The Alternative Hero

SUGGESTED LISTENING: Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left (Island, 1969)

You can’t just wander
around with a drunken
grin on your face

[From Geoff Webster’s writing ideas notebook.]
SAINSBURY SID
“Oh, drat it!”
Sid the fly sighed and moved quietly around the milk bottles and yoghurt. Here he was, at ten o’clock, shut in Sainsbury’s. This was all he needed. He was just flying at full pelt towards the door when the manager closed and locked it. Sid was shut in, left for a whole night to ramble among the Fairy Liquid bottles and the oven-ready chickens. But hang on! This thought hadn’t yet occurred to him.
“Food!” exclaimed Sid excitedly.
He pulled himself together, took off from the yoghurt pot and flew up to the roof of the supermarket. There he could see the full scale of his lucky find. He looked at the signs. Biscuits. Crisps. Cakes. Fruit. Delicatessen. Fly swats. Fly swats? He had a sudden moment of panic, then he thought: Hang on! There was nobody there to use them. Suddenly, with a burst of excitement, he dived like a plane and soared into a packet of Dairylea.
“Delicious!”
He had a few huge bites and moved on to the finer taste of a packet of French Brie. This was the life! He flew back up to the ceiling and looked at more signs. Meat. Frozen vegetables. Bags of soup. Off-licence. Then he took a look behind him, across the sea of Persil Automatic. What a huge shop! As he looked at all the words, one of them hit him smack across the eyes and stayed there for five seconds before he could see normally again.
HONEY.
He shot like the Concorde towards the Jam and Chutney section and rammed straight into a jar of honey with a paper lid. There he was, slurping and gulping his way through a huge pot of the sweet, sticky, glorious gunk.
After a while, he got tired and squeezed his way out through the hole and flew in the direction of the fresh-bread counter. But he could only get as far as the cash registers, and then flopped out: tired, full, but happy.
At about five o’clock in the morning Sid woke up, but not naturally. A baker had come in to make fresh bread for the day’s customers. Sid quickly rose from the cash register and flew as quietly as he could towards the bread section to get a better look. But the baker instantly heard Sid buzzing around and, to Sid’s horror, walked over to the fly-swat counter! Without further ado, Sid soared high into the air and zoomed over to the other end of the shop, far away from the fly-swat-waving baker. He spotted the pot of honey he had opened the night before, swooped down and soared into his breakfast.
He was just about to leave the pot when he saw the huge face of the baker through the glass! But hang on! Sid had an idea. Where the baker had come in, he must go out. He shot out of the jar, making another hole, and zoomed towards the bakery, where he saw an open door. Just as the baker was about to smash down the fly swat, Sid flew out into the morning air.
“Phew!” he gasped, heading towards his nest in the gutter of the train station. But he would be back soon, for some more of that delicious food.
I stare at the lined page for a few moments longer. It’s not the first time in my life I’ve had no idea what to say. But it is, perhaps, the first time I’ve had a grinning former hero of mine merely two feet away, his face practically bursting off its hinges in anticipation of my considered opinion. I’ve got, ooh, probably four more seconds to think of an opening comment, so I buy myself an extra two by taking a large gulp of tea. This, unfortunately, is the wrong thing to do.
“You didn’t like it,” Webster moans.
Shit. Now I have to do double-strength lying.
“No!” I begin. “No, not at all. It’s … sorry, it’s just not, um … not what I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?”
“Well, a … for a start, something for …”
He frowns. Time’s up.
“I didn’t think it was going be a children’s story,” I admit.
He frowns some more. Oh God. Please say it is meant to be a children’s story.
“I love children’s stories,” he mutters at last, in a tone an East End gangster might use to describe a favourite cuddly toy. “Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, Michael Bond.”
“Right.”
“Penelope Lively, Astrid Lindgren.”
I’m completely lost, and my face must be saying it rather loudly.
“Pippi Longstocking,” he continues.
“Blimey, some of these pen names,” I smile desperately.
“No, that’s a character—one of Astrid Lindgren’s characters.”
“Ah.” Glad he cleared that one up for me.
“Jill Murphy, Helen Cresswell.”
“J.K. Rowling?” I suggest hopefully.
“Not my cup of tea,” he shrugs. “Norman Hunter?”
“Sorry … who?”
“You know … Professor Branestawm?”
“Oh yeah, him! Fantastic!”
“Then you must also like Spike Milligan?”
“Yes!” I bark. “Genius!”
I’m so relieved, I bang my mug down and tea escapes all over the table. Everyone in the café looks round and Marzy comes running over with a cloth.
“Exciting stuff, this editing process,” Webster quips as she wipes up the mess. He smiles at her, and for the first time I see a drop of the rock-star charisma that must have worked wonders with the ladies back in the day. Marzy goes all gooey for a second and it strikes me she may be doing more for him than just making his lunch.
