2008 - Kill Your Friends

by John Niven

  Darren comes in and starts banging on about new bands he wants me to listen to; Athletico Strip, Dragdoll, Magoo, Starfish.

  I flip through Music Week while he talks and slips cassettes and CDs into my machine. Lucian Grange has been promoted to MD at Polydor. He is only a few years older than me. This news mixes with my simmering hangover and fills me with a depth, a profundity, of sorrow I cannot adequately describe.

  “What the fuck is this?” I say to Darren, nodding towards the stereo at some tuneless pile of shite he’s stuck on the turntable.

  “Ah, the Lazies, American band. Fucking cool.”

  “It’s an insult. Take it off.”

  The racket stops and he rummages through his pile of 7 and CDs for something else.

  My mobile chirrups. “Hello?”

  “Christ, big night or what?” a thick, hoarse voice says.

  It takes a few seconds for me to register it, to believe it.

  “I…how do you feel?” I manage finally.

  “Bit rough.” He goes on for a while, talking about a gig we’re meant to be going to tonight, some band called Bellatrix at the Bull and Gate and finally I hang up, numb.

  I’m thinking a couple of things. 1) Fucking worthless Thai Valium. 2) From the sound of things it is not that unusual, it is not completely out of the normal run of things, for Waters to wake up naked and covered in his own shit with a thrumming butt-plug up his arse.

  Like Freddie, or Jason, or Michael Myers, he is probably unkillable.

  The greenery of Oxfordshire blurs past the tinted windows of our people carrier. Derek is shouting on his mobile, ranting about some artwork he’s unhappy with. Ross taps away at his laptop while Dunn, Nicky, Waters and I read the trades. Schneider has headphones on, listening to Christ knows what on his Discman and trying to act relaxed.

  We’re all headed to the Rage playback. No one’s heard a note yet, but the album will be a key summer release for us among what is a pretty thin-looking release schedule and expectations are running pretty high.

  We bowl through the studio—where wine, beers and nibbles have been laid on—and into the control room where Rage, Fisher and two engineers are waiting. Rage sits in a huge leather chair at the centre of the mixing desk.

  The first thing I think as he swivels round to greet us is—fuck me. His nose is dewy and leaking, his eyeballs vibrating marbles, his left leg stutters and pumps uncontrollably, his jaw is locked forward and set hard, frozen by cocaine. Ross and I exchange a quick, incredulous look.

  “Right,” Rage says once we’re all seated on two huge leather sofas at the back of the room, glasses of warm Chardonnay in hand. An engineer hits ‘play’ and Rage moves a trembling hand towards a fader, pushing it all the way up.

  ♦

  Forty minutes into the thing I sneak a look around at the expressions on display. Most people just look blank. Ross is fighting laughter. Derek looks like he might burst out of his seat and kill someone at any moment. Schneider’s face is harder to read. It is buried in his hands.

  The first five or six minutes of the song were simply annoying—a hi-hat pattern and some abstract tweeting sounds. Somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark a bass line arrived and Rage began conducting the music with his hands, his eyes closed, lost in some mad rapture over this abortion he’s created. People cross and recross their legs, sip their wine and pray for it to end. But it doesn’t. It just keeps on going—drum loops clattering randomly, snatches of vocals, jarring keyboard stabs.

  As the track approaches the one-hour mark and nothing has emerged that vaguely resembles a hook, or a chorus, or a recognisable melody, it collectively dawns on us that we’re listening to the sonic representation of someone’s mind coming apart. On a positive note I’m thinking that I must get the name of Rage’s dealer, because the chang the cunt is getting his hands on is clearly fucking phenomenal.

  In the end I simply stare at the red, digital numbers on the tape counter, watching the minutes, the money, Schneider’s career, tick away. The counter reads ‘64.33’ when it all finally ends in a mad, juddering flourish, like the crescendo at the end of ‘A Day in the Life’, played on broken computers by mongoloids. Rage has his hands extended, trembling, his forefingers pointing skywards as he wrings the last notes out of his cocaine-induced hallucinatory mind-orchestra.

  I look over at Schneider. He has tears in eyes. He is finished and he knows it.

  Rage swivels around in his chair to face us. “It’s called ‘Birth’,” he says.

