by John Niven
“Best live band I’ve seen in a long, long time.”
“Yeah?” The manager—a stringy, indie, vegetarian-looking anorak cunt—doesn’t look up from spooning pulpy melon into his mouth. He couldn’t look less enthusiastic if he tried, which is fucking cheeky considering the effort, the time, I’ve put into arranging and preparing for this lunch.
When I got back to the hotel last night—tramp-drunk at 3 a.m.—I rang Darren. While I should, by rights, have been snorting inhuman amounts of chang and trying to negotiate the local ostros down to a hundred bucks for uncovered oral, I was on the phone, working. After berating Darren for not already being on to the Lazies (the lying prick claimed he tried to play me the single) I told him I needed to know who managed them, I needed his phone number, I needed a potted history of the band, and I needed him to find a record store in Austin who had the band’s records and then he had to buy the records over the phone with his credit card and have them cabbed to my hotel.
Then I passed out.
I woke up five hours later. The fax with all the info was in an envelope that had been pushed under my door. A package containing the band’s slender catalogue—one single and an EP—awaited me behind reception.
I rang the manager, the kid Jimmy now sitting opposite me, and here we are. I gave the music a cursory listen earlier—it’s all right. I don’t know really. Who knows? But enough people seem to be interested. We’re having lunch in the restaurant at the hotel. Good PR for me to be seen lunching with the manager of a hot band.
“What was your favourite track on the EP?” he asks.
Shit. “Track three,” I say, “definitely.”
“Yeah? That’s interesting.” Is it?
“Are you going to be playing in England soon?” I ask.
“Uh, yeah. In a month or so. Glastonbury. We’re doing some warm-ups first. At the, uh, is it the Borderline?”
“Yeah. Good venue.” Stinking fucking toilet.
He finishes his fruit salad and surprises me by lighting a cigarette. “So, man,” he says, leaning back, pushing long, unkempt hair from his face, “what’s your favourite album of all time?”
The fucking nerve. I pretend to think for a moment, then say, “Marquee Moon.” With a certain type of indie loser you cannot go wrong with Marquee Moon.
The clown nods and says, “Cool.”
He starts talking about how hard the band work, how little they’re willing to compromise, how great their debut album’s going to be. All the usual shit I’ve heard a billion times before. I nod away, looking like I’m listening, generally doing a reasonable impression of a normal human being.
Across the restaurant I see Parker-Hall and Tench walking towards us. “All right, lads?” I say magnanimously, chewing on a toothpick, “this is J—”
“How you doing, Jimmy?” says Parker-Hall. Jimmy’s already on his feet and they’re embracing warmly. “Hey, Tony! My man! What’s up?”
“Me and Si are just going for a bit of a stroll. Catch some rays.” Jimmy, the Yank cunt, is lapping up Parker-Hall’s Dick Van Dyke schtick. I cannot believe he gets away with this shit. “We still on for later?” Parker-Hall asks him.
“For sure. I’ve just got this meeting to finish up with…” the manager has forgotten my name, “…ah, with Steve here. Then I’ll be back at my hotel.”
In the background I’m sure Tench is smirking as they say their matey goodbyes and tool off.
“You know Tony then?” I ask.
“Yeah, we talk on the phone a lot. He was a big fan of the first single.”
“Right.” Cunt. Fucking fuck.
“Hey, Steve, I’ve really got to run too. We’re playing again tonight at this thing, it’s a little way out of town…” he writes the address down on a napkin.
“Yeah, great. How far along are you? You know, in terms of other companies.”
“Well,” he says grinning, shaking his head, “I’ve got to tell you, we’ve got a couple of really interesting offers on the table already. I wouldn’t want you to get your hopes up.”
I laugh. “Another offer wouldn’t hurt though, would it?” I am going to fire Darren. Why weren’t we on to this fucking band earlier?
“Maybe not, maybe not. Thanks for lunch.”
We shake hands and I watch him fruit off through the restaurant, stopping halfway to shake hands with some girl.
A waitress appears. She’s cute, huge rack.
“You’re finished?” she says.
