The Alternative Hero

by Tim Thornton

  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:

  She has short, scruffy black hair, a thick, baggy black jumper that easily hides any tattoos, a brown skirt, and a blank, stoned expression. A lot of people look like that around here. Must be the vodka. But one look at her eyes and she is unmistakably Gloria. She might as well be wearing a name badge. She’s abandoned all her face jewellery, but you can see the little piercing holes from right across the room. Sam is initially not so certain—but after a minute or two Slava Pero glares at us, leaps up, frantically throws a few roubles at the waitress and darts out the door. We’ve not spoken a word since we walked in, and we’re wearing purposefully neutral clothing, but she must just know. Sam shakes his head and says, “That was blatantly Gloria.” And that is the last we see of her.

  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:

  She was the life and soul of the party, the first to arrive, the last to leave, with a stamina few could match. Something had to give eventually. No one removed Gloria but herself. “I’m tired,” her letter continued, “and feel older than I should. I long for far-off places, where no one knows me, where I can be myself, whoever that is. I had a dream, just the other day, of a distant city, with trees, and rain, and dramatic seas, and wilderness I can explore, unfettered by complication and all these silly, trivial things. Do you ever feel that way?” Her curiosity perhaps finally got the better of her. The choice of city is a bit dubious: a dirty, dark, cold, bleak and depressing sort of place, with an infeasibly healthy organised-crime ingredient—but maybe that is the whole point. Perhaps she has to sink right down in order to rise back up. And few can deny there is a typical ring of eccentricity to it: at the eastern end of the former Soviet Union, a mere thousand miles from Peking and Tokyo, and just five hundred miles from Seoul, but in what is still to all intents and purposes a European country, Gloria Feathers has finally found a place in which to unfetter herself.

  Cynics also trumpeted that Vladivostok was one of the cheapest places in the world to buy heroin—but who really knew the truth. By the end of 1996, the question, “Where the fuck is Gloria Feathers?”—rather like, “Whatever happened to the fat bloke who introduced Carter USM?” or even, “Is the singer from Placebo a boy or a girl?”—seemed to be a question only losers would ask.

  But the mystery remains. And there are still some losers out there who intend to solve it.

  SUGGESTED LISTENING: Nirvana, Incesúcide (DCG, 1992)

  Everything that’s happened

  to me from that moment

  onwards has been

  vaguely disappointing

  I press save, and shut the creaking lid of the almighty laptop. The dark grey laptop I bought in 1997, when I inherited a grand from that great-aunt who met her end in a nursing home in Leighton Buzzard; the laptop that had seemed so slick and ultramodern back then with its groovy navigation keys and Windows 95, but now looks as ancient as my mum’s typewriter when side by side with Polly’s spanking Mac on the kitchen table. I’ve ridden it hard, like a faithful old workhorse (does one ride a workhorse?)—I’ve had parts replaced, upgraded the memory and processor two or three times, dropped it down umpteen flights of steps, allowed friends to skin up on it, almost set fire to it (it has no power switch thanks to this particular incident), spilled tea on it, nearly lost it completely when Heathrow
decided to send it to Frankfurt while I was on the way to Copenhagen—but it still works. Granted, it takes two or three minutes to open up a Word document, and navigating to certain Web pages is often an excuse to pop out for another can of beer, but it’s been a reliable old thing and I’ll be quite sad to see it go. I say that as if I’ve got a spare eight hundred quid for a new one, which as you’ve probably figured is something of an untruth, but I imagine it’ll happen one day when I get a windfall or it finally kicks the bucket and goes to the big IT department in the sky.

  Like a shirking schoolboy, I’ve been studiously avoiding what I’m meant to be doing. It’s now eleven o’clock at night, but the frantic scribbling of likely-looking plot outlines, sample chapters and character explorations for the alleged novel I’m supposed to show Mr. Webster tomorrow afternoon has not yet commenced. You may wonder what the arse I’ve been doing for the last twenty-four hours. Funny, I’ve been thinking the same.

  You see, being unemployed is not simply a situation one puts up with for a while. It’s actually a full-time job in itself; a wholly absorbing occupation that commences the second you leave the building of your outgoing employer and doesn’t stop until you arrive at the door of your next, however many days, weeks, months or years that takes. There is never, in my fairly comprehensive experience, a period of grace when one cheerfully thinks, “Ooh, I’ll catch up on my reading/tidy my papers/go to a museum/learn to make curry/take advantage of the cheap afternoon cinema tickets,” etc. From minute number one there is a massive, ugly, concrete prehistoric mammoth of guilt and worry standing in the useful bit of whatever room you’re in, trumpeting loudly whenever you try to concentrate, butting you with its tusks if you attempt to do something normal like have sex or eat in a restaurant. A small number of unemployed people—chiefly dependent on their bank balance and/or mental state—manage to give the mammoth its marching orders at five thirty every day and at weekends, enabling them to coexist with partners and friends in a relatively civil and functional manner until nine o’clock the following morning; but alas, the majority continue to mope around like grumpy, directionless dickheads until they’re either too drunk to care or asleep. You can guess which group I belong to.