“Thanks … sorry,” I mumble uselessly.
“Not a problem, Alan,” Marzy replies, departing. Ugh! I’m sure people don’t remember my name so readily when I’m using the real one. Perhaps “Clive” is eminently forgettable.
“Anyway,” Webster resumes, “for some reason I’ve been reading nothing but children’s stories lately. And when I wrote the other thing—the one about the people with the power—one of the publishers said it might actually make a cracking children’s book. So I thought I’d have a go at a kid’s yarn.”
“Why not just make that other one into a … um … a kid’s thing?”
“Wanted to do something new.”
“Okay,” I nod. “Well, in that case, it’s …”
“Go on. You can be honest. That’s what we’re here for.”
So I launch into a timid examination of his piece, concentrating heavily on the few bits I thought were good (“slurping and gulping his way through a huge pot of the sweet, sticky, glorious gunk;” “across the sea of Persil Automatic”), and some harmless criticism about repeating words too often. I steer well clear of my true thoughts, i.e., that it’s as exciting as a maths lesson and would bore the bib off any self-respecting child within three sentences. My jaw is already hurting from all the fake smiling, and the temptation to blurt out, “F*ck all this, let’s talk about rock!” is daunting.
“Oh, and of course—it’ll be accompanied by illustrations,” Webster declares, fishing around in his bag. “Sorry, I should have shown you these already. One of my friends has done some mock-ups.”
He passes over some decent pencil sketches of a smiling housefly in various states of honey-related bliss, and a fly-swat-brandishing baker who bears more than a passing resemblance to a career-peak Webster himself, goatee and all.
“Wow, these are great!” I enthuse. “It’ll make so much more sense with pictures.”
Webster glares at me.
“Better than the story, then, huh?”
“Well, er …”
“Come on, Alan. It’s obvious you don’t like it. There’s no point in us sitting here unless you tell me why.”
“Uh … well, it’s just not really my thing … It’s a little bit … um …”
There’s the glimmer of a smile on his face and it occurs to me he’s actually enjoying making me squirm.
“A little bit what?”
“Unbelievable.”
“What, a fly buzzing round a supermarket eating food is unbelievable?”
“No, but … you know, the things he thinks, and the fact that he’s able to read …”
Webster almost spits his coffee out with incredulity.
“It’s for kids! It’s make-believe!”
“And there’s a whole section of the shop devoted to fly swats.”
“It’s supposed to be funny!”
“And who says ‘Drat it!’ these days?”
“Yeah, well, you may have a point there,” he concedes, grabbing his notebook and scribbling in the margin.
“And is ‘Hang on’ meant to be his catchphrase?”
“‘Hang on’?”
“Yeah. He says ‘hang on’ about six times.”
“Three times,” corrects Webster.
“Well, maybe he should say it more often—turn it into a catch-phrase.”
“Okay,” he shrugs, jotting it down. “Fair enough. [BBC announcer voice] ‘Hang on, with Sid the fly.’ Anything else? You see—this is more like it!”
“Right,” I reply dubiously. “Um … well, there’s heaps of product placement—Dairylea, Persil, Sainsbury’s, of course …”
“Which could be an advantage.”
“What, get some of them on board?”
“Yeah,” he smiles craftily. “In fact, my illustrator knows some of the Sainsbury’s marketing team—they’re interested in taking a look.”
“Blimey.”
“Ha,” Webster snaps. “Gonna start taking it seriously now?”
I pick up the notebook again. This potential interest seems to have nothing to do with his being Lance Webster, so maybe he’s genuinely got something. I still think it’s bollocks, though. And I can’t imagine Sainsbury’s wanting to advertise that their shops are crawling with insects.
“Um … the Concorde doesn’t exist anymore,” I volunteer, spotting another glitch. Webster waves this away.
“Doesn’t matter. Kids still know what it is.”
I sigh and have a final scan, running out of straws to clutch at.
“I guess you’re really not into kids’ stuff.”
“Not really,” I admit, “not since I was … you know.”
“A kid?”
“Yeah.”
“Not enough beer involved, perhaps?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ever think about having kids?”
Uh-oh. Here comes his “life coach” act again.
“Well, I probably would do, but …”
“I understand. There’s an essential ingredient missing.”
“Yup.”
“Did you enjoy your own childhood?”
Who is he now? Freud?
“Yeah, well enough,” I grumble. “You?”
Suddenly the café has gone very quiet, and I’m certain the five or so people present, Marzy included, are hanging on our every word. How I long to be elsewhere.
“Tell you what,” says Webster. “Are you doing anything tomorrow afternoon?”
“Saturday?” I reply, mentally flicking through my packed diary. “Not a lot. Why?” One thing that can be said for all this: at least it gives Alan (the real one) a kick up the arse. I’m on the bus when he rings me, about halfway down Mare Street.
“Clive-ist!”
