by John Niven
A waiter appears in full Cossack rig and dispenses menus. “May I get you some drinks?” the fruit asks.
“Yes,” I say, “can you bring us the vodka menu? You have to check this out, guys, they’ve got over thirty—”
“Could I just have some water please?” Marcy says.
“Yeah me too,” from Adam.
“We got an early start tomorrow,” Jimmy explains, “gotta drive to…Dover?” (he pronounces it ‘Daw-ver’) “to get the ferry.”
“No problem, water’s good for me.”
Water. Waters. He liked the Prodigy artwork.
It’s a fundamental—if they drink, you drink. If they don’t…dear sweet mother of teats-blown Jesus. I am going to have to spend a couple of hours with these cunts sober.
The drummer—Greg? Kevin?—orders a beer and they fall to frowning over the menus.
“So,” I say, “are you looking forward to Glastonbury?”
“Shit, man,” Adam says, “it’ll be…”
“Wild?” one of the other guys suggests.
“Yeah, wild.”
“We are going to rock that motherfucker.” The drummer. Obviously.
Marcy doesn’t say anything. She stares at a hole in her shoe, a chunky, scuffed DM boot. I try to visualise her in heels.
We order and I make a big show of ordering nearly everything on the menu—beluga, sevruga, blinis, smoked salmon, chops, goose, baked fucking pike. Ominously the band order mostly salads.
“What’s the vibe like at Glastonbury?” one of them asks. Vibe? It is a fucking insult that I am sat here having to live through this. For the umpteenth time today I lament the fact that I am not more successful and above all this.
“Oh, Glastonbury? It’s just the most incredible…atmosphere.” (If you reckon that the atmosphere in medieval England—plague, filth, disease and billions of mud-spattered tolers everywhere—would qualify as incredible, then Glastonbury is indeed incredible.) With an upward surge of nausea I realise that, if we’re going to have any chance of signing these clowns, I will probably have to go to Glastonbury.
The food starts to arrive. Darren talks indie with Adam. I watch Marcy pick at her salad. “You must have had a bellyful of those record company dinners by now?”
She smiles for the first time—nervously, hesitantly, but still a smile—revealing a row of gleaming teeth whiter than her skin. A shred of purple lettuce is stuck between the front top two. Nice lips too. I can’t make out the jugs because she’s wearing a baggy sweater but, if I remember rightly from the gig in Austin, she’s well stacked for a boiler her size. I don’t remember any of the fucking songs, but I remember that.
“Nah,” she says, removing the strand of lettuce, “it’s nice, y’know? People being interested.”
“Have some caviar.” I push a dish of beluga towards her.
“No thanks. I don’t eat fish.”
“So…tell us about your label,” Jimmy says.
“OK…” I clear my throat.
But what is there to tell really? We’ll manufacture your records and put them in the fucking shops. We’ll try our best not to spend a red cent unless we’re sure we’ll get it back with interest. We’ll second-guess you and interfere at every conceivable stage of the artistic process. We’ll edit and remix tracks without your permission. We’ll force you to appear on appalling, degrading kiddies’ TV programmes where you will shake hands with Dobbin the Donkey and have to explain yourself to a teenage VJ with the attention span of a Ritalin-fuelled infant. We’ll work you until you can’t stand up. In collusion with your publishers we’ll try and license your music to TV adverts for everything from banks to multinational petrochemical companies. (We’d license it to whaling fleets and arms dealers too if only they advertised on TV). We’ll under-account to you and charge you for every recoupable expense from the staples used to knock your horrendous contract together to the Coke you had from the fridge in my office. And if it doesn’t all work out, you’ll be dropped faster than a Plymouth hooker’s knickers when there’s a big ship in town.
Howzat, you pasty-faced vegetarian hippy cunts? Strap that on for a fucking laugh.
But, sadly, you can’t say that these days. So I sip water and talk and they all nod away as I drone on about ‘artistic freedom’ and ‘creative control’ and ‘long-term artist development’ and all the usual balls until I’m nearly crying with boredom. Finally, when I can stand it no more, I get up and say, “Excuse me.” I head for the Gents, leaving Darren to continue his part of the conversation—B-sides and the guitar solos of Tom Verlaine.
