by John Niven
The room is crowded—industry, random girls and a few fairly well-known musicians. Trellick is sitting on the ledge of the tall windows which overlook Hyde Park, arms folded, nodding earnestly as some girl talks shit to him. A few feet away from Trellick, Damon Albarn is engaged in exactly the same sort of conversation. I tune back in. Parker-Hall is telling us, “…the fucking mixes were all over the shop.” I says to Flood and Moulder, “Listen, cunts…”
“Excuse me,” I say.
In the bathroom I sit down on the toilet, put my head between my legs, and take deep, steady breaths. I’m sweating. Thirty thousand a week. That fluky little prick. That chancing mockney wanker. In Mission Control there’s a red wash of colour, alarms sounding, the screens all flashing deranged, bloody images of Parker-Hall and Chalmers being forced to gobble and bum each other before a shotgun is slipped in each of their mouths and, simultaneously, their heads fly apart in a pinkish mist of viscera. The technicians are thumping their monitors, twiddling knobs, but they can’t shake the pictures.
I splash some water on my face and hold my wrists under the cold tap for a long time and finally I start to feel better. I’m scraping some powder out from the wrap and carving out a heart-stopping elephant’s leg when I become aware of a gentle tapping at the door. I open it a crack and squint out, trying to focus into the dark hallway. “Steven?” a girl says.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Anita. From BMG? Can I come in?”
I pull her in and point her towards the coke.
Maybe fifteen minutes later, as we’re leaving, I take a quick look around for Trellick. I wander along a hallway and try the door to one of the bedrooms. It opens silently and I hear a girl’s voice breathlessly chanting a mantra of “oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck”. I peer in. A huge bed is lit by soft halogen spots. On the bed Ellie Crush is naked on her hands and knees. There is a black kid—one of the singers in this new boy band Leamington has signed—crouched behind her, doing something to her with his fist. As I softly close the door something silver flashes under the amber halogen glow.
Yes, twenty-one-year-old Ellie Crush had definitely found a safe place to put the statuette for Best British Breakthrough Artist.
♦
“The thing is,” she says, “no one over there takes my opinion seriously.” Anita and I are at opposite ends of my sofa, an oversized number from Heal’s in heavy caramel cloth. A gold disc for some dance record I signed, flecked and streaked with cocaine, lies between us. Jeff Buckley warbles soft in the background as we discuss her career prospects in A&R. Given that she has none it is a remarkable tribute to both my patience and the focusing power of the drug that we’ve managed to keep the conversation on the rails for a good three hours. Outside, horribly, dawn is beginning to crinkle through Maida Vale. The clock is ticking, but there’s still some crap I have to listen to.
“Oh, I’m sure they do,” I say, standing to pour cold shots of Stoli and then flopping back down a little nearer to her. When we got back, remembering that she’s really an indie kid, I quickly washed and changed my shirt and tie for a Radiohead T-shirt.
“No they don’t. I was the first one saying we should sign Mansun the other year. Look at what that turned into.”
“Really?” I say.
“Oh, there’s been loads,” she says and goes onto reel off a list of bands she loves, all either total or demi-turkeys, while I chop more lines out.
“Well,” I say, handing her the furled twenty, “what are your plans? Where do you want to go from here?” She stands up and bends over right in front of me to snort her line. Her rump—which is near perfect by the way—strains against the tight, shiny dress. I wonder—knickers? thong? nothing? The slit falls open to the top of her thigh, laying bare a yard of brown flesh. “Ahh…thanks,” she says, throwing her head back. She sits down beside me and passes the gold disc. “I’ve been A&R coordinator for three years now,” she continues, snuffling, “I could do it in my fucking sleep. I mean, I’m nearly twenty-three, Steven. What am I doing?” She looks at me with sad, damp eyes. Her breasts—which are pushed tight together by one of these new superbras I’ve been reading so much about, some triumph of geometric wiring and tit-engineering—are straining hard against the gold-speckled satin of her dress. She’s really packed into it. I am so thick, so angry, with lust that, just for a moment, I think I may attack her.
