2008 - Kill Your Friends

by John Niven

  A few grunts and twists and turns (and in my memory I’m not sure what Rebecca’s up to during all of this, whether she’s aware of what I’m doing or not. I think she’s wanking herself off. Or doing coke. Or both). I manage to fashion a strange cock-like contraption from a wire coat hanger. I mean, it looks exactly like a long, thin, cock. The only real drawback, I suppose, is that it is flat and two-dimensional. But we give it a go anyway, both of us mad and sweating and naked; me kneeling on the floor at the foot of the bed, frowning—tongue between my teeth in concentration—as I grimly work the contraption into her, looking for all the world hike a backstreet abortionist on an emergency call-out.

  After a while, as her moans decrease, I said, “It’s not really working, is it?” and, shortly after that, thankfully, we both passed out.

  ♦

  “Hello, you,” she says and leans in for a kiss. Mindful of all the utter disgrace her mouth was put through just a few short hours ago—at one point it felt like she was trying to get her whole head up my arse—I manage to just graze her lips before blurting out, “Shit, I’m late,” and running for the shower.

  I lean tiredly under the stinging needles and think about how quickly I can have Rebecca fired. Fired? No, not these days, you’re joking, aren’t you? You’ll be up in front of some tribunal before you can say, “She loved it, Your Honour.” With a sigh I get a foreboding glimpse of how very badly I am going to have to treat Rebecca in the coming weeks and months in order to get her to quit.

  I tiptoe back into the bedroom, praying she’ll have fallen asleep. She hasn’t. She’s propped up on one elbow on the pillow watching me carefully. “I’ve got to go,” I say, “Glasgow.”

  “I know,” she says, tonelessly. I bend down to pick up my trousers. There, on the floor next to them, is a strangely bent coat hanger. The contraption. Queasily I kick it under the bed. “Steven?” Rebecca says.

  “Mmmm?”

  “You killed Roger. Didn’t you?”

  Total silence. Somewhere outside the window, a seagull squawks. I blink at her, too hung-over to think, to lie. I manage a hoarse, feeble laugh as I say, “What?”

  “I don’t care,” she goes on, matter-of-factly, “he was an idiot.”

  I sit down and we look right at each other for a long time, neither of us saying anything. It is like I am really seeing Rebecca for the first time, seeing some reserve of strength, of will, that I never knew she had.

  “Why do you think I killed him?”

  “I follow you sometimes. I go to all these stupid gigs because I know you’re going to be there. I was parked across the street from Roger’s house the night he died. Just watching the flat because I knew you were in there. I saw you leaving.”

  “Why would you…”

  “I love you, Steven.”

  I sit there basking in this fresh hell while I allow myself time to register the new information: Rebecca is insane. It’s a long time before I speak.

  “What do you want to do?” I say.

  She tells me. I can’t believe I’ve heard her properly so I ask her to repeat it.

  “I want us to get married,” she says for the second time. “OK…”

  “And then we’ll never talk about Roger again.”

  “OK…”

  ♦

  A few traumatic hours later (I lost my car keys so we have to get a cab to Gatwick while the Saab stays in Brighton; squatting in the NCP, racking up thirty quid a day in charges) I’m standing at reception at the Glasgow Hilton trying to check in. There’s a braying mob five-deep in front of me, all waving credit cards, travel vouchers and confirmation slips. The girls behind reception look like the last few Redcoats left at Rorke’s Drift, trying to front out an angry mob of spear-chuckers with two bullets and a tattered Bible.

  Behind me the bar, lobby and reception area have all merged into one drunken scrum and Parker-Hall is already working the crowd. (“All right, geezer! Nice one! Pack orf, you cant!”) I just want to get up to my room. To think. To try and plot some way forward through the chaos.

  Parker-Hall and I were late getting up here because of our conference. Some people, a lot of the scouts, have already been here a couple of days. Pete Tong says hello. Nigel Coxon from Island strides by. Matthew Rumbold from Food waves hello. A bunch of publishers are huddled at the bar; Mike Smith from EMI is talking animatedly to Bruce Craigie from Deceptive and that lawyer from Russell’s, the one who is handling the Idlewild deal. Rob Stringer is listening, angrily, to his mobile phone. Ian Brodie from the Lightning Seeds shuffles by. People are talking about bands. They’re talking about Idlewild, the Lanterns and the Smiles. They’re talking about Magicdrive and Dawn of the Replicants. They’re talking about the High Fidelity, Tarn and Fat Lip as ‘Candle in the Wind’ is piped through the lobby, swirling beneath the roar of conversation.

