Three men in their sixties arrive on stage at the Royal Albert Hall to launch
into a song called Helplessly Hoping, from their first, self-titled
album.
For those too young to have heard of them, Crosby, Stills & Nash, known in
their heyday simply as CS&N, were a “supergroup” of talented musicians
and songwriters known for their close harmony vocals.
They typified the best qualities, or some would say the worst excesses, of the
incestuous and self-regarding Los Angeles music scene in the late 1960s. As
they limber up on the Albert Hall stage, their combined age stands at almost
exactly two centuries.
True rock cognoscenti, the sort of middle-aged men who own books of worrying
“family trees” telling you exactly when this member of the Jefferson
Airplane left to join Moby Grape, think that CS&N’s work was at its best
after the more astringent Neil Young arrived in 1969.
I am enjoying the hospitality of Ralph Bernard, who took over at the start of
last month as the Hall’s chief executive. Mr Bernard is agnostic on the
Young Question. “Without Neil Young? I still feel they will be pretty
formidable,” he tells me beforehand.
Now we are here to find out. The Albert Hall is walled into rock history for
some performances there in the late 1960s. It was the scene of two farewell
concerts in late 1968 by Cream, another supergroup, one of them attended by
Mr Bernard’s wife Lisa. He, to his regret, was not there. He put right the
oversight in 2005 when Cream reformed to play the Albert Hall, naturally.
Mr Bernard, 56, is known as “the father of commercial radio” and his
involvement with music is deep. He set up Classic FM in 1992 and remains its
chairman, even though the station, along with GCap, the radio company where
he was chairman and then chief executive, has passed under the control of
Global Radio.
He went from being a radio documentary maker into management, then an unusual
career move. “I was a journalist. We were never encouraged to understand the
relationship between journalists and the sales team.”
He engineered the first merger in the history of commercial radio, bringing
together his Wiltshire Radio with Radio West to form GWR Group, which listed
on the London Stock Exchange in 1989. It merged with Capital Radio in 2004
to become GCap. The latter years, at least, were challenging.
“I hated running a public company, which I did for 25 years . . . no, that’s
not strictly true, I loved it. Your natural instinct, if you’re from an arts
background, is to keep the investment going, but you’re under constant
pressure to look after the bottom line.”
His views chime with those of any executive who has had to reconcile the
culture of an arts business with the need to survive in a commercial arena.
“The City loved media companies for a long time, but fell out of love
spectacularly. I was called a bit of a dinosaur sometimes. Some people
thought I was only interested in production and not delivering profits,
which isn’t true. I strongly believe that delivering product results in a
stronger bottom line and a more robust company.
“Radio is a very, very simple business in reality. If you control the costs,
and you don’t have to be draconian, you can see yourself through a
recession.”
Back on stage, Crosby, whose trademark moustache, now white, makes him look
like the oldest walrus on the ice shelf, announces that they are now going
to “take a few chances” and the trio, augmented by backing musicians, play a
series of covers, of songs by “our friend Jerry Garcia” (the departed
guitarist with the Grateful Dead), Bob Dylan and Tim Hardin’s Reason
to Believe, once recorded by a young Rod Stewart.
The audience, surprisingly mixed in age, respond warmly enough. They could
hardly do otherwise; it is difficult to tell if the mist rising up the
sweltering Albert Hall is from a light use of dry ice, or is actually steam
generated by all those hot bodies.
Things pick up when they play Nash’s Our House — no relation to
Madness, a picture of domestic bliss with fellow songwriter Joni Mitchell.
Close your eyes, the harmonies seem almost unchanged and the intervening
years slip away. Nash and Crosby perform, largely unaccompanied, the
yearning Guinevere, which Mr Bernard ackowledges as one of his
favourites. Stills, who looks like a retired docker and appears a tad frail,
exits the stage, possibly for a lie down.
Mr Bernard is hugely enthused. “Not bad. I mean, absolutely brilliant!” he
says in the interval. “I first saw them at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall.” He
can’t remember the year, some time in the 1970s.
We take up his story. By 2007, the marriage of equals that had produced GCap
had fissured with the departure of David Mansfield, who had come in from
Capital to be chief executive, requiring Mr Bernard, who was chairman, to
step into his place.