This is Alan’s new thing, putting “-ist” on the end of everything. Much like a few years ago when he added “-ster” to everyone’s name: I became “the Clivester,” Polly “the Pollster.” For a short time Liz was “the wifester,” which was where the craze abruptly met its end.
“Meet me for a jar!” he trumpets. “Liz went to her mum’s for the avo with Jocasta—I got let off ’cos of my sore throat.”
“I can’t,” I tell him, reluctant to go into too much detail.
“What you up to?”
“I’m meeting someone.”
“Who?”
“Just someone.”
“You’re meeting Webster again? Didn’t you meet him yesterday?”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t you guys getting a little friendly?”
“Piss off. It’s actually all getting a bit annoying. He’s taking me on a ‘mystery tour.’ Says he wants to reacquaint me with my childhood.”
“Wow. Can I come?”
“No.”
The line goes a little quiet; when Alan speaks again his voice has lost its edge of mockery.
“What’s he like?”
“Alan, I can’t really talk about this when I’m on the bus. I’ll meet you later if you like.”
“How long you gonna be?”
“Dunno. Depends what he’s got in mind.”
“It must be quite cool to hang out with him, though?”
I groan, and take a quick look round the bus to see who’s listening. No one looks remotely interested, but I turn back and lower my voice to just above a whisper.
“He is cool to hang out with—as long as you can stand the way he continually asks you probing questions about your life, kicks his legs over to your side of the table, keeps banging on about children’s books, eats the most boring food known to man, never suggests meeting in a pub …”
“Why don’t you suggest it, then?”
“He says he’s on the wagon at the moment. I’ve also got to keep up the act of not knowing virtually everything there is to know about his life and career, and not having been his biggest fan for the past seventeen years, and not even knowing very much about bloody music at all.”
“You seem to be managing okay so far, man.”
“Yeah, but it’s bloody hard work! I feel so … suppressed when I’m talking to him. I’m not me. I trip over my words. My face aches from this perpetual grin. I spilt my tea …”
“Well, that does sound a little bit like you.”
“And I keep wanting to say stuff about his songs. He … when …”—I lower my voice still further—“when we were paying in the caff yesterday he handed me a fiver and said, ‘There’s my contribution,’ and I swear I was within f*cking molecules of saying—”
“‘… to this pretend revolution’?”
“Yeah.”
“Fair enough, man, but look … just think, you’re in the presence of the bloke who gave you all that stuff. He got you through some tough times …”
“Oh, please.”
“He did! I don’t mean to be cheesy, man, but this guy wrote the sound track to your f*cking youth … and he genuinely wants to hang out with you!”
“Well, I can’t think why.”
“Well, whatever! The fact is, he does. Just try and enjoy it for what it is. Be a bit grateful.”
“Uh.”
“And … honestly, man, if the opportunity arises … I wouldn’t mind saying hello.”
“Ah! I see.”
“Yeah, well. Like I said, if the opportunity arises.”
“Right. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Have a good one. Later.”
“Yeah.”
I’ve been instructed to meet him outside Bethnal Green tube station, although as it turns out neither of us arrives by tube. I’ve been waiting a couple of minutes on the busy corner of Roman Road when a black cab pulls up, from which Webster leaps, again suggesting the reserve accounts haven’t completely dwindled.
“Morning!” he beams. It is two o’clock.
“Hi,” I wave, receiving that day’s frisson at the appearance of my companion. He’s looking more like Lance than ever—jeans, chunky trainers, a dark blue suit jacket and shades. His hair even looks relatively funky. He pays the driver then gives my hand a squeeze.
“Let’s go back in time,” he announces, in a deep-throated American accent.
“Sorry?”
“Oh, cheer up, you miserable f*cker!” he yells, slapping my back. “Christ, dunno why I bother.” He propels me briskly up the street, runs up the steps to a large red factory-looking building on the right, bursts through the double doors and two seconds later I find myself inside the Museum of Childhood.
“Now,” he informs me, “this is just about the best f*cking thing in London.”
From that point onwards, my presence is purely incidental. Webster, with an enthusiasm more animated than anything I ever saw him do onstage, is truly besotted with the place. He bounds around, from toy exhibit to doll’s house, from antique pram to puppet show, whooping with joyous recognition (“Oh, man! My neighbour had one of these! I stole it one weekend and busted it. Got grounded for a month”), sobbing with painful memories (“My first girlfriend had this doll … When she moved away she gave me its cardigan to remember her by … I was heartbroken … was only five”), pointing out vintage remote-control cars and video games to any hapless kids that pass (“You see this? It was brilliant. You could programme it to go anywhere, up stairs, the works. Better than your ‘wee’ or whatever it’s called”) and almost, before I step in and calm him down, jumps into the indoor sandpit with a collection of toddlers. While it’s fairly entertaining in itself, the downside of this absurd behaviour is that I can’t, as I had hoped, furtively try to spot if anyone recognises him, because just about everyone in the building is gaping at him anyway.
