Respect is overdue

I had the privilege of working with Maurice and his partners Tim, Stuart and Steve, from 1990 to 1996 as the company they'd founded, MCP Promotions, became the UK's biggest concert promoter.

I confess that it didn't always feel like a privilege, particularly as year after year the company increased its workload adding more acts and more gigs until we were easily surpassing five hundred shows per year. The shows ranged from capacities in hundreds to hundreds of thousands, and they required varying levels of work not always consistent with their capacities. That Maurice and partners did all of this in very inconspicuous surroundings - a small office in Aldridge before moving to a large converted house in Walsall - is even more incredible than it may now seem.

MCP was a fantastically successful company with the ability to create and build the live reputations of some of the World's biggest acts; it might have been the biggest Midlands company you never heard of. Equally, Maurice Jones might've been one of the most successful figures in the music industry that few people - in or out of the industry - would've known.

It seemed to be part of the ethos, as Tim Parsons' initially explained to me: 'people don't buy a ticket because we're promoting the show' consequently if there was leverage to be had from allowing it to appear that others were behind the event (generally media companies like radio stations or newspapers), we would capitalise upon that leverage.

In retrospect, as companies continually seek to make themselves look more glamorous than ever from their tenuous associations with music, it could have been argued that we needed to add greater publicity to the ethics and excellent customer-service standards of MCP but it worked for the times and, for us, the most important thing was making the artists more successful and the events even better.

Maurice was all about this. The relationships with the artists were paramount; the loyalty he was shown by the acts he promoted was a great recognition of this. The market has moved on and now it's often about who is the highest-bidder, but the people that Maurice worked with had a tremendous amount of trust and respect for him. The same was true of the fans, the people who bought the tickets. Having created the 'Monsters of Rock' Festival at Donington Park, Maurice would always go up to the camp-site on the night before the show and have a drink and chat with the fans.

One of my enduring memories of Maurice was as a passenger in his Merc as he drove at speed around the Donington track, and of regularly sitting the other side of his desk as he'd smoke one of many cigarettes and tell me about the next tour he had planned.

In retrospect I now know that I learnt more from him than I ever thought at the time. If he gave me a job to do he trusted me to get on with it, there are few bosses - before or since - of whom the same could be said. He had a quiet but overwhelming authority, a dry sense of humour, and an imposing presence. The music business is a lot poorer from the absence of characters like Maurice Jones.

It troubles me that we only realise these things when forced to do so, often as a result of someone's death. We all could, and should, try to show some more respect to those who helped us to become the people we are - friends, family or employers. Letting them know now may be a great deal more beneficial to them than waiting until they're gone