The Alternative Hero

by Tim Thornton

  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:

  The hair may be long and the guitars loud ’n’ thrashy, but these gents from Reading manage to make glorious pop the way it should be: spiky words, catchy melodies and beats to make you jump around the kitchen, complete with brilliant titles such as “Have You Stopped Talking Yet?” and “I Always Hated Love Songs”—like Morrissey but less pretentious.

  As enticing as the rest of it was, that last bit was what grabbed me: “like Morrissey but less pretentious.”

  I didn’t get Morrissey. I do now, of course, now that my balls have fully dropped and we have The Smiths’ whole career to look back on, but I was too young in 1984 when they were doing the really good stuff, and by the time I was old enough to appreciate them, their output seemed limited to strange ditties about girlfriends in comas or disco dancers meeting sticky ends. And they were northern. Not that I have anything against northerners, but my blinkered, never-set-foot-north-of-Luton teenage self couldn’t understand how a foppish, posh-singing geezer with flowers protruding from his arse could hail from a city that looked, whenever I saw it on TV, like the set of Coronation Street.

  But these Thieving Magpies sounded wicked. Guitars that were “loud ’n’ thrashy”? Pop music “the way it should be”? All in the same band? In 1988? Get me to a record shop NOW. And the fact they were from Reading, rather than East Kilbride, put a nice, cosy Home Counties spin on the whole thing. Clearly they were the band for me.

  So I got me to a record shop. For such an occasion I decided to go somewhere a little more special than my town’s usual chain retailers, partly because I anticipated blank looks when mentioning the band name, but mainly because I felt this total departure from my usual buying habits (the few things I heard on the radio that didn’t disgust me) warranted a total change of scene. This was to be, after all, the very first time I had bought a record without previously hearing a note of its contents. I rose one Saturday morning, donned (in all probability) a Level 42 T-shirt, muttered something to my mum about having some homework to do with a friend and boarded the train to London.

  An hour later I was struggling up the escalator of the world’s windiest tube station, Kentish Town. I’d been reliably informed by someone at school that Kentish Town was the mecca of specialist pop music, bursting with stockists that were unlikely to shirk at a request for the obscurest of discs, let alone something that had already been featured in Smash Hits. So, imagine my surprise when I found myself wandering down a breathtakingly dull, rainswept high street, punctuated by a few scary-looking Irish pubs. I walked and walked, but the only hints of anything remotely cutting-edge were a shop that sold drums and an ironmonger’s, which were hardly of interest. When the shops finally ran out I plucked up courage to ask a passerby where I might go to buy records: “Loads of places in Camden Town,” came the reply. Bugger. My idiot school informant had messed up the names. I strode the half mile back up to Kentish Town station and, blissfully unaware of the finer points of London geography, travelled the one stop to Camden, eventually locating a likely looking emporium that happened to be about two hundred metres south of the spot where I’d just asked the passerby for help.

  Things didn’t get any less confusing once I was inside. I’d seen few shops that looked less like my local branch of WHSmith. Here was a world of odd, multicoloured posters and flyers advertising appearances by groups whose names I couldn’t even pronounce; of black-clad, black-haired, pale-faced characters floating aimlessly around; of background music that sounded like the neighbours were being murdered, and thousands of records arranged in no comprehensible order. What was “US New Wave”? What was “Industrial”? What was “UK Indie”? And—most significantly, for me—where was the “Rock and Pop” section?

  I decided the best way of coping with my predicament was to also float around aimlessly, letting these strange new names and phrases creep into my head. Gothic. Post-punk. Front 242. Nitzer Ebb. Reading Festival. The Marquee. Spacemen 3. The Men They Couldn’t Hang. Green on Red. Fulham Greyhound. Hüsker Dü. What was all this?

  I must have been in the shop for twenty minutes before the guy behind the counter (dressed in a T-shirt that announced—to my continued bemusement—“Death to the Pixies”) asked me if I was all right.

  “Uh … yeah,” I lied. But then, realising I didn’t much want another perplexing, fruitless quarter of an hour to pass, added, “Um … you got any Thieving Magpies?”

  “Over there,” the assistant pointed. “UK Alternative section.”

  “Cheers,” I grunted. Alternative to what?

  I located the appropriate rack and fished around, eventually reaching, via The Godfathers, Transvision Vamp, All About Eve, Voice of the Beehive and The Cult (some of whom I’d actually heard of), a plain, black cover that bore the legend “Thieving Magpies/ Shoot the Fish” in the favoured mock-typewriter-print font of the day. Nothing else was on the sleeve, apart from the track list (which included, to my amazement, a song called “If I’m Still Sober, You’re Still Ugly”) and a small photo of some spotty, long-haired oiks on the back, standing next to a pond.