“Well, listen,” I say, “off the record?” She nods, wide-eyed, and I realise that I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to say next. But it’s no problem. I lie constantly, I lie all the time. The very fabric of my daily existence from breakfast until bedtime, from toast until tranquillisers, is a finely woven torrent of utter shite. So I know, I’m reasonably confident, that when I start speaking the words, the lies will tumble from my mouth and arrange themselves into a convincing sentence that will take me nearer to what I want. “Well,” I say, “we’re about to promote Darren to Junior A&R. He doesn’t know that yet so you can’t tell anyone.” She nods solemnly. “So we’re going to be hiring one, possibly two, new scouts sometime in the next few months. I think you’d be perfect, but the thing is,” I say, completely free-forming now, “it’d probably mean a drop in salary.”
“I don’t care about the money,” she cuts in quickly, leaning towards me, smelling of perfume, sweat, cigarettes and vodka, “I mean, you only get one life and you have to make sure that whatever you do makes you happy. I’ve always loved music and I know that, if someone would just give me a shot at it, I’d make a brilliant scout. I spend half my life going to gigs anyway. You couldn’t name a new band in London I haven’t seen in the past twelve months. The Audience, Bellatrix, Cuff, AC Acoustics, Basement Jaxx…Even when I was a kid, I’d listen to the Top Forty every Sunday because I wanted to hear what records were going up, what was going down and all that. I’ve got my own account at Rough Trade. I pay for it myself. BMG won’t let me have one because I’m not technically A&R staff—hey, I’ve got perfect pitch too, did you know that?—and I’m so sick of it there that I’ve been thinking about just packing it all in and going travelling. A couple of my friends are out in Goa right now and sometimes I just think, “Fuck it, why spend the winter here? You’re worth more than this.” I mean, what am I doing? Booking studio time and booking cabs and hiking bloody tapes around London and all that crap. My dad died last year and we never really got on and that really made me take a look at things because at the end of the day if you’re not happy then, basically, what’s the point? Do you know what I mean?”
“Anita,” I say hoarsely, “can I suck your tits?”
♦
Fucking cocaine.
Two hours later and she’s still trying to mangle my cock into something in the vicinity of a hard-on. We’re both naked, slick and salty with sweat, and she’s going at it like a demon: flicking at the tip with her tongue, nibbling the shaft with her teeth, blowing on the helmet gently, viciously gobbling up and down the whole thing, kissing it as softly and tenderly as a mother soothing a crying infant, biting and gnawing on it like an angry pit bull, spitting on it, greasing it with baby oil, making direct eye contact and moaning with pleasure as she sucks, rubbing my cock greedily against her clit, pussy-lips and arsehole, and sliding it between her heavy, lubed breasts. At one point she crams the entire package—prick, balls, the lot—into her mouth and churns them crazily like an overdriven washing machine. Finally she goes absolutely bananas and simply begins furiously wanking me off. For a long, sorry time—teeth gritted, sweat flying from her—she pounds her clenched fist up and down on the melted ribbon of plasticine I have instead of a cock. Somehow, somewhere into about the fifteenth minute of this (by which point she’s emitting random screams of pain, her arm just an insane blur, like one of those machines they use to shake paint in DIY shops), my cock stiffens minutely, going from the consistency of—say—jelly into Play-Doh. As she eagerly, desperately, swivels a leg across my chest in an attempt to mount me, I shudder, moan, and ejaculate.
♦
When I wake up she’s gone. Horribly, inevitably, I have a raging, titanium erection. I roll the sheets back and look at it. My relationship with my prick is beginning to resemble the kind of friendship you have with an old, alcoholic college pal—completely unreliable, always turning up at the worst possible time and costs you a lot of money. Yet you’re stuck with him. I stare him down. “What the fuck do you want? You’re late,” I say. I want to punch him out.
But, with heavy heart and thick blood, I root around on the floor, pluck my wallet from my trousers, and begin dialling the number of a local escort agency. “Aww,” I think, folding a cool, soothing fist around my radioactive helmet, “how could I stay mad at you?”
