SUGGESTED LISTENING: Pixies, Doolittle (4AD, 1989)
My life completely
changed after I
saw Lance Webster
coming out of
that dry cleaner’s
It starts with an unusual dream.
Of all the dreams I’ve had in my life that feature Keith Richards boisterously playing the piano at the side of a large stage while a veiled Adam Ant slow-dances with Syd Barrett, this one is definitely the best.
Before my rapidly moving eyes, the dancers separate and prance about like banshees, emitting the appropriate hysterical shrieks and sobs. Then, in an almost biblical vignette, Ant weeps at the edge of the stage while Barrett affectionately wraps the veil around his head, moaning, “Weep no more, Stuart—weep no more.”
“Roger, you have healed me,” Ant replies, and they embrace.
Keith Richards laughs heartlessly and continues his piano torture, pausing occasionally to yell at a TV audience that the donation target has yet to be reached and could we please all go to the website now.
Even through my beer-induced slumber, it intrigues me that while Richards is every inch the rancid present-day specimen we barely believe can still manage a chord shape, Syd Barrett appears exactly as he did in 1966: long brown hair, chiselled features, pretty and infinitely capable, Pink Floyd at the height of their psychedelic powers. My dream also features the Adam Ant of yesteryear, in his case the 1982 model, youthful, dark and dashing, having newly lost his Ants. But the presence of the Internet and other mise en dream suggests a far more recent happening. Of course, dreams can f*ck with time and space whenever they feel like it, but there lingers in my brain a certain relevance to this particular warping. Similarly, as the dream’s end credits roll, a final bewildered utterance from Barrett seems also to signify something fairly important: “I’ve lost Geoffrey. Where’s Geoffrey? I’m looking for Geoffrey Webster.”
Geoffrey Webster?
Who the hell is Geoffrey Webster?
The question bounces around my aching head as I rise, clean my teeth, fling on some clothes, down a few Alka-Seltzer and rush out of my flat. I must’ve had a few more drinks than I can recall last night, for I’m ashamed to say the bus has trundled over halfway to Old Street before it hits me who Geoffrey Webster is.
Lance Webster.
The man who, as far back as 1984, decided his given name could and would not be the name of an internationally famous purveyor of alternative rock ’n’ roll, ditching Geoffrey for the infinitely more viable abbreviation of his grandfather’s Christian name, Lancelot.
The front man whose charmed, platinum-selling world plummeted headfirst into the contents of a rancid festival toilet before the eyes of the indie cosmos one wretched summer night in 1995.
The former star (“the closest thing Britain’s ever had to its own Cobain,” as I once wrote in some dreadful fanzine) whose subsequent career became an increasingly pitiful series of cock-ups and false starts until he finally gave up in 1999.
And the man who I more than partly blame for the way my life has steered itself over the underwhelming course of the last nineteen years.
But enough of that.
Why was Syd Barrett looking for him?
Now, I know trying to explain dreams is an ill-advised and mostly fruitless endeavour. If there’s any deep-seated, sinister Freudian reason for the fact that members of my family (particularly the male ones) have been known to morph into my ex-girlfriend halfway through dream conversations, I really don’t want to know it. But usually dreams at least feature people that I actually care about, or have thought about recently. I’ve never been remotely bothered about Pink Floyd, and Keith Richards is an overrated guitarist in one of the planet’s most overrated rock bands, as far as I can tell. It’s true I’ve developed a keen interest in Adam Ant’s early career over the last few years, but why he was hanging out with these other cocks I have little idea. So, I’m forced to analyse this dream a bit. Plus I have a moderate hangover and there isn’t much to do at work: ideal circumstances for ruminating over reveries.
The best explanation I can come up with is that Keith Richards was presiding over a charity television show at which pseudonym-using, fallen-from-grace pop stars had the old wounds of constant media buggery healed via a dancing ritual performed by their look-alikes, while a watching audience donated money. Lance Webster was next on the bill (perhaps a duet with Gary Glitter) but, true to form, had vanished before his allotted stage time.
Great. I’m glad to have sorted that one out.
Apart from a cursory glance at Google to see if Webster has been up to anything new that the universe might be alerting me to, I make no other attempt to find a reason for his reappearance in my psyche. My obsession—as my ex-girlfriend termed it—with Webster died in about 2002, when I’d finally tired of waiting for a follow-up to his debut solo album (Commercial Suicide, released in the same week as Oasis’ Be Here Now), but certainly his spectre has continued to clatter about in my skull like a bad relationship. It’s therefore not particularly surprising that I’m still dreaming about the man—or, more to the point, the absence of him.