  In The City again. In The Fucking City.

  In The City is an annual music industry convention that was knocked together in the early nineties by Tony Wilson, who used to run Factory Records—until those cretins the Happy Mondays skanked the whole label down the shitter for a bag of rocks. Then Wilson somehow chiselled a deal out of Tracy Bennett and Roger Ames over at London Records for a new label, the hysterically named Factory Too, which also recently went under, having produced zero hits in three years. Laugh? I nearly bought a fucking round.

  Anyway, it seems that all this wasn’t quite enough to fill Wilson’s days for him so, a few years back, he decided that what the music industry really needed more than anything was another fucking convention. Hundreds of bands playing in dozens of venues all over the city, networking opportunities (have Hans from Düsseldorf palm you a 12 of some mad techno you will never listen to), and discussions and debates on things like ‘Is the Remix a Valid Artform?’, ‘Will the Internet Engender a Pan-Global Dissolution of the Record Industry?’ and ‘Darkies: Have They Been Ripped Off Over the Years, Or What?’

  Every year now you have to sit through this shit. (And have you ever tried to get hold of a decent hooker up North? Fuck me. A couple of years ago, desperate in Manchester, I pulled this toothless pig into the cab off the street. She started undressing in my hotel room and, for a second, I thought she was wearing some artful, designer bodice. It turned out to be a lattice-work of stained, seeping bandages. The AIDS, I supposed, literally leaking out of her. I threw her a tenner and kicked her into the elevator rapid-style.)

  The whole thing would be just about tolerable if they had it in Soho but, no, every September we all have to troop off to Manchester, or Dublin, or Glasgow. You check into the Holiday Inn, or the Ramada, and bowl around a skanky Northern city—getting in and out of taxis in the rain, standing in drizzly guest-list queues, having damp business cards thrust into your hands by stinking amateur hour ‘managers’ and indie label ‘bosses’—for a few days, seeing a load of unsigned bands. They’re unsigned for a reason, of course. Every single one of them is fucking shit. Cheers, Tony.

  Leamington comes over to us through the crush. “Oi oi,” he says.

  “Oi oi,” I reply.

  “Did you hear about your boy? Well, former boy.”

  “Who?”

  “Rage. He was DJing here at this thing last night. Gets into an argument with some bouncers, starts giving it all the ‘do-you-facking-know-who-I-am’ business—the usual—anyway, they beat the fucking shit out of him.”

  “Good on them,” I say.

  “Nah, mate, I mean they properly beat the shit out of him. They’re talking about fucking brain damage and the like.”

  Wow, I think. How can they tell?

  ♦

  When I get into the room the message light is flashing on the phone. I hit the button and put it on speaker while I get a drink from the minibar. As I rummage among the cool shelves I get this:

  “Hi, Steven, it’s Alan Woodham. I gather you’re up at In The City.” Woodham’s tone is flat, neutral. “Listen, you said you’d get back to me about this publishing deal before
the end of August. It’s now the middle of September and I haven’t heard anything. I’ve tried ringing you several times now. I left a couple of messages on your phone. I need you to call me back because…”

  I cannot bear long phone messages. You want to kill, don’t you? What’s wrong with “Call me back?” Why crap on for a fortnight? It’s like directions, as soon as someone gets past the third “and then a left at that roundabout and then—” you just want to cut their tongue out and fucking feed it to them.

  The Woodham situation: after striking out with all the big publishers I actually sent his miserable demo round some of the smaller independent publishers—Complete, Rondor, Netting Hill Music—and got told to fuck off there too.

  “…there’s something else I need to talk to you about. In connection with the Roger Waters murder.”

  Hang on a fucking minute.

  “So please call me back as soon as you get this.”

  I pick up the receiver and drop it back down, cutting the message off, and start scrolling through my mobile for his number. Outside, the sky is the colour of smoked glass and it is starting to rain. Christ, I hate Scotland. What a nation of fucking losers.