On the way to the toilet I stop at the bar and drink three double bison grass vodkas. In the toilet I deftly roll a fifty, lean close into the cistern lid, and snarfle up a heart-stopper. “Right, you cunts, let’s fucking rock…” I say, before—pausing only to vomit about a kilo of black sturgeon roe down the toilet—I’m striding manfully back to the table, sweat breaking out on my forehead and clear bubbles popping and exploding in my brain.
Well, things livened up after that, I can fucking tell you. I order a massive round of vodkas and a couple of the band even join me. I crack a few jokes. One contains the punchline, “No, that’s my flask.” I talk about making them ‘bigger than U2’. I get more drinks in…
Things get blurry and I find myself sitting next to Marcy, pressing myself closer and asking about her childhood and shit like that. Christ, she’s fit. Maybe if I…no, must remain professional.
I get the Russkis to turn the music up and I drag one of the waiters in and make him Cossack-dance for us, throwing twenty-pound notes at him and laughing my head off. I start singing Clash songs with the drummer but I keep getting all the words wrong. I start Cossack-dancing myself, trying to drag Marcy up but she’s not really into it. I order more vodka and then Jimmy is turning to me and saying, “Hey, thanks for dinner, man. We gotta run.”
“Fuck off. It’s only eleven.”
“No really, we’ve got an early start.”
“Come on…” But they’re all getting up now, pulling jackets on, gathering bags.
“Right, no problem. I’ll give you a call. We’ll send our offer to your lawyer.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks for dinner, man,” one of them—Adam? Doug?—says and they’re gone. I mean—who fucking farted?
“That went all right,” Darren says, not convincingly.
“Yeah. Fine. Fucking Shermans.”
“You got any bugle?”
I toss him the gram and he heads for the bogs. I get up and duck out into the hallway. Marcy is pulling her jacket on. “Hey, you’re not really going back to the hotel, are you?”
“Yeah,” she smiles, “I’m beat.”
“Bollocks. Come for a drink. I know this place. Members only.”
“No thanks.”
“Come on, love, you know you—”
“Are you, like, hitting on me?”
“Am I…?”
“Look, thanks for dinner. Goodnight.”
I wander back into our room and neck a stray vodka. A grinning waiter appears and a silver dish with a long strip of paper on it is plonked down in front of me.
The bill is just over seven hundred quid.
When I get into work in the morning there’s a message on my machine from Jimmy. In a flat tone he says:
“Uh, Steven…I just called to say thank you for last night. We, uh, as you know we’ve still got a few other labels to meet so…you could have your guy send your offer to our lawyer if you like and I…I’ll try and give you a call and let you know what’s happening. OK. Bye.”
So that’s over, then.
June
The Ivor Novello Awards are held at the Grosvenor House Hotel. Ken Berry becomes Head of EMI. ‘MMmm Bop’ by Hanson is N°1. A lot of people are talking about Basement Jaxx. The Ultrasound deal is really heating up—Simon Williams, Head of Fierce Panda, says, “It is clear that this band will be around a lot longer than eighteen months…”
“A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is. I don’t think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.”
Mariah Carey
The tailback is long and we’re surrounded by tolers—goths, ravers, punks, hippies, everything—carrying their backpacks, tents, huge plastic bottles of cider, cases of cheap lager, acoustic guitars, ghetto blasters, all that crap. They stumble along the sides of the road, pressing around the cars, all of them soaking wet and spattered with mud. Through the softening quartz of the windows of Trellick’s Range Rover it feels like watching a CNN bulletin about an evacuation, a refugee trail somewhere. Incredibly enough it has stopped raining for a few minutes. The sun filters through weakly and all the losers cheer.
I pull the handbrake on just enough to allow me to turn on the dashboard TV. Trellick, in the driver’s seat, is patiently arguing with another security guard (“We’re from the record company. One of our acts is playing in fifteen minutes. We need to get in now”), while, in the distance, the boom of the festival shudders around the hills and vales of Somerset. In the back Ross and Darren—already drunk—are ‘ironically’ singing ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go—’
A guy suddenly bangs on my window. He’s stripped to the waist, tattooed, crew cut. I press the button and the window hums down a few inches, admitting a reek of lager. “Fucking hell!” he says to some people behind him, pointing at the dash, “There’s a fucking telly in there!” I just look at him. “All right, mate!” he says cheerfully. “What you watching then?”
