by John Niven
“How was Rage by the way?” Trellick asks me.
“The usual.”
“And the album?”
“He reckons it’ll blow our tits off.”
“Mmmm, odd that.”
“I know. Pompous cunt. Just out of interest,” I say, lowering my voice, “for argument’s sake, ”
“Go on.”
“Let’s assume the new Rage album is a pile of shit. Unsellable.”
“Assume away.”
“What’s that going to do to Schneider’s position?”
“Death row. Game over.”
“So if, when, Schneider goes…”
“Who’s in the frame for Head of A&R?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s not fucking rocket science. It’s either you or Waters, or they go out of house.”
“Do a Duke of Wellington on Waters.”
“Pros: a couple of years older than you, a little more experienced in making albums, the rank and file think he’s a nice bloke. Cons…he’s a lazy, brain-dead, cocaine addict with the attention span of a fucking gnat who hasn’t had a hit record in donkey’s.”
“So he could get the job?”
“Definitely.”
I try to run a few Waters-as-my-boss scenarios through my head: Waters shouting at me because we’ve missed out on some deal. Waters calling me into meetings, locking me out of meetings with important managers and heads of departments, Waters sending me off to, I don’t know, fucking Stoke on a Saturday night to see some band. But I don’t get very far with picturing any of this, because a crimson mist keeps closing in, a skull-charge of blood keeps dimming my vision. I feel faint. Sick.
Trellick looks at me and realises exactly what I am thinking. “You know what they say, young Steven. It’s not dog-eat-dog around here…” He drains his glass.
“I know,” I say, finishing the aphorism for him, “it’s dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known.”
“Any more for any more?” Trellick says, pointing at my glass, signalling with a drinking motion to Darren and Leamington behind me.
“Wifebeater,” I say.
“Rockschool,” say the other two.
Trellick gets the Stella and the Jack and Cokes in.
♦
Three AM and we are ruling this fucking place.
We’re in a big, tasteless nightclub somewhere on the outskirts of Cannes. It must be 120 degrees in here. We’ve commandeered our own chunk of the packed dance floor right in front of the DJ booth and we are going bonkers.
Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’ pounds at festival volume from the massive sound system. There are about fifteen of us now, with waifs and strays. I’m leaping around with an ice bucket on my head, Trellick is down on his knees on the dance floor, playing air guitar, Darren is spraying champagne all over the place, Ladbroke is stretched out against a pillar, nearly unconscious.
Schneider and I split another pill and we’re all shouting along to ‘Born Slippy’, which gets mixed into something else which gets mixed into something vaguely familiar—tribal drums, lolloping bass—and we’re all grooving along to it for a minute before—whump!—the chorus drops: “WHY DON’T YOU SUCK MY FUCKING DICK!” The entire room goes absolutely fucking nuts. By the time it gets to the second chorus everyone is singing along. Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I’m staggering off the dance floor, pushing my way through dancing, singing idiots, trying to find an exit, pawing in my hip pocket for the Nokia. Someone puts an arm around me and shouts, “Hey, Steven! Is this the record you’re signing?”
“Yeah. Done deal.” The lie is automatic.
“Congratulations, mate! Fucking tune.”
Darren looks like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I pull him close and—still smiling—scream in his ear, “Weverbally agreed the Jacking deal today. OK?”
He nods and I stumble off towards an exit, dialling Rudi’s number. It rings a few times before going straight to message. “RUDI!”—I bellow over the roar of a thousand people screaming “WHY DON’T YOU SUCK MY FUCKING DICK!”—“IT’S STEVEN. JUST TO CONFIRM—WE DEFINITELY WANT THE RECORD! ‘SUCK MY DICK’? WE WANT IT! CALL ME WHEN YOU GET THIS!”
I hang up and lean against the wall, catching my breath. The door to the main room opens and some kid I know from EMI wanders out, gurning, with sweat pouring off him and some sour-faced stick-insect cow dressed in nothing but a thong and some duct tape over her nipples on his arm.
“All right Steven?” he says. “Fucking tune this, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, fierce.”