  I twist the caps off of three tiny bottles of Johnnie Walker from the minibar, pour them into a dirty glass and neck the lot. I start smoothing the coke out, covering the powder with a fifty and then scrubbing my room key up and down the note. I snort the line and sit back and give my problems free rein to strut and preen in my head.

  As problems will, they soon settle themselves into a swirling, but definite, hierarchy. At the bottom level, coughing and grumbling and looking for attention, are all the constant, normal, low-level issues to do with work and money: Who can I get to remix the Songbirds single? How big is the Lazies LP—and subsequently Parker-Hall—going to be? How much more cash will the house haemorrhage? I must do my expenses. I should be getting paid more.

  Floating above all this, sharper, clearer, more insistent, are the newcomers: My car is still in the NCP in Brighton. It is possible that Parker-Hall thinks I am a loser and will soon fire me. Does Woodham really know anything? And—straight in at N°1 with a fucking bullet—Rebecca has been stalking me. She’s gone round the bend, figured out I killed Waters and yet she wants to marry me regardless. (On reflection perhaps this isn’t quite as crazy as it seems—didn’t Ted Bundy get inundated with marriage proposals? And he was properly hardcore. He killed and raped dozens of women. Top lad, Bundy.)

  I glug a belt of Scotch, honk a stupefying line of chang, and dial Woodham’s mobile. He answers on the second ring. “Alan? Hi, it’s Steven. Listen, sorry for not getting back to you sooner. It’s been mental recently. I—”

  “Mr Stelfox,” (no ‘Steven’, ‘Steven’ is long gone), “can you tell me why one of your neighbours claims that they saw you entering your flat at 5.30 AM on the morning of Roger Waters’ murder when you already told me you’d arrived home around 11.30 the previous evening and gone straight to bed?”

  He just rattles this off, staccato, machine-gun style. The blood in my head starts pumping so hard behind my eyeballs that I think they’re going to burst out of my skull. “I…I got up early and…went for a paper?”

  “Where?”

  “What?”

  “Where did you buy this newspaper?” This is a different guy I’m talking to.

  “At the newsagent…on the corner of Shirland Road and Elgin Avenue.” Fuck, fuck, fuck—are they even open at that time? This will be so easy to check.

  “Alan, is everything OK?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, “is it?”

  I think hard, and then I’m talking. “Listen, Alan, I’m sorry I haven’t got back to you, about the demos. It’s…it’s looking good. It’s just taking a little time. We’ll get there. ”

  “Whatever you can do would be great.” He hangs up.

  Woodham’s new voice is clipped and formal, so much older-sounding than his indie-kid-down-the-Monarch voice. His new voice is the leathery whisper of gloves coming off, the hard-edged crack of cards being slapped on the table.

  I’m shaking. It all comes crashing in and the precariously balanced hierarchy of problems comes tumbling down. The mortgages, the credit cards, Woodham, the coke, the never-ending building work, the whores, the overdraft, the bridging loan, the holidays, the private members’ clubs, the coke, the whores, the restaurants, the airily picked-up four-hundred-quid bar tabs, the coke, the whores, Rebecca…

  I just make it to the bathroom before I jackknife over, spewing a torrent of searing broth over the floor and down the toilet for a long, long time until I collapse onto the soothing tiled floor. I stare at the sour orange-brown puddle, recognising a few things; a bit of potato, peas, a chunk of what looks like chicken that I can’t remember eating. Then I lie on the floor crying for a long time.

  Much later—it is dark outside—I am sitting at the little desk up by the window of my hotel room multitasking. I am simultaneously drinking Scotch straight from the bottle, smoothing out another line, and scanning through the Music Week Directory.

  Publishers. I’m looking for publishers.

  ♦

  Currency begets currency. We all know that Parker-Hall is a useless mockney twat; however, he has just signed the coolest band in the country and has also had a big commercial hit with a half-arsed soul/pop diva that he’s somehow managed to hoodwink everyone into thinking is hip. So people want to meet him. People listen to what he has to say. As we make our way from elevator to pavement people stop him to talk. “What do you reckon to them?” they say. Or “I hear you’re looking at…”or “How’s the album going?” or “Hi, I sent you a demo of…” I stand there nodding while he pontificates.

  This is what I’ve become. I am Parker-Hall’s muppet.

