Rod Smallwood

Background:Born in the North of England in Huddersfield, the son of a policeman, on 17/2/50. An archetypal hard-working, even harder-playing Yorkshireman, he attended Huddersfield New College and 1968 moved south to attend Trinity College, Cambridge University. Up until then his greatest passion was not music but sport, in particular cricket and rugby.

However, although initially heavily involved in rugby at both a University and College level, he gradually found himself graduating towards the organisation of music events. During his first year at Trinity Rod volunteered himself to work at the Trinity May Ball and found himself helping out with the band Colosseum, who were the main attraction, and discovered he both enjoyed and had a flair for this kind of activity. The following year he got more involved, this time booking and organising the Production and the entertainment for the whole Ball, joining up with contemporary Andy Taylor in a ongoing partnership continuing to this day, some 40 years later! Rod’s understanding of music and creative and organisational skills coupled with Andy’s finance and business acumen made for a dynamic team.

By the 1971 Cambridge Trinity May Ball they had progressed to also arranging Rag Balls, discos, dances, putting on all kinds of different acts from reggae to rock and organising the entertainment of not just Trinity but many other May Balls in both Cambridge and Oxford. Rod’s dealings with established booking agents gave him a taste for working in that area so after leaving Cambridge in the summer of 1971 he started work at Horus Arts, an Agency in Cambridge. Soon London beckoned and through connections he had when booking the legendary MC5 for the 1970 May Ball he moved on to Gemini for the princely sum of £12 per week! However after just a few weeks here his main contact moved on to the much larger MAM Agency, to which Rod soon followed and during his18 months there he signed artistes including Cockney Rebel, Be Bop Deluxe, Judas Priest and Golden Earring.

By 1974 this had given him the experience to move onto his chief objective, band management. As Rod said later "If you want to work for yourself (which I always did), dress like you want, get paid to see the World, have total responsibility yet with the opportunity to also be irresponsible, and have a great time too, management to me was the place to be"Via contacts made at MAM, Rod therefore moved into band management as a partner in the management of Cockney Rebel which gave him his first No 1 UK single with the massively successful "Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)". However by 1979 he felt his career was going nowhere. He had never related to punk, the trend at that time, as "after the terrific early bands like the Pistols and The Clash it soon became corporatized, leaning towards fashion and pop, neither of which interested me in the slightest. I was more into Zappa, Floyd, Zep, Purple, The Doors - anything heavy with attitude". He was on the point of giving it all up to go back to university to pursue a career in law when a rugby friend at his club Rosslyn Park handed him a 4-track cassette of an new young East End band, Iron Maiden, a tape that was soon to become the legendary Soundhouse Tapes after the studio it was recorded in, ironically in Cambridge. Before long Rod was on the phone to the tape’s owner and band founder, Steve Harris, making arrangements to go and see them perform live.

Being massively impressed on seeing them, Rod quickly had the band touring nationally and by Nov 1979 he had arranged Iron Maiden’s signing to EMI Records and publishers Zomba. As Rod didn't want to manage another band he didn't really relate to, he instead took time to see where the relationship went and didn’t actually sign the band to a management agreement until some six months later when he formed Sanctuary, a company named after one of their songs. Up until then, as Steve Harris, Maiden' founder member, later remarked “It was all down to trust”.

Maiden soon proved to be a great international success and at the end of 1981 his partner Andy rejoined full-time, after having qualified as a Chartered Accountant and gaining experience as the Financial Director of Perstorp, a multi-national company. Andy was now ready to oversee the business aspects of Maiden and, in parallel with Maiden, over the next 15 years the pair built up Sanctuary to become the World’s biggest independent music company, coining the phrase ‘360 degree company’ to embody its interests in many facets of the music business, including management, records, agency and merchandise. Sanctuary, having been floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1998, later encountered similar difficulties to the rest of the music industry, eventually being sold to Universal, and in late 2006 Rod moved on to form Phantom Music Management Ltd , being joined again by Andy. Phantom concentrates on the management of Maiden, whose incredible ongoing Worldwide success makes it a full time task.

Achievements: In a career spanning 40 years of working with music, Rod has received numerous awards and accolades both individually and jointly with his business partner Andy Taylor . He has been honoured both by the music press and the Industry Bodies themselves. The following selection gives an indication of how Rod is viewed within his field:1999 International Managers Forum (IMF) – Peter Grant Award for Lifetime Achievement2002 Music Week – “Lifetime Contribution To The Music Business” Award (jointly with Andy Taylor)2003 Music Week – Named 4th in the annual list “Most Influential People In The Music Industry” (jointly with Andy Taylor)2004 Q Magazine – “100 Most Powerful People In Music” Award2006 - Classic Rock "Rock Icon" Award

Now:Thirty years on and Rod is still managing Iron Maiden, and the band continues to grow from strength to strength. Now playing to a whole new generation of rock fans at sell-out concerts across the globe, it goes to show Steve Harris’s words still ring true today, "It is all down to trust".