by Chris Welch
Cole was working for Patrick Meehan, manager of Black Sabbath at the time. “A friend of mine, Peter Nash, was interested in buying Peter Grant’s house and he drove me down there in his Rolls-Royce. The watch that Elvis Presley gave me was in Peter’s house and somehow that had got stolen. So I thought I’d never see my things again. But Warren was fishing in the moat and he came out with this bag and it had all my collection of photographs and slides in it! It was wonderful because they were the pictures I had taken over the previous 30 years since 1964.”
The gifts, souvenirs and mementos that Grant and his men had collected over the years took on greater significance as slowly it dawned that an era had ended. Alan Callan remembers the delight that Peter took in being given gifts that seemed to celebrate his life and career. “We went to see The Everly Brothers at the Albert Hall and we went backstage afterwards and Don came over to see Peter. He said: ‘Peter, I’d like to present you with a gift. And he gave him a walking stick. The top part was silver in the shape of a naked woman. Peter said, ‘Every time I touch it I’ll know Don Everly was there before me!’”
Phil Everly also paid tribute to the man who had been The Everly Brothers’ tour manager back in the Sixties. At the same party he introduced Grant to other guests and said, “This man made everything possible. Without his efforts, musicians had no careers. He was the first to make sure the artists came first and that we got paid and paid properly.”
As Grant lost weight and recovered from the demons that troubled him, he began to show his face more frequently at music business functions. ELO’s drummer Bev Bevan saw Peter at the Kerrang! heavy metal magazine awards one year. “I saw Peter and couldn’t believe how tiny he had become. He used to be such a massive man. He didn’t look well at all and had shrunk so much and he had lost all his bombast. I had several takes before I believed it was him. We talked about Denny Laine because he had split up with his daughter and gone to live in America.”
The subject of Denny Laine was something of a sore point with Peter as the former lead singer with The Moody Blues who later worked with Paul McCartney in Wings had fathered a child by Peter’s daughter Helen, but the couple had later split up. When Laine’s name came up in conversation, Peter Grant glowered in much the same way as he once glowered at bootleggers. Ed Bicknell: “He came over to my house down in Eastbourne one Boxing Day, with Helen, Warren and all of their kids. Helen had broken up with Denny Laine, who was the father of Lucy, who was Peter’s granddaughter, who he absolutely doted on. I said to Peter: ‘What’s it like having Denny Laine as a sort of son-in-law?’ They weren’t technically married. He looked at me and said, ‘Waste of food.’ That was the only thing he said.
“An hour later, he must have thought about him again because he suddenly said, ‘What do you think Denny Laine is doing on New Year’s Eve?’”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” replied Bicknell.
“He’s playing a gig in Latvia, with Rick Wakeman. Heh, heh, heh!”
“It was very cold in Latvia and Peter thought that was very funny,” adds Bicknell.
As well as turning up at lunches, Peter was also invited to take part in panel discussions, TV shows and conferences where he always proved an able and amusing speaker. Explained the newly slimmed down and active Grant: “I wanted to use all my experience and thought I had something to offer people. I did a TV programme called Wired and was asked why there were so few women in management. I didn’t know, but there are a lot of bright ladies in business.”
Indeed, Peter formed a partnership with co-manager Anna George to nurture Thomas McLaughlin, a ten-year-old guitarist and a singer songwriter called Tina Summer from Bournemouth whose songs and lyrics he liked. “But it was hard for me to get into managing another band,” he admitted. “Thomas was an amazing player for his age. Ahmet came over to see him. Trouble is, he was one of those with a difficult father. You know, ‘All I want for my boy is to hear him on Radio One, being a star!’ I mentioned that to Brian May and he said that was the biggest mistake anyone could make!”
Peter’s most memorable public appearance was at ‘In The City’, a significant industry seminar attended each year by top media and music industry figures. When the convention was held in Manchester in 1992, Peter’s appearance at a debate on rock managers proved one of the most eagerly awaited events.
