SUGGESTED LISTENING: Longpigs, The Sun Is Often Out (Mother, 1996)
Farewell,
Zeitgeist Man
At around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 8 April 1998, Lance Webster walked into BFM’s headquarters on London’s Mortimer Street, ostensibly for a meeting with his former label’s product and marketing team about a planned Thieving Magpies “greatest hits” release. He signed in with security, settled himself down cross-legged by the lifts, hoisted a large hand-painted sign bearing the legend say no to pointless records and remained there until removed by police at around four.
During his one-hour, one-man demonstration, a wave of gossip swept through the London offices of the British music industry. From record company to management office, rock venue to promoter, press agency to music paper—the telephone-propelled whispers of derision streaked across the city until a small crowd of highly amused and merrily intoxicated industry representatives gathered on the pavement outside to catch a glimpse of the fallen indie idol and his latest madcap blunder. I myself was halfway through my first—and, as it happened, last—week working as a staff writer for the dying Britpop rag Craze; I shelved my workload and jumped in a taxi, arriving on Mortimer Street to find I was Webster’s sole supporter.
To add stinging insult to considerable injury, Webster had dressed from head to toe in white (a reference point woefully displaying his inflated opinion of his intentions) and had printed a stack of information leaflets, which he handed to anyone entering or exiting the lifts, painstakingly listing BFM’s crimes against the campaigner himself, his erstwhile group and British music fans in general. The rambling and frequently repetitive copy boiled down to three main points:
that BFM had effectively “assassinated” the Thieving Magpies via a sustained policy of underspend, forcing them to embark on a massively overlong tour to promote The Social Trap, accompanied by a level of financial support fit for a “recently signed band on their first outing” rather than an act who’d just sold four million albums. “But we were an ‘old school’ alternative band,” harped the leaflet, “so obviously we were used to slumming it.”
that the same label “blackmailed” Webster into swiftly releasing a “substandard” solo album (1997’s Commercial Suicide) to fulfil his contractual obligations.
that “greatest hits” albums are an utter swindle and merely a quick, cheap, easy way for record companies to make pots of cash out of their old catalogue. BFM’s decision to release such an album by a band they themselves had “destroyed” proved they had respect for neither their artists nor the listening public.
While there may have lurked a grain of truth in all three charges, the fact it was Lance Webster who chose to bring them, and in such a public and pathetic manner, struck a distinctly incongruous note. In the weeks and months following the Magpies’ infamous final performance in August 1995, Webster appeared to do everything in his power to sabotage attempts at salvaging the band’s career: prohibiting further single releases, refusing requests to record new material, rubbishing their output whenever the opportunity arose, even blocking plans to stage a special free gig for those who’d been present at the abortive Aylesbury show. When the entity known as Thieving Magpies officially ceased to exist in March 1996, Webster redirected his bile towards the record industry itself, calling it a “coke-addled circus of pointless, peripheral morons,” adding petulantly that “everything was fine before Britpop came along and f*cked everything up.”
The typewriters of the music press duly veered between ignoring the man completely (NME), encouraging hot debate as to whether he was right or plain bonkers (Melody Maker) and merciless mockery (Craze, Select, Vox). A number of publications mentioned the continued absence of Gloria Feathers, musing that Webster seemed a very lost and unfortunate soul without her apparently “cosmic” guidance. For my own part, still scribbling as hard as I could for my fanzine Definitely Not (which aimed to give space to anything but Britpop), I went as far off the scale as you could imagine:
The behaviour of the man is admittedly perplexing, but how can anyone be surprised? He’s spent the last ten years giving us precisely what we wanted: consistently brilliant, inventive alternative rock, endlessly witty and thought-provoking lyrics, exhilarating live shows and entertaining interviews. But he made one mistake; and now you’ve all decided you don’t want him anymore. You’re either too drunk, too stupid or you’ve shoved too much white shit up your nose to realise that Lance Webster, and a few others like him, are the reason you’re able to do what you do today. None of these Britpop bands, none of your shitty little magazines, would be selling anything if he hadn’t done the groundwork. If you sat down and examined your rock history for one second, you’d realise he’s the closest thing Britain’s ever had to its own Cobain. And who are you clueless pricks worshipping instead? The Gallagher brothers: a pair of charmless, primeval fools who’ve somehow learned to use a microphone and string a few chords together. They’re the kings of your pitiable little world, and you lap it up like the weak, brain-dead, sycophantic little cunts that you are.
