Kill Your Friends (8 page)

Desoto’s wife opened the bedroom door and the children—aged five
and seven—burst out from behind her, laughing at the thrill of
surprising Daddy. Daddy gradually came into focus through the
children’s watering eyes; watering first chemically from the
rubbery stench of burning bicarbonate of soda, then watering
naturally through tears of confusion and anguish: Daddy was naked
with a jutting, Viagra-fueled erection. Daddy was propped up
against the headboard, almost in crucifix position with a Coke-can
crack pipe in one hand and a shit-streaked dildo in the other.
Daddy had a dreamy grin strung across his face as he watched two
young Latvian girls—hired cheaply from an agency he
favoured—furiously 69-ing each other across the foot of the bed,
their heads coming up, their mouths both slick with cum as the
scream began to rise from Mrs Desoto.

The divorce was swift and financially close to ruinous. Among
many other things she sought, and secured, an enormous monthly
payment towards the cost of post-traumatic stress counselling for
the children.

We sit and scan the room and gossip and bitch. It’s very
easy—everyone falls neatly into one of two categories: winners and
losers. People on the up and people on the down. The winners are
‘fucking cunts’ and the losers are, well, ‘fucking losers’. At a
nearby table Schneider is talking to Nick Raphael, an
A
&
R guy, recently installed at BMG with
Christian Tattersfield. Raphael, in his turn, is monitoring the
room over Schneider’s shoulder, casually yet fiercely casting about
for an upgrade. He doesn’t need to be caught having a high-profile
conversation with a loser like Schneider. Like being caught
cracking jokes with a rabbi in downtown Berlin in 1938. Desoto nods
towards Schneider and says, “Dead man talking.”

Trellick, catching the drift, waves a hand in the air and says
“Waiter? A bottle of
Schadenfreude
for my friends here.”

A few yards away Ellie Crush is interviewed by some TV girl.
“
Very
exciting,” the interviewer gushes breathlessly to the
camera, “twenty-one-year-old Ellie Crush taking home Best British
Breakthrough Artist tonight. Ellie, just quickly, what does winning
this award mean to you?”

“Oh God,” says Ellie, hefting the silver statuette into view,
“I’m speechless, Jo! Honestly, I can’t even begin to tell you how
much this means to me.” She glances around the babbling throng.
“I’m going to have to find a safe place to put it, mind you!”

“Thanks, Ellie.”

“Cheers!”

“Doable,” Trellick says thoughtfully. “Very doable.”

“Mmmmm,” I say as Crush comes towards us through the crowd, the
statuette cradled against her chest, a bottle of champagne and lit
cigarette dangling from the other hand. “Hi, Ellie,” I say as she
passes.

“Oh, hi…there!” her face explodes into a ludicrous smile.
“Mwwwah, mwwwah.” She smacks the air either side of my cheeks.

“Congratulations.”

“Shit, I can’t bloody believe it! Will you pinch me? I feel like
I’m dreaming!” Her face is just an exclamation mark.

“Nah, you deserve it.”

“Aww, thanks, love.” She tries to take a swig of the champagne
but burns her hair with the cigarette, dropping her award in the
process. Her press officer steps in to help manage the crisis as,
right on cue, Parker-Hall emerges from the throng, accepting
handshakes, his features a picture of benevolent indulgence. It’s
always worse when they’re magnanimous. “OI! OI!” Ross shouts in
greeting.

“All right, lads? Steven,” he says, shaking my offered hand.
“What a fucking result that was, eh?” he says, rubbing his hands
together briskly and accepting a cigarette from Trellick. “Done
them other cunts up like kippers, didn’t we?”

Remember, Parker-Hall comes from Hampstead.

“You fluky cunt,” I say.

“Suck my root,” he says, lighting up.

“What you up to later?” Ross asks.

“We got a party on. Up West, innit?” Parker-hall says, reaching
into his pocket and handing out a brick of laminates to his
after-after-party. “Right, better do one. Ellie’s got to meet the
press while she can still fucking speak. C’mon, love.” As he ushers
her off Crush turns to me and says “Bye…um, Alex.”

Trellick is still laughing when we reach the green-and-white
EXIT sign which glows in the distance on the other side of the
auditorium, showing us the way to the after-party.

