Rathbone's Ramblin'

[rathbone]

Sometimes I think my life is getting too close to Still Game for comfort.

Last night Jack and Victor, or should that be JimJam and I were in the pub with Stan and Kerr. The conversation was wide ranging. In other words we were able to talk about anything but the six nations rugby, which Stan found too painful to contemplate.

So we ended up having a good dig into three main topics.

The first was that old perennial, funeral arrangements. What do you want played. Who do you want to be there and who do you definitely want to go before you. Where do you want your ashes scattered or, if you don’t want the wind beneath your wings, what do you want on your headstone.

The second was comparing the photographs on our bus passes. We agreed that Kerr’s was probably the best, but Stan’s was the most generic. Half the population could get on a bus with his pass and never be challenged.

That led us on to a discussion as to why, whenever we try to arrange a weekend away with our mates we always end up in an hotel which is linked to a golf course. What that means, in effect, is that Dougie and Alex tend to dictate where we go. And when we do go we never see them all day because they are out on the links. It’s been like that for the last forty years.

So we decided that this year it is going to be different. What we are going to do is see what is the furthest place we can get to for free using only our bus pass, and stay at the hotel nearest to it, wherever it may be. So far the record is held by Kerr who travelled from Edinburgh to Inverness via Fort William exclusively on the public bus system.

The third topic of the evening was all my fault. I mentioned Casuals a couple of posts back. We then had a long debate on what was meant by Casual. Not in the football hooligan sense, but in the sartorial. Was Burberry casual? What about Aquascutum or Stone Island? Probably all three. We agreed the Fred Perry sport shirts was definitely casual, but it was the continental lines, Fila, Lacoste, and Ellesse which really defined the style. Our conclusion was that it was just up-market Mod, but where Mod had been fanatical about the clothes, the Casuals were a bit lazy, being fanatical about the football, but getting the clothes off the peg. Between us we probably have about a dozen bits of clothing which might be classed as casual. Maybe we should try wearing them on our bus pass attempt.

[rathbone]

Hasan makes good coffee. That might not sound too strange, but he runs our local fish and chip shop and more people drop in for the coffee than the fish and chips. He’s always a bit coy about how he does it, but it’s certainly distinctive.

I put it down to his background. Though he is British born and bred, his family come from Turkey and I assume that there is something middle-eastern in the coffee mix.

Anyway, I was in there the other day for a coffee. Sitting at the table in front of me were a couple. She was rather large, with her hair pulled back into a straggly pony tale. He had one of those heads which go straight down from the ears to the shoulders, with no division between the head and the neck. It turned out that it was his birthday and she was treating him. He had the full english breakfast and two coffees. Hasan’s sidekick, Zaid, brought it over to the table and put it down.

“And brown sugar” the guy said, so Zaid came back with two sachets of brown sugar.

“I said brown sauce”.

Zaid protested. The guy insisted he had said brown sauce, so Zaid went back and brought a sachet of brown sauce then went back to the counter.

After a few minutes Mr. No-neck called over Hassan and started to criticise Zaid, his attitude and the lack of service. He had clearly asked for brown sauce and he had been brought brown sugar, and then the wog had argued with him.

Hasan politely said that perhaps the wog had difficulty in understanding what the guy had said. After all these foreigners do have language difficulties and were a bit thick. Take him, he was a wog and he was a bit thick himself. He often found it difficult to distinguish between sugar and sauce. But then he had seen a programme on the television which suggested that most of us only used a fraction of our brain power, so probably most people were a bit thick. It was just as well, then, that people like our friend could use their full brain capacity and could understand that when they said sugar they really meant sauce.

The guy looked a bit confused, so Hassan elaborated. If everyone could use their full brain capacity, then we would all be able to communicate without misunderstandings, and if we all communicated without misunderstandings then the world would be a much more peaceful and tolerant place and Hassan wouldn’t have to ask him to leave.

But unfortunately the world wasn’t like that and Hassan chucked him out.

[rathbone]

I have a rather awkward filling between one of my upper front teeth and the adjoining incisor. It’s a good filling, but slightly difficult as in order to get it to hold the dentist carried it over the gap between the teeth. As a result it is impossible to floss and I have to use interdental brushes to clean the very small space between the top of the filling and the gum.

Over the years I have worked my way through various makes and it’s amazing the difference. Big ones, small ones, wire ones and plastic ones. Hairy ones and smooth ones. Unfortunately it is difficult to get comparative objective information. Almost everything on the web is tied in with one manufacturer or another.

The problem for me is getting the right size. Mostly they are either too large, or almost like a needle. It was quite some time before I discovered that there is an international standard and that there is meant to be a colour code for each size of brush. Apparently I needed an orange. So I started buying orange brushes. Some of them worked reasonably well, most of them were too thick and a good third of those buckled before I could get them through to the back of the tooth.

So I went down one size to pink. Have you every tried to get hold of pink interdental brushes in your local chemist? On-line you almost have to buy them by the gross. (That’s an exaggeration of course). Icon Interdentals do them in packs of 48. Tepe do them in smaller amounts, but the individual cost goes up incrementally. Nevertheless I bought a range of pinks.

The first point to note is that while the international standard says that pink brushes should be 0.4 mm dia., of the five brushes I bought only two were 0.4mm. one was 0.5mm and two were 0.6mm.

Then the price, per brush, ranged from a whopping £2.99 down to 34p.

As before some of them buckled and bent. Only two of them went in the gap without forcing and all of them only lasted one brushing.

Then I came across a another brush, advertised as throwaway. It tapers from 0.4 to 0.6 and comes in a pack of 20 for £2,and can be bought from Boots, not on-line. The only problem is it is blue, not pink. So much for international standards. It works fine for me though and demonstrates that it pays to shop around.

[rathbone]

This thing with Casuals rumbles on. The eldest Rathbonette was round yesterday and we were talking about the conversation in the pub. We got on to how ‘style’ changes regularly and whether it was something which developed from the street up or was something which was fabricated by the industry and fed down to create a market. In my view it’s a bit of both. The fashion market is quite good a spotting trends and then hyping them until they become main stream.

She then challenged me to list the various styles that I had experienced in my lifetime.
We ended up with the following list (in roughly chronological order):

Teddy Boys
Beatniks
Bikers
Rockabilly
Surfers
Mods
Rockers
Hippies
Greasers
Skinheads
Northern Soul
Two Tone
Glam
Disco
Rastafarians
Headbangers
Punks
B-Boys
New Romantics
Goths
Casuals
Psychobilly
Raggamuffins
Desi
Rave
New Age
Grunge
Modern Primitives
Techno
Cyberpunk
New Boring

I’m sure that you can identify with at least one of those. Maybe later on we can have a poll in order to identify the style demographic of Porty.

[rathbone]

My first Teddy Boy was probably my cousin Tommy. I can’t remember if it was before or after he had completed his national service, but I suspect just after. He and his mates used to come down from Gilmerton to my Nana’s in Bath Street in their ‘Edwardian’ suits and parade along the prom.

We were just out of rationing and people were beginning to get decent jobs with decent wages again. It’s generally accepted that Teds first started dressing in long, fitted, single breasted jacket, narrow trousers and brocade waistcoats in London’s Elephant & Castle area around 1952. This was long before the emergence of Rock ‘n’ Roll and it’s a trick of hindsight which has inextricably linked the two together, even by people who were original Teds.

