The Alternative Hero (22 page)

Except, of course, the major record company who originally offered them a deal. But six months after Gloria Feathers’ tactical hunger strike, missing out on the Magpies had become the very least of that label’s worries. The failure of a yearlong campaign to break a very expensive band had meant dipping shares, staff cuts and ailing confidence, followed by—inevitably—new signings being dropped. It is a mathematical certainty that the Magpies would have suffered this fate. And yet Feathers never claimed to have any insider knowledge of the company’s potential difficulties; in fact, she displayed very little interest at all in the business side of her beloved music. “She just had an inkling,” shrugged Webster in a March 1989 interview. “Must have been a fucking strong inkling, I grant you—but that’s all she says. We’ll probably listen next time she has one.”

Little did he know that another of “Gloria’s inklings” was brewing even as he spoke. Having extracted as much mileage as possible from
Shoot the Fish
, the Magpies had decided to quickly record a four-track EP to cash in on the upcoming festival season, before embarking on their second album in the autumn. A typically abrasive high-speed pop song entitled “Something About Him” was chosen as the lead track; the green light was duly given by the label; the release
date was set for 28 May; the master and artwork were poised to be sent off to the manufacturers—and Lance Webster’s phone rang.

“I knew something was up by the tone of her voice,” he told
Melody Maker
later that year. “As everyone knows, Gloria hardly ever speaks calmly, or slowly. She’s usually so excited about what she has to say that it all comes out in this mad torrent of words, and there’s almost always some gag or some hilarious situation she’s got herself into. But now she was deathly serious … like, eerily calm and deliberate. I’d only ever heard her speak like that once before, and two days later she was bloody starving herself to death.”

This time, Feathers solemnly instructed her old friend to demote “Something About Him” to side B of the EP, and make something else the lead track. When asked why, she had even less reasoning to offer than on the previous occasion. Despite his earlier pledge to pay more attention if this happened again, the arbitrary nature of the request led Webster to dismiss her once more. Just as she did in 1986, Feathers countered by laying a hefty threat on the line, the details of which have never been disclosed. One assumes it was pretty compelling, as twenty-four hours later Webster was hurriedly persuading his exasperated band and manager that the more funky and atmospheric “What If Everyone Goes Mad?” would really be a far better radio song. “Thank fuck Gloria phoned me on the Saturday,” he commented afterwards. “If she’d left it ’til Sunday, it would’ve been too late.”

Indeed. The amended EP was despatched to the pressing plant at lunchtime on the Monday, and soon the earlier plan was all but forgotten. “What If Everyone Goes Mad?” did the usual rounds of pluggers, journalists and DJs, a video was made—and everyone agreed that it was a nice shift in direction, something a little more laid-back, but retaining the now familiar Magpies bite. More fortuitously, the song slipped neatly into an embryonic movement that was currently
being stirred by the likes of The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Jesus Jones: the heyday of indie dance was just around the corner and the Thieving Magpies knew it. Of
course
they did. A few forward-thinking producers offered to remix the track. Well, why not? Get played in a few nightclubs for a change. The release date neared, Radio One put the track on their B-list (not bad for an alternative-rock single in 1989), the band went on an eight-date hike around the UK (climaxing with a sellout show at London’s Brixton Academy), the record hit the shops—and on Sunday 4 June, Bruno Brookes announced to the nation that Thieving Magpies had a new entry at number nineteen. It was the highest position a single of theirs had reached to date. Webster, receiving the news from the record company that afternoon, allowed himself a mild whoop and then rang Feathers to congratulate her on another successful “inkling.” Of course, there was no way of knowing how well “Something About Him” might have done, but everyone agreed “What If Everyone Goes Mad?” had done the business.

That afternoon, band, entourage and friends gathered at Bob Grant’s house in Cricklewood for a small celebration in his back garden. But it was an odd sort of day for a party. The world was reeling from reports that hundreds, if not thousands, of demonstrators had been killed in and around Tiananmen Square, Peking, at the hands of the Chinese army. Aside from sheer horror at the extent of the bloodshed, the political implications of the news hit the Magpies’ camp pretty hard; being a liberal, nouveau-hippy sort of bunch, there were certainly a few doom-and-gloom merchants giving the gathering an anxious edge. “Gloria was pretty frantic,” Webster recounted in a 1992 interview. “She’d been to some acid-house parties that year which the police had shut down in a rather heavy-handed way, so she was wandering around saying, ‘This is now the yardstick for the planet. They’ll get away with anything after this.’ I
thought the connection was a bit tenuous at the time—I guess now with the whole Criminal Justice Bill thing you can sort of see what she was worried about. Anyway, she and a few others just sat in Bob’s lounge, smoking and watching the footage of the massacre, then rewinding it and watching it again. I told them to stop it and try to enjoy themselves. It got pretty weird.”

