by John Niven
“Who are we seeing today?” I ask, lighting a Marlboro and taking a swig of Leamington’s beer.
“Cornelius,” Darren says.
“Arab Strap,” someone else says.
“Buckcherry later,” Leamington says and he starts singing, “I love the cocaine, I love the cocaine.”
My drink arrives and I gratefully sink a third of it in one go. The guys are all talking about what Carnival parties will be worth going to. Christ, Carnival. It’s Bank Holiday weekend and there’s still another two days to go. I had two hours’ sleep last night, none the night before. I pull myself up onto a bar stool. It’s already hot and bright outside, the sun filtering through the slatted blinds, smoky beams and bars falling across the sofas and tables, trying to land on the vampires and the damned. In a room full of people who’ve been up all night, it’s like the air itself is sweating, grimy and tired.
I run a quick mental, feasibility study on just fucking off out of there: concierge gets me a cab, back to London in about an hour, hit the sack for a bit, shower, food, then over to Netting Hill for Ross’s Carnival party. Doable. Very doable. Sensible shoes option.
“Oi, Stelfox,” says Leamington, clapping a hand on my shoulder, “do you want a fucking nose-up or what?”
“Yeah,” I say. And then I’m following him to the toilet, my hands on his shoulders as I bounce up and down, both of us singing, “I love the cocaine, I love the cocaine,” and the girls on reception can hear us and everything but we don’t give a fuck. As we barge into the toilets Brett Anderson from Suede and Justine Frischmann from Elastica come staggering out looking fucked out of their skulls. She gives Leamington a sloppy kiss and then follows Anderson off towards the elevators.
The world is much brighter—sharper and clearer—as we jump out of the taxi and crunch our way through a wasteland of plastic glasses towards the backstage bar. It’s pretty much a freak show in there. We say hellos and hit the bar and then a cubicle for another bump. Darren and I split an E and then we bowl off across the site towards the Evening Session stage because a couple of people want to see Ultrasound again for some fucking reason. Why? They just signed to Nude for fuck’s sake.
“Hey,” I say as we make our way there through a sea of broken tolers, “I’ve got an idea…”
We root through a few stalls, people selling T-shirts, hash pipes, Rizlas, soft drinks and crap like that, until we come to a fifty-year-old hippy with a shameful tray tucked among his flea-bitten merchandise—a few rows of tiny brown bottles with names like ‘Bolt’ and ‘TNT’. (American poppers have far better names. In direct acknowledgement of the huge faggot market for the popular quasi-legal heart stimulant, they’re called things like ‘Locker Room’, ‘Cruising’ and ‘Rectal Trauma’.) As I hand over the money I notice that the guy has a little sign up advertising his amyl nitrate. ‘Room Odorizer’ it says.
“Hey, cunt,” I say as the guy hands me two bottles of Liquid Gold, “who do you know whose room smells so fucking bad that drenching it in amyl is actually going to be an upgrade?”
♦
Early evening and it’s still hot and clear and sunny and I’m stretched out in the back of a chauffeured company people carrier with Leamington. Darren sits up front with the driver, the windows down and the M4 sizzling by outside. The only other sound is the soft hiss of the radio. We are all fucking destroyed. I tilt back in the leather seat and look out of the back window, at the sun sinking behind us as we speed towards London. The sun seems huge. I mean it looks fucking enormous; a scarlet ball that’s about to touch the ground. It looks like Armageddon falling over Bristol, over Reading.
