Kill Your Friends (3 page)

Trellick: “Aha. Good. Could you be little more specific?”

“Man, you wouldn’t believe how the studio’s coming together.
They’ve painted the live room a sort of sky blue.” People look at
him. I wonder if he’s stoned.

“Good. Good,” says Trellick, losing patience. “Do we have any
music yet?”

“Not yet, no. The thing is MaxMan, their rapper, he had to go
back to Trinidad to…” He blathers on about what these shiftless
spear-chuckers have been up to with our money. Some people
frequently dig their own graves in these meetings. Rob is building
himself a fucking mausoleum. Derek is colouring, turning from mauve
to vermilion to fluorescent, the colour of his shirt.

Derek, in his turn, dresses like what he is: a wealthy,
psychotic, tasteless, middle-aged queer. Grotesquely overweight, he
favours billowing shirts by Versace and Ralph Lauren—in fuchsia
pink, emerald green, canary yellow and candy-striped combinations
of all three—which are worn in a doomed attempt to disguise his
enormous girth. His black hair and little beard are flecked with
silver, the hair thinning on top now while remaining in a luxuriant
thatch around the sides. His normal facial expression, the one he
uses when he’s off’, when he isn’t trying to present a certain
persona, is really something: the hooded eyes rotate slowly,
scanning, evaluating. The faintest flicker of a smile, or a sneer,
trembles like an electrical current across his thin top lip while,
above it, the crimson nostrils—the colour a painful reminder of the
hellish quantities of cocaine and poppers he undoubtedly forced up
there the night before—rhythmically flare gently or rapidly,
according to his mood. I mean, he looks like fucking Caligula or
something, mad and ravaged, cold and violent.

Rob is still going. “And Massive Attack, Goldie and James
Lavelle are all keen too. But the outboard equipment wasn’t really
up to scratch so we to had to replace most of it and—”

“Yes, Rob, I understand.” Trellick raises a hand to silence him.
“However, we’re now,” he consults his notes, “four hundred and
seventy-eight thousand pounds in the hole on this act and we’re no
closer to having—”

“Look, James man, I know the situation is, y’know, frustrating,”
says Rob, trying to be assertive, “but the, the creative process,
man. Sometimes you can’t, y’know, rush it.”

There’s collective astonishment at this nonsense. I interrupt,
directing my comments at Trellick.

“Yeah, James, hang on, it’s not like nothing’s happening.
There’s definitely a vibe for the band out there—” I manage to keep
a straight face. Rob, the total cuntfuck, is nodding away, thinking
I’ve come to his defence—“and Rob’s doing some good stuff to
support it. I mean, those T–shirts look fantastic.”

Derek’s head snaps up—a starving attack dog shown
sirloin—“T–shirts? What fucking T–shirts?”

Jackpot. In a misguided fit of craziness (and, I suspect, under
extreme pressure from our coloured friends down in Southend) Rob
had got a few Sound Collective T–shirts made up. Just a few, but
spending company money on having T–shirts made for a band who are
half a million quid unrecouped and who have yet to release a record
is a bit like taking a full-page ad out in the
Sun
to
announce yourself as winner of the lottery before you’ve even
bought the ticket. Rob had quietly and proudly shown me one of the
shirts a few days ago and I was pretty sure Derek had no idea.

Rob swallows. “Yeah. I had a couple of T–shirts m—”

“YOU’RE MAKING FUCKING T-SHIRTS FOR A FUCKING ACT THAT DON’T
EVEN HAVE A FUCKING RECORD OUT AND ARE HALF A MILLION FUCKING
POUNDS IN DEBT TO US!
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?
”
Derek’s fury is so total and instant that, for a second, I think
little Katy is going to burst into tears.

“But Derek, I thought if—”

“I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THOUGHT! IF WE DON’T HAVE A
FUCKING SINGLE FROM THIS BAND BY THE END OF THE MONTH WE’RE PULLING
THE FUCKING PLUG! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

“But—” Rob is going down, drowning.

“
DO YOU FUCKING UN-DER-STAND?
” Derek pounds his fist on
the table six times, with ‘understand’ getting three of them. Total
silence. People admire the oatmeal carpet. Draw on their notes.

Derek is generally in a pretty bad mood. I don’t know, maybe the
experience of spending his entire adult life having men spray their
burning jism over his face and back, of hearing them growl as they
pump another radioactive load deep into his mouth or rectum, has
soured him on life. I mean, it’d definitely fuck me off, being used
as a human toilet for a quarter of a century.

