Authors: John Niven
“Hey, Stelfox, how’s tricks?” he says.
“Oi oi,” Isay.
“Listen, I been meaning to call you. Got a bit of a band coming
together just now that’s right up your
Strasse
, mate.”
“Yeah?”
“Fucking yeah. Four birds. Girl power. Limit.”
Christ, I bet no one else is thinking that, the week the Spice
Girls go to N°1 in the States. “Any good?” I say.
“Fucking useless at the minute, mate, but you’d do the lot of
them. We’re working on it. One of em’s got sumfin.”
“Yeah? What they called?”
“Get this—Songbirds. Gerrit?”
“Yeah.”
“Right, do you want a fucking nose-up or what?”
Girl power. Do me a fucking favour. However, there’s going to be
a bunch of these whores having it away over the next couple of
years. No question. One thing you learn when you’re in the business
of selling utter shite to the Great British Public is that there’s
really no bottom to where they’ll go. Shit food, shit TV, shit
bands, shit films, shit houses. There is absolutely no fucking
bottom with this stuff. The shittier you can make it—a bad
photocopy of a bad photocopy of what was a shit idea in the first
place—the more they’ll eat it up with a fucking big spoon, from
dawn till dusk, from now until the end of time. It’s too good.
♦
Come the early hours we wind up at the Met Bar and then up into
the hotel above, to Parker-Hall’s suite for his
‘after-after-party’. We’re all chang’d up to the eyeballs by this
point and listening to a chang’d-up Parker-Hall go through a
variant of his ‘How-I-Did-It’ speech for, surely, the billionth
time tonight. Now and again Chalmers, Crush’s Product Manager, will
boringly interject details about the marketing plan, how big the TV
ad spend is going to be, the increased poster campaign, who they’re
getting to direct the next video. Chalmers is just one of the
thousand fathers suddenly lining up to stamp their parentage on
Crush’s success. “We’re looking at doing thirty thousand albums a
week from here on,” he says.
I’m trying not to hear this. The expression on my face is
pleasant while, inside, I feel like the village girl as she stares
at the face of the tenth soldier in the raping queue—blood on her
thighs and half a pint of semen already up her.
I’m not
here
, I tell myself.
I’m walking in a forest. I’m walking in
a forest
…
The room is crowded—industry, random girls and a few fairly
well-known musicians. Trellick is sitting on the ledge of the tall
windows which overlook Hyde Park, arms folded, nodding earnestly as
some girl talks shit to him. A few feet away from Trellick, Damon
Albarn is engaged in exactly the same sort of conversation. I tune
back in. Parker-Hall is telling us, “…the fucking mixes were all
over the shop.” I says to Flood and Moulder, “Listen, cunts…”
“Excuse me,” I say.
In the bathroom I sit down on the toilet, put my head between my
legs, and take deep, steady breaths. I’m sweating.
Thirty
thousand a week. That fluky little prick. That chancing mockney
wanker
. In Mission Control there’s a red wash of colour, alarms
sounding, the screens all flashing deranged, bloody images of
Parker-Hall and Chalmers being forced to gobble and bum each other
before a shotgun is slipped in each of their mouths and,
simultaneously, their heads fly apart in a pinkish mist of viscera.
The technicians are thumping their monitors, twiddling knobs, but
they can’t shake the pictures.
I splash some water on my face and hold my wrists under the cold
tap for a long time and finally I start to feel better. I’m
scraping some powder out from the wrap and carving out a
heart-stopping elephant’s leg when I become aware of a gentle
tapping at the door. I open it a crack and squint out, trying to
focus into the dark hallway. “Steven?” a girl says.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Anita. From BMG? Can I come in?”
I pull her in and point her towards the coke.
Maybe fifteen minutes later, as we’re leaving, I take a quick
look around for Trellick. I wander along a hallway and try the door
to one of the bedrooms. It opens silently and I hear a girl’s voice
breathlessly chanting a mantra of “
oh fuck, oh fuck, oh
fuck
”. I peer in. A huge bed is lit by soft halogen spots. On
the bed Ellie Crush is naked on her hands and knees. There is a
black kid—one of the singers in this new boy band Leamington has
signed—crouched behind her, doing something to her with his fist.
As I softly close the door something silver flashes under the amber
halogen glow.
Yes, twenty-one-year-old Ellie Crush had definitely found a safe
place to put the statuette for Best British Breakthrough
Artist.
