Kill Your Friends: good on music, sub-American Psycho story

John Niven’s book, Kill Your Friends, is set in the music business at the height of Britpop. Niven knows what he’s talking about - he was an A&R man at the height of Britpop - and his protagonist’s rants about the music business, consumers and the general bovine stupidity of artists clearly come from experience. Pity the opening quote, Hunter S Thompson’s “cruel and shallow money trench” is a misquote (HST was talking about the TV business).

Here’s the book blurb:

It’s not dog-eat-dog around here…it’s dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known. Meet Steven Stelfox. London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where ‘no one knows anything’ and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public - ‘Yeah, those animals’. Fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine Stelfox, blithely criss-crosses the globe (’New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn’) searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.

But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.”Kill Your Friends” is a dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved - as long as you want it badly enough.

As a satire on the music industry, Kill Your Friends is pretty much peerless. (Real) A&R stupidity is mercilessly skewered, artists of all stripes get it in the neck and one particular rant, a Trainspotting-esque monologue about bands who want record deals, should be printed in 72-point type and nailed to the wall of every rehearsal room in the world. Some of the fictional artists are clearly drawn from real ones, like the self-indulgent drum’n'bass superstar and the band producing sub-Radiohead whiney nonsense, and many of the music business characters appear to be thinly disguised versions or composites of real-life characters.

As a novel, though, it isn’t great. Niven’s going for an American Psycho thing here, but American Psycho did it much better. You can’t help but think Niven should have written a memoir rather than a novel.

Don’t have a cow, man

You know the expression “might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb”? A former police officer seems to be taking it as a motto. Not only has he been charged with sexual assualt on humans, but he’s also been accused of getting oral sex from a cow.

Additional charges have been filed against former Moorestown police officer Robert Melia after allegations surfaced last week that he performed several sexual acts with livestock, specifically cows. Melia, 38, of 126 Cottage Avenue in Moorestown has been charged with four counts of animal cruelty after purposely and knowingly tormenting an animal, specifically by having a cow perform fellatio

[via Fark]

Flying to the US on business? Leave your laptop at home

Business travellers visiting America are being warned not to travel with sensitive information - because US security staff can copy it and hang on to it indefinitely.

“Right now, the U.S. customs department has the right to look at the data on your computer and download that data if they want to,” Gurley said. “The Ninth Circuit held that it is within the purview of the U.S. government to look at or download anything” on laptops and other electronic devices at the border, she said.

A recent court ruling says that laptops are just like any other luggage, which means security have the right to search their contents.

The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) has issued a warning to its members worldwide – and to all business travellers – to limit proprietary information on laptop computers when crossing U.S. borders, and to eliminate any personal data, including photographs, finances and email that you do not want examined by Border Protection authorities. The warning follows a decision by a federal appeals court on 21 April 2008 giving customs officials the unfettered authority to examine, copy, and seize travellers’ laptops – without reasonable suspicion.

The ACTE isn’t telling its members to hide data; it’s suggesting that they should take steps to avoid sensitive corporate information from getting into the wrong hands, or from being deleted by some fat-fingered fool. The group also recommends:

3) If your laptop also serves as your major home computer, get another one for travel purposes.

I reckon journalists travelling to the US might want to pay attention to that one.

Save the environment by making your bathroom look like the toilets in Doom 3

It should have been easy. Bulb burns out in the bathroom. Decide to do the right thing and put an energy saver in there instead of a cheap incandescent job. Buy energy saver. Put energy saver in bathroom. Earn the undying gratitude of polar bears. Easy!

Not easy. I bought a soft glow bulb labelled “60W equivalent” in Tesco for about a million jillion pounds,  I slapped it into the light fitting, and I switched it on. It made my bathroom look like something you’d expect dead bodies to be sawed up in. Bright doesn’t begin to describe it - it’s a vicious, bluey light that makes any room look like a pathology lab, or the toilets in Doom 3. Have you seen the film Sunshine? Remember the bit where the bloke opens up the blinds to let all the light in, and it all goes burny and scary and horrible? Or have you seen any film showing what happens when they drop an atom bomb on your shed? Turning on my bathroom light was pretty much like that. I’m scared to look in the mirror in case I’ve lost all my skin.

Maybe there are a few digits missing from the packaging and I’ve installed a 6000W bulb by mistake, or maybe it’s that energy saving bulbs are unnecessarily complicated and confusing. My money’s on the latter.

To be fair, energy saving bulbs are labelled so you know what you’re getting. Just compare the milliwatt figures and the number of lumens. If, like me, you neither know what millwatts and lumens mean in this context and can’t be arsed finding out, the labelling might as well tell you the bulb’s favourite pasta or the name of the manufacturer’s mother-in-law.

