Kill Your Friends (27 page)

Dunn. The spastic was almost cheerful when he told me Songbirds
didn’t get playlisted. Like everyone else at the label he is in
love with Parker-Hall and thinks the Lazies are going to be the
next Led Zeppelin.

He will pay. They will all pay.

♦

As requested Ross calls me the minute he gets the midweeks in.
“Sitting down?” he says. Jesus, this must be bad. “Three,” he says
bluntly. I don’t think I’ve heard him right.

“Thirty?” I say, hopefully.

“
Three
,” he repeats, “it’s number three.”

Numbly I hang up. The midweek chart prediction for the Lazies
single is number three. A stupendous result for Parker-Hall and a
disaster for me. Well, anywhere in the top ten would have been a
disaster for me but this…it’s terrible, a living nightmare I am
praying to awaken from. I only really have two options: 1) slink
out of the office, take the rest of the week off with a mysterious
illness and wait until all the fuss dies down a bit, or 2) go along
to Parker-Hall’s office, right now, and congratulate him. Play the
magnanimous card.

His door is open. I take a deep breath, will my features into an
idiotic grin, and pop my head around. “Hey!” I say.
“Congratulations on…” Derek and Dunn—horrible success vampires—are
both already in there, the three of them are deep in
conversation.

“Yeah, cheers, mate,” Parker-Hall says breaking off in mid-flow.
“Can you just give us a minute? Thanks.” Neither Derek nor Dunn
even look at me.

I turn to go but—“Sorry, Steven, hang on a minute.” I turn back.
Parker-Hall is holding a piece of paper up. “Have you spent four
and a half grand on club promotion on this Songbirds single?”

Dunn and Derek look at me coolly now. Can this really be
happening? “Umm, yeah,” I say shrugging, “what’s the problem?”

“In future,” Derek says, aggressively, “anything like this will
have to be signed off by either Anthony or myself.”

“Right…” I say.

“Just run it by me, mate,” Parker-Hall says airily. I nod. They
resume their conversation—Derek literally turning his back on me
and saying “Anyway”—and I stumble off along the hall, numb,
beginning to realise just how far I have fallen.

The tiny file squats on Parker-Hall’s hard drive, inert and
unnoticed, waiting for me to push the button.

Not yet, I think. Not just yet.

♦

I somehow manage to add a new, alarming vice to my already
jam-packed roster. In addition to the chang, the booze and fags,
the ostros, the online dog and pony shows, the sex lines and
whatever else opportunity, cash and technology throw my way, I am
now compulsively overeating. In the car on the way to the office,
idling in fogbound traffic, I cram buttery croissants into my face,
washing them down with litre-and-a-half vats of full-fat latte.
Standing at my office window, listening to demos and gazing at the
bend of the Thames, I follow triple-decker BLTs with a couple of
rounds of chocolate brownies. At lunch with Trellick and Ross, with
Darren and Leamington, I bulldoze through plates of gnocchi and
pasta, covered in oozing tomato sauce and hidden under drifts of
Parmesan. I tear apart side portions of heavily buttered bread and
inhale gallons of Diet Coke. (“I see they’re working,” Ross
commented one lunchtime, patting my burgeoning paunch as I drained
a third silver-and-red can.) The other night the normally
inscrutable kid from the Thai takeaway did a slight double take as
he set the groaning bags (torn yam gai, green curry, special rice,
spring rolls, three orders of dumplings) on the kitchen counter and
realised I was eating alone. It’s the cold, I suppose, I reflect as
I wait impatiently for the evening’s second tub of Belgian
chocolate ice cream to complete its twenty-second thawing in the
microwave.

With all this going on New York is probably the worst place on
earth for me, yet here I am, sprawled on my bed at the Soho Grand—a
tub of minibar M
&
Ms in my left hand, my softish
prick in my right, and some hardcore on the TV. I’m tiredly
watching some brick-shithouse darkie slide his horse-prick (the
vein running down it is like a section of garden hose) in and out
of a traumatised arse when the phone rings, its tone soft, purring,
apologetic, like it doesn’t really want to disturb you. Still
half-heartedly masturbating, I pick it up. “Band’s on at half
seven,” Parker-Hall says, “then we got dinner with the American
label, yeah?” He’s not asking me.

“See you downstairs,” I say and hang up.