♦
“The thing is,” she says, “no one over there takes my opinion
seriously.” Anita and I are at opposite ends of my sofa, an
oversized number from Heal’s in heavy caramel cloth. A gold disc
for some dance record I signed, flecked and streaked with cocaine,
lies between us. Jeff Buckley warbles soft in the background as we
discuss her career prospects in A
&
R. Given that
she has none it is a remarkable tribute to both my patience and the
focusing power of the drug that we’ve managed to keep the
conversation on the rails for a good three hours. Outside,
horribly, dawn is beginning to crinkle through Maida Vale. The
clock is ticking, but there’s still some crap I have to listen
to.
“Oh, I’m sure they do,” I say, standing to pour cold shots of
Stoli and then flopping back down a little nearer to her. When we
got back, remembering that she’s really an indie kid, I quickly
washed and changed my shirt and tie for a Radiohead T–shirt.
“No they don’t. I was the first one saying we should sign Mansun
the other year. Look at what that turned into.”
“Really?” I say.
“Oh, there’s been loads,” she says and goes onto reel off a list
of bands she loves, all either total or demi-turkeys, while I chop
more lines out.
“Well,” I say, handing her the furled twenty, “what are your
plans? Where do you want to go from here?” She stands up and bends
over right in front of me to snort her line. Her rump—which is near
perfect by the way—strains against the tight, shiny dress. I
wonder—knickers? thong? nothing? The slit falls open to the top of
her thigh, laying bare a yard of brown flesh. “Ahh…thanks,” she
says, throwing her head back. She sits down beside me and passes
the gold disc. “I’ve been A
&
R coordinator for
three years now,” she continues, snuffling, “I could do it in my
fucking sleep. I mean, I’m nearly
twenty-three
, Steven. What
am I doing?” She looks at me with sad, damp eyes. Her breasts—which
are pushed tight together by one of these new superbras I’ve been
reading so much about, some triumph of geometric wiring and
tit-engineering—are straining hard against the gold-speckled satin
of her dress. She’s really packed into it. I am so thick, so angry,
with lust that, just for a moment, I think I may attack her.
“Well, listen,” I say, “off the record?” She nods, wide-eyed,
and I realise that I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to say
next. But it’s no problem. I lie constantly, I lie all the time.
The very fabric of my daily existence from breakfast until bedtime,
from toast until tranquillisers, is a finely woven torrent of utter
shite. So I know, I’m reasonably confident, that when I start
speaking the words, the lies will tumble from my mouth and arrange
themselves into a convincing sentence that will take me nearer to
what I want. “Well,” I say, “we’re about to promote Darren to
Junior A
&
R. He doesn’t know that yet so you
can’t tell anyone.” She nods solemnly. “So we’re going to be hiring
one, possibly two, new scouts sometime in the next few months. I
think you’d be perfect, but the thing is,” I say, completely
free-forming now, “it’d probably mean a drop in salary.”
“I don’t care about the money,” she cuts in quickly, leaning
towards me, smelling of perfume, sweat, cigarettes and vodka, “I
mean, you only get one life and you have to make sure that whatever
you do makes you happy. I’ve always loved music and I know that, if
someone would just give me a shot at it, I’d make a brilliant
scout. I spend half my life going to gigs anyway. You couldn’t name
a new band in London I haven’t seen in the past twelve months. The
Audience, Bellatrix, Cuff, AC Acoustics, Basement Jaxx…Even when I
was a kid, I’d listen to the
Top Forty
every Sunday because
I wanted to hear what records were going up, what was going down
and all that. I’ve got my own account at Rough Trade. I pay for it
myself. BMG won’t let me have one because I’m not technically
A
&
R staff—hey, I’ve got perfect pitch too, did
you know that?—and I’m so sick of it there that I’ve been thinking
about just packing it all in and going travelling. A couple of my
friends are out in Goa right now and sometimes I just think, “Fuck
it, why spend the winter here? You’re worth more than this.” I
mean, what am I doing? Booking studio time and booking cabs and
hiking bloody tapes around London and all that crap. My dad died
last year and we never really got on and that really made me take a
look at things because at the end of the day if you’re not happy
then, basically, what’s the point? Do you know what I mean?”
“Anita,” I say hoarsely, “can I suck your tits?”
♦
Fucking cocaine.
Two hours later and she’s
still
trying to mangle my cock
into something in the vicinity of a hard-on. We’re both naked,
slick and salty with sweat, and she’s going at it like a
demon
: flicking at the tip with her tongue, nibbling the
shaft with her teeth, blowing on the helmet gently, viciously
gobbling up and down the whole thing, kissing it as softly and
tenderly as a mother soothing a crying infant, biting and gnawing
on it like an angry pit bull, spitting on it, greasing it with baby
oil, making direct eye contact and moaning with pleasure as she
sucks, rubbing my cock greedily against her clit, pussy-lips and
arsehole, and sliding it between her heavy, lubed breasts. At one
point she crams the entire package—prick, balls, the lot—into her
mouth and churns them crazily like an overdriven washing machine.
