Access All Areas - Barbara Charone

 ACCESS ALL AREAS - BARBARA CHARONE

When working as a music journalist in the Seventies, Barbara Charone was put on The Who's guest list for when they were playing Madison Square Garden but then found herself being denied backstage access by a security guard who presumed the only reason a girl would want to go backstage is because she's a groupie. Back then, rock critics were almost exclusively male so Barbara Charone was nothing less than a trailblazer, leading the way for other female writers to follow.

Hailing from Chicago, Illinois, by the age of 22 Charone had freelanced for among others the NME and Rolling Stone magazine before moving to London in 1974 to be a staff writer for Sounds music newspaper. This was the era of rock and pop exuberance when bands and singers would not so much walk the earth but soar above it. When private jet planes were de rigueur, payola part of the rule book, and cocaine a measure of success.

Access All Areas is the story of Barbara Charone's journey through the peaks and troughs of the music business - though mostly the peaks. The lofty heights where you'd find the likes of the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton and Madonna. A place, in fact, that on maps of old would be marked as 'Here be monsters'.

Two years after arriving in London, Charone was failing to heed the advice of Lester Bangs when in the film Almost Famous he says to the Cameron Crowe-inspired journalist about musicians: just remember 'they are not your friends'; with this actually being key to her whole book.

'You'd be surprised how many people who work in the music business make the mistake of believing the artist is your friend,' Charone writes 'That's really where the trouble starts. I saw so many people try to copy the Stones' extracurricular habits and fall by the wayside.'

Ten pages later she's writing 'At this point I must confess that by now I had developed quite a fondness for cocaine.' And then 'I was unprepared when Roger Daltrey burst into tears when discussing his struggles with Pete and I loved him even more for it. It was this kind of personal relationship that really made this era of journalism unique, something never to be repeated.'

By autumn of 1976, however, Charone was becoming restless: 'Punk was just round the corner, and it just wasn't for me. I was enamoured with more mainstream music and didn't really relate to this soon-to-be next big thing. I could feel the sea change fast approaching and began to feel it was time to move on from being a rock critic.'

So after approaching Keith Richards and him giving consent for her to write a book about him, that's what she did. Coinciding, by chance, with Richard's arrest in Canada for possession of heroin. From there she went to work for WEA Records in their press office before finally starting her own PR company called MBC, taking on (or rather, being taken on) over the years by the likes of Madonna, REM, Rufus Wainwright, Primal Scream, and Foo Fighters.

Access All Areas is a rollercoaster ride of namedropping and as Guardian journalist Alexis Petridis rightly points out in a blurb on the back cover, Barbara Charone is nowadays a music industry legend. In her book she comes across as a really likeable person who would make a good friend - though this doesn't mean, of course, that her book is above criticism.

The main problem with it is in the editing and the question of who it's being aimed at and written for. As an example, is it really necessary after mentioning somebody to put in brackets who they are? I mean: Jim Morrison ('lead singer of The Doors'), Keith Moon ('the infamous original Who drummer'), Ian Hunter ('the fab Mott The Hoople frontman'), Kiki Dee ('famous for a duet with Elton John'), etc, etc. Really?

And then she does Marianne Faithful a disservice when talking about Keith Richards by writing 'Back in 1967 he was infamously arrested at Redlands along with Mick Jagger (remember Marianne Faithful and the infamous Mars bar).' This is when Charone would know full well that the Mars bar incident is a myth and a lie, as stressed by Faithful herself. So why refer to it and in doing so dress her in that lie yet again?

There's also the question of Charone being rather too diplomatic for her own good. She calls Stephen Stills 'plain nasty' and Max Clifford 'despicable', and that's fine but when it comes to Sun tabloid newspaper editor Victoria Newton she calls her 'a credit to women everywhere'. Really? Let's not mention phone-hacking, shall we, particularly during Newton's tenure as deputy editor at the News Of The World before its closure in 2011?

And then there's Russell Brand who Charone was doing PR for at the time when he was hosting the NME Awards at the Hammersmith Palais in 2006, when Bob Geldof called Brand a cunt. The incident was used to escalate and enlarge Brand's public profile but behind the clash was the issue of 29 year-old Brand briefly 'dating' Geldof's 16 year-old daughter.

Access All Areas is good but if I was her editor I would have advised her to take the whole thing away and start again, and then to come back with a 'take no prisoners' attitude and with all guns blazing. She might well have lost friends and alienated people in the process but it would have made for a much better book.

John Serpico