John Niven: Oasis v Blur, Coldplay and Kill Your Friends
In 1997 a young A&R man at London Records opened the post and found demos from two unsigned bands called Coldplay and Muse. He listened, shrugged, and decided Britain did not need another Radiohead. Episode Summary: John Niven spent the 1990s inside the record industry at London Records and Independiente, and then turned all of it into Kill Your Friends, the novel that caught the decade's greed, cocaine and moral collapse better than anything else written about it. In this episode he tells Martin Deeson about the demos he waved away, the American visitors his label laughed out of the building who turned out to be setting up Yahoo, the five broke years it took to become a novelist, the memoir he wrote about his brother's suicide, and why Oasis stitched themselves into the soul of the British people in a way Blur never could. John Niven is the author of eleven novels including Kill Your Friends, The Second Coming, Straight White Male and The Fathers, and the memoir O Brother. His first stage play, The Battle, is about the 1995 Blur and Oasis chart war. Three things you will get from this episode: The best explanation you will hear of why Oasis became bigger than Blur, from the man who has written a play about that summer. What it actually felt like inside a major record label at the peak of the money, from a man who was paid a fortune to be there and freely admits he was terrible at the job. A working writer's account of how you get there: the discipline, the poverty, the seventeen rejections, and why the first draft of Kill Your Friends had to be thrown away. In this episode: The Loaded job John Niven applied for and did not get, and the letter James Brown almost certainly binned Cocaine on the desk: why the music industry and the magazine industry behaved identically, and why only one of them was making real money Kingsley Amis on the moment lunch becomes dinner The truth about turning down Coldplay and Muse, and the photocopy of a photocopy line that ended up in Kill Your Friends Take That, East 17, Boyzone, Westlife, and underestimating the public's appetite for the same thing again The American visitors to London Records in 1994 who described streaming, wireless listening and the death of the CD, and got laughed out of the office The £50,000 investment London Records turned down, the second Menswear album they made instead, and the Yahoo fortune that got away Giving up the company car at 30 to write a novel, and being turned down by seventeen publishers Music from the Big Pink, drug dealers, private jets, and why that particular life curve rarely ends well Why the first draft of Kill Your Friends was unreadable until Steven Stelfox took over the telling Paul Schrader writing Taxi Driver on bourbon and cocaine, Bruce Robinson typing with his nose, and why John Niven could not write with a hangover Straight White Male, Irvine Welsh, and inhabiting men you would not want to be in a room with The Fathers, Dan and Jada, and the two versions of John Niven's own life O Brother, his brother's suicide, and the median peak age for male suicide Why books, films and music can be a lifeline for men in middle age, and what happens to the men who never had them The Battle: John Niven's play about the summer of 1995, Country House and Roll With It From Damon Albarn saying it should have been shared with Oasis at the Brits in February, to Noel Gallagher's AIDS remark by July Why the 90s revival has arrived exactly on schedule, thirty years on, just as the 60s did for the 90s 80,000 people at Wembley knowing every word, the magnetism of Liam Gallagher, and the Lennon and McCartney comparison Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinDeesonUnloadedX: https://x.com/martindeesonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/martindeeson/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martindeesonWebsite: https://www.unloadedpodcast.com/