With its range of skills and services overlapping the functions normally carried out separately by pop-management firms, production houses, record labels and business consultancies, 19 is an unusual, as well as an unusually successful, business. About 60 of the 80 people that Fuller employs at Ransome's Dock are women - and he insists they are not there to look good, type and make the tea, or because they are cheaper to hire, as is often the case in the music industry. He likes women because they are 'harder-working and more loyal'. Most of the people who work for 19 turn out to be old friends, former colleagues, or in the case of Kim Fuller - who scripted the Spice Girls movie and is writing one starring the American Idols Kelly and Justin - his brother. At a birthday bash Fuller threw in Putney in west London earlier this year, the invitees divided into two groups: the people whose wages he pays and those whose services he sells. 'I'm the opposite of a networker. I don't easily trust people,' he says. 'This is all about family and friends.'
Fuller grew up in Hastings, a faded seaside town on England's south coast where his father was the headmaster of a primary school. He went to the local comprehensive where his favourite subject was history, an interest he retains because 'to go forward you have to look backwards'. In his case, history means the television programmes of the 1960s, shows like Opportunity Knocks, The Monkees, and those variety entertainments that once featured so prominently on the schedules at Christmas. Just the sort of thing he is reinventing with 19. History also means the big-band music that his father, a big Sinatra fan, used to play on the stereogram at home, and which he sent the UK Pop Idol finalists out to play on tour after the series ended. 'The song and the singer was what it was all about once upon a time, and that's been overlooked recently,' he says. He yearns for the pre-rock era when singers sang, writers wrote, managers managed and so on. He says he quite likes U2 and Radiohead as bands but thinks Bono and Thom Yorke have got pretty crummy voices.
While he was in the sixth form, Fuller began promoting gigs on Hastings pier and managing local bands. One of them featured a fellow pupil at his school, Andrew Smith, the former rock critic of The Sunday Times. 'Simon wasn't allied to any particular music,' Smith recalls. 'He didn't know much about managing either, but he was a tremendous wheeler-dealer, very good at filling our gigs. With him it was always, ÔI'll make my own parameters.'' This boldness applied equally to his social life. 'Simon always went out with the most attractive girls, and when we asked him how he did it he would say, ÔI just go and ask them.''
After leaving school he worked as an A&R man, or talent scout, for the Chrysalis label. While there he discovered Paul Hardcastle, an electronic keyboardist whom he decided to manage. In 1985, Hardcastle had a huge No 1 with a record about the Vietnam war, Nineteen: a title Fuller adopted - and with characteristic loyalty has retained - for his management company. In the next 10 years he had his ups and downs. His first big up came at the end of the 1980s with Cathy Dennis, a singer and songwriter from Norwich who had a string of international pop hits. They were an item for six years. After Eurythmics split, he took on Annie Lennox, whom he calls 'a genius, a phenomenal singer, spiritual beyond anyone I've ever met', but who is also, he claims, chronically insecure. 'She'd always worked with Dave [Stewart], never been on her own. I gave her confidence, which is a daily battle for her, strangely.'
Both women are still on 19's books and remain his close friends.By the mid-1990s, with Dennis's career temporarily becalmed and Lennox in semi-retirement, Fuller's 19 Management was drifting into the red. Luck, judgment and a £20,000 gamble on an all-girl pop group who wanted out of their relationship with the men who had assembled them changed everything. The Spice Girls swiftly turned Fuller from a struggling manager with a staff of two into a pop impresario - the Brian Epstein, some suggested, of the 1990s. He turned them into Britain's biggest musical export since Dire Straits, and the most heavily marketed and widely merchandised pop phenomenon since the Beatles. The pairing lasted for 31/2 years, and its messy end has never been explained. On the eve of the release of the group's second album they sacked him, amid rumours that they were irked by the welter of product endorsements - from crisps to Polaroid cameras - that Fuller had organised on their behalf; that he was a control freak; even that he had been conducting a clandestine affair with the band member Emma Bunton.
The legal terms of their severance have kept everybody's lips buttoned, but the fact that four of the five Spice Girls have since approached Fuller to manage their solo careers (only Mel B has kept her distance) suggests there are no hard feelings. Fuller has, so far, only agreed to take on Emma, the one he regards as best-liked Spice. Of the original break-up he will only say: 'It will always feel unfinished, the one little smudge on my CV, but it was understandable, really. Five girls with two really strong characters, Mel B and Geri, locked in a love-hate thing, was always going to be a handful. So much had happened so fast. I was full of ideas and, in the nicest possible way, I dominate. And there were these young girls who just wanted to be famous and rich and have a laugh. When it all got serious, the fun went out of it.'The criticisms of his sponsorship arrangements still rankle. 'They were about exposure rather than money. If Pepsi would spend $40m running a commercial for the group, hallelujah! It was about using their money to make my group more famous.' Without this financial assistance the girls halved the production costs of their world tour, which he had conceived as a Madonna-esque extravaganza and wanted to make into a film. Even in its slimmed-down form, the tour lost money.