No, I think. Not completely. Not yet.
♦
With the indie kids you have to remember this: they really think that what they do matters in some way. They reckon that history will care. (They don’t know that history will have other shit to be getting on with.) The indie kids figure that they’re passing on the torch or some fucking thing. That, just as they were influenced by someone—the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, the Stooges, whoever—then, in the future, young bands will be influenced by them. Maybe so. Maybe a few thousand malnourished cockless freaks scattered around the globe will give a shit. So what? Real people don’t care, do they? Real people put stone cladding and UPVC double-glazing on their council houses, they buy four albums a year and they want to be able to hear all the words. And there are fucking billions of them.
That’s why I like it when you deal with a genuine pop act. It’s so refreshing and honest. Some greasy demi-paedo of a manager flops down in your office with three fit fifteen-year-old sluts on his arm. Half a GCSE between them, they say, “We want to be famous and make a lot of money.” You know what? No problem. Let’s fucking rock. I might thereafter have to have the odd conversation about, for instance, do we need to Photoshop someone’s jugs to make them look bigger or firmer? What I won’t have to do is sit in some toilet flat at three in the morning, listening to tuneless B-sides and talking about, I don’t know, Tom Verlaine’s guitar solos. Because, really, who gives a fucking shit?
Here—you want to say to these indie kids—have a steak. Let’s go to Harvey Nicks and buy you some decent clothes.
Here’s three hundred quid—go and get a hot boiler to suck your dick properly for the first time in your life. Live a little, son.
May
Talk of EMI/Seagram merger. Spice Girls do massive Pepsi deal. Lots of interest in Ultrasound now. The Jamiroquai LP goes triple platinum. Audioweb’s single ‘Faker’ charts at 70. Reconstruction signs this girl singer called Sylvia Powell. The label’s MD Keith Blackhurst says, “I’m sure her songs will make it onto TV and radio and that the album will be huge.” Echo and the Bunnymen look like making a comeback. Labour wins the election.
Nine
“The nature of show business means that people within the business feel that if someone else fails, they move up a notch.”
Tom Arnold
A few days after I get back from Austin I go on a date. Yeah, I know.
The thing is, if you just fuck an awful lot of whores all the time then you kind of need to go on a date now and again, if only to prove to yourself that you can still do boilers without a fistful of grubby fifty-pound notes changing hands. Also, sometimes I’ll look at people who have girlfriends and I’ll think, “That doesn’t look so crazy.” Who knows, maybe it’s worth a pop.
I’ve been listening to this girl (she’s literally called Sophie, for fuck’s sake, a friend of a friend, works in international at…Warners?) crapping on about something—an argument she had with the singer from some band about, I don’t know, maybe the quality of cheeseburgers at Oslo airport, or the purity of bottled water in Auckland—for what feels like a decade. This is the thing. You’re expected to make conversation, aren’t you? Beyond the level of ‘here’s your money, now suck this, you rancid fucking slut’.
“Hey,” she says, waving a hand across my vacant face as a fawning spic plonks her dessert in front of her, “what are you thinking about?”
Gak, chang, nose-up, bag, beak, charlie, krell, powder, chisel, bump, posh, bugle,
sniff, skiwear…
This is the thing about girlfriends. They’ll say to you: “What are you thinking?” I am always thinking about cash and fucking, but you can’t really say this, can you?
But people do it, don’t they? You see it all the time. There seem to be definite upsides, financially and health-wise at least. I mean, you’re unlikely to come in from work of a Friday evening and—during the course of a quiet weekend with your girlfriend—spend nearly two grand on coke, crack, booze, Viagra and hookers. I don’t imagine that’s how it goes, is it? Your girlfriend is unlikely to suggest the kind of evening out that will terminate sometime the following afternoon in an Albanian knocking shop in Brixton, up to your nuts in an illegal immigrant. You don’t do that nasty stuff with a girlfriend, do you? You…What do you do? You go to, I don’t know, the cinema? Or maybe for a walk? Stuff like that?
