The Alternative Hero (3 page)

Before my rapidly moving eyes, the dancers separate and prance about like banshees, emitting the appropriate hysterical shrieks and sobs. Then, in an almost biblical vignette, Ant weeps at the edge of the stage while Barrett affectionately wraps the veil around his head, moaning, “Weep no more, Stuart—weep no more.”

“Roger, you have healed me,” Ant replies, and they embrace.

Keith Richards laughs heartlessly and continues his piano torture, pausing occasionally to yell at a TV audience that the donation target has yet to be reached and could we please all go to the website now.

Even through my beer-induced slumber, it intrigues me that while Richards is every inch the rancid present-day specimen we barely believe can still manage a chord shape, Syd Barrett appears exactly as he did in 1966: long brown hair, chiselled features, pretty and infinitely capable, Pink Floyd at the height of their psychedelic powers. My dream also features the Adam Ant of yesteryear, in his case the 1982 model, youthful, dark and dashing, having newly lost his Ants. But the presence of the Internet and other
mise en dream
suggests a far more recent happening. Of course, dreams can fuck with time and space whenever they feel like it, but there lingers in my brain a certain relevance to this particular warping. Similarly, as the dream’s end credits roll, a final bewildered utterance from Barrett seems also to signify something fairly important: “I’ve lost Geoffrey. Where’s Geoffrey? I’m looking for Geoffrey Webster.”

Geoffrey Webster?

Who the hell is Geoffrey Webster?

The question bounces around my aching head as I rise, clean my teeth, fling on some clothes, down a few Alka-Seltzer and rush out of my flat. I must’ve had a few more drinks than I can recall last night, for I’m ashamed to say the bus has trundled over halfway to Old Street before it hits me who Geoffrey Webster is.

Lance Webster.

The man who, as far back as 1984, decided his given name could and would not be the name of an internationally famous purveyor of alternative rock ’n’ roll, ditching Geoffrey for the infinitely more viable abbreviation of his grandfather’s Christian name, Lancelot.

The front man whose charmed, platinum-selling world plummeted headfirst into the contents of a rancid festival toilet before the eyes of the indie cosmos one wretched summer night in 1995.

The former star (“the closest thing Britain’s ever had to its own Cobain,” as I once wrote in some dreadful fanzine) whose subsequent
career became an increasingly pitiful series of cock-ups and false starts until he finally gave up in 1999.

And the man who I more than partly blame for the way my life has steered itself over the underwhelming course of the last nineteen years.

But enough of that.

Why was Syd Barrett looking for him?

Now, I know trying to explain dreams is an ill-advised and mostly fruitless endeavour. If there’s any deep-seated, sinister Freudian reason for the fact that members of my family (particularly the male ones) have been known to morph into my ex-girlfriend halfway through dream conversations, I really don’t want to know it. But usually dreams at least feature people that I actually care about, or have thought about recently. I’ve never been remotely bothered about Pink Floyd, and Keith Richards is an overrated guitarist in one of the planet’s most overrated rock bands, as far as I can tell. It’s true I’ve developed a keen interest in Adam Ant’s early career over the last few years, but why he was hanging out with these other cocks I have little idea. So, I’m forced to analyse this dream a bit. Plus I have a moderate hangover and there isn’t much to do at work: ideal circumstances for ruminating over reveries.

The best explanation I can come up with is that Keith Richards was presiding over a charity television show at which pseudonym-using, fallen-from-grace pop stars had the old wounds of constant media buggery healed via a dancing ritual performed by their look-alikes, while a watching audience donated money. Lance Webster was next on the bill (perhaps a duet with Gary Glitter) but, true to form, had vanished before his allotted stage time.

Great. I’m glad to have sorted that one out.

Apart from a cursory glance at Google to see if Webster has been up to anything new that the universe might be alerting me to, I make
no other attempt to find a reason for his reappearance in my psyche. My obsession—as my ex-girlfriend termed it—with Webster died in about 2002, when I’d finally tired of waiting for a follow-up to his debut solo album
(Commercial Suicide
, released in the same week as Oasis’
Be Here Now)
, but certainly his spectre has continued to clatter about in my skull like a bad relationship. It’s therefore not particularly surprising that I’m still dreaming about the man—or, more to the point, the
absence
of him.

