John Niven tells us about the Big Apple’s expensive core
For the uninitiated, John Niven has written six best-sellers and been hailed as one of Britain’s sharpest writers.
His debut novel Kill Your Friends was called ‘the best British novel since Trainspotting’ when it was published in 2008.
Rampaging through the rip-roaring book is Niven’s most notorious creation yet – murderous A&R man Steven Stelfox.
Stelfox soullessly snorts, shags, snarls schemes and finally slaughters his way to the top of the greasy music industry pole.
Kill Your Friends was inspired by the 10 hedonistic years Niven spent as a London-based music talent spotter in the drug-frenzied money-trench of the Nineties music industry.
His book was such a brutal evisceration of the business it’s been called ‘American Psycho for the Britpop generation’.
Now it’s being made into a long-awaited film, with a screenplay also written by Niven.
Breathing life into Steven Stelfox is Nicholas Hoult – known as the lad out of Skins and About A Boy.
The movie is due out in 2015 and Niven is now globe-trotting to wrap up filming.
Niven describes what it was like going back to New York to see his dreams come true, now that the Big Apple has transformed from a Taxi Driver-style hellhole to a millionaires’ playground.
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“New York, New York, Forty Second Street – hustlers hustle and pimps pimp the beat.”
So sang Joe Strummer on The Clash’s very fine 1979 composition The Right Profile.
And, in 1979, old Joe was right on the money: You’d take your life (and your wallet) in your hands going anywhere near 42nd street or Times Square at night.
It was the time of Taxi Driver New York: of steam billowing through manholes and gratings and either a gun or a hooker’s breasts getting thrust in your face at every turn.
Nowadays of course, it’s Disneyland up there: giant video screens where tourists wave at themselves while they queue up to get into the Warner Brothers store to buy dolls of crime-fighting superhero characters who were dreamed up to fight the villains in dystopian, corrupt and bankrupt cities.
Cities, in fact, just like old New York. (In fact, here’s an interesting stat for you – back in 1984 there were an annual 2,300 crimes committed in and around Times Square – six every day – and the entire district generated six million bucks in property taxes: about the same as a single mid-sized office building in midtown produces today.)
I was pondering all of this as I walked across Manhattan a few weeks ago.
I was in town for the filming of the movie of my novel Kill Your Friends (starring Nicholas Hoult as murderous, psychopathic A&R man Steven Stelfox) and I realized it had been exactly twenty years to the month since I first set foot in the city.
The New York I landed in back in 1994 when I was a young (not murderous, only relatively psychopathic) music industry exec still had – even that late in the day – something of the old New York in its DNA.
I remember having no luck getting a cab driver to take us to an after-hours bar in the Meatpacking District over on the lower west side.
The whole area was still pretty dicey back then – the place where, only a few years before, Bret Easton Ellis had Patrick Bateman go to pick up prostitutes to murder in American Psycho.
Now it’s all chic restaurants, Stella McCartney outlets, Soho House and two million dollar condos.
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“with New York, London and Berlin all going or gone you have to wonder where the next centre of edgy, hip, urban cool is going to be.”
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Another first on that trip was having a gun pulled on us, when we were stumbling around in the early hours of the morning trying to find our way back to our hotel after a night at the legendary Sound Factory, on West 21st Street, just north of the Meatpacking District.
Well, I say ‘a gun pulled on us’.
We went up to three guys hunkered beneath a lamppost eating slices of pizza and asked them something like, “Excuse me? Could you direct us to the Gramercy Park area?” in our sweetest Scottish accents.
One of them replied by simply pulling up his sweatshirt to reveal the butt of the pistol tucked in his waistband and saying, “Fuck off.”
Unsurprisingly this did the trick: off we fucked.
In 1994, while New York was well on its way to transforming itself from the wasteland of Escape From New York into the urban paradise of real estate and tourism it is today, it hadn’t quite completed the journey.
It still had teeth and you had to be careful about where you slummed it because the slums, as they say, bit back.
It’s almost impossible to convey this to those aged much under 30 now, but back in the day, in the era of Scorsese’s Mean Streets, New York City was technically bankrupt.
Whole city blocks lay uninhabited and mounds of refuse piled up in the streets.
After midnight walking through Central Park or riding the subway wasn’t so much foolhardy as suicidal.
Around the same time Taxi Driver was being shot in 1975 the CBGB’s scene was happening down on the Bowery: a place for derelicts and vagrants and white punks on dope.
A place where you could rent an enormous loft for $100 a month, a place where, in former resident Debbie Harry’s words, you could often see a “three hundred pound bum taking a two hundred pound shit on your front doorstep”.
Today the Bowery is home to the hipper-than-thou ventures like the Ace Hotel and the John Dory Oyster Bar – a place where you can barely get dinner for a hundred dollars.
The same thing is happening all over Berlin these days and the obvious parallel in London would be somewhere like Hackney: from knifepoint mugging to soy caramel latte in 20 short years.
Of course part of the reason that cities see explosions of creativity is that when they are cheap to live in then young, creative people flock there.
So what am I saying?
Am I advocating a return to bankruptcy, mugging and actual human turds piling up in the streets in return for cheap rents and a few good films and records?
Maybe not, but with New York, London and Berlin all going or gone you have to wonder where the next centre of edgy, hip, urban cool is going to be.
Stay tuned next month for my report from the happening boroughs of Hartlepool kids…