Kill Your Friends (12 page)

The first thing I think as he swivels round to greet us
is—
fuck me
. His nose is dewy and leaking, his eyeballs
vibrating marbles, his left leg stutters and pumps uncontrollably,
his jaw is locked forward and set hard, frozen by cocaine. Ross and
I exchange a quick, incredulous look.

“Right,” Rage says once we’re all seated on two huge leather
sofas at the back of the room, glasses of warm Chardonnay in hand.
An engineer hits ‘play’ and Rage moves a trembling hand towards a
fader, pushing it all the way up.

♦

Forty minutes into the thing I sneak a look around at the
expressions on display. Most people just look blank. Ross is
fighting laughter. Derek looks like he might burst out of his seat
and kill someone at any moment. Schneider’s face is harder to read.
It is buried in his hands.

The first five or six minutes of the song were simply annoying—a
hi-hat pattern and some abstract tweeting sounds. Somewhere around
the fifteen-minute mark a bass line arrived and Rage began
conducting the music with his hands, his eyes closed, lost in some
mad rapture over this abortion he’s created. People cross and
recross their legs, sip their wine and pray for it to end. But it
doesn’t. It just keeps on going—drum loops clattering randomly,
snatches of vocals, jarring keyboard stabs.

As the track approaches the one-hour mark and
nothing
has
emerged that vaguely resembles a hook, or a chorus, or a
recognisable melody, it collectively dawns on us that we’re
listening to the sonic representation of someone’s mind coming
apart. On a positive note I’m thinking that I must get the name of
Rage’s dealer, because the chang the cunt is getting his hands on
is clearly fucking phenomenal.

In the end I simply stare at the red, digital numbers on the
tape counter, watching the minutes, the money, Schneider’s career,
tick away. The counter reads ‘64.33’ when it all finally ends in a
mad, juddering flourish, like the crescendo at the end of ‘A Day in
the Life’, played on broken computers by mongoloids. Rage has his
hands extended, trembling, his forefingers pointing skywards as he
wrings the last notes out of his cocaine-induced hallucinatory
mind-orchestra.

I look over at Schneider. He has tears in eyes. He is finished
and he knows it.

Rage swivels around in his chair to face us. “It’s called
‘Birth’,” he says.

Of course it fucking is.

It gets better when Rage corrects our assumption that we’ve just
heard the whole album, segued together in its entirety. No, he
tells us that this will be a
single
, the first single to
precede the album in fact, that he
will not
allow an edit of
any sort, and how pleased he is that we’ve been the first witnesses
to the world’s first drum’n’bass opera. Then he runs off to the
toilet. There’s a lot of polite nodding and words like
‘interesting’, ‘radical’ and ‘challenging’ get thrown around.

The second we’re all inside the people carrier and the driver
slams the door shut Schneider turns to Derek and says, “Look…” It
will be his longest contribution to the conversation for some
time.

“
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE!
THREE AND A HALF MONTHS IN ONE OF THE MOST EXPENSIVE STUDIOS IN THE
COUNTRY AND WE DON’T HAVE A FUCKING THING! I’M TELLING YOU RIGHT
NOW THAT THERE IS NO WAY ON EARTH THIS LABEL WILL EVER RELEASE A
FUCKING NOTE OF ANYTHING WE HEARD TODAY! HOW COULD YOU LET IT GET
TO THIS? HOW?
”

Schneider tries to speak but Derek’s already on the phone to
Trellick at the office, telling him to get Rage’s contract out and
firing questions at him. What’s the unrecouped balance? How cheaply
can we get out of the deal? Can we, in fact, make any case for
suing Rage for breach of contract for delivering material which is
so blatantly uncommercial? Is there a sanity clause?

Janette from press leans forward and pats Schneider comfortingly
on the knee. “Actually, I quite liked it,” she says quietly, but he
doesn’t reply. He just goes on looking out of window as we thread
our way back along country lanes towards the M40. Dead Man
Staring.

♦

Danny Rent brings his girl band, Songbirds, in for a
meeting.

The four of them sit bunched up on my office sofa, scowling and
chewing gum, looking like they’ve been kept back in class. Three of
them are white and one black, but the white girls all act like
Kaffirs—they kiss their teeth and click their fingers and say
things like “seen?” They’re all aged between seventeen and twenty,
all lookers—one of the white girls in particular (Denise? Sonia?)
is stunning—but with that working-class whore look. They’re genetic
time bombs, DNA-Semtex. Every one of them will explode into
monsterism the minute they hit twenty-seven. They’re all dressed
the way these girls dress, tits busting out of T–shirts made for
newborn babies and low-slung combat pants which allow their
thongs—pink, black and lemon—to jut way up above the waistlines. I
mean, they look like they’d let you do
anything
to them
these girls; fuck them in the arse and punch them and stuff.

