2008 - Kill Your Friends

by John Niven

  By the time we finally get a single released your great mates over at press and radio could no longer give a good drop of spunk if you’re dead or alive. They liked you a year ago. They’ve got new bands to play with now. In fact, I’ll go you one further—the music press hates you now. You’ve gone from being the next Sex Pistols to the last Black Lace in twelve short months. So you get zero airplay and just a tiny smattering of reviews in the likes of the Aberdeenshire Gazette and the North Wales Chronicle (both of whom love the record; unfortunately no one who reads these papers is under sixty-five or lives within a hundred miles of a chart return shop).

  In an attempt to rebuild your profile we send you out on the road. But you’ve got a record company behind you now. Why would you travel in a Transit van like in the old days? So you get a fucking great tour bus the size of an aircraft carrier, six totally superfluous roadies, an outlandish catering company run by a pair of titless Notting Hill dykes and a light show with the equivalent power of the sun. Of course, you’re still selling zero records and playing tiny venues so you’re only getting paid about five hundred quid per show. However, the roadies/aircraft carrier/titless dyke/sun combo is costing something like five grand a fucking day. But—hey—we still believe in the band, man, so we underwrite the shortfall. You play twenty dates losing thousands every night, bringing your debt to us up to something like half a million quid. Oh, and by the way, your hundred-grand advance is now long gone. Where did it go? Well, let’s see: tax, 20 per cent to your manager, and huge legal fees (your lawyer—some utter lowlife like Trellick—spent a lot of time arguing about pointless clauses in order to line his own pockets) leaves maybe twenty grand. You pay yourselves the princely salary of two hundred quid a week each. Alas, thanks to hanging out with animals like me and Waters, you all now have chronic chang habits, so this doesn’t go far. Assuming there are four of you in the band, this means a monthly wage bill of about three grand. You’re broke in a year. So we start advancing you extra money to cover the wages. A few months of this and you soon rack up another twenty Gs.

  Finally we release your debut album. The NME expends a hundred words—and no photo—to call it ‘undiluted piss’. We optimistically press five thousand copies. We sell seven hundred in the first week and two hundred in the second. Then, well, that’s it. No more. Not another copy troubles a chart return machine anywhere in the world. Ever. Thanks to a combination of your mediocrity and our gross incompetence your debut LP—the crystallisation of all the energy, insight and ambition of your young life—has sold nine hundred copies. With retail discounts you have generated maybe four thousand pounds’ worth of income. You are finished. Game fucking over. You are twenty-two years old and six hundred thousand pounds in debt to us—a bunch of subhuman demons who were your best friends a year ago but who would now gladly slit your throat and dance in your blood if we thought it would help us claw back a penny of your debt.

  But sadly that’s not an option. We take the loss on the chin, chalk it down as a write-off, and you get the coach back up to Bolton where you lie around your parents’ house drinking lager and crying for a few weeks until you go crawling back to your old job painting houses, stacking shelves, frying chips or whatever the fuck you used to do up there. Until the day you die—probably at age fifty-five through a combination of abysmal Northern lung cancer and thirty-odd years of back-breaking work—you will bore your friends rigid with stories about your twelve months on top of the world, snorting lines in the toilets of London nightclubs and getting your dick sucked by some skanky monster on a tour bus parked behind Northampton Roadmenders. The time you spent with us playing at being pop stars will probably be the high-water mark of your entire life. Someone like me will probably be somewhere among your dying thoughts.

  So, y’know, just don’t do it. Go and become an accountant, or an IT guy or something. Get a fucking job, you stupid cunt.

  Three

  “I love sports because I’m a total competitor. If we’re playing tennis and you’re winning, I’m going to get my cock out and piss on the goddam net.”

  Don Simpson

  “Ladieez an gennelmen, we are now beginning our descent into Nice. Please return to your seats and fasten…”

  She goes on. I look out of the window as the plane continues to bank left, falling out of the sky towards the runway that juts out into the Mediterranean. Dusk is hitting the sky over to our right, the sky above Africa, and turning it incredible colours—purple and gold and orange and red. We yawn and quickly turn back to our copies of Loaded, NME and Music Week. “Ze local time is now five twenty pee em.”