Compared with Webster’s larking about, the actual contents of the museum are of mild interest to me: the train set is pretty cool, some of the old video games raise a smile (Astro Wars!), but the Scalextric and Lego collections are underwhelming and I reckon it’s a bit of a swizz that you can’t actually play with most of the stuff. After half an hour I’m starting to eye the downstairs coffee bar hopefully—until I spy something out the corner of my eye and proceed to make a total tit of myself.
“Alan! Alan, man! You okay?”
What’s come over me is anyone’s guess. I’m standing staring through one of the glass cases, sobbing uncontrollably. I can count the number of times I’ve cried in the last decade on one finger, so it’s really a rather bizarre sensation, made even stranger by the man comforting me—who is, funnily enough, the bloke responsible for me crying the previous time.
“Alan, dude! Shit, what’s the matter? Can I get you anything?”
I feel like saying, “For a start, you can stop calling me Alan”—but stop myself.
“No, no, I’m fine,” I splutter. “Thanks.”
“Jesus, man,” he laughs, “you should’ve just told me you were bored and wanted a coffee, no need to do this!”
I break into a smile. “You know … actually, a cup of tea would be great.”
We descend the stairs and Webster sits me down at one of the large tables. He dashes off while I wipe my eyes and continue to feel pretty bloody silly. A minute later he returns with a pot of tea and two pieces of cake.
“Bloody hell, I’m sorry,” I tell him. “No idea where that came from.”
“No worries,” he replies. “This place tends to bring odd emotions out.”
“It was the toy.”
“Well, I’m pleased to hear that. I’d be slightly concerned if you were crying because of the design of the carpet.”
“It was my dad’s favourite toy.”
“Right,” he nods solemnly. “Your dad is …”
“Oh, no!” I laugh, catching his drift. “He’s alive and well and living in Elstree.”
“Well, we can’t have everything.”
“Ha. It’s just … oh, it’s so stupid.”
“No, not at all. Please carry on. That is, if you want to.”
“Yeah … well, that windup Pinocchio-on-a-donkey, he had it since he was a kid and … well, my dad wasn’t really much fun when we were kids. He worked loads, came home late. He was very much a ‘kids should be in bed already so I can have my sherry in peace’ kind of guy … not unpleasant at all, just … I dunno … distant …”
“Got it.”
“And when I was about eight, I was a right little brat …”
“As we all were.”
“Yeah, I s’pose … but I was really stressing my mum out this one weekend, wanting this, wanting that, arguing with my sister and stuff … I dunno what happened, my mum probably had a word with my dad and told him to try and chill me out or something … He came into my bedroom with this toy. He’d never done anything like this before. He knelt down and said something like ‘Well, son, here’s a toy I had when I was a boy,’ and he showed me how it worked—and bless his cotton socks, it’s a toy for four-year-olds probably, but it obviously meant loads to him … but all I could f*cking say was, ‘Dad, it’s rubbish! It’s wooden and crap and …’—I dunno, probably that it hadn’t got any Space Invaders on it or something … and he just looked so heartbroken and picked up his toy and stomped off out the room … He never tried to do anything like that again … I can’t help thinking he was never really arsed with trying to get close to me after that, he’d reached out to me once and I basically told him to f*ck off …”
Poor old Webster is just gazing down into his tea, probably doesn’t know where the hell to look.
“Anyway,” I conclude, “that was his toy up there.”
Webster does a bit more of his solemn nodding, then:
“I understand … wish I could help, y’know? But the truth is we must’ve all done stuff to our folks that we regret.”
“You have, then?”
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” he gasps. “Come on, mate, I was a pop star. None of my family wanted to be anywhere near me for the best part of ten years, I was such a stuck-up, inconsiderate wanker.”
“Really?”
“Of course! I was a total knob.”
I keep quiet, hoping he’ll elaborate. Unfortunately, he doesn’t.
“No,” he sighs, “the only thing we can do is just hope they forgive, or forget. Preferably both. And for you—to be honest I wouldn’t worry about it. If you don’t mind my saying so, your old man sounds exactly like mine was: well-meaning, responsible and respectable, but totally set in his ways. Not changing for no one. He probably put that toy straight back in its cupboard and hasn’t given the incident a second’s thought since.”
I study my cake and think this over. Then I think about Webster’s dad. He died of cancer in the late nineties: another blow in what must have been a chain of nightmares for Lance. Or Geoff. Or whoever.
We’re silent for a good half a minute. A group of French people at the next table suddenly erupt with laughter at something. Makes me feel even worse, being this picture of misery in such a fun-oriented place.
“God, this is ridiculous,” I sigh, breaking off a piece of cake. “What a way for you to spend your Saturday afternoon.”