We’re watching a ‘video’ Danny has had made, to try and sell
them to record companies—the four of them, dressed in cheap, nasty,
high-street clothes, grind their way unsteadily through a really
tacky R
&
B number.

The video finishes.

“Mmmm,” I say, “who are your influences then?”

Silence. They shift uneasily. I realise they do not understand
the question.

“Steven’s saying,” Danny butts in, “what music do you like?”

Another gargantuan pause. “Ip op?” says a brunette,
uncertainly.

“Madonna,” says the blonde.

“Good,” I say, nodding, “good.”

“Ere, mate,” the black boiler says, “Danny says you signed Rage.
Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I lie and they all murmur approval.

“Wot’s e loike?” one asks.

“Rage? He’s great. Really clever guy.”

Another long silence. “So,” the blonde one, the really
attractive one says, fingering a trainer lace and nervously looking
up, making eye contact with me through her fringe, “what chew fink
of our stuff then?”

What do I think? I think you look like the worst sort of
sink-estate, single-mother, benefit-fraud trash imaginable. I think
that your ‘music’ is about the biggest insult to humanity since a
roomful of Nazis first cooed over the blueprints for Auschwitz.

But I’m also thinking that, if we bring in real songwriters,
session musicians and a decent producer, if we throw suitcases of
money at stylists and hair and make-up artists, if we hire
world-quality photographers and video directors, if we get personal
trainers in and manage to keep you all off the KFC and the vodka
for a few months, if we can find someone to teach you how to speak
properly, if we spend eye-popping sums on retainers for press
officers and pluggers, and if they can somehow convince enough
journalists, radio programmers and TV producers that you’re not
really talent-free sluts who would gobble a donkey just to meet
Chris Evans, that you are, in fact, ‘the real deal’, then maybe,
just maybe, with the wind behind us and a couple of breaks, I think
we could probably sell a few fucking records.

“I think it’s great,” I say, getting up and showing them out. I
mean, it might be worth a pop.

Girl power, innit?

Rebecca is holding a phone towards me. “It’s Barry from club
promotions.”

“Barry?”

“Steven, hi, I got the club reactions in on ‘Why Don’t
You…’.”

These are A4 sheets, like little report cards that all the club
DJs fill in to tell you what they reckon to the track.

“Well?”

“Ah…” In a nanosecond my blood turns to antifreeze.

“Barry?”

“Yeah, they’re all right. They’re all right.”

All right? Just
all right!
This is bad. This is very
fucking bad.

♦

We have a second ‘Why Don’t You’ marketing meeting. It is
markedly different from the first. Dunn kicks off.

“Sorry, Radio 1 don’t think it’s for them. If the record had
been bigger at club then we’d have some ammunition. As it is…” He
spreads his hands.

Barry pipes up, “It just seems to be the kind of record
that…we’ll need a bit of radio before we can get a lot of the
commercial club DJs to pick up on it.”

Hannah: “MTV quite liked the video. But they’re not going to
playlist it until we get some radio.”

Through all of this Derek just glares at me. With the video
(hastily shot, at my insistence) we have spent well over one
hundred thousand pounds on this turkey. Turkey? That’s an insult to
turkeys. It’s a fucking dodo.

Ross: “No point in doing much advertising or a big poster
campaign until we’ve got some awareness at radio and TV…”

Suzy: “Not much interest at press, I’m afraid. We’re getting
reviewed in
Mixmag
.”

Nicky: “I’m afraid there’s not much I can do with this at the
moment.” She tries to look sympathetic but the bitch can hardly
keep the smile from creasing her fat fucking face in half.

Finally Derek hits critical mass: “ARE YOU TELLING ME WE’VE
SPENT OVER A HUNDRED FUCKING GRAND TO GET A FUCKING REVIEW IN
FUCKING
MIXMAG
?! JESUS CHRIST!”

I stare at the glass table—through the glass table and onto the
carpeting where I uselessly notice that Dunn is wearing the same
Prada shoes as I am—and say nothing. There is nothing to say. If
there was something to say I’d be saying it.

Derek hates the record. The marketing department hate the
record. The club promotions department hate the record. The radio
department hate the record. I want to kill Rudi, that
Nazi-scumbag-fucking-child-molester-fucking-animal. In a bizarre,
alchemic process perhaps unique to the entertainment industry the
cancer cure I brought back from Cannes has mysteriously morphed
into something closer to the cause of AIDS.

Finally Derek looks around the room and says, with absolutely no
enthusiasm, “So where do we go with this record now?”

