Jason Rice: First I was hoping I could get to the bottom of why you wrote a book about the music business, or that business as it used to be, right now, in an age when most people couldn’t name a single record company, and have sold all their CD’s, bought an IPod filled it with songs costing no more than 99 cents. And second, what do you think happened to the music business, and will it ever be the same, or has it evolved into something that hasn’t been categorized or can’t?
John Niven: Without getting too grand – but I will – the novel’s really about greed and ambition, particularly about the awful cost when a culture allows the primacy of ambition over talent. That conceit kind of goes back to Euripides and it seemed to me like it might have a little more mileage left in it beyond whatever format people choose to consume music in. As for the future of the music industry – I wouldn’t be giving the last rights just yet. The old business model is finished and everyone’s scrambling around to try and find a new one. But they will. Or maybe not. Maybe the music industry will be one of the features of late period capitalism that the world finds it can get along without…
JR: We thought the book was an absolute homerun, funny, witty and very hard to put down. To get to this point, you know, of being able to write a novel, what kind of rough draft process did you have to go through? In the P.S. section of the galley I read you’ve mentioned you wrote several other novels in a short period of time. Could you have written this without writing those other books? Can you take us through the gestation period on Kill Your Friends?
JN: I left the music industry for good in 2003 and tried then to write a draft. But the whole thing was still too fresh and raw and the book wouldn’t come. The experience needed a while to distil down. So I wrote a novella (Music from Big Pink) set in Woodstock in the 1960s and attempted, then abandoned, an entirely different novel and I outlined The Amateurs (my third book, now finished and due for UK publication in Spring 2009.) Then, sometime late 2005, I went back to Kill Your Friends and it just poured out. Once you find the voice for a character like Stelfox, they often won’t shut up. The book went through three drafts over fourteen months before I submitted it to my agent, and then another draft based on her notes, which has kind of become typical for me.
JR: The slick and greasy nastiness that gurgles up out of the moat which surrounds Stephen is truly gruesome but yet totally hysterical and over the top. When did you say, “Jezz…this is good, but I really want to get people’s mouths to drop open.” Like the piece of corn on the shit smeared dildo. You had to come up with really titillating dialogue, scenes and situations in your mind, (drawn from where ever, I don’t ) and then write them down, maybe save them for a moment like Stephen has when the cop and his girlfriend show up towards the end. Is there a stock piling of ideas that happens when you write, or maybe when you don’t write, probably in the shower, or driving to the cinema, or right before you go to sleep?
JN: My single worst habit as a novelist is failing to keep coherent notebooks. I’ll scribble things down on napkins, hotel stationary, etc and then lose them. But I have a pretty good memory and I find that act of writing something down is sometimes enough to commit it to memory. To answer the first part of that question – I never, ever, had moments when I thought ‘I really want to shock people here.’ It’s funny that you mention the dildo/sweetcorn scene because a few people have mentioned that as a particularly, umm, memorable moment. I don’t know – it didn’t seem too extreme to me! Sweetcorn often makes it to the bottom of the alimentary canal completely undigested, so it seemed logical that if he had a dildo stuck far enough up his ass then a piece of sweetcorn might have made it onto it. It then seemed like it would be funny to have a reasonable human being – like Parker-Hall – witness this atrocity.
JR: From what I understand about the music business, it seems like everyone has a demo, and if they find out you work for a record company you’re pummeled by everyone from the doorman to the newspaper boy punting CD’s filled with monosyllabic chanting that don’t ever make it through your eardrums. How do you deal with this, and how does it carry over to your job, which is to find the wheat buried in the chaff?
JN: Oh every lunatic out there has a demo. It took a truly evil genius like Simon Cowell to decide to put the fuckers on national television and make a billion dollars out of them.
JR: This is an incredibly cynical and nasty piece of writing. At any point did you or your editor think you needed to lighten this up, make it palatable, and even get Stephen more likeable? As it stands now there isn’t a redeemable moment in this story. Where and when do you tear the rearview mirror off with your narrative structure and just say “fuck it”, this guy is an asshole, and I’m never taking my foot of 
the gas.
