How a Welsh valley boy from a family of coal miners survived 30 years as a major agency player…

You’re unlikely to forget ever meeting Carl Leighton-Pope: a post six-foot impending figure with an infectious personality, cutting sense of humour and encyclopaedic knowledge of the music industry. With the ability to command an audience of hundreds, yet taking meticulous care of his artists, he’s the irrefutable, big-hearted showman for whom the world of showbiz was invented.

How a Welsh valley boy from a family of coal miners survived 30 years as a major agency player…

You’re unlikely to forget ever meeting Carl Leighton-Pope: a post six-foot impending figure with an infectious personality, cutting sense of humour and encyclopaedic knowledge of the music industry. With the ability to command an audience of hundreds, yet taking meticulous care of his artists, he’s the irrefutable, big-hearted showman for whom the world of showbiz was invented.

Like so many of the fashionable upstarts who would go on to shape the European live music industry, Carl Leighton-Pope’s rock ‘n’ roll baptism took place in London’s legendary Marquee Club. On 13 March, 1964 – the day the club opened at its heyday address of 90 Wardour Street – an 18-year-old coal miner’s son started work in the cloakroom and was forever smitten.

His life before this moment was relatively undistinguished. Carl was born in 1946 in Gilfach Goch (a small village in the South of Wales epitomised in the Richard Llewellyn novel How Green Was My Valley) into a long line of coalminers, but he escaped the family profession after a tunnel roof collapsed on his father, Brin, who swore his boys would never suffer the same ordeal and promptly relocated the entire family to London.

Growing up in Swiss Cottage (a North West suburb of London) Carl’s schooling was “directionless”, largely due to a lack of parental interest. A keenly intelligent child but bereft of focus he was expelled from the local grammar school and finally left Kynaston all boys school at 16. “My dad couldn’t believe it,” he says. “He thought I was going to leave at 15. My father and mother had no interest in my education.”

It was a time when rock ‘n’ roll was digging a permanent foothold and from 1962, while he attempted short stints in city offices, Carl and his school peers discovered The Who. “We were all Mods, we all had scooters, and we were all in trouble,” he says. “It was the beginning of playing drums in a band and the possibility that there might be something more exciting.”

While he worked to find his calling – trying acting, comedy and even wine bar management – the Marquee job saw him very much in the right place at the right time; the fast-talking hip young face in the hub of a London scene beginning to swing.

“It was a time when nobody really knew they were famous,” he says. “It was nice because you could hang out with everybody – the Stones would always be around, and even the Beatles would show up from time to time. I spent ‘64, ‘65, and ‘66 captivated by the music business, being backstage in dressing rooms and hanging out.”

And when the Carnaby Street scene began to ebb in ‘67, Carl again found himself in the right place at the right time. That same year his father had taken over the Markham Arms pub on King’s Road in Chelsea – the largest watering hole in London’s new centre of cool – and as an out-of-work actor, Carl often managed it.

Throughout his formative years, Brin was a huge influence on his son, and much of Carl’s extrovert personality is mirrored in his father. “I’m like him,” he says. “He was mister personality and a magician with people. If he’d done half of the things that he lied about he’d have been 163. But sadly, he didn’t understand money or success or the need for security. When he died, my father had 16 pairs of cufflinks but he didn’t have any property, he didn’t own anything. He drank all the money he made.”

Star Cars

By 1968, faced with unemployment and with a wife and young son (Andrew) in tow, Carl stepped out of the music scene and started a car hire company, Park Cars. But even in an industry so unrelated to show business, the entertainment world still called, as much of the company’s success was built by celebrity accounts with the likes of photographer David Bailey and actors Richard Harris and Michael Caine.

“We were making a shocking amount of money, but the bigger it got, the more I lost interest,” he says. The period was also personally difficult, as his first marriage broke down, and he met Pamela, his partner of 38 years. It’s unsurprising then, that in 1971, when old school friend Peter Jacobs offered him a half share of a recording studio in Cardiff, Carl jumped at the chance, not just to escape some difficult situations in London, but to return to the music business he’d been sorely missing.

One of Carl’s most undeniable traits is an almost obsessive enthusiasm, whatever the project of choice. These days it includes learning French, a musical based on 1960s Carnaby Street that’s been ten years in the making and an Icelandic actor/director named Gísli Örn Garðarsson. Back then, without the financial security he has today and still six years from his formal beginnings as an agent at NEMS, it became Ddraig Studios and managing its engineer’s band, Sassafras.

“I took every penny I owned and poured it into Sassafras,” he says. “We funded the band and bought everything. I bought them a PA system which got stolen at the first gig. We used to get offered the Old Grey Whistle Test and I had to beat them up to do it because we wouldn’t get paid for three weeks and we needed the money on the day. We were on our arses.”

