Tim Thornton

by The Alternative Hero (v5)

  “I never knew you liked alternative, Beresford.”

  That word again.

  “Well, I sort of, you know … Thieving Magpies. They’re pretty good.”

  “Yeah, but did you see Birdland? Fuck!”

  Did I?

  “Apparently they did their shortest set ever the other day, and it was six minutes,” he enthused, as if this represented the very pinnacle of artistic achievement.

  “Wow, amazing,” I replied uneasily.

  “D’you want some of this?” Alan asked, handing me a plastic glass of bright red liquid.

  “Uh, yeah.” I took a sip. Blackcurrant. With some sort of alcohol.

  “Who you here with?”

  “Er … no one,” I admitted.

  “No one? Fuck, man. You can hang out with us if you like. But don’t tell anyone at school.”

  If I was heartened by this gesture, I soon discovered the payoff. After I settled down next to the pair, I attempted to make conversation by asking what Alan had meant by “alternative.” After he stopped laughing at my evident naïveté and ignorance, he provided me with a definition so compendious that I began to assume he’d memorised a school essay on the subject. Alternative, he began, was the name of the musical movement to which the Thieving Magpies belonged, so called because it formed an alternative to basically everything else. The criteria under which a band qualified to call itself alternative was subtle, somewhat intangible and often contradictory, but Alan advised keeping in mind a mental tick-box chart, on which the group in question must score at least two or three, as a reliable identifier:

  Guitars, often distorted or effected, but with a minimalist playing style (i.e., few solos)

  Straightforward, raw production on recordings

  “Gigs” (as opposed to “concerts”) at which …

  … “rucking” took place (as opposed to “moshing,” which only happened at heavy-metal shows)

  A loyal group of fans, often with its own collective name (e.g., The Mission’s followers, who were known as “eskimos”), sometimes even with an exclusive costume or dance

  A down-to-earth, ironic, self-effacing attitude (which therefore excluded most heavy-metal bands)

  Participation at outdoor festivals

  Coverage in the music papers Sounds, NME and Melody Maker

  Public denouncement of mainstream pop music

  A paucity of clichéd/excessive references to love in lyrics (with the exception of goth bands, who could pretty much get away with anything)

  “Experimental” nature of song composition/arrangement

  An appreciation of (but not necessarily overindulgence in) alcohol and/or drugs

  And so on.

  The overall sound of the music mattered less than one might think, Alan explained. Crucial to the issue was the band’s aesthetic relationship with punk. An act could, for example, mainly use electronic instruments—the staple of decidedly nonalternative acts like Eurythmics—but throwing in the occasional punky power chord and having a “punk attitude” would instantly put them in the alternative bracket, as in the case of Renegade Soundwave or The Shamen. Punk was also a key factor in how a band ceased to be alternative: U2, for example, had almost certainly been alternative when they started out, but had recently steered themselves so far off the punk map with releases like Rattle and Hum that they’d been expelled. (It was theoretically possible, Alan argued, for a previously mainstream group to become alternative, although it rarely happened—Depeche Mode being one of the few recent examples.)

  He pointed out that a lot of people described all of this as simply “indie” music, on account of the greater share of alternative acts being signed to independent labels, but earnestly warned me that using this term could be misleading in the extreme, for not only could it accidentally include unwanted horrors (most of the acts produced by Stock/Aitken/Waterman, for example, were signed to Waterman’s own label, PWL, so were technically speaking “indie”), but it could also discount a whole crop of dyed-in-the-wool alternative bands (e.g., New Model Army, Balaam and the Angel and Thieving Magpies themselves) whose output was administered by major record companies. “Alternative” was therefore a far more reliable moniker.

  Alan sat back, clearly delighted with this dissertation, and took a swig of his red stuff. I was just about to comment when he embarked on the appendices—a bewildering rundown of the many subgenres that sheltered under alternative’s umbrella (goth, grebo, punk-metal, et al)—but then he must have sensed that I’d switched off, for he rapidly reverted to the Magpies themselves.

  “They’re the most likely to,” he stated.

  “Most likely to what?”

  “Go mega. Become huge, man. They’re gonna be the biggest alternative band in the world. They’ve got the goods. They’re streets ahead. No one else has got the songs, man.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed, knowledgeably I considered asking him if he’d seen my school-magazine piece, but decided it might be neither the time nor place.

  “But their attitude as well. Webster’s got it sussed. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He can run circles round those cunts.”

  I nodded uncomfortably. “So, do you go to a lot of these, er … gigs?”

  “Not many,” Alan grumbled. “Only about once a week. I can’t afford much more. I try to see smaller bands; they’re always cheaper. Tickets for this place are seven quid now, man. With travel and a few jars that’s almost a score. I only get paid fifteen.”

  “Fifteen—you work, then?”

  “Sainsbury’s on Saturday, man. It’s a pisser, but … Uh-oh. Hold up. We’d better get going.”

