by John Niven
Because everyone reckons they’re a player nowadays. Everyone thinks they’re big time.
You live in an eighteen-foot-square toilet in Dagenham with your eighteen-foot-square girlfriend. You work as a crate packer in a warehouse and she’s part-time behind the till at Iceland. Effectively the two of you earn about a millionth of a pence a year. Your net worth is zero. Yet you think it reasonable—perfectly acceptable—to stroll down to the George&Dragon dressed like some bad-acid version of Tom and Nicole at the Oscars, matching his and hers Rolexes on your wrists and freshly tanned from your four-star week in Ayia Napa.
The clothes are on the plastic.
The holidays are on the plastic.
The plastic is on the plastic.
I’m having drinks at Momo with Paul Dex and Terry Del Mar, a DJ/producer duo who I am going to commission to remix the Songbirds single. We’re in a booth downstairs, an ornate Eastern lamp dangling above our heads. There are patterned rugs on the walls, some of the walls themselves appear to be made out of mud, and somewhere I think incense is being burned. Dex and Del Mar are about my age, ‘geezers’ who’ve been through the whole acid-house thing, and they use expressions like ‘massive tune’ and ‘it drops big time’.
Deafening hip hop plays and, were I remotely interested in anything these clowns have to say, I’d have to really strain to hear it. Thankfully I’m not. None of the A-list DJs we approached could remix the tune in time. These mongo-loids were top of the B-list, available and—relatively—cheap. They’re hired, this meeting is a formality.
“Massive props,” Dex is saying.
“An underground vibe,” Del Mar chips in.
I nod and sip my vodka tonic.
Earlier today, at lunchtime, I waited until Parker-Hall strolled downstairs for a meeting I knew he had scheduled. I slipped across the hallway into his office and hurriedly got to work on his computer. I uploaded the contents of the Dover disk onto Parker-Hall’s hard drive. I buried the disk in a file I named ‘Personal’, then buried that file in a deep, remote corner of ‘My Documents’. There are hundreds of files in there and I’m sure he won’t notice one tiny new addition. The whole thing took less than two minutes and then I was back in my office flipping between MTV and VH1.
I drift back into the conversation. Del Mar is saying, “Soma, Basic Channel, Peace Frog…”
Dex says, “Hooj Choons.”
“Lads,” I say, getting up and peeling a fifty from my wad to cover the drinks, “I gotta run.”
Upstairs as I leave I see Paul Oakenfold sitting in the restaurant. Coincidentally he was one of the DJs who turned down the Songbirds remix. On the table in front of him is an ice bucket containing a bottle of Dom Perignon. Beside it is a Dictaphone, its red light glowing. A young guy faces him, chewing on a pen, nodding. An interview, then. As I pass, Oakenfold stabs the table with a pudgy finger, looks the journalist right in the eye, and says, “I am the biggest DJ in the world. In. The. World.” His teeny little legs dangle over the banquette seating, his feet—kiddie’s feet—barely touching the ground.
Yeah, beware the small man, I think to myself. Always beware the small man. He’ll fuck you every time. Because they never forget, do they? All that grief they got at school. Over and over, and for the rest of their miserable short-arsed lives, someone’s got to pay.
♦
Autumn really gets going and things happen, mostly bad.
An entire wall in the house will need to be replaced. Weeks—months—and thousands and thousands of pounds before I can sell the fucking place for anything like a decent profit.
‘Fully Grown’, Songbirds’ debut single, is taken up to Radio 1 for playlist…and swiftly rejected. Even Music Week—usually a publication that gives every record released in Britain a little gold star—describes the single as ‘somewhat lacklustre’.
The Lazies are offered the cover of NME. Demand for their debut LP is at such a pitch that it is sure to go straight into the top ten. There is a passing reference to Parker-Hall in the Sunday Times where he’s described as an ‘A&R guru’. After I read this—at eleven o’clock in the morning—I drink half a bottle of vodka and cry for a while.
