I have known Paul McGuinness for some 40 years, from before he managed U2. He learned the tricks of a rough trade and graduated as a go-to guru in ethical management.

And, hand-on-heart, I have never known Paul McGuinness (or U2) do anything mean or petty. He is worthy but never dull.

In the early 1990s, U2 became the most successful rock band in the world – and their most recent world tour had the biggest ever ticket sales by any rock band.

I first asked him to sit down with me for a long interview a year ago and he was initially reluctant. When he recently agreed, it was fascinating looking back at a phenomenal story.

Six years ago, when he was stepping away from U2, the manager of the then latest boy band sensation, One Direction, acknowledged McGuinness’ legacy thus: “He’s one of the top five managers of all time,” said Richard Griffith. “And above all, Paul McGuinness is a nice man.”

He made mistakes but never sold his clients short and he shared their vertiginous ambitions. Professionals advised but McGuinness and U2 collectively made all of the decisions that saw them inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.

Other successes, like co-publishing the music for Riverdance with composer Bill Whelan, also give him enormous satisfaction.

Six years ago, when he decided to walk away from the helter-skelter realm of rock’n’roll touring, he jumped into the cut-throat world of network television drama. And the first season of Riviera, his debut as an executive producer, was the most watched and downloaded programme on Sky television.

Success can be a fluke – but successive triumphs in different fields suggest intelligent design.

We begin by discussing Riveria, the television show that he created and is executive producer of. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Paul McGuinness.

*****

Sam Smyth (SS): Riviera was Sky Television’s most watched original commission programme and the third season is now available. Tell me Paul, is the new season of Riviera like U2 releasing a new album?

Paul McGuinness (PMcG): In a way, yes, in that we tried to make the audience aware that it is coming so that there’s a sense of expectation in the market. But the market is very crowded nowadays for television, and so achieving prominence is quite difficult. At one time it used to be that if you wanted to know what was in television, you got the RTÉ Guide or the Radio Times and that was it.

Now, all the newspapers cover television in a very extensive way, and there’s a lot more high-quality television programmes, but there’s also a lot more high-quality writing about television and television, particularly during the pandemic. During lockdown, television has comforted the world. So many people are unable to go out. Cinemas are effectively not happening.

SS: It is the only game in town for most people when they go home in the evening.

PMcG: Obviously during the lockdown. And there’s a shortage of new production because film and television production, pretty much worldwide, halted. It is sort of starting up again now in a rather faltering, socially distanced way with film crews and actor groups in bubbles.

SS: Well you’re getting ready now, I assume, to go onto your fourth season?

PMcG: Yeah, with Riviera, we’re involved in the writing process of season four. And we’re not intending to shoot it until the back end of 2021. But who knows what the rules and regulations will be then? I mean, it is a health and safety thing.

SS: Who’s left standing, I suppose. Obviously, one of the things that I read said that each episode costs €2.3 million. That’s double the budget of, say, the early episodes of Downton Abbey.

Now, you’re the originator and executive producer of the programme. Tell me, when you were starting that, was House of Cards the TV programme that inspired you?

PMcG: I’m a great admirer of House of Cards, both the American version and the English programme.

SS: The original BBC one?

PMcG: I think it was wonderful. And the way they shot it with that Shakespearean technique of breaking the fourth wall and Kevin Spacey turning to the camera and making sly and perceptive remarks about the people he was stabbing in the back that week.

SS: Letting the viewer in on the secret sort of way.

PMcG: Yeah, I loved that show.

SS: The early episodes were made near your home in the south of France, Now, they’re filmed in Venice, Buenos Aries and so on. Is the opulence on screen reflected in increased budgets?

PMcG: Well, not really. We have to cut our cloth. We started off with a very healthy budget from Sky.

SS: It was €40 million for a series.

PMcG: Yeah, roughly €40 million per season. And then the pound took a hammering and the currency…

SS: Oh, because you were paying out in euros…

PMcG: Most of our costs were in euros and so we lost some budget there and had to adjust. The first two seasons, as you say, were shot pretty well entirely in France, maybe a little bit in Italy. Season three, which is about to go on air, we shot a couple of episodes in Venice, a few episodes in Saint-Tropez. And then we moved the story to Argentina and shot in Buenos Aires for a couple of episodes. That was fun. And we finished shooting the last episode, the first week in March of this year. So, we must have been one of the last productions to complete before the pandemic struck. And the pandemic has paralyzed the film and television business all over the world.

Oligarchs, John Banville and Neil Jordan

SS: When it was first broadcast five years ago, Riviera made a huge splash. You got, what was it, 20 million views and downloads? But then, I can remember it very well, the original showrunner there, Neil Jordan, he disowned it. Although he did leave his name on the credits, as far as I could remember. Then the writer John Banville walked away. What happened there, Paul?

PMcG: Well, Neil… I have to be careful what I say about this, because in our termination contract, when Neil left the project, there is a no defamation clause.

