Banging his own drum

Once shunned as a publisher of top-shelf magazines, Richard Desmond is now a successful press baron and friend of the Prime Minister. He's also a front-runner in the race to buy The Daily Telegraph. But what he really wants, he tells Sholto Byrnes, is to make music. Loud music...

Thursday, 20 November 2003


Ludgate House, 10am. The news that Lord Black of Crossharbour may have to sell his Telegraph titles has the media in a frenzy.

Ludgate House, 10am. The news that Lord Black of Crossharbour may have to sell his Telegraph titles has the media in a frenzy. Will they be bought by Richard Desmond, owner of the Daily Express and Sunday Express, the Daily Star, OK! magazine and a clutch of publications containing even more column inches of bare female flesh than The Daily Telegraph?

The papers are certainly on his mind. Although I am offered a seat in his fourth-floor office overlooking the Thames, the Express proprietor, exuding adrenalin, insists on remaining on his feet. "I'm in a pacing mood," he says, wearing out the carpet between his desk and the opulent white sofas. Mischievously, he mentions that he might be getting to know the Berry family (former owners of the Telegraph) rather better, and picks up on a comment attributed to Conrad Black's father in the morning papers.

Desmond, however, has summoned me to talk about a rather more important subject - drums. Interviewers invariably mention the kit that greets the eye immediately on entering the office of the 52-year-old media magnate, sometimes offering their inexpert opinion on his competence with the sticks. The drums' presence is often treated as a sign of Desmond's eccentricity, on a par with the duck hooter and bell he uses to signify approval or disapproval in meetings. In the same vein, his recent appearance behind the kit at a gig in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust at Ronnie Scott's, where fellow band members included Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey of The Who and Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, could be dismissed by doubters as a rich man's indulgence.

But they would be very wrong to do so, as anyone who hears the live recording made that night would have to agree. Shortly after I arrive, Desmond leaves his office to find the CD and plays two tracks, "The Letter" and "My Generation", on the stereo. He keeps time well, the accented tom beats are entirely of the period, and the fills and rolls across the kit are impressive. "My Generation" ends with a cymbal crash and screams from the audience; it sounds like a proper rock gig.

This, though, should not come as any surprise. Before newspapers and magazines, music was Desmond's first love, and a profession in which he shared bills with many famous names of the time.

"Roger [Daltrey] is convinced that if he hadn't found music he'd have been a gangster," Desmond says. "He's convinced that music took him out of Acton and gave him something to focus on." For Desmond, it was an alternative to the torments of formal education a few miles away in north London. "I hated school with a passion. I couldn't understand why I was learning this stuff," says the man tipped to become the owner of Britain's biggest-selling quality newspaper. "Why learn what the capital of Botswana is? Who cares?"

At 14 he bought a drum kit that had been rejected as a bar mitzvah present by a schoolmate, and started working in the cloakroom of a club in Manor House where he heard Georgie Fame, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Jimi Hendrix and Cream. "Apparently I'd always bashed away on biscuit tins," he recalls, "but the thing that did it was hearing Mayall's band on a hot summer's night. There were about 30 people in a room that held 300, and you could smell the colour slide on the spotlight burning. Then I heard Clapton play. I remember standing there grabbing the radiator and thinking, 'Fuck, this is it. I've found it.'"

A friendly drummer taught the young Desmond paradiddle patterns during intervals and encouraged him to take lessons, which he paid for by taking on a Saturday job at Woolworths. One day the Tube was delayed and he turned up to find his teacher still demanding payment for the missed lesson. Thirty-five years later, Desmond's famed temper ignites at the memory. "I said, 'Do you realise, pal, what I've gone through to get this?'" His tone makes one think the teacher was quite wise to have agreed to give the lesson later. "I was so intense, as focused then on playing the drums as I am on running this business now. If one tom was a quarter of an inch out it was the end of the world."

Before long, armed with a kit that had belonged to Bill Bruford of Yes (which Desmond still has today), he was out on the scene. "In the 1960s you played with every band; lots of blues bands, jazz bands, Motown bands." It was connections forged then that led to Daltrey approaching Desmond about an evening in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust. "Last time I'd seen Roger was when I was about 19 and we'd gone out and got pissed after he played at the Regal in Edmonton, which is now a Safeway, and we went off to the Playboy Club. He came to my office here and said, 'Why don't we do a gig?' I said, 'I last did a paid gig 30 years ago.'" After his secretary urged him to accept, Desmond agreed. "I said, 'OK, give me a date.' Next thing I know, they've started talking about lighting and ticket sales, and I am crapping myself."

