Kill Your Friends (26 page)

I’m shaking. It all comes crashing in and the precariously
balanced hierarchy of problems comes tumbling down. The mortgages,
the credit cards, Woodham, the coke, the never-ending building
work, the whores, the overdraft, the bridging loan, the holidays,
the private members’ clubs, the coke, the whores, the restaurants,
the airily picked-up four-hundred-quid bar tabs, the coke, the
whores, Rebecca…

I just make it to the bathroom before I jackknife over, spewing
a torrent of searing broth over the floor and down the toilet for a
long, long time until I collapse onto the soothing tiled floor. I
stare at the sour orange-brown puddle, recognising a few things; a
bit of potato, peas, a chunk of what looks like chicken that I
can’t remember eating. Then I lie on the floor crying for a long
time.

Much later—it is dark outside—I am sitting at the little desk up
by the window of my hotel room multitasking. I am simultaneously
drinking Scotch straight from the bottle, smoothing out another
line, and scanning through the
Music Week Directory
.

Publishers. I’m looking for publishers.

♦

Currency begets currency. We all know that Parker-Hall is a
useless mockney twat; however, he has just signed the coolest band
in the country and has also had a big commercial hit with a
half-arsed soul⁄pop diva that he’s somehow managed to hoodwink
everyone into thinking is hip. So people want to meet him. People
listen to what he has to say. As we make our way from elevator to
pavement people stop him to talk. “What do you reckon to them?”
they say. Or “I hear you’re looking at…”or “How’s the album going?”
or “Hi, I sent you a demo of…” I stand there nodding while he
pontificates.

This is what I’ve become. I am Parker-Hall’s muppet.

We’re just about out the revolving doors when we run into Derek.
I look pretty rough, Derek looks…insane. Hitler-in-the-bunker
insane. He clearly hasn’t been to bed.

“Anthony! Steven!” he barks. “Come with me.”

Back up in the elevator and we walk into his suite behind him.
Little Stan, one of junior scouts, is in there. He’s sitting at a
coffee table in the lounge. In front of him is a gigantic pile of
rocky cocaine which he’s attempting to chop into finer powder. He
looks up as we enter and we see real fear in his eyes. He can’t
actually speak, but with his eyes he’s begging us to help him, to
get him out of there. “Stan!” Derek barks. “A line for Steven and
Anthony.” Stan, chained and shackled in Derek’s mad gak factory,
immediately begins drawing out a couple of fat lines for us. “So,”
Derek says, sitting down and motioning for us to do the same, as
though everything is perfectly normal, “what’s our strategy here
this week?” For the first time since he’s joined the company I see
that Parker-Hall is getting the true measure of Derek. I think up
until this point he thought all the Derek stories were just that:
mad stories. But here he is looking like death whacked out of his
fucking mind on chang and asking us, sincerely, what our ‘strategy’
is.

Parker-Hall begins mumbling a response, some bunch of shit
about’ A
&
R culture’, while Derek nods and
tightly rolls a fifty-pound note. He passes it first to Stan, who
leans towards the powder and then stops. He looks up at Derek, fear
and shame colliding across his face, and says, “I’m sorry, Derek. I
can’t do any more.”

There’s a pause.

Magnanimously Derek dismisses him with an airy wave of the hand.
Passing the note to Parker-Hall, Stan gets up and timidly asks
Derek, “Do you have a hairdryer?” Stan’s hair is perfectly dry.

Derek, confused himself now, says, “In the bathroom.”

Parker-Hall and I quickly split one of the elephant-leg lines
between us, tell Derek we’re running late for a gig, and fuck off
out of it.

As we leave we can hear the whirring blast of the hairdryer
coming from behind the bathroom door.

“What the fuck was all that about?” Parker-Hall says after the
lift doors close.

“Weird scenes inside the gold mine,” I say.

We go out and rattle around the freezing Glasgow night, climbing
in and out of cabs (where the suspicious Jock bastards expect you
to pay them
before
you step out onto the pavement) and
seeing pointless band after pointless band.

We return to the Hilton and hit the bar where we drink and do
coke before I finally slope off upstairs with some girl—some
publisher—just before dawn.

