Kill Your Friends (4 page)

Finally we release your debut album. The
NME
expends a
hundred words—and no photo—to call it ‘undiluted piss’. We
optimistically press five thousand copies. We sell seven hundred in
the first week and two hundred in the second. Then, well, that’s
it. No more. Not another copy troubles a chart return machine
anywhere in the world. Ever. Thanks to a combination of your
mediocrity and our gross incompetence your debut LP—the
crystallisation of all the energy, insight and ambition of your
young life—has sold nine hundred copies. With retail discounts you
have generated maybe four thousand pounds’ worth of income. You are
finished. Game fucking over. You are twenty-two years old and six
hundred thousand pounds in debt to us—a bunch of subhuman demons
who were your best friends a year ago but who would now gladly slit
your throat and dance in your blood if we thought it would help us
claw back a penny of your debt.

But sadly that’s not an option. We take the loss on the chin,
chalk it down as a write-off, and you get the coach back up to
Bolton where you lie around your parents’ house drinking lager and
crying for a few weeks until you go crawling back to your old job
painting houses, stacking shelves, frying chips or whatever the
fuck you used to do up there. Until the day you die—probably at age
fifty-five through a combination of abysmal Northern lung cancer
and thirty-odd years of back-breaking work—you will bore your
friends rigid with stories about your twelve months on top of the
world, snorting lines in the toilets of London nightclubs and
getting your dick sucked by some skanky monster on a tour bus
parked behind Northampton Roadmenders. The time you spent with us
playing at being pop stars will probably be the high-water mark of
your entire life. Someone like me will probably be somewhere among
your dying thoughts.

So, y’know, just don’t do it. Go and become an accountant, or an
IT guy or something.
Get a fucking job, you stupid cunt
.

∨
Kill Your Friends
∧

“
I love sports because I’m a total competitor. If
we’re playing tennis and you’re winning, I’m going to get my cock
out and piss on the goddam net
.”

Don Simpson

“Ladieez an gennelmen, we are now beginning our
descent into Nice. Please return to your seats and fasten…”

She goes on. I look out of the window as the plane continues to
bank left, falling out of the sky towards the runway that juts out
into the Mediterranean. Dusk is hitting the sky over to our right,
the sky above Africa, and turning it incredible colours—purple and
gold and orange and red. We yawn and quickly turn back to our
copies of
Loaded, NME
and
Music Week
. “Ze local time
is now five twenty pee em.”

“All righty!” says Trellick in the seat next to me. “The
cocktail hour!”

MIDEM. Sometime in the middle of the swinging sixties a couple
of Frog fruits decided it would be cool to have a little convention
in the South of France for the music industry. Thirty years on,
last week of every January, something like ten thousand freeloading
madmen descend on Cannes from all corners of the globe and go
crackers.

Champagne is drunk, lobsters are chomped, coke is honked and
expense accounts are wildly abused in a week-long orgy of
networking and deal-making. The Palais des Festivals on the
Croisette houses hundreds of stalls where record labels,
publishers, CD manufacturers and merchandising companies—everything
central and peripheral to the music business—hawk their wares and
ply their trades.

The plane is
rammed
with industry. Had this flight gone
down, London’s cocaine, prostitution and private members’ club
industries would have been devastated.

With a comic, a cartoon-strip “EEEK!” the wheels rubberise the
tarmac and we’re already popping buckles and reaching for bags.
(Hand baggage only for us on these trips. If you were to check a
piece of luggage in our company you might as well be caught on your
hands and knees in the bathroom blowing one of the stewards.) The
major-label guys favour luggage by Mulberry and Prada while the
indie boys all have record bags with their label logos stitched or
transferred on them: Soma, Talking Loud, Nova Mute, JDJ, Rising
High, Moonshine and lots more. These guys will also have checked
hulking great boxes of records, the promos and white labels they’ll
be hawking around the stalls for the next few days as they
desperately try to license some piece of shit track for a couple of
hundred quid to help cover the cost of the trip. This is how the
indie boys do business. Those of us higher up the food chain will
take meetings in the chill, air-conditioned suites of the big
hotels.

I look around as my fellow A
&
R men—all
smudged with champagne, spangled with vodka tonics—begin braying at
each other. This is the sharp end of the record industry. The front
line. We’re the SAS. Fucking Delta Force. Our jobs involve making
fast decisions with hundreds of thousands, often millions, of
pounds at stake. These decisions are often predicated on no more
than a hunch or a rumour and are often made under the influence of
drugs, alcohol, peer-group pressure and fear.

