Kirjahaku

By the time most people hit 30, they've managed to do one of the following things:1. Grow up2. Quit idolising rock stars3. 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 fucked everything up'...

In this comic, wildly energetic first novel, Clive Beresford is a failed music fanzine writer in his early thirties who fears that his best days are behind him. The turning point came when Lance Webster, the lead singer of Thieving Magpies, the band that Clive is obsessed with, self-destructed on stage right before his eyes. Years later, Clive has discovered that Lance has moved in down the block. Desperate to meet him, but more desperately nervous, Clive concocts an ill-advised, alcohol-fueled scheme to befriend Lance and land an "earth-shattering exclusive" interview that will revive both their careers. With the story shifting between Clive's life-changing Magpies past and his frantic present, Tim Thornton has written a warmhearted, uproarious view of friendship, hero worship, and the full-blast power of music.