In pride of place between the awards and vinyl from 45 years working with Madonna, Keith Richards and Rod Stewart hangs a picture that Barbara Charone treasures above all.
“The greatest night of my life,” says the public relations impresario, pointing from her desk towards a signed photograph of the Didier Drogba penalty that decided the 2012 Champions League final.
Charone has invited Telegraph Sport to her St John’s Wood office where she still brokers deals for music’s biggest names to explain how she landed a surprise key role in the Todd Boehly-led Chelsea takeover bid.
The A-list anecdotes come thick and fast, and help illustrate how her love affair with Chelsea is the real deal. She failed to get Madonna interested after handing her son Rocco a Chelsea shirt with his name on the back in the early 2000s, but “Rod’s a proper football fan,” she explains. She recalls one trip with him in April 1991 to Stockholm where the rocker was shooting a cover for Rolling Stone magazine. “It was a weekend and he had me reading the scores from the newspapers,” she says. “Chelsea for some crazy reason had lost 7-0 to Nottingham Forest. I read him the results but I didn’t say the Chelsea score, and then the next day, he just called and shouted ‘7-0’ and hung up. He’s proper.”
Charone was brought up in Chicago watching baseball and tennis, but her interest in football and Chelsea traces back indirectly to her befriending Richards in 1977 in Toronto, after he had been charged in Toronto with intent to traffic heroin. She then spent the next two years working on an authorised biography of the Stones’ guitarist and songwriter. “He was letting me use his house in West Wittering outside Chichester,” she explains. “He wasn’t there so I spent probably a couple months transcribing tapes. The only thing on was Midweek Sports Special on ITV that was of any interest. I started watching football, and as soon as I went back to London, which was at the end of the season in the late 70s – I started to go to Chelsea because I lived on Sloane Street and it was the nearest ground.”
By 1981 she had a season ticket in Stamford Bridge’s East Stand, where she has remained ever-present since. Everything, she says, but her love for the club has changed. “I remember when Leeds fans smashed our scoreboard at the last game of the season,” she said of one of her earliest memories. “We didn’t even have a new one for the whole next season. We just had no scoreboard. It was just a completely different era and we kind of flip-flopped in and out of the old first and second division for about three or four years.”
Charone, who now lives in Maida Vale, counts Pat Nevin and Graeme Le Saux among friends and, before leaving the Warner Music label to set up her own firm, she helped co-ordinate the club’s 1997 FA Cup final record Blue Day with Suggs.
