Authors: John Niven
Waters looks up from shaping more lines and peers over my
shoulder. “Good that, isn’t it?” he says.
I stare at the picture, dumbfounded, for a long, long time. All
I can think about is how much—if you were somehow forced to live in
the world depicted on the Prodigy sleeve—you’d want to be on the
coppers’ side of that chasm; in the filthy city with its casinos,
hookers and petrol stations. Its five-star hotels, sex shops,
nightclubs and banks. I am also filled with a great and unexpected
affection for Britain’s riot police.
I look up at Waters. “How?”
“What?”
“How is this picture good?”
“It’s…y’know. It’s got a message.”
“What fucking message?”
He craps on with some anti-Establishment balls for a while as I
sit there getting angrier and angrier. To calm myself down I try
and think of all the words I know for cocaine—gak, chang, nose-up,
bag, beak, charlie, krell, powder, chisel, bump, posh, bugle,
sniff, skiwear, schniff, Bronson, Bolivian, toot, junior (crack is
called senior), chas, nonsense, bounce, blow, Vim—but it’s not
working.
“Oh fuck off. You know what I mean,” Waters says huffily.
“Anyway…” he tries to change the subject.
“Excuse me,” I say as I get up and leave the room.
It’s hard to say what does it. Whether it’s his views on the
Prodigy sleeve, or the fact that that dismal spunk-worshipper Derek
could choose to make this guy Head of A
&
R over
me, or the fact Waters doesn’t even know that Paul Weller is
primarily known for being a songwriter. I mean, don’t get me wrong,
I don’t give a good drop of spunk about the Prodigy, or about
Weller or his music—although it was certainly impressive that Go!
Discs managed to resurrect the fossilised mod cunt and grind a
million albums out of him—it’s just…the indignity of the situation
suddenly hits me. No one knows what they are doing, yes, granted.
But Waters…Waters really doesn’t know
anything
. And now he’s
my boss. For a second I almost experience sadness, a sense of loss,
regarding Schneider.
I walk into the kitchen. There, still in the corner by the
fridge, is the blue-and-steel baseball bat.
Home security.
I come back in. He’s sitting on the floor with his back to me,
hunched over the mirror on the low coffee table,
already—always—shaping more lines. I check my watch. It’s almost 6
AM
. A dance compilation plays softly. Waters is
still talking, gibbering. To me? To the sleeping dog? To the wall?
Who knows?
I walk up behind him. I start the bat back, swinging it so far
over my head that I’m sure I feel it touch the heel of my right
shoe. Then I bring it down with humming force. I can hear the air
being moved aside. Waters is saying the word ‘crossover’.
Sound of Impact.
♦
Now, I expected there to be some crunchy give as his skull caved
in and he slumped forward. Goodnight Vienna. But no. There’s a loud
clear ‘thwock’—like hitting a very hard piece of wood—and Waters
immediately
howls
in agony, grabs his head, and starts
staggering to his feet, knocking glasses and ashtrays noisily onto
the polished wood floor. The bastard dog explodes into life and
starts yelping and growling. Stunned and shaking, it takes me a
second or two to recock the bat, by which time he’s on his knees,
halfway up. I swing down again, this time the bat glances off his
forehead, which is already slick with blood, and sends him reeling
into the middle of the room. He looks up, right at me. Then he
looks at his trembling hands, which are covered in blood. The
expression on his face…he looks confused, horrified. Like when you
open your bank statement thinking you’ve had a quiet month, and
scan down the tumbling debits, to the unthinkable figure at the
bottom with the letters ‘OD’ beside it. The dog is barking its tits
off, going crackers.
For a second I think he’s going to charge at me, and he’s a big
guy, Waters. Then the force of the blow, the shockwave, hits him,
his eyes start vibrating, his legs spastic about and he wobbles
onto his knees, making a terrible ‘ohhhh…urrrr’ sound. Blood is
pouring down his face now and it looks like oil under the soft
halogen spots. I run towards him. He manages one actual
word—“please”—as I bring the bat down for the third time in a
massive, terrible arc. He’s on his knees, at around waist height to
me, and I connect right in the centre of his dome. This time there
is
lots
of crunchy give and his skull caves in. A jet of
blood sprays out of his nose and he goes over, falling onto his
side and twitching on the floor.
