Barbara Charone, music journalist turned legendary PR woman, has had (and continues to have) an impressive career. It’s obvious from her memoir, Access All Areas, that she also has an impressive contacts book, impressive stamina and an impressive capacity for partying.
Most impressively, she’s still working in the music business well past her pension age. And she still seems to love it.
The first chapter of this memoir, Access All Areas, tells of her excitement as a teenage Who fan getting a standby ticket to see the band playing Tommy in New York. “I could barely catch my breath before I had to run back to the hotel to meet the family, full of adrenaline and unadulterated rock’n’roll energy. I was high for days on the excitement of the show.” We’ve all been there. (Not New York… but, you know.)
The last chapter talks about the bands she’s been working with recently (and guitar bands are still her first love). “You have to keep that excitement and wonder in your life. The magic really is in the music.” It’s remarkable that despite making rock’n’roll her day job, she has never lost that sense of being a fan.
Born in the US, and brought up on Broadway musicals and “British Invasion” bands, she found herself drawn to England and made her home there as soon as she left university. She’d already been working as a freelance music journalist and soon got a staff job at Sounds.
In the early 80s, she made the career change that set her long-term path. She worked her way up in the press office at WEA, eventually becoming head of press, and then set up her own PR agency, where she is still in business. I’ve probably still got some press releases with her name on.
She did it all herself. Well, there was a bit of help from bank of mum and dad but it would not have happened without her tenacity and talent.
This is not a feminist book. As a visibly successful woman in the music business, Charone is unusual (and yes, she does get called “formidable”), but she doesn’t dwell on this. She mentions occasionally the lack of women in most departments of the record company: the press office is one of the few female spheres, while senior management is definitely not. (According to Lucy O’Brien’s She Bop, that hasn’t changed much over the years.)
There’s also a story about women journalists trying to get backstage being seen as groupies. Yes, someone said that to me, one afternoon in London in the early ’80s when I was going to interview the Cramps. It might have been a joke but I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t funny, anyway.
Women in music journalism were rare when Charone started in the early 1970s. She was the only woman on the staff at Sounds, replacing the departing Penny Valentine. She thinks they wanted another woman. I suspect there was only room for one woman at a time. But she says “the boys in the office could not have been nicer or more welcoming”.
From that start to the current day, the book romps through numerous stories of working hard, playing hard and hanging out with famous people. There’s a LOT of name dropping, but it’s not showing off. These people are her friends and clients (mostly, both). “The music business is a very small place,” as she points out.
It’s huge fun to read, but I’d have liked her to slow down occasionally and go into a bit more detail. And I’ve have liked this to be longer – I expected it to be expansive, like her career.
It’s obvious, though, that Charone is not the sort of person who ever slows down. And the book does cover a lot of ground, even if not in depth. It gives you a good overview of how the music business and the music press have changed over the decades, with a lot of insights into how to manage the relationship between them.
It is very much written from the professional viewpoint, but I’d also have liked to know more about Charone as a person. It’s clear she has a full social life, but there is little mention of a private life apart from her parents, sister and an “unofficial” god-daughter. It’s also clear that there’s little distinction between her professional life and her social life: music is a lifestyle, not a job. Maybe that doesn’t leave room for much else but, if so, that is a story that she does not wish to share.
Whatever the case, the book doesn’t indicate that there’s any downside to the music business life. The opposite, in fact: it is one of the few books about the industry that makes you think it must be a really fun place to work.
In an early chapter, Charone recalls her childhood view of Broadway: “It all seemed so exciting and glamorous.” In this book, that’s the picture she gives of her rock’n’roll life.
Access All Areas is one of six books by women that were longlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize 2023. Read about the rest of them here.
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