Kill Your Friends (24 page)

Some of the acts, the priority acts, will play live at the
conference. If you are in a band this must be your worst nightmare.
Imagine striding onstage to belt out your heartfelt anthems of
youth and alienation to a hotel conference roomful of sales reps: a
roomful of Mondeo-driving, Next-suit-wearing,
pebble-dash-semi-and-two-kids cunts. Some bands have kind of an
existential meltdown about playing at conference. It’s too funny.
It’s like they know it’s the antithesis of rawk and roll, playing
for a roomful of ‘suits’, but they all want to sell records too, so
they fret and moan for a while before, inevitably, agreeing to do
it. They’re all good little capitalists at heart, bands. Even Thorn
fucking Yorke, when he’s not crying and wringing his hands about
what kind of coffee beans you should be using so some cunt in Outer
Mongolia can afford to put an inside toilet in his filthy gaff,
even he’s wondering what the marketing spend is looking like. He’s
wondering about venue sizes, about playlists. He’ll tell you—with a
straight face no less—that he thinks about all this stuff because
he wants to ‘get the message across’. He wants to ‘reach as many
people as possible’. That’s what he’ll tell you.

But it’s bad news for us too, conference. In the evening, at
dinner, in the hotel bars, you have to mingle with the reps; the
retards who pound up and down the motorways in their two-litre
Vauxhall mongol-wagons, desperately trying to get some cunt at
Bob’s Records in Ipswich to take a few more copies of the new
Mansun LP. You stand with an aching fake smile strung across your
face as you listen to their stories about how many Celine Dion
records they sold in a week, about what local bands from up North
they reckon are going to be big next year, to their dismal,
Chardonnay-fuelled views on the way the music industry is
going.

Finally Trellick is dressed so we do a quick line and hit the
bar.

I decided not to have Songbirds appear at conference. True, we
finally have a single ready to release, a fizzy slab of
pornographic dance-floor baloney called ‘Fully Grown’ (the lyrics
rammed with near-the-knuckle plays on how close to the legal age
for fucking the girls are), but if anyone actually heard them sing
live, the jig would be up in a nanosecond. Derek, desperate to fill
out the upcoming releases roster, begged, nearly demanded in fact,
that they do a mimed PA instead, but I held out. This too would
have been fraught with danger because it would have involved the
girls dancing in public.

I’d assumed that, like most teenage girls, they’d be able to
stomp and bomp around in some sort of coordinated fashion and that
eventually, with the aid of some pricey choreography and dance
gurus, we could knock together a couple of routines. I was
disabused of this notion when I attended one of the dance
rehearsals. It was like watching…carthorses won’t quite cover it.
Annette and Kelly at least had a basic move they could execute, a
sort of running up and down on the spot while grinning their heads
off kind of routine. Jo had this whole other thing going on—it was
like watching a baby horse, a five-minute-old colt, still gloopy
from the womb, trying to stand up. Her legs, absurdly too long for
her body (like all the girls in Songbirds she has freakishly
pronounced sexual characteristics: their arses jut out like ledges,
the tits are gravity-insulting miracles, even through baggy combat
pants you can make out Debbie’s pussy lips) twanged and skittered
away from her as she tried to keep her balance while she
shadow-boxed, furiously thrashing the air with her tiny fists.
Dance? Jo could barely fucking walk.

All this, however, was prologue to Debbie. Perhaps having
already realised and come to terms with her inadequacies as a
dancer she abandoned all pretence at the choreographed routine and
chose instead to concentrate on the sexual angle of the
performance. All the time rocking epileptically to the music, she
slid her hand down her pants and worked two fingers in her crotch.
She massaged and tweaked her own breasts so hard that the
choreographer (who by this point was watching the whole thing from
behind his clipboard, a clenched fist in his mouth, salty tears of
anguish running down his face) thought she might perform a
half-arsed mastectomy on herself. She started dry-humping the
microphone stand. As the track climaxed, she dropped onto all fours
and swivelled round to present her rump to us, shaking it madly
while she tugged her G-string up and down her butt crack in wild
frottage. The whole time, all around her, Annette and Kelly jogged
resolutely up and down on the spot with idiotic fixed grins on
their faces and Jo skittered around like a Glaswegian drunk on
ice.

It was like watching CCTV footage of the tail end of a
twelve-hour hen night in Liverpool.

