The Alternative Hero

by Tim Thornton

  And yet, they tell me to grow up.

  All right, so I’ve had a few drinks and Thursday is rapidly turning into Friday, but I’m deathly serious: how many problems, arguments, insecurities, guilt complexes and overdrafts are a direct result of this “growing up”? The demon adulthood, and what’s expected of you, or what you expect of it?

  “Grow up,” they say. My ex-girlfriend said it. Alan says it. My mum says it. My sister once said it (then my five-year-old nephew repeated it all afternoon). My bank manager says it, albeit in a style owing slightly more to interest rates and loan top-up policies than models of emotional development. Geoffrey “Lance” Webster says it; for what was the sending round of his pair of amplifier-lugging stooges, if not a big, unwashed crustie fist with the words “GROW UP” tattooed in that hideous, faded greeny-blue colour? And now even fucking Polly—Polly the neurotic, nymphomaniac disaster, who somehow manages to hold down a legal job in between crazed nights of mainlining red wine, tying pizza-delivery men to her bed and getting taxis from London to Bristol, Polly who can’t even sit still through a film at the cinema without nipping out for a fag and a gin and tonic—she has decided to start saying it. Why? Why are all these people trying to convince me that life would somehow improve if I started behaving like a textbook version of a thirty-three-year-old?

  For my small amount of money anyway, most people on this paltry little island are actually trying to be younger, at least cosmetically speaking. Or feel younger. They want the body, face, libido and spontaneous spirit of a twenty-year-old, welded seamlessly onto the carcass of an individual with a forty-year-old’s level of experience, discipline and knowledge of the property market. I spend a substantial amount of my time trying to squeeze forth the tiniest drop of enthusiasm for any of that stuff. But in truth, I’d rather drink dishwater than glance in an estate agent’s window; would sooner chat to a dead pigeon than with someone who’s about to renovate their loft.

  I find it fascinating, this differing view of “growing up.” For me, it was nothing more than the process of becoming physically larger, less interested in getting extra track for my Scalextric and more interested in what lay behind women’s clothing. Maybe I’m deeply lacking something, but that was pretty much it; apart from being able to buy certain items and go to certain places without pretending to be Billy Flushing’s elder brother. From then on, the improvements of aging ceased. My first eighteen years were spent looking forward to the age of eighteen, while—if I call upon the sort of brutal honesty only five cans of lager can summon—the last fifteen have basically consisted of looking back.

  Blimey.

  I sit unhappily in my chair, staring through my bedroom window at the funny little yardy bit we never use (“Why don’t you try growing veg out there, man?” Alan once asked), nagging on my beverage, wondering if there was ever a period around the turn of my twenties (the “happy gap”?) when I was satisfied with the status quo, and if so, how long did it last? Or was it more like some deranged Venn diagram of life, the middle loop representing a period when I was looking both back and forth with equal levels of dissatisfaction?

