2008 - Kill Your Friends

by John Niven

  “Here we go, best cloob in’t North,” Steve says as he throws a set of double doors open and we bowl right into Hades: two thousand bikini-clad girls and Teflon-shirted Northern arguments for mass sterilisation are going fucking bananas to some awful cheesy house record. The DJ is suspended high above the crowd in what looks like a metal egg. He is wearing a baseball cap with a giant foam cock-and-balls on top of it. I’m not fucking kidding. Steve the promoter grins proudly.

  “Wow,” Trellick says.

  “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit,” Ross whispers.

  We get given a table in their ‘VIP’ section: actually a tiny bar roped off to one side of the club with a few fag-burned, booze-stained sofas dotted around. It’s rammed with what can only be local VIPS—hairdressers and third division footballers. A few of the boilers are doable in an utterly disgraceful filth kind of way.

  “It’s grim up North,” Ross says laughing as he opens the bottle of Moet Steve has proudly placed on our table.

  We make the best of a terrible situation, talking crap, chatting up girls, draining bottle after bottle of complimentary pobey and ducking down to sneak surreptitious card-edges of chang.

  It’s nearly 2 a.m.—everyone in the place is incandescent with booze: boiled on Stella, Breezers, vodka Red Bulls and speed and Es and all the other terrible crap the penniless spastics in places like this shovel into themselves—when I hear a familiar drum loop and a breathy female vocal. “Come on,” Barry says, pulling me after him as we head out into the club proper. Packs of girls are charging towards the dance floor, pushing us aside. Guys follow them. Whoops and cheers are going up. Trellick and I look at each other. Then the track kicks in properly.

  The whole place goes fucking ballistic. We watch open-mouthed. Every girl in the place knows all the words. Dozens of them are doing this funny little dance. It is, without doubt, the biggest reaction to a record I have witnessed in a super-toler nightclub since we all heard ‘Saturday Night’ by Whigfield for the first time, in some cattle market outside Marbella a few years back. Barry appears, sweating and drunk through the crowd. “What did I tell you?” he shouts over the Dex and Del Mar remix of ‘Fully Grown’ by Songbirds.

  Ross charges up. “They’ve got a dance!” he screams. “They’ve got their own fucking dance!”

  “Maybe it’s just this club…” I say.

  “Bollocks,” Barry shouts, “I was in Leeds last weekend. Glasgow too. It’s like this everywhere!”

  Trellick slips an arm around my shoulder, “This, matey boy,” he says gesturing towards the music, the tolers, all of it, “is going to be a fucking smash,” and then the four of us are dancing a jig, holding our champagne flutes on top of heads and laughing so hard that tears are running down our faces.

  Immediately—and without consulting Parker-Hall or Derek—I authorise Barry to treble the club mailout. To get the record to every cock-and-balls-on-the-head DJ in the country, to every Ritzy-Cinderella-Rockafeller piece-of-shit, stab-you-in-face-with-a-broken-Beck’s-bottle nightclub from Land’s End to John O’-fucking-Groats.

  Because I got blindsided, didn’t I? Sidetracked by detail and nonsense I lost sight of the big picture. Only one thing matters in this racket: Big. Hit. Records. And plenty of them. Sort that out and you can do what you fucking like.

  Back at the hotel I turn it all over in my head—

  Woodham, Waters, Rebecca, Parker-Hall—and the same question keeps coming back. How far? How far can you go? I root through my bag, take out the dog-eared copy of Hauptman’s Unleash Your Monster and flip back and forth until I find the passage. “In every difficult, worthwhile endeavour there will come a point when the easiest course of action is to abandon forward motion, to allow inertia to take over and to return to the status quo. It is the brave and great man who, upon recognising this point, resists inertia and smashes on through to the far side. No matter the cost. I call this juncture the critical moment of will.”

  I underline the last four words several times.

  Payback time.

  ♦

  I take Rebecca out to dinner at an obscure Sudanese restaurant to discuss our ‘wedding’. Rebecca does most of the talking and I do a lot of nodding. “We can announce it,” I say grandly, “at the company Christmas party.”

