The Alternative Hero

by Tim Thornton

  The same female Australasian vet who occasionally jabbed a needle into my ex-cat emerges from the consulting room, her face lighting up with recognition.

  “Ah, yes! Mr. Beresford!”

  I hold up my hand in reluctant acknowledgement. “That’s me.”

  “So good of you. What time can you start?”

  “Er … well, whenever, really.”

  “Do you drive?”

  “Do I drive?”

  “The animals need to be picked up from the weekend surgery at nine.”

  “Ah. Yes. Where’s the weekend surgery?”

  “Stevenage. The van will be in Stanmore, though, where the weekend driver lives. Is it possible for you to collect it tomorrow evening? So good of you!”

  “Er, well, yeah, I guess so …”

  “Jackie will give you the address, if you could bring the animals back here. They need to be fed, and then the other vet arrives around eleven. After that it’s just managing the till and waiting room until we close.”

  “Ah.”

  “Whatever you can manage, really. The whole day would be great.”

  My dad has an expression that always used to irritate me as a child: “How do I get into these things?” But in recent years I’ve come to recognise its accuracy and its myriad uses. Hell’s bells. All this had bloody better be worth it.

  Jackie, the blondy-grey-haired lady who suddenly has a name, gives me the address of the van place (“It’s just a little walk from Stanmore tube—about twenty minutes or so”), then the weekend surgery place (“It’s not really Stevenage—it’s out the other side of the town, village called Walkern, round the back of the trading estate near a water mill—you can’t miss it”) and briefly apprises me of the nature of my cargo (“Not too many this weekend: five cats, a guinea pig and a ferret—only three dogs, but then one of them is Nigel the boxer, and he can get a little frisky”). Just on my way out, my head spinning with the intricacies of a world hitherto as remote to me as that of tap dancing, I stop and ask what is almost certainly a rather peculiar question.

  “You haven’t, um … the vet, she … erm … has she had to put any animals down today?”

  Jackie frowns.

  “Yes. She has, I’m afraid. Why?”

  “Oh, no reason,” I smile unconvincingly, and stumble out.

  I hurry home, trying my damnedest to recall how long Webster was in there. Fifteen, twenty minutes? Maximum. Is that long enough?

  Polly is sitting at the kitchen table when I stumble through the door, her black mop of hair all over the place, still wearing her mangy dressing gown and those rank, oversized animal slippers from way back, splattered with a few years’ worth of toothpaste drips. She’s smoking, sipping red wine, calmly dipping cream crackers into a tub of margarine while reading the Saturday Telegraph. It’s a fairly typical scene.

  “How long d’you reckon it takes to put a pet down?” I ask, without preamble.

  “Put a pet down?”

  “Yes. You know. Kill it. Put it to sleep. Out of its misery, via lethal injection.”

  “How long?”

  “Yes!” I repeat irritably, extracting a can of beer from the fridge and cracking it open.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “What does that matter? D’you reckon ten minutes, fifteen?”

  Polly sits back and thinks.

  “We had an Alsatian that once suddenly became demented while Dad was on the toilet,” she begins. “It wouldn’t let him out of the bathroom. Each time he tried to escape it would hurl itself at the door and attack whatever part of him was protruding. Almost bit one of his fingers off. He had to stay there until Mum came home a few hours later. Then it tried to attack her. Eventually she managed to whack it over the head with a paving stone.”

  “Did she kill it?”

  “No, just stunned it. They called the vet but the vet was busy, so they got the farmer from over the way to come with his shotgun. The dog woke up before the farmer got there, so Mum tried to hit it again. Problem was she missed and hit Dad’s foot. Broke his ankle.”

  “So what happened in the end?”

  “It chased Mum into the garden, so she jumped in the swimming pool. It was normally the only place the dog wouldn’t go. But the fucking dog just leaped in and swam after her. Finally the farmer appeared and shot the dog.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah.” Polly sighs and takes a large swig of wine. “Loads of blood, though. We had to drain the pool.”

  Polly’s examples are always as entertaining as they are thoroughly useless.