  Of course it fucking is.

  It gets better when Rage corrects our assumption that we’ve just heard the whole album, segued together in its entirety. No, he tells us that this will be a single, the first single to precede the album in fact, that he will not allow an edit of any sort, and how pleased he is that we’ve been the first witnesses to the world’s first drum’n’bass opera. Then he runs off to the toilet. There’s a lot of polite nodding and words like ‘interesting’, ‘radical’ and ‘challenging’ get thrown around.

  The second we’re all inside the people carrier and the driver slams the door shut Schneider turns to Derek and says, “Look…” It will be his longest contribution to the conversation for some time.

  “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE! THREE AND A HALF MONTHS IN ONE OF THE MOST EXPENSIVE STUDIOS IN THE COUNTRY AND WE DON’T HAVE A FUCKING THING! I’M TELLING YOU RIGHT NOW THAT THERE IS NO WAY ON EARTH THIS LABEL WILL EVER RELEASE A FUCKING NOTE OF ANYTHING WE HEARD TODAY! HOW COULD YOU LET IT GET TO THIS? HOW?”

  Schneider tries to speak but Derek’s already on the phone to Trellick at the office, telling him to get Rage’s contract out and firing questions at him. What’s the unrecouped balance? How cheaply can we get out of the deal? Can we, in fact, make any case for suing Rage for breach of contract for delivering material which is so blatantly uncommercial? Is there a sanity clause?

  Janette from press leans forward and pats Schneider comfortingly on the knee. “Actually, I quite liked it,” she says quietly, but he doesn’t reply. He just goes on looking out of window as we thread our way back along country lanes towards the M40. Dead Man Staring.

  ♦

  Danny Rent brings his girl band, Songbirds, in for a meeting.

  The four of them sit bunched up on my office sofa, scowling and chewing gum, looking like they’ve been kept back in class. Three of them are white and one black, but the white girls all act like Kaffirs—they kiss their teeth and click their fingers and say things like “seen?” They’re all aged between seventeen and twenty, all lookers—one of the white girls in particular (Denise? Sonia?) is stunning—but with that working-class whore look. They’re genetic time bombs, DNA-Semtex. Every one of them will explode into monsterism the minute they hit twenty-seven. They’re all dressed the way these girls dress, tits busting out of T-shirts made for newborn babies and low-slung combat pants which allow their thongs—pink, black and lemon—to jut way up above the waistlines. I mean, they look like they’d let you do anything to them these girls; fuck them in the arse and punch them and stuff.

  We’re watching a ‘video’ Danny has had made, to try and sell them to record companies—the four of them, dressed in cheap, nasty, high-street clothes, grind their way unsteadily through a really tacky R&B number.

  The video finishes.

  “Mmmm,” I say, “who are your influences then?”

  Silence. They shift uneasily. I realise they do not understand the question.

  “Steven’s saying,” Danny butts in, “what music do you like?”

  Another gargantuan pause. “Ip op?” says a brunette, uncertainly.

  “Madonna,” says the blonde.

  “Good,” I say, nodding, “good.”

  “Ere, mate,” the black boiler says, “Danny says you signed Rage. Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I lie and they all murmur approval.

  “Wot’s e loike?” one asks.

  “Rage? He’s great. Really clever guy.”


  Another long silence. “So,” the blonde one, the really attractive one says, fingering a trainer lace and nervously looking up, making eye contact with me through her fringe, “what chew fink of our stuff then?”

  What do I think? I think you look like the worst sort of sink-estate, single-mother, benefit-fraud trash imaginable. I think that your ‘music’ is about the biggest insult to humanity since a roomful of Nazis first cooed over the blueprints for Auschwitz.

  But I’m also thinking that, if we bring in real songwriters, session musicians and a decent producer, if we throw suitcases of money at stylists and hair and make-up artists, if we hire world-quality photographers and video directors, if we get personal trainers in and manage to keep you all off the KFC and the vodka for a few months, if we can find someone to teach you how to speak properly, if we spend eye-popping sums on retainers for press officers and pluggers, and if they can somehow convince enough journalists, radio programmers and TV producers that you’re not really talent-free sluts who would gobble a donkey just to meet Chris Evans, that you are, in fact, ‘the real deal’, then maybe, just maybe, with the wind behind us and a couple of breaks, I think we could probably sell a few fucking records.