  “Yeah!” she coos, excitedly—doubtless imagining all her tunnel-cunted, doomed-to-childlessness, thirty-something secretary friends shimmering with envy as she waltzes around showing off the ring—and continues blathering about arrangements for her wedding that will never happen.

  “…in gold, or ivory, and then there’s place settings, and napkin rings and the like to think about…possibly Claridge’s—or Babington—but I suppose we’d need to book the whole place out, and then there’s the question of how late you can go on…DJs or band? Oh! Maybe we could get…”

  It occurs to me that this is why boilers like Rebecca want to get married so much—it is the ultimate organisational hard-on.

  Earlier today I called Woodham. Without preamble I said, “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

  “Bad news first,” he says.

  “Well, the deal isn’t huge and it’s with a pretty small publisher.”

  “What deal?”

  “Your publishing deal.”

  A pause while he takes this in. “Seriously?” he says finally.

  “Congratulations,” I say.

  “You got me a publishing deal?”

  “Yup.”

  This was almost true. Having been laughed out of town by every real publisher in the business I rang Benny Gold.

  Benny’s an old-school has-been who copped the publishing on a couple of big novelty records in the seventies. He’s made a little money on property since then but, like a lot of old-school fools, he likes to reckon himself still ‘in the business’. He runs a tiny publishing company called Cloudberry Music: going to MIDEM every year and scratching around for deals no one else wants. He’s a nice loser, the kind of guy you end up getting pissed with in the Barracuda—hundred-franc notes and whores all over the shop.

  The deal I make with Benny is straightforward enough. I will personally sink twenty grand into Cloudberry to become a sleeping partner. I’ll then punt acts his way, give him tips on hot bands and stuff. In return Benny agreed to make Alan Woodham our first joint signing (Benny’s nearly sixty, he thinks Joe Jackson is a hot new artist, he had no idea if the demo was good, bad, or whatever) and to pay him an advance of ten grand out of my twenty K seed money. The only other condition I imposed was that Woodham never knows I’m involved in the company. He must think the whole thing was Benny’s idea. Under the deal we have to pay Woodham five grand of the advance on signature and I max out my overdraft writing the cheque for this. I am up to the hilt on the cards. I am teetering right on the fucking brink, no question.

  Woodham is beyond excited. “How much?” he stammers.

  “The advance is only ten grand, but—” I begin.

  “Really?” he says, excited, and I have to remind myself that this is probably half his annual salary.

  “Yeah. Sorry, but—”

  “Oh fuck the money,” he babbles, cutting me off, “all I ever wanted was a chance.”

  Woodham is thinking about fame and success. I am thinking—will this be enough?

  “Alan,” I said, my knuckles whitening around the phone, “about this neighbour of mine who saw me coming home early the morning Roger was murdered.”

  A pause while he adjusts to the twist in the conversation. “When you went out early to get a newspaper?”

  “Yeah, but, well, am I in trouble here?”

  “Why would you be in trouble for that?”

  “I just thought, when we spoke about it on the phone the other week, you sounded a bit…pissed off.”

  “No.”

  “So everything’s OK? We’re good? I mean, you don’t think…”

  “We’re fine, Steven.”

  And I want to
believe him. I really do.

  “Oh no!” Rebecca says suddenly, looking up at me, her fork suspended halfway to her mouth. “That won’t work, will it?”

  “What won’t?”

  “Announcing it at the Christmas party.”

  “Why not?”

  “Darling, your memory! I won’t be here, remember? I told you, I’m going to see my parents. I leave on the first and I’m not back until the new year. Bugger!”

  She had told me. Rebecca—like me—is an only child. Her parents live in Melbourne. It’s their anniversary soon and she’s taking a month off, to fly out unannounced and surprise them. I think quickly. “Tell you what…tell you what. You know I’m going to Thailand with the lads on the 15th?”

  She nods eagerly.

  “Why don’t I cut it short with them and come to Australia for Christmas? I can meet your parents and we can tell them together? I mean, thinking about it, we should keep it under wraps until then, shouldn’t we? Your parents should really be the first to know.”

