Authors: John Niven
Breathing hard, I rub my pulsing temples and look around.
There’s a pool of vomit on the floor, a rusty streak of blood on
the white sheets, pieces of glass from a broken champagne bottle
scattered all over the place, and a woman, a hooker I guess,
looking at me from the bed. Other than that the room seems to be
completely normal.
The hooker—who is black and fat—starts talking to me in French.
I don’t get all of it, but the gist seems to be that I still owe
her money from the night before, for some unspeakable extra I must
have made her perform. I ignore her, lost in wondering exactly how
I’m going to pin the blame for us not signing Rudi’s track on
Darren. The phone rings and I snatch it up.
“Hello?”
“Schteeven? It is Rudi.” He sounds formal, almost stern, and
immediately I know it is bad.
“Rudi, listen, I—”
“I know. I got your message this morning. I am sorry to tell you
this, but I have done the deal with Sony.”
Fucking Nazi cunt fuck shit. “But, Rudi, I told you I—”
“Come on, Schteeven, we are big boys. These things happen.”
I close my eyes and ask him, “Have you signed the contract
yet?”
“As good as. We have a verbal agreement.”
Thank Christ. “How much?”
“Schteeven, it doesn’t matter now. I shook hands on it with
Graham last night. As you know, I am a gentleman. A man of my
word.”
“Come on, Rudi, how much?”
“There will be other records, my friend.”
“
How much?!
”
“Sixty,” he says, almost sounding embarrassed.
“I’ll see you in half an hour,” I say, hanging up.
The hooker gets to her feet, wincing, and tiptoes gingerly
towards the bathroom. She’s clearly having some trouble walking,
and I notice a couple more streaks of dried blood on the backs of
her legs and buttocks. Her tone of voice is properly angry now and
it dawns on me that I must have been going absolutely bananas last
night.
♦
The Barracuda is a Cannes institution. You go into the main
bar—a black, windowless hole just off the Croisette—and drink
yourself senseless for a few hours, ordering bottles of champagne
at two hundred quid a pop, before asking for the ‘special vintage’.
Your credit card is whisked through the machine and you are charged
for another bottle that doesn’t appear. Instead, you get ushered
through to one of the little back rooms where one of the waitresses
hunkers down and slides your balls into her mouth, the waitresses
being, in fact, top-notch ostros. Hookers. The Barracuda is the
music industry in microcosm: the guys are out front dancing around
with champagne glasses on their heads while the girls are chained
up in the back, gargling with spunk. The best part of it is that
the credit-card receipt still reads ‘champagne’, rather than
‘vicious blow job’. Consequently, every MIDEM there is a steady
flow of company plastic over the Barracuda’s bar. Last year, when
Trellick finally left the place after a seven-hour session,
staggering into the dawn clutching a bottle of bubbly and a sheaf
of Amex slips totalling three and a half grand, the only people
left were the cleaners and a few ‘waitresses’ rubbing their aching
jaws. As the madame held the door open for him she playfully thrust
her hand between his legs, grabbed the aching, drained raisins he
had instead of balls, and huskily intoned, “
Sexos
machines!
”
“I am sorry for the, ah, mix-up, Schteeven,” Rudi is saying.
“Hey, don’t worry about it. We got it fixed.”
“I know. You know I always want—ach! Softly, baby, softly!”
“I understand, Rudi, Graham made you an offer and, ah…”
“
Ja, ja!
I was only trying to…ach, ah
gut
!”
Rudi and I—both paralytic—are sprawled on facing sofas in one of
the back rooms drinking champagne. I take a long swig and look
down: an absolutely gorgeous French girl of maybe twenty-one is
trying to take her tonsils out with my cock. She looks up and makes
perfect eye contact with me for a second or two before her dark
brown eyes flip upwards in their sockets and she moans softly, as
though my sour prick tasted like cherries and ice cream. Through
the beaded curtains that serve as a door we can hear the roar from
the bar drifting down the hallway.
I lie back and shut my eyes. We closed the deal with Graham
Westbourne calling Rudi’s suite the whole time going nuts and
upping his offer. Trellick has the signed contracts in his
briefcase and Darren has been comprehensively briefed on the need
for utmost secrecy as to why my indecision has cost us thirty
thousand quid.