I hold her hand as we cross the lobby, take the lift, and
stumble down endless corridors of halogen and beige, seeing only
old people at this hour—pensioners driven from their beds at 6
AM
by the death fear, sleep becoming too close to
the real thing for them now, what with the real thing snuffling
right outside the door.

Back in my room she talks about girl power for a while and then
I’m ripping her Wonderbra off and fucking her from behind. I spit
into her arse and try and stuff my cock up there but she’s not
really having it and I think I remember punching her in the back of
the head a few times (playfully but not really) and when I wake up
she’s gone and it’s
still
raining outside.

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

Virgin Records’ Ray Cooper and Ashley Newton move
to LA to run Virgin America. The Verve album is N°1. Daniel Miller
at Mute Records, talking about the new album by an act he’s signed
called Teach, says, “It is a timeless record. The album is packed
with hits. I’m so confident.” Gary Glitter is honoured by the MCPS
with a lunch at the Savoy
.

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

“
Artists and executives come and go. Record
companies are forever
.”

Anonymous lawyer

F
riday night on
Regent Street and I light the fourth cigarette of the tailback and
engage second gear for the first time in forty-five minutes. This
has to stop. We can’t go on like this. You can’t drive anywhere any
more. You can’t park anywhere. In central London now you can’t even
walk
anywhere. For a mile radius in every direction from
Oxford Circus it’s like being down the front at Glastonbury. The
shops are all rammed with filthy tolers, every last one of them
wielding a sweaty handful of tacky credit cards—their Bank of
Toytown Gold Card, their DSS Mastercards—as they hurl themselves at
the counters, desperate to cram their blubber into another new and
lurid outfit. I mean, I hate to sound like a killjoy, a
party-pooper, but it’s Tuesday afternoon, for fuck’s sake. What do
these losers all do?
Where’s all the fucking dough coming
from?

Because everyone reckons they’re a player nowadays. Everyone
thinks they’re big time.

You live in an eighteen-foot-square toilet in Dagenham with your
eighteen-foot-square girlfriend. You work as a crate packer in a
warehouse and she’s part-time behind the till at Iceland.
Effectively the two of you earn about a millionth of a pence a
year. Your net worth is zero. Yet you think it reasonable—perfectly
acceptable—to stroll down to the George
&
Dragon
dressed like some bad-acid version of Tom and Nicole at the Oscars,
matching his and hers Rolexes on your wrists and freshly tanned
from your four-star week in Ayia Napa.

The clothes are on the plastic.

The holidays are on the plastic.

The plastic is on the plastic.

I’m having drinks at Momo with Paul Dex and Terry Del Mar, a
DJ⁄producer duo who I am going to commission to remix the Songbirds
single. We’re in a booth downstairs, an ornate Eastern lamp
dangling above our heads. There are patterned rugs on the walls,
some of the walls themselves appear to be made out of mud, and
somewhere I think incense is being burned. Dex and Del Mar are
about my age, ‘geezers’ who’ve been through the whole acid-house
thing, and they use expressions like ‘massive tune’ and ‘it drops
big time’.

Deafening hip hop plays and, were I remotely interested in
anything these clowns have to say, I’d have to really strain to
hear it. Thankfully I’m not. None of the A-list DJs we approached
could remix the tune in time. These mongo-loids were top of the
B-list, available and—relatively—cheap. They’re hired, this meeting
is a formality.

“Massive props,” Dex is saying.

“An underground vibe,” Del Mar chips in.

I nod and sip my vodka tonic.

Earlier today, at lunchtime, I waited until Parker-Hall strolled
downstairs for a meeting I knew he had scheduled. I slipped across
the hallway into his office and hurriedly got to work on his
computer. I uploaded the contents of the Dover disk onto
Parker-Hall’s hard drive. I buried the disk in a file I named
‘Personal’, then buried that file in a deep, remote corner of ‘My
Documents’. There are hundreds of files in there and I’m sure he
won’t notice one tiny new addition. The whole thing took less than
two minutes and then I was back in my office flipping between MTV
and VH1.

I drift back into the conversation. Del Mar is saying, “Soma,
Basic Channel, Peace Frog…”

Dex says, “Hooj Choons.”

“Lads,” I say, getting up and peeling a fifty from my wad to
cover the drinks, “I gotta run.”