Others recruited included Gary Moore from Thin Lizzy, Gary Brooker from Procol Harum, the pianist Zoot Money, and Greg Lake, whom Desmond bumped into at a wedding. The four days of rehearsal began with "everyone being Mr Macho". Desmond initially found it difficult to take to Gary Moore. "He has a way about him. Then I said to him, 'Do you remember when we supported you in Folkestone - was it the Eastcliffe Hall?' And all of a sudden we had a conversation going."

I tell Desmond that an old acquaintance from his days running music magazines in the 1970s remembers him being a good drummer. "That gives me as big a kick as anything," he says, proud of the effort he put into his craft before opting for publishing instead. He tells how he met two fellow drummers, Queen's Roger Taylor and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, for a drink and talked about how they were drawn into playing. "Mason was saying, 'No, I didn't have lessons, it just took off.' I said, 'What about you, Roger?' 'No.' I realised that out of the three I was the one who really loves drums. Nick loves Ferraris, Roger loves the lifestyle, the big house. But I love drums."

There's certainly something very single-minded about his approach to the instrument, as shown by the way he prepared for the Ronnie Scott's gig. "You've got to get your hands back in, otherwise they blister. So from April I put in at least two hours, maybe four hours, every weekend with the drums. Then every night I'd get home at 9pm and play them for an hour. I don't think people realise just what goes into playing."

It paid off. The day after the gig he was exultant; then he sank into a depression for two days, worried about how he had played. "Then they gave me the CD, and I thought, 'Actually, that's OK. I didn't fuck it up.' I've proved that I was the world's greatest drummer," he adds with endearing grandiloquence, "which is why I'm now the world's greatest publisher."

Staff at the Telegraph might care to note Desmond's connection between the two disciplines, as the man who could end up overseeing their futures draws interesting parallels. Publishing, Desmond says, should be fun. "I'm not like some others in the business not so far away from here - first name beginning with Clive, last name beginning with Hollick. Running newspapers is the most fantastic fun you could have. But it's just the same as a band. Your editor is your lead guitarist, your bass player is your number two, you've got the circulation manager at the keyboard, and you're sitting there drumming, trying to add passion and sparkle and keeping time."

Media observers pondering Desmond's suitability as the proprietor of another stable of newspapers gleefully seize on his ownership of such titles as The Very Best of Mega Boobs, Asian Babes and 60 Plus, and his legendarily forceful management style. These factors, however, did not stand in the way of his acquiring the Express group for £125m three years ago; a year later he had paid back the £97m the banks loaned him to buy the papers. Telegraph employees may shiver at the prospect, but in Desmond they would have a proprietor who is a welcome visitor to Downing Street, and the focus he brought to his drumming might not be bad for the finances either.

Desmond thinks his experience working with musicians (as a drummer and as the publisher of International Musician, which he no longer owns) was helpful when he started OK! "We were able to succeed because we understood how to deal with artists. Elton and all these guys, we know them. Phil Collins, for instance, apart from the fact that he used to support us on gigs, used to be in our ads saying, 'Subscribe to International Musician'."

Lest anyone labour under the misapprehension that making music together means there is no possibility of discord, Desmond points out the value of the learning curve. "Playing drums is running a business. I suggest people forget about getting MBAs - get some lessons, get out on the road, get the money out of a promoter when he doesn't want to pay you. What better training could you have than to be 15 or 16, you've driven to Norwich, you're stuck in the back of a van with equipment that's going to kill you if the driver goes too fast, and then the bloke doesn't pay you and you're stuck in Norwich? Which has happened to us all." What do you do then? Pay attention, dear hearts of the Telegraph leader office: "You pin the guy against the wall and you get your fiver out of him. You couldn't have a better training than that."

The Express proprietor has a meeting at 11am, an important one that appears to concern the Telegraph (whatever happens, Desmond owns 50 per cent of the printing works the two groups share and is entitled to buy the other half if the papers' ownership changes), but the butler who deposits the banana for his elevenses has already been and gone.

Still we talk. His public relations adviser, Brian MacLaurin, practically has to drag him away from our discussion about the merits of Zildjian cymbals versus those made by Paiste, or Ludwig versus Yamaha kits. Ever the businessman, though, he has just one worry at the end of the interview. "I hope this hasn't made me seem soft," he says. Soft, no. A more rounded human being and highly entertaining company, I think, yes.

