by John Niven
Going outside a few minutes after this we have to pass in a line by the family. I shake the dad’s hand and tell him how sorry I am, that I knew his son through work and all that, and he just nods and doesn’t really say anything. The mother isn’t in the line-up, it’s just the dad and the sisters, one of whom looks doable: big tits strapped tightly into a black dress that’s a little too small for her and bright red lipstick on. I hug her quite hard and then I’m out on the steps of the church, lighting a cigarette in the hateful Northern air.
Ross goes off to try the office again, to see if they’ve got the midweeks yet. Trellick has to get hold of Fisher and I call the office to speak to Rebecca, to make sure she’s booked me a cab to Heathrow in the morning. (I am off to Miami in the morning, for the Winter fucking Music Conference—which is like MIDEM, but with just dance music—and then onto Texas for South by South-fucking-west—which is like the Winter Music Conference, but with indie music. They’re all the same thing: a tide of networking cunts going bananas.) The three of us stand off to one side smoking and talking on our phones as more people file out of the church and the coffin is carried out.
So. Much. Fucking. Respect.
I listen to Rebecca reminding me about connection times and check-in baloney as the coffin is rolled into the big hearse. People are scattered around crying and hugging each other. Waters’ mother is sandwiched between the two old girls on a bench. She twitches like some bar-rattling inmate from a Victorian asylum, literally demented with grief.
Wow, I think to myself, remembering the expression on Waters’ spastic face when he died, it really is something to kill somebody and create all of this.
Eight
“You can’t spell ‘star’ without A and R.”
Ronnie Vanucci
“Maybe we should go out,” someone says.
“No…I…that would be bad,” someone else says. It might be me. It’s hard to tell who is saying what because all our voices are the same now—all cracked, ghosted whispers, static crackling across the room. Fragments of several different conversations ricochet around, overlapping, out of sync, at cross-purposes.
The suite is dark, the curtains drawn, the only light coming from a couple of table lamps and the gently strobing pornography on the TV screen.
“We’ll need more coke soon.”
“The guy’s bringing it.”
“The black guy? Oh fuck…”
“Go in the bathroom.”
“And we need more fucking booze. I need a whiskey.”
“Have you heard that Stardust bootleg?”
“I can’t face him…”
“Get room service to fill the minibar again.”
“Hide in the fucking bathroom.”
“Fucking tune.”
“Oh God. I can’t face room service. I think I’m having a heart attack.”
“Hide in the bathroom, you cunt.”
“I think we should go out.”
“Fuck off.”
“Right, you cunts. I’m calling room service!” Leamington says this.
We’ve been in Miami for thirty-six hours now and I have yet to leave this room. I move across the darkened, fetid suite (we’re in the hotel, where they filmed some of Goldfinger, as someone uselessly points out every five minutes) to the window and very nervously pull the curtains a couple of millimetres apart. A thin band of intense toxic sunshine lasers across the room and, just for a second, I glimpse sky, green palms and, beyond them, the beach and the ocean before everyone is screaming for me to shut the fucking curtains. “Just…urn, checking,” I say. It is around thirty degrees outside, but we have the windows all sealed and the air con on full crank. I reach behind the curtains and open a window. Ten floors below you can hear the roar of chattering delegates intercut with splashes as people dive into the pool.
I walk about the room swinging my arms, kicking my legs, my chin tucked tight into my chest. I’m beyond wired—pure current.
“I think if I did a couple of pills I could go out,” someone says.
“That’s not totally crazy,” someone replies.
“Fatboy Slim tonight,” someone else says.
“Roni Size.”
“Where?”
“At the Cameo Theatre?”
“Fuck that.”
“We have to go out tonight.”
“Size at the Cameo?”
“Maybe we should get some hookers in.”
“No Fatboy.”
“He’s at the Delano.”
“Or strippers anyway.”
“Do you mean where he’s staying or where he’s playing?”
“Eh?”
