John Niven confesses he was lucky to survive the nineties.
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“There’s a pool of vomit on the floor, a rusty streak of blood on the white sheets, pieces of glass from a champagne bottle scattered all over the place, and a woman, a hooker I guess, looking at me from the bed. The hooker – who is black and fat – starts talking to me in French. I don’t get it at all, but the gist seems to be that I still owe her money from the night before, from some unspeakable extra I must have made her perform.”
John Niven counts his blessings he earns a crust committing this kind of gleeful depravity to paper.
He crafted those sentences after he quit his hedonistic day – and all- night – job in the money-trenches of the Nineties music industry.
They are the narcotic-fuelled thoughts of Niven’s most infamous character yet – Steven Stelfox.
He’s the murderous A&R slimeball who rampages through Niven’s debut book Kill Your Friends.
It’s such a brutal evisceration of the ’90’s music business it’s been hailed “American Psycho for the Britpop generation”.
Stelfox soullessly snorts, swigs, shags, snarls, schemes, and even slaughters his way to the top of the greasy music pole.
He’s deliberately sexist, racist, ageist and every other–ist going – including ugly-ist.
And Stelfox’s drug-crazed life was inspired by the decade Niven spent as a coke-blasted A&R man working at the zenith of Britpop’s sex, drugs and cash insanity.
For a decade he worked at labels London Records and Independiente after moving from Scotland where he had been toiling at indie companies.
The bottomless expense account he was handed in the Big Smoke allowed him to lash his liver with an onslaught of days-long booze benders.
He stayed up for days on end during benders, his heart pounding through what he once described as the “cocaine apocalypses” of the Nineties.
And he spunked a fortune on company cab accounts to travel minutes between champagne- soaked music industry bashes.
This year marks two decades since he laid waste to millions of his brain cells.
And Niven’s knackered. Not from nights out.
From grafting on transforming Kill Your Friends into a movie. Filming has just wrapped in New York on the film – also scripted by Niven.
It is finally being breathed to life by Nicholas Hoult – known as the lad from About A Boy and Skins.
Niven tells Loaded if he hadn’t walked out on the A&R job – and lifestyle – it might never have happened.
He fears he could have ended up a zombie casualty of Nineties’ excess.
It’s a fate that has met a sad clutch of failed musicians and Niven’s former high-flying colleagues.
Niven occasionally bumps into those when he’s in London for business meetings or parties.
Seeing the “hollowed-out” shells makes him grateful he got out before it was too late.
But life now for the no-nonsense Scot couldn’t be more different.
As well as being made into a film, Kill Your Friends has been translated into seven languages and become a bestseller across Europe.
He’s also published novels The Amateurs, The Second Coming, thriller Cold Hands and most recently Straight White Male.
Taking a break from his hectic schedule sorting out his new movie, Niven admits he has no regrets about his Nineties excess – because a lot of it was fun.
Just don’t use the term “Britpop” round him when talking about it.
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Congratulations on the movie. Happy?
It’s looking great. But it’s always tough.
I wrote the book, then I wrote the screenplay too, so when you actually see it on the set it’s never 100 per cent as you imagined it in your head, so you have to let go a bit.
Kill Your Friends is said to be the seminal Britpop novel…
I hate the term Britpop.
It’s such a clumsy, horrible, lazy piece of language.
Nobody ever said that at the time – it wasn’t a phrase anybody ever used.
It just doesn’t capture the sense of excitement at the time.
Why do you think it was so exciting?
I came to London to work at a major label, London Records, in 1994, and decades don’t usually get going until a few years into them.
But it was exciting when I got there because the music business was full of bands you liked.
There were bands you liked getting in the charts and having hits.
So it was a very exciting time in that sense.
For me it was a time when I came from an indie label to working for a major – and we had access to a lot of money.
The music industry was so different then.
A record would be selling a million-plus and it would cost up to £15 for a new CD as opposed to a fraction of that now.
You’re also lucky to sell a couple of hundred thousand these days.