♦

After the awards ceremony proper finishes the floodgates open
and the cannon fodder pours in: the secretaries, marketing
assistants, junior PRs, make-up artists, runners, stylists,
hairdressers, accountants, legal assistants and friends-of-friends
who could only get after-show tickets. Clearly you or I would, upon
being told that these were the only tickets available to us, simply
climb into a warm bath and open up our veins. However, these losers
consider themselves lucky, fortunate even, to be able to get within
two bouncers of Robbie or Liam. To be allowed to pay for their own
drinks. The secretaries in our building spend
months
planning for tonight. They buy new clothes, they get haircuts and
facials, and they pool their miserable salaries to buy a few grams.
It’s a boiler-fest in here.

Now, you keep reading things—in magazines, in newspapers—about
how the nineties are turning out to be, well, nice. According to
these articles, men in the sharing, caring nineties have rejected
the hollow materialism and sexism of the eighties and embraced
women as equals. Partners. You read these things and you
wonder—where the fuck are the people who write this stuff hanging
out? Primary schools? A rural Greenpeace office?

My industry, always resistant to change (in the fifties we hated
the idea of singles, in the seventies cassettes were the enemy,
initially CDs were the Antichrist in the eighties—boy, we soon got
our heads around that one), hasn’t really bought into all this
nonsense yet.

Thankfully, very few women seem to have understood it either.
There are lots of them already here and thousands more clamouring
to get in. Every day piles of CVs tumble into the office.
Fresh-faced young girls with excellent qualifications, all hungry
to get a job where, in return for working twelve-hour days, being
sexually harassed from dawn till dusk, having to cope with all
manner of coked-up, coming-down, hung-over, flaky, irrational,
abusive, demanding behaviour from people like me, they will be
rewarded with maybe fifteen grand a year, the odd backstage pass
and occasional glimpses of pop stars in the building.

In toilets, offices, broom cupboards, hotel stairwells and on
the chill leather seats of BMWs, Saabs and Mercedes coupes, they
will suck cocks and take it up the arse. Their twenties will flash
by in a holocaust of parties, hangovers, semen and bad champagne
until, one fine morning somewhere down the line, they wake up to
find themselves thirty-five years old with sagging tits, a
cancerous, shrivelled womb, tired, fucked-out eyes, and a
complexion battered by late nights, drugs and cocks. A lucky few of
these girls will, through a combination of low cunning and
viciously skilful fellatio, manage to marry one of the executives
they serve and hang on to him for—at best—a decade, raising his
children and decorating the house while he works late at the office
pumping his way through her successors. Eventually, either she will
put her foot down or (more likely) he will upgrade to one of the
Sophies or Samanthas who replaced her. They will get divorced
somewhere in their mid-forties and she will find herself standing
in the kitchen of a big house somewhere in Buckinghamshire with two
nasty, pre-pubescent monsters whingeing at her as she haplessly
uncorks her second bottle of white wine at half past four in the
afternoon.

A very, very few of these girls will manage to marry one of the
pop stars. The Meg Matthews deal. This is the record-industry
boiler equivalent of winning the lottery—the
Pretty Woman
,
rags-to-riches story that surely keeps so many of these girls
choking down warty cocks, swallowing spunk and throwing themselves
down on all fours like it’s going out of fashion for the best part
of twenty years. It. Could. Be. You. For the tiny minority of
Cinderellas who pull off this incredible coup the life pattern will
be much the same as it is for the ones who marry the executives,
although the time frame of the marriage will be greatly truncated
and the remuneration significantly enhanced.

We’re hunkered around a corner table in another cavernous room.
Billowing white drapes have been hung, candles lit and carpeting
laid down. There are blackjack tables and roulette wheels but, here
and there, you can still see the cement floor, the steel poles and
corrugated metal of the roof and the gloomy dark above the
canopies. You remember that the hulk of Earls Court looks down
impassively on everything from car and boat shows to international
widget manufacturers conferences—all of them filled with the same
kind of guys trying to figure out if Susan from accounts is really
up for it or not. Echoing behind the crack of champagne corks, the
supercharged laughter, the crackle of suits and sparkling dresses,
there is a tinny, reverberating sound. It is the sound of people
trying to have a really good time in a lightly decorated
underground car park.

