The Alternative Hero (34 page)

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:

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:

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:

1. 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.
   

2. 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.
   

3. 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 fuck 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: