Tim Thornton

by The Alternative Hero (v5)

  “Alan, it’s Clive. Um … listen, I’m not sure what time’s gonna be best for later, and my bloody phone’s running low on credit and battery so what I’ll do is … I think I’m gonna have enough juice for [bleep! bleep! bleep! bleep! announces the accursed mobile as its final power courses through the circuit] … well, I’ll hopefully have enough juice for, like, a one-word message … y’know, after it’s had a rest, so I’ll just write the time you should get there. I should think it’ll be seven-ish, but we’ll see. All right? Later.”

  Yet another rescue mission accomplished, you trot back over the road just in time to catch your bus. You climb to the top deck, where, apart from feeling a little dazed, prematurely knackered and slightly in need of a piss, you manage to enjoy the half-hour ride back to your home turf. You scoot round to your own street, ring the buzzer of 3A and shake the hand of the beaming former indie-rock icon who energetically swishes open his front door—but only then do you recall another, infinitely more important thing Alan should know before bowling happily into the boozer this evening.

  “Hey!” exclaims Webster, chuckling slightly. “What’s with the suit, Alan?”

  Bugger.

  Considering the pair of pints (you realise that “have lunch” might also have been a good thing to write on the to-do list) and the maelstrom of worries churning around inside you all afternoon, you do pretty well at the Webster children’s-book workshop. Having bonded over toys, shrines and Belgian beer three days previously, frankness is forthcoming and ideas surprisingly plentiful. But every time Webster leaves the room to do anything—put the kettle on, visit the loo, make a phone call—you’re frantically working out how you can say what you need to say in the shortest possible text message before your phone bleeps its last:

  7 p.m. Web thinks my name is Alan please don’t call me clive sorry explain later

  7 my name is alan will explain later

  7 my names alan explain l8r

  Other lines of communication haven’t been written off: it’s a possibility that you could open up your email page on Webster’s computer, compose the appropriate message to Alan and send it before he reappears, but it’s risky. If the page locks up, he could return to find the name Clive Beresford slapped all over his screen, shortly before showing you the colour of his front door and reacquainting you with his roadie pals. Just about the only safe option is to announce you must suddenly pop home for something, giving you the chance to run to another pay phone—but what for, and why is it so urgent? You’d need an excuse—but imaginative resources run dangerously low when you’ve spent the last few hours trying to dream up catchphrases for a talking fly.

  Inevitably, because of all this mental turmoil, you haven’t had much chance to properly take in your surroundings. You are, after all, inside Lance Webster’s flat; notes should be made, searching questions should be asked, a small amount of emotion should even be felt. But in truth, there’s not an awful lot to see. You’re working on a laptop in a comfortable but sparsely furnished front room; the kitchen is functional but hardly top of the range; there’s a paucity of gold discs, musical instruments or any other memorabilia that might suggest the abode of a pop star; there’s a flash-looking stereo but only a small rack of CDs. An indifferent ginger cat you’ve been warned not to approach—evidently the more vicious colleague of the recently departed Jessica—periodically prowls through the room. You haven’t been offered “the grand tour” and you’re not completely comfortable asking for it, but the hospitality has been reasonable enough: tea, biscuits and even, at around four, a round of cheese and pickle sandwiches. But the distinct impression remains that you’ve purposely not been allowed into the real inner sanctum, the studio, where Geoff still occasionally becomes Lance. The only item you’ve seen that’s worthy of a second thought is a framed photograph, on the mantelpiece, of a male toddler.

  The session starts winding down at around half past six. Webster is beside himself with joy at the afternoon’s achievements and you feign suitable amounts of enthusiasm and satisfaction, but you’re close to exhaustion, regretting every last millilitre of beer you consumed earlier in the day for both its mental and physical effects (you’ve had a pounding headache for the last two hours). Delightedly, Webster asks if you’re still up for “some grub,” to which you nod and smile. He dashes upstairs to “freshen up,” leaving you to contemplate your mobile phone and whether, in your hour of greatest need, it will be there for you.

