Free Kill Your Friends by John Niven Page A

boat shows to international
widget manufacturers conferences—all of them filled with the same
kind of guys trying to figure out if Susan from accounts is really
up for it or not. Echoing behind the crack of champagne corks, the
supercharged laughter, the crackle of suits and sparkling dresses,
there is a tinny, reverberating sound. It is the sound of people
trying to have a really good time in a lightly decorated
underground car park.
    Pete Dunn rocks up to our table, arms raised, a bottle of
Perrier Jouet in each fist. “AHHHHHGH! Wahey the lads!” he
screeches. He’s a big guy, Dunn. Once chunky and, back in the
eighties, ponytailed, he’s now bald and running, sprinting in fact,
to fat. His broad Geordie face is ruddy, the stubble greying and
the eyes puffy, set back in little pouches. Dunn is our Head of
Radio and TV Promotions. He has spent his adult life wheedling and
begging radio DJs and programmers and kids’ TV producers and
presenters to put our acts on their shows. I’m sure he loved his
job when he was twenty-six: falling out of nightclubs with Radio 1
DJs and flying to the south of France with pop stars. Now pushing
forty-six his every waking moment is a nightmare. Told to fuck off
and die on a daily, hourly, basis by TV and radio executives, he
must then drive back to the office where he is—far more
robustly—told to fuck off and die by Derek.
    How much better his job would have been back in the good old
days of the fifties—the golden era of payola and 1 per cent artist
royalty rates. Now payola was a genius idea, wasn’t it? Tell me
that wasn’t a winner for everyone involved? You didn’t have to take
anyone out to dinner and suck their dick. You didn’t have to laugh
at Chris Evans’s jokes. You just paid the cunts. Here’s the money,
now play the record and fuck you. Fuck you .
    Not too bright to begin with, a decade of grovelling and sucking
dick has turned Dunn into a sort of failed light entertainer with a
melancholic streak. He pours champagne into all our glasses,
singing, “Here we go, here we go, here we go.” Shouldn’t he be at
home with the wife and kids? Then you remember—he went upgrades and
left the wife and kids two years ago, to go balls-deep in a
twenty-year-old dancer he met at the taping of some
Saturday-morning kiddie moronathon. She, in her turn, left him for
some photographer’s assistant six months later. His upgrade
upgraded him.
    Dunn actually raises his glass to propose a toast—something only
the truly suicidal ever do. “To the lads!” he shouts.
    Waters joins in like a retard, pathetically clunking his plastic
flute against Dunn’s. Leamington from Virgin materialises through
the crowd and sidles over to me.
    “Oi oi,” he says.
    “All right, mate? Two awards for those cows?” I say, nodding
across the room towards Mel B, “You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?
They must think it’s fucking Christmas.”
    “Nah, I think Geri’s off crying somewhere.”
    “Ah, fuck her. Congratulations.”
    “Nothing to do with me, mate,” he says shrugging, “but cheers.”
We clack tumblers. “Here,” Leamington says, “is it right what I’m
hearing about your old mucker Rage?”
    “What are you hearing?”
    “That it’s all gone Colonel Kurtz—he’s upriver, gone fucking
native. Off his nut on the nosebag, months in the studio, no
contact with anyone.”
    “Fuck knows. Schneider’s problem.”
    “When’s the record due?”
    “Three months ago.”
    “Could be Bad News Bears for Schneider.”
    “Mmmm,” I say. As we drink and gossip and bitch I look over at
the recently clean and sober Robbie Williams, who is sitting at a
table a few feet away. He’s fiddling with the label on a bottle of
mineral water, smoking two-handed, and nodding while some guy I
don’t know—some manager, some lawyer—explains something to him.
Williams periodically turns away to stare hard—a hard stare I know
well—at the glittering rump of some boiler