Recalled Peter: “I’d seen ‘In The City’ promoted in Music Week and I rang Elliot Rashman, Simply Red’s manager, who was organising it and I’d also spoken to Ed Bicknell and they all wanted me to come, so I did. It was supposed to be a celebrity interview with the journalist Paul Morley. Someone tipped me off that he was going to do a number on me. I sorted him well and truly. He thought I was an old fart and he came unstuck. But it was great and I met so many people, and the good thing is so many new managers keep in touch. It’s nice to share that knowledge.”
Bicknell recalls how Peter dominated the event. “He rang one day and said, ‘Oh Ed, I’ve been asked to go up to Manchester for a conference. What’s a conference?’ I explained how the music industry had become very businesslike. He said he would go, if I came with him. So we went to Manchester but his health wasn’t too good. I remember just walking down the platform was quite a stretch for him. He’d already had one heart attack and was quite frail. The night before the conference got underway, a group of us went out to dinner and came back to the Holiday Inn and we sat in the bar.”
It was a summit meeting of the kind that rarely happens in the music business. Gathered around the table were Gail Colson, who managed The Pretenders, Elliot Rashman, who managed Simply Red, Ed Bicknell, who managed Dire Straits, and, presiding over them all, Peter Grant, the legendary manager of Led Zeppelin. “We started talking about getting fucked by your act, which is something rarely mentioned in the management profession,” recalls Bicknell. “Elliot said he could never imagine his artist would ever let him down. Peter said, ‘Elliot, as sure as eggs is eggs, the day will come …’ and he described what happened when a manager and his artist breaks up. Peter came across as a very gentle and wise person and he wouldn’t slag people off. He was very discreet in that way. We were all very surprised.
“At the conference the next day Paul Morley* had to interview him. Morley made an absolute tit of himself. He came on stage with a huge bodyguard and people began heckling. In the end I took over the questions myself.”
Peter enjoyed himself so much he went again the next year. Recalled Grant: “I didn’t do any interviews but I sat in on an interesting forum called ‘Do we need lawyers?’ which was quite fun. They said to me, ‘Are you retired?’ and I said, ‘If something really special came along I’d think about it,’ and within 30 seconds somebody’s mobile phone went off and Paul Russell from Sony shouts out, ‘There’s an offer now, Peter!’ and somebody else says, ‘It must be Robert Plant,’ and I said, ‘Oh no, not a second time!’”
Grant was also invited to the Canadian National Music Week in Toronto in 1994 where he agreed to another Celebrity Interview and a young generation of Zeppelin fans hung on his every word. It proved to be his last major public appearance.
He had become such a celebrity that plans were made to make a movie of his life story. Behind the plan was another music industry maverick, former Sex Pistols manager, Malcolm McLaren. He planned to get financial backing from America for the project to be made by Glinwood Films and to be called Hammer Of The Gods. (“The hammer of what?” Peter would snort.) It would draw from the book of the same name by Stephen Davis and tell the story of “the south London heavy who became boss of rock’n’roll’s most notorious supergroup.” The film would have a screenplay by Barrie Keeffe, and the executive producers were Peter Grant and Terry Glinwood. The producers were John Goldstone and Malcolm McLaren.
Such a sensationalised picture might have worked in the rock years, but the world had moved on. The concept seemed less appealing in a scene dominated by rap and dance music. However the emergence of a new genre of British
gangster movies seemed to provide the key. After all, Grant’s bodyguard, John Bindon, had played gangster parts in movies. Why not portray Grant in the same light? McLaren may have had the idea, planted by Grant’s appearance toting a Tommy gun in The Song Remains The Same. But if Peter was uneasy about his fictitious role then, he certainly wasn’t convinced by the idea of reviving such an image in the Nineties. He had been at pains to shed his ‘bad guy’ image. A film along these lines wouldn’t help with his rehabilitation.
Recalled Peter: “Malcolm McLaren came to me with an idea of doing a film based on my life story. We had a long chat with Barry Keeffe, who wrote The Long Good Friday. But nothing really came of it. Malcolm went to America to see a couple of film companies and they went, ‘Oh, rock’n’roll. Forget it.’ Then he rang me up and said, ‘We’re gonna do it.’ The plan was to spend a few months writing the script and then to make the film for release in Christmas 1991.”
