Authors: John Niven
Whose bright idea was all this? I picture a bunch of old Rastas,
hunkered on a doorstep on Ladbroke Grove on an August afternoon a
long time ago. “Leroy,” says Winston, passing across the
dachshund-sized reefer “suppose we be holding dem carnival and all
dem white batty boys be spending dem money?”
“Righteous,” says Leroy, shivering under the weak London sun as
he takes a big, Jamaican toke. Half a century later on the
Portobello Road some student hands over a tenner for a burnt piece
of plantain and a couple of warm lagers and steps around the corner
to be mugged.
You’ve gotta hand it to them, Carnival is definitely one-nil to
the Kaffirs.
I’m wired from the coke, taut and angry, on the verge of going
nuts and smashing an elbow into somebody’s face, doing anything to
bust out, when there’s a change in the pulse of the crush,
something weakens and opens up on my left. I grab Darren’s arm and
manage to pull both of us through and out onto Talbot Road, where
it’s quieter, where the crowd is just insanely—as opposed to
life-threateningly-big. A few mounted policemen trot around smiling
benevolently, their horses braying, their hooves clipping on the
cement. Carnival’s a PR job now for the filth; you’re in
shirtsleeves, you get your picture taken with a big fat mama who’s
wearing your helmet. I even see a young constable taking a matey
swig of Red Stripe.
But now and again, on the faces and in the eyes of the older
coppers, you see flashes of how it used to be. Some young ragga
will flounce by, nonchalantly billowing clouds of ganja smoke, his
gold teeth shining and his trainers gleaming in the sun, and
there’ll be a tightening of the jawline, a contracting of the
pupils, and you can see these old boys thinking, “
Come on. Come
on, you fuckers…
” High up in the saddle they glaze over as they
reminisce about the Perspex shields and the baton charge, the
pleasing give of black skull beneath lead-tipped truncheon, and
then a leisurely hour in the cell with the rolled-up phone book and
the rubber hose. The good old days.
“Fucking hell,” says Darren as we press on, edging our way along
the Portobello Road towards the Earl Percy.
Shouts of “Oi! Oi!” rend the air as we shoulder our way into the
pub. Trellick stands on a chair, his arms outstretched, a bottle of
champagne in each fist. Behind him, crouched down, Ross is
furtively doing a bump off the back of a girl’s hand. Tench is
sprawled across a row of seats, his face buried between the
miniskirted thighs of some shrieking boiler. Parker-Hall is holding
court at a corner table with a couple of girls, what’s-his-name
from Chrysalis and one of the guys who writes songs for Ellie
Crush. Rebecca and Katie and Sophie and Pam and a bunch of other
girls we know all dancing in the corner. Someone throws an E at me.
That guy Richard Bolger from London Records pours a drink over
himself. Derek DahLarge is talking to the wall.
Thank Christ, I think. Civilisation.
Ross’s party at his place on Colville Terrace goes on until
Tuesday morning. At some point, somewhere into the early hours, I
turn round and realise I am crapping away to Parker-Hall. I don’t
know what we’re saying or how long we’ve been talking. We’re both
off our tits but he’s clearly in better shape than me. In a moment
of pilled-up, cracked-up, coked-up, boozed-up, sleep-deprived,
woolly false-bonhomie, I put my arm around him and say, “I’m really
enjoying us working together.”
“Me too, mate,” he replies, smiling as he pats me on the knee,
untangles himself from my arm, and waltzes off, disappearing into
the smoke and music.
Granted, I’m off my fucking head and might be paranoid, but even
so, I’m sure there’s a terrifying lack of sincerity in
Parker-Hall’s voice. I watch as across the room he talks and laughs
with Ross. It’s important for A
&
R to have a good
relationship with marketing.
I’m not sure I like the way all this is going.
♦
The following Monday, having slept through all of Sunday, I
stroll into the office late, hung-over and grouchy. Rebecca and Pam
and a couple of the other boilers are sitting around in tears.
Nothing unusual there—I figure that Derek has just blazed through
the department on one of his scorched-earth rampages, a
search-and-destroy mission because of an errant bar code on a
single, or a wrong release date on a poster. However, it is unusual
that
all
of them are crying. Then Rob Hastings comes towards
me. The clown looks genuinely shaken.