But irrespective of your opinion on the man, it came to everyone’s surprise in the summer of that year when it emerged that Lance Webster would be appearing at a brand-new festival, V96, to road-test material for an upcoming solo tour and album. Odder still, he had agreed to a midafternoon slot on the weekend’s Britpop-heavy second stage, sandwiched between Space and Kula Shaker. Even the choice of festival itself was puzzling; as quickly became clear, everything about the clean, well-ordered V was emphatically “new school,” from the wooden walkways of the inner arena to the ticketed method of purchasing drinks. Still, a couple of thousand faithful dragged themselves away from the delights of Mike Flowers Pops on the main stage and waited with bated breath or (in my case) bitten-down-almost-to-the-cuticle fingernails for Webster’s appearance, hoping that this time he would be sober.
In retrospect, it probably would have been better if he’d been drunk. Accompanied by nothing more than an acoustic guitar and an expressionless male piano player barely into his teens, he slouched on, uttered no word of greeting and proceeded to play six of the most dismal ballad-style numbers imaginable, none of them bearing even the faintest hallmark of the man’s former prowess. His voice retained its range and power, but the material it warbled was of such a bewilderingly low standard that half the audience were gone by the end of the first song. The remainder clapped politely (I remember thanking the gods he hadn’t tried doing this at Reading) and steeled themselves for the next intake of bilge. Webster spoke only once, before the final track, informing us that “this is David over here; he’s doing music A-level”—far from the expected, bitter slagging of all things Britpop which might at least have been worth watching. The few onlookers who’d bothered to stick around sighed and gradually sloped off to see … well, anything.
Although in its own way as derisory as the Magpies’ Aylesbury show, Webster’s V96 performance had the unexpected result of temporarily killing the Lance bashing; why bother, when he’d done such a good job of it himself? Consequently, by the time reports of a completed debut solo album circulated the following spring, Webster had as good a chance as ever of redeeming himself. Frustratingly, he both did and didn’t.
On the one hand, no one could deny he’d made a decent record. It was mercifully bereft of any material debuted at V96 and featured a lean combination of conventional rock and electronics, not a million miles from the sound of certain tracks on Blur and OK Computer, two of 1997’s biggest releases. Most of the songs matched the quality of those on The Social Trap (“The Bad Life,” “Blissful Indignance”), a few of them (“Walk-In Disaster,” “His Fax Beats Out the Blues”) as convincing as anything the Magpies had ever recorded. All in all, Webster could hardly claim BFM forced him to put a “substandard” record out.
So much for the good news. Sadly, his behaviour throughout the summer of 1997 capably supplied the bad. For a start, the album was mixed, mastered and ready by April, but for reasons best known to himself a managerless Webster insisted on holding the release back, employing various delaying tactics: unexpectedly lengthy publishing negotiations, dissatisfaction with artwork, sudden loss of confidence with the final mix, illness, disappearing abroad, even alleged jury service. At last, a firm date of 18 August was agreed upon: later than BFM would have liked, but thank God they were finally getting the thing out there. They even grudgingly agreed to the rather portentous title. Only after the date had been set in stone did they realise Oasis’ highly anticipated third album Be Here Now was scheduled to arrive—unusually—on the Thursday of the same week, and not the following Monday as originally planned. Evidently having acquired this information via the few industry contacts he had left, Lance Webster was quietly ensuring his album would receive as little attention as possible.
In addition, Webster refused almost all interviews, only agreeing to a handful of continental publications, a few in the States and a short chat with the Big Issue, in which his monosyllabic grunts were so worthless the feature was ultimately abandoned. A UK tour was arranged, then scrapped—again, the phantom jury service cited—Webster honouring only a one-off date at London’s Borderline, where he enraged punters by starting his set ten minutes before the doors opened and ordering his support band to play after he’d finished.
