The Alternative Hero
When your favorite band moves in down the street, what's an aging music fan to do but go all stalk-y?
Reviewed by Marc Savlov, Fri., July 17, 2009
The Alternative Hero
by Tim ThorntonKnopf, 416 pp., $24.95
In some circles, it's bad enough that Manchester baggies and former Factory Records stalwarts Happy Mondays are somehow not only back in gear but actually touring outside of the UK. That shambolic, pre-Britpop, blissed-out Shaun Ryder and his skeletal cohort in liver abuse, the ever-out-of-control Bez, should be returning from the screamadelic land of Madchester, Stone Roses, and cheap E is cause for concern. Haven't we got over all that ages ago, musicwise? No. We're never over our alternative heroes, those post-puberty guardians of our teenage kicks and musical malfeasances, be they the Pistols or the Smiths or the whole of Seattle. Like the Stranglers' "The Raven," they are with us, evermore. This is a realization not of the defeated (as if anyone could ever conquer our hearts and minds more than those who soundtracked them) but of the victorious: We never had no one, ever, who understood us as much as the three-chords-and-the-truth heroes who accompanied the worst years of our lives, long-gone and dead though they surely must be. Except – in Tim Thornton's walloping (he's a drummer), occasionally windy (he's a music writer) debut novel, which hinges on the realization by unemployed, thirtysomething protagonist Clive Beresford that his own personal teen-angst melody maker and former frontman of late-Eighties, indiepop darling buds the Thieving Magpies is currently living on his block, virtually across the street, in London. What's an aging music fan to do but go all stalk-y? Comparisons to Nick Hornby's OCD music fan's manual High Fidelity, which merits a snarky name-check, are obvious but relatively unfounded. Clive's first-person melodramatics strike a deep and resonant chord, not because they revolve around any particular band, but because they're about those of us who live and die for music, Britpop trainspotters, post-punks, and Merseybeat die-naughts included, whatever the lineup might be. Those particular teenage heart-scars still pain us decades later, seething to a beat that goes on and on and on, even when our own lives seem to have come to a full stop. Thornton's peculiar genius is in marking those teenage tablatures and playing them all the way through, a music fan's grace note, a love song to what was and may yet still be.