  That said, a few hours spent on the life of Gloria Feathers is hardly time wasted, and will be handy for my eventual masterpiece. Even Alan might give it a quick read. He went through a period of unnatural obsession with Gloria; oddly, it was long after what might be described as her “heyday,” by which point she looked extra emaciated and white as a Tudor. Alan, nearing the end of a degree at Manchester University, had heard the song “4st 7lb” from the Manics’ Holy Bible, decided Gloria was anorexic (he wasn’t entirely alone in this opinion) and made it his mission to “save” her, as recounted in this charming scrapbook entry:

  WEDNESDAY 5 OCTOBER [1994]

  S*M*A*S*H, Manc Union

  Went with Gavin Walker and Dave Smith cos everyone else was revising, turned out to be a fucking nightmare, never going near either of them again. They had loads of speed before then drank about five pints and just got really obnoxious, support band unknown think they were local, then GLORIA appeared. Can’t believe it, what’s she doing up here. Haven’t seen her in time and she’s even worse than before but she’s so delicate, beautiful, why didn’t I notice this years ago, she’s ill though, sure of it now, waited til band came on (don’t know what all the fuss is about really) then went up to try and say hello … she ignored me at first then I said “would you like a drink” and she said “yes, but don’t expect me to talk to you.” I got her a vodka and she smiled when I passed it to her, my God her eyes are so gorgeous, they look into your soul, I was just going to ask her something about her health when those PRICKS came up and asked if she wanted a cheeseburger. I kept telling them to piss off then Gloria moved away. Was so gutted bought myself three bottles of Mad Dog and had them all while walking back down Wilmslow Road then puked, phoned Clive

  It cuts off just like that. I remember my university years being peppered with these late-night phone calls from Alan, which became more drunken at both ends of the line as the years went by and our student debts soared. The discussions usually involved either a band he’d just seen and felt the need to gush or rant about (Miranda Sex Garden and Suede, respectively, seem to stand out in my memory), or a girl he’d just been wounded by. “Why won’t she go out with me, man?” he’d whimper, while I’d try to work out which one of the many he’d recently mentioned had spurned him and why I was suddenly considered an expert. I’m straining to remember the contents of that specific night’s discussion, shivering as I probably was in one of the long corridors of my hall of residence near Marylebone, hanging on the incoming-calls-only intercollegiate phone, wearing my boxer shorts and Power of Dreams “100 Ways to Kill a Love” T-shirt (I kept my rarest shirts for pretend-nonchalant use around the hall in the hope that some girl would notice). It was around this time I turned down the job at the NME (oh yes) so maybe we were talking about that, in between bouts of Alan’s ongoing Gloria-related misery and Mad Dog-fuelled blethering.

  I place Alan’s fragile scrapbook carefully on my desk and make the usual trip past Polly’s bedroom (she’s in there with someone, judging by the wrestling noises) towards the kitchen in general and the fridge in particular, where I find my habitual can of liquid refreshment. I hold the funny, cold metal tube in front of my eyes for a moment, pondering its ingredients and precisely how I’ll benefit from them. Looking at it logically, I’m not drunk, nor do I need to be, but there’s the general buzz of half a dozen units of alcohol inside me; if I increase that buzz, is it really likely do anything for the creativity which must occur at some point between now and 3 p.m. tomorrow? It’s doubtful. I’m thirsty but there’s water in the tap, tea or coffee in the cupboard, milk in the fridge, even some orange juice. I could have any or all of these things. Polly, in a fit of health consciousness, has even bought some echinacea tea, which I also could sample.

  I stop being so silly and crack open the beer.

  Returning to my room, I decide—inspiration now being somewhat thin on the ground—to take a look in my Important Box. This is a wooden chest I inherited from a university friend who’d been at boarding school, in which I have stored my most valuable and noteworthy items: my passport and birth certificate, my twenty-first-birthday cuff links, my signed copy of Casual Sex in the Cineplex by The Sultans of Ping FC, my university dissertation (some rambling bollocks about Arthur Miller), my letter from Stephen Fry (“I am delighted you so hugely enjoyed The Hippopotamus”), my Letter of the Week in Melody Maker (“You are an important and usually excellent newspaper; STOP abusing your position!”), other assorted paraphernalia and some of the more superior copies of Vorsprung Durch Peanut and its Britpop-era successor, Definitely Not. Although I’m supposed to be writing about anything but music, I can’t resist a quick leaf through these. The first issue that reaches my hand is from autumn 1991, by which time the Peanut had evolved from a bedroom concern to a bedroom concern with slightly faultier equipment (I’d managed to buy one of my ex-school’s old photocopiers at a knockdown price). It primarily consists of a report on the “Great Summer Indiethon”—an insane, forty-two-band slog designed to take in various Reading Festival warm-up gigs, in-store performances, the festival itself and, coincidentally, the secret Thieving Magpies appearance before which Alan and I thrashed those two roadies of theirs at pool in the pub next door to the venue. Throughout, we’re referred to by our fanzine nicknames, Clive Pop and Anal Alan; there’s a cast of other occasionals (including Alan’s university chums Steve the Swede and Emily from East Anglia), loads of banter, in-joking and far less cider than one might imagine. Reading Thursday of that year was my eighteenth birthday, in fact.

  A happy memory.

  Now, I’m not normally the kind of bloke who mopes around wondering where it all went turnip-shaped, but there’s an irony to all of this that’s making me wince. Unless the rose-tinted specs are messing w
ith me, it goes something like this—eighteen: contented, not a lot to worry about except how much indie the human body can physically absorb, indulging in cheeky snogs and fumbles with whichever female permits it, my weakness for alcohol still in its infancy, trouncing two hardy, dreadlocked Thieving Magpie roadies at pool. Fast-forward to thirty-three: frustrated, no job, next-to-zero money, recovering from a six-year relationship which probably lasted five years too long, my weakness for alcohol well into its senility, being scolded by two hardy, shorn-headed, former Thieving Magpie roadies for writing foolish, bunny-boiling letters to an ex-alternative superstar. I wouldn’t say things were improving with age, would you?