Rebecca bustles around the office jangling with happiness. We went out for a drink and a long talk after I returned from Glasgow. She doesn’t see the point in a long engagement. While telling her I agree I also point out that I want to do things properly, ask her father’s permission and all that, and that this will take a little time. I manage to get her to agree that we will keep our ‘engagement’ under wraps for the time being.
Incredibly, this strict omerta seems to be holding fast. Had she confided in anyone it would most likely be Katie, Trellick’s PA, in which case it would have been around the business affairs department in seconds and Trellick would immediately have hauled me down to Full and Frank’s. In the normal run of things asking Rebecca—asking any secretary—to keep quiet about something like this would be about as effective a silencing tactic as taking out a full-page ad in Music Week to announce your engagement.
Because that’s what they do. That’s all they do. They talk to each other about the shit we do. Over salads and Diet Cokes, around photocopiers and water coolers, across wine-bar tables littered with Chardonnay bottles and packs of Marlboro Lights, they talk and they rant and they dissect the shit that we do to them. If you removed the phrase ‘and then he said’ from the language every one of these fucking sows would have a hard time kick-starting a conversation. And then—I guarantee it—the ones who have boyfriends go home at night and some poor bastard will have to hear the whole thing again, with whatever refinements and embellishments they’ve dreamed up on the tube thrown in. I mean, the sheer fucking arrogance of it, to think that anyone wants to hear about your miserable day.
Infuriatingly, when no one is around, she twirls into my office and gives me a peck on the cheek. On the plus side I have had her over to the flat once or twice, late at night, when I’ve been off my tits. Like many crazy girls she is truly gifted at fucking.
Rumours abound that Derek is going to leave the company, to move into management or something. Up until recently the only possible internal successor to him would have been Trellick, which would be an incredible result for me. But, the way things are going, Parker-Hall might just get offered the job. A nightmare beyond description. Managing Director by the age of thirty? Could it happen?
How in the seven names of fuck am I going to get Woodham a publishing deal? Does he really know anything about Waters? What’s he going to do?
Out of all this crap the most pressing problem is the Songbirds single. We’ve got the Dex and Del Mar remix in, which we’re going to ‘put out to clubs’. Is it any good? I haven’t a fucking clue. I should know, I suppose. I’m paid to know these things. But I’m tired. It’s so tiring, not knowing anything the whole time. You’re meant to listen to your ‘gut instinct’. “Go with your gut instinct,” they say. But I don’t know…all I hear from my gut are vague unhappy rumblings that I should be making more money, fucking more, and cuter, boilers, eating in better restaurants, getting more respect from quarter-wits like Dunn.
Dunn. The spastic was almost cheerful when he told me Songbirds didn’t get playlisted. Like everyone else at the label he is in love with Parker-Hall and thinks the Lazies are going to be the next Led Zeppelin.
He will pay. They will all pay.
♦
As requested Ross calls me the minute he gets the midweeks in. “Sitting down?” he says. Jesus, this must be bad. “Three,” he says bluntly. I don’t think I’ve heard him right.
“Thirty?” I say, hopefully.
“Three,” he repeats, “it’s number three.”
Numbly I hang up. The midweek chart prediction for the Lazies single is number three. A stupendous result for Parker-Hall and a disaster for me. Well, anywhere in the top ten would have been a disaster for me but this…it’s terrible, a living nightmare I am praying to awaken from. I only really have
two options: 1) slink out of the office, take the rest of the week off with a mysterious illness and wait until all the fuss dies down a bit, or 2) go along to Parker-Hall’s office, right now, and congratulate him. Play the magnanimous card.
His door is open. I take a deep breath, will my features into an idiotic grin, and pop my head around. “Hey!” I say. “Congratulations on…” Derek and Dunn—horrible success vampires—are both already in there, the three of them are deep in conversation.
“Yeah, cheers, mate,” Parker-Hall says breaking off in mid-flow. “Can you just give us a minute? Thanks.” Neither Derek nor Dunn even look at me.
I turn to go but—“Sorry, Steven, hang on a minute.” I turn back. Parker-Hall is holding a piece of paper up. “Have you spent four and a half grand on club promotion on this Songbirds single?”