Energised by a knuckle of coke as the driver pretends not to notice we pass a bottle of Maker’s Mark back and forth and talk random industry gossip: Who’s going to win the Mercury? Beth Orton? The Chemical Brothers? Are Nude going to have it away with Ultrasound? Will Kylie’s new indie stuff work? Are the Prodigy going to sell records in America? Money. Will London have a hit with All Saints, this new girl band they’ve sighed? If they do will it clear the pitch for Songbirds? (Unlikely. Remember—there is no bottom to this crap.) It looks like Ray Cooper at Virgin is signing this new band Catch, who are managed by Hall or Nothing. My head starts swimming, that last pill kicking in. “Martin Hall reckons the singer kid, Toby, is a star…” Darren says. “Yeah?” I say. Or maybe I just say, “Yeah.” I don’t know. I feel funny. Leamington craps on, he’s telling some story I already heard the night before, about something that happened at Tracy Bennett’s wedding the other week. (Subtext from Leamington: I went to Bennett’s wedding.) I nod and just stare through my Aviators—we are all wearing sunglasses—at the back of the driver’s head, at his cracked, seamy neck. I need to make more money. It occurs to me—and the realisation is in no way an epiphany, it just dawns on me in the same way you might idly realise one day that you really prefer linguine to spaghetti—that, were I forced to choose between Leamington’s life and my own career success, then I would happily watch Leamington die. I am now experiencing auditory hallucinations. I can hear feedback and the beating of helicopter blades. Watch? I would kill him myself. And I quite like Leamington. “They sound like the fucking Police,” Darren says, talking about some band. The Police.
Woodham. Fuck. Money. Waters. I think I am going to be sick. A helicopter chops right by my head. I flinch and whisper something.
“What?” Leamington says, turning.
“What?” I reply.
“Did you just say,” he lowers his sunglasses, “kill them all?”
“No.”
I feel this volume continue to build and swell behind me, beneath me, the sound of chopper blades and feedback shimmering up through the car, and I think I may be losing my mind. Then I see that, in the front, Darren is dialling the volume way up on the stereo, Leamington’s hands are shooting up into the air, he’s flicking his fingers Mane style and they’re both laughing. I lean forward and squint through the windscreen glare and I see a sign appearing out of the dusk: the comforting forestry green with white lettering which says ‘NOTTING HILL’ and now the Westway is opening up in front of us and the driver floors it and the feedback and helicopters resolve themselves into drums and guitars.
“Turn it up!” I yell at Darren. He cranks it all the way and then the three of us are singing, screaming, “All my people right here right now…” and I’ve ridden it out and everything is OK again.
I fucking love the new Oasis album. Masterpiece. Three hundred and sixty thousand over the counter sales on day one? You can’t be arguing with that, can you?
We edge along the pavement. You can actually feel the heat of the pavement through the soles of your Birkenstocks. All you can move is your head, your arms are jammed down by your sides, your legs crushed together as everyone sways from side to side, rotating from the feet up, like one of those inflatable kiddies’ toys with a weighted base. Like a Weeble. Looking up the hill, all the way along Kensington Park Road, all you can see is bobbing heads. I’m trying to keep my hand in my right pocket—the pocket with all the drugs and cash in it—because we’re surrounded by greedy, shifty-looking darkies. As the crowd moves, as the breeze changes direction, you get hit by different smells—dope, beer, vomit, frying chicken. The shrill rakka-ta-takka-ta-tak of calypso drums meshes with the subsonic whumf of dozens of sound systems cranking out dancehall, drum’n’bass, two-step and ragga, creating a chesty slur of noise. All around us grinning, sunburned middle-class losers—Rorys and Camillas—bop up and down cheering and blowing their stupid fucking whistles while they clink Red Stripe cans with the indulgently smiling brothers. (Who, in their turn, are wondering if they can get Millie’s handbag away without being caught.)
Whose bright idea was all this? I picture a bunch of old Rastas, hunkered on a doorstep on Ladbroke Grove on an August afternoon a long time ago. “Leroy,” says Winston, passing across the dachshund-sized reefer “suppose we be holding dem carnival and all dem white batty boys be spending dem money?�
�
“Righteous,” says Leroy, shivering under the weak London sun as he takes a big, Jamaican toke. Half a century later on the Portobello Road some student hands over a tenner for a burnt piece of plantain and a couple of warm lagers and steps around the corner to be mugged.
You’ve gotta hand it to them, Carnival is definitely one-nil to the Kaffirs.
I’m wired from the coke, taut and angry, on the verge of going nuts and smashing an elbow into somebody’s face, doing anything to bust out, when there’s a change in the pulse of the crush, something weakens and opens up on my left. I grab Darren’s arm and manage to pull both of us through and out onto Talbot Road, where it’s quieter, where the crowd is just insanely—as opposed to life-threateningly-big. A few mounted policemen trot around smiling benevolently, their horses braying, their hooves clipping on the cement. Carnival’s a PR job now for the filth; you’re in shirtsleeves, you get your picture taken with a big fat mama who’s wearing your helmet. I even see a young constable taking a matey swig of Red Stripe.
