Authors: John Niven
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m so sorry.” The black kid takes his
unloaded tray, and the proffered twenty-dollar tip, and fucks off
out of it, looking scared.
“You cunt,” I say to Leamington, who is laughing his head
off.
“Oh God, we’re finished now,” Darren says.
“Have a drink,” Leamington says.
“Don’t you understand,
it’s over!
” Darren is actually
becoming hysterical. “He’s going to go back downstairs and he’s
going to tell them what’s happening and they’re going to come up
here and they’re going to come in and—”
“Shut up and have a fucking cocktail, you twat. Here, have a
Cosmopolitan.” Leamington hands Darren a gigantic Martini glass
full of thin, pale blood. He seems to have ordered every cocktail
on the menu.
“Do we have any fucking pills?” I ask.
“Yeah,” someone says.
“Should we switch rooms?”
“Maybe if we take some pills we could go out.”
“Have you heard that Stardust bootleg?” someone asks.
“Here.” Someone presses an E into my hand and I suck it back
with a gulp of Tequila Sunrise.
“Hey, did you know they filmed
Goldfinger
here?”
Leamington says, still laughing.
♦
That evening and the next day become what they always become: a
series of blurred snapshots, random shreds of CCTV footage, shakily
pixellated stills from a bootleg video I don’t remember starring
in. I was dancing in the DJ booth to ‘Praise You’, clinking pills
with Leamington as we both double-dropped, vomiting out of a moving
cab on the Strip, throwing an ice cube across the lobby of the
Delano at some DJ (Rampling? Oakenfold?), being thrown out of a DJ
booth somewhere, an alleyway behind the Strip, buying glass vials
of coke, buying an E that came individually wrapped in its own
cellophane bag, wanking in a private booth at a lap-dancing club,
the Propellerheads onstage, lying on the floor of someone’s hotel
room watching a stripper do herself with a beer bottle, dawn on the
beach—Leamington and I looking out to sea dumbstruck as an oil
tanker the length of the Westway slunk across the horizon—a
breakfast pint of rum and Coke at that bar in the middle of the
hotel pool.
♦
The next morning and early afternoon are fine. I sleep right
through both of them, missing both my original flight to Texas and
the rebooked flight. I finally make it to the airport late in the
afternoon where, of course, the flight I’ve made is delayed.
I find a quiet corner in the BA exec lounge and crumple into an
armchair. The screen hanging from the ceiling silently wipes itself
and unrolls the revised flight times: AA157, MIA to Houston, Texas,
is now leaving at 6.10
PM
I settle in and inhale a long chain of Bloody Marys. I
thoughtfully chew half a Quaalude and try to place my hangover on
my personal Richter scale. Twenty minutes later, when I still
haven’t come with an answer, when I still don’t understand the
question in fact, it dawns on me why I can’t properly evaluate my
hangover. I’m not having it yet. I’m still completely off my
fucking nugget.
♦
“Sir, excuse me, sir? Are you OK?”
I look up—he’s about my age, airport uniform, concerned
expression. “Uh, yeah,” I cough. Urine-temperature drool flecks
from my chin. Outside, sunny Florida has vanished, there’s just
darkness and lights; lines, grids and blocks of them. “What time is
it?” I ask, my voice a tramp-rasp produced by broken piping,
blocked air passages. There’s a modulating whine in my ears, a
rising note, searching for its rightful, most painful, key.
“It’s just after six, sir.”
“Shit.” I swing into action, swivelling up and onto my feet,
grabbing my jacket and scooping up my bag. The guy helps me up from
the floor. “Sir…
sir?
”
“Which way to Gate…” I’m fumbling for my boarding pass.
“Sir, it’s six in the morning. Six a.m.”
I look at him. The whine in my ears finally finds its pitch and
something pops somewhere deep in the centre of my face, some
blockage behind my nose clears as a small dam bursts.
“The next flight to Houston isn’t for a few hours.”
Fucking Quaaludes. The Shermans know how to put a tranquilliser
together—you have to give them that.
“Uh, sir, you’ve got a…Christ.” He’s fumbling in his pocket.
But I can already taste the blood, sharp and salty in the back
of my throat, as it begins its warm, oddly pleasant, cascade across
my top lip and spatters down onto the T–shirt I’m wearing. The
T–shirt has a picture of Al Pacino as Tony Montana. He’s holding a
huge fuck-off gun. “
Say hello to my leetle fren
.”