Dunn and Derek look at me coolly now. Can this really be happening? “Umm, yeah,” I say shrugging, “what’s the problem?”
“In future,” Derek says, aggressively, “anything like this will have to be signed off by either Anthony or myself.”
“Right…” I say.
“Just run it by me, mate,” Parker-Hall says airily. I nod. They resume their conversation—Derek literally turning his back on me and saying “Anyway”—and I stumble off along the hall, numb, beginning to realise just how far I have fallen.
The tiny file squats on Parker-Hall’s hard drive, inert and unnoticed, waiting for me to push the button.
Not yet, I think. Not just yet.
♦
I somehow manage to add a new, alarming vice to my already jam-packed roster. In addition to the chang, the booze and fags, the ostros, the online dog and pony shows, the sex lines and whatever else opportunity, cash and technology throw my way, I am now compulsively overeating. In the car on the way to the office, idling in fogbound traffic, I cram buttery croissants into my face, washing them down with litre-and-a-half vats of full-fat latte. Standing at my office window, listening to demos and gazing at the bend of the Thames, I follow triple-decker BLTs with a couple of rounds of chocolate brownies. At lunch with Trellick and Ross, with Darren and Leamington, I bulldoze through plates of gnocchi and pasta, covered in oozing tomato sauce and hidden under drifts of Parmesan. I tear apart side portions of heavily buttered bread and inhale gallons of Diet Coke. (“I see they’re working,” Ross commented one lunchtime, patting my burgeoning paunch as I drained a third silver-and-red can.) The other night the normally inscrutable kid from the Thai takeaway did a slight double take as he set the groaning bags (torn yam gai, green curry, special rice, spring rolls, three orders of dumplings) on the kitchen counter and realised I was eating alone. It’s the cold, I suppose, I reflect as I wait impatiently for the evening’s second tub of Belgian chocolate ice cream to complete its twenty-second thawing in the microwave.
With all this going on New York is probably the worst place on earth for me, yet here I am, sprawled on my bed at the Soho Grand—a tub of minibar M&Ms in my left hand, my softish prick in my right, and some hardcore on the TV. I’m tiredly watching some brick-shithouse darkie slide his horse-prick (the vein running down it is like a section of garden hose) in and out of a traumatised arse when the phone rings, its tone soft, purring, apologetic, like it doesn’t really want to disturb you. Still half-heartedly masturbating, I pick it up. “Band’s on at half seven,” Parker-Hall says, “then we got dinner with the American label, yeah?” He’s not asking me.
“See you downstairs,” I say and hang up.
We’re here for CMJ, which is kind of the same deal as In The City, which was very much like Sound City, as was Pop Komm, which bore a stunning similarity to South by Southwest, which merges in my head with the Winter Music Festival, which wasn’t all that different to MIDEM. New York, Glasgow, Cologne, Bristol, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit-card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn.
Parker-Hall really does work. I don’t know that he actually likes going to gigs, but he certainly sees it as a necessary part of the job—which is why we’re enduring a forty-minute cab ride to some venue way uptown, where we’ll watch some fucking band for twenty minutes before another forty-minute ride back downtown to meet some people from the American label for dinner at a restaurant five minutes from our hotel. Had Parker-Hall not been here the chances of me going to this gig would have been…minimal.
He strides into the lobby, flipping his mobile shut. The hotel—the city—is rammed with Brits. In the bar I can see a couple of guys from Virgin laughing and drinking beer with the tall blond-hair-and-specs guy from the Chemical Brothers, Ed, I think. The Chemicals are on the verge of actually taking off properly over here—half a million albums or so, about the same as Ellie Crush. That’s the thing about America. It’s shit or bust. Fuck all or a couple of million albums. I physically have to shake my head to knock out a vision of Parker-Hall having that kind of US success.
“Should we be signing these cunts?” Parker-Hall asks as an opener as we clatter down the hotel’s ludicrous industrial-metal stairwell.
“Who?”
He holds up a CD of some band.