But then I think about the downsides. The talking. They’re really into the whole talking thing, girlfriends. Ross has a girlfriend. He tells you about the things they do, the stuff they say. They try and talk to you about complicated weekends away in three months’ time over breakfast. About wallpaper colours. They ask things like, “How was your day?” and “How did your meeting go?” What do you care how the meeting went? I don’t fucking care how the meeting went and I was there.
Why? Why would they ask these things? What can they possibly have to gain from the answer? At least with hookers I find the banter, the discussions, manageable: bend over…put your leg there…good…suck harder…faster…lick my balls…piss on me.
I mean, I can just about manage that.
I tune back into the present, into the restaurant, the date. She’s saying, “…and anyway, these days BA’s business class is almost as good as first.”
You’re wrong, I think. But I don’t correct her. I just listen, wondering how much more of this I will have to sit through before she will be drunk enough to let me fuck her. Tiredly I reach for the Pinot Grigio and refill her glass.
“What are you thinking?” Well, I’m thinking about having some big hit records and then upgrading your pockmarked arse for someone younger and fitter. Now, what film did you want to go and see? Shall we get a takeaway? Do you really want to go for a fucking walk, you horrible cow?
♦
I’m lying on the sofa in my office, half listening to demos, mostly playing Fifa ‘97 on the PlayStation, when Rebecca, ridiculously serious-faced, pops her head around the door.
“Steven?”
“Yeah?” Just the defender to beat, if I…
“There’s someone in reception who wants to see you.”
“Tell them to fuck off.” That’s it, scoot along the edge of the box…
“Actually, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” He shoots…
“It’s a policeman.”
…he hits the post.
The guy comes in. Plain clothes, a nasty-looking Next ⁄ Marks and Sparks type suit on. He’s young, maybe just a couple of years older than me. “Mr Stelfox?” he asks needlessly, extending his hand. Rebecca hovers in the doorway.
“Steven,” I say.
“DC Woodham. Thanks for seeing me without an appointment. I could come back another time if this is inconvenient?”
“No, no. It’s fine. Can we get you anything?”
“No, thank you.” Rebecca shuts the door and Woodham folds himself awkwardly into the chair opposite me. He’s tall and gangly, all limbs and angles in his nasty, ill-fitting suit. He’s fair-haired, but it’s not the thick Aryan blond you see on someone like Trellick. This is pauper’s hair—thin, pale and frayed into a cheap, bad cut which (surely unusually for a copper) touches the collar of his shirt here and there. His face is thin and pinched, kind of sad-looking. But that’s fair enough. If I had to tool around in a Next suit dealing with the world’s sewage for—what? twenty grand a year?—I’d be looking fucking sad too.
“Wow,” he says, eyeing up the pile of gold and platinum discs stacked beside my desk, “shouldn’t they be up on the wall?”
“Oh, I’ll get round to it,” I shrug bashfully. “I’m sorry, is this about Roger? Because I already spoke to—”
“Yes, I know you’ve given a statement. I just had a couple of questions about the—hey—” he breaks off, pointing to the pinboard on the wall behind me—“is that…is that you and Joe Strummer?”
I turn. He’s pointing to a photograph of me and Strummer—arms around each other, both in wellies and macs covered in mud, both out of our poor minds—standing behind the Pyramid Stage. I’d been looking at signing him last year but the demos were a pile of shit. But young bands often respond well to that photo. Good icebreaker. “Yeah,” I say chuckling, “backstage at Glastonbury last year. We’d had a few.”
“Wow. What’s he like?”
A washed-up cunt. “Joe? He’s a sweetheart. Are you a fan?”
“God, not half. I saw the Clash live when I was fifteen,” he beams proudly.
“Really?” Jesus wept, what a waste of fucking semen this cunt is. “Bit before my time I’m afraid.”
“Oh, best live band in the world, I reckon.”
“A few people say that. Sorry, Officer, I do have a meeting starting shortly.”
“Of course. Sorry. What it is, I’m following up with a few people and…I believe you told one of my colleagues that you,” he consults a notebook he’s pulled out, “you were with Mr Waters on the night of his death?”