It’s an otherwise uneventful day at the office. I do my usual blend of fatuous emailing, a few token work-related tasks, mindless web-surfing and keeping an eye out for Ron’s or Michael’s sudden approaches.

“Clive, this document,” announces Ron, just as I’m shutting my computer down for the day, “is an application for insurance.”

“Yes,” I answer.

“It arrived,” Ron continues, staring out of the window and fingering the sheet of paper dangerously, “at ten thirty this morning.”

“Yes,” I repeat, still unable to argue.

“Is there any particular reason why it remains in your tray, unprocessed, at a quarter to six?”

I glumly restart my machine and stay at work for another forty minutes, fantasising over what it might be like to work for a company where sometimes, just occasionally, someone looked up from their desk at half past five on a Friday evening and suggested a quick pint before home.

At some point my mobile bleeps, summoning me to some uninteresting chain pub in Islington, where I stand around with a few of my uninteresting friends as they ruminate about their week’s uninteresting highs and lows and prepare themselves for the night’s main activity: a visit to their latest uninteresting clubbing discovery. I make my excuses at ten-ish and sidle off homeward, ignoring their
usual protestations. A kebab, another can of lager, a short round of commiseratory masturbation (Katherine Heigl, if you’re interested; one in a long queue of second-tier Hollywood actresses I’ve recently become excited about—last week it was Anna Faris, the week before Carrie-Anne Moss) and another painfully predictable Friday evening is over.

The next day, however, proves significantly more intriguing.

Via the least intriguing of activities, of course. I am sent by my heavily hungover flatmate, Polly, on a mission to buy some of that rank, fruited malt loaf she sometimes favours for Saturday breakfast, plus a lightbulb, paracetamol and some tampons (one of those strange selections at the checkout that I sometimes picture mixed up in a wok together—to universal funny looks from anyone I might share this musing with). The high street is crawling with shoppers and prams, as usual, so I make a swift detour into a café to wolf down my favourite sandwich (bacon and mushroom), and then continue up the street. Imagine my surprise, half a minute later, when I see a Lance Webster look-alike emerging from the dry cleaner’s with a sizeable pile of plastic-covered items.

Except, of course, it isn’t a Lance Webster look-alike.

I’m not certain at which point in the following twenty seconds I realise this. All I know is that something about him—the way he walks, the quick glance up and down the street before he sets off, possibly his shoes (rather ostentatious shiny light brown brogues)—whatever it is, it propels me to make an about-turn and hurry back down the street after him. God knows. It certainly isn’t his face, which suggests a slightly fat elder brother of my former hero. But I don’t believe any rational thought contributes to my arrival at this decision; my body seems to move of its own accord, almost as if I
smell
that it’s Lance Webster.

I ought to point out, this isn’t the first time this has happened. A
few years ago I walked past Björn Ulvaeus on Oxford Street. Again, his appearance had become less blond Swedish male pop star and more bearded, kindly uncle, but before I knew what I was doing I was running back up the other side of the road so that I could walk past him again; it’s a funny old thing. As I approached him for the second time I ran through various lines I could maybe say to him (“Sorry to bother you, I’d just like to tell you that ABBA made my childhood slightly more bearable;” “Sorry, I thought you ought to know that
ABBA: The Album
kicks the shit out of
Pet Sounds
and
Sergeant Pepper
as a classic, flawless pop masterpiece;” “Sorry, but can I just say that ‘My Love My Life’ is the song I want played at my funeral,” etc.) but wisely decided to merely saunter past, enjoying a few seconds of being metres away from a genius. Besides, what if he’d been having a bad day and had told me to piss off? I’d have probably hurled myself in front of a passing 73 bus.

Which is partly why I don’t want to address Mr. Webster. The other part being that I haven’t a clue what to ask him. My feet carry on moving up the street while I try to arrange the myriad questions and possibilities that now present themselves like a line of hopeful auditionees. Could I talk to him? Could I make friends with him? Could I interview him? Could I finally find out the truth about 12 August 1995? Could I finally find out the truth about Gloria Feathers? Could I succeed where others had failed? Could I sell the interview for vast sums of money? Could I build a successful career as a music writer on the back of that one, earth-shattering exclusive? (“It sounds like a cliché, but it really is true,” I’d tell Zane Lowe. “My life completely changed after I saw Lance Webster coming out of that dry cleaner’s.”) Most of them wholly implausible, of course, but when, I am afraid, has that ever stopped me before? And let’s not forget, I have backup from the dreamworld. Of
course
I can do all
those things. That’s what my dream was telling me to do. Look for him. Look for Geoffrey Webster. Don’t just let him go. It was nothing less than a cosmic heads-up. All is clear.