“Nah, pony,” I say.
“It’s OK. Like the new Radiohead with some tunes. Can’t see it being good for more than a hundred thousand though. Do you wanna see if we can get a meeting? Just for a laugh, fuck every other cunt up?”
“Yeah,” I say as the doorman hails us a cab.
Parker-Hall turns to me as we edge into traffic. “What’s happening with the Songbirds single?”
“Starting to get some good club reactions in,” I say. This means fuck all. Without radio play it means absolutely nothing, unless you have a monstrously huge club record, the kind that can become a hit with minimal radio. ‘Good reaction at club’ is the kind of thing you say when there is nothing else to say. I know this and Parker-Hall knows this, but he chooses to nod and say, “Yeah?”
“Yeah, still early days,” I say. Too right it fucking is—I have already put the release date back twice.
“And the album?”
“Still writing. Trying a few different writers.”
“What’s the recording budget again?”
“One twenty.”
“Gonna come in at that? Be realistic.”
“I should think so,” I say with a straight face. I reckon, once everything is in, I’ll have spent that on the fucking single.
“Coolio,” he says in a completely neutral tone. What to read into it? It is just about possible that he’s backing me here, being supportive of my instincts in an area of the market—pop-dance—that isn’t really his field. It’s also possible—it’s far more likely, it’s practically a fucking banker—that he’s doling me out a colossal amount of thick, oily rope and watching with amusement as I coil it over my arm and climb the steps towards my shaky, home-made gallows.
Outside, the brownstones of the Village give way to the wide, loud cord of Broadway as we whip uptown through light rain and suddenly, without warning, we’re in the open space of Times Square, which squats neutralised, bereft, in the daylight. Off to our left 42nd Street snakes down towards Chelsea and I experience a sudden, intense pang of pornography, a yearning for fisting, for lurid plastic dildos and ben-wa balls, to see someone other than myself being defiled and degraded.
Parker-Hall’s mobile trills, interrupting my reverie—“All right geezer!” he says delightedly—and then he’s talking to someone back home, his affected, brutalised vowels flouncing off some satellite miles above us and passing silently through cold, cold space before they flutter out another chunk of plastic somewhere in London, where it will be bedtime.
♦
Having managed to drink pretty heavily at the gig (four double Rockschools and a couple of beers in less than an hour), I continue drinking heavily in the bar at the restaurant—some place called Balthazar, a recently opened pseudo-French shithole that seems to be the toast of every flaming virus carrier in the fucking Villa
ge—before we sit down to dinner with the American record company, which is where I really kick things up a gear.
Refreshed by repeated hops to the bathroom I begin double-fisting red wine and Scotch as well as popping back stinging tequila shots whenever I (frequently) swing by the bar to smoke another cigarette. I’m not eating and food—seared foie gras, steak frites, a salad of asparagus and fennel—builds up in front of and around me. Along from me Parker-Hall is having the fruits de mer; two sparkling tiers of iced crab, crayfish, clams, oysters, mussels and shrimp tower in front of him. “Are you having a fucking giraffe, cunt?” I think and I briefly wish that someone who would appreciate the Rage anecdote—Trellick, say—was here.
Because the dinner is mind-numbing. Parker-Hall sits between Ashley Werner, chairman of the American arm of our company, and Russ Koppel, Head of Promotions, the guy who gets your signings on the radio over here. He’s like an even more game-show version of Dunn. There’s a couple of junior A&R guys from the American label beside me and, across from me, some woman manager—in her forties, well heeled, big glasses, serious—and a couple of other boilers I don’t know. All the Shermans are drinking water and eating salads and the conversation consists of listening to Werner and Koppel pontificate away and waiting for your turn to nod. They’re all Ellie Crush fans and treat Parker-Hall as though he were the young Ahmet fucking Ertegun. Parker-Hall, in his turn, drones on about how much he values their input or something.
I lean across the table to the cutest girl here—a blonde in her mid-twenties, denim jacket, small tits perky beneath a tight vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt—and whisper “Hey…”