  “I think it’s great,” I say, getting up and showing them out. I mean, it might be worth a pop.

  Girl power, innit?

  Rebecca is holding a phone towards me. “It’s Barry from club promotions.”

  “Barry?”

  “Steven, hi, I got the club reactions in on ‘Why Don’t You…’.”

  These are A4 sheets, like little report cards that all the club DJs fill in to tell you what they reckon to the track.

  “Well?”

  “Ah…” In a nanosecond my blood turns to antifreeze.

  “Barry?”

  “Yeah, they’re all right. They’re all right.”

  All right? Just all right! This is bad. This is very fucking bad.

  ♦

  We have a second ‘Why Don’t You’ marketing meeting. It is markedly different from the first. Dunn kicks off.

  “Sorry, Radio 1 don’t think it’s for them. If the record had been bigger at club then we’d have some ammunition. As it is…” He spreads his hands.

  Barry pipes up, “It just seems to be the kind of record that…we’ll need a bit of radio before we can get a lot of the commercial club DJs to pick up on it.”

  Hannah: “MTV quite liked the video. But they’re not going to playlist it until we get some radio.”

  Through all of this Derek just glares at me. With the video (hastily shot, at my insistence) we have spent well over one hundred thousand pounds on this turkey. Turkey? That’s an insult to turkeys. It’s a fucking dodo.

  Ross: “No point in doing much advertising or a big poster campaign until we’ve got some awareness at radio and TV…”

  Suzy: “Not much interest at press, I’m afraid. We’re getting reviewed in Mixmag.”

  Nicky: “I’m afraid there’s not much I can do with this at the moment.” She tries to look sympathetic but the bitch can hardly keep the smile from creasing her fat fucking face in half.

  Finally Derek hits critical mass: “ARE YOU TELLING ME WE’VE SPENT OVER A HUNDRED FUCKING GRAND TO GET A FUCKING REVIEW IN FUCKING MIXMAG?! JESUS CHRIST!”

  I stare at the glass table—through the glass table and onto the carpeting where I uselessly notice that Dunn is wearing the same Prada shoes as I am—and say nothing. There is nothing to say. If there was something to say I’d be saying it.

  Derek hates the record. The marketing department hate the record. The club promotions department hate the record. The radio department hate the record. I want to kill Rudi, that Nazi-scumbag-fucking-child-molester-fucking-animal. In a bizarre, alchemic process perhaps unique to the entertainment industry the cancer cure I brought back from Cannes has mysteriously morphed into something closer to the cause of AIDS.

  Finally Derek looks around the room and says, with absolutely no enthusiasm, “So where do we go with this record now?”

  “Lourdes?” Ross suggests, unhelpfully.

  Sure enough it comes to pass. Schneider’s contract, due to expire later this summer, will not be renewed. They pay him off and he clears his desk out. I go for a drink with him on his last day. It is three in the afternoon and the pub is empty. Outside, rain falls lightly across Hammersmith. It’s warm though; the pub doors are open and cars sizzle by on the wet tarmac. Schneider sluices the ice around in his vodka tonic and tries to be upbeat, giving it the whole ‘best-thing-that-could-have-happened-in-a-way’ type shit. “What are you going to do?” I ask.

  “I’ve had a couple of interesting offers,” he lies. I mean, fuck. He hasn’t had a proper hit in years. He’s thirty-nine—wife and two kids—and suddenly—bosh!—it’s Goodnight Vienna. At best he might land a sympathy job with some reissues label, hawking back catalogue and farting about trying to secure the rights for Eddie and the Hot Rods live LPs. As he craps on about the non-existent offers he reckons he’s had, Alisha’s Attic, then Kula Shaker, then Mansun blare from the jukebox. It dawns on me that they are all bands that Schneider (and, by extension, me) either turned down or failed to sign in the past year or two. All of whom are having hits now. Any one of them might have saved him. But he went with Rage. The man who put it all on red…

  “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I told Derek they should make you Head of A&R.”