  Being in the fortunate possession of what amounts to a diary covering the days following my arrival in adultland, I leaf through the Peanut—looking so impossibly dated now with its thin, typed white pages, slightly thicker blue paper serving as a cover, and near pitch-black photographs (Jane Stokes from Beef, “surely the most underrated and undervalued indie group to currently grace the circuit,” is virtually unrecognisable as that season’s cover star)—to see if there are any clues. There’s indeed much evidence of a fun and carefree time: “The Peanut team do their best to ruck among the retail racks like it’s a real gig, but Clive Pop knocks over a huge stack of Blue Aeroplanes CDs;” “Clive Pop is back at his Peanut ‘stall’ trying to flog last season’s fanzine as people leave the club—the only one he sells is to a passing elderly Indian chap who walks off studying the Scorpio Rising feature intently;” “The official Vorsprung Durch Peanut Clive Pop eighteenth-birthday celebration takes place on the way back from Camden Palace at four in the morning outside 7-Eleven in Hendon, with packets of Jelly Babies and (Clive Pop’s favourite) pork scratchings, plus various cans of soft drink which the assembled ‘crack’ open, champagne-style. Anal Alan has his second minisnog of the day (different girl, obviously … shhh!)”—and so on. My eyes skim past antics we’d never get away with, nor even attempt, these days: a penniless Steve the Swede had bought a dodgy Reading wristband which came off in the Five Thirty ruck on the second night, so he snuck into the arena at daybreak, while the toilets were open for the campers, hid under a catering lorry for the next four hours with only a bottle of Mendip Magic and a bacon sarnie for company, finally emerging when the gates opened properly at noon. What strikes me most, though, is how little we actually drank. Sure, we had a few, but it was more a case of “let’s pass this bottle of apple schnapps round, get a bit tiddly, dance our arses off to De La Soul and then sober up,” rather than the emphasis on pint after pint of lager that took over by about 1994, when we had access to comparatively large reserves of borrowed cash. This change in approach also had a big effect on the end of our festival day—again, from twenty-one onwards I would ingest as much beer as anatomically possible and pass out by one o’clock at the latest (even if drugs were involved), whereas in the old days we sat around the campfire, ours or anyone else’s, singing, talking bollocks, perhaps going for strolls around the moonlit arena, not considering hitting the sack until either the smoke became too much for our eyes or we’d finally tired of endlessly debating which of the two Ned’s Atomic Dustbin bassists was better.

  But I clutch on to my can of beer and refuse to entertain the thought that this malaise is entirely down to booze. No—it must be something else.

  It doesn’t take me long to find it. Cast your eye over the snippet below—and bear in mind that this is August 1991 we’re talking about.

  4:15 p.m. [Friday] Another minidebate over the Peanut team’s next move. Clive Pop is off to meet and greet The Family Cat, but Anal Alan and Steve the Swede decide to see Nirvana on the main stage (“They’re meant to be pretty good, man”). Clive Pop sticks around for a few minutes, the first song is energetic but pretty metallist (plus they’ve got some really irritating bloke with a Mohican doing a Bez) so he sticks to plan A and heads for the signing tent.

  4:25 p.m. It’s a big queue for the Cat! They’re not playing until Sunday, but the fans are already out in force. Good for them.

  4:30 p.m. Still queuing for the Cat. A song Clive Pop faintly recognises drifts over from the main stage—must have heard it in a club. Not bad. Never mind, we’ll soon hear all about it from Anal Alan.

  4:40 p.m. Swizz! Who should walk past Clive Pop but all five members of The Family Cat! The cheeky so-and-sos have only just arrived!

  4:50 p.m. Clive Pop reaches the front of the queue, his copy of the Peanut is cheerily autographed by the band. “Nice of you to turn up,” Clive laughs. “Sorry,” they all chorus. “Watching Nirvana,” admits the singer, shaking his head. “Jaw-dropping.”

  4:55 p.m. The Peanut team reconvene by the Pennine Pizza bus. For a minute or two it looks like Anal Alan and Steve the Swede have just been told a relative has died, they look so shocked. After a while Steve manages to blurt “that was the greatest of my life”—but this is his standard post-gig proclamation (he even said it recently about a Cud show), so there’s no need for Clive Pop to worry.

  Except, of course, there was.

  For the rest of the bloody day, as I now recall, I heard nothing other than how unbelievably brilliant Nirvana had been, sprinkled with general mirth that I had missed them in favour of “The Family Shat,” as Alan and Steve immediately christened them. My usual comeback to such garbage (which I very successfully employed when Alan made similar noises about Underneath What and The Atom Seed) was to calmly state that we’d see how big they were in six months’ time. But on this occasion, fate was stacked so he
avily against me that I get a toothache just thinking about it. I don’t need to tell you (but I’m going to anyway) that by the time those six months were up, not only were Nirvana the biggest alternative-rock band in the world, but they’d also unwittingly set the plan for nineties popular culture firmly in stone. I had missed what is widely regarded, at least in Britain, as the pivotal moment—by about two hundred metres. Of course, I saw Nirvana headlining the following year, as everyone and his dog did, but by then it was far too late.