“Lourdes?” Ross suggests, unhelpfully.

Sure enough it comes to pass. Schneider’s contract, due to
expire later this summer, will not be renewed. They pay him off and
he clears his desk out. I go for a drink with him on his last day.
It is three in the afternoon and the pub is empty. Outside, rain
falls lightly across Hammersmith. It’s warm though; the pub doors
are open and cars sizzle by on the wet tarmac. Schneider sluices
the ice around in his vodka tonic and tries to be upbeat, giving it
the whole ‘best-thing-that-could-have-happened-in-a-way’ type shit.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“I’ve had a couple of interesting offers,” he lies. I mean,
fuck. He hasn’t had a proper hit in years. He’s
thirty-nine
—wife and two kids—and suddenly—bosh!—it’s Goodnight Vienna. At
best he might land a sympathy job with some reissues label, hawking
back catalogue and farting about trying to secure the rights for
Eddie and the Hot Rods live LPs. As he craps on about the
non-existent offers he reckons he’s had, Alisha’s Attic, then Kula
Shaker, then Mansun blare from the jukebox. It dawns on me that
they are all bands that Schneider (and, by extension, me) either
turned down or failed to sign in the past year or two. All of whom
are having hits now. Any one of them might have saved him. But he
went with Rage. The man who put it all on red…

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I told Derek they should make
you Head of A
&
R.”

Fuck. Support from a loser like Schneider can probably only
weaken my case right now. “Really? Thanks. What did Derek say?”

“That they’re probably going to give it to Waters.”

He drains his glass, bangs it down on the wet mahogany, and
signals wearily for another. “Sorry,” he says, not looking at me,
“bad timing there with that record of Rudi’s.”

♦

Sometimes you need to act fast. You really do. “A good plan
today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow,” and all that
crap.

The celebration for Waters’ promotion began in the fifth floor
bar at Harvey Nicks at lunchtime with the whole of the
A
&
R department plus Trellick and Derek. From
there onto Quo Vadis for dinner and then Soho House before Waters
and I—absolutely smashed beyond human belief by this point—ducked
out and caught a cab up to Camden, to see some useless band who are
playing at the Dublin Castle. We last two songs before we hail
another cab on Parkway and—stopping briefly outside the house of a
dealer we both know in Chalk Farm, where we score three more
grams—head back to Waters’ flat off Westbourne Park Road.

“You know how much I respect you,” Waters says, sniffing and
screeching out big lines on the big mirror while I pour the vodka.
“I don’t want you to feel that you’re suddenly working
for
me. We’re working
together
.”

I close my eyes and swallow about a quarter-pint of neat
Stoli.

“I want to try and build the kind of culture where…” Waters goes
into an idiotic rhapsody about his ‘vision’, about the kind of
A
&
R culture he plans to establish at the label.
Words like ‘organic’, ‘Chris Blackwell’, ‘synergy’, and ‘John
Hammond’ are freely tossed around. His stupid fucking dog snoozes
at his feet while he snorts and sweats and theorises. The
conversation drifts and rambles, landing on the subject of Great
British Songwriters, the kind of people Waters wants us to sign.
Waters is struggling for actual names. I mention Paul Weller.

“Uh, yeah. He…he writes most of his own stuff, doesn’t he?”
Waters says, his head thrown back as he sucks a gooey wad of snot
and gak down his throat.

CDs are scattered all over the place; on the low coffee table,
the sofa, the floor. I pick one up at random, to have something to
read while Waters craps on—he’s now literally talking about how his
daddy laughed when he fell off his bike when he was nine, or some
fucking thing—and find I’m holding a copy of the last Prodigy
album,
Music for the Jilted Generation
. I open the gatefold
inner sleeve and stare at the painting which covers both panels. Or
rather ‘painting’. The crude piece of artwork depicts a raver—long,
straggly hair, trainers, sweatshirt, etc.—who is standing on one
side of a dark chasm. On the other side of the chasm a huge group
of riot police are wielding truncheons and Perspex shields. Their
faces are obscured by the black visors of their hehnets. On the
raver’s side of the chasm is an idyllic green field with a sound
system, a DJ and other ravers dancing around blissfully. The sun is
shining. Back on the other side, behind the coppers, is a dark
industrial city: hulking tower blocks, ominous skyscrapers and
factories retching sulphur into the blackened sky. The two sides of
the chasm are connected by a rope bridge, which the coppers are
preparing to cross, clearly in order to give the raver a good
fucking beating. But hang on, the raver is holding a sabre to the
rope bridge, about to sever it and thwart their plans. He is also
giving the coppers the finger. The quality of the actual painting
is
appalling
—like some handicapped kid’s O-level art
project.