How Not To Be Starstruck. Portia MacIntosh

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