Rising Scum
A novel about the late-nineties music industry with a detestable A&R as its central character? Surely it’s only fiction.
Words Niall O’Keeffe
Earlier this year EMI boss, Guy Hands promised to shift power away from the company’s A&R department, disparaging the typical A&R man as “someone who gets up late in the day, listens to lots of music, goes to clubs, spends his time with artists and has a knack of knowing what would sell”. To judge from this novel, Hands doesn’t know the half of it.
The work of former London Records employee John Niven, Kill Your Friends does for the A&R men what Irvine Welsh’s Filth did for the police. Namely, it creates a loathsome caricature that, while farcically extreme, teaches us much about the evil that lurks within the profession and the dynamics that allow it to prosper.
Like Filth’s Bruce Robertson, central character Steven Stelfox is driven by passions for cocaine, predatory sex and Machiavellian scheming. Early on, he describes the inside of his head: “Picture a giant bank of screens. At any given time many of them are simply showing hardcore pornography. Other screens show financial stuff: graphs of London houses, City traders screaming in their striped blazers, pie charts of record-industry market shares, bricks of cash being stacked up, balance sheets, red figures, black figures, recouped acts, unrecouped acts. A small row of distant monitors randomly shows footage of colleagues and rivals being baroquely tortured.”
As the book wears on, your disgust for Stelfox deepens. Tirelessly racist, he refers to black people as “spear chuckers” and can’t mention a Jewish person without a sneering reference to the holocaust. His hatred also extends to women, gay men, the bands he’s signed and punters in general (“animals”), while his heroes include Joseph Stalin and Ted Bundy. Often he reminds you of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, not least because Niven lifts heavily from that book’s plot.
Still, like American Psycho, Kill Your Friends is funny as well as disgusting. Each chapter of the book, which is set in 1997, opens with a real prediction made by a deluded A&R man of that era (Simon Williams on Ultrasound: “It’s clear that this band will be around a lot longer than eighteen months”). There’s also the comedy that comes with biting insight. For example, it’s explained that asking an A&R man about his taste in music is like asking an investment banker, “What’s your favourite currency?” Elsewhere, industry people’s use of jargon to mask ignorance is brilliantly satirised, and there’s a piercing summary of the average band’s career (it concludes with some advice to aspiring superstars: “Get a fucking job, you stupid cunt”).
In an amusing scene that rings painfully true, Stelfox horrifies a pious American indie band by getting hammered, forcing a waiter to dance for them and clumsily attempting to pull the singer. What also rings true is that Stelfox neither redeems himself nor gets his comeuppance; but at least there’s the comfort of knowing that Kill Your Friends is set a decade ago and that today’s A&R men are pillars of sobriety, goodwill and sound judgement. Right?
