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I ignore her question about my lateness, but as for the latte – what is the right answer? I’m so not in the mood today. It took me two attempts to get her that damn coffee and if she doesn’t drink it she will end up wearing it.
‘No?’ I reply, although it sounds more like a question than an answer.
‘Excellent!’ She snatches it from me without the same thank-you that I received from Emily and Jake.
‘You know what they say, Nicole,’ Vicky persists, ‘the early bird catches the worm.’
‘Ah, but the second mouse gets the cheese,’ I reply.
‘Yeah, but it’s covered in dead mouse,’ she says, looking and sounding thoroughly disgusted that I’d suggest such a thing.
Vicky Mason is the newest member of the Starstruck team. She is an aspiring journalist with a BTEC in Photography, desperate to break into the world of music journalism. Emily met her at a gig she was reviewing and I guess Vicky just latched on to her. She didn’t have a job, and we didn’t have a proper photographer, so after a lot of persuasion from Em I agreed to take Vicky on. Oh, how I have come to regret that decision now; the girl is impossible to get along with. She’s bossy, she’s rude and she is so argumentative.
Emily gets on with her and Jake gets on with anyone, but Vicky and I just clash in every way imaginable.
She’s an averagely talented photographer – much better now that I’m constantly splashing out on new kit for her to use. Personally, I think she would be much more at home trying to trick drunk celebrities into flashing their underwear outside nightclubs so that she can snap some photos and sell them to the tabloids for a big chunk of cash.
I have lovingly dubbed her Succubus (a name I only use behind her back, obviously) because the first time she went to a gig with me and Emily, we ended up back at the hotel with the band and Vicky got in bed with the bassist while he was sleeping.
I tell them the story about my encounter with Tom, hoping they might think my fall had more to do with me being late than my hangover.
‘He gave you his business card?’ Jake chuckles. ‘Did you say his name was Patrick Bateman? You know, he liked blondes.’
‘Very funny,’ I say sarcastically. ‘Now hadn’t you better get back to playing The Sims or updating your MySpace profile or whatever it is you do on there when you’re pretending to work.’
I have a great friendship with Jake. He teases me about being a groupie, I tease him about a nerd. We are about as opposite as two people can be, but we get on like a house on fire.
‘Nic, can I see you in your office, please?’ Emily asks. She sounds serious, but her face isn’t giving anything away.
My first reaction is to panic – on the inside though, I’m not going to let Vicky enjoy my potential misery. I grab my caramel macchiato – I can’t hear bad news without caffeine in me – and make my way into my little office. I close the door behind us, just as Jake starts singing the chorus of Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ in an attempt to tease me. He’s spending way too much time around me if he’s learning the lyrics to songs like that, I almost feel sorry for him.
‘Right, hit me with it, get it over with,’ I babble. I’ve never been great at receiving bad news.
A smile spreads across my friend’s face.
‘It’s good news. I was going through the emails...’ Emily pauses for dramatic effect.
‘Spit it out, woman!’ I demand, unable to wait a second longer.
‘We’ve had an email from Plastic Rap’s manager, you’re interviewing them tonight!’ she tells me with an extra-loud squeal.
‘No way! We managed to blag an interview? How? I thought they were all booked up.’
‘They had some journo drop out at the last minute, there’s a slot going free. It’s after the show though, so late. Do I confirm?’
‘Erm, yeah! You’re coming with me, right?’
‘Can’t. It’s my mum’s birthday party tonight,’ she reminds me and I can see how disappointed she is. ‘He said in the email that he could supply us with photos, so you don’t even have to take Vicky if you don’t want to.’
‘I don’t want to,’ I whisper with a cheeky smile on my face.
‘I am so jealous. You never know, one of the Plastic Rap boys might fall madly in love with you. You could get married and your groupie days would be over. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about getting up for work on a morning – I told you that you’d be late today,’ she teases.
‘Oi, who are you calling a groupie? And when did you tell me that I’d be late today?’
