Powder - Softcover

Sampson, Kevin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224050826 ISBN 13: 9780224050821

Publisher: Random House UK, 1999

Synopsis

An everyday story of Rock 'N' Roll folk

Keva McLuskey craves success. Other bands are making it big. His worst enemy is on MTV.

And time is not on his side. Yet he's certain it's his destiny to be recognised among the great songwriters of our time. Without that approval, Keva can never confront his horrific past. That's why he formed The Grams.

Jamie Love wants to revel in his sexual dark side. He wants all the blowjobs, cocaine and groupies that Fame can bring. That's why he joined The Grams.

Their hapless manager, Wheezer, confesses that keeping the boys together is "like trying to cup water in your hands".

At 23, Guy deBurret is already a rehab survivor, a casualty of the soulless hedonism of the music business. The youngest son in a banking dynasty, he became the most successful talent scout in the music business before he was 20.

Rapidly disenchanted with the immorality of the business, he descended into a slough of low-rent whoring and drug-bingeing around King's Cross. But now he's been there, done that and all he wants is to find Ella, his favourite hooker, and take the pair of them away from all this ... the ethical way.

When he sees The Grams he feels fated to nurture them and protect them from the injustices of the international music business. That's why he formed a record label which prizes morality as highly as platinum discs. But, when he puts his principles into action and signs The Grams, it can only end in tears...

Powder is the most authentic novel about Rock and Roll ever. Outrageously funny, seething with coke-addled sex and paranoia, and yet capturing all the energy and excitement of a band breaking through.

Powder is also a frighteningly accurate low-down on the machinations of the music business, written by a man who - as manager of The Farm - has experienced them from the inside.

About this title

About the Author

Kevin Sampson knows  the music business from the inside as the manager of the pop group, The Farm. His acclaimed first novel, Awaydays, is also available in Vintage.

From the Inside Flap

story of Rock 'N' Roll folk

Keva McLuskey craves success. Other bands are making it big. His worst enemy is on MTV.

And time is not on his side. Yet he's certain it's his destiny to be recognised among the great songwriters of our time. Without that approval, Keva can never confront his horrific past. That's why he formed The Grams.

Jamie Love wants to revel in his sexual dark side. He wants all the blowjobs, cocaine and groupies that Fame can bring. That's why he joined The Grams.

Their hapless manager, Wheezer, confesses that keeping the boys together is "like trying to cup water in your hands".

At 23, Guy deBurret is already a rehab survivor, a casualty of the soulless hedonism of the music business. The youngest son in a banking dynasty, he became the most successful talent scout in the music business before he was 20.

Rapidly disenchanted with the immorality of the business, he descended into a slough of low-r

Reviews

If rock 'n' roll bands moan about why we can't all get along, the rock industry that scoops them up and spits them out must be the reason. Or so industry insider Sampson (Awaydays) would have readers believe. This long, over-stuffed novel, in which vomiting on someone can be forgiven but bad haircuts cannot, chronicles the rise and fall of a Liverpudlian alternative-rock quartet, the Grams, and its hordes of associated apparatchiks. It is in a fit of blind rage (read: envy over the success of his nemesis's band, Sensira) that the Grams' requisitely melancholy singer-songwriter, Keva McCluskey, agrees to play a desperate gig orchestrated by manager "Wheezer" Finlay at a rich family's party. Said family just happens to have a son recently out of rehab; said son, Guy deBurrett, just happens to be a record producer, and the Grams shoot to stardom. First, there's the record deal, financed by Guy's trust fund; then there's the first single, the big show, the big video, the big tour. The book's central appeal is the author's formidable knowledge of the record business (Samson managed the British band the Farm). There's no plot, but rather a trajectory, with the band passing through a number of preordained points: the obligatory bacchanalian pilgrimage to Ibiza, the great on-tour freak-out and the ominously recurrent wrangling over publishing rights. Though excellent at showing the hows of the music industry, Sampson does not explain the whys, and few of his many characters offer any insight. While presenting a series of funny snapshots of the music industry, the book's slow buildup and flash-in-the-pan conclusion may leave readers hoping the next record will be better. Expect no platinum or gold pressings for this title. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part One
Getting There

Keva had bought his NME twenty-five minutes ago, but only now could he bring himself to look at it. This was not something that'd just go away if he binned the mag. He could leave the cafe, walk back to the flat, walk away from it all, lock himself in, but this awful thing would still be there when he came out again. He was going to have to take his medicine and read the fucking thing.