It’s an otherwise uneventful day at the office. I do my usual blend of fatuous emailing, a few token work-related tasks, mindless web-surfing and keeping an eye out for Ron’s or Michael’s sudden approaches.
“Clive, this document,” announces Ron, just as I’m shutting my computer down for the day, “is an application for insurance.”
“Yes,” I answer.
“It arrived,” Ron continues, staring out of the window and fingering the sheet of paper dangerously, “at ten thirty this morning.”
“Yes,” I repeat, still unable to argue.
“Is there any particular reason why it remains in your tray, unprocessed, at a quarter to six?”
I glumly restart my machine and stay at work for another forty minutes, fantasising over what it might be like to work for a company where sometimes, just occasionally, someone looked up from their desk at half past five on a Friday evening and suggested a quick pint before home.
At some point my mobile bleeps, summoning me to some uninteresting chain pub in Islington, where I stand around with a few of my uninteresting friends as they ruminate about their week’s uninteresting highs and lows and prepare themselves for the night’s main activity: a visit to their latest uninteresting clubbing discovery. I make my excuses at ten-ish and sidle off homeward, ignoring their usual protestations. A kebab, another can of lager, a short round of commiseratory masturbation (Katherine Heigl, if you’re interested; one in a long queue of second-tier Hollywood actresses I’ve recently become excited about—last week it was Anna Faris, the week before Carrie-Anne Moss) and another painfully predictable Friday evening is over.
The next day, however, proves significantly more intriguing.
Via the least intriguing of activities, of course. I am sent by my heavily hungover flatmate, Polly, on a mission to buy some of that rank, fruited malt loaf she sometimes favours for Saturday breakfast, plus a lightbulb, paracetamol and some tampons (one of those strange selections at the checkout that I sometimes picture mixed up in a wok together—to universal funny looks from anyone I might share this musing with). The high street is crawling with shoppers and prams, as usual, so I make a swift detour into a café to wolf down my favourite sandwich (bacon and mushroom), and then continue up the street. Imagine my surprise, half a minute later, when I see a Lance Webster look-alike emerging from the dry cleaner’s with a sizeable pile of plastic-covered items.
Except, of course, it isn’t a Lance Webster look-alike.
I’m not certain at which point in the following twenty seconds I realise this. All I know is that something about him—the way he walks, the quick glance up and down the street before he sets off, possibly his shoes (rather ostentatious shiny light brown brogues)—whatever it is, it propels me to make an about-turn and hurry back down the street after him. God knows. It certainly isn’t his face, which suggests a slightly fat elder brother of my former hero. But I don’t believe any rational thought contributes to my arrival at this decision; my body seems to move of its own accord, almost as if I smell that it’s Lance Webster.
I ought to point out, this isn’t the first time this has happened. A few years ago I walked past Bj?rn Ulvaeus on Oxford Street. Again, his appearance had become less blond Swedish male pop star and more bearded, kindly uncle, but before I knew what I was doing I was running back up the other side of the road so that I could walk past him again; it’s a funny old thing. As I approached him for the second time I ran through various lines I could maybe say to him (“Sorry to bother you, I’d just like to tell you that ABBA made my childhood slightly more bearable;” “Sorry, I thought you ought to know that ABBA: The Album kicks the shit out of Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper as a classic, flawless pop masterpiece;” “Sorry, but can I just say that ‘My Love My Life’ is the song I want played at my funeral,” etc.) but wisely decided to merely saunter past, enjoying a few seconds of being metres away from a genius. Besides, what if he’d been having a bad day and had told me to piss off? I’d have probably hurled myself in front of a passing 73 bus.
Which is partly why I don’t want to address Mr. Webster. The other part being that I haven’t a clue what to ask him. My feet carry on moving up the street while I try to arrange the myriad questions and possibilities that now present themselves like a line of hopeful auditionees. Could I talk to him? Could I make friends with him? Could I interview him? Could I finally find out the truth about 12 August 1995? Could I finally find out the truth about Gloria Feathers? Could I succeed where others had failed? Could I sell the interview for vast sums of money? Could I build a successful career as a music writer on the back of that one, earth-shattering exclusive? (“It sounds like a cliché, but it really is true,” I’d tell Zane Lowe. “My life completely changed after I saw Lance Webster coming out of that dry cleaner’s.”) Most of them wholly implausible, of course, but when, I am afraid, has that ever stopped me before? And let’s not forget, I have backup from the dreamworld. Of course I can do all those things. That’s what my dream was telling me to do. Look for him. Look for Geoffrey Webster. Don’t just let him go. It was nothing less than a cosmic heads-up. All is clear.
