So, Dan, what does an agent do?
An agent is a kind of advisor, a coordinator between the artists, the promoters and the public. The job is really to make sure that everyone knows what the tour plan is and where they fit in with the plan. We help artists realize what they want to do on tour, and that's how I see my role, as helping artists turn a good idea into reality.
How did you become involved with Depeche Mode?
Quite by chance, really. About a week before Depeche Mode had chart success, two of the band came to see me in my offices and auditioned me. I must have said more encouraging things to them than the other agents they saw because they decided I was going to be their agent. After the meeting I went to see the band at this very dodgy club called The Pits where they put on a show which lasted all of half an hour. At the end they played this song and I said to Daniel Miller, "What was that song? That's a hit," and that was "Dreaming Of Me".
At the time they were all living at home in Basildon and would go by train to their gigs with all their synthesizers in cardboard boxes. There was avenue in Victoria called The Venue where I arranged for the band to do a gig for some charity, where the matinee show was the benefit and the evening show was for themselves. They made a lot of money that night and I can remember them talking about how they got back on the train with this large amount of cash, with their synthesizers in cardboard boxes, splitting it up amongst themselves and saying, "Well, who was the benefit for? It was for us!"
After Vince left Yazoo his publisher recommended he go to a different agent, who shall remain nameless, who did absolutely nothing, He put Vince's name on his books and said, "Well, let's have a hit and then we'll do something." The agent didn't have the inclination to make an effort and this became obvious to Vince, who did a very rare thing for an artist and said, "I made a mistake", and rejoined my agency. I appreciated that and so I made a hell of an effort for Erasure because I wanted to show Vince that I could do the job better than anyone else. In fact, we had this bet that before Christmas I had to deliver him 50 shows. In October he phoned me up and said, "Well, it's 46 now, I think you can ease up a bit!"
So Erasure were a new band and it was a bit of a challenge because basically I knew Vince wasn't that keen on touring. It was not hard to justify that he should tour but hard to be sure that he would do it with the same enthusiasm and commitment as someone who enjoyed it, But I must say that over the years Vince has shown a very good understanding of how helpful live work is to an artist's career and he has been very supportive of his fans. Whenever there has been the occasion to go back to him and say, 'We've sold out and there's loads of demand for another show,' he's been very cooperative, so I think he serves his fans very well.
And that characterised Erasure's career for a very long, sustained period of success after the third single, but to get [Sometimes] to chart they had to slog for months around the UK, building an audience base. I'd take friends down to their gigs and they'd laugh at me and say, "Where's the band, where's the drummer?" and I'd say, "You don't get it, that guy is the band". And this was before new technology was in everybody's bedroom.
Vince was the first musician I had seen to go on stage and be the whole band, so it was new and it was different.
When they started to have success I did the very cheapest ticket price for arenas I possibly could, the lowest ticket price ever. The fans sold it out immediately and wanted another show and another show and another show, to the point where we made seven nights in Birmingham at the NEC which I think still stands as a house record. We got a very strong showing all around the UK in arenas which meant Europe then kicked in and America started being hot for them. And that was the general philosophy, to tour with each record, with better shows each time, and this carried on very successfully until a very specific point of time.
The watershed was Phantasmagorical, because we did something entirely new for their audience. Instead of taking the music to the people, Erasure came to me and said they had a concept to stay in one or two places and then play as many nights as possible. I considered that a very tough brief and put together three markets where I thought it could work and held a week in each of those cities. The venues and the promoters thought I was absolutely barking mad. The Manchester Apollo told me that no artist can sustain an audience for more than two or three nights: "Diana Ross did three nights for us and that's all you're going to get".
It was definitely a high-risk strategy. We organised a very strong bus-ing campaign. I worked with the biggest coaching company in the UK and we worked to make that journey special, so that from the moment the fans got on the bus they knew they were going to an Erasure show; we put Erasure interviews on tape for the audience, some tracks on video and an interview. The bus-ing actually sold over half the tickets on weekend nights though ticket agents all over the UK, and we ended up playing three weeks in Manchester, seven nights in Edinburgh and fifteen nights in London.
