The Alternative Hero

by Tim Thornton

  So—why? Well, I will venture two possible reasons. Both of which combine to form one big, fat, intangible and thoroughly irritating reason.

  Reason Number One. If you think of Britain as a country of two latitudinal halves, with its “equator” bisecting the island at a point roughly in line with Nottingham, all the bands in the first group—with the exception of The Mission—were from the South.

  All the bands in the second group were—or are—from the North.

  The North, we are taught, is traditionally grittier, harder, more industrial, somehow more real, and—due to its widely alleged and lamented habit of being forgotten by the southern jessies in Whitehall—is the perennial underdog. That very British preoccupation. Therefore the idea of gritty, hard and real rock music coming from the North is an infinitely more attractive and sexy proposition than having it performed by someone from Wiltshire. And if there’s any remaining doubt, the North is, I need hardly remind you, where The Beatles came from.

  Reason Number Two. If you think of British rock music as an art form bisected by the two types of refreshment that fuel it, i.e., drugs and alcohol, then all the bands in the second group made music that is inseparably—in some cases heavily—linked with taking drugs. Most of these bands make you think of acid, ecstasy, being “blissed out” or at the very least stoned off your nuts, sometimes more. Indeed, the histories of two of the bands—Happy Mondays and The La’s—have been almost entirely dictated by the presence of drugs.

  But all the bands in the first group, with the possible exception of EMF, had no such association. They were booze bands. They make you think of cider, snakebite and black, a few pints of cheap lager at the very least, sometimes of being violently sick outside the student disco. How dreadfully gauche.

  There you are. Two reasons.

  And the one big, fat, intangible and thoroughly irritating reason that they join forces to create?

  The bands from the second group … are COOLER than those from the first.

  That’s it.

  I’ve said it.

  It doesn’t make it any better, but I’ve said it. That’s what I reckon.

  What does it mean? I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. But I’ve said it.

  And having said it, and having had a pretty rancid day, and being finally pissed from the cocktail of beer, wine and no dinner inside me, and not having the single fuckingest clue what to do next with the whole Lance Webster debacle, I’m going to bed, probably for the rest of the week, so good night and fuck off.

  SUGGESTED LISTENING: Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, 101 Damnations (Big Cat, 1989)

  That’s a bloody

  silly name for a fanzine, man

  Alan William Potter—thirty-four, slightly padded around his middle and hanging on for dear life on top, wearing a beige sweatshirt he wouldn’t have been seen standing next to at a bus stop six years ago—finishes his bacon cheeseburger with a wince (it’s probably the cheapest meat he’s eaten in months), takes a long drag on his Kronenbourg and reclines, his eyes following the path of one of the prettier bar staff as she saunters round the pub collecting pint glasses. Clive Beresford (my parents mysteriously neglected to bestow me with a middle name)—thirty-three, just a touch more portly than a garden rake, lanky hair with a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper and in need of a cut, the same competition winner’s XFM T-shirt I’ve worn for years in the hope that someone will think I work there-gathers up the remaining peas on his plate with a dollop of mashed potato and wishes, not for the first time, that he’d ordered the steak. You’d think I’d have mastered the strategy by now: if Alan is paying, order big.

  “Nice?”

  “Yeah,” I splutter. “Thanks.”

  “Where the fuck’s she gone with my card?”

  I watch my old friend’s beady eyes as they try to make sense of the developing debate behind the bar. I finished recounting the Webster/day-at-the-vet’s saga some forty minutes ago and, while it’ll hardly win prizes for the most gripping story of the year, I’m still rather dismayed that Alan has yet to ask me a single question about it, much less give any advice on how to proceed. Instead I’ve been treated to a brace of mundane details about the fortunes of his business and an update on Jocasta’s latest cute-toddler antics, which today I’m not really in the mood for.

  “Gotta go back in soon,” I sigh, eyeing the clock as it nears half past one.

  “How’s it going in that dump, then?”

  “Same-old, same-old. Moving offices on Friday.”