“Hey,” he counters, “I’m the one who suggested it. And don’t forget, my idea was to put you back in touch with your childhood—so, in fact, I’ve completely succeeded.”
“That’s right. You’ve overperformed!”
We laugh for a moment, then Webster ruins it by getting serious again.
“But it’s good to feel these things, y’know, get ’em out there in the open. Don’t you feel a little bit better?”
“Not really.”
He frowns and looks straight at my forehead in his customary way. I’m kind of used to it now. But suddenly his eyebrows shoot up again.
“Hang on a sec! I’ve got an idea.”
He leaps up and skips over to the French table, whom he addresses in perfect-sounding French, prompting much surprised laughter and delighted smiles. One of the girls hands him their copy of Time Out. He glances at his watch and flicks through the magazine for a second, then hands it back, accompanied by yet more francophone witticisms and eyelash fluttering. The man really is a charm machine.
Eventually he returns to boring old me.
“One of my favourite artists has a new exhibition nearby,” he announces. “D’you fancy popping in? The works are to do with music, apparently—which I know you’re not that keen on—but it’s bound to cheer you up ’cos it won’t remind you of anything!”
Oh joy. More lying. My favourite.
By the end of the next hour, I’ve told so many lies that it’s actually starting to affect my digestive system. I lurch into the loo of the little gallery, pale-faced and breaking into an unhealthy sweat, bolt the door and settle myself on the crapper, where I bury my head between my legs and try to breathe evenly. This is all getting far too much for me: first an emotional breakdown in a public museum, combined now with this ridiculous performance of perpetual musical ignorance, which I’m certain Webster is seeing through like cling film. I’ve had enough of being someone I’m not, pretending to know nothing about the thing I love most. I feel an unadulterated charlatan with this watery, featureless persona I’ve adopted, and I’m minutes away from jacking the whole thing in, coming out of the men’s room with my hands up: “Hey, Lance—it was fun while it lasted, tell your roadies I said hi … Oh, and by the way, that saxophone part at the end of ‘Bad Little Secret’ sucks.”
When Webster told me the exhibition was “to do with music,” it could have meant anything: it could have been a sound installation featuring recordings of an assortment of buskers from Vancouver, or a collection of classical composers’ portraits done in the style of Banksy, or an exploration of the design similarities between Scottish bagpipes and Mongolian nose-flutes. But no. It was none of those things, nor the several billion other things it might have been. It was, in fact—ta-daaa!—seven multicoloured, densely decorated “shrines,” each one complete with garlands, effigies, trinkets, various memorabilia, and the idol itself: an oil painting of a deceased, usually alternative, pop star.
Each of these wretched items presented a new and woefully dicey challenge for me. It ended up like playing some crazy reverse pub quiz where you try to get as many questions wrong as possible, but are then required to justify why you don’t know the correct answer. To make matters sizeably worse, Webster insisted on helpfully guiding me round the place, making sure I appreciated the finer points of each work, and, of course, who the featured musical icon was. In truth, I probably massively overdid it, as the majority have wormed their way into mainstream popular culture anyway—but I had my reasons, which I present for your inspection as follows:
Ian Curtis (teacups, return train tickets to Macclesfield, a couple of old radios, a seven-inch of “Transmission” broken in two, etc.). I suppose this was the “flagship” work of the exhibition, positioned right by the desk at the entrance. In retrospect it would have been totally safe for me to know who this was, but Webster caught me off guard by asking, “You heard of this guy?”—and I actually thought he was referring to the artist, so I said no, heralding the first of Webster’s unbearably playpen descriptions (“Well, at the end of the seventies, there was a band called Joy Division”—oh, the humiliation!).
Kurt Cobain (cut-up plaid shirts, broken guitar strings, dollar bills on hooks, etc.). A no-brainer, you might say. But the bastard has based his painting on that photo session from summer ’92, when a short-haired Cobain had taken to wearing black-rimmed glasses, thus rendering himself near-unrecognisable to anyone but a music-press reader, so I mumbled some twaddle about him “ringing a bell.” “It’s Kurt Cobain!” exclaimed Webster, with a hint of exasperation. “Met him once, nice bloke,” he added breezily, as if discussing Dennis Waterman.
Syd Barrett. Remembering his appearance in the dream I had at the beginning of this sorry saga, I greeted this “shrine” with a gasp—which Webster interpreted as appreciation of the predictable psychedelic bunting which accompanied the image of the man. “Amazing, isn’t it?” he sighed, and thankfully moved on to the next piece without further enquiry.
Richey Manic (ripped-up pages from philosophy readers, various Holy Bible-era, military-chic clothing items, “4 REAL” carved in red across the top of his portrait, etc.). “Ah, the odd one out,” smiled Webster as he approached. “Why’s that?” replied bonehead over here without really thinking properly, prompting yet another punchable explanation: “Well, there’s a rock band from Wales called the Manic Street Preachers, and before they became really popular they had a fourth member called Richey, who disappeared one day.” Argghh! The frustration! Perhaps he should write children’s books.
