Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by John Niven
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Read on for an extract from Kill ’Em All
Copyright
About the Book
‘The filthiest, blackest, most shocking, most hilarious debut novel I’ve read in years’ India Knight
Meet Steven Stelfox. It’s London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine, searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification. But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.
About the Author
John Niven was born in Irvine, Ayrshire. He read English Literature at Glasgow University and spent the next ten years working in the UK music industry. He has written for Word, Esquire, Arena and Q. He is the author of six novels including The Second Coming and Straight White Male. He lives in Buckinghamshire.
Also By John Niven
Music from Big Pink
The Amateurs
The Second Coming
Cold Hands
Straight White Male
To Helen
Read on for an exciting extract from the sequel to Kill Your Friends.
ONE
Hertfordshire, England. Friday 20 January 2017, 6.40 a.m.
It is too cold in the Maybach.
I tell Grahame to turn the A/C off. Cold outside too, winter fog in the black night, a light sleet tipping against the smoked glass as the fields slide silently by, the headlights picking out the words ‘Luton Airport, 3 miles’ and then the sign vanishing behind us as we come off the M1. I’m in the back, reading the newspapers (the inauguration, later today) and the trades – Billboard, Variety, Music Week – on my phone. I note with neither joy nor rancour that on the singles chart it has been a good week for the Chainsmokers, Ariana Grande and Bruno Mars. Bad week (again) for Unigram, whose share price has (somehow) managed to drop even further. The lead story on the cover of Billboard is about Unigram’s biggest artist, Lucius Du Pre, who is beginning rehearsals for his comeback shows this summer – twenty nights at Madison Square Garden in New York, then twenty at London’s O2 Arena.
There was a time, a very long time ago, when reading the trades was a weekly source of anxiety. Colleagues and competitors rising (traumatic) and falling (pleasurable). Firings and hirings. Now? Today? It’s almost like reading reports on a battle whose front lines are far away from me. In another country. On another planet.
A quick recap, in case you’re in the Taliban or something, living in a cave, making nail bombs and inserting yourself into goats. This is from my Wikipedia entry: ‘Following a successful career in the music industry as an A&R manager, in 2003 Stelfox created the ABN television talent show American Pop Star, on which he initially acted as one of the judges.’ Yeah, and it was all good too, until this kid who thought he was Jesus took the whole brand down the shitter in the US. You saw the show. Trailer-park fucks performed Mariah Carey songs for the pleasure of other trailer-park fucks who used up their welfare cheques phoning in to vote for them. We licensed the rights like crazy – at one point we were running in thirty-two countries – until we sold the format in late 2011 and I cashed out to the tune of two hundred million dollars. That was six years ago. Semi-retirement at fortytwo. What’s it been like? you ask. What do I get up to? How am I living? Well, take the past month …
In mid-December I left the house in freezing London (7,500 square feet in Holland Park) to the staff (Roberta my London housekeeper, Grahame who is driving right now) and we (we being me, a couple of girls I know and my mates Hedge Fund Paul and Investment Banking Mel) took a private jet to Barbados, where we boarded the yacht Mistrial. It’s the second time I’ve rented it and it’s really something. You should see it. Just under two hundred feet long, seven bedrooms, including (for me) the huge master suite, space for up to fifteen crew, gymnasium, jacuzzi, 5,000-mile range, max speed of sixteen knots – perfect for touring the Med or the Caribbean.
In Barbados we larged it in the usual spots with the usual suspects – in and out of Sandy Lane, the Cliff, Cin Cin, the Tides and Daphne’s with Tod, Wayne, Philip, Simon, Lev, Vlad, Roman and a revolving, interchangeable cast of TIBs (Top International Boilers) – the Kellys and Meghans and Svetlanas and Brooks and Whatevers. (The girls all share some common characteristics: none of them over thirty, all with giant racks, tiny waists and the ability to laugh long and hard at our jokes. The guys all have something in common too. Can you guess what it is? That’s right – no one is fucking poor.)
After a week or so of this utter nonsense we upped anchor and cruised to Grand Cayman – via St Lucia, Montserrat and Turks and Caicos – where I had some business to take care of. Your procedure on all of these islands you visit will be much the same. Drop anchor and then speedboat (the Mistrial has a VanDutch. Ten-seater, it can do 60 mph easy) into town for a long, boozy lunch at the hottest spot available. While doing this you will attract the eye of many of the girls who haunt the cool restaurants around the harbour and who have watched you anchor and come ashore. Back to the boat for an afternoon nap and then maybe some swimming over the side, some board games, bugger about on the jet skis, before the cocktails start on deck at 7 p.m. A few of those and we’re into the VanDutch again and over to town for dinner at another local sex pit. After that there’ll be a nightclub where we’ll pick up a few of the superyacht groupies who’ve been eyeing us all night and then back to the yacht where we’ll pump the tunes on deck and party until 3 or 4 a.m. when you slope off downstairs with whoever. You’ll wake up in the early afternoon, one of the crew will take the TIBs back to shore and you’ll do the whole thing all over again.