SS: Well, we would rather you didn’t defame him.

PMcG: I’m not going to say bad things about Neil.

John was a rather less important part of it. John kind of came with Neil. And I suppose the thing to understand about television drama is that it’s a very cooperative business. It’s a team sport. And there are a lot of people involved in the writing. A season of Riviera is 10 hours of screen time. That’s an enormous amount of story and production time. You go through characters and actors at quite a rate and, to shoot our show, we’ve used many, many writers.

And the process, I think, did not really suit Neil. He gave us a couple of useful characters and then we parted company. But his name is still on the show and he gets paid a royalty.

SS: Whatever happened then, there was perhaps a loss of friendships and so on. Was there any fall in viewer numbers?

PMcG: No, I think the show got better and it started to proliferate in different ways because the technology of distribution changed, and the show went on to be available on Sky and Now TV. That’s much more economical for certain viewers. The catch-up process where people go back into the archive, that is with every Sky subscription, that has become so much more sophisticated technically, but also the public have become much more sophisticated. And if they want to watch something that was shown a few months ago, they don’t necessarily have to have recorded it at the time, they can go back and to catch-up TV and watch.

SS: It’s certainly very convenient, but can Riviera run on indefinitely or is there a natural lifespan? Coronation Street is still running after 50 years.

PMcG: It’s a different kind of beast. Look, as far as I’m concerned, I’d be quite happy if it went on for a long time. The essential ingredients of Riviera remain the same and kind of originated in a list of things that I made five years ago. Shall I tell you what the list was? The list was rich people doing terrible things in the south of France on yachts, beautiful women, Ferraris, guns, murder, Russians, money laundering, art fraud. Did I say murder?

SS: Well, there’s been no mention of James Bond yet.

PMcG: There was to be glamour.

It was not a kitchen sink drama. And in many ways the intention was to reflect the life that I was having lived quite some time in the south of France.

I read the papers and the stories of the oligarchs who collect art. The big story about that painting, which may or may not be by Leonardo da Vinci being sold to Rybolovlev, who is an oligarch who also happens to own the Monaco football team.

SS: It’s also a bit like an Irish village in some ways because everybody seems to know everybody else and you know all their business.

PMcG: Oh, I wouldn’t say that. There’s an awful lot of stuff going on behind high walls that I know nothing about. And we speculate about it. Of course, we do. But I certainly don’t hang out with Roman Abramovich, who lives down the road. I have met him, and I’ve seen his yachts. The Russian influence, or the Russian arrival, in the south of France is typical of a number of waves of very high-end immigration.

SS: And also encouraged Serbian burglars, if I’m not mistaken, who’d throw sleeping gas into the house or something like that.

PMcG: Yeah, I’ve heard a lot about that. I have never actually met anyone who experienced it. It tends to be sensationalised. And I think it has certainly happened.

There’s an awful lot of vulgarity, there’s an awful lot of old men with very young wives.

SS: Not all of them are rich either…

PMcG: It seems to be a routine for people wherever they come from in the world.

SS: Well, it has been for a century now.

PMcG: Even think about it from the Russian point of view. Before the Russian Revolution, the Russian court, like the court of Queen Victoria, used to get out of the cold north and go to the south of France in the winter. In those days, it was a winter resort for the Russians and for the English particularly.

And the south of France was a haven when there was snow on the ground in St Petersburg or London. Queen Victoria was particularly popular in Nice and the other cities because she was a big-time shopper. And certainly, that tradition has continued.

The Russians also had a history of acquaintance with the south of France. And it’s not surprising that when this generation of super-rich oligarch type Russians came in the wake of the more recent, you could call it Putin-type revolution, there are a lot of Russians in the south of France. And they spend a lot of money.

Showbands, advertising and the early days of U2

SS: Has Primo Productions, that’s your company, is there another idea waiting in the wings to take over from Riviera?

PMcG: Yes, we have a few things in development, as we say. I have a head of development called Alice Ryan, who scouts for material. We have a number of things that we hope will turn into programmes or indeed movies in time. None of them are ready to announce yet, and it would be premature to even hint at what they might be. But, yes, we want to make more things. I kind of like the environment of television.

SS: I was thinking of that. It must have been important to you when you left U2 in 2013, that you wanted to stay in the business you knew, which was entertainment.

Was film and TV a natural progression on from rock and roll?

PMcG: Well, in an odd way, it was a return to my youth in that when I was 20/21, I worked in film as a junior production person. I was the location manager on a film called Zardoz by John Boorman. Sean Connery was in it and Charlotte Rampling. And it was made around Wicklow where I now live. And funnily enough, John has become a very good friend of mine and is my immediate neighbour in Wicklow.

I started out in the film business shooting on various, I have to say, undistinguished films made in Ireland, usually by somewhat fly-by-night visiting overseas producers. I remember we made one particularly bad film and it turned out to be funded by the pension fund of some Canadian dentists. And it really was not very good.