But now and again, on the faces and in the eyes of the older coppers, you see flashes of how it used to be. Some young ragga will flounce by, nonchalantly billowing clouds of ganja smoke, his gold teeth shining and his trainers gleaming in the sun, and there’ll be a tightening of the jawline, a contracting of the pupils, and you can see these old boys thinking, “Come on. Come on, you fuckers…” High up in the saddle they glaze over as they reminisce about the Perspex shields and the baton charge, the pleasing give of black skull beneath lead-tipped truncheon, and then a leisurely hour in the cell with the rolled-up phone book and the rubber hose. The good old days.
“Fucking hell,” says Darren as we press on, edging our way along the Portobello Road towards the Earl Percy.
Shouts of “Oi! Oi!” rend the air as we shoulder our way into the pub. Trellick stands on a chair, his arms outstretched, a bottle of champagne in each fist. Behind him, crouched down, Ross is furtively doing a bump off the back of a girl’s hand. Tench is sprawled across a row of seats, his face buried between the miniskirted thighs of some shrieking boiler. Parker-Hall is holding court at a corner table with a couple of girls, what’s-his-name from Chrysalis and one of the guys who writes songs for Ellie Crush. Rebecca and Katie and Sophie and Pam and a bunch of other girls we know all dancing in the corner. Someone throws an E at me. That guy Richard Bolger from London Records pours a drink over himself. Derek DahLarge is talking to the wall.
Thank Christ, I think. Civilisation.
Ross’s party at his place on Colville Terrace goes on until Tuesday morning. At some point, somewhere into the early hours, I turn round and realise I am crapping away to Parker-Hall. I don’t know what we’re saying or how long we’ve been talking. We’re both off our tits but he’s clearly in better shape than me. In a moment of pilled-up, cracked-up, coked-up, boozed-up, sleep-deprived, woolly false-bonhomie, I put my arm around him and say, “I’m really enjoying us working together.”
“Me too, mate,” he replies, smiling as he pats me on the knee, untangles himself from my arm, and waltzes off, disappearing into the smoke and music.
Granted, I’m off my fucking head and might be paranoid, but even so, I’m sure there’s a terrifying lack of sincerity in Parker-Hall’s voice. I watch as across the room he talks and laughs with Ross. It’s important for A&R to have a good relationship with marketing.
I’m not sure I like the way all this is going.
♦
The following Monday, having slept through all of Sunday, I stroll into the office late, hung-over and grouchy. Rebecca and Pam and a couple of the other boilers are sitting around in tears. Nothing unusual there—I figure that Derek has just blazed through the department on one of his scorched-earth rampages, a search-and-destroy mission because of an errant bar code on a single, or a wrong release date on a poster. However, it is unusual that all of them are crying. Then Rob Hastings comes towards me. The clown looks genuinely shaken.
“What’s up?” I say.
“Haven’t you heard, man?”
“Heard what?”
He pulls me into Waters’ old office where a few wet-faced secretaries are gathered round the TV. Paris, an underpass, a mangled Mercedes, Kensington Palace, crowds of wailing tolers.
I hit the phones and make a few calls. Radio playlists are being suspended and reconfigured, release dates are being put back and cancelled. BMG are in trouble—the new Kylie LP, titled Impossible Princess, will have to be pulled, retitled and re-artworked. Death in Vegas have had a record hauled off the radio because of their name. The new Prodigy single is fucked because the sleeve featured a crashed car.
It is a fucking nightmare. Thank Christ I don’t have a record coming out in the next few weeks.
Parker-Hall and I go along to Trellick’s office. Ross is already in there and we join him on the sofa as Trellick flips between CNN and BBC. Peasants all over the country are losing their fucking minds. In Newcastle, Milton Keynes, Coventry, losers are crying in the fucking streets. A fat toler appears on the screen. Tears are pouring down her face. Her face. Fuck me—it’s a real forty roll-ups and a bottle of cheap vodka a day monstrosity, honeycombed with broken blood vessels, fucked in from not having enough cash or sense. “She…she…” the mad cow stammers, hardly able to get the words out, snapped with grief, “…she done so much good for people.” We fucking piss ourselves. It’s happening here too. Along the corridor in accounts the secretaries are all snuffling and comforting each other. It takes my breath away—genuine grief, upset, over something which does not directly affect you in any way whatsoever. But, a golden rule of showbiz states, whenever there is a massive outpouring of collective emotion among the lower classes—Christmas, the World Cup, summer holidays—there are records to be sold and money to be made.
