CHAPTER 10: Real Movie La La Land
First rule of the Svengali/trickster is always have the album to rush out on the back of your big hit in order to get maximum cash in. I was not even thinking about this. I was rushing about having a great time, thinking up the next great marketing idea, jape and photo op. I wasn’t ever thinking about the next song title or tune. But I was confident the 10 we already had would get us through till the end of 1987..... here I was still trying to manage the group, which was an ever expanding, egotistical monster. My Frankenstein was in Party mode.
And there was too much to do. I never stopped to breathe that year or to take stock of the bigger picture and where we were heading. It was all too intoxicating, all going too well and it’s so easy to get carried away when everyone wants you, wants your opinion on everything and you are in the papers every day.
Also, there was a gradual shift in perception of me, from musician to money man. Obviously the suit and the briefcase, which I had considered ironic, didn’t help, nor did the “Fleece the World” T-shirt which again had been my ironic twist on the Band Aid “Save the World”.
That “Fleece the world” t-shirt - worn so “fuck you” at the time - was coming back to haunt me. No one saw the irony, its play on the music industry using musical charity events to further careers of their ailing artists by access to a worldwide television audience. I had always exposed the trickery and cynicism of the business as part of our marketing, yet that T-shirt made me look like the cynic. “His Motto is fleece the world” prefaced every American TV show on the band. I was portrayed as the arch manipulator fleecing the fans. They were so wrong, what I meant and what I had intended on that T-shirt was fleece the industry - the evil empire - not the fans.
