by John Niven
LC: Have you ever been in The Zone?
JN: Just twice. (And while it was The Zone for me, the scores I shot would still have professional golfers thinking about early retirement.) I shot my personal best round of 79 at a course called Williamwood just outside Glasgow a few years ago. I was just finding all the greens and sinking everything. I hit a wedge 130 yards over water to about three feet. I think if it hadn’t been for one lost ball I’d have shot maybe 76, which is what a 3 or 4 handicap player might shoot on that course. Obviously I came to the final green needing to hole a slippery six-footer to break 80, which I’d never done before. Normally I’d have missed by a mile, as I’m the world’s biggest choker. But not that day—straight in. The other time was when I shot 81 on a much tougher course: Doonbeg, a Greg Norman–designed links in County Clare, southwest Ireland. This is the funny thing about being in The Zone: the moment you realize you’re in it, you’re fucked. I played the first seven holes in one under par and started thinking, “Christ—I’m not putting a foot wrong here.” As soon as I even thought that, I shanked two irons off the tee at a short par three and would up making a seven there! I came back from it a bit, but if it hadn’t been for that, I could have shot 76 or 77 on a very tough layout. That’s why it astonishes me when you see the pros managing to stay in The Zone for four whole rounds over the course of a tournament. It’s hard enough for most of us to do it for four straight holes.
“That feeling of almost omnipotence you get when you connect perfectly with a golf ball is hard to describe…. You might only be able to make that happen once in a blue moon, but you really do get hungry for that feeling.”
LC: Juxtaposition is fun—golf and gangsters makes sense, golf and crude language makes sense, but it’s quite a leap to the masturbation. Where did that stroke of genius come from, if you don’t mind me asking?
“This is the funny thing about being in The Zone: the moment you realize you’re in it, you’re fucked.”
JN: Well, like many men of my generation, I grew up slightly obsessed with the 1980s BBC documentary John’s Not Mad, about a Scottish kid with Tourette’s syndrome, and I always knew I wanted to work it into a novel somewhere. I had the initial idea for the book, which was “world’s worst golfer suffers a brain injury and somehow develops the perfect swing,” and then I thought it might be fun to give him Tourette’s as another side effect. As it says in the novel, if you stand on a golf course with the wind blowing in the right direction, you might be forgiven for thinking half the population had Tourette’s! You really do hear some very passionate, creative swearing on golf courses. Now my girlfriend’s brother is a golfer and a doctor. He’d done a stint in neurology, so I put the basic premise to him and said, “Could something like this happen?” His response was basically “We know so little about the brain and brain injuries that nearly anything is possible.” There are lots of cases of people sustaining head injuries and coming out of comas with skill sets they never previously had. Then he said to me, “Have you heard of Klüver-Bucy syndrome?” It’s a condition that was first observed in monkeys that had been partially lobotomized: they became hugely oversexualized, constantly masturbating and trying to have sex with anything that moved. It’s very rare, but the condition has also been documented in humans who suffer certain types of head injury. I’d already decided to seed in the novel that Gary was very frustrated sexually because his wife is having this affair and not sleeping with him, so I started thinking, “Well, can I give him both these things?” The answer, obviously, was “Yes, I can!” Authors are, of course, total sadists.
LC: Despite your cynical foul-mouthed front, I detect a strong value system with family and friendship at its core. Or is this just my reading and the characters are purely comic?
JN: Well, coming off the back of Kill Your Friends, I’d decided I wanted the next book to be much lighter in tone, breezier if you will. I’ve compared it to going from the set of Apocalypse Now to a Bill Forsyth film. I also knew I wanted the Scottish location: I’d written a novella set in upstate New York in the 1960s (Music from Big Pink) and one set in London during the mid-to late 1990s (Kill Your Friends), and I felt it was time to write something set in the world I grew up in. I actually had the idea for The Amateurs while on holiday in Ireland in the summer of 2005, before I wrote Kill Your Friends. But I put it off, partly because I knew it was going to be more challenging technically—third person as opposed to first, four main characters whose story lines had to intertwine in the right way, and so on—and also because ideas generally need a few years to percolate away at the back of your mind before they’re ready to write. (I finished Kill Your Friends in December 2006 and started The Amateurs in January 2007, and it was finished by June 2008.) It’s actually a far more autobiographical novel than Kill Your Friends. A lot of the family stuff in there is drawn from my own life, particularly Gary’s relationship with his late father on the golf course. If you’re a son whose father teaches you golf and then they die, there are things that never leave you, that you feel acutely on the course—even more so when, like myself, you have a son who is now starting to play golf. I suppose the best way of putting it is that, like many atheists, I only really think of the dead watching over me when I am doing something I imagine would have pleased them. Many times when I’m playing golf and I pull off a good shot, I’ll find myself glancing heavenward in a silly and sentimental fashion. My father died sixteen years ago, and one of the best things about writing the novel was getting to go to my study every day and spend some time in his company again. Which is also one of the great privileges of being a writer.