  You hold down the power button gingerly just as the ginger cat strolls into the room. You eye each other warily as the phone boots up. The first thing that happens is it makes the low-battery noise again. The cat doesn’t like this noise, flips back its ears and jumps onto the windowsill: an area Webster has spent a considerable portion of the afternoon trying to stop the cat reaching. You do your best to ignore its behaviour, racing to your “write message” function, but the cat is poking its nose through the open crack in the window. You quickly write your prerehearsed message (you’ve risked expanding it to “745 Web thinks my name is Alan sorry explain l8r”), scroll to Alan’s number (thank fuck his name begins with “A”) and press send just as the cat wins its grip on the bottom of the window and pushes it upwards to make good its escape.

  “Lance!” you shout, running into the hall and halfway up the stairs. “Lance! Your cat’s trying to get out of the lounge window!”

  In the silence that follows—as the name you have chosen to shout reverberates around your bewildered head—your phone bleeps to merrily announce its own untimely death and an upstairs door creaks open.

  “Sorry,” Webster’s voice slowly articulates, “what was that you said?”

  “I, er … I said … that your cat … is trying to escape … from the lounge window.”

  Webster runs wordlessly past you down the stairs and rushes out the front door. Mercifully he appears a moment later holding the wretched animal, which he carries into the kitchen. He throws a handful of cat food into a bowl and leaves the room, shutting the door. He grabs a jacket from one of the coat hooks in the hall and then stops, looking straight at you with a hard, featureless stare that could mean a number of things. You reasonably decide it’s probably “What fucking name did you just call me, and why?”—so you respond with a look one might give a girlfriend if caught trying on her clothes.

  After a few incredibly long seconds, your companion shakes himself out of his brief trance, announces brightly, “Come on, then—let’s do it,” grabs a batch of printouts from the day’s travails (“just in case we want to talk about it in the pub”) and you’re off towards the drinking hole of choice as if nothing has happened. You decide he’s either convinced himself he heard wrong, or surmised that you did indeed Google him after he told you the band name the other night. Either way, the banter is soon back up to speed, or as speedy as you can manage. Christ knows whether Alan received your text.

  You feel slightly better as soon as the first drink is placed in front of you, your brain and body probably in limbo since the last one some six and a half hours ago. The two of you chat about this and that, consider ordering food but decide to wait awhile. Webster is in his usual good mood but your own brain wanders easily; on more than one occasion in the next half an hour Webster asks you if you’re okay. The final time he asks, you apologise and slope off to the toilet.

  Once inside, you splash some cold water on the gaunt, ill-looking face reflected in the mirror and decide, not for the first time, that enough is enough. You simply cannot keep doing this: living your life via a string of grey lies, all of which cascade into one another, leaving you with a perpetually impossible cleanup task. You must shape up, turn the leaf, cease the “harmless” lunchtime pints, get your shit together, be honest. Possibly even right now. With the much-lied-to alternative hero of yours, who waits on the other side of the wall.

  But sadly none of this will be possible. Exactly as you initially felt his presence about a month ago, when you leave the gents’ and return to
the pub’s main room you just know that Webster has vanished. You know, even before you see his jacket missing from the back of his chair, the pile of papers gone from the little table. The room simply feels Webster-less, before you’ve even rounded the corner. You approach the table, your new pint waiting (at least he had the decency to deliver it)—no trace of a drink for him. He’s not at the bar. Then you spot the thing. Your bag is slightly open. You look inside: perhaps a note? But nothing. Apart from your wallet, not zipped shut properly, one of the credit cards sticking out. A card that of course bears the name “Mr. C. Beresford.” Not “Mr. A. Potter”: that innocent, sensible name of a man who doesn’t go putting crazed, drunken notes through ex-pop stars’ front doors at two in the morning.