‘Last night...’ she prompts, and I cast my mind back. Em and I went to a gig last night and then partied with the bands until the early hours – let’s just say things got messy. She’s right though, I remember the taxi dropping me off, drunkenly fidgeting with my door key, thinking it was the funniest thing ever, and Emily yelling something out of the taxi window about how I’d be late for work as she was driven off. A guilty smile spreads across my face.
‘And don’t think I didn’t see you snogging the face off Troy Reeves, Miss Wilde,’ she adds.
Troy was on one of those terrible reality TV talent show things. He didn’t win, but when I interviewed him he told me that he was glad because he could make music without a super-strict recording contract holding him back – he also told me he wanted to sleep with me and we’ve been getting together whenever he’s in town ever since.
‘So how come you didn’t go back with him last night?’ Emily asks.
‘I’m a lady!’ I protest, trying to give off Kate Middleton vibes but actually sounding more like David Walliams in Little Britain.
Emily gives me a look.
‘He had to go,’ I admit. ‘They were travelling through the night.’
‘You’re so bad, Nicole.’
‘The devil made me do it, now get out of my office, bitch.’ I laugh, totally defeated.
‘Gosh, Troy Reeves last night, Prince Charming today – it’s true what they say about men being like buses, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, they’re dirty, anyone can ride them and they’re never there when you want one.’
Emily, a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, rolls her eyes at this.
Plastic Rap are one of the biggest bands around at the moment. They’re mainly aimed at the teen market, but loved by young girls and mums alike. Even a few boys admit to liking them these days. At the moment they are touring the UK, and when tickets went on sale all venues sold out within a couple of hours. I managed to score a place on the guest list months ago, but all their publicity time was booked up. As far as their music goes, they’re not really my cup of tea, but this interview will be good for hits.
‘Get some work done,’ Emily says, leaving me alone in my office and closing the door behind her. There are only a handful of reasons why my office door is ever closed. 1. When Vicky is driving me especially crazy. 2. When I am in on my own, and therefore scared something might ‘get me’. 3. When I actually need to do some work. Despite today being a three, I have Googled Plastic Rap and now I’m casually clicking my way through their photos and mentally placing them in order of hotness. This takes up about ten minutes that I don’t have and I manage to burn another five flicking through the photos from last night on my phone. It certainly was a wild one.
Now officially in the p.m., I click open my emails. The first one I open is from Dylan King. Subject: Escort girl.
I quickly scan through the email which informs me Dylan is ‘sixty-seven percent certain’ he didn’t pay some girl for sex, although he is ‘eighty-five percent certain’ he did ‘bang her’. The percentages make me laugh but somehow I don’t think they were meant to.
Dylan is a mega-star, so stories are forever popping up in the press about him sleeping with some girl – and most of the time he has slept with them, in fact, I’m ninety-nine per cent certain.
As well as being a super-famous rockstar, he is also my best friend. I met him on my gap year when I won a competition to meet his band, The Burnouts. Back then the bands I hung around with were small-time, so it was pretty cool to meet one of the most famous bands in the country and get to hang out backstage.
I remember their manager came out to get me and as we were walking backstage he said: ‘They’re going to love you, darling.’ Back then I wasn’t the expert that I am now when it comes to bands, in particular the inner (and outer) workings of your typical band member, so I weakly asked him what he meant. ‘Blonde hair, big tits. You’re just Dylan’s type, you want to watch yourself with him,’ he warned me, making me even more nervous than I already was.
When I was shown into the backstage room, it was Mikey King, Dylan’s younger brother who is also in the band, who I was introduced to first and he was lovely. Dylan was always the one I’d had the crush on, but Mikey was just so down-to-earth and charming. It’s no secret that Mikey is the real talent in The Burnouts, he’s the guitarist and he writes most of the music, whereas Dylan is the egotistical front-man with the pretty face and the shocking reputation. After I’d chatted to Mikey for a while, Dylan came in and he was everything people had warned me about. His ego was in full swing and I could tell he was going out of his way to try and impress me – he even played me an exclusive clip of their next single. Until that moment, everything I had known about bands I had loved, but being around this mega-famous arsehole was really starting to get on my nerves, so when he played me their new song, despite it being amazing, I told him it was crap – because that ought to bring him down a peg or two. Of course I instantly regretted saying it, but after a few seconds of straight-faced silence he burst out laughing.