But we should be able to cobble some kind of video together…and
I still have this feeling. Instinct, I suppose you’d have to call
it. I instinctively know that I’d love to fuck every one of them
(particularly Debbie) in a vicious and degrading manner. I am
nothing if not resolutely populist in my tastes, so I have no
reason to believe that any other guy in the country would feel any
differently. If we can just get them to put one foot in front of
the other and then throw in some nice ditties and some cool clothes
for the little girlies to like, we might just have a chance. We
might just have it away with this piece of shit.

A guy I vaguely know, some marketing guy from some other label
in the group, comes up to us in the crush at the bar. “Hi, Steven,
how’s it going with those girls you signed?”

“OK,” I tell him. “It’s going OK.”

Dinner is hell. I get sat next to some rep who talks to me for a
long time about the new GPS system in his car. I’m not making this
up. He really talks about it. Derek gets up and makes a ridiculous
speech in which he actually singles out Parker-Hall for praise, for
‘injecting a new energy and focus’ into the company’s
A
&
R. Jesus Christ. Parker-Hall acts embarrassed,
pulling his sweater up over his head, but you can tell the little
fucker is loving it.

As soon as it’s respectable—i.e.: the moment a waiter holding a
dessert plate walks into the ballroom from the kitchens—I’m out of
my seat and heading for the toilets.

♦

Derek has a party in his suite—a massive lair on the top
floor—and, in the early hours, I find myself in the bathroom with
Ross. I’m sitting on the edge of the huge circular tub, sipping Jim
Beam straight from the bottle, while he racks them out on the
counter. For some strange reason we’re reminiscing about
Waters.

“Remember conference last year? In Bournemouth?” he asks me.
“When everyone ran out of coke and he had that guy drive halfway
down from London with about twenty grams and he drove halfway up
and met him at a Little Chef or something?”

“Christ,” I laugh, remembering Waters’ reappearance a few hours
later, when he’d literally been attacked by a coke-ravenous mob.
“Yeah,” I say, “he was a proper fucking gakhead, wasn’t he?” (A
proper gakhead: someone you do not like who does exactly as much
coke as you do.) Ross snorts a line and sits down on the toilet,
passing me the note. I reroll it carefully.

“Yeah,” Ross says, almost wistfully, “that was a shitty way to
go, wasn’t it? Getting your head caved in by some fucking
burglar?”

“Yeah,” I say, leaning into the powder, remembering the
expression on Waters’ face as he turned, after I’d hit him the
first time, the tiny tear of black blood appearing at his hairline.
How he just looked shocked, his eyes wide, his mouth a tiny little
‘o’, like the blow hadn’t hurt him. Like it had just
really…surprised him. “It might have been, I don’t know…drugs?”

“Drugs?” Ross says.

“Yeah. You never know. Drug debts, some mad dealer…” This is all
pure malicious invention, but I quite like the sound of it. Might
be worth putting it out there, it might well gain some
credibility.

“Fuck,” Ross says.

I perch up on the counter and tip my head back, sniffing,
feeling my throat constricting and numbing, feeling the trickle of
cold, bitter froth. I stare into one of the spots sunk in the
bathroom ceiling until it hurts my eyes and then, blinking, I turn
to face Ross. “Hey,” I say, “I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the
dead and all that,
but
, Waters
was
a fucking idiot.
All we ever did was bitch about the fat cunt.”

“Christ, Steven,” Ross says, laughing, “you
are
fucking
hardcore.”

There’s a knock at the door. Ross unlocks it and Rebecca pops
her head around. “Room for two little ones?” she asks mock
sheepishly. “Quick, shut the door,” Ross says as Rebecca hops in
trailing this girl Grace, who we know a bit. She’s a press officer
or something. Rebecca goes to get a gram out of her purse but I
motion her towards our pile as Grace hops up on the counter beside
me. Rebecca has a short skirt on and I’m wondering if it’s tights
or stockings. I have to admit it, she can look pretty doable
sometimes. “So,” Grace says, “what are you freaks talking
about?”

“Waters,” Ross says, climbing fully clothed into the tub.

“Oh please don’t,” says Rebecca, already scrubbing her room key
against the back of a fifty-pound note, “it’s too horrible…”

There’s another knock at the door. “Fuck off!” I say.

“Stelfox?” Derek asks gruffly through the door. Shit. Ross is
already scrambling for the lock. “Ah,” Derek says brightly as he
comes in, “making yourselves at home?” Like everyone else he’s
coked up, sweating like a fucking rapist.