The papers soon picked up on the image and spread it across the country. It was probably the first exclusively British style. There weren’t any Teds in America or anywhere else. (Though the revival which flourished in the 70s did have an international element.)

The attraction for young people was probably the obvious affluence which tailored suits displayed, especially among working class kids who had never experienced this sort of thing before. Most of them were prepared to spend a huge percentage of their income on clothes. It was a pattern which was to gain momentum with succeeding generations.

It was also something which their elders had difficulty understanding. Right at the beginning the papers had treated these ‘Edwardians’ as a bit of fun, and it was the media who had invented the slightly cuddly term Teddy Boys. But the papers are not very good at running cuddly stories for very long and quite soon every lad who got into trouble was being described as a “Ted”. By the mid fifties the whole movement had been demonised and Teddy Boy had become synonymous with hooligan. This had the obvious effect of encouraging those with tendencies towards delinquency and greasy combs, flick knives and slashed cinema seats became part of gang culture.

Compared to what came later it lasted a long time as an image, from the early fifties to the rise of Mod in 1963.There was a brief Ted revival in the 1970s, when the media started reporting clashes between Punks and Teds, but most of that was a fabrication.
In fact it has never gone away, just slipped underground. Next time you are in Facebook try accessing Federation Of Teddy Boys and you can talk to Teds young and old from all round the world.

[rathbone]

I thought that my first Beatniks were the guys who lived in the York Place attic I used to hang out in when I was fourteen. They probably thought they were beatniks too, but they weren’t really. They were just students pretending they were beatniks, just as I later became a student pretending I was a hippy.

Having said that, Edinburgh had a fairly thriving Beatnik community during the late fifties and early sixties. British beatniks were much more conscious of what was happening in America, but got it slightly wrong. They created an amalgam of the Beats, the emerging folk scene and what the americans classed as Hipsters.

I find that interesting because the Beats and the Hipsters had two diametrically opposed points of view. The Hipsters, like the Teds had a distinctive dress code which included scarfs, polo-necks, berets and shades. The Beats considered that as affectation and adopted a consciously anti-style style of levi’s, work shirts and sweat shirts. As far as I am aware Jack Kerouac never wore a polo-neck, beret and shades (at least not in public).

What the two groups had in common was a love of jazz, which makes it ironic that in Britain they became associated with folk clubs. While it is a generalisation, it’s probably true to say that the main difference between the two types of music is that jazz tends to be urban and forward looking and folk idyllic and nostalgic in nature. In Britain there was a further irony in that the folk crowd typically came from, and lived in the cities but their music was rooted in the countryside.

As usual, our image of the Beatnik is a media fabrication. Somewhere along the line newspaper cartoonists started drawing these women in black slacks and long hair who looked like Juliette Greco, and men with goatees, sandals and berets and the image stuck.
It found its way into films like Expresso Bongo and token Beatniks began turning up on television programmes.

So the Beatnik was a bit of a mishmash, but at the time I wanted to be one. I bought my trendy black polo neck and wore it until it disintegrated nearly fifteen years later. Then I bought another one, then replaced that as well when it fell apart. At the pub with the lads last Monday I was wearing a black polo and a leather jacket. Some styles never die.

[rathbone]

Bikers were never very prominent in Portobello.

Like the Beatniks, in Britain they were a media fabrication, while in America they were real.

The american biker gangs were spawned by servicemen who returned home after the war and found it hard to readjust to what seemed really boring civilian life. They started driving around on motorbikes as a way of getting a bit of excitement. That led to organised motor cycle races, the first of which seems to have been held in Hollister, California in 1947. From that teams developed, which mutated into ‘gangs’ like the Hell’s Angels.

Bikers hit mainstream consciousness with the release in 1953 of The Wild One starring Marlon Brando. Soon every young person could quote : “ Whaddya rebellin’ against, Johnny?” “What ya got?”. The film was considered so subversive that it was banned in the UK for several years.

But it was around long enough for people to pick up on the image of black leather jackets, jeans and motorcycle boots. It was far cheaper to buy the clothes than it was to buy the bikes, so there were a dozen young lads walking around dressed as bikers to every one who actually had a bike.

For a while they were the next great scourge of society. The papers had huge swarms of guys on bike rampaging through the quiet towns of Britain creating mayhem. I can’t remember ever seeing them storming through Portobello.

Their lasting legacy was the Black Leather Jacket. I wear mine with pride.

[rathbone]

Rockabilly is not to be confused with either Teddy Boys or Rockers. Rockabilly was the style adopted by those young people who were trying to look like the Rock’n’Roll stars they saw on the screen and in magazines. Stars like Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and above all Elvis Presley.

Musically they were bringing together and fusing Rhythm and Blues, Gospel and Jazz. They also brought the idea of music as a way to success and affluence and one way to demonstrate that affluence was through clothes.

If you look at photographs of, say, Eddie Cochran, what he is wearing is casual, but it isn’t cheap. Peg trousers or chinos. Shirts with extra wide collars worn over the jacket lapels. And the jackets themselves were usually well tailored, in white or a pastel colour with inset seams in a contrasting colour. On the feet the shoes were either two tone leather or the ubiquitous blue suede. At the other end was the greased up quiff, which lent a competitive element as guys strove to see who could achieve the biggest and highest.

Casual wear was white singlet, blue jeans and loafers.

It was a distinctive look, but one which the average teenager could approximate by begging, borrowing or stealing the various items. The start of mix and match.

Like the Teds there was a bit of a UK revival in the mid seventies, largely coming out of the pub rock scene. Shops specialising in 50s Retro opened up and barbers started developing the flat top, which had a mini-quiff at the front and fins at the back. By that time I already had a four inch centre parting and so missed out. The other defining feature of the revival was white shoes.

[rathbone]

We tend to forget that Jan and Dean, The Surfaris and The Beach Boys were having hits before the Beatles came along. And with the music came Surfers. However, we soon learned that there ain’t no surf at Portobello.

It’s remarkable how quickly the idea of surfing spread once it got publicity. I am aware that it had been going on for centuries in Hawaii and the polynesian islands, but it was only after the music became popular that it really took off in Australia, the Indian Ocean and Cornwall. Now it is everywhere, particularly if you count skateboarding as part of the genre. (Remember it was originally called sidewalk surfing).

Initially the surfer could be identified through the brightly coloured baggy shorts and short sleeved striped shirts. Then Kuta started making ranges of casual wear targeted at the surfing market and they caught on as holiday wear for people who had no direct interest in surfing as a recreation. By the 70s what had been exclusively surf gear had become the norm for beachwear and everybody was wearing it. Over the last couple of decades most of us have taken to wearing surf gear all year round and don’t even know we are doing it. Where do you think three quarter length shorts came from? The novelty is now the mainstream.

[rathbone]

I’ve already spent a fair amount of time on the Mods earlier in this thread. In the early to mid sixties there were a huge number of people in Edinburgh who liked to think of themselves as Mods, including me. It is not an exaggeration to say that they completely changed life for young people in the city. Before them there were no clubs, no coffee bars, no record shops, no music scene other than traditional folk. After them there was a whole cultural scene catering for teenagers which we now take for granted.

To be on trend you had to know your italian. It wasn’t just Lambrettas and Vespas, it was espresso coffee, italian suits and la dolce vita. If you trace it back, Italian style developed out of American cool jazz and the type of clothes that those musicians were wearing in the immediate post war period. The italian fashion industry then took that and refined it. At the same time there was one of those instances when a group of good designers all spring up together. It happened in Italy with Carlo Ponti et al in the 1950s. Sharp jackets, tapered trousers, crisp shirts and cool ties. All of them amply advertised through the films, like La Dolce Vita, which flooded out of the italian film studios and on to our screens.