In fact, this whole business of pumping and groaning and roaring
and whatnot is really old news for hardcore queens like Derek. For
ultra dark-side faggots in the nineties the idea of having some
moustachioed arse-demon clad head to cock in studs and leather
pummel away at you until your Gary looks like something out of a
medical textbook has become a bit quaint. A Norman Rockwell
painting. The bender equivalent of a married couple’s Friday night,
lights out, sheets over you, missionary position fumble. A few
months back one of the kids from the marketing department had been
up all night clubbing and found himself drinking in some hardcore
after-hours place in the East End, one of those real HIV dens where
the proper, certifiable queers round off their evenings. He
wandered through a salty fug of amyl nitrate and GHB into a dimly
lit back room where he bumped into Derek—chained to a wall, half
naked and bleeding, with a .couple of muscular Bethnal Green irons
giving him a good beating.

Now, they say that an organisation’s value systems, its core
beliefs, are shaped from the top down. Given that its Managing
Director’s idea of a reasonable evening’s entertainment involves
paying a couple of rent boys to kick the living shit out of him, it
seems logical enough that greed, viciousness, duplicity,
exploitation, hedonism and aggression feature prominently among the
values our company encourages and rewards.

“Yes,” Rob finally whispers.

I mouth ‘sorry’ at him. He nods as if to say ‘not your fault’
and goes back to staring at the table, tears in his eyes. I nearly
wet myself. Micky shoots me a look. She is much smarter than Rob
and may well have understood where my ‘help’ was coming from. I
return her glare pleasantly, looking at her properly for the first
time and noticing that today, as part of an ongoing and doomed
attempt to disguise her unimaginable bulk—which the
A
&
R department sweepstake variously puts at
between sixteen and twenty stone—she is wearing some sort of
muumuu, or sack, or kaftan. On some days she sports the sort of
Lycra leggings you only ever see incredibly fat boilers wearing,
the kind which make their thighs look like two immense black
puddings. Her mouth is just a tiny little hole—a Polo mint lost in
the enormous fleshy pudding of her face. The face itself is framed
by lank greasy black hair and seared by angry clusters of spots, by
deep ravines of acne. Most beasts of Nicky’s stripe get thrown the
odd break—the big tits, say, or the good complexion, or nice hair
or something. Nicky got fucked out of the lot. Sometimes, when
she’s talking, I’ll steal a glance at Trellick or Schneider as they
listen to her, their expressions saying the same thing: how the
fuck do you have the nerve to leave the house and show your face
among decent society? Obviously Nicky was hired directly by Derek.
As she has tits and a cunt she is completely invisible to the
demented homo. Nicky is un-doable. You could not do her. She could
not be done. If, by some chemical derangement, some alchemy of
ketamine and smack, you woke up in bed to find Nicky next to you,
you’d have two options: emigration or suicide. A plane ticket or an
exhaust pipe.

“OK, boys and girls, moving on then,” Trellick announces,
rapping his notes on the table, “unsigned bands.” Waters starts
yabbering on about some indie groups he’s been to see; Ultrasound,
Tampasm, Grouch, Angelica, Disco Pistol.

Later, as we leave the meeting and file down the corridor,
Trellick sidles up to me and whispers, “What is the meaning of
life?”

“To drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentations of
their women,” I reply automatically as, ahead of us, Hastings
scuttles down the stairs.

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

“
The object is to find a winner. The process makes
you mean because you get frustrated
.”

Simon Cowell

A
couple of words for
all you hopefuls out there in unsigned bands: Fuck. Off. Seriously,
your parents are right. You may as well spend your guitar-string
money on lottery tickets—your chances will be much the same. We
receive upwards of three hundred unsolicited demo tapes every week.
There are five other labels within our corporate group, all
receiving about the same volume. That’s fifteen hundred demos a
week. There are six other corporate groups, EMI, Universal, Warner
Bros, Polygram, BMG and Sony, most with several labels within them,
all receiving at least the same amount as us, and probably a little
more. That’s over ten thousand little packages of hopes and dreams
arriving every week. (And arrive is often all they do—the vast
majority of these packages are never opened. They just lie in boxes
and sacks around the A
&
R floor, where they seem
to breed and multiply, spilling over the carpets and taking up sofa
space until Tom, our work experience, has to lug sacks of them down
to the incinerator where your hopes and dreams are—rightly—burned
in the fires of hell.)