Finally she goes absolutely bananas and simply begins furiously
wanking me off. For a long, sorry time—teeth gritted, sweat flying
from her—she pounds her clenched fist up and down on the melted
ribbon of plasticine I have instead of a cock. Somehow, somewhere
into about the fifteenth minute of this (by which point she’s
emitting random screams of pain, her arm just an insane blur, like
one of those machines they use to shake paint in DIY shops), my
cock stiffens minutely, going from the consistency of—say—jelly
into Play-Doh. As she eagerly, desperately, swivels a leg across my
chest in an attempt to mount me, I shudder, moan, and
ejaculate.
Well, ‘ejaculate’ is probably over-egging it. ‘Ejaculate’ is
like using ‘explosion’ to describe what happens when you pierce the
foil lid on a jar of instant coffee. What actually happens is that
I scream and a drop of semen the size of a grain of rice seeps out
the end of my cock. It’s not enough to even dribble down onto her
hand, the hand which is—still!—frantically trying to guide me into
her. I roll over and gratefully pass out.
♦
When I wake up she’s gone. Horribly, inevitably, I have a
raging, titanium erection. I roll the sheets back and look at it.
My relationship with my prick is beginning to resemble the kind of
friendship you have with an old, alcoholic college pal—completely
unreliable, always turning up at the worst possible time and costs
you a
lot
of money. Yet you’re stuck with him. I stare him
down. “What the fuck do you want? You’re
late
,” I say. I
want to punch him out.
But, with heavy heart and thick blood, I root around on the
floor, pluck my wallet from my trousers, and begin dialling the
number of a local escort agency. “
Aww
,” I think, folding a
cool, soothing fist around my radioactive helmet, “
how could I
stay mad at you?
”
♦
A couple of weeks after The Brits we have an emergency marketing
meeting, to get a plot in place for Rudi’s record. Present are
Ross, one of Ross’s product-manager muppets, Dunn, the TV
promotions girls Hannah and Clare (fucked them both), Barry and
Alex, the club promotions kids, who will try to get every DJ in
every filthy, tacky toler-infested nightclub in the country playing
the record, Bill, who deals with manufacturing, Suzy the press
officer (nearly fucked her, blow job) and Nicky. As always I find
myself angry at how fucking ugly Nicky is. Usually Ross would chair
this meeting, but Derek, sensing a big hit he wants to get his
fingerprints on, has decided to sit in.
“Now,” Derek booms, gesturing grandly towards me, “Steven has
recently come back from MIDEM where, I’m pleased to say, he signed
the hottest club record of the whole convention.” There is a round
of applause and some whooping from Barry and Alex, who already know
the record, Barry even implying he had tried to play it to me
before Christmas. I move over to the stereo. “This is the club
mix,” I say cueing the track up, “I’m working on a radio edit.” I
am, of course, doing fuck all. One of Rudi’s boys will do the radio
mix, but these clowns don’t know that. Once the thing is a huge hit
it will be, naturally, ‘my’ radio mix that saved the day. I crank
the volume all the way to the right, hit ‘play’ on the CD, and bass
flattens the gold discs and posters against the walls. Everyone
nods along.
You’d think you wouldn’t have to bother with all this, wouldn’t
you? The process of selling the fucking record to the people in
your own company. But you do. Yesterday I picked off Dunn and
Ross—playing each of them the record in their offices and telling
them both only they could make it a hit. I mean, if you worked at
Baked Beans Inc and your job was marketing beans and the guy who
made the fucking beans came in with some hot new beans, he wouldn’t
have to do a sales job on you, would he? He wouldn’t have to take
you out and get you drunk and slip you a taste of the beans and
really try to convince you they were good beans, would he? He’d
just say, “Here’s the new beans I’ve made—which is my job—now sell
the fucking things. Because that’s your job.” But not in the record
industry, oh no. Everyone’s got a fucking opinion, everyone wants
to be an A
&
R guy and—most
importantly—
everyone wants you to fucking fail
. Do any of
the poor cunts around this table (some of their faces—Hannah,
Nicky—now twitching with horror as the chorus unfolds) really need
to be seeing me striding around the office with a N°1 record going
on? Do they fuck. I’m kind of unbearable when I’m having a hit.