If you were to read Kill Your Friends aloud on Aurora Avenue
at 2:00 a.m., all the sex workers would think you own everyone in this
town. This novel is an introduction into the music business us mere
“tolers” have never heard of and can’t comprehend. We are invited into
the mind of a complete sociopath to learn just how it all works and
what the record companies are really up to—how musicians are
baited, used, and thrown out, merely food for top execs who are
actually laughing at the “artist” the entire time:
You are finished. Game fucking over. You are twenty-
two years
old and six hundred thousand pounds in debt to us—a bunch of
sub-human demons who were your best friends a year ago, but who would
gladly slit your throat and dance in your blood if we thought it would
help us claw back a penny. Playing at being pop stars will be the
high-water mark of your entire life… Someone like me will probably be
somewhere among your dying thoughts.
Set in the late 1990s in a nation high on Britpop, Cool Britannia,
and Tony Blair, Kill Your Friends‘ protagonist Steven Stelfox is
a distillation of a population optimistically rushing toward the
precipice and making it up as they go along. Stelfox is the British
Psycho who lunches with Patrick Bateman when he’s in NYC. He is a
depraved man, a nihilist who wants to make money, fuck, drink, and
snort quantities of cocaine that would make Tony Montana do a double
take. All the while, he makes sure that nobody shines brighter than he
does, although it’s more a case of dragging colleagues (no one has
friends here) down so no one will notice how terrible he is at his job.
Stelfox inhabits a world where fear is at the wheel, and a seemingly
limitless expense account is fuel for a debauched and hilarious ride
with a dubious crowd of morally destitute social vampires. His story
reinforces the truth that nobody knows anything except that everyone is
full of shit, but looking the other way ensures survival as long as the
money is flowing.
Kill Your Friends is also a smashing slang dictionary of the
rich and crude language that permeated the Loaded Generation of Britain
in the ’90s, where everyone is “mate” and shouts of “oi oi” let
everyone know you have arrived and are “largin’ it up.” Stelfox would
be the twisted cousin of Jay Gatsby who crashes the party and takes
advantage of Daisy while letting you have the sick truth: “Greed,
viciousness, duplicity, exploitation, hedonism, and aggression feature
predominately among the values our company encourages and rewards.” For
full effect, read this book while listening to Definitely Maybe by Oasis. Bosh. Bosh. Done deal. 