Colin MacInnes’s book Absolute Beginners is probably the best contemporary account of the start of the ‘Modernists’. He describes his leading character as : “ College boy smooth cropped hair with burned in parting, neat white italian rounded collar shirt, short roman jacket very tailored, two little vents, three buttons, no turn up narrow trousers with 17 inch bottoms absolute maximum, pointed toe shoes.”

What the Mods truly represented was the rise of young people with money. Not a lot of money, but money nevertheless. It was the first time since the war that adolescents more or less all had jobs and an independent income and they spent it. The market shifted to cater for this new source of wealth and we never looked back.

The trouble with the Mods was, like so much else, they were picked up by the media and turned into something they weren’t. Almost everything that businesses wanted to sell was tagged as mod. Lots of groups called themselves mod even though the music they played wasn’t R&B based. Younger kids couldn’t tell the difference and the whole thing became debased.

Then the usual demonising began with the great Mods and Rockers panic in which both sides were presented as caricatures.

From time to time Mod gets revived, usually by people who misunderstand it. It wasn’t primarily about parkas and how many mirrors you could attach to your scooter. Wearing a airforce target badge and listening to The Who does not make you a Mod.

[rathbone]

Because of all the media hype Rockers are now inextricably linked with the Mods, which is a travesty of what actually happened at the time.

It is now certain that the photograph on the front of every British newspaper on 19 May 1964 showing a group of Mods forcing two Rockers to jump off the sea wall in Brighton was a set up job for the cameras. All of the alleged incidents between Mods and Rockers were greatly exaggerated by the press. Which is not to say that there wasn’t antagonism between the two groups, but it wasn’t the sort of marauding warfare which has entered the mythology.

The Rockers grew out of the british version of Bikers, the lads that the british press started off calling ton-up boys. It is doubtful that any of them bombed along the A-roads at a hundred miles an hour. Its even more doubtful that most of them even had motorbikes. They just like to wear leathers and hang out with their mates in coffee bars. Even there it wasn’t quite the real thing. Leather jackets were expensive and british manufacturers started making more affordable versions in black vinyl.

The look, therefore, was a Pride & Clarke black vinyl jacket over a hand knitted aran sweater, with blue jeans, white socks rolled over the top of biker boots, and a white silk scarf. It was also the first uni-sex style. Ton-up girls dressed just the same as ton-up boys.

To the press this was outrageous attire and they started equating ‘leather clad’ with ‘juvenile delinquent’. Around the start of the 1960s they also started equating it with Rock ’n’ Roll and the term Rockers took over from Ton-up Boys.

In 1963 the music changed with the rise of Merseybeat and Rock ‘n’ Roll was pushed to the sidelines. That seemed to spur the hard-line Rockers into fighting back for what they now saw as their music. The motorcycle culture gave way to being defenders of Rock ‘n’ Roll authenticity. Jackets began to be heavily studded (one way of demonstrating passive aggression) and the boots gave way to winkle-pickers.

If there was a war between the Mods and Rockers, the Mods won, but the Rockers didn’t disappear, they were absorbed into the Heavy Metal scene when that developed in the 70s.

[rathbone]

Like almost everything else I am talking about here there were two kinds of Hippies, the genuine ones and the ones that the media made up.

The genuine ones developed on the west coast of America out of a mixture of the Beats, the Surfers and psychedelic drugs. The name itself was a media corruption of the old jazz term Hipster. The ‘hippies’ never called themselves that and preferred the terms ‘head’ or ‘freak’.

They were a pretty loose aggregation of like minded people made up of lots of different strands. That is apparent in the music. Go back and listen to the stuff from 1965 to 1967 (before it became commercialised). Apart from being lumped together as psychedlic, there isn’t really much common ground.

Ted Polhemus has a theory that what held them together as a movement wasn’t ‘flower power’ but a common opposition to the Vietnam war. With hindsight I think there is probably quite a lot of truth in that. It also explains why the american hippies almost entirely faded away after the war ended.

American ‘hippy’ didn’t really happen over here. What we had was Swinging London Carnaby Street Hippy. To an extent, it grew out of Mod in as much as the shops which had been the outlets for Mod fashions switched over to psychedelic. After the first few years Carnaby Street had become more focussed on the tourist trade than any ‘underground’ movement, and the Swinging London tag sold merchandise.

Initially the british style tended to be boldly coloured checks and stripes but it soon picked up on the psychedelic thread of the American style, with its paisley patterns and swirling colours and applied it to just about anything. Men started growing their hair long I was sent home from school for wearing a paisley shirt and I wasn’t the only one. I still have my little brass bell on its green braided cord.

[rathbone]

The Greasers were the reaction to the Hippies. I first began to notice them at open air rock concerts in the early seventies.

The Greasers considered themselves to be the British equivalent of the Hells Angels. Some of them did have some legitimacy, having been sanctioned by the Californian Chapter. If you ever come across the autobiography of ‘Buttons’, the president of the UK Chapter, it’s worth a read.

The style had moved on significantly from the ton-up boys and the Rockers. Mostly leathers had been replaced with denim. Where leathers were worn, they were now trailing fringes and were festooned with chains. The denims were covered with hand made insignias, which meant something to the Greasers, but very little to the rest of us.

Like the Hippies, the Greasers grew their hair long. The term Greasers came from their habit of pouring motorcycle oil (and other less savoury fluids) over their clothes as part of initiation ceremonies into their gangs.

What made these British bikers distinctive from their American counterparts was the frequent use of Nazi insignia. Swastikas were common, as were SS flashes. Iron crosses, either real or fabricated, were stitched on to the denims. If they could get them, they wore old German helmets in place of crash helmets. It was all designed to provoke, and it did.

Nowadays, if you go to a typical festival you will still see aging Greasers wandering around (typically in packs of three) sporting matching insignia. Now they are looked on as curiosities, not demonic angels from hell.

[rathbone]

If the Greasers were one reaction to Hippies, the Skinheads were another, and a much more successful one at that.

The Hippies were flamboyant and colourful, so the Skinheads were pared down and basic. British Hippy was also expensive, all those fine fabrics didn’t come for free, but Skinhead’s greatest outlay was the 11 eyelet Doc Marten boots at £14.99 a pair. You couldn’t have a simpler style: cropped hair, white shirt, jeans with the bottoms rolled up to the top of the boots and a pair of braces.

It’s impossible now to trace who had the idea for this, but whoever they were they were a genius. Never has such an iconic look been achieved with such an economy of means. It spread like wildfire. By 1968 there were hundreds of these oiks parading their stuff along Dalry or Easter Road on a Saturday afternoon. By the early 70s it was thousands all over the schemes.

Right from the off the Skinheads were associated with violence and, for once, it wasn’t media hype. It started with hippy bashing, but soon expanded into queer bashing and the paki bashing. It was an image which had a deep set attraction for disaffected young guys.

While the violence didn’t diminish much, the style slowly mutated through the 70s into Suedehead and the Smooth. It might have died out altogether if Punk hadn’t come along in 1976. It gave the movement a new, and strange, momentum. Along the top of all of those smooth heads brightly coloured mohicans started to sprout and Oi was born and is still thriving well today.