  Call me melodramatic but this recollection hits me square in the emotional goolies. I grab Alan’s scrapbook again to cross-reference. There it is, plain as day, in Alan’s usual blend of hyperbole and questionable grammar:

  Thank fuck I ignored Clive going to get signatures from the fucking family shat cos instead I saw NIRVANA, okay they started a bit metallist but by song 4 they were bloody revalation. Amazing then I remembered it was them that do the q. good “gramma take me home” one we dance to at that shitty club on Oxford Street but man, they made everyone else look shit. Singer dived into kit. Could be big. Poor old Clive we took the piss a bit he spent the rest of his birthday money getting drunk, had to wake him up for the poppies.

  Yeah, poor old Clive. Now I think about it, I do have a faint sense of the rest of the weekend feeling entirely different, like I’d become another person.

  My God.

  Panicking slightly (God knows why, it’s sixteen years too late to do anything about it), I quickly nip to the kitchen for another beer, pick up my phone and speed-dial number three.

  “Yeah?”

  “Alan, it’s Clive.”

  “I know,” he growls. “I meant ‘yeah’ as in, ‘what can you possibly want at this time of night?’”

  I glance at my watch. Bugger. Twenty past midnight.

  “Sorry, did I wake you up? Need to ask you something.”

  He does that maddening trick of not replying, leaving the phone line a silent void which only I am required to fill.

  “Err … you know when we saw Nirvana at Reading in ninety-one?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Were they really that good or were you guys just winding me up?”

  His usual scoffing-burp sound comes speeding down the wire from Crouch End. “Doesn’t it say anything about this in my scrapbook?”

  “Yeah, it—”

  “Because part of the reason I gave you the damn thing was so I didn’t have to answer daft questions at times like this. I’ve got to be in Cardiff by eight thirty.”

  “Sorry. It says they were a ‘bloody revalation.’”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Yes, but was it, like, life-changing?”

  “Oh, probably not.”

  “Do you think it changed me?”

  “Changed you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You missed them, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah—I mean, do you think not seeing them changed me?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Sorry, it’s just that … I’ve suddenly realised, everything that’s happened to me from that moment onwards has been vaguely disappointing …”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “And that it might have been the start of me … you know … losing it slightly.”

  Unexpectedly, this heralds a laugh.

  “Losing your edge,” Alan chuckles. “And you were there, off your tits at Spike Island, 1990. ‘It’ll never catch on,’ you said.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Something along those lines. Forget it. Listen, put that crap away for the night, finish your can of beer [how’d he know I was drinking one?], get some sleep and stop being so bloody hysterical.”

  But Alan is an expert at the slick closure of a phone call, even agreeing to a swift morally supportive coffee tomorrow afternoon before I meet Webster. I can’t say I feel an awful lot better, though. I ignore his advice, return to the fanzine, and yes: the post-Nirvana results are quite remarkable. According to our reporter, Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned’s were both “a disappointment.” The Fat Lady Sings “didn’t deserve an encore.” The Sisters of Mercy were “ridiculous.” Flowered Up and Teenage Fanclub were “boringly similar” (which seems unlikely), while Blur “only have one good song.” The Family Cat’s actual performance on the Sunday doesn’t even garner a review. Only De La Soul sparkle—watched, as we know, with the assistance of Steve the Swede’s apple schnapps—but this judgement is accompanied by a sophisticated observation that “drinking at a festival is actually quite fun, all the bands sound great when you’re a bit pissed, and no one cares about the weather; this could be the way forward.”

  Fuck.

  I drain the last of my can, pull on my hooded top, grab my keys, stumble through the kitchen and just go, out into the northeast London night. I know from experience that feelings like these are only soothed by walking. It doesn’t really matter where I go, but naturally I always end up heading in a south-westerly direction, as if magnetically drawn towards London’s centre. I don’t really spend much time there these days, but its pull remains compelling. It’s a dry, windless night, and after an initial stiffness (I haven’t left the house since yesterday evening) I’m soon up to speed, hurrying out of my locality, past a few stragglers contemplating a kebab after leaving one of the later-shutting pubs, beyond the church, past the final bus stop and out onto the road bordering the park. There was a time when I would leap over the fence and cut across, but nowadays even I—naïveté and slightly disposable attitude to life aside—take the long route round. Not that I’ve ever had the problems with muggers and nutters some of my friends have had. I put this down to perpetually marching at breakneck speed, pulling my woolly hat down to my eyes and doing my best to look more barmy than anyone else.