‘I think you’re the only person in the world brave enough to say something like that to me,’ he chuckled and apparently the kind of person who will tell you your music is crap is exactly the kind of person you want to have in your life if you’re a musician and we became pretty much inseparable. We’ve been best friends ever since – although nothing more, I hasten to add. This works well for both of us professionally because if I am having a slow week with news he will give me an interview, and he can always rely on me to give him a bit of good press when everyone is reporting the negative stuff – like him ‘banging’ a female escort, for example.
With me living in Leeds and him all the way down in London, we don’t see each other as much as we’d like, but we talk almost every day and we always have a blast when he is on tour.
My mind darts back to the ‘real world’. Sitting at my desk and staring at my computer, I realise that I’m not going to be able to concentrate today, I’m just too excited. I go through the rest of my emails, clicking my way through the masses of press releases we receive every day. There are a few good ones but nothing too exciting, I’ll do them later.
One exciting email I have received is from a tour manager, asking to me to confirm that I will be joining a band on their tour. These guys are also my good friends; I used to tour with them when no one knew who they were, and now they’re embarking on their first headlining UK tour as a signed band, which is pretty exciting. I send a quick message (something which feels weirdly formal considering they’re my buddies) confirming that I will still be joining them on the road and then crack on with my work.
After four hours of replying to messages and writing items for the website, I am more than ready to go home. In what little time I have, I’m going to pull out all the stops for tonight. I only wish I had time to pick up something new to wear.
‘Don’t mind if I get off a bit earlier, do you, team? Big night tonight,’ I say, making my way towards the door.
‘Last one in, first one out,’ Jake jokes. ‘Lucky for some.’
‘Of course we don’t mind. If you do pull one of them, be sure to text me,’ Emily says excitedly. I think she may be even more excited than I am.
‘I don’t think so,’ I call back as I make my escape. It’s not that they are a bad-looking band, but my priority is the interview and I’m certainly not going to mess this up by getting my goals confused.
Chapter Four
The Secret
I feel so old right now, and I’m only twenty-five. I’m at the Plastic Rap gig and, apart from a handful of parents and their young kids, I am surrounded by excited teenagers, most of them female. Unsurprisingly I haven’t bumped into anyone I know, so I have been entertaining myself. I’ve knocked back a few drinks and messed around on my phone quite a lot. It’s very important to keep the good people of Twitter and Facebook up to date on what I’m doing – not to show off, I promise.
Plastic Rap are currently playing their last song and for the millionth time since I got here I am checking my bag for my Dictaphone. Absolutely nothing can go wrong tonight.
Looking up at them on stage, I have to admit that I can see exactly what the thousands of screaming girls see in them. They’re good-looking in a goody-goody pop kind of way, not a tattoo or piercing in sight, which is something I actually quite like; it’s not that often you find a musician without one or the other these days.
When the gig is finally over, I make my way to the hotel next door where our interview is taking place. Before I know it, I am plonked down in front of the band, who are eagerly awaiting my questions.
All five of them are so chatty, they’ve got bags of character and they’re definitely saying all the right things.
Sometimes the really famous ones are rude or awkward and I hate it when there’s a particular subject I’m not allowed to ask about, but that’s not the case with these guys.
I’ve asked all the music-related questions that we’re expected to ask, so it’s time to get down to the juicy stuff.
‘So, are you boys allowed girlfriends? A lot of bands with large teenage fan-bases are told to keep their girlfriends a secret.’
Sam (the hottest one in my opinion) is straight in there with an answer.
‘Yes, we’re allowed girlfriends and we all have a girlfriend at the moment. Our fans are the most loyal fans in the world, they certainly don’t mind us having them. It’s all about the music.’
Fantastic answer, although I have to disagree. It’s partly about the music, but their fans are genuinely in love with them. Hearts will break when they read this, that’s for sure.
