Barry Clayman
In Clayman’s Terms: As a true pioneer of the live music industry, Barry Clayman has been a stalwart of the business for well over 50 years. Having recently celebrated his 80th birthday, Barry is still working hard at promoting long-term clients. He talks to Adam Woods about his astonishing career…
“They came in an old Dormobile. Had to go through the audience to get onstage, and out again the same way.” This is Barry Clayman, veteran of many hundreds of shows, on the day in April 1963 that he promoted The Beatles, just the once, 30 days after the release of their debut album. “I paid them £100 for two 45-minute sets,” he recalls. “We used to hire the Pigalle [in Piccadilly] on Sundays. Brian Epstein phoned and said, ‘we are doing the NME Poll Winners’ Concert. It’s on a Sunday, we want to do a gig, and someone said you are doing some concerts at this nightclub.’ I think we had 1,200 people in there, and the licence was about 700, so we were probably pushing it a bit. It was a great atmosphere, plenty of sweat.” As with virtually everyone he has worked with (and when it isn’t the case, he swerves strictly off the record) Barry has only positive things to say about the boys. “They were charming. Pleases and thank yous. Very nice.” But the notable thing about this tale is that, for a man with as good an eye for a business prospect as any promoter in half a century, Barry didn’t quite realise what was passing through his hands. “Sometimes I think, Here, why didn’t you hang in there?!” he says. “But I lacked the experience to know what we had. Another year or two, if the same thing had happened… but you couldn’t have that kind of foresight.” In a different career, it might be a more regretful recollection, but Barry Clayman, OBE, has made good since. He’s certainly the only 80 year old striding around Live Nation’s Argyll Street office the day we meet. He’s also one of a tiny handful of promoters whose career brackets virtually the entire modern live business, from 1960, when a young
IQ Magazine July 2016
Barry ran rowdy talent shows in outer London dancehalls, to – well, the brackets haven’t closed yet. You could begin the Clayman story, incidentally, in any number of places. You might start with the one about how agreeing to pay a brass section for a young Tom Jones changed the course of Barry’s life. Or how in 1988 he masterminded seven Wembley Stadium shows for Michael Jackson, and another eight in the decade that followed. Or the Irish dance show he brought to the UK in 1995 and the plans, already in motion, for Riverdance’s 25th anniversary tour in 2020. But as it happens, the things that arguably animate him the most on this wet June morning are up-to-date concerns, reflecting the fact that, while he may now spend the larger part of his time in Portugal, where he moved in 2005 with Linda, his wife of 47 years, he remains a working promoter. “The latest thing I have heard is that there are quite big acts in the US who aren’t paying their agents any commission,” he reports, in mild disbelief at the folly of it all. “They’re leaving them to negotiate that out of the promoter’s end. Now, I don’t expect anyone to shed any tears for promoters, but they are the ones taking the risk, and their cut is getting smaller and smaller. I won’t name names, but I have heard from quite a few people that the practice does exist. And I think it’s wrong.” The other worry Barry would like to put on the record is a related one. “When I started, I might have had a few hundred quid in the bank, nothing more than that,” he says. “Maybe I might have had a rich uncle who would lend me some money when I needed it. In today’s business, I don’t know how the young people – just out of university, want to be in show business, got a nice feel for it – get started? How do they get in the big league with the multimillion pound guarantees? They have got no chance.” That may well be true. Then again, as Barry would admit, every career has always depended on a stroke of luck or two.
25