Looking back, it’s amazing any of his fans continued to bother with him at all. But I recall hearing the strong, reassuring sound of “Walk-In Disaster” emerge from my radio that summer, and with it the promise of similar things to come; I remember finally getting my hands on Commercial Suicide and grinning like an idiot for practically its whole length, such was the cocktail of relief and joy. However, I hadn’t been one of the poor bastards at the Borderline show. In the end, it was people like me who ensured the album entered the UK chart at twenty-five; far from the heights scaled by even The Social Trap, but also far from disastrous. In Europe the record fared even better, scoring a top-five showing in the charts of both Denmark and the Netherlands; although the likelihood of a hit in these territories was significantly boosted by Webster actually bothering to grace them with his presence, even dispensing that rarest of Webster commodities: a proper gig. It was for the Danish one of these that I decided Definitely Not’s shoestring budget could stretch to a Copenhagen plane ticket.
Digressing for a moment, it’s one of the ironies in what might generously be described as my career in music journalism that both of my “breaks”—one that I allowed to slip away unfulfilled, the other so short-lived as to render it almost irrelevant—came from publications I despised. For years I had tried to interest my beloved Melody Maker in bits and pieces, but met with zero response (apart from the editor of the letters page). In the autumn of 1994 a friend who worked at the NME whispered to me that a recruitment drive could be taking place, advising me to send in some material, which I did; a week later I got a message to call the apparently interested editor. Over half a dozen phone conversations with Alan in the days that followed, we examined my position. Aside from the knee-jerk dislike of NME proudly held by all Maker devotees, we genuinely couldn’t bear the writers, the layout, the music it championed, even the paper it was printed on. But, unsurprisingly, the greatest portion of our disgust was generated by their own hatred for the Thieving Magpies. All their albums, with the strange exception of The Social Trap, received terrible NME reviews, and interviews were always peppered with bitchy asides from the writer. Webster himself was philosophical about the situation: “It’s healthy to have enemies,” he bragged. “You can’t have everyone liking you. Christ, we’d be even more popular then … I’d have to buy a bigger house! It’d be a nightmare.” Still, to us, this represented the organ’s greatest crime. Unable to decide, I caught the train to Manchester that weekend so Alan and I could thrash out the pros and cons of any potential employment at the NME together. Just before I left on the Sunday afternoon, we finally reached a decision, over which Alan’s rational business head reigned: as a purely “foot in the door” exercise my pride could temporarily be swallowed, so I would call Stamford Street the following morning and feign enthusiasm for whatever was being offered. I bade Alan farewell and settled back on the London train with a two-litre bottle of cider and Soundgarden on my stereo. By the time the train hit Rugby I’d finished all the drink, permanently reversed the decision—and Definitely Not was born.
As you’ve probably gathered, I never really got Britpop. I fully agreed with Webster’s thesis that it was a fairly decent little scene with some fairly decent music. It was not, as rock historians often desperately scribble, the most important and influential movement in British music over the last twenty-five years. For a start, that’s a claim to a pretty weak accolade; there’ve only really been two of the damn things, and even then Britpop lost by some distance to its one competitor, acid house, whose musical influence remains almost omnipresent, registering (albeit sometimes unwittingly) on the dial of every current artist from John Lydon to Shirley Bassey All that Britpop has given us is some faintly memorable pub songs and an opportunity for a band like the Kaiser Chiefs to exist: a group in every way inferior to the Barron Knights.
But then, Britpop never really got me either. Everything about the effect it had on me was wrong, or at least at odds with what everyone else seemed to be feeling. I detested Oasis, from the moment I heard the opening chords of “Shakermaker” to the first time I listened in disbelief as Liam Gallagher twattily yelled “Good evening, Great Britain!” on a BBC session. I loved Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish but considered Parklife a motley collection of disjointed ditties which sagged badly in the middle (The Great Escape was far better, but now everyone else hates it). I didn’t like the way all the indie fans in England suddenly cut their hair. My favourite bands of the era (Longpigs, Dubstar, Marion) were the ones who seemed to die immediately afterwards. My favourite songs (Sleeper’s “What Do I Do Now,” My Life Story’s “12 Reasons Why I Love Her,” Supernatural’ “The Day Before Yesterday’s Man,” Bennett’s “Mum’s Gone to Iceland”) were far from the biggest hits of the period. It was all very much like a jolly good party which someone had forgotten to send me an invitation to. When the Magpies returned in 1995 I felt vindicated that their success still remained, but when the tidal wave of backlash began after the Aylesbury debacle, I experienced, as you’ve seen, fury such as I hadn’t felt since a day in 1981 when my sister melted all my Easter chocolate on a radiator. All of this bile flowed straight into Definitely Not, which found a gratifyingly large circulation despite my heaping praise on the unlikeliest of people in my determination to crush the Britpop hyperbole:
I had the most marvellous argument at the weekend over a few drinks in the Jeremy Bentham. Unfortunately someone brought along a friend who I’d already earmarked as a goon on account of his Oasis T-shirt. However this was tolerated until a Phil Collins song (“Sussudio”) randomly came on the pub’s stereo.