  “All righty!” says Trellick in the seat next to me. “The cocktail hour!”

  MIDEM. Sometime in the middle of the swinging sixties a couple of Frog fruits decided it would be cool to have a little convention in the South of France for the music industry. Thirty years on, last week of every January, something like ten thousand freeloading madmen descend on Cannes from all corners of the globe and go crackers.

  Champagne is drunk, lobsters are chomped, coke is honked and expense accounts are wildly abused in a week-long orgy of networking arid deal-making. The Palais des Festivals on the Croisette houses hundreds of stalls where record labels, publishers, CD manufacturers and merchandising companies—everything central and peripheral to the music business—hawk their wares and ply their trades.

  The plane is rammed with industry. Had this flight gone down, London’s cocaine, prostitution and private members’ club industries would have been devastated.

  With a comic, a cartoon-strip “EEEK!” the wheels rubberise the tarmac and we’re already popping buckles and reaching for bags. (Hand baggage only for us on these trips. If you were to check a piece of luggage in our company you might as well be caught on your hands and knees in the bathroom blowing one of the stewards.) The major-label guys favour luggage by Mulberry and Prada while the indie boys all have record bags with their label logos stitched or transferred on them: Soma, Talking Loud, Nova Mute, JDJ, Rising High, Moonshine and lots more. These guys will also have checked hulking great boxes of records, the promos and white labels they’ll be hawking around the stalls for the next few days as they desperately try to license some piece of shit track for a couple of hundred quid to help cover the cost of the trip. This is how the indie boys do business. Those of us higher up the food chain will take meetings in the chill, air-conditioned suites of the big hotels.

  I look around as my fellow A&R men—all smudged with champagne, spangled with vodka tonics—begin braying at each other. This is the sharp end of the record industry. The front line. We’re the SAS. Fucking Delta Force. Our jobs involve making fast decisions with hundreds of thousands, often millions, of pounds at stake. These decisions are often predicated on no more than a hunch or a rumour and are often made under the influence of drugs, alcohol, peer-group pressure and fear.

  The fear is constant because, and you must understand this, no one really has a clue what they are doing. There is no training programme. No manual. To say that the job (the art of predicting why husky-female-singer number 3 will sell more records than numbers 1, 2 and 4 through to 99, or why loutish-group-of-youths-with-guitars C will, six to twelve months from now, bewitch the nation’s youth to a greater extent than groups A, F, P or Z) is an inexact science is like saying that Fred West could probably have been a better father. Here’s what we, the A&R community, put our money on last year. This is what we reckon you’re going to be buying and enjoying in the coming year or so: the Beekeepers, Luna, Feline, Proper, Lower, Arnold, the Dub Pistols, the Hybirds, the Aloof, Spookey Ruben, Sally Burgess, Ragga&the Jack Magic Orchestra, Genaside II, Hardbody, Finley Quaye, Jocasta, Old Man Stone, Ajax Disco Spanner, Gus Gus, Vitro, Travis, Agnes, Monkey, Tiger, Don, the Nicotines, Mantaray, Laguna Meth, Symposium, Deadstar, Foil, Peach, Manbreak, Ether, Charlotte Kelly, My Life Story, Robbie Williams, Aquasky, Code Red, the Driven, Dust Junkies, Silversun, Alistair Tennent, Kenickie, 1st Class, Ryan Molloy, North&
South, Olive, Blue Amazon, Nash, Kelly Lorena, Belvedere Kane, Horace Andy, Ariel, Craig Armstrong, Kavana, Lilacs, One Inch Punch, Kings of Infinite Space, Mandalay, the Stereophonies, Akin, Amar, DJ Pulse, Snug, Eboman, M Beat, Slipmatt.

  Go on then, you pick the change out of that lot. How many of those chancing spunkers will be kicking back in their country pile with a shelf full of Brits and Grammys in ten years? No one knows what they are doing and everyone has to live with the knowledge that they will—one day—be fired.

  Right now you can hear fear rattling around the taxiing aircraft in her socially acceptable disguise: bravado.

  “Oi! Oi! Oi!” someone shouts.

  “Stelfox! You queer loser fool!” shouts another.

  “We’re larging it, mate!”

