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