“Aw, what the f*ck are they playing this shit for?” began the goon. “I thought we’d seen the last of this bollocks.”
“What d’you mean?” I enquired innocently.
“I mean,” he replied, a smug tone creeping into his voice, “now the revolution has come we shouldn’t have to sit in a pub listening to Phil Collins.”
“You don’t like Phil Collins.”
“Whether I like him or not isn’t the point. We have real music now, real honest British pop played on real instruments … by the people, for the people … created by real characters living real life, not hiding away in their Surrey mansions staring at their gold discs.”
“I’ve always quite liked old Phil,” I muttered, biding my time.
“Yeah,” scoffed the goon, “the same way I like putting my f*cking head in the oven.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Phil Collins.”
“No, other than he’s a complete cock. You don’t honestly like him?”
“Yeah, I do, actually. He’s got an ounce of intelligence, which is more than those knobs combined,” I concluded, gesturing at his T-shirt.
“Oh, come on, Clive,” joined in one of the others. “If it was a choice between having Liam Gallagher or Phil Collins round for dinner, you’d definitely go for—”
“Phil Collins,” I insisted. “He’d be a perfectly charming, courteous, entertaining guest. You could quiz him about twenty-five years in the music business as opposed to two crappy little years. Plus there’s the added bonus that he can actually use cutlery.”
“He’s the devil,” said the goon, shaking his head and sipping his vodka tonic.
“Oh, yeah? And how much good has Liam f*cking Gallagher done? I don’t see him doing charity work. That’s the trouble with this f*cking Britpop shit, everyone thinks the sun shines out of the Gallaghers’ arses, when all they’re doing is shoving royalties straight up their noses. People like Phil Collins get completely pissed on now, even though he’s probably done more for ‘the people,’ as you put it, than all the f*cking Britpop twats put together.”
Meant every bloody last word of it, as well. I don’t remember seeing the goon again after that.
So, another deeply ironic note struck when, in the autumn of 1997, I received a call (on my first-ever mobile phone) from Stuart Harris, editor of Craze—the most defiantly, laddishly Britpop of all the new “music” magazines. Harris had finally realised the musical foundation on which his magazine was built had long since passed its sell-by date, and that diversification would be essential for Crazes survival. He’d been aware of Definitely Not for a while, he explained, but had been struck by—of all things—the passionate review I had written for Lance Webster’s show at Copenhagen’s Christiania Grey Hall:
No apologies will be made for the liberal use of superlatives and melodrama in this review. No explanation will be given for how glorious is the sight of Webster, his head thrown back, his face frozen in that familiar but long-missed plateau of exhilaration. I refuse to hold back when I say that tonight a lost lover is welcomed home, a long-dreamed-of kiss has been returned, a brutal husband has finally chosen to be kind. The bittersweet passion of “More Than Ever,” the adrenaline rush of “Walk-In Disaster,” the bite of “Disposal”—it’s all here, and more. And the acoustic encore of “This Is What You Wanted” is almost too much to bear; the years of disappointment, the hurt and the yearning, the purple, the blue and the red. The wounds. They’re all healed. The silver and gold return. It’s all better now.
Yeah, I know. What can I say? I was probably stoned. For some reason, Harris saw this and thought a slice of my old-fashioned Maker-style gothic waxings would be a good antidote to the tiresomely thuggish scrawlings of people like deputy editor Tony Gloster, who was still snarling from our run-in during The Boo Radleys at Aylesbury Over the next six months Harris kept an eye on my work, all the while arguing with Gloster about my potential involvement, as I discovered later. Finally, a week before Webster pulled his Lennon-style stunt at BFM’s headquarters, Harris offered me a position to belatedly develop the magazine’s “non-Britpop wing.” Believing (rightly, as it turned out) that it would be my last chance to write for a real publication, rather than one I had to staple together myself, I cast my principles aside and accepted.