  Energised by my successful hunt, I relaxed, rifled through the other racks, chatted amiably with the assistant and eventually sauntered happily out of the shop with the Happy Mondays’ Bummed, My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything, the twelve-inch of “Touch Me I’m Sick” by Mudhoney and The Cardiacs’ BBC Session EP. I then celebrated with a fortifying pint of Guinness in the Camden Stores.

  I’m lying, of course. I shuffled out with my sole purchase, ignored everything else in Camden, bought a Marks & Sp
encer’s sandwich and went home.

  [From the Christmas 1988 edition of Slade Lane School Magazine.]

  If you haven’t heard of the Thieving Magpies yet, you will soon. They are a new pop group from Reading that I discovered recently, and their debut album, Shoot the Fish, has been literally glued to my turntable for the last three weeks. It’s full of rocky guitars but the songs are brilliant. The singer is called Lance and he writes really good words, like in the song “Soapbox”:

  Yesterday I spent just lying in the sunshine

  Now my tan is fading and I don’t feel so good.

  Most of the songs are fast and loud, but they have two really good slow songs called “Chopped Heart” and “Have You Stopped Talking Yet?” The second of these is an example of how the singer writes really angry words but juxtaposes them with a ballad melody.

  None of their songs have got in the charts yet but they will soon. In fact, I predict that by this time next year they will be a household name!

  Ask for Shoot the Fish this Christmas. You won’t regret it!

  Clive Beresford, Form 4B

  Okay, I know. It has a distinct eau de GCSE coursework about it. But it was my first piece of “proper” writing. And that was the edited version. The first draft was much better, and it included the lyrics I actually wanted to quote (the bit in “Now That You Are Fashionable” that goes “You’re standing on a sinking ship … You might find someone who gives a shit but I doubt it”). But anyway, it gives you a basic flavour of how I was feeling at the time: not two weeks after arriving home with the record, I had been prompted to begin a glittering career in music journalism—albeit one that could be mainly followed through dodgy fanzines and various publications’ letters pages. I’ve tried many times to describe quite how I felt when I played that Magpies record for the first time (through headphones on my dad’s record player, as it happened), but to this day the very best I can offer you are two desperately underwhelming clichés:

  When I heard that pounding drum intro, followed by the jagged guitar and the first snatch of Lance’s searing vocal—everything felt right. Not quite a psychologically nourishing “all is right with the world” feeling, but certainly a feeling that everything was right with what I was hearing. The music did exactly what I wanted it to. The lyrics seemed every bit as cutting, cheeky and menacing as the titles suggested. They delivered on their promise. Unlike other bands of the time, it required no compromise on my part, no leap of faith, no “ignore the singing and it’s great” qualifiers (as I had to keep in mind when I first heard The Stone Roses the following year).

  The album gave me an unprecedented sense of belonging. Or at least, the potential of belonging. That may sound hopelessly daft and romantic, but bear in mind that at the age of fifteen—woefully shy, covered in spots and bollocks at sport—the concept of belonging to at least something other than the Tears for Fears fan club was fairly attractive. In this music I heard things I could identify with, and therefore the promise of something import ant: if I could find others in whom it also pushed the right buttons, I might just unearth a pocket of humans I could relate to. Those who were also bored to death of the utter nonsense on Top of the Pops; tired of listening to old Madness, Blondie, Police, Jam and XTC records in the absence of anything that could excite in a similar way; bewildered by simply making do with the latest Bon Jovi or INXS album because they at least happened to use guitars; too scared to try acid house, indifferent to heavy metal and harbouring a perpetual, passive and terribly English inner rage for the mundane, mainstream or familial. But too damn straitlaced to misbehave, to stand on street corners and take drugs or mug people, and also not rich or cool enough to holiday in the Mediterranean, go skiing or have a few practice rounds of golf with Daddy. I had to find this section of similar people to whom I might belong; I had to find them now.

  A set of circumstances that traditionally had driven similar disenfranchised youths to at the very least seek out the radio output of the late, great John Peel. Fuck it, I didn’t even have the sense to try that. Nor did it immediately occur to me that this world I sought was the very same world to which the Camden record shop belonged. But I found out. It took a while—six months, to be precise—but I got there. And to my credit, I succeeded because I bypassed everything else and went straight, in the spring of 1989, to a Thieving Magpies gig.