Nick Drake (five large, pressed autumn leaves, various cannabis-related paraphernalia, a sepia-tinted photograph of a—presumably fruit—tree, etc.). Too obscure, I calculated, for a non-music enthusiast to know about; then I remembered that Webster is a massive fan. Too late. The ensuing rundown of facts I was already aware of took almost ten minutes, during which the only words I spoke were “Oh, right” and “Ah.” Just two more to go, thank God.
Layne Staley shouldn’t really have been a problem. It would be perfectly possible for even the most respectable music fan to be stumped by this shade-wearing, pink-haired B-list grunge-rocker, although by now I was so bored of saying no that I was tempted to say yes, giving some improvised explanation that an ex-girlfriend ran the UK branch of the Alice in Chains fan club or something—but my brain was numb, I needed water and the rather gory syringe-related decoration had already kick-started my descent into the land of nausea.
Michael Hutchence. Another no-brainer; but again, greeted by this lurid concoction of blond wigs, empty cans of Victoria beer and photos of the Charles Bridge in Prague (all surrounded, pretty tastelessly I thought, by a thick leather belt), I was tempted to go against the grain and shake my head again. Sense prevailed, however. “Oh, that’s the bloke from INXS,” I chirped, to a frown from Webster. “Can’t believe he’s the only one you knew,” he despaired. “Just going to the toilet,” I replied.
So here I am. I must confess, I really have no idea how this ridiculous afternoon is going to finish. I’m sorely tempted to either tell all and bugger the consequences, or try to climb out this back window and leg it. There’d be little lost from doing that, and not much chance of comeback from Webster—he doesn’t even have my phone number. But after coughing up a small amount of bile, I summon my final reserves of patience and strength, and stride back into the main room, where I see, through the large front windows, an interesting little scene taking place on the street outside. Webster is being asked for an autograph.
The two girls who’ve accosted him don’t look English—perhaps Spanish?—and they weren’t in the gallery beforehand, so perhaps they’ve followed us here from the museum; this being a little side street in the East End’s former industrial area, random passersby are few. They certainly look suitably flustered and adoring. Unable to resist, I venture outside to catch a bit of the conversation.
“Oh, yeah?” Webster is saying. “Which one was that?”
“Feile, in Cork,” one of the girls answers (Irish—I was close). “Must have been ninety-four, or ninety-five?”
“Ah,” comes the response. “Our third from last gig.”
Wow. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now two gigs away from Aylesbury. This could be interesting.
“No kidding?”
“Yep,” he smiles sheepishly. “Just one in Amsterdam, then it was all over bar the drinking.”
They all roar with laughter. I’m madly studying Webster’s face for any signs of … anything. But there are only smiles as he autographs a little notebook, then a dog-eared copy of the Lonely Planet guide to London belonging to the shyer, prettier one of the pair.
“It was a deadly gig,” she offers, blushing as he hands the book back.
“Yeah? Well, thanks. We’d been going ten years at that point, so we were probably quite good by then.”
More laughter at the mock-modesty of the man. Then—as simple as a sunny day in August:
“Why d’y’all jack it in?”
Oh, you Irish beauty. You direct, perfectly charming asker of blissfully baggage-less questions. I’ll meet you in a parallel universe and buy you a crate of Guinness.
I settle back in my metaphorical armchair and prepare myself for Webster’s answer.
“Oh, we ran out of steam,” he breezes. “Ah, Alan! Girls, this is my friend Alan. We’re collaborating on a writing project.”
I rise again from my metaphorical armchair, put on my best smile and step forward to shake their hands.
Despite Webster’s wagon claims, I convince him we should close our afternoon with a quick visit to a particularly nice nearby boozer with an awesome selection of Belgian beers. He’s never been to the place and is duly impressed, ordering himself something dark and strong. We settle in. Feeling much more comfortable on this familiar turf and having witnessed a pop-star incident firsthand, I decide to risk a pop-star question.
“Does it happen often, then, being recognised?”
He bites his lip and flashes a quick look around the pub. “Y’know, it’s odd. For years it didn’t happen at all in this country. Recently, it’s happening more again—dunno why. It’s the cycle of things, I guess. But it’s always happened abroad. Never stopped.”
“Yeah?”
He nods.
“What was the name of the band you were in?”
He grins and rolls his eyes, but doesn’t answer.
“What?”
He takes a sip of his drink and looks away, shaking his head.
“Have I said something wrong?”
He exhales. “No … nothing.”
He looks, for about thirty seconds, like he’s about to confess to a particularly sordid crime from a past life. Then, finally:
“Thieving Magpies. Or ‘The’ Thieving Magpies, depending on how much of a hurry you’re in.”