♦
A couple of weeks after The Brits we have an emergency marketing meeting, to get a plot in place for Rudi’s record. Present are Ross, one of Ross’s product-manager muppets, Dunn, the TV promotions girls Hannah and Clare (fucked them both), Barry and Alex, the club promotions kids, who will try to get every DJ in every filthy, tacky toler-infested nightclub in the country playing the record, Bill, who deals with manufacturing, Suzy the press officer (nearly fucked her, blow job) and Nicky. As always I find myself angry at how fucking ugly Nicky is. Usually Ross would chair this meeting, but Derek, sensing a big hit he wants to get his fingerprints on, has decided to sit in.
“Now,” Derek booms, gesturing grandly towards me, “Steven has recently come back from MIDEM where, I’m pleased to say, he signed the hottest club record of the whole convention.” There is a round of applause and some whooping from Barry and Alex, who already know the record, Barry even implying he had tried to play it to me before Christmas. I move over to the stereo. “This is the club mix,” I say cueing the track up, “I’m working on a radio edit.” I am, of course, doing fuck all. One of Rudi’s boys will do the radio mix, but these clowns don’t know that. Once the thing is a huge hit it will be, naturally, ‘my’ radio mix that saved the day. I crank the volume all the way to the right, hit ‘play’ on the CD, and bass flattens the gold discs and posters against the walls. Everyone nods along.
You’d think you wouldn’t have to bother with all this, wouldn’t you? The process of selling the fucking record to the people in your own company. But you do. Yesterday I picked off Dunn and Ross—playing each of them the record in their offices and telling them both only they could make it a hit. I mean, if you worked at Baked Beans Inc and your job was marketing beans and the guy who made the fucking beans came in with some hot new beans, he wouldn’t have to do a sales job on you, would he? He wouldn’t have to take you out and get you drunk and slip you a taste of the beans and really try to convince you they were good beans, would he? He’d just say, “Here’s the new beans I’ve made—which is my job—now sell the fucking things. Because that’s your job.” But not in the record industry, oh no. Everyone’s got a fucking opinion, everyone wants to be an A&R guy and—most importantly—everyone wants you to fucking fail. Do any of the poor cunts around this table (some of their faces—Hannah, Nicky—now twitching with horror as the chorus unfolds) really need to be seeing me striding around the office with a N°1 record going on? Do they fuck. I’m kind of unbearable when I’m having a hit.
“SUCK IT!” reverberates around the boardroom and then it all goes quiet.
Ross breaks the silence—“It’s a smash!”—and then we’re all talking about practical stuff; release dates, lead times and artwork.
Derek loves the record. The marketing department love the record. The club promotions department love the record. The radio department love the record. I love Rudi. I have tooled back from Cannes bearing the cure for cancer.
March
Lucian Grange becomes Head of Polydor. The single ‘Local Boy in the Photograph’ by hotly tipped new act the Stereophonics stiffs at 51. Cast release their second LP. The Manic Street Preachers album goes double platinum. Lots of people want to sign the Audience, an indie band with this girl singer who’s the daughter of the boiler who used to present Blue Peter. Steve Alien, an A&R guy at Warner Brothers, says, “I see her developing the way Madonna has. This is probably the dance-album of the decade.” He is talking about Gina G.
Five
“I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.”
Elvis Presley
“…very much like the early Jam, but more angular, and you’d need to find a producer who was sympathetic to that. I don’t think…” Waters craps on about the band we’ve just watched in the Dublin Castle as Parkway at closing time creeps past—the Spread Eagle, a kebab palace, three drunk girls in short skirts, another gigantic poster of Tony Blair, the Labour guy, his red devil eyes burning out of the tear across the poster, scaring the shit out of me.
Waters and I are both coked up in the back of a hot stinking minicab, on our way to the Falcon to see some band called Kidnapper, who are meant to be a bit like Elastica. There’s the usual gibbering Paki at the wheel, the usual distorted ragga fizzing out of the tiny plastic speakers behind us. Waters is still talking. “…his mixes are just too…middle-y…” I turn to look at him for the first time in a while. He’s just a madman with double-glazed pebbles for eyes. He’s talking to the air. He may as well be talking to Abdul in front. “Too middle-y?” I repeat.
“Yeah. You know, not enough top or bottom end…”
I nod slowly. “Sorry, who are we talking about?”