♦
Sometimes, when they’re trying to understand what
A
&
R means, people who don’t know anything about
the music industry will say, “Ah, so you’re talent spotters?” This
is inaccurate. Madonna, Bono, the Spice Girls, Noel Gallagher,
Kylie…do you really think any of that lot are
talented
?
Don’t make me fucking laugh. What they are is ambitious. This is
where the big money is. Fuck talent. Forget Rock and Roll, if he’d
just turned the other way out of the schoolyard Bono could have
been a very successful CEO of a huge armaments manufacturer. The
Spice Girls? How driven are those boilers? You get these fucking
indie bands moaning about having to get up before lunchtime once
every three months to appear on some kids’ TV programme. In return
for her fifteen minutes I guarantee you that Geri Halliwell would
have risen at the crack of dawn every morning for a year and swum
naked through a river of shark-infested, HIV-positive semen—cutting
the throats of children, OAPs and cancer patients and throwing them
behind her as she went—just to be allowed to do a sixty-second
regional radio interview.
This is the kind of person you want to sign. You’ve got a shot
with that kind of attitude. Talented? Fuck off. Go and work in a
guitar shop with all the other talented losers.
♦
“I’m telling you—Pawl? Steve?—there are piracy issues involved
that we’re only just beginning to understand. The long-term
implications could be catastrophic. Cat-a-stroff-ick.” Some cunt
from our American label has been dribbling on for a fortnight about
the impending devastation the Internet will wreak on the record
industry. I can’t see it myself.
The stench of burning flesh fills the air and it’s hot. It’s
like being in hell. We’re in the grounds of one of the big hotels,
attending a barbecue some publisher is throwing. Whole hogs—basted
in barbecue sauce thicker than melted chocolate—are crackling and
spitting over flaming pits. Steaks the size of babies sizzle on
hotplates. A slaughterhouse of ribs is piled up next to rows of
silver dishes containing refried beans, coleslaw, fries, chicken
wings, cornbread, mashed potatoes, chilli and gravy. Now and then
the warm, feeble breeze changes direction and I get a whiff of this
lot and nearly throw up. Everyone of the English contingent here is
either coked up or hung-over. Either way, we’re not eating a
fucking thing. You look around at these things and you can spot the
Yanks a hundred yards away. They’re the ones who actually look like
they’ve been to bed in the past year. They look tanned, fit and
rested and they want to talk business. Players—or thinking they
are—they came to play. We—the Brits—look like we’ve just staggered
off the set of a snuff film after a meth-driven four-day shoot:
blood in the eyes, skin cracked and yellow, nostrils inflamed and
blood-caked. We look like ghosts. We came to play too.
“Mmmm,” says Trellick nodding to the Yank like he gives a fuck,
“it could be problem.” I nod solemnly too and drain my fifth glass
of cold white wine.
As we leave, the Mexican busboys are shovelling tons of uneaten
food into plastic garbage bags. I see one of them pocket a
steak.
Later we’re all at one of the hundreds of gigs taking place
across the city. There’s a band on the stage, some four-piece punk
rock kind of thing called the Lazies, I think. The very doable girl
singer is screaming over a splintering tower of glassy feedback.
There’s a couple of rows of kids going crackers at the front, like
there are at every gig. Abortion, I think to myself. Derivative,
tuneless abortion. I start polishing and sharpening a few caustic
phrases to toss off later. She’s on the floor now, the mike lead
wrapped around her body, sweat pouring down her face as she screams
something like ‘fuck me in the ass’ over and over.
She’s wearing fishnet tights that are shredded to pieces, half
an arse cheek is bursting out. Very fuckable, but still a
derivative, tuneless abortion.
Finally, mercifully, they finish. I walk through a crunchy sea
of plastic beer mugs to the bar. Leamington, Trellick, Parker-Hall
and Simon Tench, Parker-Hall’s scout, are all at the bar. I also
see Miles and Dan from Parlophone, Steven Bass from Go! Beat, and a
few others. Someone hands me a drink. A tequila shot.
“Capitol just offered two hundred, US only,” someone is
saying.
“What did you think?” that weasel Tench asks me.
I think I want a nose-up. I think my hotel room isn’t big
enough.
It really gets tedious sometimes—being paid primarily for your
opinion when you very rarely have one. Or frequently have the wrong
one.