Mickie Most recalls that Grant became heavily involved in the writing process. “One of the last times I heard from Peter was when he phoned me and said, ‘I’ve sold the house, I’m living in Eastbourne in a flat and I’ve got living with me a guy who is writing a script for The Peter Grant Story. He’s living with me so he can get the feel of my personality, all that kind of stuff. He’s dying to meet you. Can he come up and spend a couple of hours talking with you, for his script?’ The guy making the film was Malcolm McLaren but I spent two hours with the scriptwriter and when I heard the film wasn’t going to be made, I could see why.”
There were fears that the proposed film would damage rather than enhance Peter’s reputation and depict him as ‘a thuggish buffoon’. Some recalled with trepidation McLaren’s previous film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle. Said one of Grant’s friends: “There are fears McLaren will depict Peter as a gangster rather than a defender of the Zeppelin name.”
Says Ed Bicknell: “Peter didn’t like the script. When Peter was asked what he wanted left out of what appeared to be ‘a chronicle of excess’, he replied, ‘My name.’”
When Grant and Bicknell went to Canada to visit the Canadian Music Week convention in Toronto in 1994, a researcher was assigned who spent the entire time questioning Peter. Ed: “He would sit in a room and regale this bloke with anecdotes. Of course the film never went anywhere but the stories were great. He told one story about bumping into Little Richard at a show in Florida. Richard was playing at a hotel and Zeppelin was in town. Said Peter: ‘Let’s go and see Little Richard, he’ll be great.’ As soon as Little Richard saw his old tour manager come into the room he stopped the band in mid-song and began calling out, ‘Mr Peter, Mr Peter!’ He then told the audience an unbelievably convoluted story about how Mr Peter had once rescued him by knocking out half a dozen policemen in Italy. It was on the same tour that Peter took Little Richard from Paris to Dusseldorf by taxi, because he was terrified of flying.”
During the early Nineties the continuing fascination with the Led Zeppelin saga was fuelled by the release of specially prepared box sets with original material remastered by Jimmy Page. The first was a double CD set called Remasters, released on October 15, 1990, in the UK and Europe. This was a condensed version of the 54-track boxed set of six LPs or four CDs called simply Led Zeppelin, released in worldwide on October 29. This was followed by Led Zeppelin Boxed Set 2 in 1993, a further two CD set. The CD sets were a big success and sold over a million units, despite their high price. The Led Zeppelin set came out at a time when vinyl LPs were finally being phased out, and so the box, with its distinctive picture of the shadow of a Zeppelin airship flying over a crop circle, was perceived as a fitting memorial.
At the same time Led Zeppelin bootleg CDs were flooding the market, some of them produced to a quality that matched the official product. It was extraordinary to think that despite all the years Peter had spent fighting bootleggers when he was managing them, Led Zeppelin became one of the most bootlegged rock bands in the world. Incredibly, one of the finest bootlegs of all time was a huge box of 19 Zeppelin CDs produced to the highest standard in Japan. These consisted of ‘live’ recordings of such superb quality that both Plant and Page bought copies themselves.
With all this activity, the clamour for a Zeppelin reunion increased but Peter Grant, relaxing in Eastbourne and unlikely to be consulted anyway, remained sceptical. “It would have been a vast earner and would have outsold anyone including The Stones, but would they have been any happier? I know Jimmy was always keen on the idea but Robert didn’t want to do it. Let’s face it, even if they had got the band together again it wouldn’t have been the same and that Zeppelin mystique would have been gone forever.”
Back in 1993, while Robert Plant was still pursuing his solo career and released his Fate Of Nations album, Jimmy Page had somewhat perversely linked up with Whitesnake singer David Coverdale for an album and tour. Then MTV brought Plant and Page together for an Unplugged show called Unledded which they recorded in London in 1995. Behind them were an Egyptian orchestra and classical musicians and as well as new material they played many old favourites. Soon the duo was united on a more permanent basis and, under the management of Bill Curbishley, they released the album No Quarter in 1994 and embarked on what many had thought was impossible, a complete world tour. This was in effect the Led Zeppelin reunion many had dreamed about, except that they did not invite John Paul Jones into the band, nor did they utilise the services of Jason Bonham. It was a good compromise however, as it meant Jimmy and Robert could work together again, produce some new music and not entirely ignore their past.