Eventually we wrap up the interview. I pose for a few photos with the band and I’m not going to lie, these are for Facebook. I’m still a band lover at the end of the day.
Sam moves to stand next to me and slides an arm around my waist as we continue to pose for the camera.
‘We’re having a bit of a party if you’d like to stick around,’ he says between smiles. Before I have chance to reply, in walks the band’s tour manager with a group of ten young-looking fans. They’re maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, so I assume they’re here for a meet and greet before the party starts. For someone who has been hanging around bands for so long, that’s a pretty naive assumption it turns out. As if to remind me exactly how these things go, Carl the bassist walks straight up to one of the fans and sticks his tongue down her throat. Maybe it’s his girlfriend? Sure she looks a bit young, but who am I to jump to conclusions? Then again, if it was his girlfriend he probably wouldn’t be kissing the next girl in the line right now. Or the one after that.
Now I really do feel old. When I was sixteen I certainly wasn’t hanging around in hotels with taken men.
‘Thanks for the offer, but some of us have got work in the morning.’ I try to sound friendly, jokey, anything but shocked and appalled.
‘I’ll give you my number, yeah?’ He’s persistent, I’ll give him that. ‘We’re back here again in a few weeks, we’ll have to meet up, babe.’
This is the second phone number I have been given today that I have no intention of calling – unless we ever need another interview, of course.
As I gather my things and walk towards the door, I take one final look back at the band, just as they are working out which band member gets which girls. Ten girls – that’s two each. It reminds me of when we used to pick teams during PE at school. I bet a couple of those girls still have to do PE, how creepy is that?
The band’s chubby, bald tour manager stops me on the way out to ask a few questions about the magazine so I answer and politely thank him for his time. As I go for the door, he puts his arm up like a barrier blocking an exit.
‘These girls are all over sixteen, so don’t go putting this in your magazine,’ he warns me – protesting a little too much if you ask me.
‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ I reply bluntly, waiting for him to move so I can pass him. Eventually he does, but not without trying to intimidate me a little. I can’t wait to tell Emily about this, in fact I’m actually dialling her number before I’ve even left the building. It doesn’t take me long to relay the night’s events to her as I walk home.
‘I cannot believe it!’ she squeals.
‘I know, right? No wonder their fans don’t mind them having girlfriends, it really, really doesn’t matter.’
‘Well yeah, that is shocking, but I can’t believe you didn’t stay. You were in there, Nic!’
‘No way! You’d have stayed? Those girls were the same age as your little sister. God, I felt like a prudish old woman.’
‘It would have been quite the scoop for the magazine though, wouldn’t it?’ she says cannily, but I know she doesn’t really mean it. She’s right, but not only did I promise their tour manager that I wouldn’t blab, I don’t really want to be pissing off a band that I will probably want to interview again in the future. They may not be very nice guys, but they pull the hits and that’s what I need.
‘We need to keep our heads down, Em. Trying to ruin the reputation of a huge band like Plastic Rap would probably just get us sued. Right, I’m at my door. I trust we’ll be keeping this little discovery between us?’
‘Say no more. See you in the morning and try not to be late, yeah?’
Cheeky bitch. Then again, I am always late.
Chapter Five
The Indecent Proposal
It’s good to be home, and I’m so glad I escaped the teeny orgy as I much prefer my own bed, and I don’t get on that well with kids. The kettle goes on and so does my laptop because, as soon as I get some caffeine in my system, I’m going to make a start transcribing tonight’s interview. I’m very much a night person which is proving really inconvenient because people expect me to wake up in the a.m..
Kicking off my shoes and abandoning my gig outfit in the middle of my living room, I wander around in my underwear until I eventually find my dressing gown which, for some reason, is plonked on top of the cooker. It doesn’t really matter because my cooker is super-clean – not because I am a domestic goddess but because I never, ever use it. Living in the city centre, there is a restaurant or a takeaway everywhere you look – who needs to know how to cook these days?
My butt finally hits the sofa at 1 a.m. I know I’ve got to be up in seven hours (five and a half if I want to wash my hair, which I probably should because I have post-gig frizz going on), so maybe I won’t be typing up the interview tonight after all.
