2008 - Kill Your Friends

by John Niven

  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.”

  Trellick: “Aha. Good. Could you be little more specific?”

  “Man, you wouldn’t believe how the studio’s coming together. They’ve painted the live room a sort of sky blue.” People look at him. I wonder if he’s stoned.

  “Good. Good,” says Trellick, losing patience. “Do we have any music yet?”

  “Not yet, no. The thing is MaxMan, their rapper, he had to go back to Trinidad to…” He blathers on about what these shiftless spear-chuckers have been up to with our money. Some people frequently dig their own graves in these meetings. Rob is building himself a fucking mausoleum. Derek is colouring, turning from mauve to vermilion to fluorescent, the colour of his shirt.

  Derek, in his turn, dresses like what he is: a wealthy, psychotic, tasteless, middle-aged queer. Grotesquely overweight, he favours billowing shirts by Versace and Ralph Lauren—in fuchsia pink, emerald green, canary yellow and candy-striped combinations of all three—which are worn in a doomed attempt to disguise his enormous girth. His black hair and little beard are flecked with silver, the hair thinning on top now while remaining in a luxuriant thatch around the sides. His normal facial expression, the one he uses when he’s;off’, when he isn’t trying to present a certain persona, is really something: the hooded eyes rotate slowly, scanning, evaluating. The faintest flicker of a smile, or a sneer, trembles like an electrical current across his thin top lip while, above it, the crimson nostrils—the colour a painful reminder of the hellish quantities of cocaine and poppers he undoubtedly forced up there the night before�
�rhythmically flare gently or rapidly, according to his mood. I mean, he looks like fucking Caligula or something, mad and ravaged, cold and violent.

  Rob is still going. “And Massive Attack, Goldie and James Lavelle are all keen too. But the outboard equipment wasn’t really up to scratch so we to had to replace most of it and—”

  “Yes, Rob, I understand.” Trellick raises a hand to silence him. “However, we’re now,” he consults his notes, “four hundred and seventy-eight thousand pounds in the hole on this act and we’re no closer to having—”

  “Look, James man, I know the situation is, y’know, frustrating,” says Rob, trying to be assertive, “but the, the creative process, man. Sometimes you can’t, y’know, rush it.”

  There’s collective astonishment at this nonsense. I interrupt, directing my comments at Trellick.

  “Yeah, James, hang on, it’s not like nothing’s happening. There’s definitely a vibe for the band out there—” I manage to keep a straight face. Rob, the total cuntfuck, is nodding away, thinking I’ve come to his defence—“and Rob’s doing some good stuff to support it. I mean, those T-shirts look fantastic.”

  Derek’s head snaps up—a starving attack dog shown sirloin—“T-shirts? What fucking T-shirts?”

  Jackpot. In a misguided fit of craziness (and, I suspect, under extreme pressure from our coloured friends down in Southend) Rob had got a few Sound Collective T-shirts made up. Just a few, but spending company money on having T-shirts made for a band who are half a million quid unrecouped and who have yet to release a record is a bit like taking a full-page ad out in the Sun to announce yourself as winner of the lottery before you’ve even bought the ticket. Rob had quietly and proudly shown me one of the shirts a few days ago and I was pretty sure Derek had no idea.

  Rob swallows. “Yeah. I had a couple of T-shirts m—”

  “YOU’RE MAKING FUCKING T-SHIRTS FOR A FUCKING ACT THAT DON’T EVEN HAVE A FUCKING RECORD OUT AND ARE HALF A MILLION FUCKING POUNDS IN DEBT TO US! ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?” Derek’s fury is so total and instant that, for a second, I think little Katy is going to burst into tears.

  “But Derek, I thought if—”

  “I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THOUGHT! IF WE DON’T HAVE A FUCKING SINGLE FROM THIS BAND BY THE END OF THE MONTH WE’RE PULLING THE FUCKING PLUG! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

  “But—” Rob is going down, drowning.

  “DO YOU FUCKING UN-DER-STAND?” Derek pounds his fist on the table six times, with ‘understand’ getting three of them. Total silence. People admire the oatmeal carpet. Draw on their notes.

  Derek is generally in a pretty bad mood. I don’t know, maybe the experience of spending his entire adult life having men spray their burning jism over his face and back, of hearing them growl as they pump another radioactive load deep into his mouth or rectum, has soured him on life. I mean, it’d definitely fuck me off, being used as a human toilet for a quarter of a century.

  In fact, this whole business of pumping and groaning and roaring and whatnot is really old news for hardcore queens like Derek. For ultra dark-side faggots in the nineties the idea of having some moustachioed arse-demon clad head to cock in studs and leather pummel away at you until your Gary looks like something out of a medical textbook has become a bit quaint. A Norman Rockwell painting. The bender equivalent of a married couple’s Friday night, lights out, sheets over you, missionary position fumble. A few months back one of the kids from the marketing department had been up all night clubbing and found himself drinking in some hardcore after-hours place in the East End, one of those real HIV dens where the proper, certifiable queers round off their evenings. He wandered through a salty fug of amyl nitrate and GHB into a dimly lit back room where he bumped into Derek—chained to a wall, half naked and bleeding, with a .couple of muscular Bethnal Green irons giving him a good beating.

  Now, they say that an organisation’s value systems, its core beliefs, are shaped from the top down. Given that its Managing Director’s idea of a reasonable evening’s entertainment involves paying a couple of rent boys to kick the living shit out of him, it seems logical enough that greed, viciousness, duplicity, exploitation, hedonism and aggression feature prominently among the values our company encourages and rewards.