Meanwhile, Lance Webster’s future was also looking slightly more rosy. Following his European dates and the lacklustre release of the single “Blissful Indignance,” Webster was without a record deal for the first time since 1986. This state of affairs appeared to revitalise him: he reunited with manager Bob Grant, returned to the studio and started hunting for a new label, with Music Week reporting in March ’98 that negotiations had commenced with a “prominent indie.” How those chickens must have been counted at the beginning of that April: by the label, whoever they were, by Bob Grant, by me.
Then the “madness” returned.
I remember sitting at my desk in Craze’s poky little Camden Town office, wrestling with a pile of paperwork, trying to eavesdrop on the new Massive Attack album which Stuart Harris was reviewing next door, when my archenemy Gloster (still dressing like a cut-price Graham Coxon) slithered into the room and sardonically informed me of my hero’s antics across town.
“Isn’t it time someone sectioned him?” he laughed, sliding out again.
It was three thirty. Two hours of official work time to go, but the monthly issue deadline was looming and people normally seemed to stay until at least seven. But I felt so nervous, fidgety, unable to relax or concentrate—as if I was needed, somehow. The bastard Gloster had done it on purpose to torture me. I pushed papers around my desk pathetically for the next five minutes before calculating that if I cabbed it over there for a quick half an hour I could be back by five; then I could continue working until the building was locked, if need be. I dashed out onto Pratt Street and was in a taxi two minutes later.
What good I imagined I’d be able to do was debatable. There was a crowd of knobs on the pavement outside the BFM building, some holding pints from the nearby pub, some whom I recognised from rival publications or record labels. Unfortunately one of them also recognised me.
“Eh! It’s ‘definitely never’ bloke.”
“Hi,” I greeted him abruptly, and pushed my way through the doors.
Inside the foyer the scene was grimly familiar. The receptionists were attempting to continue as normal while four security guards, plus a few members of label staff and poor old Bob Grant, surrounded the white-shrouded figure. I could see his ridiculous sign, still held aloft, and after a few seconds I spied that the fool had shaved all his hair off. It was apparent that no one had yet tried any force; perhaps they remembered what had happened at Aylesbury.
From that moment, “madness” also took hold of me. A receptionist had already asked me what my business was but I was too preoccupied to answer, so a fifth security guard, clearly given the marginally less exciting job of keeping the building free from further undesirables, now approached to usher me back outside.
“Lance!” I screamed suddenly. “Lance! Get a hold of yourself! You don’t need to do this!”
“Right,” snapped the guard, grabbing my forearm. “Out! Now!”
“It’s okay, Lance! You’ve done enough! Thousands of people still love you! We understand!”
“Get out!” continued the guard, increasing his grip to Chinese-burn level and yanking me towards the door. “Or I’ll throw you out!”
My arm hurt so much that I obeyed and stepped back; but I continued to shout.
“Don’t listen to those cocks! It’ll come around—it’ll all come around! You don’t need to fight anymore!”
And with that I was back out on the pavement, facing the astonished crowd. After a few seconds they started to snigger so I moved a little way down the street.
“Twat,” I heard one of them say as a distant police siren started to become louder.
The next few minutes I only hazily recall. I know a police van must have arrived, out of which some policemen must have emerged, but only because they came out of the building some minutes later with a handcuffed Webster. I remember him looking relatively calm and resigned: a far cry from the ball of wrath that raged in August 1995. He no longer had his sign (I later saw one of the beery knobs carrying it off as a souvenir). The police were firm but gentle, perhaps because he looked like a monk—and few people would be rough with a monk. The industry representatives were amused, but didn’t seem to jeer or shout. No—the most animated, wild and enraged person on the scene, by a country mile, was me.
I wept. I howled. I shouted all manner of terrible things (“Why are you cunts doing this? He’s done nothing wrong!”), I almost took a running kick at the side of the police van but stopped myself, thankfully. Once Webster was inside, most of my monologue was directed at him: “We won’t forget you”—“You’ve done so much”—probably, I fear, “We love you”—and other desperate garbage. You’d think he was being put away for twenty-five years on a false murder charge, I was making such a bloody fuss. My final utterance I remember being “Farewell, zeitgeist man,” to which a suddenly teacherlike Bob Grant turned and said, “Oh, for God’s sake, will you be quiet.”