The pair began their US tour in Florida in February 1995, playing such numbers as ‘Kashmir’ and ‘No Quarter’ but studiously refraining from playing Robert’s bête noire ‘Stairway To Heaven’. On October 26 and 27 they made a homecoming to Madison Square Garden, New York, scene of many a past triumph. The tour continued around the world, visiting South America and Japan before returning to Europe in the summer for shows that included an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival on June 25. As the tour progressed they cut back on the Egyptian music and began to draw on some 32 Led Zeppelin classics. They played at London’s Wembley Arena on July 25 and 26. The tour was hugely profitable, some alleging they had earned more than in the days of Zeppelin.
They had also done it all without their old guardian. Peter Grant came to see them at Wembley and he was made welcome and introduced to the public from the stage. Robert Plant paid a fulsome tribute and the cheers were loud and long. Peter was later seen holding court at the mixing desk after the show, surrounded by fans and signing autographs.
Peter’s son Warren says that after his first flush of excitement at returning to public life, Peter began to cut back on his schedule. “In later years he stayed in touch with Jimmy and John Paul Jones, but less so with Robert. I think that when Robert did his solo thing, he was still under contract to Peter, but he went off on his own and dad was upset about that. But they buried the hatchet in the end and he went to see both Jimmy and Robert play. He liked doing those lectures for the music business and he was asked a lot to go to conventions, but he didn’t want to get on planes and fly about. He thought about going back into business, but didn’t really want to. He used to say, ‘I’ve been there and got the T-shirt. Let someone else do it.’ He just didn’t want any more hassles. He just wanted to relax, although he did go over to Canada. He’d sooner go to a pub in Eastbourne and judge a talent contest!”
There was more praise for Peter when he was given a special award at the first International Manager’s Forum dinner at London’s Hilton Hotel on September 20, 1995. He and Alan Callan were both invited to the dinner. “We sat at the table with Ed Bicknell and some other managers. Suddenly they announced they wanted Peter Grant on stage. They were going to induct him into the Roll Of Honour.
“I’ll never forget this. People climbed onto their tables and shouted and cheered. Elliot Rashman who managed Simply Red was shouting out, ‘Congratulations Peter, none of us could h
ave done it without you!’ Then Peter stood on the stage and said: ‘I’ve been very lucky in my life. Probably never luckier than at this moment when all of you people are honouring me. But the truth is that luck comes from the great fortune of being able to work with great talent. It is the great talent that allowed me to be successful.”
Grant also paid tribute to his many friends and among those he mentioned by name was Alan Callan, the man who had helped him run Swan Song. Said Callan: “That completely blew me away. I nearly fell off the chair. I talked to Ed Bicknell and we both agree that we think of Peter nearly every other day.”
After Peter was inducted onto the British Music Roll Of Honour it was announced that future IMF Management Awards would be given in his name as the ‘Peter Grant Award’ to recognise ‘Excellence In Management’. Says Ed Bicknell: “When Peter got the Manager’s Forum Award two months before he died, Brian May let the cat out of the bag. Peter was very friendly with Brian, who he knew from Queen days. I had to do the presentation and it was supposed to be a secret. Unfortunately Brian said to him before the dinner, ‘It’s really great they are giving you this award,’ and Peter said, ‘What award? I didn’t know I was getting an award?’”
Peter Grant died suddenly from a heart attack on November 21, 1995, aged 60. It happened while he was travelling home in his car. His son was by his side. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were still in the throes of their reunion tour when they heard the news. Right up to the last days of his life Peter was still dealing with problems. Streams of faxes and phone calls came into his Eastbourne flat in Upper Carlisle Road from those who still perceived him as the man in charge of other people’s lives and business affairs.