Pete Dunn rocks up to our table, arms raised, a bottle of
Perrier Jouet in each fist. “AHHHHHGH! Wahey the lads!” he
screeches. He’s a big guy, Dunn. Once chunky and, back in the
eighties, ponytailed, he’s now bald and running, sprinting in fact,
to fat. His broad Geordie face is ruddy, the stubble greying and
the eyes puffy, set back in little pouches. Dunn is our Head of
Radio and TV Promotions. He has spent his adult life wheedling and
begging radio DJs and programmers and kids’ TV producers and
presenters to put our acts on their shows. I’m sure he loved his
job when he was twenty-six: falling out of nightclubs with Radio 1
DJs and flying to the south of France with pop stars. Now pushing
forty-six his every waking moment is a nightmare. Told to fuck off
and die on a daily, hourly, basis by TV and radio executives, he
must then drive back to the office where he is—far more
robustly—told to fuck off and die by Derek.

How much better his job would have been back in the good old
days of the fifties—the golden era of payola and 1 per cent artist
royalty rates. Now payola was a genius idea, wasn’t it? Tell me
that wasn’t a winner for everyone involved? You didn’t have to take
anyone out to dinner and suck their dick. You didn’t have to laugh
at Chris Evans’s jokes. You just paid the cunts. Here’s the money,
now play the record and fuck you.
Fuck you
.

Not too bright to begin with, a decade of grovelling and sucking
dick has turned Dunn into a sort of failed light entertainer with a
melancholic streak. He pours champagne into all our glasses,
singing, “Here we go, here we go, here we go.” Shouldn’t he be at
home with the wife and kids? Then you remember—he went upgrades and
left the wife and kids two years ago, to go balls-deep in a
twenty-year-old dancer he met at the taping of some
Saturday-morning kiddie moronathon. She, in her turn, left him for
some photographer’s assistant six months later. His upgrade
upgraded him.

Dunn actually raises his glass to propose a toast—something only
the truly suicidal ever do. “To the lads!” he shouts.

Waters joins in like a retard, pathetically clunking his plastic
flute against Dunn’s. Leamington from Virgin materialises through
the crowd and sidles over to me.

“Oi oi,” he says.

“All right, mate? Two awards for those cows?” I say, nodding
across the room towards Mel B, “You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?
They must think it’s fucking Christmas.”

“Nah, I think Geri’s off crying somewhere.”

“Ah, fuck her. Congratulations.”

“Nothing to do with me, mate,” he says shrugging, “but cheers.”
We clack tumblers. “Here,” Leamington says, “is it right what I’m
hearing about your old mucker Rage?”

“What are you hearing?”

“That it’s all gone Colonel Kurtz—he’s upriver, gone fucking
native. Off his nut on the nosebag, months in the studio, no
contact with anyone.”

“Fuck knows. Schneider’s problem.”

“When’s the record due?”

“Three months ago.”

“Could be Bad News Bears for Schneider.”

“Mmmm,” I say. As we drink and gossip and bitch I look over at
the recently clean and sober Robbie Williams, who is sitting at a
table a few feet away. He’s fiddling with the label on a bottle of
mineral water, smoking two-handed, and nodding while some guy I
don’t know—some manager, some lawyer—explains something to him.
Williams periodically turns away to stare hard—a hard stare I know
well—at the glittering rump of some boiler standing near him. Poor
bastard, I guess that’s all he’s got now, isn’t it? The pumping.
Can you imagine it? You’re not even thirty and you can’t do
anything
any more. No nose-up, no pills, no frosty beers, no
warming shots of Jack or Remy. You’re just sitting there,
completely sober, in your fuck-off mansion, dressed head to foot in
all the finery you spent the morning trawling New Bond Street with
some stylist for, you’ve just given up trying to read some book for
the umpteenth time, because it’s too
hard
, you’re turning on
Sky Sports again, or forcing some underling to drink fruit juice
and play cards with you, and you’re thinking—another forty years of
this
? You’re just some stage kid, some poor song-and-dance
spastic with a cheeky grin who fate threw a whole bunch of sevens.
And now you’re staring down the wrong end of four decades with just
your own thoughts for company when you don’t really have two
fucking thoughts to rub together. Nasty.

Danny Rent sidles up. He’s a scumbag, a real rapist of a
manager, one of those old-school Tin Pan Alley guys that you just
don’t see much any more: late forties, stubble, well-worn Armani
suit with hash burns all over it, heavy
gold
Rolex (so
wrong) on his right wrist. He looks like a down-on-his-luck
nightclub owner from
Miami Vice
and smells like he just went
on a four-day Scotch binge and then jumped into a vat of
aftershave.