The Alternative Hero

SUGGESTED LISTENING: The Wedding Present, Bizarro (RCA, 1989)

I’m Gloria bloody Feathers

The initial rise of the Thieving Magpies was unremarkable enough. Bunch of mates from school form band, learn a load of covers (Clash, XTC, Echo and The Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs), start writing own songs, play first gig (Reading School Summer Bash, June 1984), get spotted by loudmouthed eccentric from nearby public school (Webster) who promptly forces his way into band and demotes previous singer to rhythm guitar; more gigs, disgruntled previous singer departs, Webster takes over rhythm guitar duties, more original material appears, ditto bigger local bookings (Reading After Dark Club, Windsor Old Trout, Brunel University Union), first London gig (West Hampstead Moonlight Club), fledgling entrepreneur Bob Grant attends show by chance and offers his services as manager, record first demo, tout it round to record companies, they show some interest … so far, so normal.
But what really set the Magpies apart from every other band of the time was their strange, and still largely unexplained, relationship with one Gloria Feathers.
Few would deny that Feathers (née Rosamund Amhurst) was the unofficial figurehead of the late-eighties/early-nineties British alternative scene: she was an individual so regularly and easily viewable, one almost imagined her to be on the payroll of various venues, promoters and labels (as, indeed, she may have been). Not a film-star beauty by any means, but oddly beguiling, due in part to her mesmerising almond-shaped brown eyes, and characterised by a loud upper-class accent and a selection of attention-grabbing hair creations, tattoos and piercings. She was one of those people who simply seemed to be everywhere: every important gig, every club night, every festival, every party, in a multitude of different cities, often on the same evening (one Feathers legend tells of her happily jumping around at a Wedding Present gig in Salisbury, only to be spotted later that evening in the hotel where Therapy? were staying in Dublin); and she also seemed to know everyone, every band, tour manager, roadie, bouncer, barman. Sometimes she was drunk (she famously favoured lethal half-pints of cider, vodka and blackcurrant, a drink still known as a Gloria Feathers in some music venues), sometimes sober; sometimes doing nothing, other than regaling the world with her latest exploits; sometimes doing everything, from selling merchandise to busily darting about with a walkie-talkie. And yet no one claims to have actually employed her or given her any official role as such, nor did she ever appear to be simply a “groupie;” in fact, several prominent indie stars are known to have pursued her, with little success.
She was also at school with Lance Webster.
There have always been assumptions that they were lovers, either at first, at the end or all along, but there has never been any proof of this. What is undisputed is that they were very close friends. She arrived at Webster’s school in the sixth form, part of the dubious English boys’ school arrangement wherein females are admitted at sixteen to gently introduce the poor innocent lads to the concept of a dual-gender world. By this point Webster was a loner and quite breathtakingly pretentious, a pretty-boy scholarship kid spending most of his days seated on a bench in the school kitchen garden gently strumming a classical guitar, apparently modelling himself on some bizarre crossbreed of Nick Drake, Robert Smith and Hamlet. Feathers, despite her unusual appearance and tendency to trouble her school house with the sounds of The Sisters of Mercy and Killing Joke, was universally popular with the rest of the clean-cut boys and girls, but naturally drawn towards Webster’s individualism. Together they missed lessons, experimented with drugs, attended gigs, played impressive practical jokes (they once managed to enliven a parents’ evening by spiking teachers’ drinks with LSD) and also dabbled with spiritualism; it was during this period that she adopted her new name, bestowed upon her by a medium she and Webster met in East Grinstead. Webster too swapped “Geoffrey” for “Lance” around this time—a decision reportedly reached at the 1984 Glastonbury Festival. Feathers encouraged the singer to simplify his image and toughen up his songwriting, and it was with her blessing that Webster invaded the newly formed Thieving Magpies and began to follow his rock calling in earnest.
Physical distance was briefly put between the pair when they left the school in July 1985; Webster and his band began their steady ascent of the alternative-rock mountain, while Feathers, in a final attempt by the exasperated Amhurst family to civilise their increasingly madcap daughter, was packed off to a finishing school in Switzerland. She made sure her time there was as colourful as possible—she cultivated a habit of luring boys from the local village back to the premises in the dead of night, photographing them in various compromising positions, developing the pictures in the school’s darkroom and delivering them to the boys’ families in one of the school’s embossed envelopes—but somehow she failed to achieve expulsion. By the time Feathers returned to Britain in the summer of 1986, Webster had already become a serviceable candidate for the title of Next Big Thing, the Magpies having contributed a song—“A Month of Mondays”—to the legendary flexidisc compilation Indie-duction. What followed was to establish a pattern for Feathers’ approach to her friend’s group and their career choices.
Suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end of not just one but two potential record deals, the Magpies opted, with Bob Grant’s not unreasonable guidance, for a modest arrangement presented by a major label, rather than an even more humble offering from Abandon, an independent outfit based in Gerrards Cross. A few days before the contract was to be signed, Feathers summoned Webster to her Bloomsbury bed-sit, where she made her thoughts on the matter perfectly plain: the Magpies should reject the major and go with the indie. Webster, then nineteen and hardly au courant with the arcane ways of the music industry, was baffled, and after a blazing row departed for Bob Grant’s office in Kilburn. By the time he got there Feathers had already phoned the manager to declare she would not be eating or drinking again until the band took her advice. Webster feigned nonchalance for the next seventy-two hours but caved in on the way to the label’s headquarters, bolting through the closing doors of the tube train as the band passed Russell Square. Horrified to find Feathers prostrate on her bed and in a state of some delirium, Webster glumly phoned the record company to inform all concerned that the deal was off.