Minutes later I’m tailing him round the corner of my own street. I’ve never really followed anyone before. I’m not doing any of the things I imagine one is supposed to do, such as keeping a reasonable distance: when he swings left down a little path to a fairly standard Victorian town house I’m probably about two metres behind him, so I have to swerve clumsily and walk straight past—which is stupid, really; had I been slightly further back I could have seen whether he’d pressed a bell or let himself in, or caught a glimpse of what was behind the door, whether or not it was a flat, all sorts of useful stuff. But no. I’m left standing halfway up my street with now raging curiosity but no further details, no plan, no desire to go back home—and crucially, no lightbulb, tampons, paracetamol or foul malt loaf for the waiting mess of headache and nausea that is Polly. Not wishing for a tricky weekend, I glumly venture back towards the high street. This is the way it’s always been with Polly and me: she bails me out, I run her errands in return. Ever since university, when she spared me from a five-hundred-pound library fine by pretending to be dead. Long story.
I spend pretty much the rest of the day in a daze, playing Thieving Magpies songs, scribbling things in my notebook, hammering stuff out on my ancient laptop and drinking cans of lager and so on. Polly’s hangover lasts until about six, at which point she buggers off to have a meal with Problem Sarah (a friend from university for whom Polly conducts weekly counselling sessions, to which I am rarely invited), leaving the flat to myself so I can do all sorts of exciting things like fall asleep in front of Parkinson and spill lager all over my bowl of Doritos.
It’s now Sunday. My twenty-four hours of thinking and recovering from the mini-encounter are just about up. And it’s fairly reasonable to announce, I have something of a plan.
But I’m not due at the pub for another half an hour. There’s time for a bit of a history lesson.
Unless you were a boring, unadventurous middle-class teenager living in a boring, unadventurous middle-class southern English town during the latter half of the 1980s, it’s almost impossible to conceive the seismic impact a man like Lance Webster and his band of Thieving Magpies could’ve had on someone like me.
Nowadays, even if you have only a passing, superficial interest in popular music, you’d be well aware of a fairly balanced selection on offer. If you’re after pure pop, you can get it. If you’re after “quality” indie, there’s heaps of it. There are entire radio stations devoted to it, for God’s sake. If it’s a middle-of-the-road, singer-songwritery thing that floats your boat, you’re inundated. And of course your myriad other genres and subgenres—metal, hip-hop, electronica, dance, folk, etc.—whatever you want, it’s on a plate, in the high street, on the World Wide Interweb, at your polygenre multi-entertainment enormoshop. But in 1987 or 1988, as far as the cautious, conservative me was concerned, you had shit pop—and that was pretty much it. It was Stock/Aitken/Waterman acts (Kylie, Jason, Rick Astley), almost-as-bad non-Stock/Aitken/Waterman acts (Five Star, Yazz, Swing Out Sister), pointless bands signed on the back of U2 (Then Jerico, T’Pau), watery trios signed on the back of A-ha (Breathe, Johnny Hates Jazz), rapidly declining Norwegian trios (A-ha), rapidly declining former teen idols (Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet), desperate attempts to find new teen idols (Bros, Wet Wet Wet), desperate attempts to find the new Smiths (The Housemartins), woefully worthy adult pop (Dire Straits, Phil Collins), woefully worthy stadium rock (U2, Simple Minds) … and the Pet Shop Boys. It’s an anxious state of affairs when the Pet Shop Boys can be described as a saving grace.
There I was, up to my waist in 1988, leafing through Smash Hits looking for, ooh, I don’t know, some really interesting article about Terence Trent D’Arby, when I saw it. Smash Hits isn’t widely remembered for its ground-breaking coverage of new rock talent, but back then the last embers of its early eighties credibility heyday were still smoking. Can’t remember now who the piece was written by, Tom Hibbert or Ian “Jocky” Cranna perhaps, but I can recite the review’s finest ingredients word for word to this day:
The hair may be long and the guitars loud ’n’ thrashy, but these gents from Reading manage to make glorious pop the way it should be: spiky words, catchy melodies and beats to make you jump around the kitchen, complete with brilliant titles such as “Have You Stopped Talking Yet?” and “I Always Hated Love Songs”—like Morrissey but less pretentious.
As enticing as the rest of it was, that last bit was what grabbed me: “like Morrissey but less pretentious.”
I didn’t get Morrissey. I do now, of course, now that my balls have fully dropped and we have The Smiths’ whole career to look back on, but I was too young in 1984 when they were doing the really good stuff, and by the time I was old enough to appreciate them, their output seemed limited to strange ditties about girlfriends in comas or disco dancers meeting sticky ends. And they were northern. Not that I have anything against northerners, but my blinkered, never-set-foot-north-of-Luton teenage self couldn’t understand how a foppish, posh-singing geezer with flowers protruding from his arse could hail from a city that looked, whenever I saw it on TV, like the set of Coronation Street.