  A slight change in atmosphere had alerted Alan to the imminent arrival of the main attraction. He and his female friend rose, grabbed another pint of alcoholic Ribena from the bar and then proceeded to barge their way through the now heaving and shoving capacity crowd until we reached a position of quite alarming proximity to the stage. I was also overjoyed to notice we were squashed right next to the scary tattoo brigade I’d spotted outside, who were drunkenly roaring various phrases at each other (“Theeeeevers!,” “Wan-kaaaaah!,” “Yooou’re shit! Aahhhh!”). I must have had a face like a wet lettuce, as Alan grinned and nudged me in the ribs.

  “Don’t worry, man. Just watch out for the MFM.”

  “The what?”

  “Mass Forward Movement.”

  I didn’t need to ask what it was, because just as Alan said it, it happened. The lights blacked out, four thousand voices emitted a roar louder than I considered possible, the opening piano flourish of The Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” blasted out of the giant speaker stacks and everyone instantly decided they wanted to stand where I was standing. I was carried several yards forward as people of both genders rammed themselves against me in time with the music. Quite why we were listening to Bob Geldof hoarsing his way through this old classic—let alone bouncing around to it as though it were a Motörhead song—was the least of my worries. The Magpies hadn’t even taken to the stage yet and I was already bobbing threateningly near the yellow-shirted bouncers who glared at the melee and occasionally, I was horrified to see, hoicked people out who had evidently got too close. Where did they go after that? I wondered. I had visions of some terrifying backstage torture chamber where the guards wrenched the most foul confessions out of hapless Thieving Magpies fans (“Okay, okay! I admit it! I did quite like the last Deacon Blue single!”) for their own amusement.

  It’s a strange feeling to have so many of your preconceptions flattened in so few minutes. Virtually nothing about the evening so far had been what I expected. But from the moment the onstage lights kicked in and the audience’s ovation reached an alarming crescendo, as four blokes I vaguely recognised ambled onstage and picked up their instruments, everything was somehow a little more familiar. From then on, God knows how, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I suppose the music on Shoot the Fish contained a strange sort of semiotic coding which transferred
information directly into the brain of the eager listener, so that he/she really would expect the drummer to have that cool, energetic but nonchalant approach to beating his kit, the guitarist that way of spanking his instrument like it was a naughty child even on the mellowest tracks, that the bassist would remain in his corner doing, well, absolutely nothing but playing the bass, and that Lance Webster had a habit of remaining on the lip of the stage, confrontationally staring out at the crowd, until it was almost too late to return to the microphone to bellow out the lyrics. I was also magically aware that Webster would not utter a word of greeting until after the fifth song, finally acknowledging the audience’s presence by demanding, “So what, is it your fucking bedtime already?” before launching into a seething rendition of “Scared of Being Nice,” with its tender refrain “I don’t respect you but I’ll fuck you anyway.” A sentiment I was still blissfully ignorant of, but on that night I’m sure I knew what he meant.

  Above the bouncing, kicking, screaming, ramming, hollering and gurning stupidly with unfettered delight, the proceedings were presided over with breathtaking authority by Mr. Webster: equal parts scary teacher, football coach, rock ’n’ roll fuckup and demigod. His vocals were clear, faultless and a hundred times more powerful and emotive than on the record. His regular insults (“We didn’t come all the way here to entertain a room full of idle wankers”) were perfectly executed, just the right side of totally abusive, and you knew you were never too far away from a cheeky grin. And those songs shone out across the vast theatre to the point where, for the first time in my fifteen-year-old life, I experienced a profound unity, of almost five thousand people, most of whom had never met before and would barely meet again, welded together by a common focus, taste, purpose, anger, release and enjoyment. A unity this Lance Webster was able to control with virtually the flick of an eyelid.

  I am still—some eighteen years later—astonished to report that when the band left the stage for the third and last time (after a brutal rendition of “Zeitgeist Man,” a B-side that had now become their standard gig finale) I staggered up to a similarly soaked Alan Potter, put my hand on his shoulder and burst into tears. I don’t think I’d actually cried at all since I trod heavily on a large nail when I was eight, but I was so physically and emotionally exhausted and consumed by the knowledge that I’d finally found my own world, and that Lance Webster was its de facto president, that I couldn’t do anything else. Alan clearly understood enough to not need to ask what was wrong, and patted my shoulder in a matey sort of way.

  “Yeah, all right, man, that’ll do,” he said after a few seconds.

  Although the journey home began with much lively banter and comparing of notes, I was all too aware as the train neared our town that our temporary friendship was coming to an end and that we were simply in a different year at school once more. Like a fool, in the station car park, as Alan walked away to his parents’ car, I gushed, “Let me know when you’re going to some more gigs!” To which he responded curtly, “Yeah, we’ll see what happens, all right.”

  As I trudged home I felt the evening quickly evaporate, and started to come to terms with the fact that my day-to-day life would remain, for the moment, unaltered. School trips could not be synthesised in this way very often, if ever again, really. But I had hope. I suppose I saw Alan as perhaps the key holder of that hope but, wisely for an immature fifteen-year-old, I calculated that simply striding up to him in the dinner hall and saying brightly, “Hello! So who are you seeing this week, and can I come?” was precisely the wrong thing to do. The solution would be to somehow have something that he wanted from me. My current set of possessions, attributes and circumstances presented nothing of the kind, of course, but I was sure that if I thought hard enough I would come up with something. But that’s enough for now—I’m late for the pub.

