Kill Your Friends (18 page)

They really do think like that these people. They think that
Dame Fame and Lady Fortune are going to loaf into the room and
single them out. You wouldn’t fucking believe it.

I’m making my way through the crowded bar towards the door when,
for the second time that evening, a heavy hand falls on my
shoulder. Wearily I turn round—straight into a snarling mess of
burnished fangs, a pair of burning devil’s eyes. Tony-Blair-poster
eyes.

“Oi, cunt, what the fuck is going on?” Flecks of spittle hit
me.

“Ah, hi, Rage.” What the fuck is he doing here?

“Don’t fucking give me that. What the
fuck
is happening
with my album?” There’s a couple of big darkies with him. One of
them carries a record box. Rage must be DJing somewhere later.

What is happening with the album is nothing. We’re sitting on
the abortion until the cretin speaking to me writes something
approaching a hit single.

“How do you mean?” I say innocently.

“Are you trying to be fucking funny?”

“No.”

“Schneider gets fired, that fucking queer Sommers ain’t
returning our calls, I ain’t got a release date, I ain’t been
fucking paid, I…” he goes on and I see now that he really is
angry.

“Listen,” I say, interrupting, “can we go somewhere quieter and
have a chat? I need to speak to you. Alone, yeah?” One of his boys
glares at me and kisses his teeth but Rage waves them away and
leads me off towards the dressing room, managing to get into only
two serious arguments with security guards on the way there.

Soon enough we’re hunkered down over the nosebag and, once he’s
got a thick line of my chang into his greedy fucking face, I hit
him with the truth. Schneider
hated
the record. Derek’s on
the fence. I think it’s a masterpiece. I tell him that I have some
strong ideas on how to market it properly. That we
have
to
get it released.

“That cunt of a fucking Jew-boy,” Rage says.

“I mean,” I say incredulously, “he wanted you to fuck about
writing some pop single! The fucking cheek. I kept telling him,
you’re an
albums artist
.”

“Yeah. Fucking straight up, blood.”

“We’ll get great press and build it from there. Fuck Radio 1.
Fuck them
.” I smack a fist into my palm. I’m getting into it
myself now, almost believing the utter shite I’m spewing.

“Yeah, fuck radio,” Rage says.

“Listen, when we came to the studio, to that playback, that
track you played us, ‘Birth’, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

I shake my head solemnly. “I had tears in my eyes,” (this much
was true) “fucking goosebumps, mate. I mean, who gives a fuck if
its sixty-four minutes long? It’s a classic.”

“Yeah? Cheers, Steven.”

“Look, everything’s fucked right now with Schneider going. But
it ain’t gonna be that way for long.” I have started to speak like
Rage, a trait I have when talking to bands. If this conversation
goes on much longer I’ll be breaking out the fucking boot dubbin.
“I’m not saying I’ve got the job yet, but when—if—I do, I want you
to know you’ll be a priority act, mate. A priority act.”

Rage looks at me for a long moment, the silence dripping with
cocaine. Finally he points a finger at me. The finger has three
heavy gold rings on it. “I always said to Fisher that you fucking
understood what I was doing,” he says.

“Yeah? Cheers, Rage,” I say raising my glass.

“I’ll tell you what I was trying to do with that track…” He
starts talking about the piece-of-shit song in mind-frying detail,
but it’s OK because I don’t have to listen any more. It’s fine. I
can just stand here, nodding, and moving frozen shards of coke
around the roof of mouth with my tongue while saying over and over
to myself “
you black bastard, you black bastard, you black
bastard…
”

The following morning, in business affairs, I wholeheartedly add
my vote to the unanimous landslide as we decide to drop Rage from
the label. “All righty,” says Trellick rapping his notes on the
table “…moving on, boys and girls. Unsigned bands…” Within a few
months Rage will probably be back to whatever he did
before—chiselling stereos out of dashboards, holding Stanley knives
to the throats of terrified pensioners, and filling council flats
with half-caste babies.

Darren and I take The Lazies out to an insanely expensive
Russian restaurant on the Embankment—caviar and thirty-seven
different lands of vodka and private dining rooms where you can do
nose-up right off the table without being seen.

“Jimmy! Good to see you again, man,” I say, getting up and
slapping him on the arm, trying to remember what we talked about
over lunch in Austin the month before. “How’s things? This is
Darren,” I say as Darren gets up and extends a hand.