That was fantastic but it was a much higher ticket price than before and the only problem I had with it at the time was I thought it was making them less accessible. I worried about that, because I had always tried to make the band as accessible as possible, and so I put my hand up in the air at the time and said, "This is a possible downside". That downside may not have happened except that then the band did absolutely nothing, from an agent's perspective, for almost four years. They released records, they did TV, they did some press, but they lost that link with their live audience. So much had happened in those four years, dance music came through and people started to want something different from traditional concerts - we were doing lots of all-nighters, mixing up the DJs and generally turning the concerts more into events.
It actually became a problem to decide what to do with the band. It was with this challenge in mind that I approached the Tiny Tour, which was to stoke it up a bit and remind people what a great band Erasure are live. We decided to break all the rules and tour before any new records came out and do the Tiny Tour, which was not in fact a tiny tour at all, but a very large tour - the kind of tour that many acts in the UK would be very pleased to say they had done, let alone sold out.
What was ambitious about it was to relight that spark with the fan base, and we did that very specifically by using local radio stations as partners. I could tell from day one which local radio stations were doing a great job because the shows sold out there. There was a whole build to the event. They announced that they would be making an announcement, they started playing more Erasure catalogue, and then they announced that the tickets were going on sale on Sunday at such and such a time. And on the Monday morning in all the major cities the shows had sold out, with most shows following within a few days.
For me, it was heartening to see that Erasure fans still wanted to see their band. The next challenge was to put the band back into arenas and do a good level of business. So we set that up for April, so that it could be advertised with the album, and that went absolutely according to plan; the shows did better than we expected and it was very exciting to see that level of enjoyment from the audience. I think Manchester Nynex was the standout show on that tour. We reduced the capacity of the venue, cutting off the very top balconies (which are problem areas [regarding sound] from the band's point of view) so that the downstairs was rammed to capacity and the balcony was nicely sold out and the atmosphere in there was fantastic.
What was relatively disappointing was that we had tried the same approach in Germany; right after the Tiny Tour in the UK the band had played six dates in Germany and, with the exception of Hamburg, Erasure played to half full halls which, I guess, was an accurate indicator of what would happen in 1997.
When we went back and tried to book the bigger venues, frankly, it was a disappointment.
Even with the record and more media profile, it didn't really come through as strongly as we wanted. Erasure were quite upset the shows hadn't sold out, I was upset the shows hadn't sold out and, despite whatever factors I could say contributed to it, at the end of the day, if you don't get it right you're falling down in your job. It was one of the first times in a very long period when I hadn't got things right and it was quite difficult to live with.
After they toured in the United States, there was a kind of "What do we do next?" moment and what we did next was not really from a position of strength. It was agreed that Erasure should try to play festivals in Europe over the summer months, and it was a good idea because they're a fantastic band live. The festivals who showed the imagination to book the group really appreciated their performance, but to many of the festival promoters they were a closed book. Roskilde was unfortunately confirmed relatively late and so didn't have the influential effect on the other festivals that it would have had. I had no opportunity in Germany where the open air festivals have always been rather rock-oriented, and not really any opportunity in France, so the festival appearances didn't cover as many territories as I would have liked. I was especially interested in trying to get a festival date in the UK because it would have been very interesting and progressive to expose an audience at, say, Glastonbury, to Erasure, but it was not to be.
So they played the European festivals where they were wanted and a lot of those were in Eastern Europe where the band hadn't been before. They played Budapest, several dates in Austria, Warsaw and then they did two shows back-to-back in Prague and Chicago, which must have been very painful! Then they came back to the UK and did a fairly relaxed Gay Pride festival, which unfortunately ran late and had to be cut short. Then we decided not to take up the offers from the former Soviet Union and began the first ever tour of the Far East.
