Kill Your Friends (29 page)
Authors: John Niven
Finally, with some grunting into headsets and gruff ‘excuse
mes’, a two-bouncer escort is moving us through the throng, the
velvet rope is lifted and we’re being escorted along a stickily
carpeted hallway towards the music by some guy called Steve, the
promoter I guess. He seems very pleased to have some London
industry types in his shithole. “You’ll ‘ave a fooking good crack
tonight, lads. The birds in here? Un-fooking-believable, like. We
had that FFRR mob up here a while back. Pete Tong’s lot, you know
‘em?” Barry fields the loser’s questions as the music grows louder
and louder.
“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 15
th
?”
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.
FifteenMichael 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
.”
“
Whatever it takes
.”Casablanca Records motto
W
oodham 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…”