“You don’t like talking about it?”
Another sip. “Sorry,” he says, “I reckoned you would have Googled it by now, or something.”
I shake my head, taking my own sip.
“It’s funny,” he muses, “how I seem to turn to my computer for everything these days, every single thing I want to know. I lost my keys the other day, and I swear I got halfway to the computer to Google ‘my keys.’ How bloody ridiculous is that?”
We laugh, then stop.
“But no,” he continues, perhaps realising he can’t avoid “it” forever. “You’re right, I don’t always like talking about it. Sometimes I do. I’ll bang on and on about it like you wouldn’t believe. Depends who’s asking, a lot of the time. But you and I … no offence, but we’ve always talked about other things, so it just seems … wrong.”
“Okay.”
“But there are things you don’t like talking about as well, I suppose? Like earlier.”
“Er … yeah.”
“Emotions don’t seem to be your favourite.”
I shrug. “Good ones are okay.”
“They’re all good, though. Feeling sad, feeling angry, it’s all completely necessary. Especially if you’re gonna be a writer. You can’t just wander around with a drunken grin on your face. I mean, when I write songs, they’re not all happy. It’d be duller than f*ck if they were.”
I nod, trying to ignore the four hundred questions instantly racked up in my mental outbox. I feel like I’m studying the eating habits of a particularly rare bird, and that it’s standing in front of me right now, chomping away. One move and I’ll scare it off.
“And the best stuff I ever wrote,” he concludes, “was when I was feeling like utter shit every day. It’s horrible at the time, I wouldn’t recommend it, but you know—you gotta go through it.”
This nugget digested, we move on to other topics. Yes, I could try to press him more. But frankly, I’m exhausted. And the unavoidable fact is we’re getting on well, but every time the talk goes anywhere near his music we take a nosedive into a steaming heap of conversational manure. “Just try and enjoy it for what it is,” instructed Alan (the real one) on the phone earlier. “Be a bit grateful.” So, in one of my rare instances of following Alan’s advice, I do. And in fact, miraculously, I start to enjoy myself. We finish that drink, then have another. We talk some more about Sainsbury Sid. We talk about my “project” and how it could perhaps develop. We talk about each other’s parents, a bit more about childhood, a little about school and teenage years. Then, finally, we return to Sid.
“Well, I think you should go for it,” I state confidently. “Don’t worry about what I say. I’m just a miserable git who reads a lot of Iain Banks.”
“He’s fantastic,” comments Webster.
“Of course,” I concur, “but hardly the type of thing that would put you in the mood for a kids’ book. No, I reckon you’re onto a good thing, and with those illustrations I think it’ll be a lot of fun.”
“Wow, Alan. You’re actually starting to sound relatively optimistic.”
“Thanks,” I reply, with a guilty smile. “But it needs some work still, I think … to bring it up to the standard of the illustrations.”
“All right then, Mr. Expert. How about this? I’m going away in a week’s time. Until then I’ve got quite a bit of production work to do, so what if … we reserved an entire afternoon of mucking about, properly, at my computer, on my stuff—and some of yours, if you want—get it into a shape where I think it’s fun and you don’t think it’s crap. Then we’ll go have some nosh in a pub.”
The pair of trappist ales I’ve consumed leave me so delighted with this idea, which I assume means a visit to his flat, that in my rush to accept I don’t think to ask him where he’s going. But then, I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
After we’ve drained our beers and said goodbye (he’s going onwards to town in another taxi), I board the bus and feel something approaching contentment. It’s perhaps on the same rugby pitch as that rush of pleasure I received all those years ago, at the Harlow Square, frugging away, not five yards from Lance Webster, feeling that you’re genuinely where the action is; that the best of life is occurring right there, and that you’re not merely looking at it through a frosty window, vicariously trying to catch whatever scraps you can. I may not have my award-winning story of the last days of the Thieving Magpies, but in a funny, roundabout sort of way, I have become good friends with their lead singer.
All in all, quite a good thing.
And that’s not all, folks.
When I finally return home—via, of course, the off-licence (well, I’ve got something to be happy about now, haven’t I?)—I treat myself to a round of the “Best of” game. This is a game where you close your eyes and stand in front of your CDs or records, letting your index finger search freely, and whatever album it eventually arrives at, you have to play the best song—in the picker’s opinion—of that artist or band. Playing this game at Alan’s is amazing because of the size of both his speakers and music collection; at my place it’s a bit limited, but I crack open a beer and shortly find myself listening blissfully to Beck’s “Sissyneck,” the Foo Fighters’ “For All the Cows,” REM’s “Orange Crush” (their best song is actually “Sweetness Follows” but I decided to bend the rules a bit in the interest of keeping things happy), The Cardigans’ “Been It,” Senseless Things’ “Easy to Smile,” Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host,” Thieving Magpies’ “Little House on the Flight Path,” Blur’s “Blue Jeans,” ABBA’s “Hole in Your Soul,” Drugstore’s “El President,” Beef’s “Lazen Hags,” The Beatles’ “Lady Madonna,” The Mission’s “Tower of Strength,” Pop Will Eat Itself’s “Inside You” and finally “Walk-In Disaster” from Lance Webster’s solo album. After this I get Magpies-centric and also play “A Good Time Was Had by None” and the live version of “Zeitgeist Man”—a relentless, charging stomp of a number, which finds me leaping around my room as if at the gig itself. I catch my reflection in the window and wonder what on earth Lance would think if he could see me now, merely hours after asking which band he once belonged to, bouncing to his records with such verve that I actually whack my head on my standard lamp and spill some beer on my laptop.