Minutes later I’m tailing him round the corner of my own street. I’ve never really followed anyone before. I’m not doing any of the things I imagine one is supposed to do, such as keeping a reasonable distance: when he swings left down a little path to a fairly standard Victorian town house I’m probably about two metres behind him, so I have to swerve clumsily and walk straight past—which is stupid, really; had I been slightly further back I could have seen whether he’d pressed a bell or let himself in, or caught a glimpse of what was behind the door, whether or not it was a flat, all sorts of useful stuff. But no. I’m left standing halfway up my street with now raging curiosity but no further details, no plan, no desire to go back home—and crucially, no lightbulb, tampons, paracetamol or foul malt loaf for the waiting mess of headache and nausea that is Polly. Not wishing for a tricky weekend, I glumly venture back towards the high street. This is the way it’s always been with Polly and me: she bails me out, I run her errands in return. Ever since university, when she spared me from a five-hundred-pound library fine by pretending to be dead. Long story.

I spend pretty much the rest of the day in a daze, playing Thieving Magpies songs, scribbling things in my notebook, hammering stuff out on my ancient laptop and drinking cans of lager and so on. Polly’s hangover lasts until about six, at which point she buggers off to have a meal with Problem Sarah (a friend from university for whom Polly conducts weekly counselling sessions, to which I am rarely invited), leaving the flat to myself so I can do all sorts of exciting things like fall asleep in front of
Parkinson
and spill lager all over my bowl of Doritos.

It’s now Sunday. My twenty-four hours of thinking and recovering from the mini-encounter are just about up. And it’s fairly reasonable to announce, I have something of a plan.

But I’m not due at the pub for another half an hour. There’s time for a bit of a history lesson.

Unless you were a boring, unadventurous middle-class teenager living in a boring, unadventurous middle-class southern English town during the latter half of the 1980s, it’s almost impossible to conceive the seismic impact a man like Lance Webster and his band of Thieving Magpies could’ve had on someone like me.

Nowadays, even if you have only a passing, superficial interest in popular music, you’d be well aware of a fairly balanced selection on offer. If you’re after pure pop, you can get it. If you’re after “quality” indie, there’s
heaps
of it. There are entire radio stations devoted to it, for God’s sake. If it’s a middle-of-the-road, singer-songwritery thing that floats your boat, you’re inundated. And of course your myriad other genres and subgenres—metal, hip-hop, electronica, dance, folk, etc.—whatever you want, it’s on a plate, in the high street, on the World Wide Interweb, at your polygenre multi-entertainment enormoshop. But in 1987 or 1988, as far as the cautious, conservative me was concerned, you had shit
pop—and that was pretty much it
. It was Stock/Aitken/Waterman acts (Kylie, Jason, Rick Astley), almost-as-bad non-Stock/Aitken/Waterman acts (Five Star, Yazz, Swing Out Sister), pointless bands signed on the back of U2 (Then Jerico, T’Pau), watery trios signed on the back of A-ha (Breathe, Johnny Hates Jazz), rapidly declining Norwegian trios (A-ha), rapidly declining former teen idols (Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet), desperate attempts to find new teen idols (Bros, Wet Wet Wet), desperate attempts to find the new Smiths (The Housemartins), woefully
worthy adult pop (Dire Straits, Phil Collins), woefully worthy stadium rock (U2, Simple Minds) … and the Pet Shop Boys. It’s an anxious state of affairs when the Pet Shop Boys can be described as a saving grace.

There I was, up to my waist in 1988, leafing through
Smash Hits
looking for, ooh, I don’t know, some really interesting article about Terence Trent D’Arby, when I saw it.
Smash Hits
isn’t widely remembered for its ground-breaking coverage of new rock talent, but back then the last embers of its early eighties credibility heyday were still smoking. Can’t remember now who the piece was written by, Tom Hibbert or Ian “Jocky” Cranna perhaps, but I can recite the review’s finest ingredients word for word to this day: