If I had been starstruck, I couldn't have done the job

DAVID BOWIE, The Rolling Stones, The Spice Girls, The Who... it’s what you might call the client roster of dreams.

- PR boss Alan Edwards tells KERRI-ANN ROPER about his new book looking back on his career working with some of the biggest names in the music business

But for Alan Edwards it was a reality, and the source of many gripping anecdotes from a career that has spanned more than four decades.

As the founder of public relations agency The Outside Organisation, Alan, 69, has worked with the biggest names in the business.

The list is long and impressive: Bon Jovi, Led Zeppelin, Shakira, Naomi Campbell, Michael Jackson and more.

When Victoria and David Beckham married on July 4, 1999 in Luttrellstown Castle in Ireland, it was Alan who brokered the reported seven-figure media deal for coverage of the wedding.

His career has seen him labelled the “godfather of modern music PR” and with years of experience and the stories to match, Alan has released the book I Was There, which follows his career from the Seventies’ punk scene to setting up his own PR company and beyond.

In many ways, you could say the book had its early beginnings as far back as the Eighties, because Alan is someone who was “always writing stuff down”.

He explains: “I was always a collector of bits and pieces, and I was always writing stuff down. I’ve kept a desk diary every day now for 50 years. It’s a work in progress.”

“Also, I found when I was touring, particularly in the early Eighties, because you didn’t have social media then, you didn’t have mobile phones, you were really on your own.

“So if you were in a bus in, I don’t know, Milwaukee on a Monday night, [it] could be pretty miserable, and it could be quite lonely, and often you'd be staying in hotel rooms, and so I'd often just write stuff down.

“And I realised, of course, at some point, say with The Stones and with Bowie, this is important. It’s culturally significant.