  I convinced my parents to let me go by pinching a piece of letterhead from the school office and typing a likely looking note from one of the lesser-known teachers stating that, on the strength of my magazine piece, the class trip would be to see the Thieving Magpies at the Hammersmith Odeon (it was actually Brixton Academy, but I thought that would set my mother’s antennae twitching). There was also an up-front request for fifteen pounds in cash for the ticket and travel, which I innocently took to school one day in a brown envelope. Looking back on it, all sorts of things could have gone wrong, but luckily my parents were swayed by the power of the school emblem on the letter and—apart from a little vague muttering from my dad over his gin and tonic that “surely the Science Museum would be more educational”—never thought to question it. So, rigid with excitement, I went.

  The first thing that threw me was how bloody massive Brixton Academy was. The “academy” bit brought to mind a sort of school hall, so I was amazed enough when I wandered up to the huge, domed building, but what really astonished me was the sheer number and variety of people who milled and queued outside. I really don’t know what I was expecting—a few lonely individuals who’d also seen the Smash Hits review, perhaps—but I certainly wasn’t prepared for an army of enormous, tattooed geezers wearing black vests, long shorts and dark boots; girls dressed similarly with dyed hair of every conceivable colour; some cheery-looking blokes with massive baggy jeans and fishing hats; a healthy yield of the kind of pale-faced, black-clad weirdo I had seen in the record shop (although there was nothing aimless or floatsome about most of them today in fact spirits were quite unfeasibly high); and a large collection of boys and girls who were a bit like older versions of me but with longer hair (mine was still an entirely nondescript short-back-and-sides job at this stage), groovy boots or trainers with coloured laces (I wore my school shoes) and far more interesting T-shirts (thankfully I had selected something neutral for the evening, and not another gem from my small but horrific selection of pop garments). It was this final, slightly more “normal” group of fans that intrigued me; could this be the long-sought crowd to which I wanted “in”?

  Hefty bottles of cider and cans of beer were guzzled and discarded before the whole throng streamed through the doors into the foyer. The gig hadn’t even started but the air inside was already pungent with sweat, beer, smoke and another ever-present aroma that I later identified as patchouli oil. Alternately out of my depth and oddly at home, I found myself swept along with the tide of people towards the doors of the cavernous auditorium—where I got my next surprise. The support act (a concept I’d vaguely heard of) that began as I entered consisted of only two people: a bloke fiddling with a sort of synthesizer/record-deck combo, and another chap screaming incom pre hensibles while thrashing away at a guitar. When they’d finished their opening “song” the singer acknowledged the ripple of applause in a decidedly well-brought-up voice: “Thanks! Good evening. We’re International Brian!”

  While International Brian screamed through their set I gaped at the huge hall with its incongruous white villa-style decoration, laughed at the clutch of people directly in front of the band who leapt, slammed into each other and flung their arms around (out of boredom, perhaps), bought myself a Coke (those were the days), marvelled at the collection of slogans emblazoned across people’s chests (“Dinosaur Jr,” “Info Freako,” “Unbearable,” “Heroin Satan Fuck”) and then at last prepared myself for the arrival of the mighty Magpies. I was to be disappointed. The quartet of blond-haired goons who flounced onstage to a modest cheer were in fact a second support band. What they did next beggared my already shaky belief. T
hey kicked into their first number at such a ferocious pace that I half expected them to levitate, spontaneously combust or keel over into the pit. Guitars and hair flew in all directions, drums were mercilessly tortured and what passed for vocals were entirely indistinguishable from everything else. The storm raged for ten minutes and then crashed to a halt as the band demolished all their equipment and left. I was ready to laugh, but my fellow audience members roared their appreciation. Was that good? I had so much to learn.

  As I made my way to the loo I became concerned that it might be the custom at this sort of concert for the performances to get shorter the further up the bill you went. Therefore, if International Brian’s set was half an hour and this last lot played for just under a quarter, how long would the Magpies play for? Seven, eight minutes? That was barely time for two songs. Oh well. At least I’d be home on time. Or perhaps all the groups went around again, for another go?

  “Beresford!”

  Eh?

  “Beresford! Clive!”

  Odd. Someone had the same name as me.

  “Clive! Over here!”

  I glanced in the direction of the voice. Sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the bar, to my amazement, was a face I recognised.

  “Potter! Sorry, Alan!”

  “Beresford, what the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I’m … well. You know.”

  Alan Potter was in the year above me at school, which officially meant we could have nothing to do with each other, but he’d always seemed a friendly enough chap; one of the lower-sixth formers less likely to punch you in the nuts as you carried your dinner tray. He wore black jeans with a blue and white stripy T-shirt, and was accompanied by a small purple-haired girl who stared silently at the carpet for the duration of the conversation.