The Alternative Hero - Softcover

Thornton, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022408724X ISBN 13: 9780224087247

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2009

Synopsis

By the time most people hit 30, they've managed to do one of the following things:

1. Grow up

2. Meet one of their heroes

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. He mopes around, drinking too much, wondering why life has forgotten him, disgusted at the deletion of the bands he loves (Carter USM, The Wonder Stuff, Ned's Atomic Dustbin et al.) from the world's musical hard drive, quietly lamenting his never-was career as a music journalist. To make matters worse, his best friend has turned into a boring old fart and his bank account is so empty it's actually developed an echo. But all - or at least some - of that is about to change.

One otherwise 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). Determined to grab the scoop of a lifetime, Clive hatches a ramshackle plan to befriend his idol, although Webster - whose charmed, platinum-selling life plummeted headfirst into a rancid festival toilet before the eyes of the indie cosmos one wretched summer night in 1995 - proves to be in no mood for discussing the past. But the pair quickly realise they have things in common neither could have predicted, forcing them both to revisit a period they thought they'd left behind: 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 fucked everything up'...

The Alternative Hero is that rare gem - a novel about popular music in which every sentence is completely, totally right. And it's very, very funny.

About this title

Review:

'Thornton explores the gentle complexities of this odd couple with wit and warmth' - Independent

'sparkly and authentic' - Times

'brilliant depictions of the era... a book that reminds you just how music can shape and change a life' - Word magazine

'With The Alternative Hero, Tim Thornton has gone through the looking glass of obsessive fandom and brought back a hilarious, memorable, and hard-rocking tale.' – Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising

'A deliciously bittersweet novel that will touch the heart of anybody who ever fell in love with rock and roll.' - Mick Brown, author of Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

Book Description:

A wonderful novel about music, idols and obsessive fans: if you were alive and listening to rock in the '90s, read this book.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 022408724X
• ISBN 13: 9780224087247
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320