  “So, you’ve no idea, then.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  I take the beer to my bedroom, stick on a CD (The Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic—always good for a rainy evening when you’ve just come back from the vet), pull off my soaking jeans, then collapse onto the bed. So. Day one of my fantastically well-thought-out campaign, and what have I achieved? Well, aside from a lot of waiting, scaring a granny, confusing a traffic warden, prancing about in the rain and offering my voluntary services for the day—not an awful lot. But unless he really was taking his cat to unwittingly meet its maker (which I’ve decided probably wasn’t the case—I mean, fifteen minutes would be pretty tight for a spot of pet euthanasia, even in today’s money; plus he looked wet but hardly heartbroken on the way back to his car), the odds are that I’m actually going to have some sort of exchange with the man on Monday.

  And how do we feel about that?

  I jump up and turf Harriet Wheeler’s pretty meanderings off the CD player, sift through the jewel cases that litter my so-called desk, and locate a particularly bashed-up one with that familiar cover: a schoolboy, in dirty blazer, shorts and cap, standing on a hill and holding a helium balloon, on which the legend “Lovely Youth” is scrawled.

  Of course, this isn’t the first copy of the Thieving Magpies’ flawless second album I’ve owned. I think I’ve owned three in total: the first, a cassette, as a lot of my albums were back then, long since lost. Then I bought it on vinyl in about 1993, partly so my DJ friend Archie Landless could play tracks from it at the indie disco over which he presided at our university. The bastard ran off with it in the end, along with several other gems: my vinyl copies of Complete Madness, The Wonder Stuff’s Never Loved Elvis, The Police’s Regatta de Blanc, Jellyfish’s Spilt Milk (an absolute classic—which also holds my personal accolade of having the best Side One ever), my limited-edition picture disc of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (God damn it! Why did I lend him that?) and finally—this one hurts—my never-to-be-found-again copy of the very first Now That’s What I Call Music compilation album (original pig cartoon, “Victims” by Culture Club, “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, two Kajagoogoo songs and Phil Collins wearing a flat cap on the front). But losing Lovely Youth is the real killer. I had to make do with a taped copy of Alan’s pristine vinyl version until 1996, when just about every bargain bin in the country contained a few Thieving Magpies albums. After meticulously comparing prices I eventually purchased my current copy for three quid, but it’s simply not as good on CD. Aside from the usual bollocks about the warmth of the vinyl sound, the booklet, inexplicably, doesn’t contain half the photos the inner record sleeve or cassette inlay did, and Lance’s individual song notes have been cruelly omitted. This feature of the Magpies’ records became as much a part of the acquiring experience as hearing the music itself, and gave the listener a pretty good insight into what went on in the singer’s head. Whenever I glance at Alan’s copy of Lovely Youth I go straight to the passage that accompanies “Pit Pony”: “Someone once asked me what I thought of the fashion industry. This is my response—although I still think this is too polite.” And I love the annotation for Shoot the Fish’s “Have You Stopped Talking Yet?”: “Written in the loo during an argument’s cooling-off period. The answer is no, by the way.” While this tradition was clearly deemed too silly for the mainstream-bus
ting earnestness of Bruise Unit, it was reinstated for the final album, The Social Trap, which bristled with such back-on-form attacks as: “This one’s dedicated to a clutch of ex-friends for whom cocaine has replaced personality. I’d rather gouge my eyes out with this pen than be at a party with you again. Good night and fuck off” (“A Good Time Was Had by None”) and “Ooh, look at me, I’m so dark and damaged” (“Keep It Out of My Face”).