So it was boom times.
And when you take a lot of guys in their early to mid-twenties and give them access to a lot of money, things happen.
A lot of guys that I knew at the major labels were aged 24 or 25, and some of them were running labels and getting paid a good sum of money even by today’s standards 20 years ago.
So that didn’t encourage a lot of reasonable behaviour, you know?
Kill Your Friends says it all about the depths of excess in the Nineties. Is there anything which looking back shocks you?
I’m fairly unshockable.
But the funny thing is, I was clearing out some desk diaries from the ’90s recently when I was moving house and looking at them brought home the amount of carnage we got up to back then.
The type of stuff we packed into a couple of days…if I did it today it would put me in hospital for a week.
Back then, it would be the Brits, then you would be off to Miami, then you’d be in Texas for SXSW, then it would be music awards like the NME awards, then it would be Glastonbury.
It was busy – every other week there was one of these do’s which back then would bring with it one of these two-days benders.
Did you ever think you needed to slow down or you’d end up with serious health problems?
Jesus, yes.
There was one time I went from I think from some awards do in London straight to the company conference in Brighton – so that was two days, and then I went straight from Brighton to Manchester.
And I didn’t get any sleep for a five–day period.
I lost my car keys somewhere in the middle of it and then I remembered I’d abandoned a company car in a car park in Brighton, racking up god knows what in charges a day, and I couldn’t get it out until I found the keys.
So it was all that kind of stuff – the kind of messy, expensive behaviour that happens when you haven’t been to bed.
When did you quit the lifestyle?
In my mid-30s? You have to really want to have to do it, to keep that lifestyle up as you get older…
The same age a lot of people make a big change
Yeah, it was very strange.
It was quite fun for the first sort of five years, which were pretty brilliant – because you were still young enough.
You don’t really get bad hangovers in your early 20s so much, but as you get into your 30s it starts to take its toll. You can’t do that thing anymore.
In the opening of Kill Your Friends there’s a scene where Stelfox is sort of up all night, then he goes straight into the office the next day.
Nicholas Hoult asked me on set if this was realistic and I told him, ‘Yes – we did do that. All the time.’
We were working in a world without grown ups then.
I would look around at A&R meetings at London Records – pretty much the oldest person in the room would have been the managing director and he would have been about 40.
Then there was a head of corporate affairs who was about 33. It now seems frighteningly young to me.
But all of us in A&R and marketing, we were all in our 20s.
You had the energy to scrabble about for the next big thing then. What was it like hunting for it?
Well, it’s like the writer William Goldwin’s old maxim about Hollywood – “Nobody knows anything”.
Similarly in the record industry, if you’re going to be successful you have to at least appear like you know what you’re doing.
But I remember one A&R guy said to me: “If I turned down every band I signed and signed every band I turned down it would probably have worked out about the same.”
There’s a scene in Kill Your Friends where Stelfox is so drunk and high at dinner he ends up offending a record exec’s wife and puts his career at risk. Did you ever do anything similar that put your job on the line?
Nothing quite as extreme as that scene.
But saying that – I can’t quite remember.
We tended to find that American executives were a lot better-behaved than the British ones.
When a bunch of Brits flew to Miami for the winter music conference or to meet a band you were fairly healthy looking when you got there.
But after about two days you could spot one of the Brits from 100 yards – white skin, brown teeth. The Americans would be the other way around…
What was the worst excess you saw?
It was just a general fairly grand scale of waste and extravagance.
I remember huge bills for hotels, room service, flights, and cab accounts and expenses.
Were A&Rs as cut-throat as in the book?
People in their career on their way up tend to often not behave very well.
And people trying to get ahead when they’re young tend to behave pretty badly.
But it strikes me when I meet guys who are the same age as me now in their 40s and we sort of came up together, everyone’s a little bit nicer now actually.
That also comes partly from you getting older and you get a little bit of success and you’ve less to prove.
Success as a writer has had an oddly cooling effect on me.
You’ve said before the industry started to make you “sick”. Why?