Actually, we’re now in kind of scary territory—a proper bidding
war and a sixty-grand deal for a one-off single means you have to
have a proper hit. Number 18 is no use to anyone. This stupid,
dreadful, novelty record will have to be top five, minimum, for me
to walk away with any kind of aplomb. Top five and we’ll make the
cash back purely from licensing the utter piece of shit onto dozens
of
Now That’s What I Call A Total Insult To Fucking Humanity,
Vol. 32
type compilations.
But this is all to come. Right now, tonight, we got the record
and the competition didn’t. This can be savoured for a day or two
before you have to worry about turning the fucking thing into a
hit.
I become aware of Rudi, only a few feet away, chanting “
Ja!
Ja! Ja!
” as he starts to come. I sit up and watch him roar a
final “
JA!!!
” as he blasts a jet of hot Teutonic semen into
the bobbing French head, which flies back as though a shotgun has
gone off in its mouth: “Ahhgroooughh!” she says.
After a moment Rudi gets up and zips up. We chink flutes over
the head of my girl and I watch him—this gentleman, this man of his
word—tooling off through the beaded curtains, wiping his forehead
with a handkerchief, while his waitress crawls to the corner where,
retching and coughing, she spits his cum into a wicker waste-paper
basket.
Going home in the morning, I think.
FourThanks to the Spice Girls, Virgin has an 88.9%
share of the singles market. Mark and Lard are confirmed as the new
hosts of the Radio 1 breakfast show. EMI’s share price is in the
toilet. Blue Boy and Vitro are hot new acts. NoDoubt have a N°1
single. Alan McGee is preparing to launch the debut album by 3
Colours Red. He says, “By the second or third record we’ll sell
five million. I’m serious. They’re going to be huge.” Some guys get
done for killing that black kid, Stephen something. The Brit Awards
happen
.
“
A woman’s two cents is worth two cents in the
music business
.”Loretta Lynn
E
veryone is up and
out of their seats and table-hopping now. The thrum of conversation
is rising and no one is listening to the Bee Gees, who, incredibly,
are
still
onstage about thirty yards away, cranking out the
greatest hits for the tolers watching at home. Their
nerve-shredding harmonies keen out over the disinterested crowd of
executives and flutter up into the darkness, disappearing into the
steel-and-concrete roof of Earls Court. It’ll probably sound fine
on television though.
I lean back in my chair, away from my cold, untouched
dinner—salmon, broccoli and new potatoes—and pinch the bridge of my
nose. I inhale hard and there’s a pop in my ears as the rock of
coke dislodges and shoots down the back of my throat, pleasingly
strong and bitter. I loosen my tie and wash the glob of chang down
with lukewarm Chardonnay and pretend to listen to Desoto while I
scan the crowd for someone better to talk to: Lucian Grange from
Polydor, Keith Blackhurst from Deconstruction, Nancy Berry from
Virgin, Colin Bell from London Records and Matt Jagger.
Ferdy Unger-Hamilton from Go! Beat is talking to Derek, Pete
Tong and some guy from Island. Unger-Hamilton has his arm around
Gabrielle, her statuette for Best British Female Artist on the
table in front of them. Rob Stringer is laughing his head off as he
talks to one of the guys from the Manic Street Preachers, their
awards on the table next to them. Frank Skinner, Vinnie Jones,
Simon Cowell from BMG, some soap star, one of the
Trainspotting
guys and Geri Halliwell. The singer from Kula
Shaker and Sony’s Muff Winwood. Geri from the Spice Girls totters
by, a bottle of champagne in one hand and the cheeks of her
(massive) arse spilling out of the bottom of the ludicrous Union
Jack minidress she wore for their performance. I wave to some girl
I vaguely recognise, Anita or something. I think she’s an
A
&
R coordinator over at BMG. She’s wearing a
tight black dress, kind of Chinese-style with gold patterning,
split right to the top of her thigh and slashed deeply between her
breasts. Her hair is cut in a short bob. Normally she dresses kind
of indie, I guess—T–shirts, trainers, jeans. She waves back, blowy
me a kiss. Hello.
“Oi, loser!” Trellick claps me on the leg, shouting over the
music. “
Listen
. This is good.” I turn back and lean in
between Trellick and Desoto. Behind them Ross—our Head of
Marketing—and Waters are heckling the Bee Gees. Ross is in his
early thirties, tall with a businesslike crew cut.
