Kill Your Friends (2 page)

Actually, it’s not strictly true that my mind is on the subject,
or any subject, for very long. Here’s the deal with the inside of
my head: picture a giant bank of screens, dozens of them, reaching
high into the air, like you see at NASA, at Mission Control. At any
given time many of them are simply showing hardcore pornography:
banks and banks of close-ups—some so close they are pixellated to
the point of image-degradation—showing troublingly large cocks
punching in and out of cunts, lurid dildos violating angry rectums,
cocks gliding stiff and imperious between lubed breasts. Other
screens show financial stuff: graphs of London house prices, City
traders screaming in their striped blazers, pie charts of
record-industry market shares, bricks of cash being stacked up,
balance sheets, red figures, black figures, recouped acts,
unrecouped acts. A few screens show bands and singers: acts I’ve
signed in the past, new acts we’re thinking about signing,
successful acts I wanted to sign and didn’t (the most haunting
images). A small row of distant monitors, tucked away high up in a
dusty corner, randomly shows footage of colleagues and rivals being
baroquely tortured.

There are guys in my head too. The technicians in their
short-sleeved shirts, with the pens in the breast pocket and the
little headsets on and their styrofoam cups of coffee. They sit
slack-jawed in front of the monitors. They aren’t happy about any
of this. They know it’s not good. But they can’t seem to do
anything about it. They run around and shout at each other. They
gather anxiously around bunking computers. They shake their heads
over crazily spooling printouts and mutter, “
This can’t be
right, goddammit
,” but the monitors just go on showing what
they show.

That’s what it feels like in there—like there’s a Mission going
on, but there’s no Control.

Before I go down for the meeting I pick up my paperback copy of
Unleash Your Monster
, by the American self-help guru Dr
David S. Hauptnian, and open it at random: “
In every age men are
born who, in their hearts, in the black of their blood, are
warriors. But, for most of us, there are no longer wars to fight.
What must they do, these men?
”

As I leave my office I can hear the sound of
celebration—laughter and corks—coming down the hallway from the
accounts department. “What are those clowns so fucking happy
about?” I ask Rebecca.

“Oh, Rick’s just found out he’s going to be a dad,” she says
cheerfully, and I realise that she’s genuinely happy on his
behalf.

This astonishes me on two counts: 1) actual happiness at someone
else’s good fortune in which you have no personal stake, and 2) why
is this guy celebrating the fact that he has terminated his life?
You might as well run out of the doctor’s surgery screeching with
joy as you wave your positive cancer test around. The notion of
children makes me ill. The thought of having one…when you see those
guys in the supermarket, wheeling the trolley around while their
brats whine and wheedle and some blundering sow questions every
little thing they take off the shelves. I mean, just the fucking
idea of it, the very word:
family
. Whenever I see it, on
travel brochures, on house schedules (
family holiday, family
room
), I feel sick.

Also I’m thinking, Rick? Who the fuck is Rick from accounts?

♦

So here’s what I do. I listen to music—singers, bands,
songwriters—and decide which ones stand a good chance of commercial
success. I then arrange for them to be recorded in a sympathetic
manner and we, the record company, sell them to you, the general
public. Sound easy? Get fucked—you wouldn’t last ten minutes.

Now, I don’t have a perfect track record. No one does. But I’m
pretty fucking good. On average I only get it wrong maybe eight or
nine times out of ten. That is to say, if you played me ten pieces
of unsigned music I might instantly dismiss three or four acts that
might go on to enjoy enormous success. I have thrown the demo tapes
of bands that are now megastars, bands whose records you own,
across the room with tears of laughter running down my face. I have
berated and insulted subordinates for having the temerity to play
me tracks that have subsequently sold in their millions.

It’s very likely that I’ll applaud three or four tracks that
will turn out to be absolute, grade-A, Bernard Matthews turkeys.
We, my label, have spent millions, literally millions, of pounds
signing and developing music that, as it turned out, no sane person
wanted to hear.