It was very tough, mainly because the band didn't have that much of a profile there and I had to push like crazy just to make things happen - there were a few weeks where I was coming into the office at some ungodly hour to get on the phone to Australia, Japan, the Philippines etc. I ended up delivering a series of dates I was relatively pleased with and which were very successful, not least because Erasure were doing a mountain of media; I would speak to them on the phone and they would still be doing interviews at two in the morning.
And after that, the Tiny Tour stopped being on the road from late August until mid October. The last bit of the world tour is definitely going to be the most difficult. Central America and Latin America. I'm just fine-tuning the schedule now but they should visit Puerto Rico, Columbia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru and Ecuador.
We've been asked why Erasure didn't play Japan or Israel.
Japan was a big disappointment. There was a change in personnel at their record company and the new person didn't want Erasure to come for just one concert, he wanted them to do a whole tour later in the year, which actually meant, in practical terms, it wouldn't happen at all. The tour did have a single show in Tokyo booked. I'm sure it would have done well, but due to lack of record company endorsement it didn't happen.
In Israel there has been great interest for Erasure over the years. They had a whole plan worked out for them to playa show in Tel Aviv but then suddenly the promoters were having problems with availability and another tour and so Erasure ended up going to South Africa instead, because there was more enthusiasm for them there.
How did the Milton Keynes concert in 1990 come about?
They had just had a hugely successful record called "Wild!" and Erasure were the hottest they had ever been in the UK. Over December and January they had sold out their multiple nights in arenas and the concert was a conclusion to a very successful world tour. It was a very ambitious show. We had to sell 60,000 tickets, but I could not find anything like a decent support band. The rest of the bill could be charitably described as mediocre, and so Erasure did all the work selling those tickets and it was Erasure that sold it out. The audience was the most eclectic mix, from toddlers to 60-year olds, and it was a great show, but unfortunately Vince and Andy absolutely hated it. It really pissed them off. They hated the scale, they hated the open air and I think it was that one show that made them want to do the theatre-type shows for the next tour.
What happens if the band aren't happy with a certain show?
I know about it! I know about it because Vince is a very easy client to represent [Vince is Dan Silvers main liaison regarding live plans]. He's easy because I know what's important to him and I know that if there are sound problems with a venue, I'm going to hear about it. If we've sold tickets for a balcony and they can't hear the concert up there, I'm fired. So if Erasure have a bad gig or there's been a problem with the show I hear about it. When the Tiny Tour opened in Leicester, the next day I had Radio 1 on the phone about these fans kept out in the rain which, as a matter of fact, I know did not happen because I was there.
Do you have any favourite venues?
There are venues that I rate most highly for flexibility, in the sense that you can put almost any attraction into that building and have it work. Particular venues that spring to mind in that capacity are the Brixton Academy, where I've done everything from simple concerts to 48 hour raves, and the Apollo in Manchester.
Do you have a particular favourite concert?
Well almost all the shows I've done with Erasure over the years have been very successful, commercially and artistically, so I think the best has to be the Phantasmagorical show just because of the vibe created in the towns. During the residency in Manchester I must have been up half a dozen times and the moment I got in a cab, the driver would say, "Oh Erasure, yeah, I was there last night, I've got all their records." Erasure were in town big time and I think that was a real buzz, to know that there was a special Erasure edition of the Evening News on sale outside the theatre and to know that there were buses driving around Scotland with Erasure plastered all over them.
What do you think of Erasure's fans?
I think Erasure's fans have lots of respect for the band, rand I've yet to see any aggro at an Erasure show. As I'm trying to present the band to their fans as well as possible, I do take an interest in their fans. I like to mingle with the audience at a show and hear what they're saying, because you learn more from those comments than anything else.
I hope Erasure's fans get what they want and it's my job to make sure they do get what they want. I do appreciate any feedback or comments about the tours and will always go out of my way to right any wrongs I've come across, because I have to reflect how Erasure would like their audience to be treated.
Dan Silver, thank you.
Additional questions from Ewan Saum and Mike DePaz.