  There are two things I always see on these small-hour jaunts. Indeed, both appear with such clockwork regularity I think I’d be concerned for the state of the universe if I didn’t see them. One is a collection of elderly African ladies with huge multicoloured shopping bags. Doesn’t matter what time it is. Once I saw them at three in the morning. It’s extraordinary. They always look perfectly happy, gossiping away, never in the same place (tonight they’re ambling along Green Lanes; another time they were coming out of a house in Finsbury Park; once they were even as far away as King’s Cross). When I spy them this evening I almost feel like saying hello. The second thing I habitually encounter is an old chap walking his dog. Again, time seems to make little difference—one o’clock, two o’clock, even around six on one occasion. Both man and dog always look totally miserable. The bloke’s probably got one of those jobs with crazy shifts, like Alan’s tenure a few years back in a certain banking department that required him to be there from 11:30 p.m. until 8 a.m., Friday to Tuesday; the bizarre upshot being that his working week kicked off just as everyone else was getting plastered at the end of theirs, and his “weekend” began first thing on a Wednesday morning. Typically, Alan made damn sure he didn’t miss out on a proper “Friday night,” rooting out some meatpacker’s boozer near Smith-field Market, where he would sup away happily until lunchtime and then drunkenly retire to bed. “Saturday-morning hangovers are so much nicer on Wednesday evenings,” he would tell people, “plus there’s better telly on.”

  Tonight’s dog-walking man is looking extra pissed off, tramping past Canonbury station as his dog feigns enthusiasm for a clutch of weeds.

  “Ivan!” he shouts. “Git a bladdy move on!”

  Loosely following that stupid bus route that doesn’t go anywhere useful, I enter the no-man’s-land between Canonbury and Highbury, my mind frantically sifting through a multitude of topics—my bank balance, Nirvana, Alan’s continued indifference to my plight, Spike Island (why did he have to bring that one up?), the ubiquitous Mr. Webster, my ubiquitous ex-girlfriend—although my anxiety is beginning to recede thanks to my ferociously marching along. It works every time. The gaunt, alert figure of a fox appears from behind the
council block a few hundred metres ahead, then vanishes up that posh tree-lined road I always turn down by mistake when waywardly returning from nights at the Garage. I wince as I pass the school where I vomited after one tequila too many on Alan’s thirtieth birthday. I round the corner where I had that huge row with The Ex (I wanted to walk, she wanted to get a cab: a recurring theme) and stride past those silly-looking cafés that precede Highbury Corner, finally shooting straight down the strip of overpriced shops and restaurants that is Upper Street.

  Given that I’ve never been overly attached to this particular thoroughfare, it’s remarkable how effectively it hoards memories and unleashes them as I walk, like one of those slow-release vitamin-pill things. That’s the problem with living in one corner of a city for too long, I suppose, and this top mile of the main Islington drag is all about (again) The Ex. No wonder she moved to Camberwell. Example: when I look at the Hope and Anchor, I don’t see a semidecent music pub with a creditable punk heritage, I see the place I first met the friend of a friend who joined us for a pint after we’d seen Arab Strap at the Union Chapel. When I see that petrol station on the left, I see the first packet of sandwiches we shared while waiting for a cab to take the two of us and a paralytically drunk Polly home. The King’s Head pub is the place I spilled my first pint over her. The Turkish restaurant is where I took her for a date on that first Valentine’s Day and my debit card got rejected. The Bull is where I used to listlessly wait for her to finish cackling with her work colleagues on a Thursday evening. Then the cinema, where I realised once and for all that she’d never fancy me as much as she did Ralph Fiennes. The Slug and Lettuce, where I got into that huge argument with a male friend of hers about his method of getting to work (he used to drive from Hackney to Willesden every morning; had he never heard of the Silverlink train line?)—the argument which finally precipitated The Conversation.