“Yeah, sorry,” I say.

“Do you want a line, Derek?” Rebecca says, pointlessly, as he’s
already squeezing greedily around her towards the pile. He claps me
on the leg as he passes. I try to imagine the number of cocks his
hand has closed around in its time, but it’s unimaginable. “How are
you, Steven?” he asks, genuinely friendly for some reason.

“I’m good, Derek. Great,” I say unconvincingly.

“Ross!” Derek says abruptly, looking in the huge mirror and
seeing Ross sprawled in the bathtub behind him. “Tell me, what’s
the projected marketing spend on the Lazies LP up to?”

Derek has left the bathroom door half open and out in the
darkened hallway of the suite I can just see Trellick, smiling and
nodding as he listens to something that black girl from finance is
saying.

♦

I wake up the next morning—just, it’s 11.58 a.m.—to a ringing
phone. “Hello?” I groan.

“Wakey-wakey!” Parker-Hall shouts brightly (he doesn’t really do
coke). “Get your arse in gear! I’ll see you downstairs in ten.”
We’re flying up to Glasgow together, the idea being that we can
catch up on the flight, discuss progress on various acts on the
roster, and generally ‘review A
&
R strategy’. I
was clearly off my fucking nut when I agreed to this nightmare.

I hang up and look around the darkened room at the usual
debris—suit trousers and jacket strewn across the floor like a
police outline, clutch of bottles and glasses on the table,
coke-spackled CD case on the bedside table next to a bottle of
Valium and a half-full whisky tumbler. There is a G-string on the
lampshade.

I sense the extra warmth as I turn over and lift the covers a
little. A naked back. She’s well tanned, just the white ‘T’ that
runs around the waist and down the crack of her arse. I prop myself
up on my elbow as she rolls over to face me.

“Hello you,” Rebecca says.

♦

Doing your secretary is a shocker. Worst-case-scenario shit.
Here’s how it happened:

We went back to my room in the early hours, to have a chat about
‘a few work things’, or some such nonsense. We lay on the bed
drinking and nosing, getting closer to each other, and the
conversation turned into what it always turns into in those
situations.

“What’s your favourite position?” Rebecca asks me, giggling
coyly.

Bitch tied up with a knife at her throat, I think, but, ever
reasonable, I say, “Doggy,” then ask her, “Do you masturbate?”

“Of course I bloody do! Come on, it’s
the nineties
for
Christ’s sake! Have you ever done a hooker?”

“No.” (Tip: never tell the truth here.) “Have you ever done two
guys?”

“Ummm…pass,” she says, hiding her face.

“Really?” I say. What a fucking spunk bucket.

“Have you ever done two girls?”

“Yeah. How about anal?”

“What about it?”

I raise an eyebrow.

Rebecca reaches into her handbag and rummages around. “Do you
want one of these?”

I look down at her hand. There, in the middle of her
outstretched palm, is a big, blue triangular pill.

“What is it?”

“Viagra.”

Well, I don’t mind telling you, I got greedy. Very greedy.
Greedy? I went fucking berserk—pumping, sucking, grinding, fisting.
Rebecca, as it turned out, is a
demon
in the sack. I got the
fucking mother lode—soup to nuts. At one point as I was viciously
doing her from behind, she reached down and—unprecedented
this—began to guide my cock towards her arsehole. Bosh! I started
furiously pummelling her up the Gary and the next thing I know
she’s screaming, “No! No!”

I stop.

“What are you doing?” she asks, looking back over her shoulder,
breathing hard and still pushing back against me. I am up to my
nuts in her dung funnel.

“Please keep fucking me up the arse.”

I resume. “No! No!” she starts screaming again, really enjoying
it now. Wow, I think, sometimes when they say ‘no’ they really do
mean ‘yes’.

“Talk dirty to me, Steven.”

“You nasty bitch.”

“Yes…oh God…fuck me.”

“You dirty fucking whore…”

“Oh God, I’m…”

“You slut…you whore…you…”

But that’s the problem with talking dirty. You’re hardly going
to start out with ‘you very badly behaved girl’ and gradually crank
it up, are you? No. You go straight in at the deep end with ‘you
dirty fucking slut’ and stuff like that. And then there’s not a lot
to move onto later. I pump her harder and try for a bit of
variety.