“Surely we want to be cashing in on all this?” Ross says. “A tribute LP? A charity thing?”
Trellick thinks for a bit. “Nah,” he says finally, “too much scrutiny. It’d be impossible to skim any cash off. Maybe in a year. Anniversary thing…” He’s probably right, but it’s a pity because in the past, thanks to a little creative accounting, we’ve been very successful at skimming cash off of a couple of other charity records we’ve been involved in.
“Yeah, not worth the grief,” I say.
“I dunno,” Parker-Hall says, lighting a cigarette, “the sales would still count towards our market share, wouldn’t they?”
“Good point,” Trellick admits, nodding.
“Yeah, but,” I start to say, but Parker-Hall has the floor. He’s talking about licensing, about appropriate tracks for a nation in mourning, about marketing. Trellick and Ross are nodding away, swept up with him. I sit there and read Music Week and get angrier and angrier.
Trellick makes a few phone calls, but it turns out that it looks like Elton’s doing something and he’s signed to Mercury so the project will probably happen over there. “Fuck it,” Parker-Hall says, “worth a pop. Wanna get lunch, James?”
“Sure,” Trellick says. I wait for Parker-Hall to extend the invitation. He doesn’t.
“I’ve got to go,” I lie, “meeting in town.”
“Oh, Steven?” Parker-Hall says as I leave. I turn round and without looking at me, not taking his eyes off the TV, he says, “Can you make sure you get them demos off Coalition for me? That band Rob was talking about? Thanks.”
I nod, turn, and walk on down the hallway. There is a roaring noise in my ears, a metallic taste in my mouth, and I cannot see properly.
♦
I drive through Stratford and Leytonstone—cancerous high streets choked up with Pound Smasher! shops and Alabama Fried Chicken dives—and take the M25 South.
I come along a flyover and, for a moment, the Saab is suspended so high in the air that it feels like you are in a video game. On my right, stretching back towards Docklands and the City, and on my left, oozing out into Kent, is the nuclear winter of east London—hundreds of square miles of powe
r stations and freight yards, pylons, construction sites and chemical plants, motorway and flyover, ring road and tunnel, endless miles of red tail lights, yellow headlights and sodium street lights. The air outside the blue-tinted windows of the car is smoke, dust and dirt. Out in that air, in grids and blocks, the lights are coming on in houses.
Houses.
You realise that people actually have to live in among all this and that east London is the bill, the tab that these cunts are picking up so that you can live in west London.
I take a left onto the M20 and drive on towards Dover in the dark. The guy—“Charlie”—meets me, as arranged, in the lounge of an unbelievable pub on the Dover Road. He’s in his forties and unshaven with stains (egg? curry?) on his cheap, hobbled sweater. It has taken me several weeks to meet Charlie. Weeks of furtive emailing—from a dummy Hotmail account, set up under a false name and accessed only from the computers in a random, disparate chain of internet cafes—to get to this point.
After the briefest of drinks and a minute of the most innocuous conversation (literally “Wot about them Arsenal then?”), we exchange envelopes. The one I hand to Charlie contains an awful lot of fifty-pound notes. The far slimmer envelope he hands me contains only a computer disk.
I will not look at what is on the disk until later—again, in a remote corner of a remote Internet cafe—and even then I will only do so for a split second, just to make sure. After that I will never look at it again.
The contents of the disk are, as I’d been promised, beyond description.
September
Roni Size wins the Mercury Music Prize. Dave Gilmour leaves Island Records to become Head of A&R at Independiente. Lots of interest in some Jocky band called Idlewild. Phil Howells over at London Records signs Asian Dub Foundation. He says, “I’d have to be mad not to have signed them.” Mercury launches this pop singer called Thomas Jules Stock. And ‘Candle in the Wind’, ‘Candle in the Wind’, ‘Candle in the fucking Wind’…