But these Thieving Magpies sounded wicked. Guitars that were “loud ’n’ thrashy”? Pop music “the way it should be”? All in the same band? In 1988? Get me to a record shop NOW. And the fact they were from Reading, rather than East Kilbride, put a nice, cosy Home Counties spin on the whole thing. Clearly they were the band for me.
So I got me to a record shop. For such an occasion I decided to go somewhere a little more special than my town’s usual chain retailers, partly because I anticipated blank looks when mentioning the band name, but mainly because I felt this total departure from my usual buying habits (the few things I heard on the radio that didn’t disgust me) warranted a total change of scene. This was to be, after all, the very first time I had bought a record without previously hearing a note of its contents. I rose one Saturday morning, donned (in all probability) a Level 42 T-shirt, muttered something to my mum about having some homework to do with a friend and boarded the train to London.
An hour later I was struggling up the escalator of the world’s windiest tube station, Kentish Town. I’d been reliably informed by someone at school that Kentish Town was the mecca of specialist pop music, bursting with stockists that were unlikely to shirk at a request for the obscurest of discs, let alone something that had already been featured in Smash Hits. So, imagine my surprise when I found myself wandering down a breathtakingly dull, rainswept high street, punctuated by a few scary-looking Irish pubs. I walked and walked, but the only hints of anything remotely cutting-edge were a shop that sold drums and an ironmonger’s, which were hardly of interest. When the shops finally ran out I plucked up courage to ask a passerby where I might go to buy records: “Loads of places in Camden Town,” came the reply. Bugger. My idiot school informant had messed up the names. I strode the half mile back up to Kentish Town station and, blissfully unaware of the finer points of London geography, travelled the one stop to Camden, eventually locating a likely looking emporium that happened to be about two hundred metres south of the spot where I’d just asked the passerby for help.
Things didn’t get any less confusing once I was inside. I’d seen few shops that looked less like my local branch of WHSmith. Here was a world of odd, multicoloured posters and flyers advertising appearances by groups whose names I couldn’t even pronounce; of black-clad, black-haired, pale-faced characters floating aimlessly around; of background music that sounded like the neighbours were being murdered, and thousands of records arranged in no comprehensible order. What was “US New Wave”? What was “Industrial”? What was “UK Indie”? And—most significantly, for me—where was the “Rock and Pop” section?
I decided the best way of coping with my predicament was to also float around aimlessly, letting these strange new names and phrases creep into my head. Gothic. Post-punk. Front 242. Nitzer Ebb. Reading Festival. The Marquee. Spacemen 3. The Men They Couldn’t Hang. Green on Red. Fulham Greyhound. Hüsker Dü. What was all this?
I must have been in the shop for twenty minutes before the guy behind the counter (dressed in a T-shirt that announced—to my continued bemusement—“Death to the Pixies”) asked me if I was all right.
“Uh … yeah,” I lied. But then, realising I didn’t much want another perplexing, fruitless quarter of an hour to pass, added, “Um … you got any Thieving Magpies?”
“Over there,” the assistant pointed. “UK Alternative section.”
“Cheers,” I grunted. Alternative to what?
I located the appropriate rack and fished around, eventually reaching, via The Godfathers, Transvision Vamp, All About Eve, Voice of the Beehive and The Cult (some of whom I’d actually heard of), a plain, black cover that bore the legend “Thieving Magpies/ Shoot the Fish” in the favoured mock-typewriter-print font of the day. Nothing else was on the sleeve, apart from the track list (which included, to my amazement, a song called “If I’m Still Sober, You’re Still Ugly”) and a small photo of some spotty, long-haired oiks on the back, standing next to a pond.
Energised by my successful hunt, I relaxed, rifled through the other racks, chatted amiably with the assistant and eventually sauntered happily out of the shop with the Happy Mondays’ Bummed, My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything, the twelve-inch of “Touch Me I’m Sick” by Mudhoney and The Cardiacs’ BBC Session EP. I then celebrated with a fortifying pint of Guinness in the Camden Stores.
I’m lying, of course. I shuffled out with my sole purchase, ignored everything else in Camden, bought a Marks & Spencer’s sandwich and went home.
[From the Christmas 1988 edition of Slade Lane School Magazine.]