We started on the chang somewhere over Ireland. When we landed—having raped the Virgin Upper Class bar for ten hours straight—we were met by this dealer someone knew. We got a limo and continued with the chang on the drive into town. I don’t know everyone here. There’s some guy from some indie (XL? Mo Wax? Rising High?) and a publisher kid (Warner Chappell? BMG?) and a couple of expat Brits, drug-dealer types, who someone vaguely knows who’ve attached themselves to us. Darren hasn’t spoken for five or six hours. He just sits there, rocking back and forth. At one point I made an attempt to go downstairs and register at the convention, to pick up my delegate pass, so I could attend the showcases and discussion panels (where gak and pill-lobotomised fools will ruminate on worthy topics like ‘How Will Internet DJing Affect the Economies of Former Soviet Bloc Countries?’ and ‘Is the Super Club Killing Club Culture?’). The lift doors opened and way across the lobby I could see some of the Brit contingent—Dave Beer, Kris Needs, people like that. I glimpsed a sober, businesslike Parker-Hall striding up to reception. I pressed the button for our floor again and ran back to the fucking room. “You don’t want to go down there,” I told everyone. That was, I think, sometime yesterday afternoon. The outside world now looks like an abstraction; a dream you had when you were a kid. Intangible, a few blurred images, the faintest tang of an aftertaste.
“Ritchie Hawtin,” someone says.
“Dimitri from Paris.”
“Get the Yellow Pages.”
“He shit his pants in CentroFly.”
“More coke.”
“Peanut Butter Wolf.”
“Todd Terry.”
“Carl Cox.”
“Basement Jaxx.”
I think someone is crying.
“Grooverider.”
“A case of fucking Cristal.”
“Maybe sushi.”
“Ritchie Hawtin.”
“Double-ended her.”
“Propellerheads.”
There’s a fierce, copper-style rap at the door.
“Oh fuck.”
“Jesus fuck.”
“Who’s that? Who is it?” someone asks in a whisper.
“It’s room service, you clown,” says Leamington—incredibly the only person seemingly in control—as he heads for the door.
“Fuck that. You’re kidding, aren’t you?” I say.
Three or four of us hurdle furniture, elbowing each other out of the way, as we scramble into the bathroom. We bolt the door and crouch down in the milky plastic light.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God…” someone keeps saying.
“It’ll be all right, it’ll be OK,” someone else says soothingly.
“Is this your first time in Miami?” some bloke whispers to me. I shake my head. I’m off my nut, but I’m vaguely aware that this isn’t a reasonable way to earn a living.
A long time passes. You can hear everyone’s heart beating. The tap drips.
There’s a knock on the door, Leamington’s voice, the all-clear. We open the door and creep out.
Christ.
A black waiter—a young guy, tall, thin—is standing in the middle of the suite unloading cocktails from a tray onto the coffee table. He turns and sees us. We all freeze.
“Have you got the coke?” one of the bathroom idiots says to the waiter, just seeing a Kaffir and mistaking him for the d
ealer, despite his tray, and his purple-and-black tunic and the gold name tag on his chest. And the fact that he’s clearly a fucking waiter.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m so sorry.” The black kid takes his unloaded tray, and the proffered twenty-dollar tip, and fucks off out of it, looking scared.
“You cunt,” I say to Leamington, who is laughing his head off.
“Oh God, we’re finished now,” Darren says.
“Have a drink,” Leamington says.
“Don’t you understand, it’s over!” Darren is actually becoming hysterical. “He’s going to go back downstairs and he’s going to tell them what’s happening and they’re going to come up here and they’re going to come in and—”
“Shut up and have a fucking cocktail, you twat. Here, have a Cosmopolitan.” Leamington hands Darren a gigantic Martini glass full of thin, pale blood. He seems to have ordered every cocktail on the menu.
“Do we have any fucking pills?” I ask.
“Yeah,” someone says.
“Should we switch rooms?”
“Maybe if we take some pills we could go out.”
“Have you heard that Stardust bootleg?” someone asks.
“Here.” Someone presses an E into my hand and I suck it back with a gulp of Tequila Sunrise.
“Hey, did you know they filmed Goldfinger here?” Leamington says, still laughing.