“What’s up?” I say.
“Haven’t you heard, man?”
“Heard what?”
He pulls me into Waters’ old office where a few wet-faced
secretaries are gathered round the TV. Paris, an underpass, a
mangled Mercedes, Kensington Palace, crowds of wailing tolers.
I hit the phones and make a few calls. Radio playlists are being
suspended and reconfigured, release dates are being put back and
cancelled. BMG are in trouble—the new Kylie LP, titled
Impossible Princess
, will have to be pulled, retitled and
re-artworked. Death in Vegas have had a record hauled off the radio
because of their name. The new Prodigy single is fucked because the
sleeve featured a crashed car.
It is a fucking nightmare. Thank Christ I don’t have a record
coming out in the next few weeks.
Parker-Hall and I go along to Trellick’s office. Ross is already
in there and we join him on the sofa as Trellick flips between CNN
and BBC. Peasants all over the country are losing their fucking
minds. In Newcastle, Milton Keynes, Coventry, losers are crying in
the fucking streets. A fat toler appears on the screen. Tears are
pouring down her face. Her face. Fuck me—it’s a real forty roll-ups
and a bottle of cheap vodka a day monstrosity, honeycombed with
broken blood vessels, fucked in from not having enough cash or
sense. “She…she…” the mad cow stammers, hardly able to get the
words out, snapped with grief, “…she done so
much good
for
people.” We fucking piss ourselves. It’s happening here too. Along
the corridor in accounts the secretaries are all snuffling and
comforting each other. It takes my breath away—genuine grief,
upset, over something which does not directly affect you in any way
whatsoever. But, a golden rule of showbiz states, whenever there is
a massive outpouring of collective emotion among the lower
classes—Christmas, the World Cup, summer holidays—there are records
to be sold and money to be made.
“Surely we want to be cashing in on all this?” Ross says. “A
tribute LP? A charity thing?”
Trellick thinks for a bit. “Nah,” he says finally, “too much
scrutiny. It’d be impossible to skim any cash off. Maybe in a year.
Anniversary thing…” He’s probably right, but it’s a pity because in
the past, thanks to a little creative accounting, we’ve been very
successful at skimming cash off of a couple of other charity
records we’ve been involved in.
“Yeah, not worth the grief,” I say.
“I dunno,” Parker-Hall says, lighting a cigarette, “the sales
would still count towards our market share, wouldn’t they?”
“Good point,” Trellick admits, nodding.
“Yeah, but,” I start to say, but Parker-Hall has the floor. He’s
talking about licensing, about appropriate tracks for a nation in
mourning, about marketing. Trellick and Ross are nodding away,
swept up with him. I sit there and read
Music Week
and get
angrier and angrier.
Trellick makes a few phone calls, but it turns out that it looks
like Elton’s doing something and he’s signed to Mercury so the
project will probably happen over there. “Fuck it,” Parker-Hall
says, “worth a pop. Wanna get lunch, James?”
“Sure,” Trellick says. I wait for Parker-Hall to extend the
invitation. He doesn’t.
“I’ve got to go,” I lie, “meeting in town.”
“Oh, Steven?” Parker-Hall says as I leave. I turn round and
without looking at me, not taking his eyes off the TV, he says,
“Can you make sure you get them demos off Coalition for me? That
band Rob was talking about? Thanks.”
I nod, turn, and walk on down the hallway. There is a roaring
noise in my ears, a metallic taste in my mouth, and I cannot see
properly.
♦
I drive through Stratford and Leytonstone—cancerous high streets
choked up with Pound Smasher! shops and Alabama Fried Chicken
dives—and take the M25 South.
I come along a flyover and, for a moment, the Saab is suspended
so high in the air that it feels like you are in a video game. On
my right, stretching back towards Docklands and the City, and on my
left, oozing out into Kent, is the nuclear winter of east
London—hundreds of square miles of power stations and freight
yards, pylons, construction sites and chemical plants, motorway and
flyover, ring road and tunnel, endless miles of red tail lights,
yellow headlights and sodium street lights. The air outside the
blue-tinted windows of the car is smoke, dust and dirt. Out in that
air, in grids and blocks, the lights are coming on in houses.