  “Yes,” Rob finally whispers.

  I mouth ‘sorry’ at him. He nods as if to say ‘not your fault’ and goes back to staring at the table, tears in his eyes. I nearly wet myself. Micky shoots me a look. She is much smarter than Rob and may well have understood where my ‘help’ was coming from. I return her glare pleasantly, looking at her properly for the first time and noticing that today, as part of an ongoing and doomed attempt to disguise her unimaginable bulk—which the A&R department sweepstake variously puts at between sixteen and twenty stone—she is wearing some sort of muumuu, or sack, or kaftan. On some days she sports the sort of Lycra leggings you only ever see incredibly fat boilers wearing, the kind which make their thighs look like two immense black puddings. Her mouth is just a tiny little hole—a Polo mint lost in the enormous fleshy pudding of her face. The face itself is framed by lank greasy black hair and seared by angry clusters of spots, by deep ravines of acne. Most beasts of Nicky’s stripe get thrown the odd break—the big tits, say, or the good complexion, or nice hair or something. Nicky got fucked out of the lot. Sometimes, when she’s talking, I’ll steal a glance at Trellick or Schneider as they listen to her, their expressions saying the same thing: how the fuck do you have the nerve to leave the house and show your face among decent society? Obviously Nicky was hired directly by Derek. As she has tits and a cunt she is completely invisible to the demented homo. Nicky is un-doable. You could not do her. She could not be done. If, by some chemical derangement, some alchemy of ketamine and smack, you woke up in bed to find Nicky next to you, you’d have two options: emigration or suicide. A plane ticket or an exhaust pipe.

  “OK, boys and girls, moving on then,” Trellick announces, rapping his notes on the table, “unsigned bands.” Waters starts yabbering on about some indie groups he’s been to see; Ultrasound, Tampasm, Grouch, Angelica, Disco Pistol.

  Later, as we leave the meeting and file down the corridor, Trellick sidles up to me and whispers, “What is the meaning of life?”

  “To drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentations of their women,” I reply automatically as, ahead of us, Hastings scuttles down the stairs.

  Two

  “The object is to find a winner. The process makes you mean because you get frustrated.”

  Simon Cowell

  A couple of words for all you hopefuls out there in unsigned bands: Fuck. Off. Seriously, your parents are right. You may as well spend your guitar-string money on lottery tickets—your chances will be much the same. We receive upwards of three hundred unsolicited demo tapes every week. There are five other labels within our corporate group, all receiving about the same volume. That’s fifteen hundred demos a week. There are six other corporate groups, EMI, Universal, Warner Bros, Polygram, BMG and Sony, most with several labels within them, all receiving at least the same amount as us, and probably a little more. That’s over ten thousand little packages of hopes and dreams arriving every week. (And arrive is often all they do—the vast majority of these packages are never opened. They just lie in boxes and sacks around the A&R floor, where they seem to breed and multiply, spilling over the carpets and taking up sofa space until Tom, our work experience, has to lug sacks of them down to the incinerator where your hopes and dreams are—rightly—burned in the fires of hell.)

  Occasionally, if it’s a rainy afternoon and we’re really bored and want something to do, a few of the A&R staff will gather in someone’s office, roll ourselves a couple of thick spliffs, uncork a bottle of red, and go through one of the sacks marked ‘UNSOLICITED DEMOS’. These sessions usually end with two or three of us on our hands and knees on the floor howling, gasping for breath, ribs and facial muscles aching.

  To this ten thousand we should add (con
servatively) another couple of thousand to cover the demos received by all the independent labels. That makes roughly twelve thousand demos a week received by the whole industry—well over half a million a year. In any given year my company will maybe sign something like ten to fifteen acts. The whole UK industry probably signs—at most—a couple of hundred artists every year. Out of these two hundred, in a very good year, you might have twenty or so who break through to some degree, who get their records on the radio, their pictures in the music press, and who fill decent-sized venues. Out of this twenty maybe half will eventually recoup the money invested in them. That’s right—ten acts out of over half a million hopefuls will make themselves some real money. And yet a lot of aspiring musicians really believe that getting signed means they’ve made it, that the physical act of signing a recording contract means they’re on the way to fame, riches and drinking Bono’s Cristal at the Grammys.

  Here’s what’s more likely to happen: on the back of a spurious ‘buzz’ from the music press, a few packed gigs in tiny clubs and a couple of late-night radio plays, some idiot like Rob Hastings offers you a record deal for, ooh, let’s say, a hundred grand. Great! (You now owe us 100K.) You pack your job in Quadrophenia-style and take your parents out to the local Chinese for a slap-up feed where you tell them you’ll ‘never work again’. You leave Bolton (or wherever) and get off the train at Euston thinking to yourself, “I am the fucking king.”

  You’re keen to get cracking on that debut album. However, the odds are that it will take Rob—or some cretin like him—months to make up his mind about a producer. He will then, inevitably, choose the wrong one. This guy will spend two or three months destroying what little talent you had to begin with and you’re back to square one. Not content with getting the wrong producer the first time, Rob will pick the wrong guy a couple more times. By the time you’ve gone through this process three times it’s a year down the line, the record still isn’t finished, and your initial recording budget has tripled to about three hundred grand. (You now owe us 400K.)