Brit Beat Special: Legendary Madonna Publicist Barbara Charone on Music, Her Memoir and Her Role at Chelsea F.C.

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorHer most famous client only needs one name to be recognized, but legendary Madonna publicist Barbara Charone can go one better: she’s known throughout the music industry simply by her initials.BC’s remarkable 50-year career is now being celebrated in her new memoir, “Access All Areas,” which has been the talk of the U.K.

industry since its publication at the end of last month. It charts her journey from Chicago, where she grew up, to London, where she moved in the 1970s, via bust-ups with The Eagles, partying with the Rolling Stones and a brief spell managing Rufus Wainwright.Originally a music journalist for the likes of NME and Rolling Stone, she previously wrote the authorized biography, “Keith Richards: Life as a Rolling Stone,” (Richards even let her move into his notorious Redlands mansion to write it).

She moved into PR soon after, running the in-house press office for Warner Music’s WEA in London for many years, before setting up her own agency, MBC, with her business partner Moira Bellas, in 2000.More than two decades on, MBC is one of the most powerful PR firms in the world, with a client list that includes the Foo Fighters, Rod Stewart, Metallica, Depeche Mode and, of course, Madonna, whom Charone has represented in the U.K.

since she was an unknown pop hopeful in the 1980s. But while BC has been close to the biggest stars for decades, and the book takes you into many an inner sanctum, she insists it’s not her style to reveal too many secrets.“All the artists that I work with are, in a way, incidental [to the book],” she tells Variety.