The Alternative Hero (23 page)

The first thing onlookers noticed was that she wasn’t very good. She had the moves, for sure, throwing back her long brown hair while she bashed away at her low-slung instrument, her apparent lack of concern at playing for such a large audience suggesting an amount of experience, but the sound that emerged was far from accomplished: a scratchy, slightly out-of-tune guitar with approximated chords accompanied by a voice that was all expression and no skill. It wasn’t totally unlistenable, however, which ensured that people continued to pay attention long enough to notice the second, more startling ingredient. Her lyrics were composed entirely of Thieving Magpies song titles.

“It’s
War on the Floor,” she sang, “
and it’s
Arguably the Last Time
I’ll be riding your
Pit Pony.” Other lines were less grammatically successful, such as
“I’m going to sleep with
The Cool and the Crooks
while the
Inappropriate Girlfriend
sleeps with
The Ballad That Never Ends”—while some (“
I want you to fuck my
Squarehole
with your
Roundpeg”) left little to the imagination. Towards the end of the first “song” she’d garnered more attention than she deserved on account of this feature; in fact, a collection of pissed blokes down the front were merrily listening out for the titles and cheering each time they spotted one. But most observers had started paying more mind to the increasingly peculiar moving images projected behind her.

Some reports suggest Gloria Feathers was already calling for Lesley to be removed by this point, aggressively bending the ear of the stage manager next to the monitor desk (the Magpies’ crew were quite used to fielding—and usually ignoring—Gloria’s requests). But
when the figure wandering about on the dimly lit home video became more recognisable, there is little doubt that she instantly made a beeline for the main sound desk. There were problems, however. The first was that Gloria’s route—from the side of the stage, down the steps, across the crowded backstage enclosure, through the section where all the trucks were parked, past security into the main arena, around the bustling inner ring of fast-food stalls and bars, across the field strewn with happy punters and finally right up to the sound tower—took the best part of five minutes to navigate. When she arrived she encountered a fresh difficulty: no one would let her in. Feathers was so well-known on the scene that sometimes promoters didn’t bother to give her a security pass; or even if they did, she rarely condescended to wear it. Usually this wasn’t a problem, but on this occasion a brand-new security firm, LiveTime, was being used and none of the staff knew who the hell she was. One can imagine the bemusement of the sound-desk guard, confronted by this frightsome woman with multicoloured dreadlocks, demanding to be let in, hurling various indignances (“How
dare
you
not
recognise me! I’m Gloria bloody Feathers! They should hand round photos of me at your fucking induction sessions!”) while Lesley played on, her lyrics becoming more twisted (“Look Who’s Laughing—
me when I
Lose It,
kill you and feast on your
Chopped Heart”), the visuals more worrying.

Actually Webster himself was watching the whole thing, but was too paralysed by shock to do much about it. For in front of his and now close to forty thousand other disbelieving eyes played what could effectively pass for a filmed summary of his recent activities. Starting, tentatively, with a few dark and grainy sequences of Webster wandering around a record shop, then following him along a few quiet streets, sometimes alone, sometimes with his girlfriend (who at this point was an Australian drama student named Camilla
McBriar), the film then started to gain a bit more confidence and featured long shots of Webster having lunch in a restaurant, zooming in on his mouth as he ate, drank and spoke; then a series of shots that pursued him on a car journey along a dual carriageway, stopping next to him at some lights, tracking him through an industrial estate and watching him pull up next to a large brown factory, get out of the car with his guitar and enter an unremarkable building (this was the Magpies’ rehearsal space near the Guinness brewery in Acton); then it changed scene entirely, following him round a supermarket (Sainsbury’s in Camden, as closer examination would prove) and again closing in on his mouth, hands, eyes and belongings, even to the point of focusing on the contents of his trolley (this prompted the film’s one and only laugh from the audience, presumably due to the extraordinary number of Ambrosia creamed desserts you could see); then there came a montage of assorted situations: Lance relaxing in his garden, drinking with the rest of the band in a pub, driving again (this time filmed from a motorway bridge, under which a shaded Webster passed), hurrying along streets in various parts of London (Kilburn, Soho, Putney) and concluded with—unbelievably—some similar footage of him in Amsterdam, Paris and what was almost certainly New York (the Magpies had recently played summer festivals in these various countries). But if the sequence had so far been, from a legal point of view, inoffensive-while certainly devious and creepy (not to mention well-funded)—here was where it became downright nasty and felonious. Via a method one finds difficult to fathom, the remainder of the film consisted of Webster and McBriar mooching around at home, cooking in the kitchen, canoodling in front of the television and ultimately, just before the video was at last removed from the player, having sex in the bedroom.