  “They making any money?”

  I start to reply but his attention wavers after less than a syllable, the barmaid hurrying past with an order of nachos.

  “Love, sorry … any chance of getting my debit card back before this evening?”

  She blushes and apologises; I decide my lunch hour is over.

  “I’m going. Thanks for the meal.”

  “Shit, man, I never asked—what are you gonna do next with Webster?”

  “Fuck knows. See you.”

  “Vorsprung Durch Peanut?” he calls, with a gratifying hint of guilt.

  “Vorsprung Durch Peanut,” I reply, adding a little twist of misery and dejection to the final word. Ha. He deserves it, anyway. Even if he did pay for lunch.

  Vorsprung Durch Peanut.

  So what does it mean? It means nothing.

  It was the first term of A-level history, you understand. Bored out of my mind after the euphoria of doing relatively okay in my GCSEs, I was sitting next to Billy Flushing—who was an incredible saddo really, but could be quite good value—and we’d been to see Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, a band that I’d decided to check out (as hundreds of others did) purely on the strength of their name. Despite Billy’s lingering love for all things Genesis, Marillion and Rush, he’d taken a passing interest in the new tangent my music taste had taken, and over that long, hot, final summer of the eighties we’d attended a handful of shows together (The Primitives, REM, um … Simple Minds), my parents recognising in Billy an adequately reliable companion (my mum knew his mum from Conservative Party functions). Billy remained largely unimpressed by these fairly standard rock outings, dwelling as he did in a world of comics and graphic novels (every trip I took with him to central London included a torturous thirty-minute section when I would wait outside the Forbidden Planet shop while Billy did … well, Christ knows what, really), but the slightly less obvious stuff I placed in front of Billy he loved. Carter—two punkist, anti-Thatcherite late twenty-somethings with their cheapo drum machine, Rottweiler guitars and pun-tastic lyrics—turned out to be right up his street. A more compelling draw for me was that Alan Potter, whom I was still desperately trying to impress, appeared to have little idea who they were.

  “Who’s that, man?” he asked, when I sauntered across the school playing field wearing one of their T-shirts (that one with the baby on it).

  “Oh, Carter,” I replied, with all the nonchalance I could summon.

  “Right … yeah … saw ’em once, supporting someone. Can’t remember who …”

  “I saw them last week at the Powerhaus.”

  “Any good?”

  “Fantastic. The ruck was brilliant. Stage-dived, too [this bit was a lie].”

  “Hmm,” Alan murmured, idly watching some girls limbering up across the pitch. “I remember their drummer being great.”

  I was delighted at this gaping hole in Alan’s usually spotless knowledge, though it presented a dilemma. Should I reply truthfully or, in the name of harmony, let his clumping error lie—but potentially leave myself open to looking similarly ignorant later on? Just as I was deciding, Billy showed up.

  “Good grief, Charlie Brown,” he blethered, with his rather awkward chuckle.

  I shrugged at Alan apologetically.

  “That’s, um, one of Carter’s song titles.”

  “That’s our favourite one,” Billy continued, beaming, his forehead bearing its usual sheen of sweat. He twitched, pulling his ruck
sack further onto his shoulder—an endlessly uncool manoeuvre. “The other good one is [and here he fully broke into song, head bobbing and everything] ‘Pump it up, Jack, pump it up, Jack—pump it up!’”

  Again, I sighed and explained to Alan, “That’s, um, this song, on my T-shirt.” But it was too late.

  “Laters,” Alan muttered, and wandered off.

  “Billy!” I snapped, once Alan was out of earshot.

  “What?”

  “Couldn’t you be a bit more … ?”

  I regarded him, his confused expression, his mum-cut hair, his relentless habit of pushing his glasses back up his nose. No, he probably couldn’t. Oh well.

  “Want to go for a milk shake?” he enquired excitedly. I pondered my wealth of more attractive options.

  “Yeah, all right.”