I was also working quite a lot on television commercials as an assistant director, and simultaneously I was dabbling as the manager of a couple of Irish acts. One of them was called Spud and a couple of other people.

SS: One of the things then of course was to get gigs for a band, which is the most important thing to keep them eating every week. And if I can remember right, Paul, Louis Walsh had to be beseeched to get addresses of promoters.

PMcG:  Louis was very helpful to me because Louis as a teenager was the star booker of the Irish showband business. And he worked for a guy called Tommy Hayden and he had a roster of four or five major show bands like Roly Daniels.

The ballroom business in those days, young people now can’t even imagine what it was like, but it dotted around Ireland. There were these kinds of big sheds, really, they were more like cattle sheds, and that was where men and women met because women didn’t go into pubs. The social life of rural Ireland was built around these ballrooms. And there were two kinds of ballroom. There were pop ballrooms and country and western.

Our former Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, was in the ballroom business. He had a number of ballrooms.

SS: They were all called Dreamland or Cloudland, they all had ‘land’ of some sort.

PMcG: What had happened in the early 70s was Horslips, who were smart young men, mainly from the advertising business, most of them are still doing something around this city, Eamon Carr is a journalist, Jim Lockhart is a producer in RTÉ, Barry Devlin is a screenwriter. And they were friends of mine through my best friend’s brother, Michael Deeny.

He was the manager of Horslips. And Michael and I became concert promoters. Not in Trinity, where I was supposedly studying, but in a commercial way. We put on gigs in the RDS and in the Mansion House.

SS: And did you make money?

PMcG: Well, yeah. I made a little money, but not like huge sums, but we made money.

And Michael then became the manager of Horslips and Horslips actually were signed to Atlantic Records and they were the biggest thing in the ballrooms.

SS: They had two Range Rovers going around the country.

PMcG: They were pretty cool. I was watching this from close quarters and sort of studying it, I suppose. And by osmosis, I learned quite a bit about the international music business, mainly through reading Billboard and watching Horslips. Horslips made money in Ireland, and they had some success in Germany and some success in Britain. And they went to America a couple of times.

They had a succession of very prestigious record deals and they had their own label in Ireland. So, they were a very interesting prototype.

SS: And they were well-managed.

PMcG: I think they were well-managed, and they were ambitious. And because they mostly came from an advertising background, they were conscious of styling and photography and album art, what the sleeve should look like. They were cool. And I would always say I learned a lot from them that maybe I subsequently applied to what we did in U2.

Small tours to a global phenomenon

SS: Well, you ran the business of U2 for 35 years and it was widely reported that U2 were the most financially successful band of their era. They straddled the late 20th and early 21st century, they were top of the heap at that time.

PMcG: You could say they still are. The most recent tour that they undertook, which ended last year in December 2019, they were the biggest attraction in the live business worldwide. They had been at that position in the live business for a couple of decades. And the realisation came quite early on.

When I started with U2, they were only 17 or 18 and I was only 25. And the one thing that we were very clear about in our minds was that U2 was not going to be joining that long list of artists who made bad deals and lost their rights and ended up broke. It was always understood that this was not just an art form and a very interesting art form, but it was also a business. They were quite informed and disciplined and insightful about the way the business worked.

SS: I just spotted something here and I’ll read it out. Who said this: “There was a long history of artists making bad deals and being exploited and ending their lives and careers in poverty. We were not meant to be part of that pattern. We decided to be as good as the business as we’d be at the music. That was something the band and I very much agreed on from the beginning. It became second nature.”

PMcG: Absolutely. That’s me.

SS: You said that in 2015. Now, it’s not a philosophy that was shared by many in the business world.

PMcG: It was a bit uncool to admit that you were ambitious because in the punk era, which in music fashion followed the glam, the prog-rock and glam and so on, the punk movement was very much a reaction to the very uncool prog rock and hair metal.

We didn’t like heavy rock, particularly. What U2 liked were The Clash, who were a particularly major influence on U2. The Ramones, Talking Heads, groups like that. David Bowie.

SS: The one thing I find fascinating is that also at that time, when band managers were treated with deep suspicion and disdain. I remember bands, they would usually blame their manager for any flop or failure. And I remember band managers saying to me that most bands believe that any fee they paid to their manager was either extortion or extravagance.

“Then we had Unforgettable Fire. And then in 87, The Joshua Tree, which went to No 1 all over the world.”

PMcG: There indeed was that. And in the trade or profession of management, there wasn’t the highest reputation and there were plenty of bad stories about dishonest managers and indeed brutally violent managers.

The famous one about what’s her name on TV… Sharon Osbourne. Her father was a famous Soho music business thug who allegedly…

SS: Hung people out windows.

PMcG: Dangled some kid who wouldn’t sign on the dotted line. Dangled him out of an office window by his ankles. What was his name? Anyway…

SS: It wasn’t [Ozzy] Osbourne anyway.

PMcG: No, it wasn’t Osbourne.

SS: Her father, I remember actually, Louis got a copy of a book about her father and gave it to her.