  You sit down and instinctively clutch the pint glass in front of you. You consider crying, but no tears come (which isn’t an altogether bad thing—it would start to become a habit). You look up, frowning hard, your eyes coming to rest on the clock behind the bar. Quarter to eight. Punctual as ever, Alan comes bursting through the door, swinging his car keys, glancing around the pub. He meets your eyes and comes bowling over. Nice that he’s tried to make it look accidental, just as you asked him to.

  “Where is he? Is he in the loo? Am I too late?”

  You look up at your old friend wearily, and shake your head.

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone? Whaddya mean? You said seven forty-five, didn’t you? And what did you mean, he thinks your name is Alan?”

  “Alan—get yourself a drink, and I’ll explain everything.”

  He waits a second, then mopes off to the bar.

  So.

  That’s how it happens.

  You know how it is.

  Given the chance to do it all again, perhaps you’d do things differently.

  But that chance is probably not going to come.

  Is it.

  This is what you wanted,

  now throw it away.

  Thieving Magpies, “This Is What You Wanted”

  SUGGESTED LISTENING: Longpigs, The Sun Is Often Out (Mother, 1996)

  Farewell,

  Zeitgeist Man

  At around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 8 April 1998, Lance Webster walked into BFM’s headquarters on London’s Mortimer Street, ostensibly for a meeting with his former label’s product and marketing team about a planned Thieving Magpies “greatest hits” release. He signed in with security, settled himself down cross-legged by the lifts, hoisted a large hand-painted sign bearing the legend say no to pointless records and remained there until removed by police at around four.

  During his one-hour, one-man demonstration, a wave of gossip swept through the London offices of the British music industry. From record company to management office, rock venue to promoter, press agency to music paper—the telephone-propelled whispers of derision streaked across the city until a small crowd of highly amused and merrily intoxicated industry representatives gathered on the pavement outside to catch a glimpse of the fallen indie idol and his latest madcap blunder. I myself was halfway through my first—and, as it happened, last—week working as a staff writer for the dying Britpop rag Craze; I shelved my workload and jumped in a taxi, arriving on Mortimer Street to find I was Webster’s sole supporter.

  To add stinging insult to considerable injury, Webster had dressed from head to toe in white (a reference point woefully displaying his inflated opinion of his intentions) and had printed a stack of information leaflets, which he handed to anyone entering or exiting the lifts, painstakingly listing BFM’s crimes against the campaigner himself, his erstwhile group and British music fans in general. The rambling and frequently repetitive copy boiled down to three main points:

  that BFM had effectively “assassinated” the Thieving Magpies via a sustained policy of underspend, forcing them to embark on a massively overlong tour to promote The Social Trap, accompanied by a level of financial support fit for a “recently signed band on their first outing” rather than an act who’d just sold four million albums. “But we were an ‘old school’ alternative band,” harped the leaflet, “so obviously we were used to slumming it.”

  that the same label “blackmailed” Webster into swiftly releasing a “substandard” solo album (1997’s Commercial Suicide) to fulfil his contractual obligations.

  that “greatest hits” albums are an utter swindle and merely a quick, cheap, easy way for record companies to make pots of cash out of their old catalogue. BFM’s decision to release such an album by a band they themselves had “destroyed” proved they had respect for neither their artists nor the listening public.

  While there may have lurked a grain of truth in all three charges, the fact it was Lance Webster who chose to bring them, and in such a public and pathetic manner, struck a distinctly incongruous note. In the weeks and months following the Magpies’ infamous final performance in August 1995, Webster appeared to do everything in his power to sabotage attempts at salvaging the band’s career: prohibiting further single releases, refusing requests to record new material, rubbishing their output whenever the opportunity arose, even blocking plans to stage a special free gig for those who’d been present at the abortive Aylesbury show. When the entity known as Thieving Magpies officially ceased to exist in March 1996, Webster redirected his bile towards the record industry itself, calling it a “coke-addled circus of pointless, peripheral morons,” adding petulantly that “everything was fine before Britpop came along and fucked everything up.”