I’m just about to shut down when a message from Luke Fox pops up on Skype. Just seeing his name makes me go all weird and, at twenty-five years of age, I still feel like a lovesick schoolgirl whenever I see him.
Luke is, you’ve guessed it, in a band and I have had a crush on him pretty much since the day we met. Unfortunately he is a bit of a tart, so despite our flirty banter I have mostly just stood back and watched him sleep with anything female that crossed his path.
It was Luke’s band, Two For The Road, that I used to tour with in my teens and now they’re a proper signed band in the middle of their first headlining UK tour – this is the band that I’ll be doing a few tour dates with later this week. I’m making out like it’s a magazine feature – and it will be going in the mag – but, to be honest, I have been on every tour with these guys since we met, I’m not about to stop now they’ve hit the big time. It’s amazing how things have changed. I used to sleep in the back of their van, now they’re being driven around in a huge tour bus.
Touring can really take its toll on your body. I’ve developed tinnitus from all the loud music (it turns out your ears need protection too, something I learned a little too late) and tendon damage from a particularly high pair of heels that I wore for too many days in a row, and while thankfully I’ve managed to protect myself from the cocktail of sexually transmitted diseases that I know several of my band friends have dipped their straws into, my priority has always been to protect my heart – no, I’m not talking about exercising on a regular basis and taking aspirin, I’m talking about not getting too involved with the boys. With Luke, this has always been a struggle.
It would be the biggest understatement of the century to say that I have a slight crush on him – I am crazy for him. I haven’t wanted to be anybody’s girlfriend since Robbie Williams ripped off his clothes (and then his skin) in the ‘Rock DJ’ music video back in 2000, but I could quite easily believe in monogamy for this man – something which troubles me because I’m not a commitment kind of girl and he certainly isn’t a commitment kind of boy.
He’s tall without being lanky, his dark hair is effortlessly perfect with his fringe falling over his gorgeous brown eyes and he always seems to smells so nice, even when he’s all sweaty after a show – see what I mean, I sound like a fifteen-year-old girl. The bottom line is that he is gorgeous, but I’m not the only one who thinks so. He has an even bigger female following since hitting the big time and I can’t compete with semi-naked, drunk chicks that operate as a team.
Luke: Nicole?
As the message pops up on my screen, the butterflies in my stomach start fluttering like crazy, it’s ridiculous. When we see each other at gigs, we get on so well and we flirt constantly but that’s just the way he is. He definitely doesn’t know about my little crush on him. It would be stupid of me to interpret his flirting as real feelings because he’s such a ladies’ man and a total charmer. He’s the kind of guy your mother would warn you about and your father would want to kill – actually, he could probably charm your mum too.
After what feels like several minutes of panicky excitement, I manage to compose myself enough to type a reply. He tells me that he is currently sat in a hotel room, all alone and bored out of his mind. After we get past the hello-how-are-you stuff, things start to get interesting.
Luke: No party tonight. This is not what I signed up for.
Nicole: Well I’ll be with you in a few days, and I’ll make sure we have a messy one.
Luke: Looking forward to it. Are you seeing anyone at the moment?
Am I seeing anyone at the moment? That’s a laugh. The truth is that it’s been years since I had an actual boyfriend. It’s not that I’m lacking male attention, far from it, but my type happens to be musicians.
When you’re on the road, all relationships are short, even friendships. You take ‘relationships’ where you can find them and they require about as much commitment as a pet rock. Having a guy ask you to be his girlfriend in the ‘real world’ is the equivalent of a band boy actually remembering your surname. But that’s the way I like it. The sad truth is that I’d rather have two nights with a rockstar than two years with your average bloke.
The fact that Luke is even enquiring about my love life is enough to make my heart race.
Nicole: Nope. Are you?
Luke: No, I’m single too.
I knew that. Luke totally subscribes to the musician way of life and a girlfriend would only cramp his style. Before I have chance to worry about what to say in response, Luke sends me another message.