Book review: The business of pop music — as much who you know as what you know

Sophie Oliver’s compelling documentary series No Matter What, about the life and colourful times of an Irish pop group, Boyzone, has provoked much comment. 

Much of which focuses on Louis Walsh, who created the group and managed it to heights few deemed imaginable.

Walsh has long been a polarising figure: he is either a visionary architect of the development of popular culture in Ireland or an insidious pest who got lucky. 

And like several of the other personalities in Michael Mary Murphy’s breezy take on pop music management, he was also out-grown by his charges over time.

His impact dwarfs that of the acts he worked with.

Like all those profiled here, in what is a light-touch academic read with a fanzine’s underlay, Walsh’s management style, such as it is, was learnt through lived experience. 

Because what’s clear from the wide range of examples cited is that successful pop music management just can’t be taught. 

In an industry that refuses to sit still, there is no one size that fits all.

Drawing from secondary sources only, the author does well to remind us of the importance of solid, coherent management in an industry known for its flakiness and impatience.

“The music industry isn’t fair,” Murphy tells us in his introduction. Before setting out the core of his thesis: what is management?

The search for answers takes the reader on a scenic route through key aspects of the careers of vintage big hitters like Brian Epstein, Kit Lambert, Peter Grant, Berry Gordy, and Russell Simmons.

All of whom to varying degrees not only navigated their bands to the top of the pop charts, but in so doing dynamically impacted the shape and course of popular culture.

Gordy, whose family founded the Motown label in Detroit in 1959, is an industry outlier about whom much has previously been written.

A label owner, songwriter, publisher, producer, and manager, he was a genuine one-off.

Curiously, Murphy suggests that one of Motown’s greatest successes was that its structural blueprint was never again replicated elsewhere.

Likewise, Russell Simmons, who masterminded the breakthrough of hip hop — he managed the seminal outfit, Run DMC, among others — into the global mainstream.

Central to which was the broader packaging and branding of the genre to incorporate aspects of fashion, sport, and lifestyle.

Much less is known about the successful female managers who infrequently cut through in what has long-been an almost exclusively male-skewed industry.

And so Murphy’s chapter on Arlyne Rothberg, who managed Carly Simon, and Jean Powell Harcourt, who did likewise for Janis Ian, is especially strong. 

And back-to-back with the subsequent chapter about the relationship between managers and their clients, this gives the book real heft.

Murphy makes no reference to another formidable figure far closer to home, Paul McGuinness.

Educated at one of the country’s most exclusive private schools, he took an unashamedly business-led approach to U2’s affairs and melded long-standing boardroom principles with the scaly world of post-punk. To the point where his charges became the biggest rock band in the world.

Music fans of a particular vintage will be familiar with the work of Pete Frame, the music journalist and historian who, in five volumes of Rock Family Trees, chased the genealogy of the biggest and most influential bands in the world.

Michael Mary Murphy will be familiar with Frame’s output and, in respect of pop music management, provides a similar service here.

But as Paul McGuinness will attest, success in the music industry is often predicated, not on the strength of a voice or the quality of a song, but on the keen eyes of an accountant or lawyer.

Because ultimately, successful pop music management — like pop music itself — is about connections and connecting. As much about who you know as what you know.