It’s a youth industry the music business.
I was starting to get that terrible fear of being that guy who was 40 at the back of the gig in a leather jacket not quite understanding what has changed.
The guy who doesn’t know the stuff you know and understand instinctively when you’re young.
It’s alright if you’re getting to that age and you’ve signed U2 but to be in there scrabbling around trying to sign bands at that age gets a little bit grim.
You’ve been called the “Derek Rowe of the Noughties” (the man who turned down The Beatles) because there’s a story you turned down Coldplay and Muse?
All it was that I was in A&R at the time and we got the demos of both Coldplay and Muse.
They were just two bands I didn’t really like from their demos.
I didn’t think they were that bad.
I have a vague memory of putting the Coldplay demo in the rubbish bin though.
What do you think of them now?
I get why they work and I get why they’re big but it’s not really the kind of music I’d choose to listen to.
Do you agree that ‘Britpop’ – if we have to call it that – died in 1997 with the release of Oasis’ Be Here now?
Yeah, 1997 was the year I chose to set Kill Your Friends, so it was kind of a watershed year.
At that time, the UK music industry generated more than a billion quid in revenue so it was a big year in the industry financially.
You had people like Cast having Platinum – and they weren’t even in the sort of A-list of bands.
So even the sort of C-list of bands were having huge hits…
The party was obviously fuelled by a lot of coke…
Yeah, you had Oasis singing “You might as well do the white line” on Cigarettes And Alcohol in 1994 and a few years later it was 1997, and the party was coming to an end.
Cocaine is a very insidious drug.
A few years of it sort of hollows people out and some people don’t quite come out of it the other side of it.
I meet people who were in the industry who partied hard who haven’t quite come out the other side.
You think they’re permanently damaged?
Yeah, pretty much.
It’s a fairly intense way to live your life.
If you’ve nothing to move onto next it can be very hard.
Luckily I’ve always wanted to be a writer and I was fortunate enough that it worked out for me.
But for a lot of people, it was just bedtime come ’98 or ’99.
How high were your substance abuse levels?
I never really did anything that someone in their 20s or early-30s doesn’t do.
I was in the kind of in the industry where cocaine was tolerated, if you were successful enough.
You can get away with fairly outrageous behaviour.
But if you’ve got any sense you tire of that. It’s got a shelf life.
This year’s the 20th anniversary reissue of Oasis’ Definitely Maybe. Did you party much with the Gallaghers?
Nah. But it’s hard to stress how exciting their early gigs were.
I remember seeing them in ’94 in a tent on Irvine Beach, and we went to see them in Belfast in ’94 for a couple of days and they were amazing.
They were the first band to bridge that gap between club and guitar music.
Not that their music was particularly dancey but they seemed to also connect to people from that arena too.
Do you still listen to any bands from that era?
I’ve still got a soft spot for Marion.
Why did your band The Wishing Stones (Niven was the guitarist) not make it?
Ha. I don’t think the public was really ready for our cross between Creedence Clearwater Revival and Television.
I think we were a bit ahead of our time there.
You’ve been very vocal in saying Simon Cowell is shovelling “shit” to the British public and your novel Second Coming is a satire on the X Factor and reality shows. What do you think of him now?
Well, you have to remember that there’s always been shows like that, throughout history.
It is what it is. Again, it’s not for me.
A lot of popular culture is always crap Most food’s bad, most architecture’s bad, most music’s bad, most books are bad.
Most of the stuff of any era is always bad.
But as you get older you have to learn you can’t let that stuff drive you crazy.
There’s always some good stuff too and you have to concentrate on that.
It’s difficult now because a lot of rock ‘n’ roll music was built on the generation gap and the ability to shock the generation above you.
Now we’ve moved on to a generation of parents who’ve lived through the 60s and punk rock and acid house and the Nineties.
It becomes increasingly hard to do that.
There will always be good bands and things but I don’t know that the danger that rock ’n’ roll had during it’s first 40 years.
I just don’t know if that’ll happen again.