The Amateurs (31 page)

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Authors: John Niven

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John Niven interview: Chip off the old block

This article appeared in
Scotland on Sunday,
March 22, 2009.

 

J
OHN NIVEN
has moved from the hectic heyday of Britpop to the more sedate arena of golf, creating a novel that would have made his father proud, he tells Aidan Smith.

When John Niven was a spotty teenager he thought he knew everything, and one thing above all else: that his home town of Irvine was the pits. Before the great day dawned when he could pack his rucksack, he joined a CND march in defiance of the manager of the local shopping center. “The manager was my dad and I can still see him striding towards us, Embassy Regal stuck between his snarling teeth,” says Niven. “He went absolutely mental.”

Niven, who left Ayrshire to become a useless pop talent scout and is now a successful writer of black comedies on the back of his rockbiz blunders, then tells another story about the “pompous little shite” he used to be: “The last time I saw Dad alive he was in hospital. He was watching
Hell Drivers
, a crummy B-movie about truckers, on TV and reading the
Daily Record
. This seems scarcely believable, but I actually said: ‘Dad, you’ve not got long to go—don’t you think you should be imbibing the culture a bit more?’”

These yarns might suggest that John Jeffrey Niven Jr., now forty-one and
author of pop exposé
Kill Your Friends
, endured a difficult relationship with John Jeffrey Niven Sr.—far from it. “I left the hospital to go on holiday thinking I’d see Dad again—he had cancer of the esophagus—so I was devastated when he died. But there was nothing left unsaid between us, we were very close and he knew I loved him.”

We’re in London’s Landmark Hotel, next to Marylebone station, an old Niven haunt from the dog days of Britpop (“Alan McGee was based here with Oasis”). After too many nights when he couldn’t remember being in the Landmark, he moved out to rural Buckinghamshire. His father didn’t live to see his eldest son become an A&R man, blowing the chance to sign Coldplay and dismissing Muse as no-hopers as well. He doesn’t think Dad would have enjoyed the sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll of
Kill Your Friends
, even though lots of others did, including one star-maker who bought thirty copies to sign for friends, so convinced was he that the character of Steven Stelfox was based on him (untrue).

But Niven is more confident his father would have got to the end of the follow-up,
The Amateurs
, an Ayrshire-set story of golf and family ties stronger than Tiger Woods–approved tungsten. This book is dedicated to him, and to Niven’s own son—and with ubiquitous Regals and a Bing Crosby–style bunnet, its hero’s dad is based on the old man. “What a fantastic job it is to be a writer,” says Niven. “Dad died sixteen years ago but every day working on this book I could
go to my office and commune with his spirit. I’m spending time with him still.”


[Niven’s] father didn’t live to see his eldest son become an A&R man, blowing the chance to sign Coldplay and dismissing Muse as no-hopers as well.

The Amateurs
is equal parts sentimental, violent (there are gangster executions), and hilarious, with municipal-course hacker Gary Irvine emerging from a coma after being struck by a wayward drive to find he can play like a golf god, albeit one with a bad case of Tourette’s—and bloody hell, if he isn’t romping the Open Championship with twenty pages left. Niven says he had the idea for the book prior to
Kill Your Friends
, but surely it goes way back to Irvine, the town, and to boyhood fantasies of a mashie niblick with magical powers.

“There were some summers when every boy in Ayrshire seemed to be playing golf and my dad taught me,” says Niven. “But he was a terrible teacher—of everything. Learning to drive with him almost killed me. He was the world’s most impatient man, awful short fuse. He had high expectations of me, and seemed to think I should have been able to do everything instinctively better than him, and I guess I’m like that now with my son. It’s one of the many ways I’m turning into Dad.”

Niven ditched the golf when he discovered punk rock (“It would have ruined my image”) and started showing his frustrations with Irvine: in his eyes, it was a town which produced ball-bearings, forklift trucks, and closed minds. He escaped to Glasgow, having been pushed by his father as the first in
the family to win a university place, and earned first-class honors. He’s since revised his opinion of Irvine: “It was the time of Thatcher, so lots of wee Scottish towns were bleak. And all my pals were in bands and at least trying to be creative.”


‘What a fantastic job it is to be a writer,’ says Niven. ‘Dad died sixteen years ago but every day working on this book I could go to my office and commune with his spirit. I’m spending time with him still.’

His father was older than his friends’ fathers, and twenty years his mother’s senior, but Niven was never self-conscious about this. “At school parents’ nights, the teachers assumed he was my grandfather, but I loved his wisdom and his humor, and so did my pals,” he says. “He was the spitting image of Sid James and his nickname was ‘the Sid.’ One time, when we were big into the leather trousers, the lads were round at my house and he appeared wearing mine with his oldest string vest. He looked like everyone’s dad in the Village People.”

Niven has revised his view of golf as well and is back playing when he can with his son, though the opportunities to thwack the dimpled pebble in Buckinghamshire—where a game is five times more expensive than Ayrshire rates—are limited by parental duties now that he has a baby daughter, and of course the burgeoning writing career.

