That Fleece the World T-shirt did more damage than I could ever have imagined, and even worse, it sowed the seeds within the band that I was fleecing them as well as everybody else. It made it look as if the group was all about the money, about getting the biggest deals when the sad reality was that even then, it was and still is, EMI that made the money.
We all got paid the same -- a paltry sum considering how successful we were at the time -- and I didn’t get a penny more than anyone else, then or to this day.
I was not taking any sort of management fee -- usually around 20% off the top of the deal -- nor was I earning anything for all the hours I was putting in to the ideas and concepts while the others partied the days and nights away. I am not resentful about this but I do hate the misconception that I somehow got more financially out of this than the rest of the band. That is simply not true - in fact it seems ridiculous when I look back that I didn’t insist that there was a proper manager in place before we went out to do the deal. This was partly down to the fact that me and Billy had been so ripped off in Generation X, both by the managers and by the record companies and I was determined that I wasn’t going to let that happen with Sputnik, but what it also shows is now naive I was to even think I was capable of controlling that part of the band and in reality, how hopeless I was at playing the real game with the big boys.
Above all I loved the music and the fans that loved it too, but I was not perceptive enough to understand how easily these things could be misconstrued, and there was no one there capable of reining me in, advising me of when to keep my mouth shut. I thought I knew it all and I certainly sounded like I did by then, but in reality, up against the big guys in power in the music industry, the ones you never see who can make or break you in a moment, I wasn’t even in the game and worse, the game I WAS playing, the goading and the jeering at them was starting to seriously piss them off and that should have been the biggest fucking rule written in the red notebook back in Shepherd’s Market - NEVER piss off the suits in the industry if you want to survive. It seemed I still had a lot to learn...
To make things worse, the band were inevitably reading this money stuff written about me in the Red Tops, seeing the images and talking amongst themselves. The harder they partied, the more I was the one doing all the talking to the press and the less time we had to sit down and hang out together and actually communicate as we had done at the start. If anything I was the worst communicator within the band at that time. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, it was that no one told me how to, or that I should.
Too busy and too distracted, and the band -- like everyone else, were starting to believe the hype, believe what they were reading that implied I was all about the money.