LC: I bet you never thought you’d write a feel good novel…
JN: Hopefully it’s a feel-good novel with a certain spikiness and grit to it, but yes, you’re right. No one was more surprised than me. Sometimes books, like children, turn out how they want to without much regard to your input.
“If you’re a son whose father teaches you golf and then they die, there are things that never leave you, that you feel acutely on the course—even more so when, like myself, you have a son who is now starting to play golf.”
Read on
John Niven interview: Chip off the old block
This article appeared in Scotland on Sunday, March 22, 2009.
JOHN NIVEN has moved from the hectic heyday of Britpop to the more sedate arena of golf, creating a novel that would have made his father proud, he tells Aidan Smith.
When John Niven was a spotty teenager he thought he knew everything, and one thing above all else: that his home town of Irvine was the pits. Before the great day dawned when he could pack his rucksack, he joined a CND march in defiance of the manager of the local shopping center. “The manager was my dad and I can still see him striding towards us, Embassy Regal stuck between his snarling teeth,” says Niven. “He went absolutely mental.”
Niven, who left Ayrshire to become a useless pop talent scout and is now a successful writer of black comedies on the back of his rockbiz blunders, then tells another story about the “pompous little shite” he used to be: “The last time I saw Dad alive he was in hospital. He was watching Hell Drivers, a crummy B-movie about truckers, on TV and reading the Daily Record. This seems scarcely believable, but I actually said: ‘Dad, you’ve not got long to go—don’t you think you should be imbibing the culture a bit more?’”
These yarns might suggest that John Jeffrey Niven Jr., now forty-one and author of pop exposé Kill Your Friends, endured a difficult relationship with John Jeffrey Niven Sr.—far from it. “I left the hospital to go on holiday thinking I’d see Dad again—he had cancer of the esophagus—so I was devastated when he died. But there was nothing left unsaid between us, we were very close and he knew I loved him.”
We’re in London’s Landmark Hotel, next to Marylebone station, an old Niven haunt from the dog days of Britpop (“Alan McGee was based here with Oasis”). After too many nights when he couldn’t remember being in the Landmark, he moved out to rural Buckingha
mshire. His father didn’t live to see his eldest son become an A&R man, blowing the chance to sign Coldplay and dismissing Muse as no-hopers as well. He doesn’t think Dad would have enjoyed the sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll of Kill Your Friends, even though lots of others did, including one star-maker who bought thirty copies to sign for friends, so convinced was he that the character of Steven Stelfox was based on him (untrue).
But Niven is more confident his father would have got to the end of the follow-up, The Amateurs, an Ayrshire-set story of golf and family ties stronger than Tiger Woods–approved tungsten. This book is dedicated to him, and to Niven’s own son—and with ubiquitous Regals and a Bing Crosby–style bunnet, its hero’s dad is based on the old man. “What a fantastic job it is to be a writer,” says Niven. “Dad died sixteen years ago but every day working on this book I could go to my office and commune with his spirit. I’m spending time with him still.”
“[Niven’s] father didn’t live to see his eldest son become an A&R man, blowing the chance to sign Coldplay and dismissing Muse as no-hopers as well.”
The Amateurs is equal parts sentimental, violent (there are gangster executions), and hilarious, with municipal-course hacker Gary Irvine emerging from a coma after being struck by a wayward drive to find he can play like a golf god, albeit one with a bad case of Tourette’s—and bloody hell, if he isn’t romping the Open Championship with twenty pages left. Niven says he had the idea for the book prior to Kill Your Friends, but surely it goes way back to Irvine, the town, and to boyhood fantasies of a mashie niblick with magical powers.
“There were some summers when every boy in Ayrshire seemed to be playing golf and my dad taught me,” says Niven. “But he was a terrible teacher—of everything. Learning to drive with him almost killed me. He was the world’s most impatient man, awful short fuse. He had high expectations of me, and seemed to think I should have been able to do everything instinctively better than him, and I guess I’m like that now with my son. It’s one of the many ways I’m turning into Dad.”
Niven ditched the golf when he discovered punk rock (“It would have ruined my image”) and started showing his frustrations with Irvine: in his eyes, it was a town which produced ball-bearings, forklift trucks, and closed minds. He escaped to Glasgow, having been pushed by his father as the first in the family to win a university place, and earned first-class honors. He’s since revised his opinion of Irvine: “It was the time of Thatcher, so lots of wee Scottish towns were bleak. And all my pals were in bands and at least trying to be creative.”
“‘What a fantastic job it is to be a writer,’ says Niven. ‘Dad died sixteen years ago but every day working on this book I could go to my office and commune with his spirit. I’m spending time with him still.’”