“Uh, hi, guys. Darren? Yeah. I’m good man. This is Greg, and
Adam and Kevin…” He introduces a shy, gangly, six-legged tangle of
pimples, torn jeans and BO. The musicians.

We shake hands and do the ‘hi, how are you’ stuff. None of them
makes eye contact. It is probably blowing their minds to be
ordering a meal somewhere you don’t just put the handbrake on and
speak into a grille. “…and this is Marcy.” The singer comes out
from behind them. She’s tiny, stunning. Skin white as a fridge and
perfect features half hidden under thick black, bowl-cut hair.

We do the small talk—how was your flight? Been to London before?
Bish, bash, bosh. What you’re trying to figure out here is: who am
I talking to? Whose band is it? You can usually—not always—forget
the drummer and the bass player. It’s normally a guitarist⁄singer
deal. I make sure I’m sitting next to Adam, the guitar player, and
across from Marcy. Darren gets plonked with the rhythm section, the
Muppet Show.

A waiter appears in full Cossack rig and dispenses menus. “May I
get you some drinks?” the fruit asks.

“Yes,” I say, “can you bring us the vodka menu? You have to
check this out, guys, they’ve got over thirty—”

“Could I just have some water please?” Marcy says.

“Yeah me too,” from Adam.

“We got an early start tomorrow,” Jimmy explains, “gotta drive
to…Dover?” (he pronounces it ‘Daw-ver’) “to get the ferry.”

“No problem, water’s good for me.”

Water. Waters. He
liked
the Prodigy artwork.

It’s a fundamental—if they drink, you drink. If they don’t…dear
sweet mother of teats-blown Jesus. I am going to have to spend a
couple of hours with these cunts sober.

The drummer—Greg? Kevin?—orders a beer and they fall to frowning
over the menus.

“So,” I say, “are you looking forward to Glastonbury?”

“Shit, man,” Adam says, “it’ll be…”

“Wild?” one of the other guys suggests.

“Yeah, wild.”

“We are going to rock that motherfucker.” The drummer.
Obviously.

Marcy doesn’t say anything. She stares at a hole in her shoe, a
chunky, scuffed DM boot. I try to visualise her in heels.

We order and I make a big show of ordering nearly everything on
the menu—beluga, sevruga, blinis, smoked salmon, chops, goose,
baked fucking pike. Ominously the band order mostly salads.

“What’s the vibe like at Glastonbury?” one of them asks.
Vibe?
It is a fucking insult that I am sat here having to
live through this. For the umpteenth time today I lament the fact
that I am not more successful and above all this.

“Oh, Glastonbury? It’s just the most incredible…atmosphere.” (If
you reckon that the atmosphere in medieval England—plague, filth,
disease and billions of mud-spattered tolers everywhere—would
qualify as incredible, then Glastonbury is indeed incredible.) With
an upward surge of nausea I realise that, if we’re going to have
any chance of signing these clowns, I will probably have to go to
Glastonbury.

The food starts to arrive. Darren talks indie with Adam. I watch
Marcy pick at her salad. “You must have had a bellyful of those
record company dinners by now?”

She smiles for the first time—nervously, hesitantly, but still a
smile—revealing a row of gleaming teeth whiter than her skin. A
shred of purple lettuce is stuck between the front top two. Nice
lips too. I can’t make out the jugs because she’s wearing a baggy
sweater but, if I remember rightly from the gig in Austin, she’s
well stacked for a boiler her size. I don’t remember any of the
fucking songs, but I remember that.

“Nah,” she says, removing the strand of lettuce, “it’s nice,
y’know? People being interested.”

“Have some caviar.” I push a dish of beluga towards her.

“No thanks. I don’t eat fish.”

“So…tell us about your label,” Jimmy says.

“OK…” I clear my throat.