At one point, Chrysalis actually paid Carl to keep the band off the road and in the studio, but the date sheets kept filling. “We could have possibly done three albums in a year,” says singer Terry Bennett, “but Popey [Carl] and Jake [Peter Jacobs] were putting us out seven days a week.”

It can’t have been easy to juggle family life with his working roles as roadie, driver, manager and agent, but touring with Sassafras taught Carl the road. “You got to know everybody,” he says. “You met them all in late night cafés and service stations as everybody was on the road. Paul Charles [Asgard] was on the road with Frupp, Chris O’Donnell [Live Nation] had a band called Gypsy. In the end you became part of the scene.”

In 1975, the band toured the US for the first time, an overwhelming experience survived by a collective well of Welsh humour. Recalling a riot in Baltimore when a car was razed outside their hotel, Carl says: “The promoter got a black security guy for us who was 6’5”, with a bald head and a white three-piece suit. We’re waiting to go and [guitarist] Dai Shell asks, ‘Have you ever worked with anybody famous?’ He says ‘Son, I’ve worked with the whole Kennedy family,’ to which Ralph [Evans – guitarist] replies, ‘They’re all fucking dead. I’m not going with him, he’s useless.’”

For five years, while rival bands drifted by on their way to the top, the success that Carl craved was elusive. “I was always carrying on the façade of being very important and successful,” he says, “I’m not sure who was making any money but we certainly weren’t.”

Then in 1976, while Sassafras were touring in “ever-decreasing circles”, the debt that had steadily accumulated around the studio dealt Carl a life-changing blow. “One day I got to my office and there was a padlock on it,” he recalls. He was bankrupt at 30 years of age.

“I had four children and was living in a council house in Cardiff and was worse than broke,” he says. “The receiver said it was going to be the best thing that ever happened to me. It didn’t feel like it, but it taught me a lot – I was able to draw the line and start again with no debts.

“I vowed then that the amount of money I needed to make every week to feed my family was my prime concern.”

The Phoenix Agent

If The Marquee Club lit the flame, then it was a trip to NEMS agency boss John Sherry just a few months later that both turned his luck and built the bonfire of an agency career that has lasted for three successful decades. Penniless, and having decided to quit the business, Carl travelled to London to repay a £200 debt.

“I said, ‘I’m out John. I’m going to get a job. I’ve got four kids, I’ve got responsibilities. I’m digging in the field but I can’t see the gold.’ He gave me the £200 back and said, ‘That’s five weeks wages. You start work Monday morning and I’ll teach you how to be an agent.’”

Carl was inducted into NEMS at a time when the powerhouse agency included Ian Flukes, Ed Bicknell, Ian Sales, Norman Dugdale and Phil Banfield amongst its employees. And after a slow start with ex-Spiders from Mars drummer Woody Woodmansey and booking Bedford’s 300-capacity club The Riverside, his fortunes soon began to turn.

Sassafras’s independent press officer, Richard Ogden, had begun to manage The Motors, which Carl signed in 1977 and spent three months touring the US with (despite being unable to own a credit card, and so carrying a large bag of cash wherever he went). Next came a conversation with Chrysalis’s US MD Derek Sutton, who’d worked with Sassafras, and was looking to tour Styx in Europe. 

“He said, ‘You should call my friend Herbie Herbert because he’s managing Journey and they want to come to Europe too’,” Carl recalls. “I phoned Herbie and got the tour, then I phoned John Barratt and got REO Speedwagon. Suddenly I’m booking tours.”

While working with The Motors, Carl met Arista MD Charles Levison and secured more acts, including Simple Minds, and when Ed Bicknell started to manage Dire Straits, Carl booked the early dates. “Then I met Max Hole and Jeff Dukes who I’d known from being on the road with Sassafras,” Carl says. “They had a band called Camel, so I got them. After 18 months, I had 20 acts and they were all working. It was amazing.”

The period from 1977-1980 was one of great flux in the London agency world; a time of repositioning that was the prelude to today’s business. ITB was born, MAM had shut up shop and John Giddings had gone Solo, Neil Warnock (The Agency Group) left the Bronze Records’ agency and the Chrysalis agency, which nurtured Martin Hopewell (Primary Talent), became Cowbell, with John Jackson (K2) departing to form Fair Warning.

NEMS was no exception, and when Ian Copeland left, shortly followed by Ian Flukes and then Ed Bicknell, Carl, Phil Banfield and Norman Dugdale set up Performing Artists Network Agency, packing up their acts along with their desks.

“It kept getting better,” Carl says. “I’d signed SAGA who were a big Canadian band. I put them on a Styx tour and it went through the roof. They were arena business in a minute. We were flying.”