Houses
.
You realise that people actually have to live in among all this
and that east London is the bill, the tab that these cunts are
picking up so that you can live in west London.
I take a left onto the M20 and drive on towards Dover in the
dark. The guy—“Charlie”—meets me, as arranged, in the lounge of an
unbelievable pub on the Dover Road. He’s in his forties and
unshaven with stains (egg? curry?) on his cheap, hobbled sweater.
It has taken me several weeks to meet Charlie. Weeks of furtive
emailing—from a dummy Hotmail account, set up under a false name
and accessed only from the computers in a random, disparate chain
of internet cafes—to get to this point.
After the briefest of drinks and a minute of the most innocuous
conversation (literally “Wot about them Arsenal then?”), we
exchange envelopes. The one I hand to Charlie contains an awful lot
of fifty-pound notes. The far slimmer envelope he hands me contains
only a computer disk.
I will not look at what is on the disk until later—again, in a
remote corner of a remote Internet cafe—and even then I will only
do so for a split second, just to make sure. After that I will
never look at it again.
The contents of the disk are, as I’d been promised, beyond
description.
ThirteenRoni Size wins the Mercury Music Prize. Dave
Gilmour leaves Island Records to become Head of
A
&
R at Independiente. Lots of interest in some
Jocky band called Idlewild. Phil Howells over at London Records
signs Asian Dub Foundation. He says, “I’d have to be mad not to
have signed them.” Mercury launches this pop singer called Thomas
Jules Stock. And ‘Candle in the Wind’, ‘Candle in the Wind’,
‘Candle in the fucking Wind
’…
“
I’m basically in the David Geffen
business
.”David Geffen
I
t was Bournemouth
last year, so it’s Brighton again this year.
The TV set in my room says that the Grand Hotel welcomes ‘Mr S.
Stalefox’. I pull back the net curtains to check the view again, to
check that it really has happened.
It has: brick walls, heating ducts, pipes. This is my ‘sea
view’. I am overcome by another seismic jolt of fury. How could
Rebecca have allowed this to happen? I try her mobile again and it
just goes straight to message for the umpteenth time. Hatefully I
picture her; on the train down here, or in the bar at Victoria,
drinking wine and gossiping with the other sows while I am forced
to live through this.
They’ll be excited, of course, all the PAs and marketing
assistants love the company conference. It’s an excuse to spend a
couple of days wallowing in a five-star hotel, getting manicures
and facials and fuck knows what by day, then agonising over what to
wear in the evening before spending the early hours of the morning
sweating over some guy’s coke-broke prick.
My rage only increases the moment Trellick—wearing a dressing
gown, his hair wet, his mobile cradled in his shoulder—opens his
door. The chinless bastard has lucked into some kind of suite, with
double French windows opening out onto a balcony overlooking the
seafront. “Fuck you,” I say, taking two Scotches from his
minibar.
I take a seat by the open window, the chill September breeze
filling the room as Trellick strides around, simultaneously talking
on his mobile, smoking a cigarette and putting on his suit. I’m
wearing a suit too, by the way. I flip through Trellick’s copy of
Music Week
. As has been known for a couple of weeks now,
Neil Ferris, recently installed as MD over at EMI, has been hiring
and firing people like a madman. He’s made Tris Penna Head of
A
&
R. Incredibly Nick Robinson, the previous Head
of A
&
R, has not been fired. He’s been demoted.
He’s going to work under Penna. I mean, where’s your fucking
self-respect? Wouldn’t you just top yourself?
“What’s your problem, loser?” Trellick asks, hanging up.
“Nothing,” I say. “When did you get here?”
“Just now.”
“Anyone around downstairs?”
“I saw your mate,” (‘your mate’ is now the official euphemism
for Parker-Hall), “in the bar, talking to Derek.”
“Oh yeah?” I say casually. The networking little prick.
The objective of the annual company conference is
straightforward enough: you gather together all the sales reps from
all over the country—along with key players from retailers like Our
Price, Virgin, HMV and the like—and everyone from the label above
the rank of janitor, you bang them all up in some five-star
atrocity by the sea for a few days, and bombard them with speeches
about how great we all are and show them videos and presentations
of your new acts.