Upstairs as I leave I see Paul Oakenfold sitting in the
restaurant. Coincidentally he was one of the DJs who turned down
the Songbirds remix. On the table in front of him is an ice bucket
containing a bottle of Dom Perignon. Beside it is a Dictaphone, its
red light glowing. A young guy faces him, chewing on a pen,
nodding. An interview, then. As I pass, Oakenfold stabs the table
with a pudgy finger, looks the journalist right in the eye, and
says, “I am the biggest DJ in the world.
In. The. World
.”
His teeny little legs dangle over the banquette seating, his
feet—kiddie’s feet—barely touching the ground.

Yeah, beware the small man, I think to myself. Always beware the
small man. He’ll fuck you every time. Because they never forget, do
they? All that grief they got at school. Over and over, and for the
rest of their miserable short-arsed lives, someone’s got to
pay.

♦

Autumn really gets going and things happen, mostly bad.

An entire wall in the house will need to be replaced.
Weeks—months—and thousands and thousands of pounds before I can
sell the fucking place for anything like a decent profit.

‘Fully Grown’, Songbirds’ debut single, is taken up to Radio 1
for playlist…and swiftly rejected. Even
Music Week
—usually
a publication that gives every record released in Britain a little
gold star—describes the single as ‘somewhat lacklustre’.

The Lazies are offered the cover of
NME
. Demand for their
debut LP is at such a pitch that it is sure to go straight into the
top ten. There is a passing reference to Parker-Hall in the
Sunday Times
where he’s described as an
‘A
&
R guru’. After I read this—at eleven o’clock
in the morning—I drink half a bottle of vodka and cry for a
while.

Rebecca bustles around the office jangling with happiness. We
went out for a drink and a long talk after I returned from Glasgow.
She doesn’t see the point in a long engagement. While telling her I
agree I also point out that I want to do things properly, ask her
father’s permission and all that, and that this will take a little
time. I manage to get her to agree that we will keep our
‘engagement’ under wraps for the time being.

Incredibly, this strict
omerta
seems to be holding fast.
Had she confided in anyone it would most likely be Katie,
Trellick’s PA, in which case it would have been around the business
affairs department in seconds and Trellick would immediately have
hauled me down to Full and Frank’s. In the normal run of things
asking Rebecca—asking any secretary—to keep quiet about something
like this would be about as effective a silencing tactic as taking
out a full-page ad in
Music Week
to announce your
engagement.

Because that’s what they do. That’s
all
they do. They
talk to each other about the shit we do. Over salads and Diet
Cokes, around photocopiers and water coolers, across wine-bar
tables littered with Chardonnay bottles and packs of Marlboro
Lights, they talk and they rant and they dissect the shit that we
do to them. If you removed the phrase ‘and then he said’ from the
language every one of these fucking sows would have a hard time
kick-starting a conversation. And then—I guarantee it—the ones who
have boyfriends go home at night and some poor bastard will have to
hear the whole thing again, with whatever refinements and
embellishments they’ve dreamed up on the tube thrown in. I mean,
the sheer fucking
arrogance
of it, to think that anyone
wants to hear about your miserable day.

Infuriatingly, when no one is around, she twirls into my office
and gives me a peck on the cheek. On the plus side I have had her
over to the flat once or twice, late at night, when I’ve been off
my tits. Like many crazy girls she is truly gifted at fucking.

Rumours abound that Derek is going to leave the company, to move
into management or something. Up until recently the only possible
internal successor to him would have been Trellick, which would be
an incredible result for me. But, the way things are going,
Parker-Hall might just get offered the job. A nightmare beyond
description. Managing Director by the age of thirty? Could it
happen?

How in the seven names of fuck am I going to get Woodham a
publishing deal? Does he really know anything about Waters? What’s
he going to do?

Out of all this crap the most pressing problem is the Songbirds
single. We’ve got the Dex and Del Mar remix in, which we’re going
to ‘put out to clubs’. Is it any good? I haven’t a fucking clue. I
should know, I suppose. I’m paid to know these things. But I’m
tired. It’s so
tiring
, not knowing anything the whole time.
You’re meant to listen to your ‘gut instinct’. “Go with your gut
instinct,” they say. But I don’t know…all I hear from my gut are
vague unhappy rumblings that I should be making more money, fucking
more, and cuter, boilers, eating in better restaurants, getting
more respect from quarter-wits like Dunn.