Clubbed To Death
A love-hate letter to the booming ’90s, Kill Your Friends is a caustic, comic look at the music industry, starring the cream of UK talent. Total Film goes on set of the Britpop answer to American Psycho.
The Electric Ballroom nightclub, Camden, London, April 2014. Roughly 200 extras, all decked in hot pants and glitter-spangled tops or t-shirts and Adidas tracksuits, are dancing wildly to a non-existent soundtrack. Today they’re going to party like it’s 1997. This is day 26 of the 28-day shoot of Kill Your
Friends, the adaptation of John Niven’s nightmarish novel of decadence and depravity in the music business. Today the Electric Ballroom will double for three different venues – a pumping northern nightclub, a packed-out London gig venue and a swanky club in Cannes on the French Riviera. Money’s tight, it’s a short, sharp, shoot and there’s no mucking about – a fitting contrast to this love-hate nostalgia-piece for the wealth and excess of the late ’90s.
This is 1997. The year Blair got elected. The year Princess Diana died. The year
Spice World: The Movie was announced. The music industry was booming. Cool Britannia was global. We had trip-hop and Peter Andre, girl bands and Radiohead. Lad culture was at its heyday, magazines were flourishing (indeed,
Total Film was launched in 1997) and everyone in the music business was on a high.
“It was barefaced. It really, really was in terms of what they were getting away with,” laughs director Owen Harris. “It’s quite strange that one of the biggest supporters of our film is the music industry. There’s a perverse pride in what they managed to accomplish, considering most of them, most of the time, were so completely bent out of shape. That is, in a funny sort of way, part of the rock ’n’ roll dream, blowing the doors off and going crazy.”
At the heart of the chaos is Steven Stelfox (Nicholas Hoult, chiselled and cheeky), ruthlessly ambitious A&R man for fictional label Unigram. Today we will see him celebrate one of his acts get to number one, get ridiculously mashed to obscene Europop with his entourage, and listen to hot Scandi band The Lazies. But for now he’s trying to avoid Ed Hogg’s Columbo-styled policeman D.C. Woodham.
“What did you think of my demo?” asks Woodham, snaking after Stelfox through the crowds of drama students helping out as extras today for free. “I was really impressed,” says Stelfox, who hasn’t listened to his demo and is currently under investigation by Woodham for murder. “What was your favourite?” Woodham beams. “Track 3” Stelfox deadpans.
This is a world where everyone wants something – a mix of impossible glamour held very precariously by the elite few.