  “Bollocks, you cunt!”

  “Hello, tolers!”

  It is the bravado of soldiers in a landing craft about to crunch onto a hostile shore. The few civilians on the plane—mostly rich Frogs with permatanned alligator skin—sigh and shake their heads. Needless to say, the last two hours have not been pleasant for them.

  “What time we got this meeting, Steven?” Darren asks me.

  “Nine.”

  “Coolio.” Darren has been quiet on the flight, nervous. It’s his first MIDEM. When he started here as an A&R scout a little less than two years ago, straight from running his own indie fanzine (called something like Big Growling Pop Thing! ), he actually looked puppyish. He’d never taken cocaine in his life. Wide-eyed, he’d scamper from office to office with his stack of 7 singles and demos, a constant ball of teenage enthusiasm. Well, we soon knocked that out of him. He looks like fucking Methuselah now: his skin dry and flaking; his eyes bloodshot and sunken; his hands forever trembling as he lights a fresh Silk Cut with the butt of the last one. He stumbles from office to office, nursing a constant hangover and a three-gram-a-week habit, and being shouted at for playing us some crappy record, or not playing us some crappy record, or whatever. When he isn’t being shouted at in the office he’s standing at the back of some festering indie gig until three in the morning. His glossy mane of tyre-black hair is already streaked with grey fissures. He has just turned twenty-one. I’m taking him into a few meetings with me. He’s got good ears.

  Parker-Hall stands up and stretches in the seat in front of us. “Gawd blimey!” he says, yawning. “Dis is a bit more blahddy like it! Nice an ‘ot. Fackin’ tayters in London!”

  Parker-Hall is about five foot four and looks like an unruly, mischievous child, like one of the fucking Bash Street Kids. He comes from Hampstead. He went to Wellington. His parents own a couple of streets in north London. His surname involves a hyphen, for fuck’s sake, and yet he often chooses to talk like a kind of blacked-up Dick Van Dyke—the splayed vowels, the vanished consonants—because somewhere around the age of fifteen he heard a hip-hop record and decided that Kaffirs were cool. But Parker-Hall is hot at the moment, very hot. So I laugh and clap him on the back and ask him, “Where you staying then?”

  “Packing Ritz Carlton, innit?” he says and I immediately wish I hadn’t asked.

  ♦

  The door swings open. “SCHTEEVEN! FAANTASCHTICK! FAANTASCHTICK! COME IN! COME IN!” Rudi Gertschlinger embraces me as he ushers us into his suite at the Martinez.

  It’s tacky-impressive: a huge lounge with chintzy furniture and floor-to-ceiling bay windows overlooking the Croisette and, beyond it, the sea. It is dark now and the lights of dozens of huge yachts twinkle here and there in the blackness.

  The suite is almost as tacky-impressive as Rudi himself. In his late forties, with silver hair pulled back into a ponytail, he has the face of a well-fed concentration camp commandant, a role I am sure a couple of his direct ancestors probably filled.

  We take a seat on the floral sofa and a minion fixes drinks as Rudi continues his spiel, his volume going down a notch to the simply unbearable level he uses for normal conversation. “How have you been, my friend?! It has been too long! I must thank you for what you did with our last record! And thank you for sending the gold discs from the UK! We’re trying to get them up but—you know—there is so little space left on our walls. Eh, Gunter?”

  “Ja.” This will be Gunter’s sole contribution to the meeting. He hands Darren and me tumblers of Buck’s Fizz. Fucking Germans. Darren, nervous, knocks back half of the sickly orange jism in one go.

  “When did you get here?” I ask looking around. Rudi looks pretty well ensconced; a tower of gleaming black hi-fi equipment is set up in the corner.

  “Ach, just this morning. I had Gunter and Anna fly ahead yesterday to get things set up. You know me, Steven. Time is money! I am—what did you call it—hardcore? I AM FUCKING HARDCORE!” He laughs his tits off and we cackle along with the mad bastard.

