#Zero. Neil McCormick

      If he was a fan, my security would have had him pinioned to the floor with a truncheon rammed up his back passage, but because he was a fucking celebrity they didn’t seem in the least concerned. I wished I felt as confident. Where was Tiny Tony Mahoney’s taser when you needed it most? Adam opened another door onto a room occupied by MTV desk jockeys, all looking up from monitors to be confronted by superstars on walkabout. ‘Sorry!’ he sputtered, backing us out. The staffers broke into spontaneous applause. ‘Over here!’ Adam declared, pulling me through a door marked with the universal logo for men only. Another fucking washroom confab for Kitty Queenan to scribble about in her notepad. Before closing the door behind us, Adam showed the palm of his hand to the pursuing pack, which brought them to a shuffling halt. As ranking superstar, he was firmly in control.

      So there we were, alone at last, a couple of pop stars in a toilet and not a gram of coke between us. I half expected him to whip out a crucifix and start demanding repentance. Instead he burst into another snatch of song, singing directly into my face. ‘You make me feel like a motherless child.’ I had not the first fucking idea what he was on about, but smiled and nodded, as you do when confronted by potentially dangerous lunatics. ‘A song for the orphans!’ he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Everybody’s in town, this is the moment, we’ve got to do it, we’ve got to do something, show those children that we care. I’ve been working something up, a new version of “Motherless Child”. You know “Motherless Child”? Of course you do, everybody knows it: “Sometimes I fee-ee-eeel like a—”’

      ‘I know it,’ I assured him just to stop him breathing into my face.

      ‘We’ve got some new verses. I’ve already roped the sainted Bono in, I am sure we can get the Boss, Madge, Sir Elton, all the old guard. I just caught up with Honey and Breeze in the lobby and they’re up for it. If you get on board we’ll have critical mass. We’ll get everyone who’s in for the Generator show – Dean from The Smoking Babies, I’m sure we can count on him, the guys from Safety Boots, Ed Spectrum, Ca$$andra, Premier Cru can do a rap and if he does it Cristal will do it … Can you imagine Cristal singing that chorus? It’s going to be amazing, we’ve booked a studio, Softzone will lay down a track this afternoon, Atomic Dog are going to come and do their thing, then after the show just get everyone to put down a vocal, set up a feed at the ceremony, we can have this thing on iTunes by Monday. It’ll be Live Aid all over again, ‘feed the world’, this’ll be the biggest song on the planet and all proceeds go straight to the kids in MedellÍn. What do you say?’

      What do I say? What the fuck was I supposed to say? Those fucking orphans. Hadn’t they heard it was Weekend Zero?

      I fucking hate charity records. You want to give to the poor, give to the fucking poor, don’t make a song and dance about it. Songs are intimate, songs are personal, songs are the sound of a human voice expressing their innermost secrets, not a fucking celebrity rabble swapping lines for effect. And don’t talk to me about saving starving Africans. I watched Live8 on TV and even at eleven years old I wanted to puke at the sight of all those preening peacocks puffing up their social consciences then stuffing their gullets on a backstage buffet. And you know what? The Africans are still fucking starving. Yea, the meek shall inherit the earth but not until the rest of us have fucked it for all it’s worth. Live Earth was even worse: fly a bunch of pop stars around the planet to tell us to stop flying around the planet cause we’re doomed, we’re doomed, we’re all fucking doomed, like we didn’t know already, we grew up doomed, cause you had it all, you fucking users, you had it, you ate it, you snorted it, you burned it, you spent it, and now you want us to pick up the tab. Well you can fuck right off, cause like the song says, we grew up in a world you had already destroyed. You want to sing along? I’ve got a good one for you. I feel no pain. All the children sing with me now. I feel no pain. Let me hear you, Adam, let me hear Bono, let me hear you, Brucey baby. I feel no pain like my pain, feel my pain, feel my pain, feel my pain …

      That’s not what I said to Adam Monk, though. I told him I would do whatever I could to help, and he gave me a hug, and we left the washroom to the embrace of our entourages. We were whisked away for an on-camera love-in, in which we declared how much we admired each other’s work, joked about the domestic hell of being married to movie stars (‘Even on our honeymoon, Gena insisted on a body double’ was such a good line, I filed it away to use myself) and dropped heavy hints that we planned to record together, all to be revealed in due course. Then Adam went into a huddle with MTV execs and I corralled Beasley and Flavia and their favourite minions in an empty boardroom. I filled them in on the proposed charity record while throwing down mouthfuls of pasta covered in some kind of basil emulsion as Kelly fussed over my hair. There was general inane enthusiasm about Adam Monk’s idea from the minions, although Beasley’s face was unreadable. He would be fiercely calculating whether this would put a positive spin on our campaign or steal our thunder. ‘Well, I don’t want to do it,’ I said, just so they knew how I felt, as if they even cared.

      ‘Given that you practically just announced it live on MTV, it may be a little late to start expressing reservations,’ noted Flavia.

      ‘Download the lyrics of “Motherless Child”,’ Beasley instructed his assistant, Eugenie. ‘If we’re going to do this, I want to make sure Zero gets the money shot. Let’s identify the key line and make sure our boy is singing it. And get Adam Monk’s manager on the line. My artist doesn’t get railroaded by anybody, I don’t care how big they think they are.’

      ‘It’s for the orphans,’ said Kelly, timidly.

      ‘The orphans are not our concern,’ snapped Beasley. Oh, he was a man after my own black heart.

      5

      We staged a mass exodus to the Pilgrim Hotel for award rehearsals, an MTV crew expanding my entourage. Any normal person of sound mind and limb would walk the fifty metres across Times Square but we went twice round the block so that I could be transferred from limo to blacked-out people carrier and sneaked in through the rear goods entrance. The Zeromaniacs, of course, were way ahead of us, screaming and banging on the side of the van as it drove past production trucks into underground parking. I was hustled like a presidential candidate on assassination watch into a staff elevator, almost colliding with Sting as the holistic superstar made an exit after his own rehearsal. ‘Have you been roped in by the do-gooders to save the orphans?’ he enquired, while my people faced off his people, mobiles at the ready.

      ‘I hate charity records,’ I muttered.

      ‘We all hate charity records,’ the greying Adonis laughed. ‘It’s the things that test us that make us stronger.’

      Then we were on the move again, emerging amid a cackle of walkie-talkies into an enormous ballroom, the ceiling a sea of chandelier glass blazing in the glare of TV lighting. One wall bore a blow-up of the latest Generator cover, featuring yours truly, naked from the waist up, with a Superman logo painted on my chest beneath the headline ‘From Zero To Hero’. I was introduced to camera crews, stage managers and TV directors, tragically hip men the age of my father squeezed into clothes two generations too young. One was even wearing my own brand tailored trackies, which of course I complimented him on, even though they made him look like a lardass loser. Not the feel my designers were going for, I suspect.

      A tall, nervous, middle-aged effete in mod suit and ponytail turned out to be Generator’s editor. ‘Hope you enjoyed the cover feature,’ he murmured. ‘Brian Spitzer is America’s finest contemporary music writer and I really think he’s done you proud.’

      ‘I never read my own press,’ I said.

      It’s not true, of course, but why give them the satisfaction? But I had to wink and show him I was just joking. I am so weak.

      Our host for the evening’s event was lured out of his dressing room to pay his respects. I could see him switch into on-mode, casual stroll turning into shoulder-rolling, street-hustling slouch. Willard Meeks was a black American online comic with a hyperactive persona and a rep for tweeting the untweetable. I had caught his act on U-Bend and he was pretty funny but I was