“Yeah.”
“You’d been to…the Dublin Castle in Camden?”
“That’s right. Then we shared a cab and I dropped him off.”
“See anything good?”
“Anything good? Oh, the gig. Band called Rape Squadron I think. They weren’t bad.”
“Bit of an old toilet the Dublin Castle, isn’t it?” he grins.
“Oh, you know it?”
“Yeah. Well, I played there a few times. Back in the day, you know.”
“Really? You were in a band?” Mother of fucking uncontrollable God. “What did you play?”
“Guitar. And songwriting. We still play a bit as it happens, in our spare time and that. We’ve all got jobs now. Wives and kids and all that.”
Fuck me. “Yeah, it can be tough.”
“Tell me about it,” he says, shaking his head. “Anyway, I really wanted to ask you about Mr Waters’ state of mind that night.”
“In what way?”
“Well, did he seem worried about anything? Did he have any enemies that you know of? Debts? Money problems?”
I pretend to think for a moment. “No. Nothing like that. He’s unlikely to have had any money problems.” The fat overpaid spastic.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so. Expenses all the way in this racket, isn’t it?” Woodham laughs.
I laugh too. “Yeah, we’ve been known to claim a few beers back.”
“You’d been drinking?”
“Yeah, we’d had a few. He’d just been promoted. We were celebrating.”
“Drugs?”
“No.”
“Really? The autopsy showed considerable levels of cocaine in Mr Waters’ bloodstream.”
“It must have been after I left him. I don’t take cocaine.”
“I thought all you guys…”
“Oh, that’s a myth. It’s not the eighties. You have to work too hard these days.”
“But you knew he took drugs?”
“Well…”
He writes something down and goes on to ask me a few more vaguely Waters-related questions before getting onto what he really seems to want to talk about: what kind of bands were getting signed these days? How many demos did we get a week? How many gigs did I go to? Who have I worked with? What kind of music did I like? (The Clash, Bob Dylan blah blah blah…) Finally I email Rebecca telling her to come and get me for a non-existent meeting.
She pops her head around the door. “Sorry to interrupt,” she says, leaning in, giving Woodham full cleavage, �
�but you’ve got that meeting starting now, Steven.”
“Thanks, Rebecca.” She ducks back out.
“Well, thank you, Mr Stelfox,” Woodham says, getting up.
“Steven’s fine. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” I say walking him to the door.
“No, you’ve been very helpful. Just one last thing. This is a bit awkward.” He reaches into his jacket.
Fuck. Here it comes, the fucking Columbo bit. He’s almost out the bastard door when he turns round and produces the, smoking gun. “Could you tell me what you think of this?” he says, holding something towards me.
Oh God. I look down.
It’s a CD. “It’s just some rough mixes we did at my mate’s home studio, but I’d really like, you know, a professional opinion about the songs. If you could spare ten minutes to have a listen sometime…”
I look at him for a moment.
“Sure,” I say, taking the CD. “Is your number on here?”
Seconds after he leaves Rebecca comes in to find me standing up at the window. “Is everything OK?” she says, sounding genuinely anxious.
“It’s nothing. Just some questions about Roger.” She joins me at the window and we watch Woodham walk to his car—a shitty Ford of some description.
“Quite cute for a policeman,” she says.
“Mmmm.” We stand there for a moment in silence.
“Are you all right, Steven?”
“I’m fine.”
She raises her hand, as if to stroke my arm, then thinks better of it and leaves.
I often wonder what sort of life people like Woodham end up having. I don’t mean policemen, I mean guys who toiled away in pointless bands for years, never getting anywhere, until they got some hag up the duff. Are you one of them? How do you get through it? You turn round and—bosh!—you’re nearly thirty and standing in line at some fucking B&Q at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, a giant monster holding your hand while your five-year-old runs around smashing the place up and another brat howls in a papoose round your neck. You’ve maybe got two hundred and fifty quid in your current account until the end of the month. I mean, what keeps the noose from around your neck, the razor blade from your veins? Love? Don’t make me fucking laugh. Look at how you’re living.