Kill 'Em All

by John Niven

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by John Niven

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  January

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  March

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  May

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  June

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  The long-awaited sequel to KILL YOUR FRIENDS - preorder now!

  It is 2017 – the time of Trump, Brexit and fake news. And time for the return of Steven Stelfox, exactly twenty years on from his Britpop heyday.

  Now forty-seven and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, Stelfox works only occasionally as a music industry ‘consultant’. A fixer. A problem solver. He’s had a call from his old friend James Trellick, now president of Unigram, one of the largest record companies in America. Trellick has a huge headache on his hands in the shape of…

  Lucius Du Pre. The biggest pop star on earth. Well, once the biggest pop star on earth. Now he’s a helpless junkie and a prolific, unrepentant sexual predator. Through a programme of debt restructuring so complex even Trellick can barely understand it, Du Pre is massively in hock to the record company. The only way he can possibly pay it off is to embark on a worldwide comeback tour he’s in no shape to do. The picture is further complicated when the parents of one of Du Pre’s ‘special friends’ begin blackmailing him. If their video gets out, Du Pre’s brand will be utterly toxic and will take Unigram down with it.

  Enter Stelfox stage right. Only he has the lack of morality to spin this one. With stealth and cunning he begins to chart a road out of the nightmare and to make a killing in the process. For this age of ‘American carnage’ – of populism, of the lowest common denominator, of the Big Lie – is truly Stelfox’s time to shine. But in this time of uncertainty, nothing is a given.

  ‘A banging action satirical thriller. But it’s also a proper novel about the Trumpian era, of the reality TV era, the fake news era. It’s managed to say a lot of things in a way that very few other novels are doing and in a very comedic way.’ Irvine Welsh

  ‘John Niven understands our era better than almost anyone.’ Douglas Coupland

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Niven was born in Irvine, Ayrshire. He is the author of the novella Music from Big Pink and the novels Kill Your Friends, The Amateurs, The Second Coming, Cold Hands, Straight White Male, The Sunshine Cruise Company and No Good Deed.

  ALSO BY JOHN NIVEN

  Music from Big Pink

  Kill Your Friends

  The Amateurs

  The Second Coming

  Cold Hands

  Straight White Male

  The Sunshine Cruise Company

  No Good Deed

  For Keith

  ‘All empires are built of fire and blood.’

  (Pablo Escobar)

  January

  ONE

  Hertfordshire, England. Friday 20 January 2017, 6.40 a.m.

  It is too cold in the Maybach.

  I tell Grahame to turn the A/C off. Cold outside too, winter fog in the black night, a light sleet tipping against the smoked glass as the fields slide silently by, the headlights picking out the words ‘Luton Airport, 3 miles’ and then the sign vanishing behind us as we come off the M1. I’m in the back, reading the newspapers (the inauguration, later today) and the trades – Billboard, Variety, Music Week – on my phone. I note with neither joy nor rancour that on the singles chart it has been a good week for the Chainsmokers, Ariana Grande and Bruno Mars. Bad week (again) for Unigram, whose share price has (somehow) managed to drop even further. The lead story on the cover of Billboard is about Unigram’s biggest artist, Lucius Du Pre, who is beginning rehearsals for his comeback shows this summer – twenty nights at Madison Square Garden in New York, then twenty at London’s O2 Arena.

  There was a time, a very long time ago, when reading the trades was a weekly source of anxiety. Colleagues and competitors rising (traumatic) and falling (pleasurable). Firings and hirings. Now? Today? It’s almost like reading reports on a battle whose front lines are far away from me. In another country. On another planet.

  A quick recap, in case you’re in the Taliban or something, living in a cave, making nail bombs and inserting yourself into goats. This is from my Wikipedia entry: ‘Following a successful career in the music industry as an A&R manager, in 2003 Stelfox created the ABN television talent show American Pop Star, on which he initially acted as one of the judges.’ Yeah, and it was all good too, until this kid who thought he was Jesus took the whole brand down the shitter in the US. You saw the show. Trailer-park fucks performed Mariah Carey songs for the pleasure of other trailer-park fucks who used up their welfare cheques phoning in to vote for them. We licensed the rights like crazy – at one point we were running in thirty-two countries – until we sold the format in late 2011 and I cashed out to the tune of two hundred million dollars. That was six years ago. Semi-retirement at forty-two. What’s it been like? you ask. What do I get up to? How am I living? Well, take the past month …

  In mid-December I left the house in freezing London (7,500 square feet in Holland Park) to the staff (Roberta my London housekeeper, Grahame who is driving right now) and we (we being me, a couple of girls I know and my mates Hedge Fund Paul and Investment Banking Mel) took a private jet to Barbados, where we boarded the yacht Mistrial. It’s the second time I’ve rented it and it’s really something. You should see it. Just under two hundred feet long, seven bedrooms, including (for me) the huge master suite, space for up to fifteen crew, gymnasium, jacuzzi, 5,000-mile range, max speed of sixteen knots – perfect for touring the Med or the Caribbean.

