When he saw how much the music icon earned, the entrepreneur and record producer said “it was like bloody hell”, and ‘”there’s a lot of money” in this business – “I had no idea”
Simon Cowell revealed he once found Kate Bush’s pay cheque while working in a record label’s mail room – and his jaw dropped.
In a recent interview for The Diary Of A CEO, the record executive offered insights into his working life prior to his meteoric rise to fame on tv shows like Pop Idol, The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. He spoke about some of his less glamorous roles, including a stint in the post room at EMI Music Publishing when he was 17 after his mum applied for the role on his behalf.
Simon said it “wasn’t a very nice building”, and it was “almost like being in a garage”. He was greeted by two employees, who were “probably in their mid to late sixties” and swiftly told the future music mogul to “just make us a cup of tea, son”.
Simon said: “But it was good because I did get a chance to understand what everybody did in the company, and I think I was making £18 a week at that point. And as the months wore on, because I thought, ‘someone’s going to realise that I’m really talented and offer me a great job’.
“And I literally would walk into everyone’s offices pretty much every day and say, ‘can I have a job, a better job?’, and there’s nothing going. I literally, even the managing director, I just walked in one day, and I said, ‘I’m Simon, blah blah, blah, blah; can I have a job because I’m really passionate? And he just threw me out of his office.”
He said he “started to get an understanding” of how the business worked, but as he continued on his mission, he also “glimpsed some of the cheques” that were arriving in the mail room. And said his “jaw dropped” when he saw how much Kate Bush earned. “It was like bloody hell,” he said. “There’s a lot of money in this business, I had no idea.”
Despite his various mishaps, Simon remained persistent and would constantly ask people about the industry in an effort to soak up as much knowledge as possible. He said a number of people were “really, really kind” to him and explained their roles, how publishing worked and what they did for the writers and catalogues.
He also revealed that he worked as a runner on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining. In what was likely an important on-set duty, Simon was tasked with polishing Jack Nicholson’s axe for the infamous “Here’s Johnny” scene.