I make sure the door is locked before replying. “Dole office is that way, mate,” I say, pointing back down the road as I hit the button and the window slides efficiently back up. The guy pumps his fist, wanking an imaginary cock off at me, as, he falls back into step with the other losers.
Finally the security mutant, having examined our VIP tickets and backstage parking pass for an hour or so, seems satisfied and waves us out of the queue and towards a closer, more discreet entrance. “Thank you very much,” Trellick drawls, then, when we’re a few yards away, he adds, “you fucking loser.” There is a banner over the main entrance—the entrance where thousands of weary, footsore tolers are being herded in—which reads ‘Greenpeace Glastonbury Festival 1997’. “It should read “Arbeit Macht Frei”,” Ross says sourly.
We come to another gate, endure more tedious negotiations, and then we’re on the site proper, driving past rows of tents. Scumbags and jizz-buckets sit around their tents drinking Stella and Woodpecker and Christ knows what. I see a guy drinking fucking Newcastle Brown.
I do not understand the festival experience. These people, these disgusting lowlifes we’re driving through, they fought to get in here. They think they’re lucky. They spent hours on the phone trying to get tickets, happily paying hundreds of pounds for a pair when they managed to find some. Now they’re celebrating being here, celebrating the fact that they can lie around in urine-flavoured mud drinking warm lager and eating burgers prepared by some syphilitic gyppo while fucking Cast knock out their greatest hits in the distance.
I turn round in my seat and give Darren a playful slap.
“Get the fucking pooey open and rack ‘em out then!”
He pulls another bottle of Mumm’s from a cooler at his feet while Ross digs the corner of his Amex into a huge bag of chang and we all do a quick card-edge.
“All righty!” Trellick shouts, thumping the wheel. “Let’s fucking rock!”
Darren hands me the champagne and I shake the bottle up a bit before I fire the cork out of the open window of the Range Rover “Oi! Oi! Oi!” we shout in delighted unison as a few scumbags look up from their cups of piss and tinfoil barbecues to give us what they imagine are withering looks. “We’re larging it, mate!” Ross shouts into the uncomprehending face of a passing middle-aged hippy.
The champagne cork sails up in a high arc over a row of filthy tents and disappears into the sun, finally, one hopes, hitting some filthy toe-rag right in the fucking eye. We roll off, clanking along the metal vehicle path towards hospitality parking.
♦
The backstage beer tent is rammed. We elbow our way into the crush at the bar. Ross, viciously drunk by this point, says, “It’s like fucking Hillsborough in here,” to the clear disgust of Tony Crean, who literally is a fucking Scouser. Debbie Harry from Blondie walks by, dressed head to foot in crimson—topped off with a bunch of red roses for a hat. She looks shocking, like an old hooker who’s fallen on hard times and gone crazy. “Oi, love, how much for unprotected anal?” Ross shouts after her.
Across the bar I see Dean Wengrow, recently moved from London Records to Island. He waves and then mimes bending over and slapping his arse while giving me the thumbs up and pissing himself.
Last week, after I put the release date back four times in the demented hope that something, anything, positive might happen around the record, “Why Don’t You Slap Me on the Ass?” was finally released. It sold 1112 copies and charted at N°68 for a week before disappearing forever. We spent about a hundred quid for every copy, of the record we sold. We might as well have made the sleeves out of jewel-encrusted platinum.
Finished. Game over. See you later, Sooty.
I mime wanking an imaginary cock in Wengrow’s direction.
We get absolutely fucking muttered at the bar and then someone’s saying that the Lazies are about to go onstage in the new bands tent.
“Hang on,” Trellick says as we finish up our drinks.
We huddle in a corner of the muggy, crowded bar. Darren—who has been deputised to carry the bulk of the drugs—produces a bag of Es and we all bosh one, washing them down with a swirl of flat, sour lager. Ross produces a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, we buy a load of Cokes, tip the last of our lager out of the paper cups and improvise pints of Rockschool. We lean in for another quick card-edge and we’re ready to go.
