Kill Your Friends

While watching In The Loop on DVD the other night, Louise remarked of Peter Capaldi's vicious spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, "you love him, don't you? He's exactly how you wish you could talk to people in your job, isn't he?"

Well... yes. As mentioned here previously, I have a particular penchant for angry, misanthropic, sharp-tongued anti-heroes. Gregory House, Andy Sipowicz, Al Swearengen. There's something wonderfully cathartic about these characters, and Malcolm Tucker screaming "if I could, I'd punch you into paralysis!" barges his way onto that list with pizazz.

Steven Stelfox, the protagonist (because in no way could he ever be described a hero) of John Niven's Kill Your Friends takes angry misanthropy to the extreme. Set in the music industry at the arse end of Britpop, it features the most bigoted, hateful, obscene and depraved first person narrator since American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. Yet to call Stelfox a sexist or racist or any other kind of -ist misses the point. He doesn't discriminate - he hates everyone equally. His friends, his colleagues, his bosses, his lackeys. The artists he represents and those he only wishes he represented. Man or woman, black or white, talent or tosser - he doesn't have a kind word for anyone. He does have a foul and derogatory mouthful for everyone.

Kill Your Friends is the kind of book you read with a huge guilty grin on your face. You know you shouldn't be enjoying it as much as you do - and if you enjoy it as much as I did, you'll probably hate yourself in the morning. You may even find yourself questioning what it is in your own nature - year's of repressed anger at the injustice of the world? - that makes this orgy of ignominy so deeply satisfying. You might not like the answers.

Beyond that, I felt a particular attachment to the era. 1997 was as close as I got to working in the music industry myself, albeit from the opposite side to Stelfox. Back then I was working in the radio station record library, having minor say on playlists, scrounging free CDs and gig tickets from pluggers, and dipping my toe in the cesspit this book wallows in. I recognise many of the obscure 'next big thing' bands Niven namechecks here (Ultrasound should have been massive - well, their lead singer was), and though I was never a part of the coke-snorting, prostitute-abusing, expense-account-ravaging world the author paints, I did occasionally peek in through the steamy window. If there's anyone out there who feels remotely sympathetic for the way the internet slaughtered the record industry, this book is essential reading. It's the Fall of the Roman Empire played out to a soundtrack of Radiohead and the Spice Girls. Nothing implodes like excess.

"We'll manufacture your records and put them in the fucking shops. We'll try not to spend a red centunless we're sure we'll get it back with interest. We'll second-guess you and interfere at every conceivable stage of the artistic process. We'll edit and remix tracks without your permission. We'll force you to appear on appalling, degrading kiddies' TV programmes where you'll shake hands with Dobbin The Donkey and have to explain yourself to a teenage VJ with the attention span of a Ritalin-fuelled infant. We'll work you until you can't stand up. In collusion with your publishers we'll try and license your music to TV adverts for everything from banks to multinational petrochemical companies. (We'd license it to whaling fleets and arms dealers too if only they advertised on TV.) We'll under-account to you and charge you for every recoupable expense from the staples used to knock your horrendous contract together to the Coke you had from the fridge in my office. And if it doesn't all work out, you'll be dropped faster than a Plymouth hooker's knickers when there's a big ship in town."