Kill Your Friends (10 page)

“
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.

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

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
.

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

“
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.

♦

“I’m a bear! I’m the dancing bear!”

We were both dancing to some rave compilation when the furious
cocktail of class As kicked in and Waters started tearing his
clothes off. I suggested to him that he might like to pretend he
was an animal of some sort. Now, an hour or so later, I’m lying
back contentedly in Waters’ huge leather beanbag, watching him
capering naked around his living room pretending to be a circus
bear. He is fucking
deranged
.

I shout instructions and encouragement to him, making the most
of the short window I have before he collapses. “Bear eat CDs?” I
suggest, chucking a handful at him.

“Bear eat CDs!” Waters shrieks delightedly and stuffs a copy of
Pulp’s
Different Class
into his mouth. He crunches right
through it—jewel case, sleeve, CD, the lot. “Mmmm,” he says,
turning to me and rubbing his naked belly happily, bits of paper
and plastic falling from his bleeding mouth. A worried expression
crosses his face. “Bear need…” He’s trying to say something, his
eyeballs flipping back in their sockets, as though he’s trying to
look at whatever is left of his brain.

“Bear need what? What does bear need?” I say encouragingly, like
you would to a confused child.

“Bear need—” Abruptly he squats down and unleashes a torrent of
foul shite all over his nice sea-grass carpeting. Then he loses his
balance and falls into his own effluent.

The stench is incredible, arousing the sleeping dog. I lock him
in the bedroom.

I check my watch—four
AM
. Enough’s enough. “Here,
thirsty bear,” I say, lifting his head up—being careful not to get
shit on me—and holding a mug to his lips. It’s filled with Evian in
which I’ve dissolved a further two dozen of his Valium. Waters
greedily gulps it down. “Good bear,” I say, patting his head, “good
bear…”

An hour or so later I watch him sleeping—dying—while I snort the
last of the coke and listen to the Menswear album. What the fuck
was he thinking with this? “Roger! What the fuck were you thinking
with this?” I shout, slapping his face with the CD case.

“Mmmmmm?” he mumbles, face down on the carpet, death nuzzling up
close by, putting his feet up.

I turn the TV on and watch VH1 for a while—the Cardigans,
Radiohead, Texas, the new Blur single—as Waters’ breathing goes
from loud, laboured snoring to a rattling whisper to absolutely
nothing. Satisfied he’s dead I get my cock out and piss all over
him.

Then I go and root through his bedroom drawers, hitting pay dirt
when I find a sex-trove of porn mags, videos, toys and lubes at the
back of his wardrobe. I pull out a butt-plug. It’s about the size
of a champagne cork and is attached to the handle⁄battery
compartment by a grey wire about four feet long. I click it on. It
thrums feebly so I replace the batteries with the ones from the
remote control for the flat-screen TV in Waters’ bedroom. Much
better—it’s like holding a small, angry frog. I get rubber gloves
from beneath the sink.

Before I leave I flip through the channels until I find
Red
Hot Amateurs
. Some spotty-bummed housewife in cheap red
underwear smiles coquettishly into the camera as she fingers a
dildo, like a flautist preparing for a tricky recital. I leave the
TV on, bluish light flickering across Waters’ piss-spattered,
shit-flecked corpse, the empty bottles of Valium and vodka atop the
cokey mirror, the cord for the butt-plug trailing out from between
his cheeks, a faint, muffled hum audible beneath the moans and
groans from the TV.

I walk home to Maida Vale, the sun coming up and ‘Beetlebum’ in
my head as I cross the Harrow Road. The long, festering strip
studded with fried-chicken shacks and everything-a-quid emporiums—a
greying London wound which gentrification will never reach—is
deserted except for a solitary double-decker bus. It slams past me,
ratling the pavement. It is full of tolers: poor people, their
faces as grim and stark as pornography, as blunt as final
demands.

They flash by me on their way into W1, where they will do
whatever they do all day for no money. Yellow letters glow feebly
on the front of the bus, telling me that these people have come
from Kensal Rise, Cricklewood, Wembley and other places, poorer,
more terrible places, that I don’t even know about.

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

“
If you are a fierce competitor then you want to
beat the other guys’ brains out, because that’s what you love
doing
.”

Al Teller, former Columbia Records President

“What do you think? Honestly?” one of them—the
bass player? the singer?—asks as the last blips of feedback fade
out.

I look around my office. The four musicians (early twenties,
thin, anaemic, torn clothes) sit on the sofa and the floor while
their manager (a couple of years older, a little better dressed)
sits in the chair across the desk from me.

Waters’ non-appearance in the office this morning
caused…nothing. I guess that, in most workplaces, it’s Unusual,
reprehensible even, when people just don’t turn up. Or turn up so
hung-over all they can do is vomit and cry. But not here. Not in
the record industry. (‘Industry’. That’s blinding, isn’t it?
“
Diligence or assiduity in any task or effort
.” I look
through the glass wall of my office at all the diligence and
assiduity going on around here: Rebecca, laughing her head off as
she feverishly types a gossip-laden email to some whore she knows;
Darren and Stan, our scouts, chasing each other around with water
pistols; Schneider berating Nancy for failing to secure him a
necessary restaurant reservation.)

What do I think? Honestly?

I picture the expressions which would appear on these earnest
faces if I even
began
to tell them what I was thinking while
we listened to their demo. “
Well, kids, during the ludicrously
overlong intro to the first number I started wondering if those
fucks in the car department had finally gotten around to installing
the new CD changer in the boot of my car. By the time your clicked,
long-overdue first ‘chorus’ was finally dropping, I was mentally
re-enacting a recent coke- and E-fuelled gang bang I had with a
pair of cheap Eastern European prostitutes. Then I started worrying
because I realised I’d forgotten to drop a suit that I want to wear
to the
Music Week
Awards tomorrow night into the
dry-cleaner’s and could they do it same day or should I have
Rebecca pop by my flat at lunchtime and take it in for me? Or
should I just buy a new suit? I saw one in Paul Smith I liked the
other day, but could I possibly have any alterations done in time?
Then Lisa from finance walked past the window wearing her low-cut
jeans—the piano-wire of her thong just visible above the denim—and
I started working her into the East European hooker gang bang,
having her being fucked by one of them with a huge strap-on while
I’m ejaculating an
astonishingly
large payload into her
gagging mouth and blinking, grateful eyes while the other ostro
eats her out from beneath. By the time I was standing there in my
mind’seye, sweat-glazed, panting and triumphant, over the three
tearful, naked semen-encrusted bodies, your last overwrought ballad
was spiralling to a close and I hadn’t really heard a fucking note.
Sorry
.”