Paul Charles: The Irish impresario on his new novel, and the chances of Tom Waits touring again
Paul Charles has just published his latest novel.
Paul Charles leads a charmed life, bouncing around the world as one of the music industry’s legendary impresarios. When he’s not programming the acoustic stage at Glastonbury or booking gigs for his famous roster of clients — from his first big act, the Buzzcocks, to Van Morrison and Tom Waits — he steals time in the morning to write crime fiction novels.
His latest murder mystery, the third in the McCusker series, finds his embattled police detective seconded to Portrush, Co Antrim, during a momentous moment in the seaside town’s history — the week in July 2019 when it hosted the British Open for the first time in almost 70 years, a week of Rory McIlroy mania, as Ulster’s favourite son, who is a background presence in the action, returns home.
McCusker is on home soil, too, as he holidays in Portrush. He gets a shock when he discovers the dead body he’s investigating is an old friend. As teenagers knocking around Portrush in 1976, McCusker and his two buddies — one of whom is Thomas Barry, the murder victim — bump into the gorgeous Isabella Scott. She drops her glove, giving young Thomas Barry a chance to chat her up — and Charles the title for his crime novel, — and the start of a lifelong, tumultuous relationship.
“I needed to find a way of the two main characters being introduced to each other,” says Charles. “I'm intrigued by how people — man meets wife, whatever — make this connection that may last a lifetime. I remembered in 1968 — I'm a major fan of I still am – there’s a line, which goes, ‘Hey, love, you forgot your glove.’ Visually, it was a beautiful line, and it hit me.”
Van the Man’s line from his classic album had given Charles an in. Charles began working with Morrison back in the late 1970s. He mentions the transcendental effect Morrison can have on a crowd: “I remember he did 22 shows on the first tour we did with him. I went to all of them. I was like a kid in a sweetie shop, seeing Van every night.
"On the rare occasions he would do a song from , you could sense the audience slide back into their seats and take a deep breath. They knew something special was gonna happen. The reaction was off the charts.”
Charles has been in the music business since 15 years of age. He used to hand out a business card with a phone number from the public phone box on his street in Magherafelt, Co Derry. He got his start when a showband saxophone player who lived three doors from his house agreed to give Charles’s band some bookings as a support act.
A showband star, Ryan Shannon, is a key character in McCusker’s investigation. He speaks jive, calling everyone “heads” and peppering his banter with words like “coolio”. Charles has a flair for dialogue, his characters revelling in the jazzy improv of salty conversation. Perhaps of all the music acts that Charles oversaw in his music career, Chuck Berry was the saltiest.
“In the early days, I obviously knew all the colleges and universities in Ireland. They were having great trouble getting people to come over to play in Ireland because of the Troubles. There was a sense, ‘If you go to Ireland, you'll get blown up.’ I knew Galway, Cork, Coleraine, these were great campuses, great music-loving places so I put together a circuit of maybe 12 dates. We did Chuck Berry with that circuit.
“I remember it for a couple of reasons. One, when I was trying to book him, his promoter was a guy called Derek Block. I said to him, ‘Look, you really have to try and get him to come over. The students hear, they love their music, they need it.’ He said to me, ‘Paul, you're mistaking me for someone who gives a damn.’ Anyway, we got him to come over.
“My theory is that in his early career, he was taken advantage of many times, at the sharp end of really bad deals, so he made his philosophy — ‘I'm gonna make this work for me.’ He had these contracts and rules. His contract would say, ‘We play for 40 minutes.’ By the time he got to the 37th minute, he would change gears and whip up the audience to the extent there was a major demand for an encore. He would walk off stage over to me, point at his watch: ‘Forty minutes. I'll do some more, but you're gonna have to pay me a thousand dollars.’
“Or he would ask for a Fender Twin Reverb. You wouldn't get that. You’d get a Fender Twin. He'd say, ‘You want me to play with inferior equipment? That's not right, man. It's in my contract. However, I will play on it for you, but that's an extra thousand dollars.’ He made it work for himself. When you write those songs, you write your own ticket, and you do it the way you want to do it.”
- Paul Charles’s is published by Level Best Books
Paul Charles and Tom Waits go back a long way — to 1982 when Charles bumped into him by chance, along with Kathleen Brennan, Waits’ wife and song-writing partner, in a Tower Records store in London. Charles helped arrange Waits’ last European tour in 2008, which included three gigs at Dublin’s Phoenix Park playing to 15,000 people each night in 'The Rat Cellar', a huge tent Charles arranged with Aiken Promotions, having seen Christy Moore play in the Marquee in Cork the previous year.
“With Tom I chat, and I chat to Kathleen a lot,” he says. “They go about their stuff, their lives. Lots of different offers come in. I always have to put them through [to them]. Up until to the 2008 leg, I always thought, well, it's happening in the next couple of years. You had a sense. And by and large, the tours did happen.
“But since that last European tour we did, there's been lots of false starts. He likes touring. Initially, why he toured so little was his family was growing up. He wanted to be with his family. So, we'd always tour in school holiday times. But then they grew up; they now have lives and careers of their own. And it hasn't changed. If anything, it’s got worse! Obviously, he gets offered quite a few movies and things as well. That takes up his life.”
In May, Ace Records will release , a compilation from Waits’ and his wife Brennan’s catalogue, featuring recordings by Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Marianne Faithfull, and more. It will inevitably fuel hopes among fans that Waits might take to the road again, an aspiration Charles shares too.
“I have two dreams in the music business,” he says. “One is that Tom Waits will tour again.”
