I wanna be your man(ager): Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger, Joyce Smyth, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts
SHE’S A RAINBOW
Joyce Smyth has a job title that would light up any CV: Manager, Rolling Stones.
After a memorable 12 months for the rock’n’roll legends, she can now add the title of Businesswoman Of The Year to her resumé. But there’s far more to her story than that…
------------ BY JAMES HANLEY ------------ 34 | Music Week 12.11.18
her London office. “You’ve got to be prepared to take whatever the day throws at you, but clearly there are things to try and get done. It can be quite pressurised and, of course, there is the age-old problem of the different timezones. At the minute we have an exhibition in Sydney and our promoters are in London, LA and New York, so that can be challenging. It’s just a bit of a juggle, that’s all.” Smyth, whose relationship with the evergreen rockers stretches all the way back to the 1980s, was the Stones’ lawyer prior to taking over as manager in 2010, when she succeeded the legendary Prince Rupert Loewenstein.
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“I worked alongside Rupert for many years and, as he got older and unfortunately frailer, he began to step back,” she explains. “It was a very long apprenticeship but, more and more, you found yourself doing the deals, rather than perhaps papering the deals that were given to you to document, so that was a subtle change. “Plus, there was the fact that he really had stepped down by the cusp of their 50th anniversary and that was undoubtedly going to be a big thing. We all had to put our heads together and think, ‘How can we make this special?’ So suddenly I was driving the bus.” Smyth speaks glowingly of her “amazing” predecessor, who died in 2014. “My first encounter with him was terrible, because I pulled a
musicweek.com
hat is a typical day in the life of the manager of The Rolling Stones? Joyce Smyth can say for sure, having held that prestigious position for the best part of a decade now.
“It’s not really regimented,” says Smyth, speaking to Music Week at
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