But what is there to tell really? We’ll manufacture your records
and put them in the fucking shops. We’ll try our best not to spend
a red cent unless we’re sure we’ll get it back with interest. We’ll
second-guess you and interfere at every conceivable stage of the
artistic process. We’ll edit and remix tracks without your
permission. We’ll force you to appear on appalling, degrading
kiddies’ TV programmes where you will shake hands with Dobbin the
Donkey and have to explain yourself to a teenage VJ with the
attention span of a Ritalin-fuelled infant. We’ll work you until
you can’t stand up. In collusion with your publishers we’ll try and
license your music to TV adverts for everything from banks to
multinational petrochemical companies. (We’d license it to whaling
fleets and arms dealers too if only they advertised on TV). We’ll
under-account to you and charge you for every recoupable expense
from the staples used to knock your horrendous contract together to
the Coke you had from the fridge in my office. And if it doesn’t
all work out, you’ll be dropped faster than a Plymouth hooker’s
knickers when there’s a big ship in town.

Howzat, you pasty-faced vegetarian hippy cunts? Strap that on
for a fucking laugh.

But, sadly, you can’t say that these days. So I sip water and
talk and they all nod away as I drone on about ‘artistic freedom’
and ‘creative control’ and ‘long-term artist development’ and all
the usual balls until I’m nearly crying with boredom. Finally, when
I can stand it no more, I get up and say, “Excuse me.” I head for
the Gents, leaving Darren to continue his part of the
conversation—B-sides and the guitar solos of Tom Verlaine.

On the way to the toilet I stop at the bar and drink three
double bison grass vodkas. In the toilet I deftly roll a fifty,
lean close into the cistern lid, and snarfle up a heart-stopper.
“Right, you cunts,
let’s fucking rock
…” I say,
before—pausing only to vomit about a kilo of black sturgeon roe
down the toilet—I’m striding manfully back to the table, sweat
breaking out on my forehead and clear bubbles popping and exploding
in my brain.

Well, things livened up after that, I can fucking tell you. I
order a massive round of vodkas and a couple of the band even join
me. I crack a few jokes. One contains the punchline, “No, that’s my
flask.” I talk about making them ‘bigger than U2’. I get more
drinks in…

Things get blurry and I find myself sitting next to Marcy,
pressing myself closer and asking about her childhood and shit like
that. Christ, she’s fit. Maybe if I…no, must remain
professional.

I get the Russkis to turn the music up and I drag one of the
waiters in and make him Cossack-dance for us, throwing twenty-pound
notes at him and laughing my head off. I start singing Clash songs
with the drummer but I keep getting all the words wrong. I start
Cossack-dancing myself, trying to drag Marcy up but she’s not
really into it. I order more vodka and then Jimmy is turning to me
and saying, “Hey, thanks for dinner, man. We gotta run.”

“Fuck off. It’s only eleven.”

“No really, we’ve got an early start.”

“Come on…” But they’re all getting up now, pulling jackets on,
gathering bags.

“Right, no problem. I’ll give you a call. We’ll send our offer
to your lawyer.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks for dinner, man,” one of them—Adam? Doug?—says and
they’re gone. I mean—who fucking farted?

“That went all right,” Darren says, not convincingly.

“Yeah. Fine. Fucking Shermans.”

“You got any bugle?”

I toss him the gram and he heads for the bogs. I get up and duck
out into the hallway. Marcy is pulling her jacket on. “Hey, you’re
not really going back to the hotel, are you?”

“Yeah,” she smiles, “I’m beat.”

“Bollocks. Come for a drink. I know this place. Members
only.”

“No thanks.”

“Come on, love, you know you—”

“Are you, like, hitting on me?”

“Am I…?”

“Look, thanks for dinner. Goodnight.”

I wander back into our room and neck a stray vodka. A grinning
waiter appears and a silver dish with a long strip of paper on it
is plonked down in front of me.

The bill is just over seven hundred quid.

When I get into work in the morning there’s a message on my
machine from Jimmy. In a flat tone he says:

“Uh, Steven…I just called to say thank you for last night. We,
uh, as you know we’ve still got a few other labels to meet so…you
could have your guy send your offer to our lawyer if you like and
I…I’ll try and give you a call and let you know what’s happening.
OK. Bye.”

So that’s over, then.

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

The Ivor Novello Awards are held at the Grosvenor
House Hotel. Ken Berry becomes Head of EMI. ‘MMmm Bop’ by Hanson is
N°1. A lot of people are talking about Basement Jaxx. The
Ultrasound deal is really heating up—Simon Williams, Head of Fierce
Panda, says, “It is clear that this band will be around a lot
longer than eighteen months…
”

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

“
A lot of people are singing about how screwed up
the world is. I don’t think that everybody wants to hear about that
all the time
.”

Mariah Carey