“Graham was quick off the mark, eh?”
“Uh?”
“Graham at Sony. He signed this record tonight.”
“Yeah?” I swallow.
“Yeah, he was cracking the champagne in the Barracuda with Rudi Gertschl—”
“Excuse me.” And I’m off.
♦
This is the problem with chasing hit singles—it’s such hard fucking work. And you have to chase them all the time. If you’re going to rely on singles to perk up your bottom line then you have to have a lot of them; four, five, six every year.
This is why I must soon find an act that will sell albums. Smack an album into the top ten that stays there for a year or two and you start generating proper turnover. Making real money. You can start to do less work. (You’ve been watching, you know I’m overworked.) This is why a little fucker like Parker-Hall is revered in A&R terms: he has signed a bona fide platinum albums act. Who are cool and credible to boot. The mother lode. True, the fluky, chancing prick just happened to be in the right place at the right time but who gives a fuck; he is respected as a ‘music guy’—the ultimate A&R accolade.
I’m not. Which is why I’m pulling myself out of bed at ten in the morning and, pausing only to throw up, dialling the Martinez with trembling fingers. Some rude, inefficient French switchboard bumbling goes on for a couple of minutes before the receptionist comes back with, “I am sorry, sir, that line is engaged.” I tell her—with some emotion—that it is a matter of life or death that Mr Gertschlinger rings me back as soon as he is off the phone.
I crawl across the room and rack up a twelve-quid bill in forty seconds by swallowing three mini-Cokes from the minibar. Everything is mini except for my hangover, which is most definitely fucking maxi. I struggle to place the hangover on my personal Richter scale. Eight? Nine? I try to remember how the previous night ended, but it’s like I fell asleep watching some movie and I’m trying to recall where I saw it up to. Then I throw up again.
Breathing hard, I rub my pulsing temples and look around. There’s a pool of vomit on the floor, a rusty streak of blood on the white sheets, pieces of glass from a broken champagne bottle scattered all over the place, and a woman, a hooker I guess, looking at me from the bed. Other than that the room seems to be completely normal.
The hooker—who is black and fat—starts talking to me in French. I don’t get all of it, but the gist seems to be that I still owe her money from the night before, for some unspeakable extra I must have made her perform. I ignore her, lost in wondering exactly how I’m going to pin the blame for us not signing Rudi’s track on Darren. The phone rings and I snatch it up.
“Hello?”
“Schteeven? It is Rudi.” He sounds formal, almost stern, and immediately I know it is bad.
“Rudi, listen, I—”
“I know. I got your message this morning. I am sorry to tell you this, but I have done the deal with Sony.”
Fucking Nazi cunt fuck shit. “But, Rudi, I told you I—”
“Come on, Schteeven, we are big boys. These things happen.”
I close my eyes and ask him, “Have you signed the contract yet?”
“As good as. We have a verbal agreement.”
Thank Christ. “How much?”
“Schteeven, it doesn’t matter now. I shook hands on it with Graham last n
ight. As you know, I am a gentleman. A man of my word.”
“Come on, Rudi, how much?”
“There will be other records, my friend.”
“How much?!”
“Sixty,” he says, almost sounding embarrassed.
“I’ll see you in half an hour,” I say, hanging up.
The hooker gets to her feet, wincing, and tiptoes gingerly towards the bathroom. She’s clearly having some trouble walking, and I notice a couple more streaks of dried blood on the backs of her legs and buttocks. Her tone of voice is properly angry now and it dawns on me that I must have been going absolutely bananas last night.
