Author’s Afternoon with living legend Simon Napier-Bell

August 12, 2016: Today was the 34th session of An Author’s Afternoon with Simon Napier-Bell at The Taj Bengal Chambers. Simon, born in 1939, has so far been the senior most guest author at the Author’s Afternoon series since its inception. He has been a music manager, journalist and author.

Simon, a living legend, has had an illustrious career building and managing careers of singers, pop stars and groups like Eric Clapton, Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Boney M, Wham, Japan, Marc Bolan, Ultrvox and so on. His long career has taken him to places all over the world. It was a very interesting to get an insight into Simon’s never-say-die attitude as he had persevered with the Chinese officials for 13 months before getting Wham to perform in Peking – the first western pop group to perform there.

He wrote a book I am Coming To Take You to Lunch on this subject.

He has penned some very interesting books on the music industry sharing the inside workings of pop groups. It was a lively session in which Anjan Dutta engaged Simon whose witty takes and hilarious repartees electrified the audience. Simon also talked briefly about gay rights and how the world was getting around to accept it.

It was nice to have Bruce Bucknell, the new British Deputy High Commissioner in Kolkata at the Author’s Afternoon.

Musician and film director Anjan Dutta was in conversation with Simon and it was nice of him to accept this despite the premiere of his film Hemanta on the same day.

One thing Simon said about artistes was that even if they are extremely talented they would still need marketing and promotion to make it big. As an initiator of so many events and series, I fully agree with him.

After the Author’s Afternoon session, I had dinner with a friend visiting Kolkata from London and after that I went to The Park for a get together hosted by Sarita and Shrikant Mohta to celebrate the birthday of artist Narayan Sinha.

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