After a solid fortnight of this I actually quite enjoyed getting to the Caymans and taking care of business for a couple of days. Edgar, head of the team who look after my accounting, had flown out from London with some forms that needed signing in connection with the several companies I have in Grand Cayman. Of course Cayman isn’t a tax shelter any more. How dare you. They’ve taken to calling themselves an ‘international finance centre’. Which is great. It’s like Ian Huntley calling himself a ‘bathing coordinator’. Sometimes, when I think of the schools, the hospitals and the roads that aren’t getting their piece of my cash, I swear to God, it’s all I can do not to get my cock out and start wanking. Do you pay tax? I’m guessing you do. You’re probably paying somewhere between 25 and 45 per cent of the disgraceful pittance you call an income. In fiscal 2015–2016 I paid tax at a rate of roughly 12 per cent. It’s too much of course. Every January I find myself screaming at Edgar, ‘The cunts want how fucking much?’
But there is no tax here in Grand Cayman. None. You get to keep all your money and pass it down as you see fit. It is the ultimate expression of trickle-down. How’s that working out for the indigenous population you ask? Well, 40 per cent of the toerags live in poverty and a packet of fish fingers will cost you eight and a half quid. What a fucking result.
Take a look at your life. Go on. Your gaff. The clothes you wear. The restaurants you eat in. The holidays you take. Pretty good, eh? You’re not doing too badly.
Mate, you’re nothing.
In the world of pure money, your life is a urinal. A human toilet. Your very existence a suicide job. The average UK salary is twenty-eight grand a year. I made twenty times this betting against the pound before Brexit. I made even more than that with a single bet on the US election. Why? How did I know to do this? How did I pull these rabbits out the hat while you’re sat there scratching your horrific balls on your pleather sofa, ringing Domino’s for an American Paedophile with hot-dog crust while your monstrous beastwife lumbers around in her jeggings, her feet creaking and cracking on your millimetre-thick laminate wood floor, her IMAX-sized fucking chobble getting in the way of the single most valuable asset you own: your massive plasma-screen TV? (Doubtless bought on credit from some high street den called TolerHouse! at an interest rate of 3,000 per cent per annum.) I pulled this off because I learned one very important thing in the music industry, something gleaned from two decades of pushing reeking musical log after reeking musical log down the throats of idiots, something that has stood me in very good stead in the past year. It is this:
Never overestimate the taste of the general public.
Music, TV, movies, furniture, food, architecture, politics – there is absolutely no depth to which those cunts will not sink. They will willingly vote themselves into living in an extreme, real-life version of The Road for eternity for the chance to say ‘fuck all Pakis’ once. Where there’s that kind of thinking going on, there’s always cash to be made.
Anyway, we spent a few days in the Caymans before boarding the jet back to Heathrow, where the plan was to hang out in London before the traditional end-of-January skiing trip to Courchevel with a few of the guys I used to work with in the music industry. (The successful ones of course: not the ones who went mad, or broke, or into rehab.) But then this plan was interrupted by what can only be described as a distress call. From Trellick.
You’ll remember James Trellick. Lawyer.
We came up together, back in the nineties. Trellick is now managing director of Unigram in Los Angeles. We stay in touch, celebratory emails when a mutual adversary is publicly destroyed, the odd lunch or dinner when he’s in London or I’m out there. We lived near each other in Beverly Hills for a while, back in the noughties, when I was still doing the show. Now you’d always have used one word to describe Trellick, that product of Eton and Oxford: ‘unflappable’. Not last night. Last night Trellick was distinctly … flapped. He couldn’t go into it on the phone, couldn’t put anything in writing, but it was urgent enough that he wanted me in LA this morning. Urgent enough that he agreed to my enormous consultancy fee just to take a look at his problem. Urgent enough that it awakened something within me that very rarely gets an outing these days: genuine curiosity.
‘Here we go, boss,’ Grahame says from the driver’s seat.
9 I look up to see the lights of Luton Airport coming up ahead. I picture what will be happening inside it. Tattooed mums and dads punching their screaming kids around KFC. Fights and rows in the two-mile-long queues. Crazed Arsenal fans smashing back pints of Tits in the Great British Boozer at seven o’clock in the morning, all of them stunned that their quid now gets them about half a euro, none of them having seen that coming when they proudly ticked the box marked ‘LEAVE’. Right at the last moment, when I’ve had just enough time to convince myself of an alternative life fantasy where we actually drive up to Luton Airport and I have to walk into the terminal and witness first hand all the horrors I’ve just been picturing, Grahame makes a left at the roundabout, the minty-green signage of the Holiday Inn Express on our right now, and we are turning into the familiar entrance for the RSS Private Jet Centre. Over behind the small VIP building I can see the plane, a Gulfstream G550, and on its tail the Unigram logo.