He'd been all too well aware that Sensira were starting to do it, but this, the scale of it, the sheer bigness, was a total, total shock. From the moment he saw it, it made him ache to the pit of his soul. He'd bent down, half-genuflecting in the usual place on the usual bottom shelf in his newsagent, and there it was. There they were. Nothing could have prepared him for that stunning impact as he twigged who was on the cover. What he was looking at, there, then, in luscious, grinning colour, smiling from the front of the New Musical Express, from the cover, was Sensira.

Sensira! On the cover of the NM-fucking-E! Jesus! Was every fucking journalist and punter in this country a complete mug? Fuck! How could people fall for it? They're shit! They are such shit! Sensira, for fuck's sake!

They'd been cleaning his boots a few months ago. Now, Sensira, the eternal support group, were on the cover, in the middle, in the news. Keva, quite properly, felt his whole spirit sink again as he turned the page and forced himself to take it all in. It was too true. Sensira were news. They were Big. Thank Christ there was no one in there to see him like this. His face, he could feel it, was twitching with envy. He stared at the article vacantly, reading without taking in a word. This was it, then. This was how the end felt. There was no point, no point at all in his carrying on.

He looked at the picture of Helmet. The little twat even had his hair the same as his now. He was shameless. Keva tried to drink his coffee but it tasted of nothing. This creeping realisation, this whole thing was horrible. He had to read on. He had to.

`What's so damn hilarious, handsome?'

Lorraine. One of the girls at Keith's. Gorgeous. Tall and fine-boned, with a bent nose that looked great on her. You couldn't call any of the Keith's girls waitresses or manageresses or whatever. They all seemed to do everything. Lorraine, at various times, had waited-on, cashed-up, grill-chefed, sung `Kiss Me Honey Honey' for the students and chased out junior hoods trying to make a name for themselves in a soft establishment. She's one of the girls at Keith's.

He'd been potty about Lorraine, once. Plenty enough people had told Keva she liked him, especially since the band started gigging. He knew she liked him. But he knew, too, that if he were ever to ask her out, she'd put him down. No doubt about it and no matter, anyway. He was long past her. He lost interest once he knew he could have her. Suddenly, once the unattainable Lorraine, the object of much delusory masturbation, was within his grasp, there seemed no point to it. She'd end up leaving him.

Besides, the other thing about her, which people seemed to find cute but only made Keva wince, was her range of irritating Hollywood starlet accents, sometimes as many as three in one short enquiry. She could make `Top up ya coffee, handsome?' start out as Melanie Griffiths and end up as Jean Harlow. Marilyn was never far away, of course, either. She used words like `handsome'. He couldn't spend too much time with someone who did that.

Keva pushed the NME across the table to her, looking away in disgust as he did it. She clocked the accompanying shot of Helmet and snorted.

`Don't getcha knickers in a twist over him, honey. He's bogus.'

Coming from Lorraine it could've sounded pat, just another of her sayings. But she was dead on. That's exactly what he was. Helmet Horrocks was bogus. Seeing him there, now, the subject of an almost hysterical NME editorial, was actually painful to Keva. He picked up the paper again.

helmetmania! ran the headline. Then:

`Sensira for Arena', and:

`It's all gone bonkers!' - Helmet.

The gist of this news-spread, inside the front page, was that the demand for a show by Helmet's band, Sensira, had been so enormous that they'd had to move it from the Forum to Wembley Arena. Wembleyfuckingarena! Sensira!

`With capacity limited to 8,000 by Brent Council for the show, tickets sold out within four hours of going on sale.'

What? Limited to 8,000. Jeezuz! Fuck! He felt dizzy. Just a couple of good club gigs would do the Grams for now ... bring a few bob in, get a demo together, keep things moving, but ... FUCK! Wembley Arena! For that stunted little get and his phoney strung-out waster hymns. Twat! He flicked a look at the black-and-white of Helmet, saucer-eyed, scared, intense - a sickly child grown big. Keva couldn't help himself. He gobbed on the photo then read the piece again, the bit where Helmet was justifying the switch from the intimate, punter-friendly Forum to the enormous fleeceadromes of the arena circuit.