To the great disservice of the Skinheads and Oi, a substantial number of them became increasingly associated with extreme right wing political groups and were, to a large extent, exploited by them. In the public mind Skinheads are now synonymous with racism.

[rathbone]

As the rest of 60s music moved on a whole Mod subculture developed, determined to keep soul music alive. In 1970 the journalist Dave Godin coined the term Northern Soul and it had a name.

Northern Soul tends to be associated with Lancashire and in particular the Wigan Casino, but it has always been a thread running through the Edinburgh music scene. Back in the early sixties the DJs at The Place, The Top Storey and McGoos would compete with each other to find the rarest R&B imports and after those clubs either closed down or moved on to other trends, Brian Joyce set up The East Of Scotland Soul Night at the Grosvenor Hotel. It ran every Sunday night for decades. Even today Lenny Toshack, who used to sweat alongside me in the Top Storey, runs Real Soul nights at the Spiders Web in Morrison Street.

Northern soul was all about dancing and comfortable dancing needs loose clothes. Gradually trousers started getting wider from the knee. (Flares), then, when that wasn’t loose enough, they stared flaring from the waist. (Baggies). Then the flares started getting wider and wider. From fifteen inches to twenty inches all the way up to fifty inches. And that was just the boys. At the waist belts got wider and wider as well, up to eight inches. Then they were replaced with plastic waistband adjusters.

Inevitably a whole industry of tailors catered for this trend. The back pages of NME were full of adverts from made to measure outfits in Skegness and Cleethorpes offering needle cord Bombers and heavy duty zipped cardigans to go with your pleated patchwork baggies.

For a while Northern Soul was massive. Then it gave way to Punk, but it didn’t disappear. It just became the best kept secret on the music scene. It is still going strong, as any soul weekenders at Great Yarmouth, Prestatyn or Southport will be glad to demonstrate provided you can drop the right name. Try ‘Stick T Me Baby’ by The Salvadors. That usually does the trick.

If you want a good laugh and get some feel for the fanaticism behind Northern Soul check out ‘Cider With Roadies’ by Stuart Maconie.

[rathbone]

Two Tone was another style which developed out of Mod, this time by those people who had picked up on Jamaican Ska music.

When I first went down to London to live in 1970 the cool thing to do at the weekend was to go to Jamaican house parties. These were basically situations where a group of Jamaican DJs would take over a house, usually a squat, and run what would later be called a rave. You were charged admission at the door and the sound systems were pretty rudimentary. What was important about them was that this was almost the only way you could get to hear up to date Ska and Bluebeat.

The Jamaican guys tended to be dressed in slim pants cut sharp to the ankle, smart shirt and tie, a two-tone jacket and a pork pie hat. Almost traditional Mod gear in fact. The important bit here was the two-tone jacket. When I was talking about the early Edinburgh music scene I mentioned suits of material which, if you looked at them from one direction looked blue, from another green. That was ‘two tone’.

A bit like Northern Soul, the people who followed Ska tended to be fanatical about it. For much of the seventies it was mostly confined to the house parties, but during the early Thatcher years it flared up into a full scale movement, spurred on by groups like The Specials and The Beat. The Two-Tone record label publicised the name and the media publicised the fashion. For a while pork pie hats were all the rage.

Gradually it was absorbed into the mainstream, Madness had a string of hits, and Two-Tone was seen as the ‘fun’ side of the music business. Which was a shame, because it was essentially all about integration. Its lasting legacy has been that absorption of jamaican music into the mainstream, something that we now take for granted.

[rathbone]

In 1973 I had a pair of really high platform boots hand tooled in mustard coloured leather and a blue jacket from Biba with the most enormous shoulders. One night Stan and I were made up by Dorothy and Joan and tottered along to the Hammersmith Odeon to see Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel. Glam was a laugh.

Most people still view Glam as a joke and whatever else it was, it was certainly frivolous. But it was seriously frivolous. Like the Skinheads, Glam was a reaction against the Hippies, but where the Skinheads pared things down, ‘Glam Rockers’ beefed them up. The media had accused the Hippies of blurring the line between male and female. (Is it a boy or is it a girl?) Glam did that for real. David Bowie was the most overt when he wore a dress on the original cover of Man Who Sold The World, but soon loads of groups had adopted an androgynous image, and where the groups led, we sheep must follow.

Overlaid on that was a science fiction twist which was originally introduced through American funk bands like George Clinton’s Mothership. It was probably Clinton and Bootsy Collins who introduced glitter to the scene as well.

In this country it was undoubtedly Bowie and Bolan who led. Bowie dyed his hair in outrageous colours. Bolan’s eye make-up and feather boas were a sub-genre in themselves. The boundaries between male and female styles completely blurred.

Glam was unique and distinctive and could have developed along a different and probably more interesting path if it hadn’t been for laughter. The bulk of the population found it amusing and bands started to play up to that. Everything became glitter and camp, probably best encapsulated in Noddy Holder’s mirrored top hat and Dave Hill’s baco-foil jumpsuit. Mud were just as bad with Rob Davis’ flouncy bell bottoms and gigantic earrings. A Sweet’s Steve Priest would simper : “We just haven’t got a clue what to do.” The whole thing degenerated into farce.

I haven’t got a clue what happened to the platform boots, but the Biba jacket is still around in a suitcase in the attic.

[rathbone]

Disco allowed the androgyny which had developed through Glam to have free rein.

From the early days of the Waldman brothers Edinburgh had discotheques. The Casablanca, Romanos, Annabellas and others came and went, but it was only when The International Club on Princes Street became Fire Island that disco, as we currently use the term, finally arrived in the capital.

In New York during the early seventies the emerging gay community began to establish clubs with their own distinctive music style which was soon dubbed “Philly” because most of the records came out of Philadelphian studios. Philly was soul with big, lush, orchestral arrangements. More importantly, however, the tracks had insistent, repetitive dance beats. Soon bands were focussing on these repetitive beats and a new genre developed, which was almost immediately dubbed Disco.

For most of the seventies Disco was confined to gay clubs. Fire Island (now Waterstones) was a gay club.

In 1977 Saturday Night Fever propelled Disco into the mainstream. Within months discos were everywhere around the globe. Because John Travolta had worn a white suit in the film, everybody was wearing white suits. At wedding receptions middle aged men were posing and pointing and strutting their stuff. There was no-one who couldn’t do ‘the hustle’.

What really made Disco as a style was that, like Skinhead, it was cheap. All you needed was a suit and some attitude. For the club owners all you needed was a record deck and a DJ. It was custom made for the recession which the country was going through at the end of the seventies. For the clubs it was a cheap way to make money and for the punters it was a cheap way to have fun.

Its lasting legacy was to get people off their backsides and back on to the dance floor. The sweat began to drip off the dance hall ceilings once again.

[rathbone]

During the seventies Rastafarians started popping up at the jamaican house parties I would go to. You could tell them from the Two Tone guys because they wore their hair long. Gradually the long hair developed into dreadlocks and with the dreadlocks came knitted tams to keep them in place. It was noticeable that the house parties that they frequented were more Ska orientated than Bluebeat, and that the Ska itself was changing into something else. That turned out to be Reggae.

It was interesting that not all of the West Indians I knew at that time were tolerant of the Rastafarians. They considered them to be religious fanatics with an Ethiopian fixation. The Rastas insistence on using patois didn’t help much either. It was difficult to have a conversation with any of them.

