Confessions of a Pub Rock Promoter, Bob Yates

Back in 2017, I greatly enjoyed reading Bob Yates’ first book The Angels, the authorised story of the very popular Australian rock band.

While Yates was never the band’s manager, he was an early supporter and an industry insider from his role as a Sydney promoter, and wrote the book with the blessing and cooperation of the Brewster brothers who’d formed the band with lead singer Doc Neeson.

He did, however, manage New Zealand imports Mi-Sex from 1978-86 when they were at their peak following the success of their single “Computer Games”, as well as having close associations with a number of other bands of the time.

In 2021, Bob asked me to take a look at an early draft of his own memoir, in which he detailed his adventures in the rock and roll scene from the 1960s through to the ’80s. It was long, pretty ramshackle but also entertaining, insightful, and often very funny. I gave him some encouraging notes and he kept working on it.

Bob eventually finished that manuscript and this year self-published it under the title Confessions of a Pub Rock Promoter, a considerably better (and more marketable) title than the original.

What he’s kept, though, is the fundamental character of the book – in fact, he’s expanded and refined it into a rollicking account of his time in the music industry.

It’s a deeply personal account, very frank and detailed. He makes no bones about giving some people a serve and giving credit to others. He doesn’t leave out his own failings and mis-steps but he makes it clear that while things might not always have gone to plan (when there was a plan), he trusted his instincts and thoroughly enjoyed his time as a rock manager, champion of live music, venue operator, and – as the title says – pub rock promoter.

It’s a hell of a journey. After a brief prologue explaing that he started writing the book while he was in jail in 2008, he takes us back to 1963 when his attendance at a Kings Cross folk club gave him the idea of putting on a folk festival. “Us?”, his friend John says.

Yeah! We get a hall, book all the best artists that play at the Attic, put up posters like they do for the concerts at the Sydney stadium.

That pretty much nails the Yates method, and he kept coming up with ideas and solving problems around live music for the next couple of decades that saw him eventually haggling with international record company executives in LA and New York.

In between, there were stints mowing lawns for convents, running a steak house, falling in love, carrying bags of thousands in cash, spotting talent, and taking on whatever needed to be done to build unknown bands into superstars.

Not surprisingly, everyone is in Confessions: all the bands, managers, promoters, journalists, and rock punters who made that period so exciting. Often, you get an angle that might be a bit different to your existing perceptions of them.

It’s a fantastic, riotous story that had me laughing out loud as well as shaking my head in disbelief. It encapsulates a time when people like Yates thrived on the excitement, when punters could see multiple top class bands in a single night, when there was risk and reward for the brave and the foolish in live music.

It’s a very Sydney book, in my opinion – even though a lot of the events take place in other cities here and overseas. It just feels like an inherently Sydney kind of story, told with relish and more than a little nostalgia for a time and place that came and went.

At 420+ pages, it’s not a quick read but it’s neatly structured into short, digestible chapters and cleverly designed to feature heaps of photos, posters, album covers, and funky printing tricks. In the end, I read it in just a few days, finding it really hard to put down.

I will give one warning – if you’re the type of reader that gets annoyed by typos, be prepared: the book is riddled with spelling errors, poor punctuation, bad grammar, disjointed syntax, and inexplicable line breaks. I’m usually on those pernickety people but with this book, I just didn’t care. If anything, it adds to the chaotic, rambling nature of the book. It just makes it more fun.

Well done, Bob, in finally bringing Confessions to fruition and making it so damned entertaining.

Highly recommended.