♦
The Barracuda is a Cannes institution. You go into the main bar—a black, windowless hole just off the Croisette—and drink yourself senseless for a few hours, ordering bottles of champagne at two hundred quid a pop, before asking for the ‘special vintage’. Your credit card is whisked through the machine and you are charged for another bottle that doesn’t appear. Instead, you get ushered through to one of the little back rooms where one of the waitresses hunkers down and slides your balls into her mouth, the waitresses being, in fact, top-notch ostros. Hookers. The Barracuda is the music industry in microcosm: the guys are out front dancing around with champagne glasses on their heads while the girls are chained up in the back, gargling with spunk. The best part of it is that the credit-card receipt still reads ‘champagne’, rather than ‘vicious blow job’. Consequently, every MIDEM there is a steady flow of company plastic over the Barracuda’s bar. Last year, when Trellick finally left the place after a seven-hour session, staggering into the dawn clutching a bottle of bubbly and a sheaf of Amex slips totalling three and a half grand, the only people left were the cleaners and a few ‘waitresses’ rubbing their aching jaws. As the madame held the door open for him she playfully thrust her hand between his legs, grabbed the aching, drained raisins he had instead of balls, and huskily intoned, “Sexos machines!”
“I am sorry for the, ah, mix-up, Schteeven,” Rudi is saying.
“Hey, don’t worry about it. We got it fixed.”
“I know. You know I always want—ach! Softly, baby, softly!”
“I understand, Rudi, Graham made you an offer and, ah…”
“Ja, ja! I was only trying to…ach, ah gut!”
Rudi and I—both paralytic—are sprawled on facing sofas in one of the back rooms drinking champagne. I take a long swig and look down: an absolutely gorgeous French girl of maybe twenty-one is trying to take her tonsils out with my cock. She looks up and makes perfect eye contact with me for a second or two before her dark brown eyes flip upwards in their sockets and she moans softly, as though my sour prick tasted like cherries and ice cream. Through the beaded curtains that serve as a door we can hear the roar from the bar drifting down the hallway.
I lie back and shut my eyes. We closed the deal with Graham Westbourne calling Rudi’s suite the whole time going nuts and upping his offer. Trellick has the signed contracts in his briefcase and Darren has been comprehensively briefed on the need for utmost secrecy as to why my indecision has cost us thirty thousand quid.
Actually, we’re now in kind of scary territory—a proper bidding war and a sixty-grand deal for a one-off single means you have to have a proper hit. Number 18 is no use to anyone. This stupid, dreadful, novelty record will have to be top five, minimum, for me to walk away with any kind of aplomb. Top five and we’ll make the cash back purely from licensing the utter piece of shit onto dozens of Now That’s What I Call A Total Insult To Fucking Humanity, Vol. 32 type compilations.
But this is all to come. Right now, tonight, we got the record and the competition didn’t. This can be savoured for a day or two before you have to worry about turning the fucking thing into a hit.
I become aware of Rudi, only a few feet away, chanting “Ja! Ja! Ja!” as he starts to come. I sit up and watch him roar a final “JA!!!” as he blasts a jet of hot Teutonic semen into the bobbing French head, which flies back as though a shotgun has gone off in its mouth: “Ahhgroooughh!” she says.
After a moment Rudi gets up and zips up. We chink flutes over the head of my girl and I watch him—this gentleman, this man of his word—tooling off through the beaded curtains, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, while his waitress crawls to the corner where, retching and coughing, she spits his cum into a wicker waste-paper basket.
Going home in the morning, I think.
February
Thanks to the Spice Girls, Virgin has an 88.9% share of the singles market. Mark and Lard are confirmed as the new hosts of the Radio 1 breakfast show. EMI’s share price is in the toilet. Blue Boy and Vitro are hot new acts. NoDoubt have a N°1 single. Alan McGee is preparing to launch the debut album by 3 Colours Red. He says, “By the second or third record we’ll sell five million. I’m serious. They’re going to be huge.” Some guys get done for killing that black kid, Stephen something. The Brit Awards happen.
Four
“A woman’s two cents is worth two cents in the music business.”
Loretta Lynn
Everyone is up and out of their seats and table-hopping now. The thrum of conversation is rising and no one is listening to the Bee Gees, who, incredibly, are still onstage about thirty yards away, cranking out the greatest hits for the tolers watching at home. Their nerve-shredding harmonies keen out over the disinterested crowd of executives and flutter up into the darkness, disappearing into the steel-and-concrete roof of Earls Court. It’ll probably sound fine on television though.