“Mike Hedges.”
“Right. Too…middle-y?”
“Yeah.”
Waters is saying that one of country’s most respected producers—a guy who has been making records since Waters was a child—is incapable of turning out a mix with the necessary levels of bass and treble. Waters is not saying this because he believes it or because he has given the matter any serious thought (an endeavour he is, in any case, incapable of). He is just saying it to have a view. Views are very important. You should always have one.
I say, “Shall we fuck off this band at the Falcon? Go back to yours and have a think about producers? Draw up a shortlist? Get some more bugle in?”
He grins. Well, he gets as close to a grin as his coke-blasted features will allow, like he’s trying to eat his top lip with his bottom teeth. Actually, he looks like he’s having a fucking stroke. But he’s nodding.
Waters leans forward, causing a fresh torrent of sweat to pour off him, and gives the driver his address in Netting Hill. We make an illegal left up Camden High Street, past the tube station, the Brassiere, teenage goths outside the Electric Ballroom, a woman tramp with a filthy bandage around her arm rooting through a rubbish bin.
By one we’re well into the third gram. Waters is still talking—I don’t think he’s stopped talking since we left the Dublin Castle—and pouring drinks while I root through his record collection. He has about twenty-five CDs—mostly major label promos and a few Greatest Hits collections: Fleetwood Mac, Japan, the fucking Doors. For some reason—some inexplicable, haunt-you-to-the-grave-unfathomable reason—he has a copy of Nuisance, the debut album by Menswear. I also see an advance copy of the new Jam box set Polydor are bringing out and a copy of the Gang of Four’s Entertainment. My copy of the Gang of Four’s Entertainment, the one that went missing from my office a couple of weeks ago. This explains Waters earlier, mystifying, spastically inappropriate use of the word ‘angular’. I put disc two of the Jam set on. “Thanks,” I say, taking the tumbler of vodka tonic he hands me and sinking into his ludicrously oversized sofa. “Right, where were we?” says Waters, tapping his teeth with a biro and staring
at the piece of A4.
We’ve been ‘brainstorming’ for nearly two hours now. There are two names scrawled in Waters’ mutated handwriting on the grimy sheet of paper: Ed Bueller and Dave Eringa, both my suggestions. Waters’ dog lies sleeping on the sofa. On the coffee table between us is the coke-flecked mirror, the heaped ashtrays, the empty bottle of Stoli. Copies of Music Week are scattered all over the floor, all opened at the album charts where we’ve been scanning the producers’ names for ideas. Waters thinks hard. Or rather he makes the expression he imagines humans use when thinking—furrowed brow, gaze focused somewhere in the mid-distance—while whatever goes on in his mind goes on. I picture the inside of his head as a sleeping donkey, a 747 exploding on the tarmac, a nuclear winter. “How about…” I say sitting forward, picking up his Amex, scooping some powder towards me, pausing dramatically as Waters looks up hopefully, “…Guy Stevens?”
I wait a few seconds while his brain turns, as swift as a container of near-set concrete tipping over. There’s the vaguest light somewhere in his eyes, the tiniest hint that something like a mind lives and functions in there. “You know,” I say helpfully, “he produced London Calling. Mott the Hoople.”
“Oh, Guy Stevens!” the clown exclaims, as though I’d said Guy Stephenson, or Guy Simons or something. “Yeah, great idea,” he says, enthusiastically writing down the name of a man who has been dead for nearly twenty years. “I’ll get the drinks,” I say.
Waters’ kitchen is chrome and marble, clean-lined, halogen-lit and never-used. An aluminium baseball bat with a navy leather grip leans against the fridge. “Home security,” Waters had said casually when we came in. I grab his mortar and pestle and quickly grind up three more Valium, two Es, a tab of acid, and a scoop of ludicrous-strength, Trade-certified, hardcore-queers-only ketamine. “Fuck it,” I think, breaking open two big, egg-shaped temazepam with my thumbnail and squeezing the viscous, gluey liquid into the chalky powder. I dump the lot into his glass and fill it to the brim with neat vodka, adding a splash of tonic as an afterthought.