Kill Your Friends (11 page)

What do I think? Honestly? I think I would like to see you and
the rest of your band die screaming in agony from something like
testicular cancer. I think that last week I spent a hundred and
eighty pounds on a necktie and lost it a few hours later, drunk in
Soho. I think about telling these hopeless, penniless cunts this.
But instead, pointlessly, I say, “Great guitar sound.”

“Yeah,” the manager says, and he starts crapping on about how
Doug—or whoever—has been playing guitar since he was a fucking
foetus or something. Doug looks up from the floor and smiles
bashfully. It’s about all I can do not to punch his stupid,
talentless face in. To stand up, run the length of the room, and
boot him full-force in his pasty, pimply, stinking indie chops.
But—ever reasonable—I just nod and listen and say things like
“yeah?” and “yeah” and “great” and “really?” for a long time.

I
hate
indie music. Until a couple of years ago you
didn’t really have to think about it. It was just a couple of
hundred losers fucking around in Camden. Then a pair of Mancunian
losers rock up clutching a Beatles songbook and suddenly you’ve got
to listen to all this shite and take all these meetings in case you
miss the next one. It’s a fucking nightmare.

I’m tired. I got home from Waters’ place and managed just a few
hours’ fitful, cokey sleep before I had to get up and drive over to
the new house, where there was another problem.

I’ve bought a toilet at the top of Ladbroke Grove. Desoto hooked
Trellick and me up with a bent estate agent, one who specialises in
finding ‘undervalued development opportunities’. What this means is
that he convinces derelict pensioners (ideally ones without
immediate families) who have been in their derelict houses since
the dawn of time that the place is worth a lot less than it really
is. You buy it, gut the place, lick of paint, couple of real
fireplaces, do the floors up, and flog it a few months later for a
sickening profit.

I pulled up at the place and walked through a trio of builders
on the front steps—astonished-looking Albanians, buckled over tea
and tabloids, smoking like lab beagles—down the hallway, where a
couple more Albanians are hunkered down either side of a tea chest
savaging a stinking parcel of vinegar-sodden fish and chips, and
into the living room where Murdoch, their boss, my builder, stood
in a large pool of water gazing thoughtfully at a wall.

A section of plaster around six feet in diameter had been hacked
away leaving a black, gaping wound, exposing the guts of the old
house; a hydra’s head of ancient wiring, rusted copper pipes. One
of the pipes had been hastily bandaged, but a thin trickle of water
still ran from it down into the wall cavity. “You’re joking?” I
said.

“Dinnaeworry,” Murdoch replied cheerfully,
“Plumber’s-cummin’rooninnamimut. Jistasweelwefunoutthenoo.”

“Found out what?”

“Thonpipe’sbinleakin’furdonkey’san’it’sweekendyer
halewathere.”

Murdoch was saying that the pipe has been leaking for a long
time and has caused damage to the entire wall. It’s taken three
agonising months but I’m now fluent in the land of horrible,
guttural Scottish Murdoch speaks. It’s like I’ve been forced to
learn a language I will never use again.

There’s no point getting angry at Murdoch. He just talks more.
You just have to ask the question. “How long and how much?” I
said.

“Well…” He fired up one of his unspeakable cigarettes—a Raffles,
a Mayfair, a Concord, a Savoy—and started talking.

I didn’t listen—it’s not worth the effort. It really isn’t.
Whenever a problem comes up with the building work—which it does on
a weekly, sometimes daily, basis—Murdoch will crap on for eternity,
giving me several options. He’ll then tell me why the cheapest
option isn’t worth bothering with. And then why the mid-priced
option isn’t really what I’m after either.

It’s all good for Murdoch though. No matter how tits up anything
goes—he just keeps raking in cash. He has squadrons of crazed
Albanians all over north-west London. Some of them do very well,
Murdoch’s Albanians. Strong work ethic. You come over here and you
work your balls off from dawn until dusk—plastering and painting
and bodging and fucking up—while the wife (or sister, or mum) does
her bit across town, ankle-deep in spunk in some massage parlour
off the North Circular.

I say Murdoch gives me options, but he doesn’t really. He just
talks shit for a while until I wind up spending more money. But
what can I do? What do I know about this stuff? Murdoch could lift
up some floorboards and show me a pair of elephants, chained to a
tandem and frantically pedalling, and tell me that the building is,
in fact, elephant-powered and that we need to replace one of the
beasts. I’d display irritation, but only mild surprise, as I
scribbled out a cheque for the most costly house-powering elephant
on the market.