The fear is constant because, and you must understand this,
no one really has a clue what they are doing
. There is no
training programme. No manual. To say that the job (the art of
predicting why husky-female-singer number 3 will sell more records
than numbers 1, 2 and 4 through to 99, or why
loutish-group-of-youths-with-guitars C will, six to twelve months
from now, bewitch the nation’s youth to a greater extent than
groups A, F, P or Z) is an inexact science is like saying that Fred
West could probably have been a better father. Here’s what we, the
A
&
R community, put our money on last year. This
is what we reckon you’re going to be buying and enjoying in the
coming year or so: the Beekeepers, Luna, Feline, Proper, Lower,
Arnold, the Dub Pistols, the Hybirds, the Aloof, Spookey Ruben,
Sally Burgess, Ragga
&
the Jack Magic Orchestra,
Genaside II, Hardbody, Finley Quaye, Jocasta, Old Man Stone, Ajax
Disco Spanner, Gus Gus, Vitro, Travis, Agnes, Monkey, Tiger, Don,
the Nicotines, Mantaray, Laguna Meth, Symposium, Deadstar, Foil,
Peach, Manbreak, Ether, Charlotte Kelly, My Life Story, Robbie
Williams, Aquasky, Code Red, the Driven, Dust Junkies, Silversun,
Alistair Tennent, Kenickie, 1
st
Class, Ryan Molloy,
North
&
South, Olive, Blue Amazon, Nash, Kelly
Lorena, Belvedere Kane, Horace Andy, Ariel, Craig Armstrong,
Kavana, Lilacs, One Inch Punch, Kings of Infinite Space, Mandalay,
the Stereophonies, Akin, Amar, DJ Pulse, Snug, Eboman, M Beat,
Slipmatt.

Go on then,
you
pick the change out of that lot. How many
of those chancing spunkers will be kicking back in their country
pile with a shelf full of Brits and Grammys in ten years? No one
knows what they are doing and everyone has to live with the
knowledge that they will—one day—be fired.

Right now you can hear fear rattling around the taxiing aircraft
in her socially acceptable disguise: bravado.

“Oi! Oi! Oi!” someone shouts.

“Stelfox! You queer loser fool!” shouts another.

“We’re larging it, mate!”

“Bollocks, you cunt!”

“Hello, tolers!”

It is the bravado of soldiers in a landing craft about to crunch
onto a hostile shore. The few civilians on the plane—mostly rich
Frogs with permatanned alligator skin—sigh and shake their heads.
Needless to say, the last two hours have not been pleasant for
them.

“What time we got this meeting, Steven?” Darren asks me.

“Nine.”

“Coolio.” Darren has been quiet on the flight, nervous. It’s his
first MIDEM. When he started here as an A
&
R
scout a little less than two years ago, straight from running his
own indie fanzine (called something like
Big Growling Pop
Thing!
), he actually looked puppyish. He’d never taken cocaine
in his life. Wide-eyed, he’d scamper from office to office with his
stack of 7 singles and demos, a constant ball of teenage
enthusiasm. Well, we soon knocked that out of him. He looks like
fucking Methuselah now: his skin dry and flaking; his eyes
bloodshot and sunken; his hands forever trembling as he lights a
fresh Silk Cut with the butt of the last one. He stumbles from
office to office, nursing a constant hangover and a
three-gram-a-week habit, and being shouted at for playing us some
crappy record, or not playing us some crappy record, or whatever.
When he isn’t being shouted at in the office he’s standing at the
back of some festering indie gig until three in the morning. His
glossy mane of tyre-black hair is already streaked with grey
fissures. He has just turned twenty-one. I’m taking him into a few
meetings with me. He’s got good ears.

Parker-Hall stands up and stretches in the seat in front of us.
“Gawd blimey!” he says, yawning. “Dis is a bit more blahddy like
it! Nice an ‘ot. Fackin’ tayters in London!”

Parker-Hall is about five foot four and looks like an unruly,
mischievous child, like one of the fucking Bash Street Kids. He
comes from Hampstead. He went to Wellington. His parents own a
couple of
streets
in north London. His surname involves a
hyphen, for fuck’s sake, and yet he often chooses to talk like a
kind of blacked-up Dick Van Dyke—the splayed vowels, the vanished
consonants—because somewhere around the age of fifteen he heard a
hip-hop record and decided that Kaffirs were cool. But Parker-Hall
is hot at the moment, very hot. So I laugh and clap him on the back
and ask him, “Where you staying then?”