  In Barbados we larged it in the usual spots with the usual suspects – in and out of Sandy Lane, the Cliff, Cin Cin, the Tides and Daphne’s with Tod, Wayne, Philip, Simon, Lev, Vlad, Roman and a revolving, interchangeable cast of TIBs (Top International Boilers) – the Kellys and Meghans and Svetlanas and Brooks and Whatevers. (The girls all share some common characteristics: none of them over thirty, all with giant racks, tiny waists and the ability to laugh long and hard at our jokes. The guys all have something in common too. Can you guess what it is? That’s right – no one is fucking poor.)

  After a week or so of this utter nonsense
we upped anchor and cruised to Grand Cayman – via St Lucia, Montserrat and Turks and Caicos – where I had some business to take care of. Your procedure on all of these islands you visit will be much the same. Drop anchor and then speedboat (the Mistrial has a VanDutch. Ten-seater, it can do 60 mph easy) into town for a long, boozy lunch at the hottest spot available. While doing this you will attract the eye of many of the girls who haunt the cool restaurants around the harbour and who have watched you anchor and come ashore. Back to the boat for an afternoon nap and then maybe some swimming over the side, some board games, bugger about on the jet skis, before the cocktails start on deck at 7 p.m. A few of those and we’re into the VanDutch again and over to town for dinner at another local sex pit. After that there’ll be a nightclub where we’ll pick up a few of the superyacht groupies who’ve been eyeing us all night and then back to the yacht where we’ll pump the tunes on deck and party until 3 or 4 a.m. when you slope off downstairs with whoever. You’ll wake up in the early afternoon, one of the crew will take the TIBs back to shore and you’ll do the whole thing all over again.

  After a solid fortnight of this I actually quite enjoyed getting to the Caymans and taking care of business for a couple of days. Edgar, head of the team who look after my accounting, had flown out from London with some forms that needed signing in connection with the several companies I have in Grand Cayman. Of course Cayman isn’t a tax shelter any more. How dare you. They’ve taken to calling themselves an ‘international finance centre’. Which is great. It’s like Ian Huntley calling himself a ‘bathing coordinator’. Sometimes, when I think of the schools, the hospitals and the roads that aren’t getting their piece of my cash, I swear to God, it’s all I can do not to get my cock out and start wanking. Do you pay tax? I’m guessing you do. You’re probably paying somewhere between 25 and 45 per cent of the disgraceful pittance you call an income. In fiscal 2015–2016 I paid tax at a rate of roughly 12 per cent. It’s too much of course. Every January I find myself screaming at Edgar, ‘The cunts want how fucking much?’

  But there is no tax here in Grand Cayman. None. You get to keep all your money and pass it down as you see fit. It is the ultimate expression of trickle-down. How’s that working out for the indigenous population you ask? Well, 40 per cent of the toerags live in poverty and a packet of fish fingers will cost you eight and a half quid. What a fucking result.

  Take a look at your life. Go on. Your gaff. The clothes you wear. The restaurants you eat in. The holidays you take. Pretty good, eh? You’re not doing too badly.

  Mate, you’re nothing.

  In the world of pure money, your life is a urinal. A human toilet. Your very existence a suicide job. The average UK salary is twenty-eight grand a year. I made twenty times this betting against the pound before Brexit. I made even more than that with a single bet on the US election. Why? How did I know to do this? How did I pull these rabbits out the hat while you’re sat there scratching your horrific balls on your pleather sofa, ringing Domino’s for an American Paedophile with hot-dog crust while your monstrous beastwife lumbers around in her jeggings, her feet creaking and cracking on your millimetre-thick laminate wood floor, her IMAX-sized fucking chobble getting in the way of the single most valuable asset you own: your massive plasma-screen TV? (Doubtless bought on credit from some high street den called TolerHouse! at an interest rate of 3,000 per cent per annum.) I pulled this off because I learned one very important thing in the music industry, something gleaned from two decades of pushing reeking musical log after reeking musical log down the throats of idiots, something that has stood me in very good stead in the past year. It is this:

  Never overestimate the taste of the general public.

  Music, TV, movies, furniture, food, architecture, politics – there is absolutely no depth to which those cunts will not sink. They will willingly vote themselves into living in an extreme, real-life version of The Road for eternity for the chance to say ‘fuck all Pakis’ once. Where there’s that kind of thinking going on, there’s always cash to be made.

  Anyway, we spent a few days in the Caymans before boarding the jet back to Heathrow, where the plan was to hang out in London before the traditional end-of-January skiing trip to Courchevel with a few of the guys I used to work with in the music industry. (The successful ones of course: not the ones who went mad, or broke, or into rehab.) But then this plan was interrupted by what can only be described as a distress call. From Trellick.

  You’ll remember James Trellick. Lawyer.

  We came up together, back in the nineties. Trellick is now managing director of Unigram in Los Angeles. We stay in touch, celebratory emails when a mutual adversary is publicly destroyed, the odd lunch or dinner when he’s in London or I’m out there. We lived near each other in Beverly Hills for a while, back in the noughties, when I was still doing the show. Now you’d always have used one word to describe Trellick, that product of Eton and Oxford: ‘unflappable’. Not last night. Last night Trellick was distinctly … flapped. He couldn’t go into it on the phone, couldn’t put anything in writing, but it was urgent enough that he wanted me in LA this morning. Urgent enough that he agreed to my enormous consultancy fee just to take a look at his problem. Urgent enough that it awakened something within me that very rarely gets an outing these days: genuine curiosity.