“Abootseevenoreightthoosanahreckon…” he finally said.

“Fuck me.”

“Ayeit’sbadnewsrightenuff.”

“Right, whatever. Do it. And will you please tell your guys to
stop eating that stinking fucking takeaway food in here?”

“Ayeah’lltellthemtaewatchitbuttheboayshuvgotaeeathke.”

I’m now three months and a
lot
of money into this
nightmare. I’ve reached the point where just the sight of Murdoch’s
mobile number popping up on the screen of my Nokia makes me feel
sick.

Murdoch went on, talking about skylights and RSJs and supporting
walls, about hardwood flooring and cornices. About new windows and
planning permission. And it’s all expensive. None of it is
cheap.

The funding for this whole farce is, of course, borrowed. Just a
few years back it would have been impossible to do this at my age
and income. To obtain the financing you’d have needed guarantors,
collateral and accounts going back to the Stone Age. I just told
them a mad pack of utter crap—I’m Senior Vice President of
A
&
R for the Fucking World—and I earn a billion
quid a minute. Bosh. Done Deal.

I drove back to the office, for this meeting. Crawling along
Ladbroke Grove with the top down I got stuck in traffic across from
a pub; until very recently a crunchily carpeted pit of bitter,
satellite TV and boil-in-the-bag pies. Now there are polished oak
floors and pan-fried, line-caught Scottish trout. Frosty bottles of
champagne and Sauvignon gleam in glass-fronted coolers. An ancient
local, baking in his tattered overcoat and cap, stands on the
pavement outside, frowning at the braying laughter and the
Propellerheads pumping from the jukebox. He’s easily eighty and
squints through thick glasses at the chalkboard menu, which is
telling him that today’s special is seafood linguine with Irish
lobster, scallops and prawns. The chalkboard may as well read ‘go
home and die, you fucking old cunt’. I smile. What wars and
depressions, what hardships and indignities has this poor bastard
lived through, coming of age as he did during unarguably the worst
stretch of the twentieth century, to end his days having to witness
this shit?

I think about money. I’m running two mortgages, a bridging loan,
an overdraft and six credit cards, as well as all the usual monthly
outgoings: large and regular tabs must be settled with west
London’s cocaine dealers. Drinks, fine dining and regular exotic
holidays must be factored in. Monthly, it seems, I must write
cheques (or rather, Rebecca must before I sign them) to various
London parking authorities for hundreds of pounds’ worth of fines.
There are clothes, gadgets and impulse buys in Heal’s and Harvey
Nicks of a Saturday morning—last weekend a pair of cherrywood
bedside cabinets, snapped up for just twelve hundred quid when I
was hung-over and showing off in front of Trellick, four hundred
quid the week before on a set of Japanese butcher’s knives which
sit gleaming and never-used on the black granite breakfast bar.
There’s the cleaner, a witless Colombian demi-hooker whose efforts
in the flat seem to diminish in direct proportion to the wage
increases she regularly demands. Some days I bowl through the door
and the only significant difference to the place is the fact that
she’s lifted the money from the kitchen counter. I jump into
Sainsbury’s for a pint of milk and stumble back to the Saab three
hundred quid later, juggling bottles of champagne and Ecuadorian
kiwi fruit, foie gras, fresh Loch Fyne oysters, Jerusalem
artichokes, Belgian chocolates, sushi and dinky miniature
vegetables. The champagne is drunk and the food is tossed straight
into the bin from the fridge by the cleaner a couple of weeks later
after it’s started to fester and turn incredible florid
colours.

Because I’m never home, of course. I sometimes think I am buying
all this stuff solely to impress the monosyllabic retards who work
the supermarket tills. I smoke three packs of Marlboro Lights every
day—my tabs tab is approaching four hundred quid a month. An
average night out with the lads—drinks at the Atlantic bar, dinner
somewhere new and ludicrous, more drinks at Soho House or the
Groucho, coke, cabs and boilers—clocks in at about eight hundred
quid. It’s no wonder I’m trying to keep it down to two or three
nights out a week. Even though a fair chunk of this can be punted
onto expenses, it still takes a lot of fucking dough to keep the
wheels on the wagon. My bank manager stutters in disbelief as every
month brings the same request to maintain, or increase, my
overdraft. He knows what I earn. (About five times what he does.)
He can’t believe I’m getting through it either. On the plus side my
hooker expenses do seem to be steady and manageable at around a
grand a month these days. Maybe it’s the cold weather. Sometimes,
in the feverish months of spring and summer, I have to admit I go a
bit bonkers.

