Legendary PR and unlikely former drama student Andy Saunders is celebrating 20 years of Velocity Communications and a lifetime at the crisis management coalface. Here, he talks about what he learned from the madness of Creation Records, and remembers a moment of revelation at the Music Week Awards…
The key to a successful client-PR relationship is…
“Honesty. In my case, brutal honesty! You can say what you want about me, I’ve got skin like a rhino, I’ve been doing this far too long. But I’m fiercely protective of my clients. I will go over the barricades for them, I will start wars for them because I feel that responsibility. But what clients really appreciate is honesty and expertise. So if you can be the person that is able to say, ‘You shouldn’t do this’ or, ‘That’s a bad idea’ and give a reason why, you end up being a lot more trusted than somebody that just says yes to everything, puts press releases out and doesn’t question the actions.”
I love working for mavericks because…
“I love people who have the guts to take a bold idea and run with it. Alan McGee, Tony Wilson, Malcolm McLaren, Colin Lester… They’re all cut from the same cloth: they have utter self-belief and amazing integrity. Those sort of characters have gone out of the biz, but there was a good reason for that. The business went through a terrible period when piracy was threatening to wreck our industry. Everybody had to get their shit together. There wasn’t a place for the hedonistic side of things – which I personally hugely embraced in the ’90s – in the Noughties. And that meant a lot of the mavericks couldn’t function in the same way. There just wasn’t the opportunity to make the money they’d made in the ’90s, or to be that crazy.”
The main thing I learned on my drama degree was…
“To compartmentalise. I was never going to be an actor. But the Andy Saunders shouting on the phone is not the Andy Saunders that sits at home with his wife, dog and kids and watches telly. There’s an element of being able to perform a role when I go into certain situations for my clients. And that means I can leave it at the door when I go home. You can’t live the music industry 24 hours a day. Otherwise you’re going to end up with problems.”
The key to crisis management is…
“Usually counter-intuitive. The first thing most of my clients want to do is scream from the rooftops that it’s not fair. But ‘it’s not fair’ is not a strategy. You have to go, ‘Let’s remove all the emotion from this and think about it pragmatically’.”
Working for Creation was like being in a gang because…
“You showed utter loyalty to the leader, and the leader led you wherever he wanted. Sometimes he led you off a cliff, sometimes he led you to sunlit uplands. There were so many surreal experiences; from sharing a taxi with Johnny Depp and Kate Moss to being one of the first people to shake Tony Blair’s hand when he became Prime Minister, because we’d played a pivotal role in advising him on the youth vote. It was an amazing journey to be part of that craziness.”
The Music Week Awards changed my life…
“Creation was brilliant, but there were a lot of distractions working for a company like that. And I went down that road. In the ’90s, we went to the Music Week Awards. We had been pre-drinking and when we won Record Company Of The Year, Alan McGee said, ‘I’m too drunk to get the award, you’ll have to go’. In my addled state, I thought it would be funny to tell the audience that they were all, ‘A bunch of corporate, cocksucking whores’, thinking I’d get a massive laugh. Utter silence. I walked off to the sound of my own footsteps, with people quietly booing. When I got back to the table, Glen Matlock said, ‘That was a bit strong’. When you’ve been told off by a Sex Pistol, it’s probably time to knock it on the head. Shortly after, I decided to stop all that and I’ve been 24 years sober. It’s a good story, but it wasn’t fun at the time!”
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