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After being named 2007’s Woman of the Year, Emma Banks chatted to Greg Parmley about wasted talent, hard work and old fashioned values.
2007 was an annus magnus for booking agent Emma Banks: a year that began with a new company, continued with a string of successful tours and ended with her crowned as the UK music industry’s Woman of the Year.
 After being named 2007’s Woman of the Year, Emma Banks chatted to Greg Parmley about wasted talent, hard work and old fashioned values.
2007 was an annus magnus for booking agent Emma Banks: a year that began with a new company, continued with a string of successful tours and ended with her crowned as the UK music industry’s Woman of the Year.
She might not have been the only Banks to be crowned Woman of the Year (American supermodel Tyra Banks received a similar accolade from OK! Magazine), but according to a string of colleagues and friends, she was certainly the most deserving.
“She should have won way before now,” says promoter Donald MacLeod; “She’s much more than Woman of the Year,” says manager Michael ‘Curly’ Jobson; “The fair agent with the heart in the right place,” adds Flemming Schmidt.
The 29 November ceremony at London’s Intercontinental Hotel was organised by Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy and the BRIT Trust and attended by 600 music industry luminaries. In winning the award, Banks joins a list of past recipients that includes Sharon Osbourne, songwriter Cathy Dennis, the BBC’s Lesley Douglas and artist manager Gail Colson.
“It was lovely,” Banks says. “It was a brilliant day, and I proved to everyone that my hair can look OK if someone does it!”
2007 began with Banks (and colleague Mike Greek) establishing the London office of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) – a role for which she was headhunted in 2006 – and it continued with her named Second Least Offensive Agent at the ILMC’s Arthur Awards in March (for the third time). But such recognition among her peers is more the result of 17 years of hard work than discrimination based on her sex.
“It never occurred to me that I was a woman in the industry,” she says. “I come from a fairly male dominated background, so it’s never been something I considered. I’ve never actively thought, ‘there aren’t any women doing this, can I?’”
In fairness though, if the agency business was ever investigated by a feminist, wheelchair-bound ethnic minority auditor, there’d be blood on the tracks before bedtime – It’s a sector populated almost exclusively by white males.
“Why do you think I’m in it? I’m actively campaigning against women entering it so there’s more men for me!” she jokes, but while, as a woman, she’s conspicuous in having reached the top of her game, Banks sees no limitations based on gender.
“It’s not difficult for a girl to do this job, and I think you get a different kind of agent, potentially,” she says. “Women can be a bit more nurturing and they come at it from a different angle, although you can’t be prudish…if you are, you need to be booking different acts to the ones I’ve got.
“When Nine Inch Nails want me to sit on their tour bus and watch hardcore pornography, as long as it’s not one with me in it, I’ll watch it! But you need to establish boundaries and barriers, which comes with age as much as anything, and experience.”
Girl About Town
The ability to nurture is just one characteristic from her early years that set Banks on her current  career path. Growing up in Cambridge with two younger brothers (“I am a bit older sisterly”), Banks was preoccupied for much of her teenage years with her pony, Popeye.
“I’d obsessively bandage the poor bastard’s legs,” she says. “I wasn’t that interested in riding it, I just wanted to look after it and tell it what to do.”
Her time was spent with schoolwork (“I was never rebellious”) and organising an annual gymkhana to raise money for charity, inspired by her father, a successful businessman. “I know I’m out there trying to prove something to him,” she says. So with a bossy older sister mentality, a successful father to impress and an innate organisational ability, even as a teenager Banks possessed the motivation, inspiration and inclination to do well.
But while the older generation of agents were consumed by music at an early age, Banks’ only indulgence was to tape the Top 40 charts on a Sunday afternoon. By the time she began a Food Science degree at Reading University in 1986, she’d been to two gigs: Dire Straits Live in ‘85 at Birmingham NEC Arena, and the TV-broadcast of an Adam and the Ants show, filmed in London.
“I certainly wasn’t out going to see Bauhaus or the Sex Pistols,” she says, “although I certainly went through the schoolgirl crush thing. I had Adam Ant, John Taylor, and Stuart Adamson from Big Country on my school folder. When I later went on a hiking holiday with Simon Le Bon I couldn’t tell him that John Taylor was on the folder and not him.”
UK universities in the late 80s were suffering from poor levels of investment and funding, and the entertainment departments of the student unions were no exception. “They were screwed up as there was no incentive to make money,” Banks says. “I got involved in Rag organisation [fund raising by students in the UK] which had to make money as it was all for charity.
“I got to know a guy called Neil Richards who ran it, but there were maybe five or six of us,” she says. “By my second year it was me and Neil running it – putting the shows on, costing them out, being tight about everything and deciding that agents were wankers and the scum of the earth.”