I notch the volume down a tad and mop my long-suffering computer with an old T-shirt, then decide to make sure everything’s still working by checking my emails. Imagine my surprise when there’s one sitting there from a certain “William F”—which turns out to be this:
From: WILLIAM F ([email protected])
Sent: 5 May 2007 09:54:34 -0500
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: the geeks shall inherit the earth
Dear Clive
What?? I can’t believe you’re not a completely bitter 33-year-old drunken mess. You should know that’s the minimum prerequisite for anyone who went to our school. Have you gone the route of obese and balding? I’m working on it.
So, that Clive Beresford, eh? I’m mentally flicking through all the Clive Beresfords I know. If you’re writing to me about Alternative Heroes then you must be—wait! The former editor of Vorsprung Durch Peanut! Well, well. Sorry about Spike Island, eh? You bloody well should be. It may be seventeen (f*ck!) years ago, but you’ll still be hearing from my solicitors. Yes, I remember Alan Potter. Tell you the truth, I always thought he was a bit of a dullard, but there you go. If you’re thinking about that incident you must be feeling nostalgic yourself. Yes, that was me sticking the sticker up. How amazing that you saw it! I sold a flat in Farringdon recently and when I cleared out one of the bedrooms I found a whole load of stuff like that. After a few drinks I decided to have a bit of a trip down memory lane, got a friend to drive me up there, and to the Garage and even past Camden Palace (nice to see they’ve changed its name to something sensible … what the f*ck is Koko??!!), while listening to this brill compilation tape I also found (Carter, New FADs, Cardiacs, Kitchens of Distinction, Sandkings, Eat). A lot of it sounds much better than I thought it would.
So what are you doing nowadays? Still writing? I found a lot of stuff on forum pages that seems to be written by you, and your Amazon review section is awesome, they should start paying you. Yes, life’s rumbling on for me and there’s a lot to be happy about, I must admit. I got passable A-levels before ending up at Bristol University, which was a riot (come to think of it, I think I caused a few). After Bristol I did some commercial graphic design, screwed that up and worked for a bank (similar to working with zombies, but with better pay), and then finally packed it all in to do my own art and comic stuff. Haven’t looked back since and am having a ball writing and drawing, running a little company and even occasionally being a newspaper and magazine critic—I can’t believe people trust the opinion of a lunatic like me!
I’ve lost contact too with just about everyone from school. I did get a mail from Ben Simons actually—surprisingly I didn’t immediately write back with, “Ah, my old friend!!”
So, want to meet up for a beer soon to thrash out the highs and lows of the last sixteen years? Let me know and I’ll give you a shout when I’m next in London, probably in a couple of weeks.
Cheers
Billy
Thoughts that immediately strike me:
There appear to be no hard feelings. Or maybe life is just too damn good now for him to care.
Clearly he no longer lives in London; I wonder if he works out of his firm’s New York office?
He “sold a flat in Farringdon”? The “a” would suggest it’s one of many. Hmm. How the other half live.
Seems to be a funny blend of modesty about his business and artistic achievements with a David Brent-style pretend modesty regarding his personality (the comments about the riots and being a lunatic). Generally he sounds levelheaded, though.
He’s right. Amazon should start paying me.
He’s also right about Alan. I love him dearly but a dullard he certainly is.
But really—how interesting. I wonder what he’s like in person. I know it shouldn’t affect the way I think, but it seems funny that someone so obviously successful could be … normal. I suppose I’ll be finding out in a few weeks when he jets in.
Billy Flushing. Good grief, Charlie Brown.
And after that, something quite strange happens. Although it’s just past ten o’clock on a Saturday night, and I’ve had no more than three drinks today, a bizarre wave of tiredness engulfs me and I decide to go to bed. I stick on something mellow (Elliott Smith’s XO) and settle down to an unusually satisfied and worry-free sleep from which I don’t stir for the entire night, apart from when Polly crashes in around three to ask if I’ve got any spare condoms.
For once, a chapter ends on a happy note.
But don’t you worry.
I’m sure I’ll f*ck it all up somehow.