Alex Hardee Partying Hardee at Secret Garden Party
Indeed, he admits that the Concorde boss had a big influence on him. “I didn’t really have any mentors because nobody wanted to take me on. But I did learn an important lesson from Louis Parker: get the deposit in early.” Working at Concorde paired Alex with Louis’ son, Solomon Parker, who joined Coda as an agent in 2015, as well as Cris Hearn who also became part of Coda in the same year. “It was a bit of a strange set-up, but we shared rosters at Concorde,” says Alex. “I did lots of rave stuff like SL2 and loads of others that I can’t even remember. But that was the start of the whole dance culture.” But the regime at Concorde didn’t suit him. “We’d get one third of our commission. It was terrible and at one point I had to survive for three months living on £500, so it couldn’t go on and I left to go to MPI.”
Breakthrough
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Moments
n his new surroundings, Alex started enjoying some meaningful success, notably when Roni Size received the 1997 Mercury Music Prize. As his reputation grew, Alex started working with more and more successful acts. “I got Scissor Sisters three sold-out shows at The O2 before they sacked me,” he laughs. “But through that I started working with Mika, who is still a huge star – he sold 32,000 tickets in Paris alone last year.” Alex remembers an early Paris show with Mika. “He was playing the Stade de France but he’d managed to spend more on the production than what he was getting as a fee. I was backstage
with his manager when a Chinese dragon walked by us on its way to the stage and his manager turned to me and said, ‘There goes my commission…’” Since then, Hardee’s roster has become the envy of the business, including artists such as Bastille, Everything Everything, Example, Grace Jones, Halsey, Hurts, Kelis, Liam Gallagher, London Grammar, Mika, Jake Bugg, Sean Paul, Sia, Tiësto and Tom Odell, to name but a few. Having established a solid reputation at MPI, Alex was eager to take his career to the next stage and soon found himself in talks to launch a new agency. He’d already persuaded MPI boss Phil Banfield to buy back company shares owned by Miles Copeland, and looking to take the next step up, it was the departure of one of his peers that acted as the catalyst. “What happened was, Cris Hearn left MPI to go to Primary, so I said I wouldn’t stay unless the company did something,” says Alex. “I suggested we talk to Clive Underhill-Smith and Rob Challice at Concert Clinic and that’s how the merger came about to start up Coda.” But while Alex was looking forward to being one of Coda’s founders, tragedy struck the Hardee family. Older brother Malcolm, heralded as one of the pioneers of the British alternative comedy scene, drowned in an accident while making his way home to his houseboat from his floating pub, the Wibbly Wobbly. “I took three weeks off to arrange the funeral,” says Alex. “It wasn’t a surprise. Malcolm lived on a boat and he’d get pissed before going home – when they found his body in the water, he was still clutching a bottle of beer in his hand.”
“When I asked Louis why he had a photo of Malcolm naked in the toilet, he replied ‘You’re Malcolm’s brother? You’ve got the job.”
IQ Magazine March 2017