Apart from the dreadlocks and tams, the most distinctive thing about the Rasta style was the almost ubiquitous use of red, gold and green, the colours of the Ethiopian flag.

It hit the mainstream in 1974 when Eric Clapton reached number one with ‘I Shot The Sheriff’, by an obscure reggae musician called Bob Marley. Within months Marley was touring the UK and Reggae was the next big thing.

While that was great for the music, it was probably bad for Rastafarianism. The original Rastas were deeply religious, but they were soon overtaken by copy-cat Rastas (often with no connection to Jamaica), who simply liked the look. A whole series of home grown British Reggae bands started up.

Trendy white kids started taking up the look. You could even order fake dreadlocks through the back pages of rock papers. The concept of ‘Babylon’ started to be used to describe anything about western civilisation that kids didn’t like.

By the end of the decade the whole thing had become debased. Culture Club were on Top Of The Pops singing about red, gold and green, with Boy George swinging his artificial dreadlocks back and forth. It was a long way from the Rastas original belief in Ras Tafari Makonnen.

[rathbone]

Headbangers: I have to be careful with this one as both the younger Rathbonette and her intended husband consider themselves as falling into this category.

I think it’s probably best summed up by an advert from the back of NME in 1975 headed ‘Rock On Your Chest’. Heavy Metal spawned the customised T-Shirt.

The music itself was a reaction to prog rock and the early metal bands didn’t really know that they were doing it. They thought they were getting back to the basics of Rock’n’Roll, but tempered through the guitar pyrotechnics that Jimi Hendrix had pioneered. The music was based on loud and repetitive guitar riffs. Even before Steppenwolf had coined the term ‘Heavy Metal’ journalists had noticed that at Led Zeppelin gigs guys would by rhythmically shaking their heads to the beat and started describing them as Headbangers.

As the music developed and the number of bands grew, the fashion industry started to produce ‘sew on’ patches which could be stitched to denim jackets and for a while that became the main style and then, some time in the mid seventies, some genius had the idea of printing the band logos on t-shirts and selling them at gigs. Where would we be without them now?

Headbangers have never gone away and the style has changed very little. During Glam there was an increase in the number of studs attached to jackets, but that’s about it. The stereotype is of a lank haired gangly youth in a t-shirt playing air guitar to an unfeasibly loud racket. And for once the stereotype is largely true. You can look at photographs from Heavy Metal gigs from the 70s through to today and the only way to date them is from the names of the groups on the t-shirts.

Heavy Metal has given us a lot of great music with a bewildering range of sub-genres within it, but the Headbangers have suffered badly from the effects of snobbery, usually classed as being uncouth and somehow at the bottom of the musical food chain. Simply because they have not changed, the music press has generally either patronised them, dismissed them as out of date, or cynically exploited them. It doesn’t seem to matter much to the Headbangers.

[rathbone]

I’ll try to keep this short. More has probably been written about Punks than any other of the styles I’m talking about here. What is remarkable about that is that Punk, as a style flared up and subsided again within about eighteen months.

Of course it had been building up for some time before that, mostly in London, more specifically in World’s End where Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood had their shop. McLaren had spent some time in New York where bands like The Ramones were already being called punks, and decided to import the concept into the UK. He nurtured the disaffected kids who were hanging around his shop. He astutely deduced that growing unemployment, depression and lack of opportunity were a market opportunity for the right sort of merchandise. It was a tipping point and McLaren and Westwood had the nous to give things a push.

They started producing clothing which was the antithesis of high street fashion. Bondage, black leather, rubber, PVC, pornographic images on t-shirts, cheap off the peg suits with slogans painted on them, ‘distressed’ school blazers, dog collars and safety pins used in place of jewellery, brightly coloured mohican hairstyles. Nothing quite like it had been seen before. The media picked up on it instantly. To use current cyberspeak, it went viral.

Within a couple of months in 1976 Punk had become a stereotype. By the end of 1977 it was more or less all over. In the intervening period any kid who wanted to upset his mum started wearing Punk. In the big cities any kid who wanted to make a buck posed for their photograph with a gullible tourist. Up and down the country shops opened up to peddle punk gear. In Edinburgh Cockburn Street was transformed over night. The Wig and Pen pub was overflowing with little punks and punkettes. By 1978 it had all become a parody of itself. Westwood and McLaren had moved on to the New Romantics and the music had changed again.

On the positive side, Punk, at least temporarily, flushed all of the crap out of the music scene. The music business hadn’t seen it coming and took long enough to adjust to enable a whole new series of genres to take root.

On the negative, the pseudo punk style lingered on longer than it had a right to, and even now, over thirty five years later, the idea of the ‘punk menace’ is still being peddled by the media.

[rathbone]

While Punk was taking over Britain, in the US a new genre was developing on the streets of New York. At first it didn’t have a name, but because it was based on DJs talking over the top of the music it started to be called Rap. Then the jamaican community started house and street parties, just as they had done in London. This led to competing ‘crews’ of DJs battling it out with sound systems. The turntables themselves became musical instruments with the DJs scratching and mixing more than one record together at the same time. The resulting sound became known as Hip Hop

The street parties led to kids trying to out-do themselves dancing to this new music. They would really get going on the instrumental breaks between the ‘raps’. This started to be called break dancing and the dancers were known as B-Boys.

Inevitably a style developed out of the dancing. Trainers and tracksuits survived the roughness of street dancing best and baseball caps offered a bit of cushioning when spinning round on your head.

Equally inevitably, business got in on the act and started producing variations on the street clothes, using more flamboyant and more expensive materials. Suddenly what brand you wear wearing became more important than the actual garment. At the same time, as the DJs and Rappers became wealthier through exploiting the music, it became a mark of status to display your wealth. Heavy gold jewellery, particularly chunky chains and big rings became obligatory. The poorer kids mutated that into wearing stolen car insignias.

For reasons which I have never been able to fathom, it became the most copied style in the world, used by everyone from extremely rich executives to extremely poor kids. It is still with us, along with its attendant fetish for designer labels.

Along the way it destroyed the whole reason for it being there in the first place. No-one would risk break dancing in a Louis Vuitton jump suit.

There were more affordable variations, or course. At the end of the 80s we had urban commando chic which married military camouflage with chunky gold jewellery and for a while there was an ethnic african look coupled with the Ethiopian red gold and green. Sometimes these reflected the way in which Hip Hop itself was developing, with the Political thread promoted by Public Enemy, the Gangsta thread which came out of Compton and the Roots thread from the likes of the Jungle Brothers.

Hip Hop is now everywhere, and is arguably the the most wide reaching musical style of the past hundred years. It came early to Edinburgh and stayed. Once it had taken root through the efforts of people like Patrick 'Reachout' Coll and Young Clovie it began to take on a distinct local identity and now, with people like Werd and Wardie Burns the city has some of the best, and most underrated rappers in the world.

[rathbone]

New Romantics developed because Punk didn’t really leave much room for camp posing and glitter, and there were still enough people left over from Glam who wanted to dress up not dress down. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren latched on to that and soon left their punk offspring behind.

Like most of these styles, it began to develop through the clubs. In London Steve Strange started Bowie Night at Gossips. It attracted everybody who felt that they didn’t fit into Punk and different sub-genres were catered for on different nights. The concept of the ‘one-night’ club was born and spread across the country. Edinburgh had its fair share.

