For the record

John Niven accidentally stumbled into the non-stop Britpop party of drink, drugs and decadence that carried on for 12 years… and you paid for it

IN THE summer of 1991 I graduated from Glasgow University. I strolled through the ancient quads and out into leafy Hillhead, drunk on possibility. And sherry. I had an English Literature degree in my fist and not really a thought in my pretty young head beyond that fine old Spinal-Tapage "Have a good time all the time."

Bright, ambitious yet lazy and a moral blank tape, I was, of course, absolutely perfect for a career in the music industry.

It began innocently enough – co-running a small independent dance label called Bomba Records on West George Street for £100 a week. It would end less innocently a little over a decade later – standing sipping sauvignon and nursing a scratchy cocaine hangover in a Primrose Hill gastropub as I was 'let go' from my (insanely lucrative) A&R consultancy with Warner Brothers.

I moved to London in 1994 to work as a marketing manager for London Records, home to an, umm, 'eclectic' roster of recording artists including Bananarama, Fine Young Cannibals, Orbital, East 17, All Saints and… Menswear.

For the next few years Britpop bestrode the country like a cash-ejaculating colossus and the industry was awash with money. Gene, Shed 7, Dodgy, Sleeper – anything seemed to be selling. Indeed, the time was so out of joint that Cast had a multi-platinum album for Christ's sake.

Marketing was all very well but A&R (Artiste and Repertoire, the department dealing with the acquisition of new talent) is the real nexus of money and power at any label. I stumbled into it by accident. I went to a private party at a nightclub in Mayfair where the musical entertainment was an easy-listening orchestra called the Mike Flowers Pops. I was briefly introduced to the bewigged Mr Flowers. A few days later Chris Evans began playing Mike's version of 'Wonderwall' to his 12 million listeners. I gave Mike a call and – a few weeks later – we came within a whisker of having the Christmas number one, selling half a million singles in the process.

By the late 1990s, CD sales were at record levels (they've fallen every year since 2000) while the unit price was reassuringly high. The industry's business model was more robust than Brigitte Nielsen on steroids. Our profit margins would have made a particularly avaricious sweatshop owner wince. And what did we do with this fine profit margin?

We went absolutely f***ing bonkers.

I had a taxi on near permanent 'wait and return' for almost a decade. My cab account bill was more than some people's rent. My T&A (travel and entertainment) expenses were far in excess of most people's salaries. (This is nothing – one A&R guy I knew ran up a six grand bar bill celebrating the release of an LP which sold maybe 600 copies.) I casually wrote off two company BMWs in as many years. (This really is nothing – one A&R guy I knew gave his company BMW to a drug dealer to settle an exorbitant coke tab. He called it in stolen and was promptly issued a sparkling new one.)

It was all a little like Goodfellas – "It didn't matter. None of it mattered. When you ran out of money you just went out and stole some more". Well, Goodfellas starring a spectacularly inept bunch of public schoolboys.

And who was picking up the tab for all this? For all the cabs and the coke and the business-class flights? For the four-day 'conventions' in Miami, Cannes, Texas and Cologne? (In reality, scarcely credible marathons of expense-account abuse.) For everything from the flowers in the office to the Cristal at the launch party to the dozens of flights we missed because we were just too goddamn hungover to get out of bed?

You were, dear gentle reader. You were.

Manufactured in enough quantity a CD costs a few pence. Today you can buy a stack of blank discs in the petrol station for a couple of quid. Today, to a 14-year-old, the CD looks about as sexy and state-of-the-art as an Etch A Sketch. Back in the day, however, it was a dazzling objet d'art that had materialised from the future in a chill whisper of dry ice. And we charged you £12 to £14 for one.

Using the stock market ready reckoner – that money roughly halves in value every 10 years – this means that, back in the summer of '98, you were shelling out approximately £28 in today's money for your copy of Be Here Now…

Ouch.

In royalty terms we paid the artists about a quid a record. Unless, of course, they had been unfortunate enough to sign their record deal back in the early to mid-1980s before CDs were discovered. Then, for a brief, glorious window, we paid them the vinyl royalty rate on CD sales: about a millionth of a penny per unit. I remember the singer of one early 1980s indie band who had a freak hit in the mid-1990s calling the office in tears. All he'd earned from his enormous hit single was his Top Of The Pops appearance fee.

Of course, like the neutron bomb, working on this sort of stuff is so immoral it can actually drive you insane. What with the stitch-ups and the cynicism and, naturally, the drugs, by the time I reached my early thirties I was a wreck. The industry that had looked so seductive in my twenties had begun increasingly to resemble a quartet of ravenous feral dogs (EMI, Warners, Sony/BMG and Universal) fighting over an emaciated corpse.

I'd been a wee Clash fan from Ayrshire who went to Glasgow Uni because he, y'know, liked books. What was I doing here? I never meant me any harm.

So I left. I spent a couple of years recovering from the 12-year party, during which time I wrote a novel that revolved around the adventures of a murdering, lying, racist, sexist, homophobic A&R executive, a black hole of cynicism so filled with venom, bile and hatred that I seriously doubted anyone would get through the book.

I sent a copy to an old colleague who is now a very senior industry figure. "Interestingly enough," he said, "people will think you're exaggerating…"

• Kill Your Friends by John Niven is out this week. Published by William Heinemann (£12.99). To get your copy for the special price of £10, please call 01206 255 800 and quote the reference "SOS"