It's like, the kids've made it clear that they want the big vibe, the tribal gatherings. They want thousands of kindred souls, all together, having the time of their lives. It's all gone a bit bonkers when Sensira go from playing to four men and a dog in Eccles to this - but it's just the way things are going right now. It ain't too big. How can a party be too big?

In how many ways could Keva despise him for this fake, cynical rhetoric? Seven. The seven deadly idiocies of Helmet fucking Horrocks.

1) The affected, and improper use of like. Either the kids have made it clear or they haven't. It is not like anything.

2) Kids? Fuck off.

3) Vibe. See kids.

4) Tribal Gathering with small initials. Pseudo-clever tapping of popular culture, letting the journo know that he's not a pleb, he can come up with the straplines, too, while simultaneously letting the reader see that he's `out there'. With them. A well-deliberated, fake-spontaneous soundbite. Gobshite.

5) Bonkers. Slipped up there, tithead. Who the fuck says `bonkers' except you.

6) Four men and a dog. Direct lift from Keva, whose fine band, the Grams, are loved by the grassroot fanzines and are just now starting, with three or four other similarly poetic, melancholic guitar outfits, to be touted by the music press as the New Underground. In the Grams' biggest interview so far, a splash in Chasing Chaos fanzine, Keva pointed to a gig in Carlisle as being epochal, in spite of being attended by `four men and a dog'. Maybe Helmet was taking a swipe at him. As if he'd have time to, the twat. And that wasn't all he'd nicked. His whole look had gone from scruffy folkie in cord jackets to the cool, smart-casual look favoured by the Grams. Regardless, he still looked a Ted in low-cut trainies with no socks. He just couldn't carry it off.

7) Ain't. Nuff said.

That was just the news page. At the end of the report, readers were directed to an exclusive Helmet interview in the centre spread of the mag. Keva speed-scanned it for mentions of the Grams and the New Underground, but it wasn't so bad. Helmet was looking forward to Sensira's imminent tour of the States, which he expected to be bonkers and stressed, again, his bewilderment at so much happening so fast. He reminded readers that it was only six months since their first, independent single (`Noodledoodled'. Crap. Helmet guessing what it's like to be out of it.) had dented the Top 40, signalling the start of this unplanned stampede to Wembley Arena, Los Angeles and fuck knows where else. It was difficult to keep a critical distance (not half!), difficult to take it seriously. It was bonkers. He only touched upon the New Underground reluctantly, and only then at the journo's behest, hoping that bands like the Grams, The Purple and Macrobe `get to where they wanna be'. Helmet pointedly excluded Sensira from any `scene', but it was not a bad interview. Not like last time.

It wasn't even a year ago. The Blackpool gig. Wheezer had cobbled together a mini-tour - Derby, Sheffield, Leeds, York, Manchester, Blackpool, Liverpool, then on to an earner at Bangor University that no one wanted to do. The venues were tiny, mostly, but the gigs were going well, over a hundred at each show, touching two hundred at a couple of them. Sensira were going on first every night, with the Grams and The Purple alternating the headline slot, on the grounds that they'd both had Radio One sessions - the Grams on Peel, The Purple on Lamacq. Helmet was just made up to be there. He'd written to Keva about twenty-five times, said how much he loved the Grams, thought they were the only new group worth bothering about, the only band that made a difference to him. Next thing he'd formed his own band, made a demo - any chance of any gigs, anytime, anywhere? They'd even roadie for the Grams. Be honoured to. Keva didn't much like the tape but, so what? Helmet seemed to have passion. He was a dreamer and he loved the Grams - and praise was something which Keva could always tolerate. So Sensira did a couple of farting little one-off gigs with the Grams, kissed their arses and humped their gear. And then came The Tour.

There'd been a great rapport between the bands, an atmosphere of shared destiny, with the Grams the unspoken topdogs. It was starting to feel like this was going somewhere. Three years of playing in shitholes in front of twelve, twenty, fifty people then suddenly The Wheeze had come on board and started to get the ball rolling. Local press and radio. Bit of a following in Liverpool, then the Peel session and this little tour. Decent PA systems. Soundchecks. Crowds which, though still modest, formed enough of a throng to infiltrate the Bermuda Crescent, that semi-circle of dance floor in front of the stage where no fan dared to tread. There'd been nights not so long ago, nights like Carlisle, when the Grams had been on fire and you could sense that the handful there just wanted to get into it, hurl themselves to the front an...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224050826
• ISBN 13: 9780224050821
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288