Brighter Young Things

In 1981, after three years with the agency, UFO approached Carl to manage them, and a year later he signed Matt Bianco for management and agency. By the time he signed Bryan Adams and Huey Lewis for agency in 1983, he’d developed a formidable, lucrative roster, and yet doubts had begun to circulate.

“I’d become a really good agent but was getting concerned about the sameness of my life,” he says. “I was showing up every day to more and more date sheets, to find somewhere between Stuttgart and Bremerhaven.

“I got this exciting offer from Clive Corcoran from SAGA who owned everything – the records, publishing and management. I decided to throw my lot in with him and we formed Bonaire, a record, publishing and management company.”

Bonaire bought offices in Harley Street, London; Los Angeles and Munich. “We were making a lot of money,” Carl says. “Bryan Adams was breaking, Huey Lewis was doing good business and I’d signed Bonnie Tyler. I had five or six really good acts.”

But despite profiting from the abundantly flush music business of the 80s, the more Carl was occupied with artwork and points of sale, the further he felt from his roots. “It took me from ‘83 to ‘87 to realise that I was an agent,” he says. “I loved the whole idea of tours, and roadies and trucks and venues and the excitement of being at gigs. I’d lost the road.”

In 1988, Bonaire was dissolved, and Carl returned to his roots, working with Phil Banfield and Miles Copeland at Prestige Talent until 1991, before taking the name of his next company from his most hopeful rising star.

“Bryan Adams never knew who I worked for. He said, ‘What’s the name of your company?’ I told him it was Bonaire and he said, ‘Why the fuck are you working for a company called Bonaire? I keep telling people that Carl Leighton-Pope’s my agent. Why don’t you call yourself Carl Leighton-Pope?’”

Back to Basics

The Leighton-Pope Organisation (LPO) bought and moved into its Hammersmith offices in 1991, with daughter Lara and son Andrew on board. And if there were any worries about financial pressures, they were allayed a year later by Adams’ global hit (Everything I Do) I Do It for You which spent 16 weeks at No.1 in the UK alone.

But it wasn’t just Adams who broke big during this period. “In 1992, my whole life changed when the Chippendales arrived,” Carl says. “I found them in 1990 in a club in Los Angeles and [with Anthony van Laast] developed it into a theatre show.”

“It was amazing business. Sell-out business like you couldn’t believe – 2,000 women a night. We did nine months at The Strand [theatre in London], six weeks in just one theatre in Holland, and Bryan was huge that year.”

Acts such as Huey Lewis, Van Morrison, Bonnie Tyler and Melissa Etheridge were doing well, but what the Chippendales and Bryan Adams provided was financial security and the knowledge that his family would be protected. It was a situation Carl had striven for since his father died penniless, and one which allowed him the freedom of choice.

“When somebody sits down and says that you’re safe, it means you can do things slightly differently,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that your passion or excitement or enthusiasm diminishes, it just means you can say no to a lot more stuff than before.

“I’ve said no a lot in the past five years. Working with people I don’t like, acts I don’t believe in – I did that when I needed the money. Now I’m working with Keith Urban and Michael Bublé because they’re fabulous, and the wrestling [WWE, which Carl consults for internationally] because they’re great people.”

One of Carl’s proudest achievements has been watching his kids carve careers in the business. Andrew moved from LPO to The Agency Group earlier this year, Jake is at Bravado and youngest son Toby currently works at Live Nation. “I taught them how to structure deals and tours,” he says. “I love that I’m in an industry where our entire family’s involved.”

These days, he’s no less busy than ever, but when it comes to choosing projects and conducting business, 30 years of hard agency graft has afforded Carl a more relaxed approach. He’s currently working with a young singer named Peter Grant, and spending a good deal of time on his musical, which is due to open next year.

But for all of the daily weaving of showbiz magic, he’s always maintained a life outside of the business. “I play a bit of golf and Pamela and I go to lots of movies and shows and travel a great deal together,” he says. “I bought a house in the South of France last year, and I’m so excited about the prospect of learning to speak French that I do an hour a day, but that’s how I am.”

Such enthusiasm – along with his outspoken nature (“I’ve no problem at all with stating the truth, I don’t have to smarm my way around stuff”) – is witnessed annually at the ILMC, where Carl’s Talking Shop session regularly draws the largest crowd of the weekend. Always the showman, his performances are the result of an ever-present fascination with the limelight.

“It’s the idea of me being the artist rather than representing the artist,” he says. “If I had to do it all over again, I’d have been a radio DJ with a view to becoming a TV presenter.”

But there are few regrets, if any, and life these days for Carl Leighton-Pope, is better than ever, buoyed by an outstanding run with some of the world’s best-selling acts and shows. “If I walk away now and decide I don’t want to do it any more, my life wouldn’t change,” he says. “I would still eat what I eat, and be what I am, it’s just an even bigger joy that I have the choice. What man could want more than that?”

Greg Parmley