  Anyway, I digress. Although Bruise Unit unarguably marked the point at which the diverse compound of the band boiled down nicely, enabling them to make a unified, uncomplicated but accomplished album that would prove their career zenith, it’s Lovely Youth that I need to hear right now. If all successful bands experience Neil Tennant’s much-referenced “imperial phase,” where everything they touch turns to platinum, this must be reached via a “territorial phase,” during which the group’s best work is normally produced and they are in possession of a factor that can be (sadly) best described as “cool”: referenced by all the right journalists, played by all the right DJs, name-checked by all the right colleagues, remixed by all the right producers. This period’s length varies enormously from act to act: usually it lasts for just one album, often their debut (Oasis, The Killers, The Strokes, The Stone Roses), sometimes their second or third effort (Blur, Manic Street Preachers); occasionally a band manages to stretch it slightly longer (Radiohead, The White Stripes). In a few isolated cases this era actually never finishes (The Smiths), or is sometimes so fleeting in length it’s as though it hasn’t actually occurred at all (Coldplay, Snow Patrol). For the Thieving Magpies, Lovely Youth encapsulates this period. As snotty as their debut, containing some of their loudest, punkiest efforts (“Tube Screamer,” “Everyone Behaves Like a Cunt So Why Can’t I”), it also finds them stretching their sonic palette, experimenting with samples and sequencers (“War on the Floor,” “Camp David”), and is home to one of the most robust pop compositions of their career (“Look Who’s Laughing”). But more important, it’s the freshness of the record that strikes you; the excitement of writing and recording such an article seeps unstoppably through the speakers until there’s no doubt that you’re listening to something genuinely rare and thrilling. Fifteen months after hearing their debut, during which time I had changed more than I can possibly describe, hearing the adrenaline rush of opening track “Rancid/Putrid” escape from my cassette deck was … well, certainly more exciting than losing my virginity, which I’d been permanently parted from the previous month.

  And what sort of man was Lance Webster back then? Well, the geezer Alan and myself nervously chatted to in Harlow would have been basking in the knowledge that, two months after its release, Lovely Youth had sold its one-hundred-thousandth British copy, prompting the incongruous appearance of a gold disc in his Kentish Town flat. In the post-Britpop music business this statistic would be simply described as “a good start,” but back in 1990 their label BFM were more than happy with the Magpies’ progress. Previously average sales—it had charted high but quickly fallen, as most alternative albums tended to do—had been inflated by the release of the aforementioned “Look Who’s Laughing” as a single, which by early March had leapfrogged The Stone Roses, Primal Scream, Inspiral Carpets and even Bros to insert itself at a confident number nine, sharing the top ten with the likes of Michael Bolton, New Kids on the Block and Jive Bunny (the only alternative act who charted higher was Depeche Mode). A sellout European tour was about to commence—the band retaining their integrity by eschewing an economically sensible offer to play Wembley Arena in favour of an equivalent three nights at Brixton Academy, and even America was pricking up its ears, as the album floated around the high sixties of the Billboard chart thanks to heavy rotation on college and alternative radio.

  Lance Webster, it could therefore be safely assumed, was feeling pretty pleased with himself. At an age when most of his school contemporaries were just finishing university and embarking on exciting careers in law and accountancy, Webster was Out There, playing to packed clubs and theatres in Britain, Europe and America, straddling the covers of Sounds and Melody Maker on an almost monthly basis; his waistcoat and shorts, long brown hair and—when slightly more pretentious occasion called for it—round glasses becoming as much an outfit du jour for the fans as the baggy flares, flowery shirt and fishing hat of the Madchester set. He could walk into any indie club in the country with a test pressing of a new song; the DJ would greet him like an old friend and spin the disc instantly, always resulting in frenzied grooving and bouncing from the kids. But although he was the champion of the T-shirted masses, who felt relatively comfortable (as we did) wandering up to him at a gig and saying hello, Webster’s slightly more intellectual slant, way with words and lyrical references to books, films and art undeniably put him far apart from the melee, and well removed from the aesthetic concerns of, say, a member of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Simply put, he was not one of us—nor did we want him to be. Admired and in many cases counted as a friend by a wide cross section of alternative luminaries—Robert Smith, Clint Mansell, Wayne Hussey, Jim and William Reid, Bill Drummond, Steve Mack, Billy Bragg, Jim Bob, Mark Arm, Bobby Gillespie, Tanya Donnelly, Tim Smith, Billy Duffy, even Nick Cave and Michael Stipe—Lance, with his ready wit and low tolerance of bullshit, was one of the coolest new kids on the indie block. For a while this meant he could get away with virtually anything and still come out looking like a hero. I don’t mean in the traditional zones of “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll”—in fact, he mostly seemed to frown on all this as “old hat,” although there never seemed to be any shortage of stunning girls around him—but more in the way he addressed his constituents. Mostly this behaviour revealed a graduate of the Johnny Rotten school of insults, but at times Webster seemed to address them as a PE teacher would some recalcitrant kids, or like they were particularly dumb sheep in a field. Stranger still, no one complained. “We’re gonna play a cover of ‘Centrefold’ by the J. Geils Band,” he announced at one show. “Anyone got a problem with that?” Of course, some old-skool-punk dissenters down the front roared their disapproval, to which Webster barked, “Right, you can fuck off, the exits are clearly marked;” and then actually waited for the culprits to leave the pit before the band launched into the song. In June of 1990, the Magpies were given an evening slot on the second (now “Other”) stage at Glastonbury A minute or two before their published stage time, Webster wandered onstage wearing dark glasses and a bowler hat, and began to speak in a fake posh accent. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to watch the Reading-based rock band commonly known as Thieving Magpies. Before you do, you are legally required to repeat the Glastonbury Second Stage Oath.” General looks of amused confusion from the audience, some of whom hadn’t yet realised who this figure was. “Repeat after me: I do solemnly declare [the crowd repeated] … that the second stage at Glastonbury … has the shittiest sound in the world … most of it disappearing … across the plain … and into the valley behind … or drowned out by the rain … which will almost certainly begin … halfway through the set … but I promise … to enjoy myself anyway … and not shout out for any songs … because the band choose the fucking set [a particular bugbear of Webster’s] … and we are merely … lowly audience members … who aren’t fit to lick … the grease off Craig Spalding’s kick-drum pedal.” And with that, he introduced his own band. The assembled masses, having obediently chanted every word, rewarded him with a louder ovation than ever.