Again, reports differ as to how Feathers was eventually admitted
into the sound tower. The probable story is that she was spotted by one of the chaps inside and ushered in; a more colourful tale is that she punched out the hapless security guy. Either way it was certainly Feathers who pressed the eject button. She then promptly sacked all the crew. Clutching the videotape, she stormed back to the main backstage area, sacked pretty much everyone else (it is assumed that, like Webster, they were all too transfixed by the film’s sheer audacity to put an immediate stop to it), then grabbed Lesley by the scruff of the neck (she had finally been booed off by the crowd after the film stopped) and dragged her off to the nearest police van, where the officers simply cautioned her and advised that she should leave the site immediately.

The rest of the day passed without further drama and was, if truth be told, a trifle dull. Even the Thieving Magpies themselves were a little under par, knackered from close to eighteen months of playing virtually the same set. Webster did not, as had been hoped, make some witty remark about Lesley’s video, which perhaps demonstrated how freaked out he really was by the whole thing. Gloria Feathers angrily left the site around eight, after Bob Grant calmly reminded her that she was not in a position to go round dismissing Thieving Magpies employees when she was not even one herself.

In fact, as the autumn of 1993 approached, you didn’t have to be within the Magpies’ inner circle to surmise that Feathers’ reign as their closest confidante was nearing its end. The band, although road-weary and in desperate need of the impending break, were bigger than ever, their mushrooming popularity now seemingly invincible to any hitch or bad move that Gloria may or may not foresee. Her arrogance, at one time laughed off by all as a charming quirk of her multilayered character, had now reached alarming proportions, and become insufferable to everyone from hotel porters to other rock stars, not helped in the slightest by her excessive drinking. The “last
semiuseful thing she did,” to employ Craig Spalding’s expression, was to spot the infamous Lesley, camcorder in hand, following Webster around while he was on holiday with Camilla McBriar in Barcelona, and to again cart her off to the authorities (the Spanish police took a rather more serious view of Lesley’s antics and kept her in a cell overnight)—but even this had its downside: one may reasonably ask what the hell Feathers was doing in Barcelona anyway. It was supposedly a coincidence, although by now you were beginning to wonder. Whatever the explanation, Feathers’ almost constant presence was causing noticeable strain between Webster and McBriar, and they eventually split just before Christmas of that year. 1994 dawned and progressed, with all its attendant cultural gear changes, and Feathers was seen less and less in public. For the most part she was unwelcome in Britpop circles (Liam Gallagher allegedly described her as a “punk-rock Miss Piggy”), but the feeling was usually mutual. She still ventured out to see some of her favourites: Swervedriver, Cranes, Senser, Eat Static—and even managed to fly to Seattle for the public vigil that followed Kurt Cobain’s death (“Gloria would go to the funeral of an envelope,” one music journalist quipped)—but her omniscience and popularity had long since waned. Even her indestructible friendship with Lance Webster was showing visible signs of wear and tear; they were seen having a rather large argument over dinner at Quo Vadis, leaving separately, Webster looking close to tears. In an interview conducted to coincide with the television screening of
The Liar
, he both acknowledged and denied that something was amiss with his chum: “Off the rails? Naah. Listen, you don’t become someone like Gloria by having lots of early nights and drinking orange squash. And I’ve been friends with her through worse than this.” Worse than what, exactly, he did not articulate; but it wasn’t difficult to take a few wild guesses.