Which perhaps begs the question, what kind of music do I like?
Incredibly, you really do get asked this from time to time. Usually
by some new kid, some earnest junior product manager who has tagged
along to lunch or by a member of some band you’re trying to sign.
The new kid will be quickly dismissed with a curt ‘fuck off’ and
the guy from the band you’re trying to sign will get a sincerely
delivered litany of seminal bands and songwriters; “Yeah,” you
intone sombrely, “Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Clash, Husker Du, the
Band, Lennon.” (Delete as applicable to the musical tastes of the
retard you’re talking to.) What kind of music do I like? Asking a
major label A
&
R manager this question is like
asking an arbitrageur what kind of commodities he likes. Or saying
to an investment banker, “Hey, what’s your favourite currency?” I
have very wide musical tastes. ‘Eclectic’, as spastic musicians say
when they’re trying to sound clever in interviews. I don’t care
which genre something comes from—rock, trance, hip hop, Bulgarian
fucking heavy metal—
as long as it’s profitable
.

Finally, though, out of those ten tracks, I’d probably get at
least one right. As long as I manage to do that every couple of
years, then I’m doing incredibly well. I’m ahead of the curve. I
mean, there are guys who
never
get it right.

♦

Here’s the important thing to say about meetings—nothing
important ever got decided in a meeting. The place to get your own
way is over lunch, in someone’s office, in the corridor, over
drinks, dinner,
anywhere
but in a fucking meeting. What
meetings are very good for, however, is stitching people
up—undermining, belittling and humiliating them.

This is particularly the case in gatherings where there are
representatives present from several different departments. In the
Business Affairs meeting I am now tooling into there are people
from Legal (Trellick), Accounting (Leader-kramer),
A
&
R (myself, Hastings and Waters, who are my
colleagues, my fellow A
&
R managers, and
Schneider, Head of A
&
R and our immediate boss)
and International (Nicky). At the head of the curving glass-topped
table sits Derek Sommers, the Managing Director. At forty-five
Derek is, by some distance, the oldest person in the room. Katy,
Trellick’s PA, takes the minutes.

A useful trick in meetings like this is to try and have a little
nugget or two about everyone else’s business filed away. Something
that they should have known, or that they haven’t done that they
said they’d do. You then slip your carefully sharpened nugget in at
the correct moment—usually in the form of an innocent question or
observation—and retire to a safe distance. Business Affairs is an
especially good forum for this kind of backstabbing because the
stakes are high. Every A
&
R man has his roster
graphically analysed; how much you’ve spent on this act, how many
records they’ve sold, what’s still to be spent, how much more can
we sell. There’s nowhere to hide because it’s like looking at a
bank statement; there’s credit or debit. And, believe me, we don’t
spend too long talking about the credits.

“Paul, the Rage LP?” Trellick says, turning to Schneider and
sweeping a raft of thick blond hair hack off his forehead. James
Trellick is a generic toff, the end product of a lineage of fine
dining and arse-fucking the poor that stretches back to the
Domesday Book. He’s tall and pointlessly handsome with the
questing, jutting cleft chin that seems to be standard issue to his
class. But it’s the voice that really does it; an oak-and-gilt
Etonian baritone, the sound of someone brought up to run the
empire.

“Nearly done,” Schneider says, leaning back, eating a green
apple. “He wants to have a playback for everyone in a couple of
weeks.” Schneider is like a weedier, discount, Jewish version of
Trellick; similar clothes not filled out so well, a more minor
public school, his voice a thinner, reedier take on Trellick’s
fruity rumble. Today his dark hair is slicked back and he has
recently taken to wearing glasses, black-framed designer jobs the
clown undoubtedly thinks make him look more intelligent. He will
take them off and chew thoughtfully on them during meetings.
Rodent-like, Schneider has a victim’s face. The happenstances of
time and geography surrounding his birth have provided him with
opportunity, but there’s no getting around it—if Schneider had been
born a few decades earlier and a few hundred miles east of here,
he’d have toppled off the train, bunking into the sun at Birkenau
or Belsen, to find the guards falling over each other to get stuck
into him. He nibbles on his apple and talks on, about release dates
and lead times. He appears relaxed. He’s not.