PMcG: Well, I think Louis and Sharon became great pals.

SS: They did and shared, I think, a plastic surgeon at one stage.

You were the manager of a band. Tell me what does the manager of a successful rock band do? Do you haggle over appearance fees? Do you talk about percentages from record contracts? What do you do?

PMcG: I worked extremely closely with booking agents, two in particular. Ian Flooks in Britain, who was also the agent for The Police, and Ian Drury with The Clash, and The Talking Heads, The Pretenders. He had all the hip English acts of the late 70s. His talent agency called Wasted Talent was ours. And Ian and I were incredibly thorough about inspecting venues in Germany and different parts of Britain. We were going to see them before we would agree to do a gig.

And we had a policy of not playing colleges, which was an expensive policy to have. We felt that going into a town and playing the university, where the gig basically excludes the real public and would be subsidised by the university usually. That was the circuit for many bands.

We didn’t think that was getting popular. In the circumstances to that audience, we didn’t think that was enough. And so we looked for…. What’s the distinction they make? Town and gown. We were going for town. We kind of applied that pretty well everywhere in America subsequently. Ian Flooks’s corresponding agent in North America was the legendary Frank Barcelona, who was the agent for Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen and The Who. He was, as I say, legendary. I went to see him in 1980 whilst U2 were recording their very first album here in Dublin.

SS: Was he in Los Angeles?

PMcG: He was in New York. His agency Premiere Talent was the biggest and the strongest in the industry.

And he took a shine to U2. He was Godfather, really, of the industry of the rock and roll business. The system he had set up was like a network in each major market. There was a promoter, Bill Graham in San Francisco, Ron Delsener in New York.

SS: But there was a Bill Graham or Rob Delsener in all the major cities.

PMcG: And the theory was that you would go into that city for the first time and you’d play a small club and try and get some attention from radio, which is so important. And then you’d come back and you might play a bigger club or even a theatre, and then you would progress to playing arenas. And then if everything worked out, you’d end up in the stadiums.

SS: That was the hope. But when you were playing these smaller venues throughout America, there wasn’t a lot of money.

PMcG: Very little money.

SS: The price of your hotel and the petrol or whatever.

PMcG: Yeah, and tours had to be subsidised and tour support came from your record company. You would appeal to them to give you the cash that would make the tour…

SS: An advance on your royalties.

PMcG: It was chargeable to your royalty account, but you still had to get the cash. And we were fortunate in that even though we were on an independent record label, Island, since absorbed into Universal, but at that time, Island was independent and frequently short of money. But they were distributed in America by Warner Brothers. And I made some allies in the Warner Brothers building in Burbank who loved the band. And Warner Brothers put, what at the time was, considerable money into those tours. Like, for $100,000 we could do a three-month tour of the United States. Mind you, not very luxuriously, we’d be in a bus and…

SS: Staying in motels?

PMcG: Yeah. That’s what we did for pretty well every year from the early 80s, 81 to 84. We did those kind of tours for three months of each year and built up an enormous live following even though the records were not hugely successful. The first big success we had was in 1983 with War and the that was successful in Britain. It was a No 1 album, but it wasn’t a big success in the US.

Then we had Unforgettable Fire. And then in 87, The Joshua Tree, which went to No 1 all over the world.

Buying rights, taking ownership and haggling with Apple

SS: The one thing you did do was you had the cleverest lawyers and obtained the wisest of financial advice for yourself and the band. How important was that?

PMcG:  Well, I like working with lawyers. It’s a complicated environment and it’s changing all the time. And during that period the record business was absolutely thriving. U2’s career coincided with the boom in the sales that was a response to the introduction of the CD.

SS: Profits skyrocketed.

PMcG:  And so the record companies were making really quite a lot of money. For the artists to get what I regarded as a fair share of that involved a certain amount of – in fact, a great deal of negotiation. But since we were having more success each time we released a record, it was normal and natural for the record company to renegotiate the terms of the deal. Improving them, from our point of view.

And the other thing that was happening during that period was that the publishing rights. We had made publishing deals and with different publishing companies…

SS: A lot of people, I don’t think, will understand the importance of publishing, and that is that each song that is on each record, the artist gets paid for performing it and so forth. But the person who writes that song gets the same amount of money as the performer isn’t that right?

PMcG:  Well, it’s a considerable amount of money. And artists who write their own material, which has become commonplace, in the 60s were quite unusual. The Beatles were with the first group that organised their own writing, even though their early publishing deals were not very good and caused them a great deal of unhappiness later on, when they realised they didn’t own their material. Other people could put a Beatles song in a movie or a television commercial with or without their permission. The ownership and control of the rights to the recordings and also the rights to the song, somebody else could always sing the song, artists began to realise that those rights were lucrative and worth fighting for.

With U2, we eventually got to a position over years of renegotiation where U2 now own all their own recordings, everything they ever recorded. And they own all the songs they ever wrote.