His father was older than his friends’ fathers, and twenty years his mother’s senior, but Niven was never self-conscious about this. “At school parents’ nights, the teachers assumed he was my grandfather, but I loved his wisdom and his humor, and so did my pals,” he says. “He was the spitting image of Sid James and his nickname was ‘the Sid.’ One time, when we were big into the leather trousers, the lads were round at my house and he appeared wearing mine with his oldest string vest. He looked like everyone’s dad in the Village People.”
Niven has revised his view of golf as well and is back playing when he can with his son, though the opportunities to thwack the dimpled pebble in Buckinghamshire—where a game is five times more expensive than Ayrshire rates—are limited by parental duties now that he has a baby daughter, and of course the burgeoning writing career.
The next book will be a collection of short stories, and Niven is twenty thousand words into another novel, about Christ’s second coming. Then there are the screenplays: both Kill Your Friends and The Amateurs are set to be turned into films while an original script, titled Roadkill and yet another black comedy, has just been sold to Hollywood for a sum he describes as “obscene—I’m too embarrassed to tell you how much.”
He isn’t the only Ayrshire lad who’s stood on a grassy mound, looked out to sea, and dreamed of America. For him, the writing dream would never have come true if he hadn’t wasted ten years being self-important, decadent, and ludicrous. “I seemed to be intent on lobotomizing myself,” he says of that time. And to think John Niven once scolded his father for reading a tabloid.
“The writing dream would never have come true if [Niven] hadn’t wasted ten years being self-important, decadent, and ludicrous.”
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PRAISE FOR
Kill Your Friends
“I loved Kill Your Friends. Who didn’t? Scorched earth humor at its finest.”
—Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X
“Brilliant. It made me ill with laughter. The filthiest, blackest, most shocking, most hilarious debut novel I’ve ever read.”
—India Knight, author of My Life on a Plate
“Darkly hilarious…. The American Psycho of Britpop.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Kill Your Friends is the most exciting British novel since Trainspotting.”
—Word magazine
“Kill Your Friends is a pitch-black comedy that’ll leave you exhilarated, exhausted, and feeling a bit dirty—in a good way.”
—Anthem
“A very dark, viciously funny novel.”
—Booklist
“Like the product of an unholy union between Bret Easton Ellis and Martin Amis, John Niven has delivered a gleefully amoral morality tale, set in the manically unprincipled world of the music business at the height of Britpop…. Through a whirl of drugs, violence, and unashamed sexual deviance, the reader is alternately shocked and left crying with laughter.”
—The Bookseller (London)
“Sensationally naughty…. John Niven’s wicked debut novel Kill Your Friends savagely satirizes the music industry—and strikes the right nihilistic note for troubled times.”
—The Daily Beast
“American Psycho meets The X Factor in an orgy of mad, gleeful nastiness. A sustained spew of gothic nonsense, blackly lampooning the stupid, hypocritical world of the music industry, it’ll probably make you go deaf, but you’ll be having too much fun to care.”
—The Guardian (London)
“To call John Niven’s Kill Your Friends a satire on the music industry is a wicked understatement. It is an all-out assault, a withering, scabrous, and often repulsive attack on every part of the filthy machine…. Stelfox is a creation of unparalleled awfulness, chronically sexist, racist, and everything else-ist. He is funny, too…. You laugh though you know you shouldn’t.”
—The Independent (London)
“Hilariously dark and satirical.”
—Library Journal
“Steven Stelfox, the anithero of Niven’s debut novel, is an A&R psycho…. He shares key traits with Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman: a large disposable income, extreme shallowness, a soul as moribund as a licked-clean coke wrap, and a somewhat casual attitude to the well-being of his fellow humans. But where Bateman is as cold and sharp as a sushi knife, Stelfox is viscerally livid, spewing bile over all he sees as he shags, snorts, and slaughters his way through 1997. The delight is Stelfox’s irredeemably poisonous, often hilarious, and utterly filthy inner voice.”
—The London Paper
“Brilliant satire on the Britpop generation, as increasingly desperate A&R man Steven Stelfox resorts to murder to shore up his failing career and keep his nose powdered. It hits all the right notes.”
—Mirror
“Vitriolic good fun that’s frighteningly believable.”
—The Onion A.V. Club
“This is not for the easily offended, but readers with at least a slightly deranged bent will have a ball.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A vicious, black-hearted howl of a book…. A realist
ic portrait of the music industry, doing for it what The Player did for Hollywood. Having spent ten years in the business, [Niven’s] insider knowledge, coupled with the kind of headlong, febrile prose that would have Hunter S. Thompson happily emptying both barrels into the sky, results in a novel that is cripplingly funny in the way that only the very darkest comedy can be.”
—The Times (London)
“A dazzling comic novel…. This book is fantastically funny. The humor isn’t so much dark as dismally black. No one is to be trusted; no one is to be liked. And yet have violent sex with prostitutes, excessive use of drugs, and attempted murder ever been this entertaining?…Buy this book and give it to your friends. Five stars.”
—Time Out (London)