  The typewriters of the music press duly veered between ignoring the man completely (NME), encouraging hot debate as to whether he was right or plain bonkers (Melody Maker) and merciless mockery (Craze, Select, Vox). A number of publications mentioned the continued absence of Gloria Feathers, musing that Webster seemed a very lost and unfortunate soul without her apparently “cosmic” guidance. For my own part, still scribbling as hard as I could for my fanzine Definitely Not (which aimed to give space to anything but Britpop), I went as far off the scale as you could imagine:

  The behaviour of the man is admittedly perplexing, but how can anyone be surprised? He’s spent the last ten years giving us precisely what we wanted: consistently brilliant, inventive alternative rock, endlessly witty and thought-provoking lyrics, exhilarating live shows and entertaining interviews. But he made one mistake; and now you’ve all decided you don’t want him anymore. You’re either too drunk, too stupid or you’ve shoved too much white shit up your nose to realise that Lance Webster, and a few others like him, are the reason you’re able to do what you do today. None of these Britpop bands, none of your shitty little magazines, would be selling anything if he hadn’t done the groundwork. If you sat down and examined your rock history for one second, you’d realise he’s the closest thing Britain’s ever had to its own Cobain. And who are you clueless pricks worshipping instead? The Gallagher brothers: a pair of charmless, primeval fools who’ve somehow learned to use a microphone and string a few chords together. They’re the kings of your pitiable little world, and you lap it up like the weak, brain-dead, sycophantic little cunts that you are.

  But irrespective of your opinion on the man, it came to everyone’s surprise in the summer of that year when it emerged that Lance Webster would be appearing at a brand-new festival, V96, to road-test material for an upcoming solo tour and album. Odder still, he had agreed to a midafternoon slot on the weekend’s Britpop-heavy second stage, sandwiched between Space and Kula Shaker. Even the choice of festival itself was puzzling; as quickly became clear, everything about the clean, well-ordered V was emphatically “new school,” from the wooden walkways of the inner arena to the ticketed method of purchasing drinks. Still, a couple of thousand faithful dragged themselves away from the delights of Mike Flowers Pops on the main stage and waited with bated breath or (in my case) bitten-down-almost-to-the-cuticle fingernails for Webster’s appearance, hoping that this time he would be sober.

  In retrospect, it probably would have been better if he’d been drunk. Accompan
ied by nothing more than an acoustic guitar and an expressionless male piano player barely into his teens, he slouched on, uttered no word of greeting and proceeded to play six of the most dismal ballad-style numbers imaginable, none of them bearing even the faintest hallmark of the man’s former prowess. His voice retained its range and power, but the material it warbled was of such a bewilderingly low standard that half the audience were gone by the end of the first song. The remainder clapped politely (I remember thanking the gods he hadn’t tried doing this at Reading) and steeled themselves for the next intake of bilge. Webster spoke only once, before the final track, informing us that “this is David over here; he’s doing music A-level”—far from the expected, bitter slagging of all things Britpop which might at least have been worth watching. The few onlookers who’d bothered to stick around sighed and gradually sloped off to see … well, anything.

  Although in its own way as derisory as the Magpies’ Aylesbury show, Webster’s V96 performance had the unexpected result of temporarily killing the Lance bashing; why bother, when he’d done such a good job of it himself? Consequently, by the time reports of a completed debut solo album circulated the following spring, Webster had as good a chance as ever of redeeming himself. Frustratingly, he both did and didn’t.

  On the one hand, no one could deny he’d made a decent record. It was mercifully bereft of any material debuted at V96 and featured a lean combination of conventional rock and electronics, not a million miles from the sound of certain tracks on Blur and OK Computer, two of 1997’s biggest releases. Most of the songs matched the quality of those on The Social Trap (“The Bad Life,” “Blissful Indignance”), a few of them (“Walk-In Disaster,” “His Fax Beats Out the Blues”) as convincing as anything the Magpies had ever recorded. All in all, Webster could hardly claim BFM forced him to put a “substandard” record out.