  We’re just about out the revolving doors when we run into Derek. I look pretty rough, Derek looks…insane. Hitler-in-the-bunker insane. He clearly hasn’t been to bed.

  “Anthony! Steven!” he barks. “Come with me.”

  Back up in the elevator and we walk into his suite behind him. Little Stan, one of junior scouts, is in there. He’s sitting at a coffee table in the lounge. In front of him is a gigantic pile of rocky cocaine which he’s attempting to chop into finer powder. He looks up as we enter and we see real fear in his eyes. He can’t actually speak, but with his eyes he’s begging us to help him, to get him out of there. “Stan!” Derek barks. “A line for Steven and Anthony.” Stan, chained and shackled in Derek’s mad gak factory, immediately begins drawing out a couple of fat lines for us. “So,” Derek says, sitting down and motioning for us to do the same, as though everything is perfectly normal, “what’s our strategy here this week?” For the first time since he’s joined the company I see that Parker-Hall is getting the true measure of Derek. I think up until this point he thought all the Derek stories were just that: mad stories. But here he is looking like death whacked out of his fucking mind on chang and asking us, sincerely, what our ‘strategy’ is.

  Parker-Hall begins mumbling a response, some bunch of shit about’ A&R culture’, while Derek nods and tightly rolls a fifty-pound note. He passes it first to Stan, who leans towards the powder and then stops. He looks up at Derek, fear and shame colliding across his face, and says, “I’m sorry, Derek. I can’t do any more.”

  There’s a pause.

  Magnanimously Derek dismisses him with an airy wave of the hand. Passing the note to Parker-Hall, Stan gets up and timidly asks Derek, “Do you have a hairdryer?” Stan’s hair is perfectly dry.

  Derek, confused himself now, says, “In the bathroom.”

  Parker-Hall and I quickly split one of the elephant-leg lines between us, tell Derek we’re running late for a gig, and fuck off out of it.

  As we leave we can hear the whirring blast of the hairdryer coming from behind the bathroom door.

  “What the fuck was all that about?” Parker-Hall says after the lift doors close.

  “Weird scenes inside the gol
d mine,” I say.

  We go out and rattle around the freezing Glasgow night, climbing in and out of cabs (where the suspicious Jock bastards expect you to pay them before you step out onto the pavement) and seeing pointless band after pointless band.

  We return to the Hilton and hit the bar where we drink and do coke before I finally slope off upstairs with some girl—some publisher—just before dawn.

  I hold her hand as we cross the lobby, take the lift, and stumble down endless corridors of halogen and beige, seeing only old people at this hour—pensioners driven from their beds at 6 AM by the death fear, sleep becoming too close to the real thing for them now, what with the real thing snuffling right outside the door.

  Back in my room she talks about girl power for a while and then I’m ripping her Wonderbra off and fucking her from behind. I spit into her arse and try and stuff my cock up there but she’s not really having it and I think I remember punching her in the back of the head a few times (playfully but not really) and when I wake up she’s gone and it’s still raining outside.

  October

  Virgin Records’ Ray Cooper and Ashley Newton move to LA to run Virgin America. The Verve album is N°1. Daniel Miller at Mute Records, talking about the new album by an act he’s signed called Teach, says, “It is a timeless record. The album is packed with hits. I’m so confident.” Gary Glitter is honoured by the MCPS with a lunch at the Savoy.

  Fourteen

  “Artists and executives come and go. Record companies are forever.”

  Anonymous lawyer

  Friday night on Regent Street and I light the fourth cigarette of the tailback and engage second gear for the first time in forty-five minutes. This has to stop. We can’t go on like this. You can’t drive anywhere any more. You can’t park anywhere. In central London now you can’t even walk anywhere. For a mile radius in every direction from Oxford Circus it’s like being down the front at Glastonbury. The shops are all rammed with filthy tolers, every last one of them wielding a sweaty handful of tacky credit cards—their Bank of Toytown Gold Card, their DSS Mastercards—as they hurl themselves at the counters, desperate to cram their blubber into another new and lurid outfit. I mean, I hate to sound like a killjoy, a party-pooper, but it’s Tuesday afternoon, for fuck’s sake. What do these losers all do? Where’s all the fucking dough coming from?