Imagine it. Imagine flying commercial.
But more than all this, more than wanting to help an old mate out (yeah, right), I have to admit, great though life is at the moment, there is the odd day when I worry that a lifestyle like the one I’ve been outlining here could be described as a tiny bit … vacuous. So I’m retired, but I’m not. Because you have to do something, don’t you? You’d go fucking mad otherwise. So I work occasionally as a ‘consultant’. If the project is interesting enough, and the fee large enough, I’ll get on a plane. Like a few years back, when Warner Music bought EMI. I helped put that together, behind the scenes. A few months’ work for seven figures that, pleasingly, provided a bonus opportunity: engineering the firing of a few clowns who’d had the temerity to offend me back in the nineties. (Like the great man says in Think Big: ‘I love getting even when I get screwed by someone. Always get even. When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back 15 times harder. You do it not only to get the person who messed with you but also to show the others who are watching what will happen to them if they mess with you. If someone attacks you, do not hesitate. Go for the jugular.’) There’s also, and I hate to admit this, been the slight niggle recently that I might have got out of the music industry at the wrong time …
The music industry. What do you think happened to it? If you ask the man on the street, the average mongoloid shuffling his hump from the boozer to the bookies, you’ll get something like the following: ‘Oh yeah. It’s over. The Internet destroyed the music business. You don’t need record companies now. My mate Glen put his own album out online and sold eight hundred copies. The gatekeepers are gone, man.’
I pick up my phone and open my Twitter account. I find a tweet I favourited last week, from one Roger McGuinn, the former guitar player in 1960s proto-indielosers the Byrds. Roger says: ‘Pandora played ‘Eight Miles High’ 228086 times in the second quarter of 2016 and paid me $1.79.’
A quid and a half for a quarter of a million plays.
After a moment, and even at this ungodly hour of the morning, I am laughing so hard that Grahame has to ask me if I’m OK. Now, granted, it got a bit scary for a while, back there in the early noughties, what with Napster and everything, but in the end it worked out fine. We did it again. Can you believe it? From sheet music, to the 78 rpm shellac disc, to singles and albums, to cassettes, to CDs, to now, today, the Internet: the music industry has once again managed to insert a ten-foot dildo made of broken glass into the anus of an entire generation of musicians. That royalty break clause, the one that covers ‘all technologies yet to be discovered’, the one that we’ve been putting into contracts for the last thirty-odd years, that was a fucking doozy. I’d like to go back in time and shake the hand of the scumbag animal lawyer who came up with that beauty. Back in the day, in the late eighties and early nineties, it meant that for a while we got away with paying artists the same royalty on a CD single we sold for four quid as we did on vinyl that sold for half that. Today it means some songwriter looks at Spotify and sees his one million plays have earned him a fiver. Where’s the rest of that money going? Where do you fucking think? The gatekeepers are gone? That’s right, mate – they’re in your house, eating everything in the fridge and doing your wife.
I send a couple of pro-Trump tweets from my troll accounts (‘#godonald! #MAGA #inauguration’) to take my mind off my pre-flight anxiety while Grahame deals with the luggage and the whole check-in palaver, out there in the chill January dawn. Passport and security take all of two minutes. (‘Hi, sir! Nice to see you again.’) When I do this, I spare a thought for you out there – the dear, the gentle – taking your belt and shoes off, furiously scrabbling through your bag for that laptop or iPad, wearily walking back through the scanner, then extending your arms skywards as the guy with the wand does his stuff, the whole thing taking an eternity because, in the queue ahead of you, there are people who, today, in 2017, seemingly haven’t been on a plane since Mohamed Atta and his lads did their thing back in 2001. Who don’t understand about the whole laptop, belt and shoes deal. Who are utterly astonished when they are asked to take these things off/put them in a tray/ whatever. By the time you stumble out of security two hours later you’re needing that pint of Tits in the Dog and Lettuce. You’re suicidal and you haven’t even left the fucking airport yet.
