Kill Your Friends (6 page)

Rage clenches his fists together, black skin banding white
around gold rings. Here we go.

Every time I have been in a public place with Rage there has
been an angry, dramatic scene—a walkout, a storm-off, physical
violence on more than one occasion. I’m not of what you’d call a
‘cheery’ disposition myself, but these guys, guys like Rage, you
wonder how they do it. What does it take to wake up every morning
already furious, and for that anger to increase steadily during the
course of
every single fucking day
! He lives in a world
where every possible encounter—from parking the car, to buying a
pint of milk, to eating dinner, to having a business meeting—is
fraught with the potential for real or imagined ‘disrespects’,
which must be immediately, viciously, avenged. How
does
he
do it? Then you remember his childhood: the foster-homes, the
beatings. His actual conception: a radioactive wad of angry
nigger-rapist semen getting pumped into some gibbering crack whore
to produce the ‘drum’n’bass superstar’ sitting opposite me.

Hefe’s the thing. When Rage was a little boy his mother drove
them from London up to Manchester for the day. She pulled up in the
city centre and made him get out of the car. Then she drove back to
London. He never saw her again. He lived on the streets—crying and
begging—for a couple of days before the cops got hold of him. They
slung him in and out of a bunch of care homes for the next ten
years, where he was doubtless constantly beaten and fucked in the
ass. Let’s face it, that’d fuck you off, wouldn’t it? That’d about
do it for you with regard to the notion of unconditional love.

But today, surprisingly, he decides to be benevolent. Graceful
even. “Whatever,” he says airily, somehow managing to wave an
ingot-heavy hand, “just bring me some fucking food. Yeah?”

“Couldn’t we just hire the gear for the tour?” I say.

Rage shakes his head, sucking air in through a mouthful of
chrome teeth. “Can’t work with no hired gear, man. No way.”

“Look,” says Fisher, “do you guys believe in this fucking guy,”
he jerks a pudgy thumb at Rage, “long term?”

“Yes,” we both lie.

“Then this ain’t gonna be the only tour we ever do. It’s an
investment
.”

“I just don’t think we can justify the additional expense,”
Schneider says, nervously. “The tour support’s high as it is.”

“Right,” Fisher sighs as he lays down his last card, “we’ll have
to pull the tour.”

We laugh. They don’t.

“I ain’t fucking doing it,” says Rage. There’s a long
silence.

“But,” Schneider says, realising they’re perfectly serious,
“we’ve already paid for advertising, we’ve—”

“Not our problem,” says Fisher.

Would they pull their own tour out of spite? Of course they
fucking would. When your own mother tells you to go and get fucked
at the age of seven, telling the rest of the world to go and get
Ricked on a daily basis holds no terrors. I wonder why they
bothered with lunch. Why didn’t they just walk into the boardroom
with stockings over their heads, wielding shotguns and demanding
sixty grand?

Schneider pretends to think for a long time. There’s nothing to
think about.

“Thirty grand,” he says, “recoupable.”

“Fifty,” Fisher says.

“Forty.”

“Deal, man.”

They shake hands. At some point we’ll see a
Fantasy
Island
budget from Fisher’s management company with a bunch of
fake receipts stapled to it for silly money they never spent on
gear they do not own. Essentially Schneider has just agreed to give
them forty grand, no strings attached. We might get it back if—and
it’s a continent-sized ‘if’—Rage’s album ever recoups all of its
costs.

Neither Rage nor Fisher really had any formal schooling, but, in
their own ways, their backgrounds prepared them thoroughly for a
successful career in the music business. There was a visa problem
for a trip to the States last year and the legal department had to
sort it out. Trellick got to see the rap sheets.

Yes, you guessed it. Back in the day Rage and Fisher were both
muggers.

“So,” Schneider says pleasantly, “how’s the album coming?”

“Mate,” Rage says sombrely, slowly removing his Oakley’s for the
first time and making eye contact with Schneider. His irises are so
brown as to effectively be black. A shark’s eyes. “It’s gonna blow
your fucking tits off.”

“When can we hear it?”

“Soon, mate. Soon.”