Walking from the backstage area at Glastonbury into the main arena is like stepping from a drug-addled village fete into the Holocaust. Or from a field hospital onto the battlefield itself. The mud, the devastation, is incredible. It’s only Friday afternoon but already, everywhere you look, you see the casualties: tripping, wall-eyed Scousers who haven’t slept in three days; Jocks who’ve been living on speed and lager and who have, somehow, even with the downpour, still managed to get sunburned; and crying teenage girls. Unconscious bodies (corpses?) lie broken in the mud and hooded Kaffirs stand by the walkways, muttering their “speed? ‘ash? aceed? coke?” mantra out of the sides of their mouths. You see forty-five-year-old blokes with their faces painted; accountants and estate agents off their nuts on mushrooms, having their one big weekend of the year.
Clean and shining, bright with coke and bourbon, it all looks very funny to us. “Hello, tolers!” we chirp as we pass by. “Arbeit macht frei!” we say brightly to their red, confused faces.
The Lazies are on early, it’s only four o’clock in the afternoon, but there’s an incredible surge into the tent. It takes us forever to crawl around the side and then push our way in at the front. Steam is rising in great clouds off the crowded bodies at the crash barrier. I count no less than fifteen other A&R people around us as the band walk onstage. No Parker-Hall in sight. Got to be good news. (Or is it? What if he’s changed his mind? Maybe the Lazies are actually shit. How can you tell?)
Marcy runs out last. She is wearing a black catsuit as tight as a surgical glove and now, elevated by the stage, italicised by the lights, she looks about twelve feet tall.
“Sen-say-shunal,” says Trellick. People start yelling and screaming.
“What’s she like?” Ross asks me.
Are you hitting on me? “Bang up for it,” I reply automatically.
Marcy grabs the mike from the stand, “Hey, Glaston-bury!” she yells over a deafening squawk of guitar, two ribcage-moving thumps on the bass drum, “are you motherfuckers ready to fucking rock!”
“NO!” shouts Ross.
; “FUCK OFF, YOU SHERMAN CUNTS!” some wag shouts and then the drumsticks click together fast—one, two, three, four times, the wooden slap echoing through the huge walls of speakers in front of us—and they pile into the first song. The place goes berserk.
Two songs in and people are being pulled out of the crowd unconscious. People are stage-diving. For a band just two singles old, it’s an incredible reaction.
Ross: “They are going to be fucking massive.”
Trellick: “We have to get this deal. We should up the offer.”
Me: “I’m all over it.”
♦
Later in the evening I find I can’t remember much about their set because I was so traumatised by what happened at the end of it.
What happened was this: the last song was grinding and juddering to a climax, the E was kicking in so I was actually, incredibly, just enjoying the music. I had my eyes closed, swaying, when Trellick tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to something. I followed his finger woozily, looking along it like a gun barrel towards the stage where the band were flouncing off, waving and blowing kisses to the baying, ecstatic crowd. I watched as Marcy skipped offstage and jumped delightedly towards someone standing at the side of the stage, someone with a stage-laminate dangling around their neck, the only pass greater than ours. With gut-pummelling agony I recognised the shaved head and grinning features of Parker-Hall, as Marcy embraced him.
♦
Outside the tent the rain has stopped again and a weak purplish sun is setting over the fields. Time to spend the summer’s evening experiencing all that the biggest, most diverse music festival in the world has to offer. We stomp sulkily backstage to someone’s Winnebago where we pull the blinds and spend the next five hours angrily drinking brandy and snorting cocaine.
It’s all broken, out-of-focus snapshots from there. We’re in the backstage bar; we’re walking across the site, through lakes of mud and along rattling metal paths; we’re buying mushrooms (mushrooms?) and pints of cider (cider?); and we’re walking, walking, walking and then I’m tripping my nut off in the middle of a huge crowd are you hitting on me and the rain is falling lightly on us as we strain to see something in the distance, something far away in the dark, glowing red and blue and gold and green and there’s music and fucking Parker-Hall it’s getting louder and there are people singing something I can’t make out and hugging each other all around us and 120 grand unrecouped this music is building and building and then suddenly it all pulls into focus crossover and brilliant white light washes over the crowd and you can see the raindrops—billions of them—suspended in the light above us and I realise we’re watching Radiohead and he’s singing “Rain down…” everyone’s singing “Rain down…” and I don’t like Radiohead because I don’t know what they marketing spend want but it’s really beautiful and Darren turns to me and I think he’s crying and maybe you are not alone in the universe sound of impact and for a moment there I lose myself.