We’re here for CMJ, which is kind of the same deal as In The
City, which was very much like Sound City, as was Pop Komm, which
bore a stunning similarity to South by Southwest, which merges in
my head with the Winter Music Festival, which wasn’t all that
different to MIDEM. New York, Glasgow, Cologne, Bristol, Texas,
Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit-card slips and
all that really changes is the quality of the porn.

Parker-Hall really does work. I don’t know that he actually
likes going to gigs, but he certainly sees it as a necessary part
of the job—which is why we’re enduring a forty-minute cab ride to
some venue way uptown, where we’ll watch some fucking band for
twenty minutes before another forty-minute ride back downtown to
meet some people from the American label for dinner at a restaurant
five minutes from our hotel. Had Parker-Hall not been here the
chances of me going to this gig would have been…minimal.

He strides into the lobby, flipping his mobile shut. The
hotel—the city—is rammed with Brits. In the bar I can see a couple
of guys from Virgin laughing and drinking beer with the tall
blond-hair-and-specs guy from the Chemical Brothers, Ed, I think.
The Chemicals are on the verge of actually taking off properly over
here—half a million albums or so, about the same as Ellie Crush.
That’s the thing about America. It’s shit or bust. Fuck all or a
couple of million albums. I physically have to shake my head to
knock out a vision of Parker-Hall having that kind of US
success.

“Should we be signing these cunts?” Parker-Hall asks as an
opener as we clatter down the hotel’s ludicrous industrial-metal
stairwell.

“Who?”

He holds up a CD of some band.

“Nah, pony,” I say.

“It’s OK. Like the new Radiohead with some tunes. Can’t see it
being good for more than a hundred thousand though. Do you wanna
see if we can get a meeting? Just for a laugh, fuck every other
cunt up?”

“Yeah,” I say as the doorman hails us a cab.

Parker-Hall turns to me as we edge into traffic. “What’s
happening with the Songbirds single?”

“Starting to get some good club reactions in,” I say. This means
fuck all. Without radio play it means absolutely nothing, unless
you have a
monstrously
huge club record, the kind that can
become a hit with minimal radio. ‘Good reaction at club’ is the
kind of thing you say when there is nothing else to say. I know
this and Parker-Hall knows this, but he chooses to nod and say,
“Yeah?”

“Yeah, still early days,” I say. Too right it fucking is—I have
already put the release date back twice.

“And the album?”

“Still writing. Trying a few different writers.”

“What’s the recording budget again?”

“One twenty.”

“Gonna come in at that? Be realistic.”

“I should think so,” I say with a straight face. I reckon, once
everything is in, I’ll have spent that on the fucking single.

“Coolio,” he says in a completely neutral tone. What to read
into it? It is just about possible that he’s backing me here, being
supportive of my instincts in an area of the market—pop-dance—that
isn’t really his field. It’s also possible—it’s far more likely,
it’s practically a fucking banker—that he’s doling me out a
colossal amount of thick, oily rope and watching with amusement as
I coil it over my arm and climb the steps towards my shaky,
home-made gallows.

Outside, the brownstones of the Village give way to the wide,
loud cord of Broadway as we whip uptown through light rain and
suddenly, without warning, we’re in the open space of Times Square,
which squats neutralised, bereft, in the daylight. Off to our left
42
nd
Street snakes down towards Chelsea and I
experience a sudden, intense pang of pornography, a yearning for
fisting, for lurid plastic dildos and ben-wa balls, to see someone
other than myself being defiled and degraded.

Parker-Hall’s mobile trills, interrupting my reverie—“All right
geezer!” he says delightedly—and then he’s talking to someone back
home, his affected, brutalised vowels flouncing off some satellite
miles above us and passing silently through cold, cold space before
they flutter out another chunk of plastic somewhere in London,
where it will be bedtime.

♦

Having managed to drink pretty heavily at the gig (four double
Rockschools and a couple of beers in less than an hour), I continue
drinking heavily in the bar at the restaurant—some place called
Balthazar, a recently opened pseudo-French shithole that seems to
be the toast of every flaming virus carrier in the fucking
Village—before we sit down to dinner with the American record
company, which is where I
really
kick things up a gear.

Refreshed by repeated hops to the bathroom I begin
double-fisting red wine and Scotch as well as popping back stinging
tequila shots whenever I (frequently) swing by the bar to smoke
another cigarette. I’m not eating and food—seared foie gras, steak
frites, a salad of asparagus and fennel—builds up in front of and
around me. Along from me Parker-Hall is having the
fruits de
mer
; two sparkling tiers of iced crab, crayfish, clams,
oysters, mussels and shrimp tower in front of him. “Are you having
a fucking giraffe, cunt?” I think and I briefly wish that someone
who would appreciate the Rage anecdote—Trellick, say—was here.