“Packing Ritz Carlton, innit?” he says and I immediately wish I
hadn’t asked.

♦

The door swings open. “SCHTEEVEN! FAANTASCHTICK! FAANTASCHTICK!
COME IN! COME IN!” Rudi Gertschlinger embraces me as he ushers us
into his suite at the Martinez.

It’s tacky-impressive: a huge lounge with chintzy furniture and
floor-to-ceiling bay windows overlooking the Croisette and, beyond
it, the sea. It is dark now and the lights of dozens of huge yachts
twinkle here and there in the blackness.

The suite is almost as tacky-impressive as Rudi himself. In his
late forties, with silver hair pulled back into a ponytail, he has
the face of a well-fed concentration camp commandant, a role I am
sure a couple of his direct ancestors probably filled.

We take a seat on the floral sofa and a minion fixes drinks as
Rudi continues his spiel, his volume going down a notch to the
simply unbearable level he uses for normal conversation. “How have
you been, my friend?! It has been too long! I must thank you for
what you did with our last record! And thank you for sending the
gold discs from the UK! We’re trying to get them up but—you
know—there is so little space left on our walls. Eh, Gunter?”

“
Ja
.” This will be Gunter’s sole contribution to the
meeting. He hands Darren and me tumblers of Buck’s Fizz. Fucking
Germans. Darren, nervous, knocks back half of the sickly orange
jism in one go.

“When did you get here?” I ask looking around. Rudi looks pretty
well ensconced; a tower of gleaming black hi-fi equipment is set up
in the corner.

“Ach, just this morning. I had Gunter and Anna fly ahead
yesterday to get things set up. You know me, Steven. Time is money!
I am—what did you call it—hardcore? I AM FUCKING HARDCORE!” He
laughs his tits off and we cackle along with the mad bastard.

Rudi’s company DMG (Dance Music Group. Yeah, must have taken him
a while) has a huge building on the outskirts of Hamburg. On the
top floor are offices housing his three record labels, artist
management and video production companies. (He diversified into
music from pornography.) Below that is a floor with several small
recording studios and below that, on the ground floor, is Das
Technotron, Rudi’s nightclub. It works like this: he has teams of
writers, engineers and producers working twenty-four⁄seven in all
three studios. They’re young kids desperate to break into the music
business, so Rudi pays them a minuscule wage and they get free
studio time to work on their own tracks. They get next to no income
from record sales and Rudi’s name appears as co-writer on every
track that comes out of there, (in Rudi’s defence here he will,
occasionally, charge into one of the studios and scream at these
guys to make it “HEAVIER!” or “FASTER!” or “CRAZIER!”) Amazingly
most of them think this is a good deal. Well, for a while anyway.
Inevitably they will get wind of how royally Rudi is fucking them
and will ask for what’s coming to them. At this point Rudi will
show them a) the bit of paper they signed when they joined, and b)
the fucking door.

And how do you write a song? Well, in the words of a hero of
mine, the late, great Morris Levy, you “get some kids in a room,
you get a beat going, you get a few words together. Boom. You got a
song.” This was Levy’s statement to the judge when he was being
cross-examined about his role in the creative process behind the
many hit records his name had appeared as co-writer on. He had, of
course, written absolutely jack. A bunch of spear-chuckers—on
breadline wages but kept perfectly sweet with the occasional
(leased) Cadillac and the odd chicken dinner—wrote the actual songs
of course. Levy simply told them that, if they ever wanted the
record to see the light of day, then they’d better be putting his
name in the brackets too, and cutting him in for a goodly slice of
the publishing. Levy was a music-industry mogul back in the fifties
and sixties—the good old days. The Wild West. When artists did
whatever you told them to and thought it was fucking Christmas when
you paid them a royalty of half a pence in the pound. (Not like
now, when every toerag with a demo tape has their lawyer in tow,
some lowlife who, when he’s not banging on about royalty uplifts,
or trying to skank you for a few extra points, is trying to make
everything non-recoupable and threatening you with an audit every
fifteen minutes.) Back then you could really make some money. So,
while Rudi’s tactics might seem draconian to someone who dabbled
in, say, ethics, they’re hardly innovative.