The last undisputed public sighting of Feathers was at the February 1995 Brit Awards, where Blur won in a record-breaking four categories. Britpop aside, the band had been indie staples since 1990 and were therefore known and liked by Feathers, who seemed very much her old self as she delightedly applauded their many trips up to the podium. She looked well and, un usually, in possession of a slight suntan—she didn’t even appear to be drinking quite so much. Apart from her dreadlocks’ new colour scheme (red, white and blue: perhaps a nod to the new obsession with all things British), the rest of her appearance could have been the Gloria Feathers of any point in the previous eight or nine years: short red PVC skirt, fishnets, thick studded belt, threatening boots and a heavily ripped Head of David T-shirt. She remained at the event until Sting took to the stage to present Elton John with his Outstanding Contribution award, perhaps deciding that this was a step too far into the land of the mainstream. Skipping off through the vast hall, kissing goodbye to a few friends, stopping to retrieve her fake-fur coat from the cloakroom, jumping into a taxi and heading south: that was the last the world at large was to see of Gloria Feathers.

Unlike history’s other disappearees (not least Richey Manic, who had only been missing for a few weeks by this point), there was relatively little hue and cry about Feathers’ vanishing act, the fundamental reason for which being that her next of kin, father Donald Amhurst, decided not to report her as a missing person following a farewell note he received. In her legendary and incredibly well-researched feature “Where the Fuck Is Gloria Feathers?” (published in the 1996 edition of the fanzine
Things That Make Me Go Moo)
, Alison O’Bawd quoted from this message (although how she managed to be privy to its contents also remains something of a mystery). “Fate united us,” it purportedly read, “and now please accept that fate has separated us. You may wish to find me; perhaps you may
not. If any love for me remains within you, please understand that I wish to be left alone.” It is difficult to say whether Amhurst took his daughter’s elegantly Garbo-esque advice as a result of any remaining love, or simply because he was sick to the back teeth of her. Either way, no official moves were made towards tracing her whereabouts, and the Feathers-spotter must rely on the few friends and family members who conducted their own independent investigations. Based on slight contributions from this group of people (which, conspicuously, did not include Lance Webster) and noting other independent sightings heard through the indie grapevine, O’Bawd’s feature makes an admirable stab at constructing a possible passage, thus: having shaved her head and donned unremarkable clothing, Feathers travelled to Switzerland, where she met with an old school friend, acquired a fake Swiss passport and became Rosamund von Feder; she lived in the small town of Dietikon, near Zürich, for the next four months (among Feathers’ few academic successes was her proficiency in German), after which she travelled by car to Moscow, where she ditched the vehicle with a hitchhiker (and Thieving Magpies fan) she happened to meet at a petrol station near Minsk, boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway and headed for Vladivostok on the far-eastern coast of Russia. Here her voyage apparently drew to a halt.

Two Feathers-related visits to Vladivostok were made that year: the first by her elder sister, Persephone, who after a few weeks of fruitless searching was told by some locals on the outskirts of the city of a strange young Swiss woman fitting Feathers’ description, living alone in a remote apartment block, calling herself Slava Pero (“Glory Feather”). Unfortunately this character was nowhere to be found at the time of Persephone’s visit. Shortly before Christmas, Alison O’Bawd herself made the trip with her boyfriend, fellow writer Sam Northam, managing to locate Pero having lunch in a nearby café:

Or, indeed, that anyone saw of her.

Naturally, rumours abounded that Lance Webster was somehow involved in her vanishing act; stories that he had ordered her to leave the country, to take on a new identity, even that he had paid for her to be kidnapped, finally tired of her wild instructions and intrusions to both his personal and professional life. A particular advocate of this explanation was Persephone Amhurst herself, who had reportedly never cared much for the singer, believing he and his band had kept her Rosamund at perpetual odds with the rest of reality. When Webster’s own world collapsed six months after the disappearance, Persephone made sure her opinions were heard in any media that listened: “This drunken, hostile lout has finally shown the world his true colours—a streak that our family have experienced at close quarters for too many years. It is our hope that he receives a custodial sentence and hefty fine for his violence and disregard for those who have given him a career.” O’Bawd, however, saw it differently, as her exhaustive article—referencing a 1993 letter
Feathers wrote to her friend,
NME
journalist Alan Leader—concludes: