The Alternative Hero

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

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

Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume

Brilliant depictions of the era...nails it so precisely

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'

It's the usual lad-lit comic romp ... but it's fresher, funnier and more amiable than most

Tim Thornton was born in 1973. Despite a boarding-school education and a degree in drama, his adulthood has largely been spent playing the drums, most recently for indie/folk artist Fink. Along the way he has delivered daily newspapers in Copenhagen, changed light bulbs at Shepherd's Bush Empire, and pulled one of the first rickshaws in London. The Alternative Hero is his first novel.

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 fucked everything up'...

Tim Thornton

So real you can smell the sound man, see the promoter sneaking out without paying you and hear JJ72... a truly compelling read

Hilariously charts the dismal lows of a struggling band

Really funny... Writing about bands could slip into pompous theorising, but this does what all good books should do, which is concentrate on the personalities

a funny and touching read about a struggling rock band

Hilarious, bittersweet, and like the epic powerballad the band sometimes ends on, ultimately triumphant

a cleverly written and entertaining read'

Being an unsigned band isn't a situation - it's a mental illness. Few people realise they're suffering from this affliction. Russell Groom knows, and he wants to change things fast. But Russell doesn't fit the traditional rock-star mould, and his woefully unexceptional band are headed nowhere, inhabiting a world of cramped and sweaty rehearsal rooms, crap day jobs, empty gigs and interminable trips down the A303 to dodgy festival slots in Wiltshire. Enter Josh - the enigmatic and arrogant son of a successful record producer - with an offer it's impossible to refuse... 
 
Tim Thornton's new novel is a hilarious fly-on-the-wall trip round the outskirts of the music industry, with a valuable lesson: unsigned bands never become signed bands. They have to die first.

Tim Thornton

Praise for Death of an Unsigned Band

So real you can smell the sound man, see the promoter sneaking out without paying you and hear JJ72... a truly compelling read

Hilariously charts the dismal lows of a struggling band

Fun, shambling...well-told

So real you can smell the sound man, see the promoter sneaking out without paying you and hear JJ72... a truly compelling read

Hilariously charts the dismal lows of a struggling band

Fun, shambling...well-told

So real you can smell the sound man, see the promoter sneaking out without paying you and hear JJ72... a truly compelling read

Hilariously charts the dismal lows of a struggling band

Fun, shambling...well-told

Books by Tim Thornton

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