  She looks at me in gaping, wide-eyed adoration. “Sweetie, that’s a marvellous idea! I’ll look into flights in the morning for you. Bangkok to Melbourne. Oh, you’ll love my dad!”

  She starts talking about her dad, about how funny he is, how laid-back he is, and it’s good because now I don’t have to listen any more. I can think. I’m thinking—this could actually work out really well. But there are questions. At the flat? Or a hotel suite? And just how hardcore is Woodham? How much does he want it? I think about all this as I push rice around my plate and Rebecca talks on in the background. She’s saying, “…and you don’t want a stretch limo, so tacky, but maybe a Lincoln Town Car, we can use Addison Lee for the guests and if we…”

  As she talks I look up into her face, which is lit a soft orange from a candle which is floating and glittering in a bowl of water in the middle of our table. Rebecca’s eyes are bright green. They are glittering too—the zinging glitter of utter madness.

  November

  Michael Hutchence tops himself in some demented wanking frenzy. The Teletubbies are N°1. Chris Evans buys Virgin Radio. Martin Heath is fired from Arista. A&R guy Jono Cox is given a label deal by Deconstruction/BMG on the strength of this band he’s signed called Superstar. He says, “This is very much a long-term relationship.”

  Fifteen

  “Whatever it takes.”

  Casablanca Records motto

  Woodham signs his publishing deal. He takes the day off and I take him to the Groucho for lunch.

  We’re barely into the second bottle of Perrier Jouet when he starts coming out with all the crazy shit they all come out with—“…things are gonna happen now…I’ve been trying so hard for so long…all I needed was a break…” At one point he even starts talking about the ‘craft’ of songwriting. You what? I think. You’re a twenty-eight-year-old copper.

  As I upend the second empty champagne bottle into the ice bucket and signal the waitress (the cute one I always overtip) for a third, I ask him about his kids. He goes misty-eyed and starts blathering on like they all do, thinking that you give a shit about the howling brats they’ve conjured up out of some sloppy fuck. He talks on while I think about house prices and money and remixes and chart positions and stuff. I catch the odd phrase—“…such a clever little boy…takes after her mother…the thing about being a parent…” Fucking spare me.

  “Do you plan on having kids, Steven?” he asks me finally.

  “Oh, definitely,” I say. Then, quickly, I add, “Do you want some fucking chang?”

  He doesn’t understand so I explain, employing a more widely used noun. There’s a pause.

  “Here?” he says, glancing around the half-empty bar.

  Downstairs into the little bathroom with the little stack of books in it and soon I’m watching the detective constable snort up an icy line of very decent cocaine.

  Of course the downside to this is that I soon have to listen to the cunt talking an incredible amount of balls: how much he owes me; how, in ten years, I was the first A&R guy to give his music a chance; how he gets laughed at by the other coppers for persisting with his dream in his spare time; how they call him ‘Noel’; how his—now dead—father never understood his drive to make music. “He told me it was a waste of time,” Woodham says sadly, and suddenly I feel a great surge of affection for his dad, for old man Woodham, sagely telling his worthless son what they should all be told really—“Get a fucking job, you stupid cunt.”

  We’re literally a breath away from the same story about how he fell off his bike when he was nine when I interrupt him. “Listen, Alan,” I say, swallowing and slapping on my gravest expression, “now we’re getting to be…well, friends, I suppose…”

  He nods eagerly and with utter conviction, the coked-up, brain-dead fool.

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about but…it’s difficult. I…” I trail off.

  “What?”

  “Christ, I…”

  “Come on, mate,” he says, his jaw is set at a mad gak-angle and I am pretty sure he will believe anything I am about to tell him.

  “It’s just, when you were talking about how much you loved your kids earlier…it got me thinking. Oh God…”

  “Steven,” Woodham says, setting his drink down, putting a hand on my shoulder, “what is it?”

  I wait for a long time, looking like I’m really weighing it up, before I say, “There’s this guy at work…”

  I tell him.

  He sits there for a long time. He looks very angry. Finally he says, “Are you sure about this, Steven?”

  “Pretty sure. Things he’s said, when he’s drunk.”

