INTERVIEW
1971 AND ALL THAT Adam Barker joined Universal Music as a deal-maker. He’s now also a film-maker, cutting his teeth on Amy and, more recently, exec-producing the new Apple TV+ series, 1971…
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round 10 years ago, renowned British music journalist David Hepworth posited the theory, quite casually but quite confidently (and quite often, actually), that 1971 was, as he put it ‘the annus mirabilis of the rock album’. He didn’t make a big deal of it. He does, after all, posit theories reasonably regularly – on podcasts, on his blog, on Twitter. It’s what he does. But they’re more pub chat than pitch. This one, however, had legs. And then wings, becoming first a best-selling book, Never A Dull Moment, and now a eight-part documentary series on Apple TV+, 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything. The series has moved things on quite a bit from Hepworth’s original position; it’s more global, less personal, and dwells more on the societal and political scenarios music was reflecting and sometimes influencing at the time. It has been made by much of the team behind Amy, the Oscar-winning featurelength documentary from 2015, including series director Asif Kapadia, who is part of a group of executive producers that includes Universal Music UK’s Director of Business Affairs, Adam Barker. Here, Barker discusses his evolving role within UMG, and explains how the mosttalked about new music doc of the year came together. Can you first give us a quick thumbnail sketch of your career so far? I was a criminal defense barrister for a few years, then I bumped into a friend of a friend of a friend who said, ‘You should have a look at working in the music industry, you’d love it: you get drunk all the time and don’t do any work; it’s amazing.’ From asking around, I realised that was what very much what this person did, and they were promptly fired. But the idea had been planted.
Adam Barker
I first worked for a guy called Tony Calder, who was one of the music industry’s great rogues. He was a comanager of The Rolling Stones, he was Marianne Faithfull’s manager and he was often referred to as ‘a psychedelic gangster’. Quite a character. From there, I went to work with Dean Marsh at a boutique law firm that specialised in dance music. That took me to Ministry of Sound, for about three years, which was an education – very strange, but very enjoyable. And then I joined Universal in 2003 via
what used to be Mercury Records, but has since morphed into EMI. 10 years ago, my predecessor in this job, Clive Fisher, retired and I was lucky enough to be put forward as his replacement [as Director of Business Affairs]. In that 10 years as, if you like, the chief deal-maker and contract negotiator at Universal, what have been the main changes in that area, from the record company side of the desk? It’s definitely become more complex; the variety of different types of deals has 85