♦
That evening and the next day become what they always become: a series of blurred snapshots, random shreds of CCTV footage, shakily pixellated stills from a bootleg video I don’t remember starring in. I was dancing in the DJ booth to ‘Praise You’, clinking pills with Leamington as we both double-dropped, vomiting out of a moving cab on the Strip, throwing an ice cube across the lobby of the Delano at some DJ (Rampling? Oakenfold?), being thrown out of a DJ booth somewhere, an alleyway behind the Strip, buying glass vials of coke, buying an E that came individually wrapped in its own cellophane bag, wanking in a private booth at a lap-dancing club, the Propellerheads onstage, lying on the floor of someone’s hotel room watching a stripper do herself with a beer bottle, dawn on the beach—Leamington and I looking out to sea dumbstruck as an oil tanker the length of the Westway slunk across the horizon—a breakfast pint of rum and Coke at that bar in the middle of the hotel pool.
♦
The next morning and early afternoon are fine. I sleep right through both of them, missing both my original flight to Texas and the rebooked flight. I finally make it to the airport late in the afternoon where, of course, the flight I’ve made is delayed.
I find a quiet corner in the BA exec lounge and crumple into an armchair. The screen hanging from the ceiling silently wipes itself and unrolls the revised flight times: AA157, MIA to Houston, Texas, is now leaving at 6.10 PM
I settle in and inhale a long chain of Bloody Marys. I thoughtfully chew half a Quaalude and try to place my hangover on my personal Richter scale. Twenty minutes later, when I still haven’t come with an answer, when I still don’t understand the question in fact, it dawns on me why I can’t properly evaluate my hangover. I’m not having it yet. I’m still completely off my fucking nugget.
♦
“Sir, excuse me, sir? Are you OK?”
I look up—he’s about my age, airport uniform, concerned expression. “Uh, yeah,” I cough. Urine-temperature drool flecks from my chin. Outside, sunny Florida has vanished, there’s just darkness and lights; lines, grids and blocks of them. “What time is it?” I ask, my voice a tramp-rasp produced by broken piping, blocked air passages. There’s a modulating whine in my ears, a rising note, searching for its rightful, most painful, key.
“It’s just after six, sir.”
“Shit.” I swing into action, swivelling up and onto my feet, grabbing my jacket and scooping up my bag. The guy helps me up from the floor. “Sir…sir?”
“Which way to Gate…” I’m fumbling for my boarding pass.
“Sir, it’s six in the morning. Six a.m.”
I look at him. The whine in my ears finally finds its pitch and something pops somewhere deep in the centre of my face, some blockage behind my nose clears as a small dam bursts.
“The next flight to Houston isn’t for a few hours.”
Fucking Quaaludes. The Shermans know how to put a tranquilliser together—you have to give them that.
“Uh, sir, you’ve got a…Christ.” He’s fumbling in his pocket.
But I can already taste the blood, sharp and salty in the back of my throat, as it begins its warm, oddly pleasant, cascade across my top lip and spatters down onto the T-shirt I’m wearing. The T-shirt has a picture of Al Pacino as Tony Montana. He’s holding a huge fuck-off gun. “Say hello to my leetle fren.”
♦
Sometimes, when they’re trying to understand what A&R means, people who don’t know anything about the music industry will say, “Ah, so you’re talent spotters?” This is inaccurate. Madonna, Bono, the Spice Girls, Noel Gallagher, Kylie…do you really think any of that lot are talented? Don’t make me fucking laugh. What they are is ambitious. This is where the big money is. Fuck talent. Forget Rock and Roll, if he’d just turned the other way out of the schoolyard Bono could have been a very successful CEO of a huge armaments manufacturer. The Spice Girls? How driven are those boilers? You get these fucking indie bands moaning about having to get up before lunchtime once every three months to appear on some kids’ TV programme. In return for her fifteen minutes I guarantee you that Geri Halliwell would have risen at the crack of dawn every morning for a year and swum naked through a river of shark-infested, HIV-positive semen—cutting the throats of children, OAPs and cancer patients and throwing them behind her as she went—just to be allowed to do a sixty-second regional radio interview.