I lean back in my chair, away from my cold, untouched dinner—salmon, broccoli and new potatoes—and pinch the bridge of my nose. I inhale hard and there’s a pop in my ears as the rock of coke dislodges and shoots down the back of my throat, pleasingly strong and bitter. I loosen my tie and wash the glob of chang down with lukewarm Chardonnay and pretend to listen to Desoto while I scan the crowd for someone better to talk to: Lucian Grange from Polydor, Keith Blackhurst from Deconstruction, Nancy Berry from Virgin, Colin Bell from London Records and Matt Jagger.
Ferdy Unger-Hamilton from Go! Beat is talking to Derek, Pete Tong and some guy from Island. Unger-Hamilton has his arm around Gabrielle, her statuette for Best British Female Artist on the table in front of them. Rob Stringer is laughing his head off as he talks to one of the guys from the Manic Street Preachers, their awards on the table next to them. Frank Skinner, Vinnie Jones, Simon Cowell from BMG, some soap star, one of the Trainspotting guys and Geri Halliwell. The singer from Kula Shaker and Sony’s Muff Winwood. Geri from the Spice Girls totters by, a bottle of champagne in one hand and the cheeks of her (massive) arse spilling out of the bottom of the ludicrous Union Jack minidress she wore for their performance. I wave to some girl I vaguely recognise, Anita or something. I think she’s an A&R coordinator over at BMG. She’s wearing a tight black dress, kind of Chinese-style with gold patterning, split right to the top of her thigh and slashed deeply between her breasts. Her hair is cut in a short bob. Normally she dresses kind of indie, I guess—T-shirts, trainers, jeans. She waves back, blowy me a kiss. Hello.
“Oi, loser!” Trellick claps me on the leg, shouting over the music. “Listen. This is good.” I turn back and lean in between Trellick and Desoto. Behind them Ross—our Head of Marketing—and Waters are heckling the Bee Gees. Ross is in his early thirties, tall with a businesslike crew cut.
“Right. Strap yourself in,” Desoto says, leaning forward. Desoto—a lawyer, a friend of Trellick’s—is coke-sweating, his rugby-player bulk straining against the seams of his suit. His fine brown hair is shorter now than it used to be. Until a few years back he kept it pretty long but he felt, rightly, as he approached fifty, that it was getting a bit undignified.
Desoto went to Harrow, then the Bar, then, briefly, the City. When he figured out that life in the square mile meant that you had to get up in the morning and actually work for a living he soon gravitated towards music industry law. He made a fortune. Then he lost it.
“A couple of weeks ago I put an ad in Music Week for a new PA.”
“You’re firing Sophie?”
“No. Listen,” Trellick says.
“I put the ad in and made it non-specific,” Desoto continues, “it just said ‘major music industry lawyer seeks PA blah blah blah’. The response is Off. The. Fucking. Scale. I get something like fifty replies in forty-eight hours.”
“Sen-say-shunal,” says Trellick.
“So I go through the CVs, checking out the dates of birth to make sure they’re all under thirty, and ring six of them back.”
“But you’re flying blind at this point, no?” I say.
“Correctos, but you have to figure that out of six at least one of them is going to be doable, no?” We both nod. “So, I arrange for them to come in for interviews, different days, all at the close of business, around five thirty. Now,” he pushes his glass towards Trellick, who is pouring the three of us more champagne, “I kick off by saying to them that I’m really sorry but it looks like I won’t have a job to offer any more.”
“Why not?”
“Oh,” he waves a hand, “because my original PA just decided that day to stay on.” A bit of bread flies past me. Ross.
“But,” I intone slowly, beginning to see where Desoto is going with this.
“You’ve got it. But, she’s probably going to leave in about six months, so if they’d still like to have a chat, then in the future who knows?”
“Good work. Continue,” says Trellick, emptying the bottle and upending it in the ice bucket.
“By this time it’s after six so I—”
“Sorry,” I interrupt, “what’s the quality like?”
“Astonishingly high. Out of six there’s only one monster, two are doable and three of them are sen-say-shunal.”