Along with the one-nighters came exclusivity. Steve Strange is usually credited with that as well. Strict door policies meant that if you weren’t trendy enough you couldn’t get in. That meant that the fashions became more and more extreme. A good way to follow how that trend developed is to google George O’Dowd and watch how he mutated into Boy George.

The name New Romantics came when Chris Sullivan started New Romantics night at the St. Moritz in Soho and the media picked up on it. You could only get into New Romantics if you were Glamorous, darling, with a capital ‘G’.

I was always put off by the posing, but I did like the music and if there is a real legacy from the New Romantics it is the club scene as we now know it, and the rise of ambient music from its roots in Kraftwerk and Visage.

[rathbone]

Hanging around in the New Romantics club was a guy called Steven Jones who used to dress like Dracula, with white make-up, black lips, vampire peak hair and a long black cloak. It was an image which appealed to a lot of people.

In some ways they were old romantics, harking back to the gothic fantasies of Mary Shelley and the Romantic Poets.

Soon this group had developed their own style, which they called Goth. They soon had their own clubs, starting with The Batcave in Soho which opened in 1982.

Some of the New Romantic bands such as Bauhaus started catering for their needs with semi-punks like The Damned and Siouxsie and The Banshees tagging along with the image. With The Cure and, later, Sisters Of Mercy they developed their own bands, if not a full blooded Goth music of their own.

The defining element of Goth was black. Black velvet, black leather, black lace. (and black bedroom walls ..... the eldest Rathbonette had her entire bedroom painted black. She was bumping in to things for months.) If you were really daring it was permissible to spice it up with scarlet or purple accessories.

In terms of dress everything was tight laced, literally with the use of corsets by both men and women. Everyone wore black gloves and dyed their hair black. Heels were high, stiletto if you could manage them. Silver jewellery, preferably involving occult symbols, could be worn. As time went on the jewellery became allied with body piercing.

Remarkably, for such a kooky and extreme style, Goth has lasted. Every town still has a few Goths. Families such as mine have at least a couple lurking in dark corners. It touches a corner of the pysche that other styles cannot reach.

[rathbone]

It was my reference to Casuals which started off this string of posts, so I won’t dwell much longer on them here. Apart from bringing designer sportswear into the mainstream they didn’t contribute a whole lot to making the world a brighter place.

Unlike Psychobilly.

The Cramps were, and always will be, one of my favourite bands. They managed to fuse the classic americana of Rockabilly with the anarchy of Punk and throw in a liberal dash of overall weirdness. They appear to be the ones who coined the term Psychobilly and advertised themeselves as that on gig posters as early as 1976.

Other bands, like The Meteors and Guana Batz picked up on it and developed a following of their own. By the early 80s those followers had their own style and their own venues. The Klub Foot in west London was the most prominent example.

The visual style was the same, slightly awkward mix of punk and rockabilly as the music. Bleached jeans, Dr. Marten boots and studded leather jackets over band logoed t-shirts. The two defining factors were the horror comic motifs painted on the jackets and the hugely towering quiffs, usually dyed either green or purple.

Psychobilly was never a big movement, but it did go global and it did last. You can see psychobillies across most of Europe and they are big in Japan. Voodoo Zombie and Horrorpops still cater to their musical needs.

[rathbone]

It was probably inevitable that Reggae would become corrupted by the music business. I’ve already mentioned the way in which it was exploited and debased in Britain. A similar thing happened in Jamaica.

A slightly wealthier class of young people developed as the island’s economy improved through the 1980s. Like all new generations they wanted to demonstrate their uniqueness. They imported music, dance and fashion from the New York disco scene and grafted it on to Ska and Reggae and called it Ragga.

Women started dressing provocatively, with extremely cut down shorts or see-through jump suits. Men favoured stonewashed denim liberally decorated with brocade applique. An ostentatious display of wealth was the order of the day. It was designed to offend their elders and it was no surprise that did. They became disparagingly known as Raggamuffins.

What was perhaps more surprising was that just as they had stolen from the New York club scene, so New York stole the image back again and Ragga became all the rage in America and spread from there to the UK.

Here musicians like Shabba Ranks and Buju Banton took the music into the charts and designers like Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano took the style on to the catwalks.

Raga did not last long as a ‘movement’, but its look was insidious and is still around, even if no-one calls themselves Raggamuffins any more.

One of the least expected consequences of Raga was its attraction for the British Asian community. It is probably true to say that, while there is little direct affinity between the Asian and West Indian communities, they tend to live in fairly close proximity in the larger cities and cross fertilisation was inevitable.

The Asian community had its own traditional music, Bhangra. As Raga became popular, young asians began to pick up on it. In Birmingham an asian DJ called Steve Kapur began mixing Raga and Bhangra together and soon all over the West Midlands DJs were playing this hybrid style in the clubs. With typical finesse, the music papers started calling the resulting sound Bhangramuffin.

The asian kids themselves called their style Desi from the Hindi for ‘of the homeland’.

Fashion-wise it wasn’t a homogenous style, but a mixture of traditional asian clothing with a hip hop emphasis on heavy jewellery and intricately razor patterned hairstyles.

[rathbone]

It was a long time before Harvey Ball’s smiley face entered the mainstream, and I’m not really sure how it found its way there. Ball was a commercial artist and invented the yellow smiley for an advertising campaign in Seattle in 1963. In 1985 it was exploded on to the Ibiza Rave scene and then brought back as a holiday souvenir by the 18-35 crowd.

Once it got back to the UK it immediately became the latest symbol of moral panic for the tabloids. Anyone caught wearing a smiley face was obviously off their head on Acciieeed!!! or this strange, and even more dangerous, drug, Ecstasy. Gangs of feral ravers were roaming the countryside looking for barns to invade and fields to churn up with long loaders stacked with sound equipment capable of generating, oh, a million decibels of something called ‘house’ music. Around our little town the dust carts were used to block off the roads in case the rabble descended on us. They never did.

The feral Ravers started with the rise of cheap package holidays in the seventies. Spain, in particular, quickly adapted to catering for British tourists and companies specifically targeting young people grew up. That led to a plethora of night clubs. By the eighties Ibiza had become the main destination for kids looking for a good time. Clubs like Amnesia, Pasha’s and Ku imported british DJs like Danny Rampling.

In 1987 Rampling returned to London and opened his own club, Schoom, playing the same ‘balearic’ music he had played on Ibiza. The sign outside Schoom was a big yellow smiley face. Kids who were nostalgic for their holiday experiences flocked in and inevitably other clubs followed suit.

When the limited number of clubs could no longer cope with the demand some enterprising guys started running ‘raves’ in disused warehouses in London’s east end. The resulting publicity about these illegal events led to raves springing up all over the country Smiley was quickly being sold on t-shirts. Somewhere along the way the music press stopped calling the music balearic and began describing it as Acid House. With the acid came a revival of psychedelia and tie-dye was in fashion again.

At the same time Acid House was absorbed into mainstream club culture. House music became the norm at clubs like Manchester’s Hacienda, which could hardly be described as a ‘rave’ venue. To a lesser extent the same was true of the Edinburgh clubs of the period. The defining features were hypnotic beats, widespread use of ecstasy with everybody ‘loved up’, and a belief that everybody had the right to party.

The Government didn’t agree on the second and third of those. Ecstasy was quickly designated a class A drug and rave assemblies were banned. As usual the reactionary approach of the authorities only made the kids more determined. House became Hardcore.

[rathbone]

Another outcome of the clamp down on raves was the bringing of New Age Travellers into prominence. The changes in the law which caught the acid house lot caught them too.