Bear eat CDs!
“You stupid fat cunt!” I scream. “Paul Weller writes
all
his own songs!
He’s one of the foremost singer-songwriters of
his generation!
” Just to be on the safe side, because the anger
is fizzling out now, the adrenalin going, my blood clotting,
becoming thick as tarmac in my veins, I smash the bloody bat down
once more, onto the side of his head this time. With the sound of a
loud, wet fart, a mess of grey-white ‘brains’ spurts out of the
crack in the top of his head. The dog stops barking and growling
and starts licking and nibbling at the spreading puddle of blood
and brains which is oozing out of his master’s broken head.
Disgusted, and with about the last of my strength, I smash the Jack
Russell incredibly hard over the head. Its skull just explodes, the
eyeballs both flopping out and dangling down its face and then it’s
nice and quiet, the only sound that of the house compilation,
Frankie Knuckles’ ‘Your Love’ playing softly. There’s something
small, pink and bloody on the floor next to Waters’ mouth and I
realise he’s bitten the tip of his tongue off. It’s just lying
there, a few inches away from a bloodstained paperback copy of
Fever Pitch
by Nick Hornby.
SevenLondon Records terminate their deal with Tony
Wilson’s label Factory Too. R. Kelly is N°1 for a fucking month. XL
spends a lot of money signing some band called Stroke. Whispers
start to circulate that the new Radiohead LP is off its tits—an
unlistenable prog-rock nightmare. Andy Thompson’s label VC
Recordings prepares to launch an album by dance act D*Note.
Thompson says, “I can see D*Note at the Royal Albert Hall. The sky
is really the limit for them
.”
“
Lemme tell ya something—if a guy’s a cocksucker
in his life, when he dies he don’t become a saint
.”Morris Levy
T
he day after I kill
Waters I have to go to Dublin to see a band.
I
hate
the cab ride into Dublin. It’s a bitch. I mean,
it’ll soon be the twenty-first century and these worthless Paddy
tramps can’t even get their diseased, potato-ravaged arses into
gear and build a fucking motorway. You have to sit for eternity on
some two-lane B-road that winds through housing estates, high
streets and Christ knows what, all the while with some lobotomised
fucking Mick asking you all manner of crap about yourself.
“AndwillthisbeyerfirstvisittoDublinnow?” the horrible
tip-scrounging cunt has the balls to ask me.
I just groan and crank up my Discman, turning to stare silently
out of the window at the dreadful shops, bars and inbred mutants
that crawl past in the rain-streaked gridlock. But the guy, the
cabbie, swings round from the wheel again and keeps asking me
something. I slide the headphones down.
“Andwhichhotelwasityewereafternow?”
“What?” I sigh.
He says it again, slower.
“The Clarence.”
“Ohverynicenowyeknowit’syennanfromyewtoowho…”
But I don’t hear the rest of this because I slip the headphones
back up over my ears and Richard Ashcroft’s singing “
You’re a
slave to money
…” as I return to staring out the window through
cracked, stinging, hung-over eyes: a big Guinness poster, a dirty
child on a mountain bike, an old man bawling in the doorway of a
pub, and a bright red butcher’s shop with carcasses hanging from
hooks and gleaming entrails piled in plastic trays.
I check in at the Clarence.
I go to my room, masturbate, and fall asleep.
I wake up and realise I’ve missed the gig.
I go back to sleep.
I get up the next morning and eat a late, expensive
breakfast.
I lie in bed and watch a film called
Outbreak
starring
Dustin Hoffman on pay TV.
I fly back to London.
I tell Derek the band were ‘promising’.
He nods, like he understands something.
♦
I waltz into the office around lunchtime the next day, sucking
on an ice lolly and wearing shorts and sandals—London’s having one
of those early-spring mornings where it thinks it’s summertime. As
I round the corner towards my office I see Rebecca and Pam. They’re
huddled over Rebecca’s desk, their faces red, both clutching wet,
shredded Kleenex.
“Oh Steven,” Pam says, a catch in her voice, “it’s terrible…”
She bursts into fresh hot tears.
“What?” I say.
“It’s…Roger…” she manages between sobs.
“WHAT?” I say.
“He’s dead!”Pam says.