“I had a pretty horrible last year or two. I had 25 years of fantastic
success, I greatly enjoyed building GWR, launching CFM, launching digital
radio, Planet Rock. Then the first straws of recession started to slide
through my office in Leicester Square, which soon became great bales of
straw. You do get tired after a while . . . no, not tired. You get very
stale. You can be reinvigorated by another deal, but you get stale.” Then
his plans for a quieter future were derailed. Emap, the publishing and media
conglomerate, which owned an array of radio stations, came up for sale. “I
couldn’t avoid looking at our biggest competitor. At the same time my wife
had been planning for many months for us to have a sabbatical.” He broke the
news to her at their home in Marlborough. The sabbatical was put on hold. As
it panned out, GCap did not buy any of the Emap stations.
On February 21, 2008, he left the company for two months in South America.
While he was there, GCap became the subject of a formal offer from Global
Radio.
Mr Bernard was already involved in various projects, such as the Central
School of Ballet and the Watermill Theatre in Newbury. “I did want to do
more in the charity field, particularly arts and health. I’m not going to
tell you I was inundated with offers, but one or two quite interesting
things came through. You start to think, I’m a bit too young to plant
cabbages, and I always thought I would do one more thing.”
A phone call came. Was he interested in replacing David Elliott, retiring
after 18 years at the Royal Albert Hall? His wife had gained the impression
that he would be easing off his workload. “I didn’t tell her originally I
was talking to the Albert Hall. I didn’t know how.” He sat her down for
coffee in that same conservatory in Marlborough that had hosted that earlier
fraught conversation. “I said: ‘You know I said I was going to give up. I
was thinking . . .’ She was absolutely convinced I was going back into
radio.”
Some might see it as a quiet, part-time role ahead of retirement. “You must be
joking. It’s so full-time. It’s a charity but it’s still a business. The
Albert Hall doesn’t receive a penny in public subsidy. It has to find its
way in a competitive world.”
The trio start up again. They are on surer ground with hits such as the eerie Déjà
Vu, the title track on their second album. It was a Crosby song and he
introduces it with “My job was to write weird s***”.
There is Marrakesh Express, a train trip to the fabled hippy paradise,
and Wooden Ships as an encore, written by Crosby on his luxury yacht.
By the end, the trio are jamming on guitars like teenagers. The second
encore is the inevitable, crowd-pleasing Teach Your Children.
“Superb evening — a job doesn’t get better than this!” Mr Bernard raves
afterwards. And the best song? Military Madness — from Graham Nash’s
solo album, Songs For Beginners.” He was enthusing about this in the
interval. For some reason the album passed me by.
He says that one of the most difficult balancing acts is between traditional
classical music and more modern acts, such as Eric Clapton and his fellow
guitarist Jeff Beck, also appearing this month. “There are very definitely
those people who would like you to have 365 days a year of Proms. There are
those people who would like nothing more than 365 days of Clapton. There are
those who would like 365 days of Cirque du Soleil.
“There’s without question a feeling of slight elitism, that the Hall is the
home of classical music. It’s had some outstanding performances over the
years.”
But it has also featured Jimi Hendrix setting fire to his guitar and the
Beatles and Stones on same bill for the only time ever. Who would you like
to see perform, I ask? He saw Led Zeppelin when they reformed at O2. “I
would love to have had Led Zeppelin here, it was a brilliant, brilliant gig.”
Who else? “I know you would love me to give you a whole list. It’s just too
early. Here you are talking about pop and rock. There’s so much that goes on
here.” This includes the Cirque du Soleil, the Masters’ Tennis in December
this year, boxing, even sumo wrestling.
Completed in 1871, in the 19th century the Hall staged 50 to 75 performances.
Now it is in use 360 days a year, after a £70 million redevelopment. Mr
Bernard is keen to open it up to a much wider range of performers.
“In the space of a few weeks we’ve had Eric Clapton, the Killers, The King &
I and the Women’s Institute. It doesn’t get much more versatile than that.
“It’s a wonderful 19th-century building. It’s iconic. But it’s got to be
living and breathing in the 21st century. It can’t just be some old lady at
the edge of Hyde Park.”
CV
Born: February 11, 1953, London
Education: Caterham School, Ilford
Career: 1975, Hallam Radio, Sheffield (first job in radio); 1980-82:
news editor and programme director, Hereward Radio, Cambridgeshire;
1982-2005: chief executive and chairman, GWR Group; 2005-08: chairman, chief
executive, GCAP Media; June 1, 2009-present : chief executive, Royal Albert
Hall.
2002: CBE for services to broadcasting; Also: chairman, Classic FM,
Digital One; chairman, Central School of Ballet; chairman, British Lung
Foundation; chairman, development and appeal board, Watermill Theatre,
Newbury;governor, Dauntsey’s School, Wiltshire
Other interests: Football, cricket
Family: married, four daughters
