Neil Warnock
In 1962 and at the tender age of sixteen, Neil Warnock saw his first band using electric guitar at his local youth club, and he was hooked. He bought a drum kit, and while he quickly discovered he was an absolutely hopeless drummer, he became fascinated in the work surrounding bands, how they rehearsed, how they put on a gig, and so on.
His day job was as an apprentice compositor (a typesetter, when type was still set by hand), but he started promoting bands, ‘The Emeralds’ for example, for his local youth club. “My dad was the bouncer on the door, and I think my mum took the money,” he recalls. Soon he was doing the same for his college, the London College of Printing, his biggest coup being to book The Who for £70 to play the day after ‘I Can’t Explain’ was released.
Neil set up his first agency ‘South Bank Artists’ at the age of eighteen, joining forces with another agent who was successfully promoting British bands in Germany, which enabled Neil to develop an enviable network of London colleges where he could place bands. “I started to put artistes into University College, Imperial College, Kings College on the Strand – so much so that the major agencies had to come through me to put their bands into the colleges,” says Neil.
Neil stuck with his apprenticeship in parallel with the agency work until he was 21, after which he “resigned honourably”. “It meant that I could always go back and get my ticket again,” he says. Not that he ever would – within a year the pressure to work for one of the major agencies became too great. He chose to work at the Beatles’ agency Nems Enterprises, but it was when Nems acquired the more contemporary Bryan Morrison Agency (representing Pink Floyd, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Fairport Convention and the like) that Neil really learned what it took to be a good agent. “The education their agents gave me, changed me from being an old style agent where you always looked after the promoter, to realising that the band, the artist is the reason why everybody else is making a living,” he explains.
Having worked his way up to becoming a director of Nems, in 1973 Neil moved to Bron Agency as joint managing director, working with Pink Floyd, Jeff Beck and Deep Purple. “I was picking up the heavier acts,” says Neil. “By the time we got to ‘75 we had Uriah Heep, we had Blue Öyster Cult, we had Aerosmith, Kiss…” Through such bands Neil had a good relationship with Jeff Franklin’s company, ATI; through this connection he first heard about Rush and almost immediately, he set about becoming their international agent by putting a call in to SRO. “They told me that they couldn’t believe that there was any market whatsoever for Rush in the UK; I said, if you want to come over we can do two dates at Hammersmith, we can do Manchester, Birmingham, four or five shows,” he says. “I had already spoken to John Curd at Straight Music, a promoter with brilliant ears who picked up on a lot of music very early on.” SRO said yes – and the first UK tour for the band was set – as well as Neil earning the role of international agent, which he carries on today. “Every single show they’ve played outside of America I have been the agent for – Japan, Brazil, everything.”
All the same, Rush could never be his only band. “If I was going to set my income for life based on this band touring over here, I would have been a pauper a long time ago!” Over the years, Neil has worked doggedly to get Rush to tour outside North America. Things haven’t been helped by the disinterest of the band’s recording label. “If I took notice of what the label were telling me in terms of sales we would never have brought the band in and we would certainly never have brought the band back.”
The international presence of Neil Warnock’s agency – The Agency Group – has taken many years to establish. “As I got bigger bands, and as the bands started to spread out around the world then I learnt to book around the world,” he says. “My two favourite trail blazers are Status Quo and Deep Purple, they have got the crews that can deal with it and they have also got the bands that can deal with it.” Today, the company has a number of offices worldwide and represents over a thousand acts but Neil still insists on having his own roster of artists – Rush included. “It is a fairly mixed up, eclectic roster,” he says. “George Benson, Motorhead, Lisa Stansfield and Rush, it’s all over the place. I have a mezzo Soprano, Katherine Jenkins, who is going to be selling 300,000 albums by Christmas – I like to push myself to do different things as well.”
Back at Rush, Neil has learned through the years how best to satisfy the band’s demands, at the same time as enabling them to reach out internationally. His efforts culminated in Rush’s agreement to play Brazil for the first time, on the ‘Vapor Trails’ tour. “They never believed there was an audience for them there,” says Neil, who left no stone unturned in his quest. “I kept going back to them and saying I got this now, yeah but we need all our stuff taking down there in a 747 freighter, yeah I got that, we have all got to be in 25 star hotels. Everything is like, which argument have you got now that we can’t go, give me an argument because I have covered everything that you said you wanted to have covered! The best thing that happened in Europe and in South America was that the band enjoyed it. The band are at the stage now where, if they don’t enjoy doing it they are not going to repeat it.”