If you haven’t heard of the Thieving Magpies yet, you will soon. They are a new pop group from Reading that I discovered recently, and their debut album, Shoot the Fish, has been literally glued to my turntable for the last three weeks. It’s full of rocky guitars but the songs are brilliant. The singer is called Lance and he writes really good words, like in the song “Soapbox”:
Yesterday I spent just lying in the sunshine
Now my tan is fading and I don’t feel so good.
Most of the songs are fast and loud, but they have two really good slow songs called “Chopped Heart” and “Have You Stopped Talking Yet?” The second of these is an example of how the singer writes really angry words but juxtaposes them with a ballad melody.
None of their songs have got in the charts yet but they will soon. In fact, I predict that by this time next year they will be a household name!
Ask for Shoot the Fish this Christmas. You won’t regret it!
Clive Beresford, Form 4B
Okay, I know. It has a distinct eau de GCSE coursework about it. But it was my first piece of “proper” writing. And that was the edited version. The first draft was much better, and it included the lyrics I actually wanted to quote (the bit in “Now That You Are Fashionable” that goes “You’re standing on a sinking ship … You might find someone who gives a shit but I doubt it”). But anyway, it gives you a basic flavour of how I was feeling at the time: not two weeks after arriving home with the record, I had been prompted to begin a glittering career in music journalism—albeit one that could be mainly followed through dodgy fanzines and various publications’ letters pages. I’ve tried many times to describe quite how I felt when I played that Magpies record for the first time (through headphones on my dad’s record player, as it happened), but to this day the very best I can offer you are two desperately underwhelming clichés:
When I heard that pounding drum intro, followed by the jagged guitar and the first snatch of Lance’s searing vocal—everything felt right. Not quite a psychologically nourishing “all is right with the world” feeling, but certainly a feeling that everything was right with what I was hearing. The music did exactly what I wanted it to. The lyrics seemed every bit as cutting, cheeky and menacing as the titles suggested. They delivered on their promise. Unlike other bands of the time, it required no compromise on my part, no leap of faith, no “ignore the singing and it’s great” qualifiers (as I had to keep in mind when I first heard The Stone Roses the following year).
The album gave me an unprecedented sense of belonging. Or at least, the potential of belonging. That may sound hopelessly daft and romantic, but bear in mind that at the age of fifteen—woefully shy, covered in spots and bollocks at sport—the concept of belonging to at least something other than the Tears for Fears fan club was fairly attractive. In this music I heard things I could identify with, and therefore the promise of something import ant: if I could find others in whom it also pushed the right buttons, I might just unearth a pocket of humans I could relate to. Those who were also bored to death of the utter nonsense on Top of the Pops; tired of listening to old Madness, Blondie, Police, Jam and XTC records in the absence of anything that could excite in a similar way; bewildered by simply making do with the latest Bon Jovi or INXS album because they at least happened to use guitars; too scared to try acid house, indifferent to heavy metal and harbouring a perpetual, passive and terribly English inner rage for the mundane, mainstream or familial. But too damn straitlaced to misbehave, to stand on street corners and take drugs or mug people, and also not rich or cool enough to holiday in the Mediterranean, go skiing or have a few practice rounds of golf with Daddy. I had to find this section of similar people to whom I might belong; I had to find them now.
A set of circumstances that traditionally had driven similar disenfranchised youths to at the very least seek out the radio output of the late, great John Peel. F*ck it, I didn’t even have the sense to try that. Nor did it immediately occur to me that this world I sought was the very same world to which the Camden record shop belonged. But I found out. It took a while—six months, to be precise—but I got there. And to my credit, I succeeded because I bypassed everything else and went straight, in the spring of 1989, to a Thieving Magpies gig.
I convinced my parents to let me go by pinching a piece of letterhead from the school office and typing a likely looking note from one of the lesser-known teachers stating that, on the strength of my magazine piece, the class trip would be to see the Thieving Magpies at the Hammersmith Odeon (it was actually Brixton Academy, but I thought that would set my mother’s antennae twitching). There was also an up-front request for fifteen pounds in cash for the ticket and travel, which I innocently took to school one day in a brown envelope. Looking back on it, all sorts of things could have gone wrong, but luckily my parents were swayed by the power of the school emblem on the letter and—apart from a little vague muttering from my dad over his gin and tonic that “surely the Science Museum would be more educational”—never thought to question it. So, rigid with excitement, I went.
