Book review: Pop Babylon

Published on Sunday 20 July 2008 21:23

POP BABYLON IMOGEN EDWARDS-JONES & ANONYMOUS (BANTAM, 320pp, £12.99) Review by NICK CURTIS

AXL Rose, lead singer of heavy rockers Guns N' Roses, used to employ a stage-side roadie with two hairdryers to dry his testicles during his bandmate Slash's guitar solos, to prevent "chafing". The Rolling Stones take their own furniture on tour. Lee Ryan from boyband Blue once ordered a drink while urinating against the bar of a Japanese hotel. And a member of UB40 who failed to turn up to an album cover photo shoot was replaced by a technician with a paper bag on his head.

These are the most entertaining revelations in Imogen Edwards-Jones's enjoyably trashy expos of the pop industry. Like her previous Babylonian investigations into hotels, airlines and fashion, it takes the form of a generic, fictionalised story, narrated by an insider who is a composite of Edwards-Jones's anonymous sources. This narrator is necessarily a bit thick, so that he can have the dirty realities of his own business explained to him, and therefore to us. And all the really litigious stuff, in this case the underage drinking and coke-snorting and sex, can be safely assigned to the fictional figures. It's a formula that works well and that Edwards-Jones can presumably repeat almost indefinitely.

Her story here is of a debauched, twice-divorced band manager, tired of whingeing and unremunerative indy singer-songwriters, who decides to make some fast cash by launching a boy band. We follow Band of Five from the casting sessions to find two singers, one backflipping dancer and two good looking "passengers" on a year-long arc of promotion, touring, charting, the outing of the (inevitable) gay one, and the (equally inevitable) jealous split. After which only panto beckons. This book should probably be required reading for X Factor wannabes.

Edwards-Jones evokes the utter cynicism of an industry fuelled by contempt for artists and music fans alike. And she is particularly acute on the dodgy economics of the pop business, which the Wall Street Journal described as "medieval in character: the last form of indentured servitude". Bands are ruthlessly milked by record companies, managers, promoters and producers, often paid as little as 50 a week, and often left stranded in limbo, forced by ironclad contracts to record songs the label then refuses to release. On the other hand, if they join the very few who hit the big time, they can make more money from endorsements and personal appearances for Russian oligarchs than they ever could from releasing music.

She also describes an industry in freefall, knocked sideways by free downloads and giveaway CDs, slowly paying for past profligacies like the 8 million promo for Michael Jackson's HIStory. In their short year, Band of Five make little money but get all the cocaine, groupies, booze and crisps they could desire.

The book is pretty slackly written and even more lazily characterised. By the end, I still couldn't remember which band member was which, or tell the tour manager from the roadie. Not that it matters. It's the nuggets of insight that fuel the Babylon books. Some of these are genuinely intriguing, such as the revelation that a label will simply stop issuing a successful song, like Bryan Adams's Everything I Do, if it loiters too long in the charts and delays the follow-up single. Some stories are familiar, some clearly apocryphal, and some, such as the demands bands put in their tour contracts, are clear examples of musicians self-mythologising. It did make me smile, though, to read that Motley Cre's backstage demands included a 12ft boa constrictor, a submachine gun and the schedule of local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.