Over 100 years ago, Gustav Mahler said: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
Recently, Pete Townshend on tour with the Who, put it a different way: “We’re old men... People want to hear the songs the way they remember them.”
Legacy World Artists is built on the fusion of those two observations – that the future of much live music will lie not with its original performers, but with a new generation of artists interpreting established rock repertoire.
Legacy World Artists is a new London-based company formed by music managers Sir Harry Cowell and Simon Napier-Bell, with agency owner Neil O'Brien. It has been established to develop live performances of the repertoires of major popular artists. These acts should not be seen simply as tribute bands, but as high-level performers treating popular music in much the same way as classical music.
The company has experience of this from Raiding the Rock Vault, a stage show developed by Sir Harry Cowell and Simon Napier-Bell, which ran in Las Vegas for 13 years and was toured in Britain by Neil O'Brien. It featured a rotating cast of established rock musicians performing classic rock repertoire, and its success lay in a simple principle – to respect the original recordings while allowing the musicians to bring their own personality to them — not imitation, but interpretation.
The approach is not new in principle. In the 1960s, young British bands learned their craft by performing the songs of American artists in clubs across the UK — a process that helped shape The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Yardbirds, who, incidentally, were managed by Simon Napier-Bell.
Today, the catalogue of popular music available to artists repeating that process includes material by some of those very same acts. But as the original artists grow older and perform less, or as their ticket prices become increasingly out of reach, there’s a gap to be filled. Legacy performers can fill it – and keep the repertoire alive. And by receiving the same style of billing that classical performers receive, they can build a name for themselves.
Legacy World Artists will make that their principal focus. Not just promoting exceptional artists who play legacy repertoire; but helping them towards long-term careers — either within legacy performance or beyond it.
Lastly, while the repertoire looks to the past, the presentation doesn’t have to. The company is in talks with high-tech production groups about ways to combine live performance with cutting-edge digital and AI-driven presentation techniques.
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Behind Legacy World Artists there are three people with an enormous amount of industry experience
NEIL O' BRIEN
The founder and managing director of Neil O' Brien Entertainment, which books artist's tours and events worldwide. Neil has been a live music professional for more than 35 years and was previously employed at The Agency Group, London. His experience includes programming live music venues and festivals including Brixton Academy, Shepherds Bush Empire, London Astoria, Mean Fiddler, Forum, Clapham Grand, Subterania, Sound Republic and Scala venues. He has also been responsible for programming open air music events including Reading, Phoenix and Madstock (Madness), Kew The Music and Greenwich Music Time.
SIMON NAPIER-BELL
Simon Napier-Bell is rock manager, author, film maker and public speaker. Artists he has managed include The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, Ultravox, T Rex, Marc Bolan, Japan, Asia, Candi Staton, Boney M, Sinead O'Connor, Wham, and George Michael. He also co-wrote the song You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, has written five best-selling books on the music business and directed five music-based documentary films for Netflix and Sky Arts. With Harry Cowell, he created the Las Vegas show Raiding the Rock Vault, in which some of the world's greatest rock stars performed great rock classics. It ran for 12 years and was voted 'Best in Vegas' during each one of them.
SIR HARRY COWELL
Once a drummer, then tour manager, then manager, Harry at various times played drums on tour for Dollar, The Stranglers, and Martha & the Muffins. He was then drum tech and/or tour manager for AC/DC. Ozzy Osbourne, The Passions, Genesis and The Police. Together with Simon Napier-Bell, he managed Ultravox and Asia. Then ran Rive Droite Music for five years, and was instrumental in signing Katherine Jenkins, Errol Brown, Heather Small, and Ayo Beatz. From 2011, for 14 years, he produced and ran the Las Vegas show Raiding the Rock Vault, then devised and produced its sister show, Raiding the Country Vault, in Branson, Missouri. He also owned and ran Stone Room Studios.
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