  SUGGESTED LISTENING: Jesus Jones, Liquidizer (Food, 1989)

  You can tell us to

  fuck off if you like

  Alan is already halfway through his first pint and tenner on the fruit machine by the time I appear. He’s always been punctual. I find it quite annoying. I used to bitch to others that it was because he had nothing else to do. Now I realise he’s just efficient. Which is probably why he is the owner of a successful business and is loaded, and why I am not.

  “Hello, mate,” I begin.

  “Hi.”

  Can’t talk to him now, he’s three nudges away from victory. I get a drink instead.

  “Shit,” he observes, petulantly slapping the side of the machine as I return. We sit down, Alan switches off his phone. “All right then, what’s this amazing piece of news?”

  I take a deep breath.

  “Lance Webster is living in a house at the end of my road.”

  “Oh, fucking hell.”

  This is not the reaction I hoped for. But I remain hopeful.

  “Is that a good ‘fucking hell’?”

  “No, it isn’t. Are you serious? Is that really what you have to tell me?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Clive. I thought you were gonna tell me you’re getting back together with—”

  “And you really think that would be good news?”

  “Well, I’d think so.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be,” I assure him. “Can we get back to my original subject?”

  He exhales theatrically. “Lance Webster.”

  “I saw him yesterday picking some stuff up from the dry cleaner’s. Then I followed him home.”

  “You sad bastard.”

  “He lives at number 3 on my road. Possibly 3A.”

  “How d’you know he actually lives there?”

  “He must do. Unless he’s started a dry-cleaning delivery service.”

  Alan smirks. “It might really have come to that.”

  “I’m going to interview him.”

  “How?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  “I didn’t think he did that anymore.”

  “That’s ’cos people have approached him the wrong way,” I proclaim. “I’m going to do it differently. Informally. He might not even know he’s being interviewed.”

  “So what, you’re going to chat him up in a bar or something?”

  “Maybe. Something like that.”

  “Why do you want to interview him?”

  I take a large gulp of beer.

  “Because I think it’s time for the definitive story.”

  “Of the Magpies?”

  “Yeah, partly. But the whole scene as well. And I want to find out what really happened to him that night.”

  Alan snorts. “No one knows what happened to him that night. I doubt even he knows what happened to him that night.”

  “Well, I’m going to find out.”

  “Right.” He shrugs and looks around the pub. At first I think he is impressed by my resolve, then I realise he’s probably heard me make these grand statements of intent before. “Well, good luck,” he offers.

  “You could be a bit more enthusiastic. If I’d told you this ten years ago you’d be camping outside his house.”

  “Let’s not have that argument again, Clive.”

  He’s referring to a frightful drunken row we had a year or so ago when I accused him of becoming a total sell-out to consumerist society, with all attendant charges concerning lost youth, forgotten dreams, rampant global capitalism, blah blah. Not entirely unfounded, but not a conversation I particularly want to have again either.

  “There must be a flicker of interest in there somewhere,” I insist.

  Alan sighs. “The guy’s dead, man. I mean, the Lance Webster I used to know, we used to know. He’s old news. He’s the past. And … well, if I really think about it, I’m probably still a bit pissed off with him.”

  “All the more reason to try and speak to him.”

  Alan makes that weird noise he always makes when he’s a bit sceptical, sort of a cross between a scoff and a belch.

  “I’m not really sure
how far you’ll get.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking of doing something quite radical about it.”

  “Like?”

  “Spying on him for a few days.”

  “Careful, man. You remember …”

  “Yeah, I know, but I’d be really subtle. Nothing sinister, only to find out where he goes, what he does. Where he drinks. Where he eats. And then—go undercover.”

  “Explain.”

  “Like—I dunno, get a job in the pub he goes to, or—”

  “You could start working at that dry cleaner’s,” Alan deadpans, sipping his drink.

  “No, somewhere that might require banter. Like his music shop.”

  “You’re mad. Anyway, I don’t think he even plays music anymore.”

  “He’s bound to do something, though.”

  “What does he look like these days?”

  “Pretty much the same. Slightly fatter perhaps. Same kind of hair, like it was after he cut it. Receding a tad. Dresses smartly. A bit like Mick Jones, but younger.”

  “Facial hair?”

  “No.”

  Alan ponders for a moment, then his eyes light up slightly. I think I’ve got him.

  “I’d love to ask him about Gloria Feathers.”

  I open my hands with what I hope looks like an air of benevolence.

  “All this may be possible.”

  Alan grins stupidly at me for a few seconds, like a toddler who’s just been promised an ice cream. Unfortunately it doesn’t last.

  “So where exactly do I fit in?” he frowns.

  “Well,” I smile greasily, “quite apart from wanting to share my plan and its subsequent progress with my oldest friend … I was sort of hoping you could lend me something.”

  “What?”