Jonty Skrufff's Blog

Multi-millionaire Ministry cofounder James Palumbo chatted to Skrufff this week about his debut novel Tomas and revealed that its themes of decadence, immorality, success and failure were directly inspired by his own life.

“I had no plans whatsoever to write a book, whenever anyone says they’re going to write a book you think ‘Oh Christ, have you got nothing else better you want to do? You’re a bit of a loser’,” James admitted.

“I was just sitting in my comfortable chair at home one day and I started writing with absolutely no agenda, no plan, no agenda and no characters.”

The novel’s central character Tomas mercilessly massacres champagne quaffing financiers and takes on Russian oligarchs, learning key life lessons along the way from the likes of Napoleon (a leader James admits he identifies with).

“The worst possible thing in life- or death (is) mediocrity, those who strive for nothing “ the19th century French emperor tells Tomas.

“Can’t you send out a hundred CVs; try harder or finish with your girlfriend; buy a one way ticket out of town; retrain, go to night school; emigrate; think, discover; internet your way to a different life,” he urges, “Isn’t effort rewarded and trying always worth it? Anything but the twilight world of bitterness, prejudice, alcohol and bad language,” says Napoleon.

“I’ve sort of taken my own advice in writing this book. I’ve taken two or three really big risks in my life, including when I started a legal action against my family which could have obliterated me financially, then also during the first few years of the Ministry of Sound when I could have been shot in the head,” said James matter-of-factly.

“I’m 46, and writing a book is of course very autobiographical, everyone is desperate for things to fail and I’m sure there are plenty of people out there dying to say ‘what is this rubbish?’” he predicted.

“But when I go to the mausoleum in Paris and go to see Napoleon who has the most magnificent mausoleum of anyone in the world, surrounded by statues of victory and people blowing trumpets, what pops into my head is him being re-incarnated and saying ‘the defining word of my success is failure’. Because I believe that,” he said.

Speaking of his own greatest failure, he immediately spat out one word; Fischerspooner’.

“Do you know them? They were a gay performance band from New York and they were the hottest thing of the time and a bidding war erupted around them, which was taken to ridiculous levels by an East Coast Jewish American lawyer,” he says,

“After we signed them to Ministry, we had to deal with all sorts of bullshit,” he continued.

“They’d tell us things like ‘we can’t come over to London unless we fly on Concorde’ and ‘we’ve got to stay at (luxury hotel) Claridges’ and all this rubbish. They were acting like superstars before they actually became superstars and we ended up paying them US$2million. And sure enough there was a bang and a puff of smoke and they ended up selling nothing. I think they sold four albums, or maybe five, it definitely wasn’t ten,” he laughed,

“Their music was rubbish, I can’t even remember the name of their main song; ‘We Are Nothing’ or something like that: total nonsense. What was funny about it was that one side of the graph there was the hype and the promise and on the other side of the graph was the amount of money we lost: the bigger the hype, the more money we lost.”

Six years on, he concedes the experience was a valuable if expensive lesson into the machinations of the music business which helped him develop Ministry Of Sound into the massive entertainment corporation it is today.

“I learned what A&R is all about and I’ll tell you exactly what I think about A&R. People say ‘don’t disturb the A&R guy, he’s thinking, he’s a genius’ or ‘he needs creative freedom’ or ‘it’s a subjective process’ well actually it isn’t a fucking subjective process. There are rules involved,” said James,

“I think you can apply discipline to the music business rather than being swept by the tide of someone’s opinions,” he suggested.

James Palumbo’s debut novel Tomas (acclaimed by Stephen Fry- ‘absolutely amazing’, James Herbert- ‘bizarre, intriguing, funny and superbly written’ and Pete Tong ‘American Psycho comes to Europe’) is out now via Quartet Books.

Jonty Skrufff (http://skrufff.com)

http://www.tomas-book.com

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