SS: I remember during that time, because I actually have known you for a long time, but you did some very big deals at that time. When you were with U2, the one that stuck out in my mind was you did a deal with Apple for the iPod. I think it was the first iPod that was done, there was a U2 black iPod or something.

PMcG: Oh, yeah.

SS: And you were negotiating at that time with the legendary, sadly dead, Steve Jobs. That was quite a unique deal, I think, at that time, wasn’t it?

PMcG:  It was because it was the first time that U2 had ever allowed their music to be included in a television advertisement. And Bono formed a very deep friendship with Steve Jobs and had known him already before this. And Steve Jobs, a big music fan…

SS: So, it was like a personal friendship?

PMcG: Oh, a personal friendship. So much so that when Steve Jobs sadly died, Bono performed and spoke at his funeral. That was much more than a business relationship.

But what we did with the U2-branded iPod was we agreed to put a U2 song into an Apple commercial. Their advertising was so stylish at the time. You remember that silhouette. Every design is amazing. Their advertising was brilliant. There was a real visual component to the success of Apple. A guy called Jony Ive, an Englishman, was hand-in-glove with Steve Jobs. The first apple instrument that was not white was the U2 black and red iPod. And we had a royalty on all of those that they sold. They were the same as any other iPod. It was just black and red with U2 autographs engraved.

SS: I remember at that time there was this thing that you were wanting a royalty on it and he was wanting to pay you a flat fee. Or were you paid in equity or something?

PMcG: He didn’t want to talk about options on Apple shares.

SS: Which were the best bet in the world.

PMcG: As they increased in value, I became just the normal punter investor and I’m very glad I did. All those years ago. But we didn’t get actually paid for the use of the music in the commercial. And Bruce Springsteen used to make jokes about this in public, he made a speech about this. He said: ‘I said to John [John Landau was his manager] that I’ve heard about this deal that U2 have made with Apple. And let me get this straight, they’ve given Apple the music and they get paid nothing. Explain that to me. Why is that good?’

In fact, the way it worked was that the exposure of that TV commercial worldwide turned the track Vertigo into the equivalent of a worldwide top 10 No 1 hit.

SS: And it sold records?

PMcG: It sold records for us. And radio exposure is very difficult to get. There’s a history of payola and corruption and bribery in radio. Radio was in those days so important in breaking an act in America particularly. But also in Britain, Radio One is so important. So, getting on to radio with your material…

SS: And Apple was the shortcut to that for you?

PMcG: Yeah, it was a shortcut to the audience. And mind you, it’s fair to say it would not have worked if the audience didn’t like the song or didn’t like the ad, they’d have stopped playing the ad. As it was, the audience did like it. And it played for months all around the world. And we got a lot of benefit from that.

“I don’t really like talking about figures.”

SS: Well, if you didn’t get equity for your work, I assume you bought the shares.

PMcG: I did, yes.

SS: And did the band buy them?

PMcG: I don’t know.

I’m happy to say that I still have mine.

SS: Well, that was something worthwhile doing, I suppose.

Of the deals you did around then, one of them was also Island Records, which you had been with from the beginning. And you had a very good working relationship with Chris Blackwell, who owned it. They were going bust.

PMcG: Chris Blackwell, who’s an extraordinary character. I mean, he’s an old Harrovian. He’s a white Jamaican. But he went to an English public school. He didn’t come from money.

SS: Well he went to Harrow.

PMcG: Enough money to go to Harrow. But he was a free spirit. And growing up in Jamaica, he worked on an Ian Fleming James Bond film, Dr No. Because his mother, Blanche, was the mistress or the girlfriend of Ian Fleming himself.  And that house that used to belong to Ian Fleming…

SS: Didn’t Johnny Cash or somebody buy that eventually?

PMcG: No, no. Chris bought it. When Ian Fleming died, Chris bought it. It’s called Goldeneye. And it’s now a small, beautiful resort. I’ve stayed there a few times.

Chris is a free spirit and he was intuitively good at the record business, starting out by bringing Jamaican records into England.

SS: Like Bob Marley.

PMcG: He produced Bob Marley in the studio. He produced Millie Small in the studio. So, he was a studio producer, which is a great talent. I don’t have it. He was also a pretty good, intuitive businessman, but he took a lot of risks. And at one point, we were coming to a crucial point in U2’s career, we’d released the Unforgettable Fire album. It had been a big hit. And there was a cheque which would have been a cause for celebration. It would have been the first big, big-ish royalty check that U2 had ever received.

SS: Are you talking like six figures?

PMcG: I can’t remember. But it was going to be a bit of an event. And I turned up to meet Chris and get the money. And he said: “It’s a bit embarrassing. I don’t have it.” So he had produced and indeed financed a movie, because he was also doing a bit of that. And he basically lost our money. So, there were harsh words.

SS: Well, U2 must have had plans for that money.

PMcG: Well, they were at an age where they wanted to buy houses the same as everyone else. So, it was a bit of a blow.

