The Alternative Hero (21 page)

“Right. Well, I was in a position where it would have been relatively easy for me to get someone to publish it.”

“You had connections,” I suggest.

He twists his face and becomes busy with the beer mat.

“Well, sort of. I was … I was kind of famous, I guess.”

And I’m kind of enjoying this. I say nothing and sip my beer.

“So it would have probably sold a bit anyway, even if it was rubbish. Which,” he laughs into his pint, “it very well might have been.”

He pauses, thinking.

“But if I got a publisher I would’ve had to finish the damn thing and, I don’t know … I was worried about it. I might not have had the time—lots of research; it could have been shit, which then could have affected the … well, my other career.”

I’m still saying nothing. It’s proving rather successful.

“But I did enjoy doing it. Writing. In a room, just me. Making my own decisions. Without having to check with three other bastards first.”

He looks at me and sniggers.

“There you go. That’s the long version. So how about yours?”

“Mine?”

“Your novel.”

Oh shit. I’ve been so wrapped up listening to him witter on, it hasn’t occurred to me that he might ask this.

“Oh, there are a few,” I blether. “Funnily enough I, er, have a similar
problem—that is, never enough time to research, to really get down to it, you know …”

He shakes his head, still chuckling. “Come on, tell me. You ain’t getting out of it that easily.”

“Oh … well … the main one I had was …”

“Uh-huh?”

I take a deep breath, and, from fuck knows where, out comes this:

“Well, I quite like the idea of flawed genius, so I had this idea for, like, a scientist-type inventor bloke, still in his twenties, super intelligent, works for NASA and all that sort of thing, but he’s this incredible misanthrope, fucking hates everyone, lives on his own in the middle of a field in East Anglia or somewhere with his dog. Spends all day in his lab trying to build a time machine, but he’s a borderline alcoholic, so he keeps buggering it up. Meanwhile these people try to steal his idea. The whole story is seen through the eyes of a journalist who tries to interview him for a Sunday paper.”

I finally run out of bullshit. Webster has spent my entire speech, you guessed it, narrowing his eyes at me with his mouth slightly open.

“You wrote that?” he gasps, finally.

“Erm … yeah! Well, I got about halfway through.”

“Wow!”

“Or maybe a bit less.”

“Wow. You should finish it.”

“Yeah, but …”

“But what?” he insists. “You’ve got the time now!”

“True,” I nod.

“Did you get any publishing interest?”

“No.”

“Did you try?”

“Erm, no.”

He drains the last of his Guinness, extracts a fiver from his wallet and bangs it down on the counter.

“What are you having?”

And, just like that, we are talking. Not about anything linked to the Lance Webster I know, of course, but chatting nonetheless, enthusiastically, about jotting these silly ideas of ours down on paper. I feel like I’m with someone else—quite literally, a random bloke in my local pub—and for that reason of course it’s easier to relax. Although when he comes back from a loo visit (during which I fire off a frantic text to Alan) I do have to pinch myself as the familiar grinning figure appears round the corner. But the closest he comes to saying anything about himself personally is when I express my dislike of the inevitable love interest in a story.

“Yeah, me too,” he nods. “I was actually going through a pretty horrible breakup at the time, so there was none of that shit in my one, I assure you. It would’ve all been soaked with venom, dripping with hate! No one would’ve got through the fucker.”

We continue in this manner for another quarter of an hour, then he glances at his watch.

“Shit! Didn’t realise what the time was. Gotta get going.”

“That’s cool. Thanks for the pint.”

Again, he fixes me with one of his stares.

“I don’t suppose you’d, erm …”

I stare back.

“Do you wanna do this again?” he asks. “I mean, maybe I could have a look at some of your stuff, you know, and you mine. Bat a few more ideas around, that kinda thing.”

“Er, well—yeah?”

Fuck! And what, exactly, would I be showing him?

“Maybe go and have a coffee sometime, something like that?”

“Yeah, sure! Good idea.”

He smiles. “Great. In fact … hope you don’t think this too weird, but do you wanna put a date in right now?”

So he doesn’t have to give out his telephone number. Clever bastard.

With the suddenly wide-open weekday time I have at my disposal, we agree to meet on Friday at three in that café opposite the park. Which means I have … ooh, just under forty-eight hours to write a hell of a lot of nonsense. I feel like I’ve enrolled in the world’s strangest creative-writing class.

He puts his jacket on and gathers up his newspaper.

“Well, it was nice … shit, man, I’m so sorry, I don’t even know your name! Nor you mine,” he laughs, shaking his head.

“No!” I concur, holding myself back one last time.

“Geoff,” he grins, holding out his (surprisingly small) hand. “Geoff Webster.”

I shake as firmly as I can manage.

“Alan,” I tell him. “Alan Potter.”

Little man
with no clue and no plan
your head’s in a whirl
over the funny words of a funny girl
.
It’s a confusing dream
just like it was when you were seventeen
but you’re learning how to laugh
in your little house on the flight path
.

Thieving Magpies, “Little House on the Flight Path”

The initial rise of the Thieving Magpies was unremarkable enough. Bunch of mates from school form band, learn a load of covers (Clash, XTC, Echo and The Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs), start writing own songs, play first gig (Reading School Summer Bash, June 1984), get spotted by loudmouthed eccentric from nearby public school (Webster) who promptly forces his way into band and demotes previous singer to rhythm guitar; more gigs, disgruntled previous singer departs, Webster takes over rhythm guitar duties, more original material appears, ditto bigger local bookings (Reading After Dark Club, Windsor Old Trout, Brunel University Union), first London gig (West Hampstead Moonlight Club), fledgling entrepreneur Bob Grant attends show by chance and offers his services as manager, record first demo, tout it round to record companies, they show some interest … so far, so normal.