Anyway, the answer to all of these problems is simple enough:
Big. Fucking. Hit. Records. Have a few of those and—bosh—no more
problems.

I edge along Ladbroke Grove—at one point ecstatically managing
to get into third gear—and I keep seeing them; hunched on doorsteps
with their tabloids and their tea, smoking their Raffles or
Coliseums as they heft rolls of seagrass matting and lengths of
hardwood flooring in and out of the dusty old houses. The builders.
You see?
Everyone
’s doing it. It’s like you can look along
the road, through the leafy trees towards Holland Park, and see the
fireball of cash come flaming down the hill, burning out all the
tolers: the Kaffirs, the old people, the welfare families. They’ve
had it around here. Finished.

Finally, blissfully, the meeting is ending and I’m saying things
like ‘let’s do some demos’ and ‘see you soon’. They hand me a
flyer—a picture of Malcolm McDowell from the movie
If
,
presumably a totem of cool in whatever sorry universe these
jizz-rags inhabit—for their next gig as they leave.

I flop down on the sofa and start rolling a spliff. There are
days at work, whole days, where nothing seems to happen. All
morning long there is coffee and cigarettes and phone calls where I
say things like ‘send it over’ and ‘in last week’s
NME
’ and
‘shipping a hundred thousand’ while I watch MTV—Foo Fighters, Daft
Punk, the Chemical Brothers—and think about lunch. Somewhere in the
mid-afternoon I’ll have a spliff and a belt of Scotch, or a line of
gak, and the day will look a little brighter, sharper. I’ll make
the same calls and watch the same videos with a little more
enthusiasm. Or sometimes I’ll just crawl behind my sofa for a nap
after lunch, the blinds drawn against the outer office and music
whumping from my stereo. Later I’ll start to drift up, suspended in
that sweet honey-drop between waking and sleeping, to see that the
street lights have started to come on along the park across the
road.

Darren comes in and starts banging on about new bands he wants
me to listen to; Athletico Strip, Dragdoll, Magoo, Starfish.

I flip through
Music Week
while he talks and slips
cassettes and CDs into my machine. Lucian Grange has been promoted
to MD at Polydor. He is only a few years older than me. This news
mixes with my simmering hangover and fills me with a depth, a
profundity, of sorrow I cannot adequately describe.

“What the fuck is this?” I say to Darren, nodding towards the
stereo at some tuneless pile of shite he’s stuck on the
turntable.

“Ah, the Lazies, American band. Fucking cool.”

“It’s an insult. Take it off.”

The racket stops and he rummages through his pile of 7 and CDs
for something else.

My mobile chirrups. “Hello?”

“Christ, big night or what?” a thick, hoarse voice says.

It takes a few seconds for me to register it, to believe it.

“I…how do you feel?” I manage finally.

“Bit rough.” He goes on for a while, talking about a gig we’re
meant to be going to tonight, some band called Bellatrix at the
Bull and Gate and finally I hang up, numb.

I’m thinking a couple of things. 1) Fucking worthless Thai
Valium. 2) From the sound of things it is not that unusual, it is
not completely out of the normal run of things, for Waters to wake
up naked and covered in his own shit with a thrumming butt-plug up
his arse.

Like Freddie, or Jason, or Michael Myers, he is probably
unkillable.

The greenery of Oxfordshire blurs past the tinted windows of our
people carrier. Derek is shouting on his mobile, ranting about some
artwork he’s unhappy with. Ross taps away at his laptop while Dunn,
Nicky, Waters and I read the trades. Schneider has headphones on,
listening to Christ knows what on his Discman and trying to act
relaxed.

We’re all headed to the Rage playback. No one’s heard a note
yet, but the album will be a key summer release for us among what
is a pretty thin-looking release schedule and expectations are
running pretty high.

We bowl through the studio—where wine, beers and nibbles have
been laid on—and into the control room where Rage, Fisher and two
engineers are waiting. Rage sits in a huge leather chair at the
centre of the mixing desk.