By the end of that day, three things had happened:
George Michael had been arrested in a Los Angeles public toilet for a supposedly lewd act with an undercover policeman, thus snatching every inch of entertainment-related news space available. To the best of my knowledge, the Webster incident didn’t make it into the national press; it barely even made it into the music press.
Lance Webster was released from Marylebone Police Station without charges, but with an instruction to seek psychiatric help. Whether he did or not is unknown. He never signed the rumoured record deal and, apart from a small solo gig in Bergen, Norway, the following year, effectively retired from the music business.
I was summarily sacked from Craze magazine. In addition to my leaving crucial items of work undone for two hours on the week of an issue deadline, eyewitnesses had recounted my embarrassing hysterics to Stuart Harris, who had finally been convinced by Gloster that I was a nonstarter. In any case, the beleaguered Craze folded within months.
And why, I hear you desperately wail, am I telling you all this?
Well.
Partly because it’s now just under a month since the Artist Formerly Known as Lance disappeared from both the pub and my life—after discovering that nice, boring, timid and interest-free “Alan Potter” was actually nasty, opinionated, threatening and borderline-alcoholic Clive Beresford—and I’ve got f*ck all else to write about.
But mainly because I’m plundering my memory banks, racking my brains and scouring the very bottom of my soul with a Brillo pad, trying to work out why the hell he would choose to send me this:
From: GEOFF WEBSTER ([email protected])
Sent: 1 June 2007 07:23:46
To: [email protected]
Subject: (no subject)
Dear Clive
I’ve spent a f*ckload of time and money trying to escape the person I was ten years ago, and I’ve no desire to meet him or be him again. I don’t like being lied to, either. But I suppose I never got around to thanking you for all you did, so here I am. Also, now the past has been dug up, I might need your help sometime burying it again. Be ready.
Geoff
This arrived two days ago. Since then I’ve done very little but stare at it and wonder what the hell he could possibly be on about. I haven’t shown anyone. Even Alan. Actually make that particularly Alan. The tone of deathly seriousness makes me feel very peculiar every time I look at it, like someone’s thrown a handful of rice down the back of my T-shirt. Yesterday the reason why occurred to me: it’s like Lance himself is speaking to me, Clive, for the very first time. Today I realised it’s not like at all. It is.
Other things have changed since Webster’s departure: some good, some bad, some significant, some irrelevant. It’s become summer (good). I’ve started a temporary job of quite breathtaking banality (bad), but the pay is decent (good), so there is a tiny shaft of light at the end of the overdraft tunnel. Alan, awkward bastard that he is, has suddenly decided to take an avid interest in the whole Webster thing, ringing me up on a twice-daily basis with a new theory (“You know what, man, I reckon he knew it was you all along and was just winding you up”), or to ask if there’ve been any “updates.” The only update I know of is that Webster’s flat has been put on the market. Occasionally I see an estate agent taking people in there. Last weekend I saw the smaller of the two roadies (was it Malcolm?) coming down the outside steps with a large cardboard box; he glared at me, so I glared back. No sign of Webster himself.
Until the arrival of Webster’s email, the most significant thing that’s happened—although not directly connected to the Webster saga—is that Billy Flushing has been in touch again. He sent me a breezy text message earlier this week saying he was in town, and would I like to go for “brunch on Sunday”? Picturing a sunny, pleasantly busy pub, Bloody Marys, a stout fry-up and some fit waitresses, I immediately replied in the affirmative; but then was a little perturbed to receive a call from his PA on Friday giving me details of a members’ club in Soho where the dress code is “smart casual” (ye gods). So now I am in my work trousers, black trainers, an acceptable-looking pink shirt I found in a charity shop yesterday, and a blue jacket I’d forgotten I owned. I look pretty absurd and I’ve got the faintest notion that Billy is perhaps slyly punishing me for being such a dick at school. You know about most of this. You know about me “ditching the dweeb,” letting Alan steal Billy’s role both as my friend and as assistant editor of the Peanut. You do not yet know about Spike Island.
Perhaps it’s time you did.