There had always been a hard core of hippies who were genuinely concerned to drop out of mainstream society and live the simpler pastoral life which the majority had paid lip service to. The main expression of this was the establishing of communes, mostly in Wales and the West Country.

The idyllic life for most of them proved to be far from idyllic. Locals didn’t welcome them. Getting permanent sites proved difficult and going ‘natural’ is easier said than done. And whether they liked it or not, they still needed money to survive.

The easier option was to get a caravan or a camper van and keep moving around. It was a lesson that gypsies and tinkers had learned centuries before. Through the seventies whole travelling communities of self-styled New Age Travellers developed. They were not welcomed by either Local Authorities or the Gypsies and other travelling folk.

One hangover from the original Hippies was a fascination with mysticism. Ley-lines defined the routes travelled and sites such as Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Avebury were requisitioned as their ‘special’ places.

Paradoxically another special place was Camden Town in north London, where mass squatting by a mix of ‘new agers’ and ‘punks’ led to them declaring it a ‘free city’. Inevitably the Council were having none of that and at the end of the seventies carried out massive evictions, putting thousands of these people out on the street. They mostly joined the new age convoys, bringing with them an anger and aggressiveness which hadn’t been there before. They also fused multi-coloured mohican haircuts and bovver boots with tye-dies and beads. It was a potent mixture. It was this hybrid that the media picked up on.

The Thatcher government couldn’t allow this to continue. Using the laws they had brought in to stop raves, they confronted the New Age Travellers. The most prominent example was when 1,300 police were used to break up a convoy of 450 travellers who were on their way to celebrate the summer solstice at Stonehenge. Their vehicles were smashed and over 100 arrested.

Despite that, they haven’t gone away. They still turn up at most festivals and have become more and more associated with the ecology movement, gradually working their way back to their roots.

[rathbone]

It’s arguable whether Grunge started in the UK or the USA. Either way it came out of the Thatcher / Reagan austerity policies. Money was tight and kids made do with what they had.

Grunge, as a dress code, was an ostentatious dressing down. As something which was deliberately scruffy it had an immediate appeal. It wasn’t an image which you had to try too hard to achieve. All you really needed was a local charity shop which sold clothes which were either one size too big for you, or one size too small. Preferably both so you could mix and match.

To complete the image you had to adopt a gloomy look, go around being pessimistic all the time and listen to downbeat indy music.

In the States Seattle became identified as the home of Grunge and the label was stuck on a whole bunch of bands and musicians who, really, had only tenuous musical links to each other. What they did have were checked flannel shirts, lank hair and work boots.

Apart from trying to squeeze groups as disparate as Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr. and the Pixies into the one box, the media left Grunge pretty much alone. Maybe that was because it was all so ordinary.

It was also that ordinariness which led to its absorption into the mainstream. Grunge has never gone away, it’s just that we don’t call it anything anymore.

[rathbone]

I got my first, and only, piercing in the early seventies. At that time it was quite shocking. People told me that I would never get another job unless I took it out. The only godsend was that I hadn’t got a tattoo. Tattoos were a definite confirmation of either delinquency or a career in the navy. Now piercing and tattooing are called body art and are everywhere.

Tattooing as we now know it, developed in California in the late sixties, where a number of guys with links to the psychedelic poster movement began to replicate those designs on the skin of themselves and their friends in bands. As those bands toured more and more kids became fascinated by the tattoos and started hunting out tattooists who were prepared to go a little bit further.

Both Heavy Metal headbangers and the Oi fraternity embraced tattooing and body piercing. Fashions in ink came and went. For a while tribal art from the Pacific, particularly Maori, came to the fore and it was this that the media picked up on, dubbing it Modern Primitive.

Modern Primitive, apart from out and out self mutilation, is probably the most extreme form of personal fashion. It’s not something you can take off at night and put in a drawer. Once you’ve done it you are stuck with it.

But in recent years we have begun to see a rise in self mutilation as well. In some quarters branding has started to take over from tattooing, with the arguments that it is more ‘organic’. It even has its own magazine : Body Play and Modern Primitives Quarterly. Always an interesting read.

[rathbone]

I’m not sure if there was a Techno style as such. It’s easy enough to cite the music: Aztec Mystic, Dave Clarke, Jeff Mills et al., but pinning down a style is a tad more difficult. (And do we include Trance with Techno?)

Techno took the synthetic aspects of Acid House and honed them into an esoteric realm where the more fainthearted were challenged to follow. A lot of the music was created by solitary men locked into their bedrooms and posting it on-line, so there was an image problem. Then, when you started tracking them down you discovered that they were working out of bedrooms all over the world. There was no specific british focus. Just to take five of the people I latched on to, they came from Japan, Germany, USA, UK and Belgium.

If there was an outward expression of Techno, it was what the style press dubbed Cyberpunk, though I doubt that the ‘cyberpunks’ really thought of themselves as techno. The cyberpunks were more concerned with virtual reality in all of its manifestations. The were part of the alternative culture which has developed through the internet (and of which this forum is but one manifestation).

Their style was created for them through graphic novels and films. It’s interesting to look at old style magazines in the months after the release of Mad Max 3, Blade Runner and Robocop to see just how quickly the styles in those films were absorbed into the mainstream. In London and Amsterdam shops started opening to cater for this look. Personally I never looked good in a gasmask and rubber tubing, though the immensely high soled sneakers were a real find.

[rathbone]

There’s a wonderful irony when you get to the top of the escalator at Tate Modern. There is a sign saying that this exhibition is the first major retrospective of the work of Damien Hirst and gives the viewer the opportunity to explore his artistic development.

Then you go inside and there is no development. Twenty five years of work and nothing changes, nothing develops, nothing gets better and, perhaps more telling, nothing gets worse. The only thing that changes is that the amount of money the pieces fetch go up and up and up until you reach the £50,000,000 diamond skull. It’s some career trajectory.

It is probably the most boring exhibition I have been to in my life. The first two rooms are early works from his days as a student. You have a painting of coloured dots. You have a severed head. You have a glass cabinet with fag ends in it. You have a box full of live flies feeding on sugar. A ping pong ball being held up in a stream of hot air. So you go on.

Another room with bigger paintings of coloured dots. Lots of cases with dead things in formaldehyde swimming in them. A table covered in fag ends. A glass cabinet full of sleeping pills. Then an innovation: a canvas with dead butterflies stuck in gloss paint.

Then a room full of live butterflies feeding on sugar.

Then a room full of paintings of dots and cabinets full of pharmaceuticals and a beach ball being held up in a stream of hot air.

Then a room full of animals cut in half in vats of formaldehyde accompanied by paintings of coloured dots

Then a room of cabinets filled with surgical instruments and a large drum full of fag ends.

Then a room of cabinets full of diamonds and butterflies caught in gold paint.

Finally a black sheep in formaldehyde, a canvas covered in dead flies and a white dove in formaldehyde.

Inevitably you can’t get out of this without passing through ‘the shop’ with its outrageously priced tat. Apart from the concept of painted dots make money so make more painted dots there was little in the way of ‘message’ here.

Equally inevitably, the exhibition was packed, to the extent that guides were going round telling us we had had our five minutes in that particular room and could we please move so that other people could get in.