  And oh, we lapped it up. We would have done anything the man asked us to. For if Webster was satisfied with his own success, it meant even more to the likes of Alan and me, treading water as we were in a drab pond filled with A-levels, applications for universities we had little interest in going to and girls who had little interest in going anywhere near us; all this to a sound track (unless we were controlling the tape deck) of mindless Stock/Aitken/Waterman pop and punchable Euro-dance acts such as Black Box and Snap. But the Thieving Magpies, and a batch of similarly heroic groups, re
presented our triumph, our foothold, our flag on the world’s musical map. We were as evangelical as a bunch of canvassing Scientologists, proudly sporting our various bits of merchandise, quickly indoctrinating anyone who showed even the vaguest interest by carting them off to a pub, feeding them a few pints of cider and black, playing them a compilation tape and giving them a copy of the fanzine (yeah, I’m going to have to fill you in on that one shortly). Whenever the Magpies ascended the charts or appeared on television or mainstream radio, we genuinely saw it as our achievement.

  But on a personal level, we knew next to nothing of Webster. He’d seemed pleasant enough when we spoke to him, but privately, who had any idea? He’d once memorably described himself as an “arrogant, overbearing and selfish tosser”—which at the very least seemed likely to be an exaggeration—but any reports reaching us suggested a rounded character whose only crime was an occasional inability to hold his drink. He was certainly an expert in self-promotion, developing Morrissey-like notoriety for giving incredibly good interviews, often for publications that had little interest in his music but that were simply after a few choice bon mots and a spark of controversy. I often forget, when rereading these, how insanely young he was at the time; that he was so unapologetically self-assured still strikes me as bloody impressive, especially remembering what a clueless little fart I myself was at the age of twenty-three.

  But was he really happy? An odd thought, perhaps, but one I feel the need to address on the eve of meeting him again, some seventeen years later, his life so profoundly different. And yes, I know I’m only going to be serving him in a vet’s surgery, but still. Imagine I’m not. Imagine I’m actually going to be sitting down, tape recorder and all, for a proper interview. What would I ask him? Where would I start? Having scaled such heights, he’s now living in a small flat in a boring north-London suburb, and no one knows who the fuck he is. Having sold a good seven or eight million records over the course of his career, he’s now arguing with traffic wardens about eighty quid. Am I being hopelessly naïve, or is he likely to be really, seriously pissed off about this state of affairs? And, as Noel Gallagher once charmlessly scribbled, where—why—how—did it all go so fucking wrong?