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Fuller on nearly managing Jackson, and Lennox advising the Spice Girls
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 16 January 2014
Pop mogul Simon Fuller was once in talks to manage Michael Jackson, he has revealed via those previously reported Radio 2 programmes, but he backed away from the opportunity because of anticipated run ins with the late king of pop’s other business advisors.
According to Digital Spy, Fuller told the BBC: “There was a minute there where I was going to become his manager. I had lots of ideas, and I think about it every now and again, about what I was going to do with him, and [about how my proposals were] different to anything he’d done previously and it wasn’t about touring for sure”.
He went on: “It was quite a complicated situation and complication isn’t something I crave in life but the people around him would have made it challenging. If it had been just down to me working with Michael I think we’d have done something extraordinary but I thought better to just let it go, it was a shame”.
Elsewhere in the BBC documentary, Fuller revealed that one of his longest-standing management clients, Annie Lennox, offered some crucial advice to the group he’s possibly most famous for managing, a then fledgling Spice Girls.
Admitting that Lennox might not wish the world to know about her role in developing the Spice Girls brand, Fuller nevertheless revealed: “Each of the girls knew who they were and in their own way tried to represent it, but it wasn’t strong enough and probably the most significant thing that happened was when they met Annie Lennox”.
He went on: “I think we were flying to New York and I sort of brought up midway in the flight that I’d just signed this girl group. And Annie was very interested. She said, ‘I want to meet them’. Almost directly, she was the one who got them to be louder and more brash and more specific. So Emma who was the sweet, cute, blonde girl became Baby Spice. She just played it and hammed it up – none of these names actually existed, but Annie gave them focus”.
The second part of ‘The Fuller Picture’ documentary is on the iPlayer here.
