The Alternative Hero

by Tim Thornton

  That afternoon, band, entourage and friends gathered at Bob Grant’s house in Cricklewood for a small celebration in his back garden. But it was an odd sort of day for a party. The world was reeling from reports that hundreds, if not thousands, of demonstrators had been killed in and around Tiananmen Square, Peking, at the hands of the Chinese army. Aside from sheer horror at the extent of the bloodshed, the political implications of the news hit the Magpies’ camp pretty hard; being a liberal, nouveau-hippy sort of bunch, there were certainly a few doom-and-gloom merchants giving the gathering an anxious edge. “Gloria was pretty frantic,” Webster recounted in a 1992 interview. “She’d been to some acid-house parties that year which the police had shut down in a rather heavy-handed way, so she was wandering around saying, ‘This is now the yardstick for the planet. They’ll get away with anything after this.’ I thought the connection was a bit tenuous at the time—I guess now with the whole Criminal Justice Bill thing you can sort of see what she was worried about. Anyway, she and a few others just sat in Bob’s lounge, smoking and watching the footage of the massacre, then rewinding it and watching it again. I told them to stop it and try to enjoy themselves. It got pretty weird.”

  Unfortunately, things were about to get a whole lot weirder. Around seven, once the chart rundown had finished, Grant attempted to enliven slightly damp spirits by loudly playing the EP that had brought them all there in the first place. The opening track pumped out, eliciting the usual head noddings, critical comments (“I still reckon that backing vocal could’ve been louder”) and eye rollings that emerge when a song is played in the company of the band that created it. Then it started to rain. The second track, a thrashy workout entitled “The Bitch Is Still Around,” was almost completely ignored as everyone relocated to the living room, where Feathers and her cronies were still studying the Tiananmen video, endlessly conspiracy theorising. By the time former lead track “Something About Him” kicked in, the EP had become nothing more than mildly irritating background noise. A minute and a half later, things were substantially different.

  “We hadn’t heard that song in over a month,” drummer Craig Spalding told the NME, “it being track three now. For some reason we’d even stopped playing it live. I’d almost forgotten what it sounded like. Then the middle eight kicked in and everyone in the room just died.”

  The lyrics of “Something About Him” were basically a bitter rant about Webster’s ex-girlfriend’s current boyfriend: an individual whose sole redeeming feature, if the song was to be believed, was his bank balance. The middle eight in question—and the entire outro, for that matter—contained merely one phrase, repeated over and over, in a tone that boiled with tongue-in-cheek rage at the dullness of the man’s job, clothes, hair and personality: “Death to the square.”

  “Gloria instantly burst into tears,” continued Spalding. “There she was, repeatedly watching this bloody massacre on the telly, and then her best mate starts singing ‘Death to the square’ over and over, right in her earhole. Plus the thought of what might have been, of course.”

  It didn’t take long for the “what might have been” to sink in. The debacle that the Magpies had escaped would have done inestimable damage to their budding career. The original EP, with “Something About Him” as the lead track, would have charted on the same day; radios around the country would have reverberated with the sound of this young alternative upstart from Reading yelling “Death to the square” amid the aftermath of one of the worst peacetime massacres in modern history, which had taken place in—of all the ludicrous coincidences—a square; a Top of the Pops appearance (which had already been scheduled to air on the coming Thursday) would have beheld the macabre spectacle of Webster stomping around the stage in his customary manner, looping the unfortunate statement like some crazed despot or sick lunatic. Cue: record dropping without trace from the chart, ruin of the band’s mainstream profile, record-company unease. At the very least, it would all have been acutely embarrassing.

  But it may not have got even that far, as Webster himself acknowledged the following year. “That shit in China had been brewing for a month or so. No one knew it was going to end like that, but towards the end of May if you’d heard me singing that line I reckon you’d have made the connection. It’d be like I was egging them on. The record would’ve probably been withdrawn. The whole thing would have been a god-awful, expensive mess.” As it turned out, the controversy-free EP managed to climb even further, to number fifteen, the following Sunday; again, a very respectable feat in a chart topped by Jason Donovan and with a Cliff Richard record in the top five.

  In spite of palpable relief at the offending phrase being comfortably buried at track three, shock and the general feeling of oddness ensured that Bob Grant’s party never became the swinging affair he had perhaps envisaged. What, though, of Feathers herself?

  “Once she’d calmed down, she totally downplayed it,” Webster commented in a 1995 Q interview. “As usual. I remember her saying ‘I never thought much of that song,’ or something. She still just called it an ‘inkling.’ But God knows what she was thinking privately. I do remember that was the start of everything going a bit wrong.”