“Right. Strap yourself in,” Desoto says, leaning forward.
Desoto—a lawyer, a friend of Trellick’s—is coke-sweating, his
rugby-player bulk straining against the seams of his suit. His fine
brown hair is shorter now than it used to be. Until a few years
back he kept it pretty long but he felt, rightly, as he approached
fifty, that it was getting a bit undignified.
Desoto went to Harrow, then the Bar, then, briefly, the City.
When he figured out that life in the square mile meant that you had
to get up in the morning and actually work for a living he soon
gravitated towards music industry law. He made a fortune. Then he
lost it.
“A couple of weeks ago I put an ad in
Music Week
for a
new PA.”
“You’re firing Sophie?”
“No.
Listen
,” Trellick says.
“I put the ad in and made it non-specific,” Desoto continues,
“it just said ‘major music industry lawyer seeks PA blah blah
blah’. The response is Off. The. Fucking. Scale. I get something
like fifty replies in forty-eight hours.”
“Sen-say-shunal,” says Trellick.
“So I go through the CVs, checking out the dates of birth to
make sure they’re all under thirty, and ring six of them back.”
“But you’re flying blind at this point, no?” I say.
“Correctos, but you have to figure that out of six at least one
of them is going to be doable, no?” We both nod. “So, I arrange for
them to come in for interviews, different days, all at the close of
business, around five thirty. Now,” he pushes his glass towards
Trellick, who is pouring the three of us more champagne, “I kick
off by saying to them that I’m
really
sorry but it looks
like I won’t have a job to offer any more.”
“Why not?”
“Oh,” he waves a hand, “because my original PA just decided that
day to stay on.” A bit of bread flies past me. Ross.
“But,” I intone slowly, beginning to see where Desoto is going
with this.
“You’ve got it.
But
, she’s probably going to leave in
about six months, so if they’d still like to have a chat, then in
the future who knows?”
“Good work. Continue,” says Trellick, emptying the bottle and
upending it in the ice bucket.
“By this time it’s after six so I—”
“Sorry,” I interrupt, “what’s the quality like?”
“
Astonishingly
high. Out of six there’s only one monster,
two are doable and three of them are sen-say-shunal.”
“Fucking result.”
“So, it’s after six now—” Suddenly, thankfully, the Bee Gees
finish playing and Ben Elton walks back on and starts crapping
away. Desoto lowers his voice a little. “It’s after six, so I play
the ‘shall we go over to the pub for a chat?’ card. Not one of
them,
not one
, says no.”
“So, how many did you fuck?”
“Three. Two of them played the boyfriend card early on. The
others, it was four or five vodka tonics, back to my place—bosh.
Thank you very much and see you later Sooty.”
“You didn’t even have to buy dinner?” I ask, genuinely
impressed.
“Once. One of them wanted dinner.”
“How much was the ad?” asks Trellick.
“Couple of hundred.”
“And you got laid three times?”
“Correctos,” says Desoto, trying to hail a waiter.
“Bargain of the fucking millennium,” Trellick says.
“Couldn’t you get sued?” I ask.
“Bollocks. What am I going to get sued for?”
“Fuck knows. Misrepresentation?”
“Listen, clown, I told them very clearly, upfront, “I’m really
sorry,
there’s no job
.” They’re not doing me thinking it’ll
get them anywhere. In fact, one of them actually
thanked
me
for ‘being so honest’!” The idea of a girl existing somewhere who
is dense enough to believe that Desoto is honest is so lunatic that
Trellick and I both burst out laughing. “Two hours later, I’m doing
her up the fucking Gary.” Desoto drains his flute and thumps it
down, looking very pleased with himself.
“Did you wear a condom?” I ask.
“Oh yeah,” says Desoto, with no sincerity whatsoever as he leans
back in his chair to survey the room.
Desoto only got divorced last year. It was a blinder. He’d
packed the family off to Italy for a holiday, telling the wife he
had to stay on in London for a few days. Work. He’d meet up with
them. The wife, nanny and kids fuck off out of it and Desoto gets
stuck into a forty-eight hour crack bender.
He hadn’t got the wife’s messages—the unacceptable hotel, the
lost luggage, the heat, the kid’s illness—because he’d lost his
mobile somewhere along the line. Nor did he check the home
messages. He was so cracked up and the music was so loud, that he
didn’t hear the front door, then the feet on the stairs.