, and led them away again when it was all over and the last strands of ticker-tape were fluttering in the glow of the house lights.
Near the end of his life, Danny said: “I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Peter Grant and Paul McCartney most of all. They gave me a chance and I took it.” It was also in those final months that Danny and I worked on the story of his life, and not for the first time. For his autobiography, Star Man, published in 2003, I was his ghost writer. We had first met way back in 1989, when he was on the road with Bon Jovi and I travelled to Kansas City to write a cover story on the band for Sounds.
Danny dedicated Star Man to the memory of his father George, who died on April 4, 2002. George had not wanted to live on without his wife, Joan, who had passed away four years earlier.
Danny idolised his father, and set out to tell George’s story, as well as his own, in a second book, titled The Underdogs. He had this subtitle: The true story of a father and son who fought their way to the top. The Underdogs is scheduled for publication in 2026.
Danny was still telling his stories until the last weeks of his life. After he passed away on October 25, 2025, there was a surprise for a few of us who had been working with him on The Underdogs. It was one last story from the life of Danny Francis, and one we had never heard in all the years we’d known him.
This story came from the autobiography of actor Dennis Waterman, and was about the time when, as co-star of 70s TV cop drama The Sweeney, Waterman was developing a new series, his 80s hit Minder, in which he played a former boxer-turned-bodyguard for a minor criminal.
Waterman’s book reveals the inspiration for his Minder character Terry McCann: “Although he was obviously physically capable of looking after himself, he escaped tight corners using wit, charm and humour rather than fists. We had such a character working for us at the time. Danny Francis was employed as a ‘minder’ to the young Sheena Easton. He raised his voice to no one, and sorted out any dodgy situations with a smile and a joke, but if push came to shove, boy, could he sort things out.”