For what it’s worth, Philips Softone energy savers seem to do the job; everything else turns your house into a scene from Doom 3. It may be something to do with milliwatts and lumens, or it may be that Philips’ employees have superior taste in pasta.

Save the environment by, er, buying a new car

I know that the reasons given for tax increases are usually lies - the only reason is to boost government coffers - but the supposed environmental reasons for increasing car tax really bug me. I’ve got a knackered old Saab which is seven years old and therefore comes under the new regime, so from next year I’ll have to shell out a fifth of its value in car tax every year. Come to think of it, it’ll be more than a fifth because by next year it’ll be worth approximately 2p and the annual tax will be £300.

Given that the kind of car I need doesn’t change - I can’t fit a baby, a pram and a dog in a Smart - and that the tax is painful, that gives me two options. I can get an older estate car, or I can buy a newer estate car.

Older isn’t that green, because older cars pollute more. If I go back one  year and buy an identical Saab, the petrol and the diesel versions both pump out more CO2 than my current car, because the engines were revised to make them less polluting in 2001. Other manufacturers aren’t any better. An eight-year-old Mondeo estate pumps out more CO2 than my seven-year-old Saab whether I go for the petrol or the diesel. And of course, as cars get older they become dirtier.

Newer isn’t very green either, because most of a car’s environmental impact is in its manufacture. So changing a car that’s running more or less okay in favour of a newer one is just wasteful, and kills polar bears.

Which leaves a third option: keep the car, pay the tax, and don’t change anything.

Only a cynic would suggest that that’s exactly what the government expects most of us to do…

Don’t all rush to HMV at once, now

From the press release pile:

Finnish operatic rock supergroup, Northern Kings, release their debut album, Reborn, in the UK on Monday 16th June, on Warner Music, and the single ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ will be released in the UK as a digital download and limited edition CD on 12th June.

Reborn, which has achieved gold status in Finland, features symphonic orchestral rock interpretations of eighties classics ranging from Brothers in Arms, Ashes to Ashes, Sledgehammer, Hello, I Just Died In Your Arms, We Don’t Need Another Hero, plus Radiohead’s 1993 song Creep.

Here’s the full track listing.

Don’t Stop Believin’
We Don’t Need Another Hero
Broken Wings
Rebel Yell
Ashes To Ashes
Fallen On Hard Times
I Just Died In Your Arms
Sledgehammer
Don’t Bring Me Down
In The Air Tonight
Creep
Hello
Brothers In Arms

Computer games, diddies and the breakdown of society

This morning’s episode of Radio Scotland’s Morning Extra was about videogame violence and GTA IV (yep, I was the one who called in at the end to call irresponsible parents “diddies”, heh). I know phone-ins don’t exactly attract rocket scientists - I mean, they let me on air - but even by the usual standards of jaw-dropping nonsense I was gobsmacked by one caller. He thinks violent videogames are bad. He, er, lets his eight-year-old play 18-certificate video games for hours on end. He doesn’t approve of this.

WTF?

*bangs head on desk*

All this scratching is making me itch

Many years ago, I was driving a Transit (badly) through St John’s Wood in London and misjudged the width of the van, knocking out the taillights of a parked car. I stopped and left a note so the owner could get in touch with a bill (he/she didn’t, which surprised me). A few years after that, I was driving my mum’s car through an exceptionally narrow street and scraped someone’s bumper. I stopped, left a note, and paid for the repairs to the other car - which I regretted, as judging by the bill the owner replaced the standard bumper on his Ford Fiesta with one made of gold, rubies and diamonds. Despite that, I’d do the same thing again. To me, it’s obvious: you smash something belonging to somebody else, you pay to make it good.

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point in the last week or so somebody has scored deep lines along one side of my car while I’ve been parked in Tesco (I know it was Tesco - I’m a parent, I don’t go anywhere else). The car’s worth approximately 5p; the damage would cost several hundred quid to repair (it’s a wing, two doors and a rear panel). And it’s not the sort of damage you can do without noticing. So some bugger has scraped the shite out of my car, known full well what they’ve done, and just buggered off.

I think I’ve mentioned this before: one of my neighbours takes a note of the registrations of cars parked next to him in supermarkets. I used to think it was a stupid idea, but now I’m not so sure - because if I’d taken a note of the cars parked next to me, I could find them in future and set them on fire.

Life’s a gas

Apropos nothing…

Cost of filling a car with petrol in the US: $62 (£36).

Cost of filling a car with petrol in the UK: £71 ($142).

Comes with music. And stupidly large bills

Is Nokia’s Comes With Music deal one of the dumbest digital music deals ever struck? Could be!

The deal, which enables the phone firm to give users unlimited music downloads, could cost Nokia a fortune.

The Register has learned that Nokia must pay the wholesale per-unit rate for downloads over a certain ceiling - believed to be 35 songs per user.