Music executive Amanda Ghost: she’s the boss — but don’t call her ‘bossy’

Amanda Ghost knows both sides of the schism between talent and suits in the music industry. She used to be an artist, releasing a hyped album in 2000, but after it failed to sell the suits refused to release its follow-up. She took up songwriting for others, co-writing James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful”, one of the bestselling records of the 2000s. Beyoncé’s duet with Shakira, “Beautiful Liar”, was another of her chart-toppers. She also co-wrote Shakira’s single “Gypsy”.

In 2009, the Londoner was picked as a left-field choice to lead Epic Records in Los Angeles, a division of Sony Music. Her stint as president was a rocky experience, lasting less than two years. The US record exec suits reacted badly to the Limey talent who had been catapulted into their midst. She left in 2010 amid gossipy accusations of unprofessional behaviour, a corporate downfall almost as sudden as her rise.

“I’ve seen it all, done it all, got the T-shirt,” Ghost says of her picaresque life of hits and misses in the music business. Her actual surname was Gosein and is now Cameron: she kept her Ghost stage name after retiring from the stage. She sits on a sofa in the top-floor office of a converted townhouse in Marylebone, central London. A photo of her with Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks is among the pictures on a mantelpiece. Back in her singer-songwriter days, Ghost’s husky singing style garnered comparisons to Nicks.

The office is the headquarters of her production company Unigram, which she set up in 2010 with her television producer husband Gregor Cameron. Their business partner is one of the most powerful figures in the music business: Leonard Blavatnik, the Ukrainian-born billionaire who owns most of Warner Music Group.

Unigram operates across different branches of the entertainment industry. Its ethos is the opposite to the silo mentality that Ghost says she encountered when she led Epic Records in LA, where the various suits of film, TV and music were all failing to talk to each other.

“You’re really not allowed to go outside your box at these corporations,” the 47-year-old says. “But I always wanted to do more than music. I believed we would move into a world in which you would no longer be in music, film or TV, you’d just be in content. There’s a real gap in the market for someone who can help bring these different formats together.”

This was the prospectus that she outlined to Blavatnik in order to get his support. Their meeting came after Ghost stayed in a luxury hotel that he co-owns in Buenos Aires in 2011, which she was visiting at Shakira’s behest during a tour by the Colombian star. Ghost explained to Blavatnik that she wanted to run a company that worked across different media, with music at its core. “Go do it,” he told her.

“She impressed me as someone who has valuable business experience, creativity and a vision for the future of music and entertainment,” Blavatnik says by email. His conglomerate Access Industries provides the capital for Unigram’s productions, although Ghost insists that he is not just a moneyman.

“Len truly is a creative partner in the business. Maybe because he’s not so much in the weeds, he can really give that big-picture view to what we’re doing. Because we have that luxury of working with someone who is funding and who is heavily creatively involved, we are just making something we think is brilliant. We’re not thinking, ‘How are we going to pack them in on Broadway on a Friday night?’” 

Their first big production was a 2015 film adaptation of John Niven’s novel Kill Your Friends, a satire about the UK music industry set during the 1990s Britpop boom that failed to set the box office alight. Unigram is named as an in-joke after the fictional record label in the film, a cocaine-addled vipers’ nest of back-stabbers and cut-throats.

Current projects include Tetris, a feature film about the Soviet creation of the 1980s video game that will show on Apple TV this year. They are also producing a musical theatre adaptation of The Great Gatsby due to open in New York in 2024, co-composed by Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine. 

Ghost originally put the idea for Gatsby to a reluctant Welch. “No, I don’t want to write a musical: I don’t like musicals,” was the response. But Ghost persisted. “I don’t know anyone, Flo, who can tell a story with beautiful poetry like you can with lyrics,” she recalls telling the singer. A few months later, Welch called out of the blue to say she had written three songs for it. 

My father always said to me, you’ve got to work twice as hard. Once because you’re a woman, twice because you’re brown

“The unique thing about Unigram is my relationship with musical artists I have worked with,” Ghost says. She prides herself on being a creative, not a suit — although she found the music business fascinating when she was herself a performer. “I was probably the only artist who read my recording contract,” she says.

She grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in the outer London borough of Enfield. Her mother came to London from Gibraltar, while her father had moved from Trinidad. A driving instructor who also worked in construction, owned shops and founded a textile company, he drummed an entrepreneurial will-to-succeed into Ghost and her two older sisters. 

“My father always said to me, you’ve got to work twice as hard. Once because you’re a woman, twice because you’re brown,” she says. A backdrop of racism blighted her upbringing. A neighbour displayed white-power National Front posters, dog excrement was pushed through the letterbox, people spat at her on buses and told her to “go home”. She experienced “terrible institutionalised racism” at an almost all-white school.

“Only people who look like me and grew up where I grew up will understand it,” she says. “The idea of success to me was always about getting away from where I came from, having enough money so I didn’t have to worry about food or where I had to live.”

Her successful second act as hitmaker for the likes of Blunt, Beyoncé and Shakira led to the Epic Records presidency. The label’s market share went up under her watch, but her surprise appointment was controversial. After her 2010 exit, a hostile profile in the Hollywood Reporter depicted her as a marijuana-smoking livewire with “a penchant for profanity and a reputation for unpredictable, sometimes violent outbursts” — all of which Ghost adamantly denies.

“I am so fed up of seeing women labelled aggressive and bossy and domineering and abrasive, and men who have those same qualities get promoted to be CEOs of music divisions globally. I’ve had enough of it and I want to see it change,” she says.

She recently heard tell of a male record executive complaining: “I can’t bear Amanda Ghost, she’s so aggressive.” “And I’m like, yeah but if I was a man you’d give me a raise. Being aggressive is standing up for yourself and not lying on the floor and letting someone kick you in the face. Especially if you’re a brown woman.”

The artist-turned-exec bridles at these schisms, deeper even than the one between talent and suits. “Success to me is being able to be artistically pure in my endeavours,” she says. “As long as I continue doing that, I’ll never fail.”