Keith Altham 1941-2026
Next to their manager and their record producer, the most important person in a rock star’s life in the second half of the 20th century was their PR man or woman. Between 1969, when I joined the Melody Maker, and the end of the ’80s, I knew a bunch of them. Some I liked a lot and found easy to deal with. The trickier ones were easy to identify and not hard to avoid. Keith Altham, who has died aged 84, was definitely in the former camp.
There’s a very good obit by the Guardian‘s Robin Denselow here, telling the story of how Keith got into the music business, first as a writer for Fabulous magazine. He’d moved on to the NME by the time I met him, but a couple of years later he transitioned to the dark side and set up his own PR company.
He never lost his feeling for journalism or his ability to be objective about the stars he was now dealing with on a very different basis and whose antics fed his wonderful sense of humour. His book No More Mr Nice Guy!, a memoir in the form of open letters to some of his famous clients, was written and published in 1999, after his retirement; he always told great stories, and some of the funniest are here. Keith gives you a very different view of famous people, since he was capable of appreciating the talent of his clients while remaining clear-eyed about their human foibles and appreciating their contradictions.
Van Morrison: “What a talent. What a singer. What a songwriter. What a pain in the arse.”
Rod Stewart: “Having declared your great passions as ‘soccer, drinking and women, in that order’, none of them seem to have made you hugely happy.”
Mick Jagger: “…do you remember anything without the aid of Bill Wyman’s diaries? Very mean of him not to let you plagiarise them for the benefit of your own autobiography, I thought. After all, what are friends for, if not to be used? Giving back the million-dollar advance must have hurt.”
Ray Davies: “There is something of the rock and roll Howard Hughes about you. I would not be entirely surprised if you wound up a lonely old man with vast wealth in a huge house with one light bulb, growing your nails and wiping your fingers with Kleenex after shaking hands.”
By contrast, there’s the real fondness for such disparate characters as Noddy Holder, Donovan, Eric Burdon, Sting, Reg Presley (whose surname was bestowed by Keith), Justin Hayward and Marc Bolan (“Your heart was always in the right place even when you mislaid your head”). And Eddy Grant: “You are a perfect role model for any aspiring young popular musician trying to make it on their own terms, and having done so while remaining a decent human being first and a gifted artist second.”
And maybe most of all there was Pete Townshend. Despite enduring years of heavy-duty tantrums and frequently being fired from his role as the PR for the Who, the band he loved more than any other, Keith could write this: “When you were going through the hell of drug addiction and we were all at our wits’ end trying to stop you turning into the person you had always warned us not to become, I swore then that if this killer of a business destroyed you, then I would quit and become a postman or a milkman or anything. Fortunately you had sufficient mental strength to drag yourself back — and you also fortunately had friends and family who were not content to see you destroy yourself.”
About 25 years ago, Keith’s chance encounter with Tom McGuinness at an exhibition of old Eel Pie Island posters in Richmond led to a lunch date, to which each of them invited a friend from the business. In turn, that led to the biannual Strummers, Thumpers and Scribblers lunches, held in Barnes and still going strong, albeit with numerous changes of cast over the years. I’ve been attending them for two decades and treasure some happy memories, such as seeing P. P. Arnold and Linda Thompson sitting next to each other at one lunch, or earwigging a drummers’ conversation between Clem Cattini, Brian Bennett, Don Powell and Rob Townshend at another.
Keith could, of course, have written an equally remarkable book about the journalists with whom he came into contact (but who’d want to read that?). Here, they remain anonymous. But thinking about trying to get members of the national press interested in talking to one of his clients, he writes: “Most of my conversations with them went like this: ‘How would you like to interview Eddy Grant?’ ‘Latest single isn’t doing much.’ ‘How would you like to interview Eddy Grant in Barbados?’ ‘When do we leave?'”
Had he written that book, he might have included an episode from 1978 in which, as editor of the Melody Maker, I accepted his invitation to send John Pidgeon to the US to write about what I guess was the Police’s first American tour. I never promised covers, but I think that might have been the understanding. Anyway, John came back with a very good piece, and the Police were extremely hot at the time, but I also had what I thought were some good pictures of the Cramps to go with an interview, so Ivy Rorschach and Lux Interior ended up on the front of the MM that week. It was one of the most stupid editorial decisions I ever made. Keith was tight-lipped, as I recall. He’d be amused to know that, almost 50 years later, I still wake up in a sweat over it.
Cheers, old friend. See you down the road.
* The photo of Keith with Pete Townshend is from No More Mr Nice Guy!, reprinted by Blake Publishing in 2001 as The PR Strikes Back.
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