The irony of this non event was compounded by the other exhibition which was running at the Tate. This was a retrospective of Alighieri Boetti. When Mrs. R. and I went in to that there were only the two of us and another woman with her teenage daughter. She said that she had come in because they got fed up waiting in the Hirst queue. In the whole exhibition we only saw six other people going round. Which was a tragedy, because this was really worth seeing.

Here was someone who had developed as an artist. Nothing was static. You could see him struggling with ideas and experimenting until he reached a resolution. Often you had to struggle with him to understand where he was coming from. He made you think and, thankfully, there was no-one telling you your five minutes was up and you had to move into the next room. For the first time in a long time Mrs. R. and I found ourselves actually stopping and discussing the work at length before moving on to the next piece.

Alighiero Boetti died in relative poverty in 1994 without becoming the darling of the art business. Damien Hirst is the wealthiest living artist on the planet. Draw your own conclusions.

The Boetti was a genuinely enriching experience, unlike Hirst with his diamonds and tat. If either of them come in your direction, I know which I’d go to.

[rathbone]

A genuine tale of a community working together for the greater good:

There is a tiny village in Surrey called Compton. In 1894 they had a problem, the cemetery in the churchyard was full. It had been in use for over 400 years and it was impossible to squeeze another body in. Unfortunately there was no available land to expand into and anyway they couldn’t really afford to buy more land from any of the local landowners. For a while it looked as though they would have to spend eternity in a cemetery in Goldaming or Guildford, the two nearest towns. Centuries of family traditions would be broken.

Compton nestles in the north downs, surrounded by hills. One of those hills, Budburrow, has a flat top, but was useless for agriculture. The villagers asked the owner if he would sell them the top of the hill, and the path up to it, which he did, for £74 7s. It’s quite a steep climb up there, especially if you are carrying a coffin, and they soon decided that they needed a mortuary chapel so the coffin and the mourners could have a rest before the internment. But they had no money to build one. What they did have was local clay, and a local woman with determination. She was the potter Mary Watts. Her husband was the painter Frederic Watts.

Mary Watts decided that if she could make clay pots, she could make clay bricks and if she could make clay bricks, so could everybody else in the village. Using her pottery kiln, every thursday night the villagers came up to the Watts studio and made bricks.

Then they set about designing their little chapel, and started building it on the top of the hill, carrying everything up by hand. It took them four years.Soon they were experimenting with decoration on the bricks. They designed terracotta angels, carved patterns into wood for the doors, fired tiles for the roof. Frederic Watts sold paintings to pay for the ironwork and stained glass.

Then they set about decorating the interior. Mary Watts and the villagers covered every inch of the interior with angels and cherubims. The village children stood on seats to paint the little flowers around the bottom.

Last week Mrs. R. and I took a trip down to Compton:



Now, about that school in the park.......

[rathbone]

To return briefly to gang culture in Edinburgh, over Easter I was reading ‘Lavengro’ by George Borrow. This was originally published in 1851, but, in part, is set in Edinburgh in 1813.

He describes the situation thus:

“One day I was standing on the green brae,where it slopes down into what was in those days the green swamp or morass, called by the natives of Auld Reekie the Nor Loch. It was a dark gloomy day and a thin veil of mist was beginning to settle down upon the brae and the morass. I could perceive, however, that there was a skirmish taking place in the latter spot. I had an indistinct view of two parties and I heard whoops and shrill cries.

Descending the brae I reached the borders of the morass where was a runnel of water and the remains of an old wall, on the other side of which a narrow path led across the swamp. Upon this path at a little distance before me was a bicker. I pushed forward, but had scarcely crossed the ruined wall and runnel when the party nearest to me gave way and in great confusion came running in my direction. As they drew nigh, one of them shouted to me: “Wha are ye, mon? Are ye o’ the Auld Toon?” I made no answer. “Ha! Ye are o’ the New Toon. Deil tak ye. We’ll moorder ye.”

The next moment a huge stone sung past my head.

“Let me be, ye fule bodies”, said I, “ I live yonder, aboon the castle.”

“Then ye’re an Auld Tooner. Come gie us your help, mon, and dinna stand there staring like a dunnot, we want help sair eneugh. Here are stanes.”

For my own part I wished for nothing better and rushing forward I placed myself at the head of my new associates and commenced flinging stones fast and desperately. The other party now gave way in their turn, closely followed by ourselves.

“Ye are na a bad hand at flinging stanes”, said the lad who first addressed me as we now returned up the brae. “Your aim is right dangerous, mon. I saw how ye skelpit them. Ye maun help us agin the New Toon blackguards at our next bicker.”

And so the teenage Borrow joined the Auld Toon gang and goes on to describe their numerous battles with the New Tooners, involving dislodged teeth, broken jaws, gouged out eyes and ultimately fractured skulls and deaths.

Not much change in 199 years.

[rathbone]

I caught myself refereeing a heavyweight boxing match on Saturday night. To be more precise, the Irish Heavyweight title in Belfast.

To be even more precise, I caught one of my many google doppelgangers refereeing the Irish Heavyweight bout. If you enter my name in Google you get 4,650,000 matches. The real me appears at about 4,649,000. I have namesakes who are lawyers, authors, film directors and holocaust deniers. And boxing referees.

The bout was one of those which could have come from a film script. Tyson Fury was up against Martin Rogan for the Irish heavyweight belt.

I’ve admired Marty Rogan for years. I thing he is a good, classic boxer. The only problem is that he is now 40 and slowing down. At 6ft 2in, he’s usually pretty dominant in the ring, but Tyson Fury is the unbeaten British and Commonwealth champion, 6ft 9in and 23 years old and this had all the markings of a set-up with the young turk pitched against the old has-been.

To give Marty Rogan his due he came out battling and undoubtedly took the first two rounds on points. Fury was tentative and sluggish. But, like Mohammed Ali used to do, he was just making Rogan work. He was also confusing him. Usually Fury leads with his right but tonight he was working as a southpaw.

Rogan did all the work in the opening round, coming forward and landing a series of decent right handers just before the bell. Rogan also had the upper hand in the second round, but in the third Fury started upping the pace with a series of strong jabs and then a left hook that put Rogan briefly on the canvas.

Fury dominated Rogan in the fourth and then, early in the fifth round, landed a body shot which left the other boxer gasping for breath. He was down on the canvas again, but got back to his feet before the count. It was obvious that he was in difficulty and couldn’t get his breath. Before my namesake could intervene, Rogan’s trainer had pulled him out of the contest.

The win brought Tyson Fury’s total up to eighteen straight wins and no defeats. He is clearly one to watch.

In the post match interview he said that he found it comfortable to lead with his left hand. He wanted to experiment. “I’m a world class heavyweight and I’m going to try different things.”

The really interesting post match comments, however, came from Marty Rogan. He slammed into Mick Hennessy, Fury’s promoter. It was quite an altercation, with Rogan hurling plenty of obscenities and Hennessy returning in kind.

Rogan went out of his way to shake Fury’s hand and offer him respect for a well fought bout, but then went on to say that he had been shafted by Hennessy, who, after the contracts had been signed, had arranged for the bout being changed from the usual ten rounds to twelve. That, Rogan charged, was designed to ensure that whatever happened, the longer fight would advantage the younger, fitter, Fury. Hennessy shrugged off the accusation, saying it was just business, but if what Rogan was saying is true, then it does stink.

I presume that this will be the end of Marty Rogan’s career. If so, then I’d like to thank him for all of the pleasure he’s given me over the years. Meanwhile, I look forward to Tyson Fury’s next outing.