And we were also on the verge of completing the Joshua Tree album. And we knew we had something amazing. So, we sort of settled the dispute amicably by taking ownership of part of Island Records.

SS: Well, it was either you took, I think it was 10 per cent, or you bankrupted the company, was that the choice?

PMcG: We had another choice, which was that we had protected ourselves and we could have moved the obligations of the contract to one of the Warner labels. Warner was the biggest thing in the music business, the Warner labels were Warner, Elektra, Atlantic, Sire and Geffen. And we, at our election, could have chosen one of those labels to be our label going forward.

SS: They all wanted you at that stage.

PMcG: Yeah. And instead, we chose to stay with Island and become part-owners of the company, which when it was sold a couple of years later to the conglomerate, Polygram, turned out to have been a very good thing to do.

SS: If I can remember right, it was it sold for €200 million or something. You ended up getting, 10 per cent of €200 million or something like that.

PMG: I don’t really like talking about figures.

Touring, investing, scaling

SS: Now around that time too, I should say you also, a young man came in and asked you to manage him, Bill Whelan. And you advised him not to get you to manage him, but to allow you to become his partner in publishing.

PMcG:  Well, Bill was a pal, and I knew him from around town, around recording studios, pubs and RTÉ. And he was a sort of jobbing music producer. He did shows for RTÉ. He even hosted a talk show at one time.

SS: He was also a qualified solicitor.

PMcG: He’s a lawyer, a very, very developed individual.

And he had produced a couple of tracks for U2 in the studio in Windmill Lane. Windmill Lane was at the heart of a lot of what we did and my office was there. Bill produced a couple of tracks for U2, for which I’m sure, well I know he still receives royalties. And he said, “will you be my manager?” We were friends, and I said, I’ve got a better idea. Bill, you’re a composer. And one day, you might write something big.

And if I do what you’re asking me to, make a publishing deal with EMI or somebody for you, you won’t get all the money, you’ll get paid. And I said, “why don’t we become publishers?” And so we set up something called McGuinness Whelan and a couple of years later, he’d done smaller things, advertising, RTÉ things. Along came Riverdance and Bill wrote Riverdance, wrote the music for Riverdance, all the lyrics and so on. And I have to say, to the annoyance of RTÉ, they said, “oh we’ll pay you and we’ll own it.”

And we said, “no, Bill owns it.”

I mean, Bill and I were certainly not equal partners, that would have been completely unfair to him. But we are in an appropriate ratio partners ever after in the ownership of the music for Riverdance. And I had formed a record label called Celtic Heartbeat and that released the album of Riverdance and subsequent albums derived from Riverdance and various other Irish…

“The energy of a tour, it all goes into the show. The show’s taking place at nine o’clock that night. The whole organisation kind of ticks up to that moment.”

SS: And every video production, every showing, I presume they have to pay for the musical.

PMcG:  There’s a royalty payable on every record to the publisher and on every video-cassette and DVD and Riverdance has been a wonderful success. This would have been its 25th anniversary tour this year, and that tour started at the beginning of this year. You were there and I was there and it was so good in The Point. And that tour was a casualty of the virus.

SS: Oh it’s terrible. Just going back to what you said there. In retrospect, are you happy that you retired, left U2 at the right time in your life?

PMcG:  Yes, we parted very amicably. I’m ten years older than them. The last tour that I supervised, which ended in 2010, 2011, had played to how many people, seven and a half million people around the world in football stadiums, an average audience of 70,000 people. It was a huge undertaking and a huge logistical operation. I mean, we had 400 people travelling and three different productions, which kind of leap frog.

SS: 40 lorries?

PMcG: 200 lorries.

SS: 200 lorries?

PMcG:  Yeah, each stage had 40 lorries. I loved the numbers and I loved the logistics, which were pretty military.

It was a huge success. And it set records for the box office that probably will never be broken because of what that tour achieved creatively, because it was also creatively amazing. U2 have always been at the forefront of production, design for stadiums. It’s part of their DNA to be showmen on a giant scale. That show was so good and it just seemed like the right time to.

SS: Well you were about to go into your five-year cycle again with another album and all the tours. And you were over 60 years old at that time.

PMcG:  Yeah, I’m 69 now, so I was 62, 63 and it took a little while to disengage. My organisation, some of it transferred, the band basically manage themselves now. Some of my organisation transferred.

SS: I remember the coverage at the time. I looked them up before I did this right now, that was 2013 and I think there was, what was reported at the time was a €30 million golden parachute when you left. That’s a huge amount of money for anybody I suppose.

But did you use that money to fund future projects yourself, or did you stick by the old Hollywood principle that only a fool uses their own money to finance their own movies?

PMcG: Yes I absolutely stuck to that. ‘OPM’, never forgot it, Other People’s Money, quite right. I mean obviously, I finance development of things that might come to pass, but that’s comparatively…

SS: That’s seed money?

PMcG: Yeah that’s seed money.