  Anyway. Summer came and went, GCSE results arrived and suddenly we were sixth formers. Thinking this might mean a marked improvement in Alan’s at-school attitude towards me, I bowled up to him outside the assembly hall on the first day back and asked him how Reading Festival was.

  “Um, yeah, it was wicked, man,” he responded, then frowned, played with his floppy hair and wandered off towards a group of people from his own year.

  So there we were, Billy Flushing and me, halfway through an interest-free ninety minutes during which some old teacher, the identity of whom unsurprisingly escapes me, furnished us with riveting details of Bismarck’s progress up the Prussian power ladder. We started mumbling things to each other in stupid German accents, certain phrases from our life at the time: “I’ve got my spine, I’ve got my orange crush;” “Don’t ask any more stupid questions;” “Take me down to the paradise city” (all hilarious, I assure you), eventually coming across “Ich bin ein Berliner,” which Billy tried to convince me actually translated to “I am a jam doughnut” (which is kind of true, but I’ll let someone else explain that one). Finding this vastly entertaining, I shortly uttered those fateful words “vorsprung durch peanut.” And why? On account, obviously, of “Vorsprung durch Technik,” that nifty piece of eighties sloganeering, but also the aforementioned track “Good Grief, Charlie Brown,” which had led Billy and me to decide, just as fans of the Grateful Dead were known as “Deadheads,” that Carter USM fans should be known as “Peanuts” (it didn’t catch on).

  Gawd. Sorry. It’s like describing an episode of a bad sitcom to someone.

  And what, you may quite reasonably demand, was the earthly point of telling you all that?

  Well, over the summer I had decided to start a fanzine. Apart from the fact I enjoyed writing, it seemed the only way of arranging my various ideas and opinions regarding this peculiar music whose trickle towards my eardrums had rapidly turned into a torrent, with all the attendant phrases, attitudes, subgenres and items of merchandise. What I wanted to achieve was something indie laymen could read and feel comforted by, reassured that they had a sane companion on this journey into the wide alternative yonder. As I knew comparatively little myself at this point, there would be a strong atmosphere of mutual discovery in my fanzine’s pages, with irreverent explanations of the various acts I encountered (Pop Will Eat Itself: “They’re white, they’re from Birmingham, but they rap! No one knows why.” The Pixies: “Completely barmy, the band all seem to be playing different songs to each other, apart from ‘Here Comes Your Man,’ which sounds like The Archies’ ‘Sugar, Sugar’ after a few pints.” The Stone Roses: “I thought they would be really good. They’re not”). The name of this nascent publication was originally going to be something to do with the Thieving Magpies, but I correctly figured it was likely to be taken more seriously by Alan Potter if it wasn’t. I had toyed with Info Freako but this also seemed too obvious. After that history lesson with Billy Flushing there was little doubt it should be called Vorsprung Durch Peanut. Billy had offered to be involved, and despite some reservations, I agreed.

  The thing with Billy—and I think we’ve all had a friend like him at some point in our youth—was that you could have real, childish, eccentric fun with him, without caring for a second about how cool you ended up appearing. When I was with him, I sank (depending on one’s perspective, of course) to his level, and became a super, hyper, fucking supernova geekboy, a nerd incarnate, laughing at things that weren’t funny, entertaining possibilities that a four-year-old would dismiss as immature, and crucially, because I was slightly higher up on the school food chain, could temporarily feel as cool as a bastard by comparison. But the problem was, should anyone arrive on the scene who displaced me from this little hierarchy—one of the “hard lads,” or Alan Potter, or any member of the opposite sex—I instantly wanted Billy Flushing to be swallowed up by the floorboards or to spontaneously vaporise. This facet of our friendship eventually gave rise to One of the Nastiest Things I Have Ever Done Ever—but we’ll come to that.