Her three years at university were far from the pot-smoking, philosophising doss of popular myth. Still harbouring dreams of becoming an actress after graduating, Banks spent office hours in the laboratory, lunchtimes selling tickets or in the Rag office, and evenings making the sandwiches for the riders and promoting the gigs.
We did everything,” she says. “I swept the floor when everyone left.”
As she began to fall deeper into live music’s rabbit hole, Banks and Richards began managing local support act Jo Jo Namoza: they pressed a single, printed T-shirts and booked shows; and also booking shows for Atlantic artist Katell Keineg, who Banks later represented when she got “a proper job.”
“I loved being part of the spectacle – helping to create it,” she says. “It’s not that different to running the horse shows; I’d probably be a good wedding planner. It’s about being logical and thorough and looking after everybody and making sure they have a good time.”
 Agency Break
By the time she graduated in 1989, her aspirations to attend drama school had been replaced by the decision to enter the music industry, although the last thing Banks wanted was to be an agent. “I couldn’t think of anything worse,” she says.
“I wrote lots of letters and most people didn’t respond. I had an interview with a few people – I saw [Sony’s] Muff Winwood, [Food Record’s] Andy Ross, and [Chrysalis Publishing’s] Stuart Slater (who met my parents at a dinner party) but nobody was giving me a job. Muff said I was overqualified. It got quite depressing and my dad, the work ethic king of the world, was getting frustrated.”
In an extreme bout of selflessness, Banks’ mother had a hysterectomy earlier than necessary, in order that her daughter could spend an extra three months at home as her carer, but time was running out, both for her dreams and her degree (“A food science degree becomes irrelevant quite quickly because people are inventing new baked beans”).
She finally caved in and wrote to every UK agency. Two days after posting a letter to Ian Flooks at Wasted Talent, he called to inform her that the contact phone number on her CV was incorrect.
“The dialling codes had changed the day before,” she says. “I thought that was it and I’d never get a job, but he invited me up for an interview. Then he invited me back up to meet everyone else, and I walked into the meeting room to meet Keith Naisbitt, Paul Wilson and Bob Gold. I sat there and got grilled. I think they thought Ian was getting a bit too right on by getting a girl in, but he gave me the job.”
Having already developed a strong work ethic, Banks threw herself into agency life, booking shows for acts including An Emotional Fish, The Lilac Time and The Fatima Mansions, her first international show that she both booked and travelled abroad to watch.
”We played a gig in this beautiful art deco building in Vienna and the first five rows were full of people in dinner jackets,” she says. “When Cathal [Coughlan] started singing “burn motherfucker, burn” during Angels Delight, they all pretty much left. It was really funny.”
But mismatched audiences aside, she learnt her trade by absorbing everything around her and under experienced tutelage. “Ian really mentored me but I was really happy to do anything at all,” she says. “Ian would start a tour and then he’d have to go off and I’d finish it. He was very good at delegating a lot. I just did it all. I did nearly all of Ian’s contracts and I used to input all of the data.”
“I was doing my thing but he gave me all the opportunities,” she continues. “And I got really involved in the Achtung Baby tour for U2, which was brilliant. Ian gave me the rope and I could have hung myself with it. We were always in early and worked late – he made me the workaholic I am today.”
And with little choice between European promoters at the time, when Banks began to book shows internationally, Flooks’ contacts became hers. “You start off meeting your immediate relatives and then you go to the ILMC or people get in touch with you and you grow your database.”
Her current roster spans a wide variety of styles from hard-edged acts such as Marilyn Manson, System of a Down, And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead and Nine Inch Nails, to less aggressive names which range from Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kraftwerk to The Pretenders, Norah Jones and Crowded House.
“It’s huge,” she admits. “I do have a lot of balls in the air when it comes to acts touring but I like to have a bit of everything; it keeps it interesting.”
Her roster may still be on the increase (recent signings include Black Kids, Clocks, Alice and the Majesty, and Daniel Merriweather) but its growth has been gradual, in tandem with her skill as an agent.
“It takes a long time to learn [the business],” she says. “Being a good agent isn’t just putting gigs in a row or getting the most money, and you need at least five years experience, but you’re always learning. I always thought I could do everything and I that I was much better than I was. I look back at some of the tours I did now and wonder how they ever got off my desk – they were bloody awful.
“Bands are getting me at a better time now as I’ve bought a map since then.”
Banks’ Transfer
 Banks’ original CV, which Ian Flooks read and so many record labels passed over, is the only one she’s ever had to write, and until October 2006, she remained at the various incarnations of Flooks’ original firm. American agency ICM (International Creative Management) bought Wasted Talent in 1994, merging it with John Jackson’s Fair Warning agency to become the snappily titled Fair Warning Wasted Talent, and when Flooks quit the agency business in 1998, it was renamed Helter Skelter, with Banks becoming managing director around 2002.