  ‘Here we go, boss,’ Grahame says from the driver’s seat.

  I look up to see the lights of Luton Airport coming up ahead. I picture what will be happening inside it. Tattooed mums and dads punching their screaming kids around KFC. Fights and rows in the two-mile-long queues. Crazed Arsenal fans smashing back pints of Tits in the Great British Boozer at seven o’clock in the morning, all of them stunned that their quid now gets them about half a euro, none of them having seen that coming when they proudly ticked the box marked ‘LEAVE’. Right at the last moment, when I’ve had just enough time to convince myself of an alternative life fantasy where we actually drive up to Luton Airport and I have to walk into the terminal and witness first hand all the horrors I’ve just been picturing, Grahame makes a left at the roundabout, the minty-green signage of the Holiday Inn Express on our right now, and we are turning into the familiar entrance for the RSS Private Jet Centre. Over behind the small VIP building I can see the plane, a Gulfstream G550, and on its tail the Unigram logo.

  Imagine it. Imagine flying commercial.

  But more than all this, more than wanting to help an old mate out (yeah, right), I have to admit, great though life is at the moment, there is the odd day when I worry that a lifestyle like the one I’ve been outlining here could be described as a tiny bit … vacuous. So I’m retired, but I’m not. Because you have to do something, don’t you? You’d go fucking mad otherwise. So I work occasionally as a ‘consultant’. If the project is interesting enough, and the fee large enough, I’ll get on a plane. Like a few years back, when Warner Music bought EMI. I helped put that together, behind the scenes. A few months’ work for seven figures that, pleasingly, provided a bonus opportunity: engineering the firing of a few clowns who’d had the temerity to offend me back in the nineties. (Like the great man says in Think Big: ‘I love getting even when I get screwed by someone. Always get even. When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back 15 times harder. You do it not only to get the person who messed with you but also to show the others who are watching what will happen to them if they mess with you. If someone attacks you, do not hesitate. Go for the jugular.’) There’s also, and I hate to admit this, been the slight niggle recently that I might have got out of the music industry at the wrong time …

  The music industry. What do you think happened to it? If you ask the man on the street, the average mongoloid shuffling his hump from the boozer to the bookies, you’ll get something like the following: ‘Oh yeah. It’s over. The Internet destroyed the music business. You don’t need record companies now. My mate Glen put his own album out online and sold eight hundred copies. The gatekeepers a
re gone, man.’

  I pick up my phone and open my Twitter account. I find a tweet I favourited last week, from one Roger McGuinn, the former guitar player in 1960s proto-indielosers the Byrds. Roger says: ‘Pandora played ‘Eight Miles High’ 228086 times in the second quarter of 2016 and paid me $1.79.’

  A quid and a half for a quarter of a million plays.

  After a moment, and even at this ungodly hour of the morning, I am laughing so hard that Grahame has to ask me if I’m OK. Now, granted, it got a bit scary for a while, back there in the early noughties, what with Napster and everything, but in the end it worked out fine. We did it again. Can you believe it? From sheet music, to the 78 rpm shellac disc, to singles and albums, to cassettes, to CDs, to now, today, the Internet: the music industry has once again managed to insert a ten-foot dildo made of broken glass into the anus of an entire generation of musicians. That royalty break clause, the one that covers ‘all technologies yet to be discovered’, the one that we’ve been putting into contracts for the last thirty-odd years, that was a fucking doozy. I’d like to go back in time and shake the hand of the scumbag animal lawyer who came up with that beauty. Back in the day, in the late eighties and early nineties, it meant that for a while we got away with paying artists the same royalty on a CD single we sold for four quid as we did on vinyl that sold for half that. Today it means some songwriter looks at Spotify and sees his one million plays have earned him a fiver. Where’s the rest of that money going? Where do you fucking think? The gatekeepers are gone? That’s right, mate – they’re in your house, eating everything in the fridge and doing your wife.

  I send a couple of pro-Trump tweets from my troll accounts (‘#godonald! #MAGA #inauguration’) to take my mind off my pre-flight anxiety while Grahame deals with the luggage and the whole check-in palaver, out there in the chill January dawn. Passport and security take all of two minutes. (‘Hi, sir! Nice to see you again.’) When I do this, I spare a thought for you out there – the dear, the gentle – taking your belt and shoes off, furiously scrabbling through your bag for that laptop or iPad, wearily walking back through the scanner, then extending your arms skywards as the guy with the wand does his stuff, the whole thing taking an eternity because, in the queue ahead of you, there are people who, today, in 2017, seemingly haven’t been on a plane since Mohamed Atta and his lads did their thing back in 2001. Who don’t understand about the whole laptop, belt and shoes deal. Who are utterly astonished when they are asked to take these things off/put them in a tray/whatever. By the time you stumble out of security two hours later you’re needing that pint of Tits in the Dog and Lettuce. You’re suicidal and you haven’t even left the fucking airport yet.