Unsurprisingly, several weeks of heated debate and recrimination ensued, but once these had given way to fresh talks with Abandon for a levelheaded agreement that would eventually spawn two high-profile indie hits (“Monument” and “Siamese Burn”), the logic of Feathers’ directive became more clear. By remaining, for the time being, on the independent side of the rock fence, without the relentless attention to sales figures on which a major would surely have insisted, the band would be allowed to develop their sound and build their audience properly, as the following eighteen months were to prove. A fervent following was already baying for the Thieving Magpies when they took to the various festival stages in the summer of 1987, new material displayed the refined lyrical venom and melodic clout that were to become their trademark, and the band topped the “best newcomer” category of just about every poll in the country at the end of the year. As 1988 dawned, the flapping sound of major labels’ chequebooks was little short of deafening. Bob Grant, now fully in control, steered the Magpies towards a generous but workable deal with BFM, Abandon received a handsome payout and an appreciable percentage of the first album’s takings; everyone was a winner.
Except, of course, the major record company who originally offered them a deal. But six months after Gloria Feathers’ tactical hunger strike, missing out on the Magpies had become the very least of that label’s worries. The failure of a yearlong campaign to break a very expensive band had meant dipping shares, staff cuts and ailing confidence, followed by—inevitably—new signings being dropped. It is a mathematical certainty that the Magpies would have suffered this fate. And yet Feathers never claimed to have any insider knowledge of the company’s potential difficulties; in fact, she displayed very little interest at all in the business side of her beloved music. “She just had an inkling,” shrugged Webster in a March 1989 interview. “Must have been a f*cking strong inkling, I grant you—but that’s all she says. We’ll probably listen next time she has one.”
Little did he know that another of “Gloria’s inklings” was brewing even as he spoke. Having extracted as much mileage as possible from Shoot the Fish, the Magpies had decided to quickly record a four-track EP to cash in on the upcoming festival season, before embarking on their second album in the autumn. A typically abrasive high-speed pop song entitled “Something About Him” was chosen as the lead track; the green light was duly given by the label; the release date was set for 28 May; the master and artwork were poised to be sent off to the manufacturers—and Lance Webster’s phone rang.
“I knew something was up by the tone of her voice,” he told Melody Maker later that year. “As everyone knows, Gloria hardly ever speaks calmly, or slowly. She’s usually so excited about what she has to say that it all comes out in this mad torrent of words, and there’s almost always some gag or some hilarious situation she’s got herself into. But now she was deathly serious … like, eerily calm and deliberate. I’d only ever heard her speak like that once before, and two days later she was bloody starving herself to death.”
This time, Feathers solemnly instructed her old friend to demote “Something About Him” to side B of the EP, and make something else the lead track. When asked why, she had even less reasoning to offer than on the previous occasion. Despite his earlier pledge to pay more attention if this happened again, the arbitrary nature of the request led Webster to dismiss her once more. Just as she did in 1986, Feathers countered by laying a hefty threat on the line, the details of which have never been disclosed. One assumes it was pretty compelling, as twenty-four hours later Webster was hurriedly persuading his exasperated band and manager that the more funky and atmospheric “What If Everyone Goes Mad?” would really be a far better radio song. “Thank f*ck Gloria phoned me on the Saturday,” he commented afterwards. “If she’d left it ’til Sunday, it would’ve been too late.”
Indeed. The amended EP was despatched to the pressing plant at lunchtime on the Monday, and soon the earlier plan was all but forgotten. “What If Everyone Goes Mad?” did the usual rounds of pluggers, journalists and DJs, a video was made—and everyone agreed that it was a nice shift in direction, something a little more laid-back, but retaining the now familiar Magpies bite. More fortuitously, the song slipped neatly into an embryonic movement that was currently being stirred by the likes of The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Jesus Jones: the heyday of indie dance was just around the corner and the Thieving Magpies knew it. Of course they did. A few forward-thinking producers offered to remix the track. Well, why not? Get played in a few nightclubs for a change. The release date neared, Radio One put the track on their B-list (not bad for an alternative-rock single in 1989), the band went on an eight-date hike around the UK (climaxing with a sellout show at London’s Brixton Academy), the record hit the shops—and on Sunday 4 June, Bruno Brookes announced to the nation that Thieving Magpies had a new entry at number nineteen. It was the highest position a single of theirs had reached to date. Webster, receiving the news from the record company that afternoon, allowed himself a mild whoop and then rang Feathers to congratulate her on another successful “inkling.” Of course, there was no way of knowing how well “Something About Him” might have done, but everyone agreed “What If Everyone Goes Mad?” had done the business.
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 f*cking big girl as well. But Gloria 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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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 dragged 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.
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 F*ck 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 f*ck 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.