SS: OK. Are you a busy investor Paul? Were you involved in many of the tech investments that were so successful for Bono?

PMcG: No, I’m not part of, I mean, I have investments, I have a pension. I pay attention to those things. But I’m not partners with the band and I never was in making investments. It was always very important to distinguish between the band’s activities, in which they effectively invested their own time and money, and outside investments. I have nothing to do with their outside investments.

SS: Although when they started, I think you suggested at the beginning that there’d be a five-way even split then.

PMcG:  That was reviewed over time. And I’m not even sure what it is now. I’m out of touch. I’m not in there. I mean, they’re still friends of mine and I see quite a bit of them when I’m in France.

SS: Bono is a neighbour in France for instance.

PMcG:  Bono would have a house just down the road from me, Adam is a mile away and so is Larry, as it happens, we’re all in.

SS: In France?

PMcG: Yeah, it happened sort of accidentally. We all love the south of France from the 80s.

SS: You bought those houses in 1993 I think, didn’t you?

PMG: I’m not sure. And Nice is a very useful base from which to tour Europe because it has a 24-hour airport. So when we were playing shows in any part of Europe, we could get the tour plane back to Nice the same night. And then there might be a day or two off before the next show in another European city. And it’s very nice to be in your own bed, if that’s possible.

The energy of a tour, it all goes into the show. The show’s taking place at nine o’clock that night. The whole organisation kind of ticks up to that moment.

SS: That is the highlight of the day for everybody.

PMcG:  Then when it’s over, when the show comes down and you get to the plane or the hotel or whatever afterwards, there’s kind of a coming down period of, the energy has been expended. But it’s no time to just put your head down and go to sleep. So you might as well spend that time travelling.

Past, present and future

SS: You were also talking about investors, your investments. You were an early investor in TV3 and Ardmore Film Studios?

PMcG:  Yeah, I’m with James Morris, who has had an enormous influence on the growth of different sectors of the Irish entertainment business. James was a musician himself, he and Sean Davy, it is little known, had a record deal with Decca when they were still at Trinity and they made one record under the name Davy and Morris. But I think James would be the first to say he wasn’t a great musician, but Sean Davy was.

SS: I didn’t know he sang.

PMcG:  I don’t think Sean, I don’t know. But James and I knew each other from the advertising business. Because he was editing a lot of the commercials I worked on. And then he and his partners, Russ Russell and Mia Davies, set up Windmill Lane as a film and video editing business. And they also built Dublin’s first sort of international-class recording studio and U2 made albums there.

SS: People wrote your name all over the walls I can remember.

PMcG: My office was in the compound and yeah, it became a kind of place of pilgrimage for U2 fans who wrote on all the walls.

SS: Oh yeah, it was amazing. Now, somebody else said something that struck me. It was said of you, I don’t know if it was a friend or someone having a go at you. But they said you planned world tours around the great gourmet restaurants of the world.

PMcG: That’s not really true.

SS: But you did invest in The Spotted Pig, which was a New York gourmet pub that had a Michelin star.

PMcG: Yeah, I’ve always been interested in restaurants. I suppose there was a tendency when we were on the road to economise on hotels, we would stay in a cheap hotel, but go to a good restaurant. But I wouldn’t say I actually pulled out the Michelin Guide and booked the tour through it.

SS: A band is a curious – you know, the relationships that built up. It was reported one time you were obviously closest to Bono I think, under Adam Clayton. Is that still the case?

PMcG: Oh yes. I think it’s true, they are the two members of the band I see most. Adam was my predecessor, he was the manager of U2 and he was responsible for getting the early gigs before I got involved because he’d been – sadly, he’d been thrown out of the school. So he had time on his hands.

SS: Do you miss that at all now Paul? Do you miss the camaraderie of the group and the excitement of show business?

PMcG: No. Touring takes a toll, though we got very good at it and it became, I would say in competitive terms, the U2 organisation was the Harvard or the Oxford of rock and roll touring. We had the best people in the world working on that crew, some of whom were Irish, but there were Americans, there were English people. There were people from all over the world. And it was a very interesting and very demanding period because the technology changed so much. In the early 80s, it was just a couple of microphones and a couple of amps.

SS: There was all that the technology bit, the one thing I remember that stuck out, that I remember you saying was that, whatever about you’re advising Bono, that he had probably advised you nearly as much in the other direction.

PMcG: Yeah, he’s somebody I would, if I was contemplating some major decision about, for instance, whether to buy that house, he would be pretty well the first person I’d consult. And he’s extraordinary. He has taken every opportunity that life presented and seized it with both hands. He has phenomenal energy and very great intelligence and also a sense of duty, an obligation which sometimes embarrasses him, he’s easy to take shots at. And there are plenty of people who want to do that.

But you know him yourself. He’s a very generous individual and absolutely driven with ambition to do great things.

SS: Well, who else can you think of who sings, would have had done a duet with Frank Sinatra and Pavarotti or the other? That shows a level of confidence not all of us would have.

