2020.08.15 - Rock Talk with Mitch Lafon - Alan Niven talks about GN'R's interview policies

Excerpts from Ultimate Guitar:
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During a recent episode of Rock Talk With Mitch Lafon, former Guns N' Roses manager Alan Niven looked back on frontman Axl Rose's approach to interviews during the time he managed the group between 1987 and 1991.

"At one point Axl demanded that we present every potential interviewer with basically a contract which gave him the right to have final say over the edit," Alan said, adding (transcribed by UG):

“And to be perfectly honest, I was quite happy to employ that because it meant less people would be talking to Axl. Bless his heart, but Axl would talk about Axl more than he would talk about Guns N’ Roses. And in the early days, if you go back and look at this, I’d never let Axl do an interview on his own. I always made sure there was somebody with the band there – if not the entire band there – to keep the interviewer intimidated a little bit maybe. You know, try taking on four or five in one go if you want to be a wiseass. I can see from the artist’s point of view that it’s sometimes a pain in the ass to do the interviews.

“However, with that said, I think it’s incumbent on the management and the label and the artist to choose who you want to talk to and avoid the dummies, the wiseasses, the ‘gotcha’ guys, the snarky guys, and just brush them off and just talk to people who are going to give you an intelligent conversation. And to not allow a legitimate journalist the opportunity to develop a conversation with this subject I think is anathema – I think it’s arrogant, and I think it’s this is absolutely absurd. At the end of the day, it’s a control freak’s action, and control freaks obviously have a certain healthy ego. It’s not a downright arrogance, and it’s dismissive. If you’re going to do an interview, pick somebody that you think that you can have a decent conversation with, and have the conversation because you know better than anybody because you’ve been doing this for a long time and you’re very good at your craft.

“In the course of an interview and in the course of any conversation there are moments when you can go left, right, up, or down, and that’s part of the beauty of a genuine interview. You get the opportunity to come back with a question, come back with a third observation, and that’s how an interview should be. This is like lip-syncing on stage, there’s nothing authentic about it. It’s basically… if you want to ask my humble moderately experienced opinion, it’s fucking bullshit.”

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/ex-gnr_manager_recalls_axl_roses_control_freak_approach_to_interviews_arrogant_absolutely_absurd.html