The first thing that threw me was how bloody massive Brixton Academy was. The “academy” bit brought to mind a sort of school hall, so I was amazed enough when I wandered up to the huge, domed building, but what really astonished me was the sheer number and variety of people who milled and queued outside. I really don’t know what I was expecting—a few lonely individuals who’d also seen the Smash Hits review, perhaps—but I certainly wasn’t prepared for an army of enormous, tattooed geezers wearing black vests, long shorts and dark boots; girls dressed similarly with dyed hair of every conceivable colour; some cheery-looking blokes with massive baggy jeans and fishing hats; a healthy yield of the kind of pale-faced, black-clad weirdo I had seen in the record shop (although there was nothing aimless or floatsome about most of them today in fact spirits were quite unfeasibly high); and a large collection of boys and girls who were a bit like older versions of me but with longer hair (mine was still an entirely nondescript short-back-and-sides job at this stage), groovy boots or trainers with coloured laces (I wore my school shoes) and far more interesting T-shirts (thankfully I had selected something neutral for the evening, and not another gem from my small but horrific selection of pop garments). It was this final, slightly more “normal” group of fans that intrigued me; could this be the long-sought crowd to which I wanted “in”?
Hefty bottles of cider and cans of beer were guzzled and discarded before the whole throng streamed through the doors into the foyer. The gig hadn’t even started but the air inside was already pungent with sweat, beer, smoke and another ever-present aroma that I later identified as patchouli oil. Alternately out of my depth and oddly at home, I found myself swept along with the tide of people towards the doors of the cavernous auditorium—where I got my next surprise. The support act (a concept I’d vaguely heard of) that began as I entered consisted of only two people: a bloke fiddling with a sort of synthesizer/record-deck combo, and another chap screaming incom pre hensibles while thrashing away at a guitar. When they’d finished their opening “song” the singer acknowledged the ripple of applause in a decidedly well-brought-up voice: “Thanks! Good evening. We’re International Brian!”
While International Brian screamed through their set I gaped at the huge hall with its incongruous white villa-style decoration, laughed at the clutch of people directly in front of the band who leapt, slammed into each other and flung their arms around (out of boredom, perhaps), bought myself a Coke (those were the days), marvelled at the collection of slogans emblazoned across people’s chests (“Dinosaur Jr,” “Info Freako,” “Unbearable,” “Heroin Satan F*ck”) and then at last prepared myself for the arrival of the mighty Magpies. I was to be disappointed. The quartet of blond-haired goons who flounced onstage to a modest cheer were in fact a second support band. What they did next beggared my already shaky belief. They kicked into their first number at such a ferocious pace that I half expected them to levitate, spontaneously combust or keel over into the pit. Guitars and hair flew in all directions, drums were mercilessly tortured and what passed for vocals were entirely indistinguishable from everything else. The storm raged for ten minutes and then crashed to a halt as the band demolished all their equipment and left. I was ready to laugh, but my fellow audience members roared their appreciation. Was that good? I had so much to learn.
As I made my way to the loo I became concerned that it might be the custom at this sort of concert for the performances to get shorter the further up the bill you went. Therefore, if International Brian’s set was half an hour and this last lot played for just under a quarter, how long would the Magpies play for? Seven, eight minutes? That was barely time for two songs. Oh well. At least I’d be home on time. Or perhaps all the groups went around again, for another go?
“Beresford!”
Eh?
“Beresford! Clive!”
Odd. Someone had the same name as me.
“Clive! Over here!”
I glanced in the direction of the voice. Sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the bar, to my amazement, was a face I recognised.
“Potter! Sorry, Alan!”
“Beresford, what the f*ck are you doing here?”
“I’m … well. You know.”
Alan Potter was in the year above me at school, which officially meant we could have nothing to do with each other, but he’d always seemed a friendly enough chap; one of the lower-sixth formers less likely to punch you in the nuts as you carried your dinner tray. He wore black jeans with a blue and white stripy T-shirt, and was accompanied by a small purple-haired girl who stared silently at the carpet for the duration of the conversation.
“I never knew you liked alternative, Beresford.”
That word again.
“Well, I sort of, you know … Thieving Magpies. They’re pretty good.”
“Yeah, but did you see Birdland? F*ck!”
Did I?
“Apparently they did their shortest set ever the other day, and it was six minutes,” he enthused, as if this represented the very pinnacle of artistic achievement.
“Wow, amazing,” I replied uneasily.
“D’you want some of this?” Alan asked, handing me a plastic glass of bright red liquid.
“Uh, yeah.” I took a sip. Blackcurrant. With some sort of alcohol.
“Who you here with?”
“Er … no one,” I admitted.
“No one? F*ck, man. You can hang out with us if you like. But don’t tell anyone at school.”