JN: ‘Lightened up…palatable…likeable…’ Yeah, that would have made it just like the record industry, huh? The thought never crossed my mind and I was fortunate enough to have a marvelous agent in Clare Conville (she also handles DBC Pierre) who – upon reading the first draft – urged me to go further, darker. And then – doubly fortunate – I had marvelous editors in Jason Arthur at Heinemann UK, and Carrie at Harper US who got the book completely. You can call Stelfox an asshole and I’d have to agree. You can say he’s depraved, self-obsessed, cowardly and satanic and I’d be right there with you. If, however, you think he’s in any way extraordinary, in any way extreme (in terms of his thought processes), or excessively cynical then that, I’m afraid, is where we part company. Stelfox is utterly representative of his time and place. Funnily enough the only time I started hearing nonsense about making him more ‘likeable’ and ‘palatable’ was when we started having meetings about the film rights. Boy oh boy can these guys (producers, directors) talk themselves a bunch of shit about ‘character arcs’ and the like. It’s a miracle I’m fucking sane after some of the cack I had to hear, sitting there listening to fools talking about how he had to be either ‘redeemed’ or ‘punished’ in some way. Here’s a character arc for you – a guy’s an utter inhuman bastard madman until that no longer works for him. Then he might try something else. The entire point of the novel is this: the nice guys finish in the incinerator and the demons run amok, rocking on your dime. Forever.
JR: Where does Stephen end and your experience in the record business begin? You said you’ve burned every bridge available to you in that business, and if I look closely I can’t help but w
onder if you might have done some of these things yourself. In fiction writers take from the world around them, anyone who says they make it all up is doing just that. Will there be any late night phone calls apologizing to people who might see themselves in this and wonder, “Why did John say I did that…I was never there…?” You claim that real people are rarely good enough for a novel, I have to disagree, and there are plenty of people in my life who would make perfect characters in a novel.
JN: KYF is completely true while barely a scene in the book is drawn from real life. I think there’s one, maybe two, actual conversations that I was witness to. Oddly enough I’ve had people come up to me claiming to have been at scenes in the novel that never actually happened! And I’m far less like Stelfox than people always imagine. I could introduce you to a couple of people who make Stelfox look like a social worker. As to real people vs fictional ones, what I meant was that you tend to want to grab a few aspects from different people to make one monstrous whole. Sadly I tend to try and surround myself with sane, reasonable people, people who are, in other words, completely useless for the purposes of fiction.
JR: Rick Rubin talked about the music business becoming something else, taking a new business model and maybe just selling its wares through subscription online. What do you think of that idea? And obviously Rick Rubin isn’t the only guy thinking this, and it’s hardly a new idea. What happens to the record business if kiosks replace record stores, you know, plug in your IPod and download songs, erasing all the middle men.
JN: The problem with this line of thinking is that the world just becomes a blog: a huge, cyberspace Speaker’s Corner with everyone standing on their soapbox and shouting. A&R men – like editors – are filters. They’re necessary. The good ones at any rate.
JR: I think it would be an insult to compare Kill Your Friends to American Psycho, because it’s so much better, to the point and funnier than that faded dye job posing as classic American literature, but people who’ve read that book, can certainly look for more of the same with Kill Your Friends, except your book is better, much better. What are your hopes and dreams with this novel? Could Guy Ritchie be involved? I know Madge is taking him to the cleaners, but he would be a perfect director to adapt this book.
JN: Ahh, I’m afraid I can’t even pretend that my book is fit to breathe the same air as Mr. Ellis’, so I won’t. I think American Psycho is a masterpiece that blowtorched the entire culture while all I’ve done is kick one small component of it in the balls. Guy Ritchie. Wow. If only he could make a masterpiece like Revolver or Swept Away out of my book…
JR: We really loved the Cannes, Miami and New York City sections, and when in real life did these parties ever end? When does the money run out? For Stephen, even though he’s broke, he seems to find his pockets bottomless, and his appetite endless. Is there any truth to this behavior?
JN: From people I still speak to in the record industry these things – conventions – are getting smaller and smaller and less frequent. Back in my day there seemed to be one every month, each more lavish and ridiculous than the last. And you’re right, a lot of A&R guys might be personally broke, but the expense accounts were pretty much bottomless back then. By the late nineties I was spending around six thousand dollars a month on expenses. Allowing for inflation that’s close to ten thousand dollars a month today. I mean, I think that’s more than most normal people’s salaries, isn’t it?
JR: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. Any last words?
JN: Keep a clean head and always carry a lightbulb.
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