But what really set the Magpies apart from every other band of the time was their strange, and still largely unexplained, relationship with one Gloria Feathers.

Few would deny that Feathers (née Rosamund Amhurst) was the unofficial figurehead of the late-eighties/early-nineties British alternative scene: she was an individual so regularly and easily viewable, one almost imagined her to be on the payroll of various venues, promoters and labels (as, indeed, she may have been). Not a film-star
beauty by any means, but oddly beguiling, due in part to her mesmerising almond-shaped brown eyes, and characterised by a loud upper-class accent and a selection of attention-grabbing hair creations, tattoos and piercings. She was one of those people who simply seemed to be
everywhere:
every important gig, every club night, every festival, every party, in a multitude of different cities, often on the same evening (one Feathers legend tells of her happily jumping around at a Wedding Present gig in Salisbury, only to be spotted later that evening in the hotel where Therapy? were staying in Dublin); and she also seemed to know everyone, every band, tour manager, roadie, bouncer, barman. Sometimes she was drunk (she famously favoured lethal half-pints of cider, vodka and blackcurrant, a drink still known as a Gloria Feathers in some music venues), sometimes sober; sometimes doing nothing, other than regaling the world with her latest exploits; sometimes doing everything, from selling merchandise to busily darting about with a walkie-talkie. And yet no one claims to have actually employed her or given her any official role as such, nor did she ever appear to be simply a “groupie;” in fact, several prominent indie stars are known to have pursued her, with little success.

She was also at school with Lance Webster.

There have always been assumptions that they were lovers, either at first, at the end or all along, but there has never been any proof of this. What is undisputed is that they were very close friends. She arrived at Webster’s school in the sixth form, part of the dubious English boys’ school arrangement wherein females are admitted at sixteen to gently introduce the poor innocent lads to the concept of a dual-gender world. By this point Webster was a loner and quite breathtakingly pretentious, a pretty-boy scholarship kid spending most of his days seated on a bench in the school kitchen garden gently strumming a classical guitar, apparently modelling himself
on some bizarre crossbreed of Nick Drake, Robert Smith and Hamlet. Feathers, despite her unusual appearance and tendency to trouble her school house with the sounds of The Sisters of Mercy and Killing Joke, was universally popular with the rest of the clean-cut boys and girls, but naturally drawn towards Webster’s individualism. Together they missed lessons, experimented with drugs, attended gigs, played impressive practical jokes (they once managed to enliven a parents’ evening by spiking teachers’ drinks with LSD) and also dabbled with spiritualism; it was during this period that she adopted her new name, bestowed upon her by a medium she and Webster met in East Grinstead. Webster too swapped “Geoffrey” for “Lance” around this time—a decision reportedly reached at the 1984 Glastonbury Festival. Feathers encouraged the singer to simplify his image and toughen up his songwriting, and it was with her blessing that Webster invaded the newly formed Thieving Magpies and began to follow his rock calling in earnest.

Physical distance was briefly put between the pair when they left the school in July 1985; Webster and his band began their steady ascent of the alternative-rock mountain, while Feathers, in a final attempt by the exasperated Amhurst family to civilise their increasingly madcap daughter, was packed off to a finishing school in Switzerland. She made sure her time there was as colourful as possible—she cultivated a habit of luring boys from the local village back to the premises in the dead of night, photographing them in various compromising positions, developing the pictures in the school’s darkroom and delivering them to the boys’ families in one of the school’s embossed envelopes—but somehow she failed to achieve expulsion. By the time Feathers returned to Britain in the summer of 1986, Webster had already become a serviceable candidate for the title of Next Big Thing, the Magpies having contributed a song—“A Month of Mondays”—to the legendary flexidisc compilation
Indie-duction
. What followed was to establish a pattern for Feathers’ approach to her friend’s group and their career choices.

Suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end of not just one but two potential record deals, the Magpies opted, with Bob Grant’s not unreasonable guidance, for a modest arrangement presented by a major label, rather than an even more humble offering from Abandon, an independent outfit based in Gerrards Cross. A few days before the contract was to be signed, Feathers summoned Webster to her Bloomsbury bed-sit, where she made her thoughts on the matter perfectly plain: the Magpies should reject the major and go with the indie. Webster, then nineteen and hardly au courant with the arcane ways of the music industry, was baffled, and after a blazing row departed for Bob Grant’s office in Kilburn. By the time he got there Feathers had already phoned the manager to declare she would not be eating or drinking again until the band took her advice. Webster feigned nonchalance for the next seventy-two hours but caved in on the way to the label’s headquarters, bolting through the closing doors of the tube train as the band passed Russell Square. Horrified to find Feathers prostrate on her bed and in a state of some delirium, Webster glumly phoned the record company to inform all concerned that the deal was off.

Unsurprisingly, several weeks of heated debate and recrimination ensued, but once these had given way to fresh talks with Abandon for a levelheaded agreement that would eventually spawn two high-profile indie hits (“Monument” and “Siamese Burn”), the logic of Feathers’ directive became more clear. By remaining, for the time being, on the independent side of the rock fence, without the relentless attention to sales figures on which a major would surely have insisted, the band would be allowed to develop their sound and build their audience properly, as the following eighteen months were to prove. A fervent following was already baying for the Thieving Magpies
when they took to the various festival stages in the summer of 1987, new material displayed the refined lyrical venom and melodic clout that were to become their trademark, and the band topped the “best newcomer” category of just about every poll in the country at the end of the year. As 1988 dawned, the flapping sound of major labels’ chequebooks was little short of deafening. Bob Grant, now fully in control, steered the Magpies towards a generous but workable deal with BFM, Abandon received a handsome payout and an appreciable percentage of the first album’s takings; everyone was a winner.