“You’d do the singer,” I say, sagely. Everyone nods. “And I
liked the ‘fuck me in the ass’ song. You ain’t getting it on the
radio though.”
“Which song?” says Leamington.
“The one where she says “
fuck me in the ass
”.”
Leamington laughs. “It’s “
love me, make it last
”. It’s
the single.”
“Haven’t you got it?” Tench asks.
“Yeah, whatever,” I say airily, knocking back the oily, bitter
spirit, “fuck them.”
Trellick sidles up to me as we leave the venue to look for cabs.
“I don’t know,” he says quietly, “they all seem to like it. Should
we be in on this?”
“I was downgrading it, you clown. I’ve already got a meeting set
up.” The lie slides softly out of the corner of my mouth. The lie
itself is effortless, but, sadly, it means I’ll actually have to do
some work.
“Good boy,” says Trellick, his hand in the air as a
canary-yellow taxi comes towards us out of the jungly Texas
night.
“Best live band I’ve seen in a long, long time.”
“Yeah?” The manager—a stringy, indie, vegetarian-looking anorak
cunt—doesn’t look up from spooning pulpy melon into his mouth. He
couldn’t look less enthusiastic if he tried, which is fucking
cheeky considering the effort, the time, I’ve put into arranging
and preparing for this lunch.
When I got back to the hotel last night—tramp-drunk at 3 a.m.—I
rang Darren. While I should, by rights, have been snorting inhuman
amounts of chang and trying to negotiate the local ostros down to a
hundred bucks for uncovered oral, I was on the phone, working.
After berating Darren for not already being on to the Lazies (the
lying prick claimed he tried to play me the single) I told him I
needed to know who managed them, I needed his phone number, I
needed a potted history of the band, and I needed him to find a
record store in Austin who had the band’s records and then he had
to buy the records over the phone with his credit card and have
them cabbed to my hotel.
Then I passed out.
I woke up five hours later. The fax with all the info was in an
envelope that had been pushed under my door. A package containing
the band’s slender catalogue—one single and an EP—awaited me behind
reception.
I rang the manager, the kid Jimmy now sitting opposite me, and
here we are. I gave the music a cursory listen earlier—it’s all
right. I don’t know really. Who knows? But enough people seem to be
interested. We’re having lunch in the restaurant at the hotel. Good
PR for me to be seen lunching with the manager of a hot band.
“What was your favourite track on the EP?” he asks.
Shit. “Track three,” I say, “definitely.”
“Yeah? That’s interesting.” Is it?
“Are you going to be playing in England soon?” I ask.
“Uh, yeah. In a month or so. Glastonbury. We’re doing some
warm-ups first. At the, uh, is it the Borderline?”
“Yeah. Good venue.” Stinking fucking toilet.
He finishes his fruit salad and surprises me by lighting a
cigarette. “So, man,” he says, leaning back, pushing long, unkempt
hair from his face, “what’s your favourite album of all time?”
The fucking nerve. I pretend to think for a moment, then say,
“
Marquee Moon
.” With a certain type of indie loser you
cannot go wrong with
Marquee Moon
.
The clown nods and says, “Cool.”
He starts talking about how hard the band work, how little
they’re willing to compromise, how great their debut album’s going
to be. All the usual shit I’ve heard a billion times before. I nod
away, looking like I’m listening, generally doing a reasonable
impression of a normal human being.
Across the restaurant I see Parker-Hall and Tench walking
towards us. “All right, lads?” I say magnanimously, chewing on a
toothpick, “this is J—”
“How you doing, Jimmy?” says Parker-Hall. Jimmy’s already on his
feet and they’re embracing warmly. “Hey, Tony! My man! What’s
up?”
“Me and Si are just going for a bit of a stroll. Catch some
rays.” Jimmy, the Yank cunt, is lapping up Parker-Hall’s Dick Van
Dyke schtick. I cannot believe he gets away with this shit. “We
still on for later?” Parker-Hall asks him.
“For sure. I’ve just got this meeting to finish up with…” the
manager has forgotten my name, “…ah, with Steve here. Then I’ll be
back at my hotel.”
In the background I’m sure Tench is smirking as they say their
matey goodbyes and tool off.
“You know Tony then?” I ask.
“Yeah, we talk on the phone a lot. He was a big fan of the first
single.”