I am going up to Sydney today (for the third time this week) to the Golden Stave lunch. It has been going for 30 years!

Amazing...

It started when I was managing The Saints in the UK and Neil Warnock the Chairman of The Agency invited me to a music business charity lunch in London.

I had already decided to return to Australia and had accepted a position as Managing Director of ATV Northern Songs - which owned all the Beatles copyrights - great catalogue!

After going to the lunch in the UK, I thought, "wouldn't it be great to do something similar in Australia?" Part of the rationale was that in Australia the music publishers and the record companies could not have a decent conversation between them about the issues that faced the industry as a whole. All they could do was fight over the crumbs of what the statutory rate for a mechanical license should be. It was tragic.

I thought, if you could get all the parties focuses on an exterior issue, perhaps they could learn that being in the same room at the same time was not that difficult.

So one of the first things that I did when I got back to Sydney was to have a chat with Kent Atkinson, who was in the advertising business, and a close friend, and incidentally also on the board of Paraquad. He was the only person that I knew that was involved with a charity. I told him the idea of running a charity lunch and asked if Paraquad would be interested in being the recipients of whatever money we could raise. He thought it was a great idea.

Then I called up a few people in the music business and asked if they would be interested in putting together a committee. I think that the first committee comprised of Peter Hebbes, Jack Argent and Ross Barlow. I am not sure whether Kent was on the committee or was an observer from Paraquad. Ross was the token record biz guy.

Anyway, we put together an event, held it at the Sebel Town House, got John Singleton to be the guest speaker (he was great), and after taking out the costs of the food we had about $2,500 left over - which went to Paraquad.

Paraquad was delighted. They had never had someone raise money and give it to them without taking a percentage of the funds raised before. And the music industry was, I think, a little bit shocked, that it could get together and do something that was truly charitable and selfless.

Now thirty years have gone by and the Golden Stave Foundation raises every year somewhere in the region of $800,000 net which is distributed to charities that focus on the needs of children.

I resigned from the board of the organization some years ago. I am not an administrator of things. I am an ideas guy.  But I take great pride that I was the instigator of the Golden Stave, along with Ross, Jack, Peter and not to forget some of the other people who got on board very early on and added their energies to the concept. People like Barry Chapman, Michael Chugg, Brian Harris, Graham Fear and a lot of others...