This is the kind of person you want to sign. You’ve got a shot with that kind of attitude. Talented? Fuck off. Go and work in a guitar shop with all the other talented losers.
♦
“I’m telling you—Pawl? Steve?—there are piracy issues involved that we’re only just beginning to understand. The long-term implications could be catastrophic. Cat-a-stroff-ick.” Some cunt from our American label has been dribbling on for a fortnight about the impending devastation the Internet will wreak on the record industry. I can’t see it myself.
The stench of burning flesh fills the air and it’s hot. It’s like being in hell. We’re in the grounds of one of the big hotels, attending a barbecue some publisher is throwing. Whole hogs—basted in barbecue sauce thicker than melted chocolate—are crackling and spitting over flaming pits. Steaks the size of babies sizzle on hotplates. A slaughterhouse of ribs is piled up next to rows of silver dishes containing refried beans, coleslaw, fries, chicken wings, cornbread, mashed potatoes, chilli and gravy. Now and then the warm, feeble breeze changes direction and I get a whiff of this lot and nearly throw up. Everyone of the English contingent here is either coked up or hung-over. Either way, we’re not eating a fucking thing. You look around at these things and you can spot the Yanks a hundred yards away. They’re the ones who actually look like they’ve been to bed in the past year. They look tanned, fit and rested and they want to talk business. Players—or thinking they are—they came to play. We—the Brits—look like we’ve just staggered off the set of a snuff film after a meth-driven four-day shoot: blood in the eyes, skin cracked and yellow, nostrils inflamed and blood-caked. We look like ghosts. We came to play too.
“Mmmm,” says Trellick nodding to the Yank like he gives a fuck, “it could be problem.” I nod solemnly too and drain my fifth glass of cold white wine.
As we leave, the Mexican busboys are shovelling tons of uneaten food into plastic garbage bags. I see one of them pocket a steak.
Later we’re all at one of the hundreds of gigs taking place across the city. There’s a band on the stage, some four-piece punk rock kind of thing called the Lazies, I think. The very doable girl singer is screaming over a splintering tower of glassy feedback. There’s a couple of row
s of kids going crackers at the front, like there are at every gig. Abortion, I think to myself. Derivative, tuneless abortion. I start polishing and sharpening a few caustic phrases to toss off later. She’s on the floor now, the mike lead wrapped around her body, sweat pouring down her face as she screams something like ‘fuck me in the ass’ over and over.
She’s wearing fishnet tights that are shredded to pieces, half an arse cheek is bursting out. Very fuckable, but still a derivative, tuneless abortion.
Finally, mercifully, they finish. I walk through a crunchy sea of plastic beer mugs to the bar. Leamington, Trellick, Parker-Hall and Simon Tench, Parker-Hall’s scout, are all at the bar. I also see Miles and Dan from Parlophone, Steven Bass from Go! Beat, and a few others. Someone hands me a drink. A tequila shot.
“Capitol just offered two hundred, US only,” someone is saying.
“What did you think?” that weasel Tench asks me.
I think I want a nose-up. I think my hotel room isn’t big enough.
It really gets tedious sometimes—being paid primarily for your opinion when you very rarely have one. Or frequently have the wrong one.
“You’d do the singer,” I say, sagely. Everyone nods. “And I liked the ‘fuck me in the ass’ song. You ain’t getting it on the radio though.”
“Which song?” says Leamington.
“The one where she says “fuck me in the ass”.”
Leamington laughs. “It’s “love me, make it last”. It’s the single.”
“Haven’t you got it?” Tench asks.
“Yeah, whatever,” I say airily, knocking back the oily, bitter spirit, “fuck them.”
Trellick sidles up to me as we leave the venue to look for cabs. “I don’t know,” he says quietly, “they all seem to like it. Should we be in on this?”
“I was downgrading it, you clown. I’ve already got a meeting set up.” The lie slides softly out of the corner of my mouth. The lie itself is effortless, but, sadly, it means I’ll actually have to do some work.
“Good boy,” says Trellick, his hand in the air as a canary-yellow taxi comes towards us out of the jungly Texas night.
