Amanda Pelman spills the beans on men, music and Kylie

Amanda Pelman remembers the moment she realized she was living the life of a sitcom character. He was in London guiding the rise of Australian boy band Indecent Obsession when he looked at the TV and saw this: Absolutely Fabulous first. “My jaw was on the floor,” she says, “like, ‘This is me. This is who I am. I am Edina.'”

Thirty years later Four Weddings and an Encore The unfiltered moment that Jennifer Saunders’ champagne-soaked PR parody forgot to write. Born Melbourne fashion designer Elvie Hill and the man who invented the steering wheel lock, Pelman’s accidental mark countdown It’s a wild ride from dancer to Mushroom Records publicist to record label boss to artist manager to high-flying stage musical and festival producer.

Kylie Minogue is the jewel in her crown. Despite what some guys might claim.

“Michael Gudinski made sure to emphasize for many years that he was the one who signed him,” says Pelman on his way from London to Australia. Other members of Mushroom, including former housemate Molly Meldrum, “know the truth. I saw Kylie in Vegas before she starts her world tour in 2024. We both know where we sit in our history.”

Pelman, one of the winners who wrote it, draws a formidable figure “reflected in a Paris window,” to quote the happy-ending caption. She can be harsh on her partners in industry and romance (she’s been married twice, to her first husband; she divorced the third, from music legend Brian Cadd, in 2021) and has been unapologetic about her PR triumphs. AbFab scenes.

For example, there are times when the British girl on page three accompanies pop star Samatha Fox into a TV interview with Mike Willesee. Fox had a relationship with serial cheater Peter Foster and was forced to promote Fox’s fake weight loss products before ending the relationship and severing all ties with him. Waiting for Willesee to bring up the issue, Pelman hid under the studio table, ready to intervene.

Sure enough, as the journalist began to do his job, Pelman hissed at his protégé to get up and go out. “Samantha stood up confidently, paused with a movement of her head like a true diva, and left. It was the best move we could have made,” Pelman writes. He means it from a promotional perspective, of course. “It was all about just getting on the front page,” he says with a shrug. She’s equally unapologetic about sending rotten eggs to a reviewer who expressed disinterest in Indecent Obsession, and she’s also unforgiving of the “so-called journalist” who gave Kylie the perennial “singing budgie” tag.

“Convincing the media that Kylie was a real person and not a puppet was exhausting,” he writes, before greeting one. Rolling stone It’s the cover shoot that gives the fledgling starlet some “much-needed gravitas.” Pelman’s revelation that the then-editor of that venerable magazine was also her lover seems unimportant to her.

“Are people now going to think that sleeping with a journalist was the reason I got Kylie into the mainstream media? I don’t think so,” she says. “I was telling the truth. I think if we had asked a lot of other men or women in the music industry at that time who they might have been involved with, there would have been a lot of comparisons.”

Parts of Pelman’s book are disturbing to read; less because of the stories themselves than because of how undervalued they were by the logic of the industry he clearly knew so well. The moments that can be usefully questioned in hindsight are merely the daily noise of a world where power and excess are rarely examined.

“The boys’ club was a boys’ club,” he says. “I never felt used or abused or exposed. I never thought of myself as someone different… I never felt threatened. The thing that weighs on me is that in the independent microcosm of the record industry in the ’80s, I don’t think people were paid properly. We weren’t praised. I think women are praised now.”

“I can’t really talk about what the industry is like now because I’m not a part of it anymore,” he adds. “In 2016, I set out to go to America and entered the festival area.”
After several glorious decades of casting and producing Australia’s great stages (Long Road to the Top, Kira, Fame, Dogs, Countdown, Priscilla), Pelman’s venture into the United States with the Woodstock 50 festival scheduled for 2019 was one of his boldest and most costly ventures, personally and otherwise.

The brand seemed beyond redemption after Woodstock ’99 literally went up in flames, with allegations of greed and assault making it a symbol of rock’s toxic male culture. Pelman comments: “The audience consisted mostly of angry Caucasian men and teenage girls trying to impress them all.”

He joined Woodstock mainstay Michael Lang, he says, “because the message needed to be renewed, reborn. The ethos of Woodstock in 1969 needed to be renewed.” At eleven o’clock, “we were deprived of this experience because of a very greedy and poor choice of business partner. That’s the end of the story. It’s over.”

This breakdown, the climax of her story, Lang’s sudden death from cancer, and the bitter end of her 20-year marriage to Cadd pose a serious threat to the word Pelman constantly capitalizes. “AMAZING” is what a childhood friend predicted her life would be like with five husbands and all of 10 years old.

And so, magnificently, to a typewriter in his countless dream home in Paris, “a 17th-century attic overlooking Notre Dame Cathedral,” to type the book he dedicated to his children, Olivia and Austin.

“I wrote this absolutely and completely for my children,” he says. “And then as the story continued to unfold… I stepped back from it and said, ‘this is kind of funny.’ You know, what crazy fool gets married four times and what crazy fool goes and lives in all these different places and just thinks, ‘well, everything will be okay tomorrow’?”

Ironically, she says, “I guess it was my children who paid the price for my desire to be great, because when you decide to live big, live loud, and go to hell wherever you go, there’s a price… But it didn’t end so bad.”

Neither does Amanda Pelman. So far she hasn’t lived up to her friend’s prediction of five husbands, but the “iteration” of her title features a French architect and two cats. “I think true love is not in one place or time,” she says, now sounding more like Victor Hugo than Edina Monsoon. “It’s always around the corner, and sometimes when you’re not looking.”

Four Weddings and an Encore It comes out February 16 via E&R Publishers, New York.

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