The waiter glides into view. With a triumphant “
Voila!
”
he sets an enormous platter of
fruits de mer
in front of
Rage. Rage looks at it—at the spines, tendrils and tentacles, the
claws, wobbling antennae and glistening jet eyes of dozens of dead
crustaceans. He looks up and says to the beaming waiter, “Are you
having a fucking giraffe, cunt?”

♦

Midnight in the lobby bar of the Martinez. There must be at
least three hundred people in here—a boiling scrum of booze and
noise and networking. Business cards are constantly exchanged,
phone numbers scribbled on napkins and punched into mobiles. People
hold imaginary receivers up to their ears and mouth ‘Call me’
across the room while others throw their heads back and unleash
torrents of horrible laughter. The roar of forced bonhomie is
deafening. Massively outnumbered, a handful of melting,
white-jacketed waiters squeeze through the crush with silver trays,
bearing bottles of Krug, Cristal, San Miguel, Budweiser, Heineken,
Stoli and Johnnie Walker. A beer costs about eight quid. To have a
bottle of Scotch or vodka left on your table will cost you about
three hundred. Plenty of people are happily paying that rather than
trying to tag an exhausted, near-fainting waiter every fifteen
minutes.

Dinner had been the usual deal you fall into over here, with
fourteen of us sharing a table at a seafood place on the Croisette:
Chardonnay, champagne, cognac, cocaine and untouched food. Swearing
and shouting and braying laughter. Elderly customers asking to be
moved then the tightly smiling maître d’ and the trio of harassed
waiters hunched over the metre-long bill and the stack of credit
cards and francs we’ve flicked onto the ruined tablecloth.

Trellick and I have shouldered our way in at the bar, passing
close to Parker-Hall and Marty Kersch, a senior Vice President at
Capitol in LA. Parker-Hall—as I knew he would—nodded politely but
made no move to introduce me or bring me into the conversation, in
fact, I watched as he quickly thought of some detailed, urgent
question he had to put to Kersch and leaned in close to yell it
until I passed by. This is SOP; if you are engaged in a visible,
centre-of-the-room, high-profile conversation with someone very
powerful then you must jealously protect that conversation from
interlopers of your own, or lower, stature. Conversely, had
Parker-Hall been talking to some muppet—some guy who works in
marketing for some tiny French dance label whom he had mistakenly
fallen into conversation with—he would have greeted me like a
long-lost brother, brought me into the discussion, and then fucked
off leaving me with the muppet. And I would do the same to him in a
heartbeat.

“How was Rage by the way?” Trellick asks me.

“The usual.”

“And the album?”

“He reckons it’ll blow our tits off.”

“Mmmm, odd that.”

“I know. Pompous cunt. Just out of interest,” I say, lowering my
voice, “for argument’s sake, ”

“Go on.”

“Let’s assume the new Rage album is a pile of shit.
Unsellable.”

“Assume away.”

“What’s that going to do to Schneider’s position?”

“Death row. Game over.”

“So if, when, Schneider goes…”

“Who’s in the frame for Head of A
&
R?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s not fucking rocket science. It’s either you or
Waters, or they go out of house.”

“Do a Duke of Wellington on Waters.”

“Pros: a couple of years older than you, a little more
experienced in making albums, the rank and file think he’s a nice
bloke. Cons…he’s a lazy, brain-dead, cocaine addict with the
attention span of a fucking gnat who hasn’t had a hit record in
donkey’s.”

“So he could get the job?”

“Definitely.”

I try to run a few Waters-as-my-boss scenarios through my head:
Waters shouting at me because we’ve missed out on some deal. Waters
calling me into meetings, locking me out of meetings with important
managers and heads of departments, Waters sending me off to, I
don’t know, fucking Stoke on a Saturday night to see some band. But
I don’t get very far with picturing any of this, because a crimson
mist keeps closing in, a skull-charge of blood keeps dimming my
vision. I feel faint. Sick.

Trellick looks at me and realises exactly what I am thinking.
“You know what they say, young Steven. It’s not dog-eat-dog around
here…” He drains his glass.

“I know,” I say, finishing the aphorism for him, “it’s
dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known.”

“Any more for any more?” Trellick says, pointing at my glass,
signalling with a drinking motion to Darren and Leamington behind
me.

“Wifebeater,” I say.

“Rockschool,” say the other two.

Trellick gets the Stella and the Jack and Cokes in.

♦

Three
AM
and we are
ruling
this fucking
place.

We’re in a big, tasteless nightclub somewhere on the outskirts
of Cannes. It must be 120 degrees in here. We’ve commandeered our
own chunk of the packed dance floor right in front of the DJ booth
and we are going bonkers.

Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’ pounds at festival volume from the
massive sound system. There are about fifteen of us now, with waifs
and strays. I’m leaping around with an ice bucket on my head,
Trellick is down on his knees on the dance floor, playing air
guitar, Darren is spraying champagne all over the place, Ladbroke
is stretched out against a pillar, nearly unconscious.

Schneider and I split another pill and we’re all shouting along
to ‘Born Slippy’, which gets mixed into something else which gets
mixed into something vaguely familiar—tribal drums, lolloping
bass—and we’re all grooving along to it for a minute
before—
whump!
—the chorus drops: “
WHY DON’T YOU SUCK MY
FUCKING DICK!
” The entire room goes absolutely fucking nuts. By
the time it gets to the second chorus everyone is singing along.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I’m staggering off the dance floor, pushing my way through
dancing, singing idiots, trying to find an exit, pawing in my hip
pocket for the Nokia. Someone puts an arm around me and shouts,
“Hey, Steven! Is this the record you’re signing?”

“Yeah. Done deal.” The lie is automatic.

“Congratulations, mate! Fucking tune.”

Darren looks like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I
pull him close and—still smiling—scream in his ear, “
Weverbally
agreed the Jacking deal today. OK?
”

He nods and I stumble off towards an exit, dialling Rudi’s
number. It rings a few times before going straight to message.
“RUDI!”—I bellow over the roar of a thousand people screaming
“
WHY DON’T YOU SUCK MY FUCKING DICK!
”—“IT’S STEVEN. JUST TO
CONFIRM—WE DEFINITELY WANT THE RECORD! ‘SUCK MY DICK’? WE WANT IT!
CALL ME WHEN YOU GET THIS!”

I hang up and lean against the wall, catching my breath. The
door to the main room opens and some kid I know from EMI wanders
out, gurning, with sweat pouring off him and some sour-faced
stick-insect cow dressed in nothing but a thong and some duct tape
over her nipples on his arm.

“All right Steven?” he says. “Fucking tune this, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, fierce.”

“Graham was quick off the mark, eh?”

“Uh?”

“Graham at Sony. He signed this record tonight.”

“Yeah?” I swallow.

“Yeah, he was cracking the champagne in the Barracuda with Rudi
Gertschl—”

“Excuse me.” And I’m off.

♦

This is the problem with chasing hit singles—it’s such hard
fucking work. And you have to chase them all the time. If you’re
going to rely on singles to perk up your bottom line then you have
to have a lot of them; four, five, six every year.

This is why I must soon find an act that will sell albums. Smack
an album into the top ten that stays there for a year or two and
you start generating proper turnover. Making real money. You can
start to do less work. (You’ve been watching, you know I’m
overworked.) This is why a little fucker like Parker-Hall is
revered in A
&
R terms: he has signed a bona fide
platinum albums act. Who are cool and credible to boot. The mother
lode. True, the fluky, chancing prick just happened to be in the
right place at the right time but who gives a fuck; he is respected
as a ‘music guy’—the ultimate A
&
R accolade.

I’m not. Which is why I’m pulling myself out of bed at ten in
the morning and, pausing only to throw up, dialling the Martinez
with trembling fingers. Some rude, inefficient French switchboard
bumbling goes on for a couple of minutes before the receptionist
comes back with, “I am sorry, sir, that line is engaged.” I tell
her—with some emotion—that it is a matter of life or death that Mr
Gertschlinger rings me back as soon as he is off the phone.

I crawl across the room and rack up a twelve-quid bill in forty
seconds by swallowing three mini-Cokes from the minibar. Everything
is mini except for my hangover, which is most definitely fucking
maxi. I struggle to place the hangover on my personal Richter
scale. Eight? Nine? I try to remember how the previous night ended,
but it’s like I fell asleep watching some movie and I’m trying to
recall where I saw it up to. Then I throw up again.