DANIEL GELLER, DAYNA GOLDFINE: PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN (2026)

June 10, 2026 GUARDIAN interview with Asher

Pop star, producer, manager, and confidant to legends

This breezy documentary is rich in the lore of the British and American pop music of the sixties and seventies and beyond. It focuses on a man who was at the center of that industry and is still around to tell of it. A lot of the film draws from a stage presentation Peter Asher puts on today that dramatizes his life in the world of music over many decades.

Asher is most known as a producer. But from 1962 to 1968 he was a pop star himself as half the English close harmony duo Peter and Gordon. He and Gordon Waller met as classmates at Westminster, a famous English public school, where both were students. In their performing they, like many, emulated the Everly Brothers, which they did unusually well: their voices blended and harmonized beautifully. They were called to perform November 15, 1964 on the Ed Sullivan Show on television, at the time the hallmark of pop stardom. They were a screaming hit: see their performance of "Five Hundred Miles" on YouTube. They were part of the "British Invasion." They discovered that the American audience was incredible.

Then Paul McCartney became the boyfriend of Asher's sister Jane. For a while Paul was living with them. Peter and Gordon had a huge hit written by McCartney, "World Without Love." They had other massive hits, including other ones written by McCartney not mentioned here. McCartney's taking refuge in the Asher house led to several famous Beatles songs been composed or first performed there. (McCartney and Lennon wrote "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" in the Asher family’s basement.)

Peter was one of three red-headed siblings, Peter, Clare and Jane, who had acting roles when young. Peter wore glasses, but he was a natty dresser. Peter and Gordon's time in the limelight corresponded with the heyday of Swinging London and the moment when Carnaby Street was the capital of hip style for men. In one performance we see Peter wearing tight dark pants, an extravagantly neck-to-waist ruffled white shirt, and a dressy silk jacket imprinted with a large paisley pattern. The red hair and the dramatic black glasses frames serve to set off his look further. He was not handsome, but he was young, and he had dash. As men's styles became more extravagant, he went with it.

Riding on Peter and Gordon's moment of fame Peter, along with Barry Miles and John Dunbar, in 1965 started a London bookstore and separate gallery, which they called "INDICA." (The storefront signage was simple and striking.) Their aim was to be a fresh cultural influence and a gathering place for the counterculture. It was not a financial success and was forced to close in the autumn of 1967. The gallery famously hosted a show of the work of Yoko Ono that is where she and John Lennon first met. Asher is also responsible for Marianne Faithfull meeting Mick Jagger, which ended Marianne's marriage to artist and gallery owner Dunbar.

INDICA was a covert reference to cannabis, of which they partook generously. Other drugs were to follow, and when James Taylor met Asher he was coming from rehab off heroin and he was in and out of it for years, including in California. Later Linda Ronstadt comments on the harsh effect of cocaine, and other interviewees offer opinions on drugs, but this isn't about that. Asher's personal story is apparently unusually free of drug and sex scandals, not that he was not a witness to wrecked lives of artists from multiple causes.

Asher was a part of the British Invasion; but after Apple Records became chaotic he migrated to America in 1969, where he was to work with and consort with major pop stars as a producer and manager on the West Coast. James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt are the most notable ones he worked with closely, highlighted here.

In 1968 Asher became A&R head at the newly formed Apple Records Apple Records when he became a producer. He shortly brought the American singer James Taylor, who had newly migrated to England, to the label. Taylor became a musical star of the seventies - he appeared on the cover of the March 1, 1971 Time Magazine with the caption "The New Rock - Bittersweet and Low." But they had left Apple and moved to California with their families with Asher as Taylor's manager and Taylor signing with Warner Bros. The center of attraction for the region, musically and socially, was the Troubadour nightclub on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.

Peter Asher worked closely with Taylor, as a detailed recent chat with the singer songwriter himself makes clear. Tall and handsome, with long black hair, Taylor in the late sixties looked like a musketeer and was a dreamboat. He also wrote songs people remembered and played a simple, plangent guitar. Asher helped find him a pianist whose plain, direct keyboard style fit: Carole King. Carole King and James Taylor became an iconic musical pair, blending King's energetic piano-driven melodies with Taylor's delicate, soulful fingerpicking guitar style. Their fifty-year friendship and creative partnership significantly shaped the post-1970 singer-songwriter era - and Asher was their manager and their friend. He made certain that Taylor toured and performed a lot and reached an audience directly. Taylor's second album, Sweet Baby James, Feb. 1970 for Warner Bros., was a massive commercial success.

On the back of this LP album, we see, Asher made a point of listing all the backing musicians and session players involved (and the backs of LP albums, unlike CDs, you can actually read). This was unusual at the time. The result was that all those musicians got long, successful careers, off the album and its success, thanks to Peter Asher, who produced it. Practices of listing artists improved, we are told, as a result of innovation by Asher.

There were too many other significant stars associated with Asher to list, but among them were Cher, Randy Newman, Diana Ross, Andrew Gold, Morrissey, Elton John, Steve Martin, Robin Williams and Neil Diamond. The big discovery after James Taylor was the versatile and fiery Linda Ronstadt, who, we learn, threw so much energy into live performance that she had difficulty touring. Concert footage vividly illustrates this - though who would think Mick Jagger could survive his kinetic performances for six decades?

Carole King wrote a lot of good songs too, notably the classic, "Natural Woman," which we glimpse her performing. A pop music documentary is never complete without a post-retirement reunion, and that happens here, with Peter Asher and Gordon Waller getting together again in 2005 and 2006. Sadly Gordon died in 2009, halting this renewed collaboration. But Asher has been performing with a long roster of substitutes (rapidly glimpsed here) for his partner's voice parts in nostalgic performances. These became a part of the talk-and-sing show reviewing the "everywhere man's" long pop-centric career that is the springboard of this film.

Lots of archival footage is augmented by interviews with James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, Kate Taylor, Lyle Lovett, Natalie Merchant, Marianne Faithfull, Paul Jones, and Danny Kortchmar, some of the performers Asher has produced and been a friend to. Cultural icons heard from include Steve Martin, Eric Idle, Twiggy, and Pattie Boyd. Collaborators and friends (and relatives) interviewed include Jane Asher, Waddy Wachtell, Lee Sklar, John Boylan, and Paul Shaffer. The Beatles' Paul McCartney is also heard from in a voiceover interview.

Indeed, all the extraordinary show-biz personalities introduced in this film tend somewhat to overwhelm the story of Peter Asher. But this is a difficult balancing act, because they are after all the main reason why we're interested in him. Geller and Goldfine are an experienced San Francisco documentary team (they also made Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song ]) who do an excellent job of sketching the outlines of a complex story. This is a must-see for fans and students of the pop music and personalities of the sixties, seventies, and thereafter.

Everywhere Man: Peter Asher, premiered at Telluride Aug. 2025. Distributed by Greenwich Entertainment, it opens in US theaters Jun. 19, 2026.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.