Beat goes on in business, music for ‘Realtor that Rocks’

By SHAWN SKAGER
Auburn Reporter Sports Reporter
Mar 06 2009

Many people spend their life living in two worlds, straddling a line that firmly divides their passion – the things they do for fun – from what they do for a living.

For Auburn resident Tory Mayfield – “The Realtor that Rocks” – that line is not just blurred, it is nonexistent.

Mayfield, a real estate agent with Keller Williams of Auburn, has found a way to integrate his passion, playing drums with a local rock band, Weight of the World, with his profession.

“For me, I knew I had to set myself apart rather than try to fit a mold,” Mayfield said. “Instead of trying to overcompensate by looking more professional and overdressing to look more mature, I was confident in my abilities and what I had was my youth and a drive to succeed.”

For Mayfield, that drive has paid off in both his profession and with his work with Weight of the World.

The music started for Mayfield in high school.

“I was, I would say troubled, coming out of junior high school,” Mayfield said. “So when I got into high school, the first year that Auburn Riverside opened, they were assembling a band. I’d always been into music, especially being from the Seattle area when grunge hit. That really influenced me a lot.”

Mayfield attended his first rock show, Pearl Jam, Blind Melon and Neil Young, at the Gorge Amphitheater in 1993. But it wasn’t until he began attending Auburn Riverside High School that he first picked up the sticks.

“When I was 14, I had a girlfriend who was in the band, and joining was a way to hang out with her,” he said. “They needed a bass drummer for the marching band. I just fell in love with it. It was big and it was boomy. It fit the profile for me at that age.”

Teacher’s great influence

Mayfield credits his band teacher, Ruth VanAmburg, with helping to nurture his love for music, as well as teaching him the basics of music theory.

“She really helped me focus and taught me about music,” he said. “She taught me everything I know about music and music theory. The drum set, I was just really aggressive about learning myself and getting out there.”

Mayfield said he bounced around a bit, playing with friends “banging around and just making noise” for a while before he took out an ad looking for someone to play with.

It wasn’t long before he got a response from two other local players, bassist Billy Gadberry and guitarist/vocalist Jimmy Vanderford.

“Jimmy called and had me come down to some storage place in Kent,” he said. “And we jammed.”

Although Mayfield said the trio immediately clicked, the band decided to try working things out with their original drummer. Four months later, however, Mayfield got the call.

“And that was it, we’ve been inseparable ever since,” Mayfield said.

For the past nine-years the trio has gigged around the Puget Sound area, cutting two albums – 2001’s “6e+24(kg)” and their second, “Bringing the Rock”, released in 2004. Mayfield said the band is at work on a new album now, that will hearken back to their first album.

“We’re trying to get back to the spontaneity of our first album,” he said. “We were all influenced by different bands, so there was more creativity and less focus. But it created more magic, so we’re trying to work back to that.”

Mayfield acknowledges that the band takes a blue-collar approach to its music, practicing twice a week “religiously.”

“A lot of people don’t realize how serious we take it,” he said. “It’s a job. It takes time away from family and our businesses.

“We take it very serious,” Mayfield added. “We go in and work. Sure we have fun, because we love it, but we take full advantage of the time we have and get back to life.”

For Mayfield, that means getting back to the business of selling houses.

Jump to real estate

Mayfield said he was 22 when he first got his real estate license, making the jump from selling newspaper subscriptions at the since-defunct King County Journal.

After joining his first office, Mayfield said he decided on the “Realtor that Rocks,” moniker

“For me the ‘Realtor that Rocks’ is more of an affirmation,” he said. “It’s not that different than saying, ‘Hey, that’s cool, or hey, that’s awesome.’ Instead it’s, ‘Hey, that rocks.’ To me it was more of a statement, it means that I can get the job done, provide results and rise to the occasion.”

Mayfield adds that it’s that attitude that has brought him to where he is now, and will hopefully move him through the real estate market’s current turmoil.

“I started pre-boom, not even knowing what we were in store for,” Mayfield said. “So it’s never been a case of where things just fell in my lap. I still really had to work for it.

“Times almost got too easy, and it bit a lot of people,” he added. “Now the market is a lot tougher, a lot leaner. My last year was as tough as my first year in the business. My way of business hasn’t changed. I always want to do better. Bigger, better, faster, more.”

And his way of doing business with Weight of the World hasn’t changed either.

“I would just call us a really eclectic style of rock,” he said. “We refer to what we do as pure rock fury.

“Usually the disclaimer is that we’re not metal, we’re not your typical rock band, but we fit in there somewhere,” Mayfield said. “Yeah, we yell and scream a bit, but we’re good quality rock.”