  Alan Potter himself was a big part of the fanzine strategy though he was presently unaware of this. You may wonder why on earth I was still set on the idea of befriending the graceless sod when he was so blatantly uninterested in acknowledging my existence; here I must hold up my hands and utter two words of explanation, two timeless teenage preoccupations which, as we streak into the iPod-filled, MySpace, my-arse, your-Facebook latter half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, show absolutely no sign of waning: Girls, and Music. Alan seemed to know a lot of both. Billy Flushing, for all his entertaining observations and ability to make double history pass more quickly, had precious little of either commodity. My plan, then, was to get the first issue of the fanzine out as quickly as possible, making it so exciting that Alan Potter wouldn’t be able to resist getting involved with the next one. Cue: doors opened to a wealth of newly discovered bands, easy access to gigs (Alan had many friends who drove), respect from the sixth form at large, with particular focus on the female half. At least, that was the theory.

  Work began in earnest, Billy on the design, me on the actual content. I had spoken to one of the trainee teachers—a lacklustre undergraduate known as Mr. Eversmith, who looked a good deal younger than us—and he had agreed to sneakily let us use the art-room photocopier as long as we provided the paper. Here Billy once again proved his worth: his elder brother worked for a stationery company. A tentative date in December was set for our first issue’s launch, but it quickly became clear that an extra ingredient was required. We couldn’t very well fill an entire organ of twenty (or even ten) pages simply with my ramblings on whoever ignited my interest from the pages of Melody Maker (which I’d recently abandoned Smash Hits for). Original material was necessary, and not just my ham-fisted attempts at album and single reviews. We needed a proper interview feature.

  The most impressive coup for me would obviously have been an interview with Lance Webster, but superficial enquiries confirmed this was way out of our league. Further brainstorming boiled down to an unnatural selection of the acts Billy considered “not boring,” those whom I naïvely felt were within our grasp, and people we’d actually heard of: All About Eve’s Julianne Regan, Jesus Jones’ Mike Edwards, New Model Army’s Justin Sullivan and The Sugarcubes’ Björk were all mentioned, among a very few others. We wrote to their record companies and were greeted, predictably, by deafening silence. After waiting vainly until half-term, I agreed to an idea Billy had suggested ages ago but for some daft reason I had rejected: try Carter USM.

  Carter were a completely different matter. Slated as “ones to watch” (their anthem “Sheriff Fatman” had begun to work its magic on the more adventurous of the country’s indie clubs, and I’d noticed one of their badges had by now appeared on Alan Potter’s school jacket) but still hardly significant players even in the alternative sector, theirs was the only record sleeve I owned which bore a residential address. We fired off another letter and forgot about it. A week or so later I got home from school to a frosty reception from my mum, furious to report that someone from “one of those dreadful sex companies” had been on the phone for me.

  “W
hat did they actually say?” I demanded.

  “Oh, it’s just too awful for words …”

  “No, no, Mum—what did they actually say?”

  “He said he was the boss of a sex machine,” she moaned, extracting the leftovers of a roast chicken from the fridge. “I can’t bear it, I never thought you’d get involved in anything like that …”

  “Adrian Boss … and he manages Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine!” I exclaimed, as if this would improve matters. My mum blinked at me for a few seconds, then sat down and started angrily pulling bits of chicken off the carcass.

  Of course she’d refused to take a number, but directory enquiries were useful for once and I was soon nervously speaking to the manager himself. Carter had a show at the Marquee the following Tuesday, he explained; there was a gap in their schedule after sound check, around seven-ish, when I was welcome to join them for a pint at a pub called the Blue Posts, “just north of Oxford Street.”

  “Excellent!” exclaimed Billy, when I phoned him straight afterwards. “I think I know where that is.”

  I had been so breathlessly excited about the whole thing, I’d forgotten to get a more detailed address.

  “It’s not far from Forbidden Planet.”

  “I don’t like Forbidden Planet,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, but I do. I can nip in there before we meet them.”

  Oh dear.

  “Um, Billy … I was thinking … I’m not really sure we both need to go?”

  “Eh?”

  “Well, I reckon it would, you know … look a bit more professional if it was just one of us—otherwise it’ll just sort of look like two mates who want to meet their favourite band.”