PMcG: Yeah, he’s very versatile.

SS: A few things I must ask you quickly, do you have a favourite U2 record?

PMcG: Yeah, I suppose I do. Oddly, it’s one that is less well known. Achtung Baby, I think, was their most exciting record because it was such a change after Joshua Tree, and Achtung Baby was a huge hit. But just at the same time, they were on the tour that accompanied Achtung Baby, which must have been 1991. They were recording an album which turned out to be called Zooropa, which is more experimental and it was very hard to get together because they were doing it in the gaps between shows in different cities around the world.

And I think if I have a favourite, that would have to be it, because I know the difficulty and effort that went into it. I think it’s a great testament to their energy, that they were able to get that together whilst riding on the crest of this enormous wave, which was the Achtung Baby tour.

It was the Zoo TV tour where we kind of really pushed the envelope of technology and stage production.

“I think those lists are very vulgar, it would be more vulgar to comment on that.”

Paul McGuinness

SS: Is there any very intimate, fond memory of U2? What was the proudest moment you had with U2, have you thought about those things?

PMcG: Oh, there have been too many to name one. They’ve achieved so much. And they’re friends and colleagues. I think they’re absolutely the best. And when I see what happened to the generation of bands that we, if you like, came up with. The Clash, The Police, The Pretenders, The Talking Heads, all those bands broke up or died.

SS: They’re not there anymore.

PMcG: They’re just not there anymore. It would be really interesting, if those groups had survived, it would be really interesting to see how they would have developed.

SS: Well, just hanging together still. Is that the ultimate victory, survival?

PMcG: And doing good work. I mean, the work has to be really good, they’re perfectionists and they put an enormous amount of effort into recording, production, stage production and song-writing. I think they should get enormous credit for that. And they still want to be the best.

SS: Oh, they do. Now actually, something here that was put in this list was, the latest Sunday Times rich list guesses your wealth at €145 million.

PMG:: That’s hilarious, but not true is all I’m going to say.

SS: Does it underestimate your wealth?

PMcG: I think those lists are very vulgar, it would be more vulgar to comment on that.

SS: Yes, but listen, you do live in some comfort and some style.

PMcG: Oh I do. And people are fascinated by things like that. I have to be honest in that, it is precisely that sense, that vicarious pleasure that people have in observing wealth, that’s what we’re exploiting in my TV show. So I’d be a hypocrite if I said I’m surprised that people are interested, but those figures are…

SS: But come on Paul. For a guy who made a great life out of rock and roll and so on, you’re a bit of a traditional guy yourself. For instance, you still have the wife you married all of those years ago, Kathy Gilfillan and Kathy is still a successful publisher herself.

PMcG: Thank God for that.

SS: Max your son is a very successful academic, Alexandra, she’s an independent filmmaker now and recently gave birth to a son.

PMcG: Yes, our first grandson, Lir, who remarkably, she and her actor husband, Blake Berris and Lir are all in Ireland at the moment. So is Max. Max was the theatre critic for The Financial Times in New York until recently. He wrote 300 reviews for The Financial Times while he was in New York, he was also doing his PhD. And he has come back to Ireland to teach French literature at the University of Limerick. It’s the first time all, we’re not a very big family, but we’re all in Ireland at the same time and it’s great.

SS: That’s remarkable. Something else that was in the papers recently, that you negotiated Bono’s memoir with the publisher. Is that imminent?

PMcG: I can’t talk about that.

SS: Well a regular guest at your house, I happen to know, was the literary agent Ed Victor.

PMcG: Ed Victor was Bono’s literary agent and indeed, he did deals for other U2 books. There was one with a French journalist.

And then there was a book that we all contributed to called U2 by U2. But his own memoir is something that I’m not involved in, except in as much as Ed Victor was one of my best friends who sadly died.

SS: Well he also arranged Tony Blair’s memoir I think, and a few heads of government.

PMcG: He was a remarkable man. And I miss him greatly. But sadly, he’s gone.

SS: Listen, how about yourself? Are you going to knock out an old memoir yourself?

PMcG: No, I’m not planning to.

SS: Well you’re an old boy of Clongowes, you went to Trinity.

PMcG: Yeah, I could probably get it together, but that’s not really the point.

SS: I think you could get even with a lot of people.

PMcG: What I’ve often said about this is, a lot of what people would be interested in reading is private.

SS: You mean the sort of stuff that’s in the TV drama that you write or that you produce?

PMcG: Yeah but that’s fantasy. And as I say, it’s to provide vicarious pleasure, to people who see the yachts and the frocks and the Ferraris and the sunshine. I mean, it’s a glamorous environment. But it’s fiction. Well, fiction drawn from an environment that I’m kind of fascinated by.

SS: Well listen Paul, we’ve been talking for a long time and we’ve finally run out of it. Thank you very much, Paul McGuinness, I hope to talk again soon.

PMcG:  Well, I’ve enjoyed it greatly Sam.

*****

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