Mad Dogs & Englishmen July Newsletter
High up above the hostess desk at Mad Dogs is a Smiths poster signed by Morrissey. I am told it’s a rarity. Morrissey was renowned for being quite stingy with his autograph.
In the June newsletter, I mentioned a time when I resided in Australia. I had travelled Down Under in the early 1970’s to work for an organization that had for more than a century owned all the theatres and presented most of the shows on that continent. The Firm, as it was known, was run by three very ancient brothers, the Taits, affectionately referred to as Cogitate, Agitate and Masturbate. They resembled a cross between the Duke brothers from the movie Trading Places and the Muppets that reside in the balcony. Their company was still presenting second-rate revivals of Oklahoma when what Australians really wanted to see was AC/DC.
In a last-ditch effort to save our jobs, a few of us younger employees steered the Firm towards rock and roll, which inadvertently hastened its demise. An Eagles tour was the nail in the coffin, when their savvy little manager, Irving Azoff, extracted a good deal more from the Tait Brothers’ legacy than was warranted.
However, the collapse of the Firm had a silver lining. It created a vacuum, and I spent the next decade as an independent promoter, touring edgy plays and musicals around Australia and New Zealand with varying degrees of success. Hence the odd theatre poster amongst Mad Dogs wall art. I was careful to avoid cricket bat-wielding band managers. Theatre was less profitable than rock and roll but you dealt with more honorable types. More Harold Pinter’s and fewer Harvey Weinstein’s.
In 1983 emboldened by presenting a few quasi-rock shows like the Rocky Horror Show and Little Shop of Horrors, I decided to try my hand at rock and roll bands again. Maybe it had gotten easier. Maybe the days of destroying hotel rooms were over. One of the first people I approached was the Smiths’ manager, Joe Moss.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “I assume you employ a publicist?” I did. “If your publicist does a good job of promoting the record we just released, I’ll see you get the tour. However, you pick up the cost of the publicist. Deal?” Sounded fair enough. The publicist subsequently did a bang-up job and the Smiths sold a lot of records in Australia for a band that had never set foot there.
A few months later, I went to London to discover Joe Moss had disappeared off the face of the earth. I phoned the record company and was informed Morrissey had fired his long-term manager, and no one knew anything about a tour of Australia.
“Morrissey hates flying,” the label rep threw in for good measure, “but thanks for your help with the record. How about I get Morrissey to sign a poster. What was your name again? “
