Kill your friends

I spent the weekend in Cologne visiting a friend and attending the final concert of this year’s c/o pop Festival and Convention. When we sat down to enjoy an afternoon coffee and a long chat catching up with our lives, we noticed the program for the Fantasy Filmfest lying around, which coincidentally also takes place in Cologne right now. I browsed through the magazine and came to a quick halt, when I saw that the film adaptation of Kill Your Friends was to premiere. I really enjoyed Niven’s take on the 90s music industry in the UK with a dark twist and would have loved to watch the movie right there right then. Alas, it had already premiered the prior week, but come to think of it, the coincidences played out perfectly: Seeing the announcement for that movie (with my fav Nicholas Hoult) while attending a music festival resulting in me watching the trailer today!

Seven years after hitting all the right notes with Kill Your Friends a first look finally arrives for the movie adaptation based on John Niven’s look inside the beast of the music industry, when it still had money and less budget restraints than it has now.

Kill Your Friends was Niven’s first novel and focuses on the music industry in the UK during the main craze of the Britpop era, in 1997. It follows bored and self-centered Steven Stelfox doing his work as an A&R manager for a London based record company. While his coworker, whom he loathes, is successful in finding new and hot acts, Steven despises the scene, loves drugs and sex and can be best described as a misanthropic sociopath. His way to secure recognition in the industry is plastered with bloody corpses and a neat study of the financial reasons and callousness for any decision in the music business.

I do have high hopes for the movie, since Niven wrote the screenplay himself and Owen Harris – he contributed to Misfits and Black Mirror, two very convincing reference points – directed.

I trust that Nicholas Hoult, playing the sleazy asshole of an A&R manager Steven Stelfox, can bring the vicious, dastard and egoistical guy from the book to the screen. He does have the potential if I recall the first season of Skins correctly. Let’s see if Nicholas Hoult and Stelfox can be the Patrick Bateman – as portrayed by Christian Bale – for the next generation.

photo credit: Daniel Ebersole, unsplash.com