  “Right. What’s his name?”

  I spell it for him.

  “I’m going to make a phone call. Right now.” he says, pulling his mobile out.

  “No phones in the club, Alan.”

  “Oh, right.” He sways off towards reception, dialling as he goes.

  ♦

  Afternoon drinking blurs into evening drinking and I take Woodham on a whirlwind blitz of the West End; from the Groucho to Soho House to Black’s to the Two Brydges club before cabbing it up to Hyde Park Corner, to the Met Bar. It’s Friday night and the place is rammed. Scary Spice has a big corner table with a gang of minders and shrieking drunken mates. Jay Kay from Jamiroquai is on the dance floor, wheeling about like a fruit. For some reason all the male members of the cast of Friends are hunkered around one of the central banquettes. We elbow our way in at the bar and Woodham stands there, bathed in the light from the backlit spirits bottle—the golden glow of the Scotches, the emerald of the gins, the platinum white of the vodkas—taking it all in, astonished. “Shit,” he whispers out the corner of his mouth, nudging me, “that’s James Dean Bradfield, from the Manic Street Preachers.” I look down the bar to see that Bradfield is indeed buying a round a few feet along from us.

  “Oh yeah, you a fan then?” I say, cracking a credit card down.

  “God, not half.”

  Jesus wept. Bradfield comes through the crush beside us, heading for his table. “Hey James,” I say, extending my hand. He shakes it and it takes him a couple of seconds.

  “All right…Steve? How you doing, mate?”

  “Good, thanks. Out on the town?”

  “Ah, me and the Hedgemeister just came out for a couple.” He indicates Mike Hedges across the room, the man-mountain who produced the last Manics album. “Too middley,” Waters had said. Waters’ tongue, the tongue he had used to say those senseless words—and millions more—lying on the floor next to the Nick Hornby novel. While Bradfield and I exchange pleasantries Woodham is twitching and shuffling spastically, begging to be introduced.

  “James, this is Alan.”

  “All right mate?” Bradfield says, extending his hand to Woodham. Woodham shakes it reverently and then he slurs the following. Oh yes he does.

  “It’s an honour to meet you, Mr Bradfield. I have to say, I think you’re a
n amazing guitarist.”

  I close my eyes but Bradfield just laughs it off. “Ah bollocks,” he says. “Have a good night, lads.” And he’s off.

  A sour-faced bumboy materialises behind the bar.

  “What can I get you?”

  Woodham dives in. “I’ll get this.”

  “No, my treat tonight Alan.”

  “No, you’ve been buying all the drinks. My turn.”

  “OK. Double vodka and tonic.”

  “Same for me please.”

  The guy goes off to fix the drinks. Woodham leans into me and says, “I suppose that wasn’t very cool, was it? With James just then.”

  “Ah, don’t worry about it. I’m sure he gets it a lot.”

  “I had to tell him.”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you know him?”

  How did I know him? I didn’t really. “Oh, just from around, you know.”

  Woodham nods and says, “It’s another world.”

  The virus carrier returns with the drinks, which come in huge, heavy ice-packed tumblers. Woodham holds a tenner out and the barman looks at him like he’s lost his fucking mind. Woodham reaches into his wallet and upgrades to a twenty, which still isn’t going to cut it. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I say and head for the toilet for a bump, leaving the barman talking Woodham through the bill.

  When I come back ten minutes later Woodham is still blinking at the receipt.

  ♦

  It’s midnight when we get back to my place and Woodham is hammered.

  We’re sat on high stools at the granite kitchen counter which separates my kitchen area from the living room. On the worktop between us is a CD case (Give ‘Em Enough Rope, which we are listening to, Woodham’s choice) with a mound of gak on it, my Amex, a rolled fifty, a bottle of Stoli, a bottle of tonic, a half-full ice bucket, some sliced limes and two heavy crystal tumblers. Woodham is getting a bit giggly now, possibly feeling the effect of the half E I ground into his first drink almost an hour ago. (I thought it best to slip him small and gradual doses.) “I love this song,” says Woodham, leaping off his stool and stumbling over towards the massive speakers. He turns it up.