The Alternative Hero
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
By the time most people hit 30, they've managed to do one of the following things:
1. Grow up
2. Quit idolising rock stars
3. Move on a bit from the music they were obsessed with at the age of 17.
Clive Beresford has failed to do all three. But that's about to change.
One unremarkable Saturday morning Clive sees the biggest alternative-pop star of them all walking down the high street with his dry-cleaning: Lance Webster, disgraced ex-singer of Thieving Magpies ('the biggest British band to emerge from the late-eighties indie-boom' Rolling Stone). Clive hatches a ramshackle plan to befriend his idol and grab the scoop of a lifetime - why did Webster burn out? The ensuing chaos forces both men to revisit the sweat, feedback, T-shirts, stage-dives, hitch-hikes, snakebites and hangovers of British alternative rock at the start of the nineties; to quote Lance Webster himself, 'before Britpop came along and f****d everything up'...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A buddy comedy with a Nick Hornby vibe, this debut novel from British musician Thornton charms from the very first chord. As a schoolboy in the late '80s, Clive Beresford is a devoted fan of indie band the Thieving Magpies. Lance Webster, the band's frontman, becomes Clive's hero, a pop culture god Clive follows from gig to gig. After Lance publicly self-destructs and disappears from the public eye, Clive stumbles into an adulthood of failed romance and dismal job prospects and wonders if he'll ever get out of his rut. But after he discovers his former idol living a few doors down the street, Clive makes painfully awkward contact, and the two begin an unlikely friendship with Clive pretending to be clueless about who his neighbor is while secretly intent on writing a tell-all book. Thornton nails the changing music scene of the past two decades, combining real-life artists with the imaginary Magpies, and effortlessly captures the magnetic allure of great rock ("The album gave me an unprecedented sense of belonging. Or at least, the potential of belonging"). Best of all, though, are the quirky lead characters, two has-beens who jump-start each other's lives.