Fuller says he foresaw Geri Halliwell's departure and thinks they missed a big trick by not auditioning for a replacement. 'I would have loved to orchestrate that. But without me they couldn't acknowledge that any of them was replaceable, because that would have meant they were replaceable too.' He calls their third album 'a huge mistake, totally fed up. They made an R&B- sounding record because that's what people of their age like, which was fatal. Geri was more cunning in trying to capture the old sound in her solo stuff, but she can't sing, so she was restricted by her own limited talent'.
For Fuller, the parting was a 'defining moment' that caused him to travel around the world for a year and take stock. On his return in 1998 he started hiring more staff and designed another teen pop project, S Club 7. As with the Spice Girls, Fuller's aim was to collar an audience via saturation bombing, in their case using the vehicle of a television soap. This time, though, despite auditioning the members himself, he didn't get so personally involved. 'With the Spice Girls, there wasn't a single row that I wasn't at the centre of, pulling them off each other. With S Club, I chose them to be nice people, but I don't know them as well as I did the Spice Girls. And I don't want to. I don't think I'll ever get as close to anyone again as I did to them.'
As the S Club 7 show began its steady global advance, reaching 104 countries in its third series, Fuller had an even better idea for a television programme: a talent contest for singers where the viewers, rather than the judges, decided the winner - a modernised, poptastic version of another TV memory of his youth, Opportunity Knocks. Initially, nobody was interested. 'The main objection was, ÔWe're not sure public voting will result in the right talent winning.' And I think that's rubbish. People like to paint people such as myself as the ones who create everything, market it and ram it down the public's throat. But that's not the case. I think the public choose a lot more than we like to admit.' One of the senior executives who turned him down, for London Weekend Television, was Nigel Lythgoe. But at the beginning of last year, with Pop Idol finally commissioned, it was Lythgoe who was hired by Fuller to take the project forward.
Unusually for someone operating in the shark-infested waters of popular entertainment, Fuller has remarkably few known enemies. None of the record-company executives he professes to despise will say a bad word about him - which perhaps isn't so surprising because when he delivers them a finished recording, by Will Young, Gareth Gates or whomever, he is granting them a licence to print money. The Idols have already sold close to 10m albums and singles in 2002. Aside from that rift with the Spice Girls, he has never fallen out with any of his artists and, tellingly for a man who is now worth well over £100m, nobody has ever tried to sue him. But honourable as he is, there is a steely ruthlessness in Fuller's strategies that clearly makes him a tricky customer. It seems fitting that this skilled negotiator has never entered into one particular contract where a degree of give-and-take is required on a regular basis: marriage. He is, by his own admission, 'a stubborn swine' who could probably teach Iain Duncan Smith a thing or two about quiet determination, and as a result he can come across as high-handed. When Fuller demanded that Will Young be allowed to sing both sides of his first single on Top of the Pops, the producer, Chris Cowie, refused on the grounds that the show has never allowed one act to perform more than one song. 'Selfish, arrogant and greedy,' was Cowie's published comment on the affair.
Fuller eventually backed down. 'I don't like confrontation. I'm not a battler. I'm the opposite,' he says.There is not much time at present to enjoy the fruits of his labours. Unlike the other Simon of Pop Idols fame, the show's acid-tongued judge Simon Cowell, Fuller does not choose to be seen out and about in the company of fast women and fast cars, escorted by bodyguards. While based in LA he has been known to enjoy the odd weekend in Hawaii, and when he's back in England he likes to get away to his villa in the south of France, where he will often hold brainstorming sessions around the pool with members of his inner circle at 19. Unattached, he is perfectly happy on his own, he says, cohabiting with his plans and ideas.Contrary to the general perception, not all of these are pitched at the level of Idol-style reality-TV shows and carefully packaged teen pop. He is very excited by the forthcoming Annie Lennox album and has high hopes for a young singer-songwriter he manages called Amy Studt, 'because I think there's a real lack of feisty and original young performers at the moment'.
Cynics might blame Fuller himself for encouraging this scarcity. But he firmly believes in the limits of his own power where impressionable minds are concerned. Tracking the changing patterns of behaviour in the young, particularly females, is his abiding fascination. 'If ever there was a time not to be a boy it's now,' he says. 'Girls are smarter, more conscientious and they grow up faster. The eight-year-olds are like 12-year-olds used to be. Whereas boys are still boys.' With S Club Juniors he is trying to get inside the heads of an even younger audience, 'because four-to six-year-olds really love music and, apart from Bob the Builder, which isn't just about music, nobody has properly addressed them before'.
Another audience, more revenue streams and more carping, no doubt, from those who distrust Fuller's uncanny ability to foretell what we - or quite a lot of us, anyway - really, really want. This won't bother him, because in Simon Fuller's world business is pleasure but it definitely isn't personal. He knows better than most what a powerful drug celebrity is, and he never touches it himself.
'I hate to read what other people's view of my vision is,' he says equably. 'In an ideal world it would be great if everyone knew who Simon Fuller was, but didn't know what he looked like, like Egon Ronay. How cool would that be?'