“No!” I say. (I thought about saying “NO!”, but then I thought,
no.)
She just nods, blubbing, shoulders shaking, crinkly tissue
pressed to her face. I like girls’ faces when they’ve been
crying—hot, soft and pulpy. I wonder if Pam—in her grief—is
recalling the night after the Ivor Novello Awards last year when
she rashly went home with Waters and he tried—at length from what I
heard—to cajole her into anal sex. She pulls herself together a
little, sweeping wet strands of hair out of her face and taking a
deep breath.
“A neighbour found him this morning. It looks like someone broke
into his flat, a burglar, and Roger must have disturbed them. Or he
tried to stop them or something.”
The idea of Waters being confronted in his living room at 3
AM
by a couple of big, angry tooled-up niggers and
doing anything other than begging for his fat, sleazy life is so
laughable I have to bite my cheeks. Pam collapses forwards again
into me, shuddering and sobbing as she buries her face in my neck.
As I comfort her, and quietly enjoy the press of her (decent) rack
against my chest, Rebecca and I look at each other. Rebecca’s eyes
are red like Pam’s, her cheeks slick with tears too, but she’s
looking at me strangely, with an expression on her face I can’t
quite place.
Hastings comes out of his office. “Isn’t it terrible?” he says.
I put a hand over my face and say, “Excuse me, please.”
I run into my office, slamming the door behind me, and throw
myself face down on the sofa, my shoulders shaking and my whole
body convulsing. I can feel Hastings, Rebecca and Pam watching me
through the glass partition. I can feel their buffoonish concern
upon me.
It must really look like I’m
crying
.
♦
Later, seven o’clock, after everyone’s gone home and the place
is empty, I go and sit in Waters’ office. It is strange to sit
there as it slowly gets dark, surrounded by the things he saw and
touched every day—his computer, his diary, phone and stereo—and
think about how he said ‘please’. On the wall is a framed gold disc
from the one (almost) successful act Waters signed. (They’re
‘bands’ or ‘groups’ when you’re trying to sign them, and ‘acts’
once you have. I don’t know why that is.) Scattered around his desk
and perched on his shelves are various
Star Wars
products;
little X-Wing fighters, a Millennium Falcon, a big R2D2 that’s
actually a phone. Like many men in the record industry in their
late twenties⁄early thirties Waters thought
Star Wars
was
cool. Just looking at his dismal toys feels like justification
enough for killing the cretin.
I’m bound to get a few of his acts dumped on me. But that’s not
so bad—most of them are so fucked that they’re beyond rescue. ‘It
was broke when I got here’ stuff. I plan to suggest we drop pretty
much all of them.
A Jiffy bag, with an EMI address label on it, is propped up on
his keyboard. I feel inside and pull out a promo CD. I squint at it
in the half-light: Radiohead. Their new single, which isn’t out for
a month or so and which I haven’t heard yet. Dunn says most radio
stations are giving it the fuck off.
I slip it into Waters’ machine and a strange, terrible noise
fills the room. I turn it down.
I open the top drawer of his desk and have a root: taxi and
restaurant receipts, half-completed expenses claims, cassettes and
CDs, pens and pencils, a couple of empty cocaine wraps. One
half-f wrap…
I do a line off his mouse mat. The mouse that is a picture of
Herve Villechaize, the midget actor who played Nick Nack in the
James Bond film and Tattoo in
Fantasy Island
. (Like many men
in the record industry in their late twenties⁄early thirties Waters
thought that shit TV shows from the seventies and eighties were
cool.)
Herve was three foot ten and weighed four stone, but the mad
dwarf cunt fell in love with, and married, a fully grown woman.
When she divorced him and took all his cash he went mental; he hit
the painkillers, the Scotch and the chang and wound up topping
himself. He taped his own suicide too. Honestly. He got hold of a
tape recorder, pressed ‘record’, put a pillow against his chest,
held a big fuck-off gun up to the pillow, and he said, “
Goodbye,
my darling. I could not satisfy your love
,” and shot himself
through his tiny heart.
Or rather, he tried to. Somehow he missed everything vital and
had to cock the gun again and shoot himself a second time.
Apparently the tape ends with him moaning and groaning, saying,
“
Ohhh it hurts, it hurts. I am dying…I am dying now
.”