But in October 2006, as the financial trouble faced by parent company Sanctuary began to affect Helter Skelter, both Banks and Greek – their contracts having expired – accepted an offer to set up CAA’s new London office. After a 16-year tenure with the same company – albeit with various owners and monikers – it was perhaps unsurprising that their departure set a fair few tongues wagging.
“At the time it happened, the whole Sanctuary thing was very peculiar and there were certain issues,” she says. “Sometimes you want to feel appreciated for the things you do and the good you do. Anyone that was there, had they had the opportunity to go, would have gone.”
But Banks is also adamant that CAA’s international interests in film, sports and television were the real clincher. “I’m a busy UK agent, and I want to look after my clients properly and give them the attention they deserve so I can’t just take off a month to investigate marketing or film opportunities,” she says. Hooking up with a company that already had aspects of that, and a great infrastructure and really good people seemed like a smart move.”
 Faces & Names
Banks and Greek have always worked together; he joined Wasted Talent a month before she arrived. “I’ve spent more of my life with him than anyone else in the world,” she says. “I think the secret to our success is that we’ve never seen each other naked!
“When we started we were quite different because Mike didn’t want to do stuff for other people – after he’d done a bit of being the dogsbody, he didn’t want to do it anymore,” she explains. “He had a very different attitude to me but we’ve both ended up in the same place. He’d definitely be in my list of 28 agents if I had an act I wanted to sign!”
And it’s not just Greek that Banks shares a close camaraderie with. Being part of a large US multinational is largely irrelevant on the ground and in a sector still run on a handshake, and the relationships with her artists and managers are still key.
“It’s always fantastic taking on an act that’s done the groundwork already, but there’s something very special with working with someone from the beginning and having that relationship and sticking with them,” she says. “In this day and age, you’re the only person that remains the same. There might be the same manager, but there won’t be the same person at the record company or the publishers.”
A case in point is Aussie rockers Silverchair, who Banks began working with while the band members were just 14. “It’s fabulous as you really have been there through thick and thin,” she says.
And then there’s the late Jeff Buckley, who Banks offered to work with on the strength of an early demo tape. “I was sharing a house with other people [in late 1992] and I got a phone call from my flatmate to say ‘there’s the sexiest sounding bloke on our answer machine that I’ve ever heard, and he wants to meet up with you. If you don’t go, I’m going.’
“We met at The Dome on Kings Road [in Chelsea] and talked for four hours. He hadn’t eaten anything so I bought him duck,” she says. “He got on really well with my mum and she used to go to a lot of the shows. He was lovely; a very special guy.”
Old-Fashioned Values
While Buckley’s genius warmed to her entire family, regardless of whether Banks’ acts are touring stadiums worldwide, or scrambling for the bottom rung with their sights in the stars, she’s renowned for being honest with all parties.
It doesn’t matter to her whether her acts are big or small – she handles them all the same way. She’s the king between kings,” says Mojo Concert’s Robert van Ommen.
Another Dutch colleague goes further: “She has a very close relationship with her artists but doesn’t forget the people she deals with in the field,” says Dutch promoter Willem Venema. “I wish there were more people that straight forward.”
“I want to be someone that’s seen as fair and reasonable,” she says. “I think it’s very important that we’re fair to the promoters because without them we don’t have a business, whether the promoter is Live Nation or Nokia or Universal Records. Everyone has to be able to make money to survive.”
And despite the continuing metamorphosis of the music business and the growing and myopic pressure on live music as its saviour, she’s built a career on distinctly old fashioned values.
[Mike and I] are both a bit old school – we’re tolerant and patient, and neither of us are screamers,” she says. “We have a society now that expects to be paid a lot of money very quickly. It comes down to the culture of new; everything’s immediate and it’s instant credit. The music industry’s no different.
“For the vast majority, the amount of money that agents, promoters and artists make touring is a living wage if you’re lucky. Only a tiny percentage are raking it in. The reality has got a bit lost and I find it slightly insulting that people think being an agent is easy and a licence to print money.”
Her main concern, however, amid the turmoil of the music industry’s remodelling, is that its pundits may forget the wealth of experience accrued in every specialist field: “We have to be very careful that we don’t dismiss everyone else’s job as unimportant or not valid or requiring any level of expertise – it would be very short-sighted.”
But, whether or not the agencies of the future are major label-owned, corporate ticketing powerhouses with in-house PA companies and lighting techs, Banks’ somewhat overzealous work ethic (“I need to get that sorted out…it’s pretty screwed up,” she admits) and dedication to her artists will doubtless see her through any changes. And it has nothing to do with her gender.
“Whether you’re a man or a woman, if you work very hard and you have some luck, you can make it,” she says.
GREG PARMLEY
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