Fresh Kill from John Niven's pen

WRITER John Niven comes to talk about his latest book at Waterstones Inverness on Saturday – and the return of his anti-hero Stelfox, possibly the scariest man in global music.

Kill ’Em All is the second sequel to his bestselling Kill Your Friends set in the Britpop years.

Then Kill Your Friends introduced record label scout Steven Stelfox – not so much interested in the great bands he was supposed to be discovering, but in bettering his rivals at work. Gradually he sank further and further into a nightmare drug-fuelled world where even murder wasn’t too low an expediency to consider.

Stelfox reappeared behind a hit TV talent show in the writer’s religious satire in 2011 The Second Coming.

And now Stelfox sees an opportunity when his record label boss and friend James Trellick has a problem with his Michael Jacksonesque fallen superstar Lucius De Pre. A consultant with big ideas and an ambition to join the exclusive world of the billionaires, Stelfox can see the perfect opportunity to make that next step up.

As the new book publicity says, Stelfox is “just the man for our broken times”.

Since writing his first books, John has also created a career in screenwriting.

Experiencing life in Los Angeles has given some insights that he shares in the book.

And he deftly describes the world of the very rich and their version of keeping up with the Joneses at one point where they compare the interior design of their personal jets.

“It’s something you notice in those social circles that you never know how poor you are until you start making a bit of money,” laughed John.

“There is a description in the book where Stelfox describes the horror of being in the Caribbean on his big yacht and looks up to see David Geffen in his boat blocking the sun out and it inspires a kind of rage. And you do get people like that, successful people who have made - whether it is 10 or 15 million – and you think ‘surely you can stick there, that is alright!’.

“But I spend a lot of time in LA now and I won’t name names but I know some successful British writers out there now and they are making a lot more money than they would have been making here.

“The stakes by which you have to live increase dramatically. Suddenly you are paying the pool guy and the gardeners and you have to pay to lease the right car.

“And you are making a lot of money - but your expenses are going through the roof.

“There are lots of people who are earning the money that a reasonable person with a normal life would think of as a small fortune.

“But by their standards they are barely breaking even.

“And the way Stelfox lives is like a hugely supercharged version of that.”

John writes about his grotesque character with a kind of delighted relish.

“There is a freeing aspect to that it is a lot of fun.

“Every single outrageous thing you have heard in the last 10 years in jest or serious, he can think it and say it.”

John said: “I do find it worryingly easy to slip into Stelfox’s inner monologue. But it can also be annoying as it’s hard to get it out of your head if you have been writing it for a while!”

He added: “With these books if you really know a character well in any given situation, you know what their response will be - and then they almost write themselves.”

John has become used as a screenwriter to the low return of films made to the movie scripts worked on. It is the norm in the movie business.

“There’s a statistic that for every 10 scripts you work on, one will finally become a movie. There’s an entire industry out there where you rewrite studio projects that are in development. In fact one in 10 would be a generous estimate! One in 100 wouldn’t be bad.

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“So you can have a very nice living out there without actually having a film made. I think I have worked on four or five that have gone as far as becoming movies.”

John has written his latest script which will make it the big screen this autumn with a screenwriting partner Nick Ball.

“We are currently working on a movie called War Pigs that has got Mel Gibson and Colin Farrell starring in it which will be out at the end of October. But they all take so long to happen.

“We wrote the first draft of this script five years ago.”

It was John’s time as an A & R manager in the music industry – following his experience being in a signed band before completing his university first class degree in English – that inspired his first novel.

First he had to get over the sense of uncertainty he knew lay ahead trying to break through as a writer, to leave his job in music and follow his original plan to write.

“I had always wanted to be a writer but it seemed to me from being in the music industry in my early 20s that you were doomed to fail.

“For every million demo tapes a record company might sign 20 bands of which two would get somewhere.

“I imagine with publishing the odds are very similar and I just kind of thought ‘This won’t happen!’.

! was trying to write a novel from the age of about 22.

“But not much in life had happened to me at that point, I didn’t have very much to write about, was the problem.

“Getting a job in the music industry was really an easy option from knowing people from that business after my time of being in a band. And I managed to cheek my way into a job.

“But then, as happens to a lot of people, you turn around and 10 years have gone by.”

Kill Your Enemies came out in 2008 and was later made into a successful movie starring Nicholas Hoult.

Since then, a succession of novels and film projects has followed. As with the earlier outings for Stelfox, John’s latest novel delights in documenting the strange world inhabited by the character and the rest of us in 2018..

Catching and representing the essence of now seems to involve embracing a lack of responsibility abroad – especially among leaders and influencers.

John said: “I think there is practically no accountability any more, we can pretty much do and get away with anything – we are living in Vladimir Putin’s world which is one of former KGB officers, black ops and through the looking glass.

“Black is white and white is black. And if you lie long enough and hard enough and loud enough you can do whatever you like and nothing happens to people.

“Politicians are stumbling through outrage and crisis that would have destroyed their career 10 or 20 years ago, but it just seems to be they are indestructible.

“It’s fun for a writer.

“That’s really the theme of the book, it’s the time of the big lie.”

John describes some of the outrageous acts Stelfox gets up to in the book and the characters around him effectively saying “That’s crazy, people are not going to buy that”.

John adds: “Stelfox just points to Trump on the TV and thinks he can do what he likes, nobody cares any more.”

Though the latest return of John’s character is just published this week, John confirmed there may well be future plans for him.

John said: “Ideally, yes. I think I quite liked the idea of a character you can come back to every decade or so to have a look at the times you are living in.

“The American writer John Updike did that with his Rabbit novels, usually at the end of the decade, in the late 50s, 60s and 70s.

“The first Stelfox book was written in the 90s and set in the 90s and the symmetry of that – bringing the character back when he is 47 and to have him look now at 2017, it’s such a crazy time we are living in right now...

“And there is a really boring preachy novel to be written about that.

“But I think this way is more fun.

John remembers realising it might be good to write the book that became Kill ‘Em All.

“It occurred to me ‘Stelfox would be absolutely loving all this. He would love Trump, he would love Brexit, he would be embracing the opportunities to make money!’.

“His whole career in the music industry was based on populism and the lowest common denominator. And we live now in a time when that is more present than it was 10 or 20 years ago.

“So it felt very much to me like his time right now.”

John Niven is at Waterstones Inverness on Saturday to talk about his new book at 2pm in the bookshop. Tickets for the event are available at Waterstones and by phoning the shop on 01463 233500. John’s Twitter: @estellecostanza