If I was heartened by this gesture, I soon discovered the payoff. After I settled down next to the pair, I attempted to make conversation by asking what Alan had meant by “alternative.” After he stopped laughing at my evident na?veté and ignorance, he provided me with a definition so compendious that I began to assume he’d memorised a school essay on the subject. Alternative, he began, was the name of the musical movement to which the Thieving Magpies belonged, so called because it formed an alternative to basically everything else. The criteria under which a band qualified to call itself alternative was subtle, somewhat intangible and often contradictory, but Alan advised keeping in mind a mental tick-box chart, on which the group in question must score at least two or three, as a reliable identifier:
Guitars, often distorted or effected, but with a minimalist playing style (i.e., few solos)
Straightforward, raw production on recordings
“Gigs” (as opposed to “concerts”) at which …
… “rucking” took place (as opposed to “moshing,” which only happened at heavy-metal shows)
A loyal group of fans, often with its own collective name (e.g., The Mission’s followers, who were known as “eskimos”), sometimes even with an exclusive costume or dance
A down-to-earth, ironic, self-effacing attitude (which therefore excluded most heavy-metal bands)
Participation at outdoor festivals
Coverage in the music papers Sounds, NME and Melody Maker
Public denouncement of mainstream pop music
A paucity of clichéd/excessive references to love in lyrics (with the exception of goth bands, who could pretty much get away with anything)
“Experimental” nature of song composition/arrangement
An appreciation of (but not necessarily overindulgence in) alcohol and/or drugs
And so on.
The overall sound of the music mattered less than one might think, Alan explained. Crucial to the issue was the band’s aesthetic relationship with punk. An act could, for example, mainly use electronic instruments—the staple of decidedly nonalternative acts like Eurythmics—but throwing in the occasional punky power chord and having a “punk attitude” would instantly put them in the alternative bracket, as in the case of Renegade Soundwave or The Shamen. Punk was also a key factor in how a band ceased to be alternative: U2, for example, had almost certainly been alternative when they started out, but had recently steered themselves so far off the punk map with releases like Rattle and Hum that they’d been expelled. (It was theoretically possible, Alan argued, for a previously mainstream group to become alternative, although it rarely happened—Depeche Mode being one of the few recent examples.)
He pointed out that a lot of people described all of this as simply “indie” music, on account of the greater share of alternative acts being signed to independent labels, but earnestly warned me that using this term could be misleading in the extreme, for not only could it accidentally include unwanted horrors (most of the acts produced by Stock/Aitken/Waterman, for example, were signed to Waterman’s own label, PWL, so were technically speaking “indie”), but it could also discount a whole crop of dyed-in-the-wool alternative bands (e.g., New Model Army, Balaam and the Angel and Thieving Magpies themselves) whose output was administered by major record companies. “Alternative” was therefore a far more reliable moniker.
Alan sat back, clearly delighted with this dissertation, and took a swig of his red stuff. I was just about to comment when he embarked on the appendices—a bewildering rundown of the many subgenres that sheltered under alternative’s umbrella (goth, grebo, punk-metal, et al)—but then he must have sensed that I’d switched off, for he rapidly reverted to the Magpies themselves.
“They’re the most likely to,” he stated.
“Most likely to what?”
“Go mega. Become huge, man. They’re gonna be the biggest alternative band in the world. They’ve got the goods. They’re streets ahead. No one else has got the songs, man.”
“That’s right,” I agreed, knowledgeably I considered asking him if he’d seen my school-magazine piece, but decided it might be neither the time nor place.
“But their attitude as well. Webster’s got it sussed. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He can run circles round those cunts.”
I nodded uncomfortably. “So, do you go to a lot of these, er … gigs?”
“Not many,” Alan grumbled. “Only about once a week. I can’t afford much more. I try to see smaller bands; they’re always cheaper. Tickets for this place are seven quid now, man. With travel and a few jars that’s almost a score. I only get paid fifteen.”
“Fifteen—you work, then?”
“Sainsbury’s on Saturday, man. It’s a pisser, but … Uh-oh. Hold up. We’d better get going.”
A slight change in atmosphere had alerted Alan to the imminent arrival of the main attraction. He and his female friend rose, grabbed another pint of alcoholic Ribena from the bar and then proceeded to barge their way through the now heaving and shoving capacity crowd until we reached a position of quite alarming proximity to the stage. I was also overjoyed to notice we were squashed right next to the scary tattoo brigade I’d spotted outside, who were drunkenly roaring various phrases at each other (“Theeeeevers!,” “Wan-kaaaaah!,” “Yooou’re shit! Aahhhh!”). I must have had a face like a wet lettuce, as Alan grinned and nudged me in the ribs.
“Don’t worry, man. Just watch out for the MFM.”
“The what?”
“Mass Forward Movement.”