  Fuck. Support from a loser like Schneider can probably only weaken my case right now. “Really? Thanks. What did Derek say?”

  “That they’re probably going to give it to Waters.”

  He drains his glass, bangs it down on the wet mahogany, and signals wearily for another. “Sorry,” he says, not looking at me, “bad timing there with that record of Rudi’s.”

  ♦

  Sometimes you need to act fast. You really do. “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow,” and all that crap.

  The celebration for Waters’ promotion began in the fifth floor bar at Harvey Nicks at lunchtime with the whole of the A&R department plus Trellick and Derek. From there onto Quo Vadis for dinner and then Soho House before Waters and I—absolutely smashed beyond human belief by this point—ducked out and caught a cab up to Camden, to see some useless band who are playing at the Dublin Castle. We last two songs before we hail another cab on Parkway and—stopping briefly outside the house of a dealer we both know in Chalk Farm, where we score three more grams—head back to Waters’ flat off Westbourne Park Road.

  “You know how much I respect you,” Waters says, sniffing and screeching out big lines on the big mirror while I pour the vodka. “I don’t want you to feel that you’re suddenly working for me. We’re working together.”

  I close my eyes and swallow about a quarter-pint of neat Stoli.

  “I want to try and build the kind of culture where…” Waters goes into an idiotic rhapsody about bis ‘vision’, about the kind of A&R culture he plans to establish at the label. Words like ‘organic’, ‘Chris Blackwell’, ‘synergy’, and ‘John Hammond’ are freely tossed around. His stupid fucking dog snoozes at his feet while he snorts and sweats and theorises. The conversation drifts and rambles, landing on the subject of Great British Songwriters, the kind of people Waters wants us to sign. Waters is struggling for actual names. I mention Paul Weller.

  “Uh, yeah. He…he writes most of his own stuff, doesn’t he?” Waters says, his head thrown back as he sucks a gooey wad of snot and gak down his throat.

  CDs are scattered all over the place; on the low coffee table, the sofa, the floor. I pick one up at random, to have something to read while Waters craps on—he’s now literally talking about how his daddy laughed when he fell off his bike when he was nine, or some fucking thing—and find I’m holding a copy of the last Prodigy album, Music for the Jilted Generation. I open the gatefold inner sleeve and stare at the painting which covers both panels. Or rather ‘painting’. The crude piece of artwork depicts a raver—long
, straggly hair, trainers, sweatshirt, etc.—who is standing on one side of a dark chasm. On the other side of the chasm a huge group of riot police are wielding truncheons and Perspex shields. Their faces are obscured by the black visors of their hehnets. On the raver’s side of the chasm is an idyllic green field with a sound system, a DJ and other ravers dancing around blissfully. The sun is shining. Back on the other side, behind the coppers, is a dark industrial city: hulking tower blocks, ominous skyscrapers and factories retching sulphur into the blackened sky. The two sides of the chasm are connected by a rope bridge, which the coppers are preparing to cross, clearly in order to give the raver a good fucking beating. But hang on, the raver is holding a sabre to the rope bridge, about to sever it and thwart their plans. He is also giving the coppers the finger. The quality of the actual painting is appalling—like some handicapped kid’s O-level art project.

  Waters looks up from shaping more lines and peers over my shoulder. “Good that, isn’t it?” he says.

  I stare at the picture, dumbfounded, for a long, long time. All I can think about is how much—if you were somehow forced to live in the world depicted on the Prodigy sleeve—you’d want to be on the coppers’ side of that chasm; in the filthy city with its casinos, hookers and petrol stations. Its five-star hotels, sex shops, nightclubs and banks. I am also filled with a great and unexpected affection for Britain’s riot police.

  I look up at Waters. “How?”

  “What?”

  “How is this picture good?”

  “It’s…y’know. It’s got a message.”

  “What fucking message?”

  He craps on with some anti-Establishment balls for a while as I sit there getting angrier and angrier. To calm myself down I try and think of all the words I know for cocaine—gak, chang, nose-up, bag, beak, charlie, krell, powder, chisel, bump, posh, bugle, sniff, skiwear, schniff, Bronson, Bolivian, toot, junior (crack is called senior), chas, nonsense, bounce, blow, Vim—but it’s not working.