Truth be told, Schneider has signed one too many turkeys on the
bounce and his position as Head of A
&
R is
increasingly shaky. He signed ‘drum’n’bass superstar’ Rage two
years ago and the debut album
Phosphor-essence
(fuck me) was
the dance and style press sensation of last year, going gold and
picking up a Mercury nomination along the way. However, a gold
record means fuck all when you follow it up by dropping two million
quid on signing four absolute donkeys in a row. You need platinum
sales to insulate yourself from that kind of failure. Rage’s new
record is, Schneider hopes, his big Get Out of Jail Free card.
Ominously, though, Rage has been working on the record in total
isolation in a residential studio for the last four months and we
haven’t heard a note yet. Rumour has it (and rumour is always
right, however briefly) that he is
battering
the chang.
Grams and grams every day. As I brought the Rage deal in when I was
a scout I’m still involved in the project. But at a safe enough
distance, because Rage, I suspect, is a one-trick pony. A talent
vacuum. He’s also the nastiest piece of work you could imagine.

“And do we have a final tour support budget yet?” Derek
asks.

“Just about,” Schneider says, tossing his apple core into the
bin, “Steven and I are having lunch with him and Fisher next week,
over at MIDEM, to finalise everything.” (Schneider, in his turn, is
trying to keep me close to the project, just in case the whole
thing goes properly tits up and he suddenly needs an Oswald.)

“Good, good, make sure and
CC
me on the budget as
soon as you have it please,” says Trellick, as he turns to face Rob
Hastings now.

Hastings is thin as a guitar string and as nervy as a freshly
released paedophile. His rabbit eyes are already shooting around
the room—trying to work out where the next attack might be coming
from—while his bucky little rabbit teeth wrap themselves around one
of the filthy roll-ups he always seems to be smoking. He does not
dress like the rest of us either; no black cashmere V-necks, no
chisel-toed Prada or Kurt Geiger for Hastings. He wears untucked
flannel shirts with shredded elbows, decrepit jeans and Dr Martens.
I admit it, the guy is something of a puzzle to me. Someone told me
that Rob told them he can comfortably live on a hundred quid a
week. All he does is the odd pint, a curry here and there and the
occasional lump of hash. He drives a VW.
He rolls his own
cigarettes
. (Why isn’t the dribbling megamongol spending his
entire salary—and more—every single weekend? Why isn’t he doing
mountains of bugle and whores? Where are the five-star holidays and
the Montecristos? Why isn’t he dropping stacks of dough in Paul
Smith and Armani? He earns enough. I mean, what the fuck is going
on here?) He’s a genuinely nice guy who has good taste in music and
treats people with dignity and respect and the closest he ever
comes to a hit record is when he has a wander round HMV on a
Saturday. That’s right, he’s a fucking loser and how he ever got
into A
&
R is completely beyond me. On one level I
simply do not care if Rob lives or dies, but, on another, there
have been times when I’ve been very glad he’s here because he’s
made me look good. I could comfortably be lobotomised and still do
my job better than Rob Hastings. All Trellick and Derek see,
however, is the charcoal strip of the bottom line, which directly
affects their bonuses, and consequently either of them would gladly
have Rob fired. Fired? They’d have him fucking killed if they
could. “Raawb,” Trellick drawls, “can you give us an update on the
Sound Collective, please?”

There’s lip-biting as Rob hauls himself upright in his chair for
his weekly beating on this subject.

The Sound Collective—a loose affiliation of DJs, rappers,
producers and MCs from Southend—were signed by Rob about eighteen
months ago on the back of a couple of gushing articles in the dance
and style press and a few late-night Radio 1 plays. Rob has been
‘developing’ them since then and we are no closer to releasing a
record now than we were when we signed them, in fact, my mother is
probably closer to releasing her debut album than the Sound
Collective, who believe that our role is to shovel mountains of
cash into their account and keep our fucking white mouths shut. We
have now spent about four hundred grand and haven’t heard a bar of
music.

Rob rolls a cigarette between his fingers and goes for
nonchalance, “Update? Yeah, sure. Uh, I went down there last week.
It’s, ah, it’s really coming together.”