Music

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.LONDON — Eric Hall, Britain’s most extravagant soccer agent in the 1980s and ’90s, often confessed that he knew little about the sport.Many said that was his greatest strength, even if it also led to the occasional mishap: He once negotiated a bonus for a player on the condition of scoring 10 goals, only to learn afterward that the player was a goalkeeper.To negotiate more lucrative deals for his players, Mr. Hall would watch British soap operas on Saturdays while games were aired, but would still write down how many goals his players had scored. It was the sort of strategy that propelled his role in the explosion of large-sum transfers in the early years of the Premier League, England’s top-tier competition.Mr. Hall died on Monday in London. Michael Hall McPherson, his nephew, who is also an agent, said the cause was the coronavirus.Known for his catchphrase, “Monster, monster,” his love of cigars and his dazzling outfits, Mr. Hall had honed his negotiating skills in the music industry by promoting the likes of Queen and the Sex Pistols, and later applied similar codes to the rapidly changing world of British soccer.“He took showbiz into football and looked at players as stars, which they weren’t really yet in the mid- and late 1980s,” Mr. Hall McPherson said. “And in the negotiation room, he was a lion.”Mr. Hall was born on Nov. 11, 1947, in East London. He quit school as a teenager and went to work at a store on London’s Denmark Street, known for its recording studios and music shops. There, he befriended and packed parcels with Reg Dwight, who would go on to become Elton John.Mr. Hall later worked as a publicist for the British record label EMI, promoting rock bands like T. Rex and Queen. In 1976, he arranged a television appearance for the Sex Pistols that gained lasting notoriety when the band’s guitarist used an expletive against the show’s host, a rare action at the time.The agent long claimed that Freddie Mercury had written the song “Killer Queen” about him, even though Mr. Mercury himself had said the tune was about a call girl. “The truth is, I’ve been telling that story for so long that I’m not really sure myself, but Freddie would’ve loved it either way,” Mr. Hall McPherson recalled his uncle saying.His uncle had always been attracted to showbiz, Mr. Hall McPherson said. “He became famous from creating celebrities, but he preferred to be the celebrity himself.”In the mid-1980s, Mr. Hall left the music industry and, in a career that spanned over a decade, represented dozens of soccer professionals, including Chelsea midfielder Dennis Wise; Neil Ruddock, who played for Tottenham and Liverpool; and Terry Venables, who managed England’s national team.Mr. Hall also negotiated large salary increases for players and helped pioneer the creation of appearance fees, branding rights and other bonuses.In 1997, he fell into a coma for three months and was given a diagnosis of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, a rare blood disease. His list of players dwindled, and a new generation of influential agents like Jorge Mendes and Mino Raiola rose to prominence.Mr. Hall never really recovered in the soccer world. But he remained a fixture of Britain’s entertainment scene and since 2013 had hosted a weekly show on an independent radio station in East London.Mr. Hall is survived by a brother and a sister.“He lived for showbiz,” said Mr. Hall McPherson, his nephew. “And his life was a bit of a show.” More

One truism of the music business in the 21st century: AC/DC will sell a ton of albums, no matter the prevailing digital format.“Power Up,” the Australian hard-rock heroes’ first LP in six years, has proved that correct once again, opening at No. 1 on the Billboard chart ahead of a new streaming hit by the rappers Future and Lil Uzi Vert. “Power Up” had the equivalent of 117,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen Music, almost all of that number attributed to copies sold as a complete package — otherwise known as albums, a format that AC/DC has plenty of experience with, selling some 200 million around the world over the last 45 years, according to the band’s label, Columbia.Selling old-fashioned LPs has indeed become more difficult in the digital age. That has been the conventional wisdom for years now, and AC/DC has happily done its own thing, collecting plenty of platinum along the way. The band refused to sell its albums on download stores like iTunes until 2012, and eschewed streaming until three years after that.“Power Up” sold 111,000 full albums in its opening week. According to Billboard, 71,000 of those were CDs, while 23,000 were digital downloads and 16,000 were vinyl. For the $49 deluxe version of the CD, AC/DC took a page from Tool, the prog-metal band that made a surprise return to No. 1 last year: The album comes in a collectible box that displays AC/DC’s classic band logo in flashing neon, and plays the opening riff to its new song “Shot in the Dark” on a built-in speaker.“Power Up” is the band’s 17th studio album, and the first since the death of its founding rhythm guitarist, Malcolm Young, in 2017 — though he and his brother Angus Young, the lead guitarist, are credited with writing all the songs. It is widely available on streaming services, but the album drew just 7.8 million clicks in its opening week, the lowest streaming number for a No. 1 title since Celine Dion’s “Courage,” which opened with 3.8 million a year ago.Still, “Power Up” is only AC/DC’s third No. 1 album, after “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” from 1981 and “Black Ice” from 2008. Amazingly, the band’s 1980 megahit “Back in Black” — which has sold 25 million copies in the United States alone, according to the Recording Industry Association of America — peaked at No. 4 in the United States.Also this week, Future and Lil Uzi Vert’s “Pluto x Baby Pluto” started at No. 2 with the equivalent of 105,000 sales, almost all from streaming (136 million clicks), with just 5,500 copies sold as a complete package.The country singer-songwriter Chris Stapleton opened at No. 3 with “Starting Over,” while Ariana Grande’s “Positions,” the top seller for the last two weeks, fell to fourth place. Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon” is No. 5. More