Unfortunately, things were about to get a whole lot weirder. Around seven, once the chart rundown had finished, Grant attempted to enliven slightly damp spirits by loudly playing the EP that had brought them all there in the first place. The opening track pumped out, eliciting the usual head noddings, critical comments (“I still reckon that backing vocal could’ve been louder”) and eye rollings that emerge when a song is played in the company of the band that created it. Then it started to rain. The second track, a thrashy workout entitled “The Bitch Is Still Around,” was almost completely ignored as everyone relocated to the living room, where Feathers and her cronies were still studying the Tiananmen video, endlessly conspiracy theorising. By the time former lead track “Something About Him” kicked in, the EP had become nothing more than mildly irritating background noise. A minute and a half later, things were substantially different.

“We hadn’t heard that song in over a month,” drummer Craig Spalding told the
NME
, “it being track three now. For some reason we’d even stopped playing it live. I’d almost forgotten what it sounded like. Then the middle eight kicked in and everyone in the room just
died
.”

The lyrics of “Something About Him” were basically a bitter rant about Webster’s ex-girlfriend’s current boyfriend: an individual whose sole redeeming feature, if the song was to be believed, was his bank balance. The middle eight in question—and the entire outro, for that matter—contained merely one phrase, repeated over and
over, in a tone that boiled with tongue-in-cheek rage at the dullness of the man’s job, clothes, hair and personality:
“Death to the square.”

“Gloria instantly burst into tears,” continued Spalding. “There she was, repeatedly watching this bloody massacre on the telly, and then her best mate starts singing
‘Death to the square’
over and over, right in her earhole. Plus the thought of what might have been, of course.”

It didn’t take long for the “what might have been” to sink in. The debacle that the Magpies had escaped would have done inestimable damage to their budding career. The original EP, with “Something About Him” as the lead track, would have charted on the same day; radios around the country would have reverberated with the sound of this young alternative upstart from Reading yelling
“Death to the square”
amid the aftermath of one of the worst peacetime massacres in modern history, which had taken place in—of all the ludicrous coincidences—a square; a
Top of the Pops
appearance (which had already been scheduled to air on the coming Thursday) would have beheld the macabre spectacle of Webster stomping around the stage in his customary manner, looping the unfortunate statement like some crazed despot or sick lunatic. Cue: record dropping without trace from the chart, ruin of the band’s mainstream profile, record-company unease. At the very least, it would all have been acutely embarrassing.

But it may not have got even that far, as Webster himself acknowledged the following year. “That shit in China had been brewing for a month or so. No one knew it was going to end like that, but towards the end of May if you’d heard me singing that line I reckon you’d have made the connection. It’d be like I was egging them on. The record would’ve probably been withdrawn. The whole thing would have been a god-awful, expensive mess.” As it turned out, the controversy-free EP managed to climb even further, to number fifteen, the following Sunday; again, a very respectable feat in a chart
topped by Jason Donovan and with a Cliff Richard record in the top five.

In spite of palpable relief at the offending phrase being comfortably buried at track three, shock and the general feeling of oddness ensured that Bob Grant’s party never became the swinging affair he had perhaps envisaged. What, though, of Feathers herself?

“Once she’d calmed down, she totally downplayed it,” Webster commented in a 1995
Q
interview. “As usual. I remember her saying ‘I never thought much of that song,’ or something. She still just called it an ‘inkling.’ But God knows what she was thinking privately. I do remember that was the start of everything going a bit wrong.”

When the saga eventually found its way into the music press-bearing in mind that Feathers’ roots, omnipresence and outspoken behaviour had found her a fair amount of enemies—a few figures in the industry tried to stir up trouble, spreading rumours of her apparent clairvoyance, nicknaming her “the white witch” (which fit rather too neatly with her peroxide blonde dreadlocks) or “Webster’s witch.” While Feathers was perfectly capable of dealing with any snide comment herself (she famously punched
Melody Maker
journalist Kenny Mann at a Northside gig in 1991), the band decided to keep any further “inklings” of hers private; although Webster let it slip to
Q
that there had subsequently been “three or four at least.”

Whilst the Thieving Magpies were the sole recipient of these rather unusual pieces of advice, they were by no means the only band to whom Feathers spread her unique brand of love. A child of the trust fund, she was fortunate enough to have few concerns other than which gig she’d be going to next, what she would wear, what she would drink, and sometimes what drugs she would take. She was loudly opinionated about her music but cast her net fairly widely: she was as happy at a Levitation gig as she was at a Stereo MCs show, as content to be stage-diving in front of Thousand Yard Stare as tripping
her head off to The Orb. Success, too, was no measure—you’d just as easily spy her at a Wembley Arena backstage party as you might watching an unsigned troupe of spotty teens at the Red Eye on Copenhagen Street. No one, however, meant as much to her as the Thieving Magpies: a band for whom she had quite literally laid her life on the line. As the nineties progressed and the band’s popularity rose to giddy heights, Feathers’ protective instinct began to take on a more physical shade.

If 1990’s
Lovely Youth
confirmed Webster’s status as a British alternative pop hero—a caustic but approachable elder-brother type with a twinkle in his eye—the release of 1992’s globe-straddling
Bruise Unit
converted him into something altogether more celestial. Things that fans did in order to be near him became more outlandish, the desire to capture his undivided attention more intense. At Denmark’s Roskilde Festival in 1992, this characteristic of Webster’s success reached an unwelcome zenith. He had mooched off by himself and was happily watching Danish band Innocent Blood in one of the smaller tents when a girl next to him struck up a conversation. All was fine until Webster tried to leave for another stage where The Wonder Stuff were scheduled to play, only to discover the girl had somehow managed to manacle their ankles together with a pair of handcuffs.

“It was a variation on what had happened to Mike [Patton, of Faith No More] the previous year,” recalled Craig Spalding, “though the fact she’d chosen the ankles made him much more vulnerable. She suddenly turned into this total nutter, yanking Lance’s leg and making him trip over, then forcing herself on him. She was a fucking big girl as well. But Gloria came from out of
nowhere
—she grabbed the girl and just went
mental
, had her up against this massive tent pole, sent someone off to get the police and kept her right there until they arrived.”

Despite Feathers’ impressive emergency response, the incident caused Webster considerable distress and he has never discussed it in public. It was also the last time he wandered about on his own at such an event. Sadly, it was not the final occasion on which he was subject to obsessive behaviour; in fact, worse was to come.

In the summer of 1993 the Magpies staged their own large-scale event at Langley Park, near Slough. For supporting attractions they filled the early evening with a few ascendant bands of the moment: The Frank and Walters, Terrorvision and a promising outfit from London named Elastica, while the afternoon had been reserved for the unsigned winners of a demo scramble. During a break from the mammoth
Bruise Unit
tour the Magpies themselves sat down in Bob Grant’s office and listened to some four hundred demo tapes, selecting a list of three lucky winners: a funk-metal troupe from Kensington by the name of Fabric Flesh, a gloomy quartet from Middlesbrough known as They Say He Jumped and a solo artist from Luton who identified herself simply as Lesley. As anyone who remembers the day will attest, the first two acts were deeply unmemorable. The third was the precise opposite—but it had nothing to do with the music.

Although her demo contained passable angst-driven pop-rock (not a million miles from the noise Alanis Morissette began to peddle a year or so later), Lesley surprised the Magpies’ sound crew by showing up with just her acoustic guitar and a videotape. When quizzed as to the whereabouts of her backing musicians, she embarked on a lengthy but plausible tale of woe: her bass player had attempted to smuggle incriminating quantities of cannabis on the way back from a short European tour, and the band had been stopped at Hook of Holland, where all the gear, both musical and narcotic, had been impounded, and what a nightmare it all was, and thank God she came back separately or she’d have missed this amazing
opportunity, and “I promise to still put on a brilliant show,” and “Can your lighting guy project these visuals during my set,” blah blah. The crew thus persuaded, Lesley strolled onto the large stage at half past four and, in front of some twenty thousand people, began to play.