Occasionally, if it’s a rainy afternoon and we’re really bored
and want something to do, a few of the A
&
R staff
will gather in someone’s office, roll ourselves a couple of thick
spliffs, uncork a bottle of red, and go through one of the sacks
marked ‘UNSOLICITED DEMOS’. These sessions usually end with two or
three of us on our hands and knees on the floor howling, gasping
for breath, ribs and facial muscles aching.

To this ten thousand we should add (conservatively) another
couple of thousand to cover the demos received by all the
independent labels. That makes roughly twelve thousand demos a week
received by the whole industry—well over half a million a year. In
any given year my company will maybe sign something like ten to
fifteen acts. The whole UK industry probably signs—at most—a couple
of hundred artists every year. Out of these two hundred, in a very
good year, you might have twenty or so who break through to some
degree, who get their records on the radio, their pictures in the
music press, and who fill decent-sized venues. Out of this twenty
maybe half will eventually recoup the money invested in them.
That’s right—ten acts out of over half a million hopefuls will make
themselves some real money. And yet a lot of aspiring musicians
really believe that getting signed means they’ve made it, that the
physical act of signing a recording contract means they’re on the
way to fame, riches and drinking Bono’s Cristal at the Grammys.

Here’s what’s more likely to happen: on the back of a spurious
‘buzz’ from the music press, a few packed gigs in tiny clubs and a
couple of late-night radio plays, some idiot like Rob Hastings
offers you a record deal for, ooh, let’s say, a hundred grand.
Great! (You now owe us 100K.) You pack your job in
Quadrophenia-style
and take your parents out to the local
Chinese for a slap-up feed where you tell them you’ll ‘never work
again’. You leave Bolton (or wherever) and get off the train at
Euston thinking to yourself, “I am the fucking king.”

You’re keen to get cracking on that debut album. However, the
odds are that it will take Rob—or some cretin like him—months to
make up his mind about a producer. He will then, inevitably, choose
the wrong one. This guy will spend two or three months destroying
what little talent you had to begin with and you’re back to square
one. Not content with getting the wrong producer the first time,
Rob will pick the wrong guy a couple more times. By the time you’ve
gone through this process three times it’s a year down the line,
the record still isn’t finished, and your initial recording budget
has tripled to about three hundred grand. (You now owe us
400K.)

By the time we finally get a single released your great mates
over at press and radio could no longer give a good drop of spunk
if you’re dead or alive. They liked you a year ago. They’ve got new
bands to play with now. In fact, I’ll go you one further—the music
press
hates
you now. You’ve gone from being the next Sex
Pistols to the last Black Lace in twelve short months. So you get
zero airplay and just a tiny smattering of reviews in the likes of
the
Aberdeenshire Gazette
and the
North Wales
Chronicle
(both of whom love the record; unfortunately no one
who reads these papers is under sixty-five or lives within a
hundred miles of a chart return shop).

In an attempt to rebuild your profile we send you out on the
road. But you’ve got a record company behind you now. Why would you
travel in a Transit van like in the old days? So you get a fucking
great tour bus the size of an aircraft carrier, six totally
superfluous roadies, an outlandish catering company run by a pair
of titless Notting Hill dykes and a light show with the equivalent
power of the sun. Of course, you’re still selling zero records and
playing tiny venues so you’re only getting paid about five hundred
quid per show. However, the roadies⁄aircraft carrier⁄titless
dyke⁄sun combo is costing something like five grand
a fucking
day
. But—hey—we still believe in the band, man, so we
underwrite the shortfall. You play twenty dates losing thousands
every night, bringing your debt to us up to something like half a
million quid. Oh, and by the way, your hundred-grand advance is now
long gone. Where did it go? Well, let’s see: tax, 20 per cent to
your manager, and huge legal fees (your lawyer—some utter lowlife
like Trellick—spent a lot of time arguing about pointless clauses
in order to line his own pockets) leaves maybe twenty grand. You
pay yourselves the princely salary of two hundred quid a week each.
Alas, thanks to hanging out with animals like me and Waters, you
all now have chronic chang habits, so this doesn’t go far. Assuming
there are four of you in the band, this means a monthly wage bill
of about three grand. You’re broke in a year. So we start advancing
you extra money to cover the wages. A few months of this and you
soon rack up another twenty Gs.