What’s the story? Liverpool Tung event on how Welsh valleys boy became one of pop’s biggest managers

Their first chats took place on the school playground and were the typical conversations of seven-year-olds about football, playtime and what games to play next.

But the next time Mike Jones and Marcus Russell get together, it will be in front of a live audience to talk about how the latter became part of pop history as one of the UK’s most successful artist managers, working with the definitive Britpop act, Oasis.

The city’s Tung Auditorium is set to present ‘Before Oasis: In Conversation with Marcus Russell’ on May 8.

And it’s a story of music and memories and, above all, friendship as the now ‘Dr’ Mike Jones from the University of Liverpool’s Department of Music and Marcus talk about growing up together in Ebbw Vale in South Wales and reflect on Marcus’s formative music industry experiences as a young gig promoter and his management of Mike’s band Latin Quarter, which became a springboard to an incredible 40-year career.

Mike said:

“It’s strange. Marcus is very good at remembering my birthday and he’d got two tickets for a Liverpool game in October, and the event came about from a conversation we had after that.

“Marcus knows a lot of people and they’re always asking him to go and talk to students about the music industry. I teach music industry because I went through it, but Marcus really doesn’t like doing it.

“Marcus organised the biggest gig in British history, Oasis at Knebworth in August 1996. I think Robbie Williams went one better, but when that happened one in 20 people in the UK applied for tickets and it was a quarter of a million people over two nights.

“This is someone I have known since I was seven years old and someone I used to organise gigs with when I was 17 – he was the manager of my band!

“And to go from someone you knew at seven to someone who organised the biggest gig in history – now that’s a story!”

Mike goes on:

“When we started talking about it along those lines, he suddenly became interested. So I said why don’t we sit down and talk about how you get from being a kid in an unfashionable town to doing that?

“I want people to understand how tiny, how small, valley communities are. You were locked in a little bowl and that’s the beginning and the end of everything. And in a way that encouraged us both. You think you’re in the world and you’re going to make an impact because it’s there in front of you.

“At around 16-17 we both got into music and ended up organising gigs in a local ballroom built in about 1959. It was a ballroom and a theatre but ballroom dancing, then, had died a death so the last time the local council ran an event there 11 people showed up.

“The fire limit was 350. We had a gig one night with over 600 people in it (you couldn’t do that today)! So it’s that kind of thing, that because the world began and ended where you lived, you could make an impact on it.”

Mike went on to write songs and had a massive hit with Radio Africa in 1986 with his band, Latin Quarter.

And even though he went on to great academic success after researching his experience as a PhD student in the Institute of Popular Music at Liverpool University, being appointed programme lead for the first ever MBA in Music Industries and developing an MA degree in Music Industry Studies (as well and its MA Classical Music Industry course in partnership with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and contributing to the MA in The Beatles: Music Industry and Heritage) it still saddens him that his playing career came to an end.

“I’m really sad it didn’t last,” he admits. “I mean, we went from playing the main stage at Glastonbury and a year later not being able to get a gig in a pub.

“It was traumatic, which is why I teach my students about being prepared; the pressures are formidable and you have to figure out a way to survive.

“But Marcus was the organiser, the entrepreneur, and it’s a bit like being a football manager. If you don’t win, there’s another game, another season. It’s different.”

Marcus wasn’t just manager of Oasis. His early promoting career in the ‘70s, alongside Mike, included gigs by bands like Mott the Hoople and Supertramp. In the late ‘70s he worked with XTC, Steel Pulse, and The Stranglers and, after managing Mike’s band in the mid ‘80s, went on to manage many more.

Alongside and after Oasis, he managed Mercury Rev, Crowded House, Catfish and the Bottlemen, and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds among others.

Mike says:

“What I wanted to do was write songs, what he wanted to do was organise things.

“Marcus was so good at it. And that’s what I want to unpack on the night.

“I am really proud of him and he has always gone under the radar. Given that he managed one of the biggest bands in Britain, he never wanted the spotlight on him.

“What he’s done is quite remarkable. I’m not going to say Oasis’ success was all down to him, but I think had they not had the manager they had, it could have been very different, because you can see how volatile they are.

“Marcus had a vision and could see things in people others couldn’t – many had turned down Oasis.

“I remember being in Sheffield with a friend when they were playing the Octagon, Sheffield’s Mountford Hall, and Marcus asked my friend what the arena was like – to which my friend replied that Oasis weren’t big enough to play the arena.

“And to which Marcus replied ‘no, but if I put them on there, people will think they are’!”

“That was his talent. Of course people are going to want to talk about Oasis, but it’s just as interesting before that too.

“Marcus has great instincts. He has courage. And that’s what’s given him the edge.”

Before Oasis: In Conversation with Marcus Russell’ is on at The Tung Auditorium: Thursday, May 8 at 7pm. (£5 + booking fee).