The Alternative Hero (33 page)

“Where is he? Is he in the loo? Am I too late?”

You look up at your old friend wearily, and shake your head.

“He’s gone.”

“Gone? Whaddya mean? You said seven forty-five, didn’t you? And what did you mean, he thinks your name is Alan?”

“Alan—get yourself a drink, and I’ll explain everything.”

He waits a second, then mopes off to the bar.

So.

That’s how it happens.

You know how it is.

Given the chance to do it all again, perhaps you’d do things differently.

But that chance is probably not going to come.

Is it.

This is what you wanted,
now throw it away
.

Thieving Magpies, “This Is What You Wanted”

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 fucked 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:

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.