Because the dinner is mind-numbing. Parker-Hall sits between
Ashley Werner, chairman of the American arm of our company, and
Russ Koppel, Head of Promotions, the guy who gets your signings on
the radio over here. He’s like an even more game-show version of
Dunn. There’s a couple of junior A
&
R guys from
the American label beside me and, across from me, some woman
manager—in her forties, well heeled, big glasses, serious—and a
couple of other boilers I don’t know. All the Shermans are drinking
water and eating salads and the conversation consists of listening
to Werner and Koppel pontificate away and waiting for your turn to
nod. They’re all Ellie Crush fans and treat Parker-Hall as though
he were the young Ahmet fucking Ertegun. Parker-Hall, in his turn,
drones on about how much he values their input or something.

I lean across the table to the cutest girl here—a blonde in her
mid-twenties, denim jacket, small tits perky beneath a tight
vintage Rolling Stones T–shirt—and whisper “Hey…”

“Mmmm?” she ducks towards me, smiling uncertainly.

“Wanna do a bump?”

“Sorry?”

“A bump? You wanna do a bump?”

“Uh, whaddya mean exactly?”

“Do you want some bugle?”

“Huh?”

Fucking hell. “Gak? Racket, chang, beak, bag, nose?”

Nothing.

“Charlie?”

“Do you mean coke?” she says, her face scrunching, starting to
look like someone’s farted.

“Oh yeah.”

“No thank you.”

“Ah, come on…” I say playfully.

She shakes her head and resumes listening to one of her bosses
who is talking about ‘Madge’.

Fucking Shermans. They hit the Stairmaster, make a quick stop at
Tofu World to pick up their lunch, and are at their fucking desks
by 8
AM
. It makes you sick. Fuck you then, you dyke
cow, I think.

By the time dessert appears I’m translucent with booze and coke
and I’m drawing the odd glare from Parker-Hall. Leaning across the
table to squeeze the last few drops from a bottle of Rioja, I tune
into the old manager chick’s conversation. She’s talking about some
slag she looks after—Marianne Faithfull? Joni Mitchell? Kate Bush?
Some ancient munter or other—and how hard it is to get exposure,
press or radio, for them in this day and age. What a disgrace this
is, living legends that they are and all. “It’s a different story,”
she says, “when it’s Clapton, or Rod Stewart, but for the women…”
she trails off, shaking her (big) hair sadly.

“Well,” I say, reasonably, “it does get harder for women as they
get older.”

She turns towards me and through the booze and gak I see
properly the angles of her spectacles, the sour, rock-critic cut of
her dish.

“I beg your pardon?” she says, as if I’d just said, “I’ve done
your mother up the coal-hole, no lube.”

“Come on,” I say addressing the table now, “it’s a tough break
in general, being a chick and getting older. Being a pop star? It’s
gotta be a nightmare.”

“Why would you say that?” she asks, genuinely curious. A bunch
of people are listening now, out of the corner of my eye,
shimmering, I see Parker-Hall looking my way, his cutlery suspended
over his tart. (My entire meal has, of course, gone completely
uneaten.) Fuck him. Why does he care what this miserable
spunk-bucket thinks?

“Why on earth,” she continues soberly, “should things be any
different for a female musician than they are for a man?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “but they are.”

“Are you saying,” the dyke in the Stones shirt chips in, “that
older women in music should be afforded less opportunity for
exposure and respect than men?”

“I’m not saying they should, but,” I gesture with my glass,
suavely throwing red wine across the tablecloth, “they fucking
are.”

“Why do you think that would be?” The horn-rimmed spectacled sow
asks patronisingly.

“Well,” I say, marshalling my argument, “it’s like, you don’t
mind seeing Jagger, or Bowie, fruiting about at fifty, do you?
There’s a certain…charm there. Or Clapton, he’s just a muso, isn’t
he? You don’t give a shit what he looks like. But, say, Debbie
Harry at sixty?” A couple of people shake their heads, affecting
disbelief at my cynicism. A cynicism they all share but are too
reasonable (i.e. sober) to articulate. Fuck this, I think. In for a
penny…“Cher,” I continue, “at seventy? Playing keepy-uppy with her
fucking jugs? Cunt like a wizard’s sleeve? Face like a melted
bucket of concrete? Fuck that.”