I didn’t need to ask what it was, because just as Alan said it, it happened. The lights blacked out, four thousand voices emitted a roar louder than I considered possible, the opening piano flourish of The Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” blasted out of the giant speaker stacks and everyone instantly decided they wanted to stand where I was standing. I was carried several yards forward as people of both genders rammed themselves against me in time with the music. Quite why we were listening to Bob Geldof hoarsing his way through this old classic—let alone bouncing around to it as though it were a Mot?rhead song—was the least of my worries. The Magpies hadn’t even taken to the stage yet and I was already bobbing threateningly near the yellow-shirted bouncers who glared at the melee and occasionally, I was horrified to see, hoicked people out who had evidently got too close. Where did they go after that? I wondered. I had visions of some terrifying backstage torture chamber where the guards wrenched the most foul confessions out of hapless Thieving Magpies fans (“Okay, okay! I admit it! I did quite like the last Deacon Blue single!”) for their own amusement.
It’s a strange feeling to have so many of your preconceptions flattened in so few minutes. Virtually nothing about the evening so far had been what I expected. But from the moment the onstage lights kicked in and the audience’s ovation reached an alarming crescendo, as four blokes I vaguely recognised ambled onstage and picked up their instruments, everything was somehow a little more familiar. From then on, God knows how, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I suppose the music on Shoot the Fish contained a strange sort of semiotic coding which transferred information directly into the brain of the eager listener, so that he/she really would expect the drummer to have that cool, energetic but nonchalant approach to beating his kit, the guitarist that way of spanking his instrument like it was a naughty child even on the mellowest tracks, that the bassist would remain in his corner doing, well, absolutely nothing but playing the bass, and that Lance Webster had a habit of remaining on the lip of the stage, confrontationally staring out at the crowd, until it was almost too late to return to the microphone to bellow out the lyrics. I was also magically aware that Webster would not utter a word of greeting until after the fifth song, finally acknowledging the audience’s presence by demanding, “So what, is it your f*cking bedtime already?” before launching into a seething rendition of “Scared of Being Nice,” with its tender refrain “I don’t respect you but I’ll f*ck you anyway.” A sentiment I was still blissfully ignorant of, but on that night I’m sure I knew what he meant.
Above the bouncing, kicking, screaming, ramming, hollering and gurning stupidly with unfettered delight, the proceedings were presided over with breathtaking authority by Mr. Webster: equal parts scary teacher, football coach, rock ’n’ roll f*ckup and demigod. His vocals were clear, faultless and a hundred times more powerful and emotive than on the record. His regular insults (“We didn’t come all the way here to entertain a room full of idle wankers”) were perfectly executed, just the right side of totally abusive, and you knew you were never too far away from a cheeky grin. And those songs shone out across the vast theatre to the point where, for the first time in my fifteen-year-old life, I experienced a profound unity, of almost five thousand people, most of whom had never met before and would barely meet again, welded together by a common focus, taste, purpose, anger, release and enjoyment. A unity this Lance Webster was able to control with virtually the flick of an eyelid.
I am still—some eighteen years later—astonished to report that when the band left the stage for the third and last time (after a brutal rendition of “Zeitgeist Man,” a B-side that had now become their standard gig finale) I staggered up to a similarly soaked Alan Potter, put my hand on his shoulder and burst into tears. I don’t think I’d actually cried at all since I trod heavily on a large nail when I was eight, but I was so physically and emotionally exhausted and consumed by the knowledge that I’d finally found my own world, and that Lance Webster was its de facto president, that I couldn’t do anything else. Alan clearly understood enough to not need to ask what was wrong, and patted my shoulder in a matey sort of way.
“Yeah, all right, man, that’ll do,” he said after a few seconds.
Although the journey home began with much lively banter and comparing of notes, I was all too aware as the train neared our town that our temporary friendship was coming to an end and that we were simply in a different year at school once more. Like a fool, in the station car park, as Alan walked away to his parents’ car, I gushed, “Let me know when you’re going to some more gigs!” To which he responded curtly, “Yeah, we’ll see what happens, all right.”
As I trudged home I felt the evening quickly evaporate, and started to come to terms with the fact that my day-to-day life would remain, for the moment, unaltered. School trips could not be synthesised in this way very often, if ever again, really. But I had hope. I suppose I saw Alan as perhaps the key holder of that hope but, wisely for an immature fifteen-year-old, I calculated that simply striding up to him in the dinner hall and saying brightly, “Hello! So who are you seeing this week, and can I come?” was precisely the wrong thing to do. The solution would be to somehow have something that he wanted from me. My current set of possessions, attributes and circumstances presented nothing of the kind, of course, but I was sure that if I thought hard enough I would come up with something. But that’s enough for now—I’m late for the pub.