  When the saga eventually found its way into the music press-bearing in mind that Feathers’ roots, omnipresence and outspoken behaviour had found her a fair amount of enemies—a few figures in the industry tried to stir up trouble, spreading rumours of her apparent clairvoyance, nicknaming her “the white witch” (which fit rather too neatly with her peroxide blonde dreadlocks) or “Webster’s witch.” While Feathers was perfectly capable of dealing with any snide comment herself (she famously punched Melody Maker journalist Kenny Mann at a Northside gig in 1991), the band decided to keep any further “inklings” of hers private; although Webster let it slip to Q that there had subsequently been “three or four at least.”

  Whilst the Thieving Magpies were the sole recipient of these rather unusual pieces of advice, they were by no means the only band to whom Feathers spread her unique brand of love. A child of the trust fund, she was fortunate enough to have few concerns other than which gig she’d be going to next, what she would wear, what she would drink, and sometimes what drugs she would take. She was loudly opinionated about her music but cast her net fairly widely: she was as happy at a Levitation gig as she was at a Stereo MCs show, as content to be stage-diving in front of Thousand Yard Stare as tripping her head off to The Orb. Success, too, was no measure—you’d just as easily spy her at a Wembley Arena backstage party as you might watching an unsigned troupe of spotty teens at the Red Eye on Copenhagen Street. No one, however, meant as much to her as the Thieving Magpies: a band for whom she had quite literally laid her life on the line. As the nineties progressed and the band’s popularity rose to giddy heights, Feathers’ protective instinct began to take on a more physical shade.

  If 1990’s Lovely Youth confirmed Webster’s status as a British alternative pop hero—a caustic but approachable elder-brother type with a twinkle in his eye—the release of 1992’s globe-straddling Bruise Unit converted him into something altogether more celestial. Things that fans did in order to be near him became more outlandish, the desire to capture his undivided attention more intense. At Denmark’s Roskilde Festival in 1992, this characteristic of Webster’s success reached an unwelcome zenith. He had mooched off by himself and was happily watching Danish band Innocent Blood in one of the smaller tents when a girl next to him struck up a conversation. All was fine until Webster tried to leave for another stage where The Wonder Stuff were scheduled to play, only to discover the girl had somehow managed to manacle their ankles together with a pair of handcuffs.

  “It was a variation on what had happened to Mike [Patton, of Faith No More] the previous year,” recalled Craig Spalding, “though the fact she’d chosen the ankles made him much more vulnerable. She suddenly turned into this total nutter, yanking Lance’s leg and making him trip over, then forcing herself on him. She was a fucking big girl as well. But Glo
ria came from out of nowhere—she grabbed the girl and just went mental, had her up against this massive tent pole, sent someone off to get the police and kept her right there until they arrived.”

  Despite Feathers’ impressive emergency response, the incident caused Webster considerable distress and he has never discussed it in public. It was also the last time he wandered about on his own at such an event. Sadly, it was not the final occasion on which he was subject to obsessive behaviour; in fact, worse was to come.

  In the summer of 1993 the Magpies staged their own large-scale event at Langley Park, near Slough. For supporting attractions they filled the early evening with a few ascendant bands of the moment: The Frank and Walters, Terrorvision and a promising outfit from London named Elastica, while the afternoon had been reserved for the unsigned winners of a demo scramble. During a break from the mammoth Bruise Unit tour the Magpies themselves sat down in Bob Grant’s office and listened to some four hundred demo tapes, selecting a list of three lucky winners: a funk-metal troupe from Kensington by the name of Fabric Flesh, a gloomy quartet from Middlesbrough known as They Say He Jumped and a solo artist from Luton who identified herself simply as Lesley. As anyone who remembers the day will attest, the first two acts were deeply unmemorable. The third was the precise opposite—but it had nothing to do with the music.

  Although her demo contained passable angst-driven pop-rock (not a million miles from the noise Alanis Morissette began to peddle a year or so later), Lesley surprised the Magpies’ sound crew by showing up with just her acoustic guitar and a videotape. When quizzed as to the whereabouts of her backing musicians, she embarked on a lengthy but plausible tale of woe: her bass player had attempted to smuggle incriminating quantities of cannabis on the way back from a short European tour, and the band had been stopped at Hook of Holland, where all the gear, both musical and narcotic, had been impounded, and what a nightmare it all was, and thank God she came back separately or she’d have missed this amazing opportunity, and “I promise to still put on a brilliant show,” and “Can your lighting guy project these visuals during my set,” blah blah. The crew thus persuaded, Lesley strolled onto the large stage at half past four and, in front of some twenty thousand people, began to play.

  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 dr
agged 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.