I stride briskly across the tarmac, jog up the gangplank – to more effusive hellos from the pilots – and settle into my favoured seat on a Gulfstream G550 – front right window facing forward. A stewardess appears with a silver jug of steaming coffee and plates of fruit, freshly baked croissants, pastries and smoked salmon. Enough to feed the eighteen seats in the jet even though I am the only passenger. The stewardess is blonde, in her late thirties, and a definite DB, although she is good-looking enough to have possibly once been an RB. (The Three Categories of Boiler: Romancing Boilers: singers or actresses or models who have found a certain level of fame. Here you know you are in for the long-haul job, for a fair few dinners and drinks and movies and going to awards ceremonies together and fuck knows what else before you can fair and square get your cock out. Then there are Doable Boilers: aspiring singers, actresses and models on the way up, or very attractive girls working in the industry or a related field – fashion, film, whatever. These are the type you take out for a few drinks, dinner, then at the end of that first date, you get them back to your place where, of course, you get your cock out and it’s all good. Then there are Bogs Boilers – the kind of skanks who hang out on the fringes of any creative industry who are basically a notch above groupie. A Bogs Boiler you can drag into a toilet cubicle and smash her back door in within fifteen minutes of meeting her. As with any class system under late-period capitalism there is some fluidity between the ranks. A Doable Boiler can, with enough success, become a Romancing Boiler. A Bogs Boiler can, with a little maturing and self-respect, become a Doable Boiler. Conversely, a Romancing Boiler, with enough failure and passing years, can fall to become a Doable Boiler. Almost never will a Romancing Boiler suffer a fall so complete as to become a Bogs Boiler. Courtney Love, say, would be a notable exception here.)
I ignore the food as I settle back into the cream leather and light a cigarette. (Again, I think of you, out there in seat 44F, with your two foot of seat space, the remains of a microwaved tray of eyelids and anuses in front of you, the three-hundred-pound housewife with screaming infant to your left, the Somali marathon runner who has come straight from his latest triumph without showering to your right, your every pore screaming for nicotine as you gaze without hope at a ‘No Smoking’ sign that will remain resolutely illuminated even in the event of nuclear war. I feel for you, I truly do.) About that pre-flight anxiety. It never used to bother me, getting on a plane. Weirdly I’ve become more nervous about it in the last few years. It’s two things, I think. Obviously there’s the Russian roulette factor: the more you fly, and I fly a lot, the more bullets you put in the chamber. But it’s also this: I have so much to lose these days. Looking for a distraction, I pick up the inflight magazine (called something like High Flyer or True Player or Just Rape the Poor) and flip through pages of adverts for private islands, walk-in humidors and yachts with helipads, stuff aimed solely at people like me. I stop at a lifestyle feature, the ageing wife of some Hollywood studio boss – she’s very much like a sixty-year-old version of the stewardess on this flight, old now, but surely a hard-gobbling miracle sometime around the late seventies – is giving a tour of her Pacific Palisades home. Accompanying the article is a photograph, clearly taken many years ago, of her cradling her son (now a famous actor, in and out of rehab. Remember: if you have to stop drinking you’re a fucking loser) when he was a baby. I find myself staring at the baby for a long time: the huge limpid pools of his eyes, the softness of his skin almost palpable even in this two-dimensional form. Unsettled for reasons I cannot name, I toss the magazine aside and focus my gaze on a more reassuring sight – the buttocks of the stewardess, bending over in the galley kitchen up ahead as she gets something out of a low cupboard.
Ok, I confess. There’s something I’ve not been telling you. Another reason I’m bothering to do all this …
I had a moment this winter, down in the Caribbean. We were docked in the Tobago Quays for a day or two, fucking around on the deck, when suddenly, a shadow fell over me. I looked up and saw Geffen’s boat, the Rising Sun, coming in to dock beside us, all 453 feet, five floors and eighty-two rooms of it, blocking out the rising sun, looming over us like the Death Star above a Fiat 500. And, in that instant, I realised just how fucking poor I was. You think you’re a player? I might as well have been downing that pint at Luton Airport myself. I tried to repeat the lulling mantra I find calms me in moments of stress – I am Steven Stelfox. I am worth three hundred million dollars – but it wasn’t working.
I stood there with one thought.
I need to earn some proper money.
Because three hundred mil is nothing these days. I need to sort this out. Go big or go home.
So I am going on a journey. Jesus Christ, not that kind of ‘journey’. Not the kind of journey the simpering slags, skanks and bumboys think they undertake on the kind of TV programmes you watch. Not the kind of journey that celebrities claim to have been on when they’re flogging their book or their movie or whatever. These kinds of journeys are all lies designed to get you to part with your cash. These kinds of journeys imply that the people involved have learned something. That they have grown in some way.
I will learn nothing.
I will not grow.
I am fully formed.
Come on now.
Come with me.
Kill Your Friends
‘The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side.’
Hunter S. Thompson
January
The Kula Shaker and Jamiroquai albums both go double platinum. Warner Brothers have an 18.4% share of the albums market. ‘Say What You Want’ by Texas is the biggest airplay record in the country. The Pecadilloes and Embrace are hot new bands. Last year the British music industry generated over a billion pounds in revenue for the first time ever. The new Gene album is called Drawn to the Deep End. Polydor A&R Director Paul Adam says, ‘I have big aspirations that this is their crossover record.’