  Rudi’s company DMG (Dance Music Group. Yeah, must have taken him a while) has a huge building on the outskirts of Hamburg. On the top floor are offices housing his three record labels, artist management and video production companies. (He diversified into music from pornography.) Below that is a floor with several small recording studios and below that, on the ground floor, is Das Technotron, Rudi’s nightclub. It works like this: he has teams of writers, engineers and producers working twenty-four/seven in all three studios. They’re young kids desperate to break into the music business, so Rudi pays them a minuscule wage and they get free studio time to work on their own tracks. They get next to no income from record sales and Rudi’s name appears as co-writer on every track that comes out of there, (in Rudi’s defence here he will, occasionally, charge into one of the studios and scream at these guys to make it “HEAVIER!” or “FASTER!” or “CRAZIER!”) Amazingly most of them think this is a good deal. Well, for a while anyway. Inevitably they will get wind of how royally Rudi is fucking them and will ask for what’s coming to them. At this point Rudi will show them a) the bit of paper they signed when they joined, and b) the fucking door.

  And how do you write a song? Well, in the words of a hero of mine, the late, great Morris Levy, you “get some kids in a room, you get a beat going, you get a few words together. Boom. You got a song.” This was Levy’s statement to the judge when he was being cross-examined about his role in the creative process behind the many hit records his name had appeared as co-writer on. He had, of course, written absolutely jack. A bunch of spear-chuckers—on breadline wages but kept perfectly sweet with the occasional (leased) Cadillac and the odd chicken dinner—wrote the actual songs of course. Levy simply told them that, if they ever wanted the record to see the light of day, then they’d better be putting his name in the brackets too, and cutting him in for a goodly slice of the publishing. Levy was a music-industry mogul back in the fifties and sixties—the good old days. The Wild West. When artists did whatever you told them to and thought it was fucking Christmas when you paid them a royalty of half a pence in the pound. (Not like now, when every toerag with a demo tape has their lawyer in tow, some lowlife who, when he’s not banging on about royalty uplifts, or trying to skank you for a few extra points, is trying to make everything non-recoupable and threatening you with an audit every fifteen minutes.) Back then you could really make some money. So, while Rudi’s tactics might seem draconian to someone who dabbled in, say, ethics, they’re hardly innovative.

  When one of Rudi’s kids has a track they are particularly enthused about they will charge downstairs to Technotron on a Friday or Saturday night—when the place is rammed with two thousand gurning, pilled-up Krauts—and get the DJ to give it a spin. If the crowd go uber-ballistic then they know they’ve got something and the tune will be pressed onto white labels, whacked up to the third floor, and mailed to key club DJs. It is as sure-fire a way to road-test pop-dance records as has ever been invented and has made Rudi one of the most successful producers in Europe and a millionaire many times over. I have licensed several of his tracks for the UK, earning Rudi’s undying love by scoring top-five hits with the last two ‘My Baby Wants to Come’ and ‘Doof! Doof! (This I
s House)’. (Those titles. Again, fucking Germans.)

  “Anyway,” Rudi is saying, “let me make you happy, Schteeven. Günter.” He nods to his muppet who hits ‘play’ on the DAT machine. The room fucking explodes as a bass drum louder than the march of a thousand Waffen SS crunches out of the speakers. Rudi and Günter nod along. My fillings thrum. After a moment a flummoxing bass line kicks in and then a female voice joins it. It rumbles along like this for maybe a minute as a second, male, voice creeps in, insistently repeating the words “Why don’t you, why don’t you, why don’t you, why don’t you…” before the chorus drops: “WHY DON’T YOU SUCK MY FUCKING DICK!”

  I look up; Rudi and Günter have their eyes shut, completely lost in music. I glance left towards Darren but he won’t meet my gaze, clearly too terrified of collapsing in hysterics. Or perhaps just plain terrified. The chorus is continuing to build, tribal drums pounding and a pack of guys yelling “WHY DON’T YOU SUCK MY FUCKING DICK!” Except…they’re not just yelling, the fucking thing is actually incredibly tuneful; a nagging keyboard riff twines around the vocal line, sweetening it.

  There’s a breakdown about halfway through where the inevitable rapper tells the girl to do stuff like lick his balls and stick her tongue up his ass and stuff, and then the chorus comes back in and it all builds to a deranged crescendo before the track stops abruptly and a single, passionate, soulful voice cries out, “SUCK IT!” Then it’s over.