The next book will be a collection of short stories, and Niven is twenty thousand words into another novel, about Christ’s second coming. Then there are the screenplays: both
Kill Your Friends
and
The Amateurs
are set to be turned into films while an original script, titled
Roadkill
and yet another black
comedy, has just been sold to Hollywood for a sum he describes as “obscene—I’m too embarrassed to tell you how much.”

He isn’t the only Ayrshire lad who’s stood on a grassy mound, looked out to sea, and dreamed of America. For him, the writing dream would never have come true if he hadn’t wasted ten years being self-important, decadent, and ludicrous. “I seemed to be intent on lobotomizing myself,” he says of that time. And to think John Niven once scolded his father for reading a tabloid.


The writing dream would never have come true if [Niven] hadn’t wasted ten years being self-important, decadent, and ludicrous.

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P
RAISE
FOR
Kill Your Friends

“I loved
Kill Your Friends
. Who didn’t? Scorched earth humor at its finest.”

—Douglas Coupland, author of
Generation X

“Brilliant. It made me ill with laughter. The filthiest, blackest, most shocking, most hilarious debut novel I’ve ever read.”

—India Knight, author of
My Life on a Plate

“Darkly hilarious…. The
American Psycho
of Britpop.”


Entertainment Weekly


Kill Your Friends
is the most exciting British novel since
Trainspotting
.”


Word
magazine


Kill Your Friends
is a pitch-black comedy that’ll leave you exhilarated, exhausted, and feeling a bit dirty—in a good way.”


Anthem

“A very dark, viciously funny novel.”


Booklist

“Like the product of an unholy union between Bret Easton Ellis and Martin Amis, John Niven has delivered a gleefully amoral morality tale, set in the manically unprincipled world of the music business at the height of Britpop…. Through a whirl of drugs, violence, and unashamed sexual deviance, the reader is alternately shocked and left crying with laughter.”


The Bookseller
(London)

“Sensationally naughty…. John Niven’s wicked debut novel
Kill Your Friends
savagely satirizes the music industry—and strikes the right nihilistic note for troubled times.”


The Daily Beast


American Psycho
meets
The X Factor
in an orgy of mad, gleeful nastiness. A sustained spew of gothic nonsense, blackly lampooning the stupid, hypocritical world of the music industry, it’ll probably make you go deaf, but you’ll be having too much fun to care.”


The Guardian
(London)

“To call John Niven’s
Kill Your Friends
a satire on the music industry is a wicked understatement. It is an all-out assault, a withering, scabrous, and often repulsive attack on every part of the filthy machine…. Stelfox is a creation of unparalleled awfulness, chronically sexist, racist, and everything else-ist. He is funny, too…. You laugh though you know you shouldn’t.”


The Independent
(London)

“Hilariously dark and satirical.”


Library Journal

“Steven Stelfox, the anithero of Niven’s debut novel, is an A&R psycho…. He shares key traits with Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman: a large disposable income, extreme shallowness, a soul as moribund as a licked-clean coke wrap, and a somewhat casual attitude to the well-being of his fellow humans. But where Bateman is as cold and sharp as a sushi knife, Stelfox is viscerally livid, spewing bile over all he sees as he shags, snorts, and slaughters his way through 1997. The delight is Stelfox’s irredeemably poisonous, often hilarious, and utterly filthy inner voice.”


The London Paper

“Brilliant satire on the Britpop generation, as increasingly desperate A&R man Steven Stelfox resorts to murder to shore up his failing career and keep his nose powdered. It hits all the right notes.”


Mirror

“Vitriolic good fun that’s frighteningly believable.”


The Onion A.V. Club

“This is not for the easily offended, but readers with at least a slightly deranged bent will have a ball.”


Publishers Weekly

“A vicious, black-hearted howl of a book…. A realistic portrait of the music industry, doing for it what
The Player
did for Hollywood. Having spent ten years in the business, [Niven’s] insider knowledge, coupled with the kind of headlong, febrile prose that would have Hunter S. Thompson happily emptying both barrels into the sky, results in a novel that is cripplingly funny in the way that only the very darkest comedy can be.”


The Times
(London)

“A dazzling comic novel…. This book is fantastically funny. The humor isn’t so much dark as dismally black. No one is to be trusted; no one is to be liked. And yet have violent sex with prostitutes, excessive use of drugs, and attempted murder ever been this entertaining?…Buy this book and give it to your friends. Five stars.”


Time Out
(London)

“The Scot’s debut is a dark, gruesome, and frequently hysterical satire of this period, told from the perspective of desperate A&R man Steven Stelfox. It’s
American Psycho
meets
The Player
, as witnessed by a writer with Hunter S. Thompson’s eye for the grotesque.”


Q Magazine

ALSO BY JOHN NIVEN

Music from Big Pink

Kill Your Friends

Cover design by Milan Bozic

Cover photograph © Ervin Monn/Shutterstock

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE AMATEURS.
Copyright © 2010 by John Niven. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

EPub Edition © March 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199116-5

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