Rock and Wool

One thing I have discovered about 1982 that has surprised me is how much wool there was.  Not only was wool a heavily promoted product but it was actually worn by pop stars.  For some reason I find this kind of amazing.  I find it hard to imagine Lady Gaga in a nice knitted sweater now, but it was not too out of the ordinary in 1982.  In fact, pretty cool bands could rock a wool look. 

If you can tear yourself away from the tassells and hairdo of the dude hogging the limelight in the picture below you may notice the lead singer from the very high cred band Bauhaus in a lovely knit:

The same issue of Smash Hits features the lads from Depeche Mode in some knitted cricket whites.

Frankly there is nothing about these guys that makes them look they are in a pop band.  Their hair styles are cheerfully naff (I call the style on the right the munted poodle), and they seem to quite suit their outfits.  Out of context this really could be a picture of three lads after a good hearty thrashing of leather on willow.

But the band at the really yarny edge of rock and wool was Haircut 100.

And then we have the lead singer who I think single-handedly torpedoed his band’s chances of mainstream success by trying to bring in this look for long socks.

This band made a generation of grandmothers happy.

I have already discussed my own flirtation with high fashion/gender bending jerseys (jumpers/sweaters… whatever).  I have also featured wool ads on this blog in the past.  My personal favourite was this one in which the central model takes the concept of ready to wear to a dangerous new place:

Well, I have a new favourite.  This wool ad is perfect because every part works so well.  Here is the ad as a whole:

And here it is in its different parts.

Yeah, I know there’s a knitted dress to admire, but what really grabbed me were the jerseys with knitted alpine scenes.  I like to think that if the two models stood right next to each other the two scenes would join up to make a tableaux.  Also, I love the sheep in the foreground of the brunette’s top: it’s just so postmodern.

So much going on here.  The cats on top of the brick wall?  I mean, this is just AWESOME, but then my eye was drawn to the fully dodgy guy at the top and I thought “ha ha, he looks like a pimp” and then I saw the massage sign and thought “oh, he is” – which is a pretty odd angle to take in a wool ad but I suppose it works, I mean walking the streets at night must be pretty cold sometimes so a nice wool jumper would be good.

Here’s the payoff though; the text explaining the pictures.

Which fashion capitals are these I wonder?  Ulaan Baatar?  Vladivostok?  Here is my favourite line though: “Style that quietly screams fashion.”  Quietly screams.  Go on, go back and look at the cats on the wall top and tell me what it quietly screams to you.  Style?  Fashion?

Well, it’s only April 1982 but I think I can already declare this the provisional winner in the category Best Ad (Wool Products).  Yes, there will be awards, and yes this will be a category.  Best mail order index card system will also be a category, but it is still wide open at the moment.

Pre-teen dreams (Part One)

Leg warmers were originally worn by dancers to keep their muscles from cramping after stretching, but in the early 1980s, leg warmers became a fad, and wearing them was fashionable among teenage girls.

Wikipedia

Either I was a faddish teenage girl, or this is what is known as a generalisation.  My story about legwarmers involves Mrs Jeffries and music classes at primary school.

For a long time I wasn’t sure if I had any musical ability.  Probably because of a test we all had to take for the choir at my primary school.  We lined up next to the choir stall and were called up one by one by the man who played the organ at assembly.  When it was my turn I stepped up beside him and he pressed down on a white key in the middle of the keyboard.  “Sing that note,” he said.  I sang that note.  He shook his head, and called out “next boy, please.”  I stepped down and wandered back to class.  I think that meant that I couldn’t sing.  It seemed strange to not be able to sing but to like music.  Like I suppose it seemed strange to my wood work teacher that I had a penis but I couldn’t make anything out of wood, and seemed to have an aversion to tools.  I didn’t like my wood work teacher and he didn’t like me.

I liked Mrs. Jeffries though.  She was the music teacher.  She was tall with long, silvery hair and lovely, slender fingers.  I could imagine that she had been a dancer.  We sang songs in her class and she has never shook her head at anyone and dismissed them.  The songs I remember singing were Beatles songs.  We used to sing When I’m 64 which is a strange song to sing when you’re 7 or 8.  Every time we sang the line about turning out the lights some of the other boys sniggered.  I didn’t know why they were sniggering, but I smiled knowingly anyway to blend in.

One week Mrs. Jeffries asked my class to listen to a piece of music with our eyes closed and our heads down on our desks.  She told us that we were going to imagine a story while we listened to the music and that afterwards some of us would share our stories with the class.  I think that the music was Peer Gynt.

When the music started I was just thinking about how sitting in class with my eyes closed was sort of silly, and how Jonathan had made a funny face, and how James had made a pretend snoring noise and Mrs Jeffries had frowned at him, but the music was so good that I had straightaway started to daydream.  I imagined I was in a desert and I was walking really slowly, almost like I was tip-toeing across the sand, and there was a huge, amazing looking city sort of glowing on the horizon, but the music began to speed up, and up and up, and soon I was flying across the sand, and then shooting up into the clouds and swooping down over the city which was a jumble of towers and amazing buildings, and it was so exciting to dip and surge about that when the music ended I was almost out of breath.

Mrs Jeffries asked us to say what we had imagined, but when I described it my dream sounded sort of ordinary and hollow and I wondered why I couldn’t explain the magic.

Another time Mrs Jeffries asked us to sit in a circle and one by one say what our favourite piece of clothing was.  I was somewhere in the middle of the line, and as I heard the boys ahead of me announce their choices, I began desperately hunting around in my mind for something to say. I wanted it to be cool, but different, because Mrs Jeffries was a cool teacher.  Finally I thought of something.  It was so cool.  I waited really nervously as the boys ahead of me went, desperately hoping no one would steal my idea (ah the irony).  Finally it came to my turn in the line, and I said:

“Leg warmers.”

Most of the boys laughed at me.  Mrs Jeffries quickly hushed them and moved on to the next boy in the line.  I was very confused and red in the face.  Why had the other boys laughed?  I had to wait to the end of the lesson when James told me: “only girls wear leg warmers”.

At first I felt embarrassed and then I remembered that this wasn’t true.  Sometimes boys wore leg warmers.  Leroy in Fame wore them and he was cool. 

In fact, at the time of Fame and Flashdance I thought it would have been pretty cool to go to a school like the one in Fame but I’m not really sure what I would have done there.  My mother tried to get me to take piano lessons but somehow I couldn’t understand what the dots and lines on paper had to do with pushing keys and making sound.  Sometimes I tried to dance like Leroy did.  I put on my blue track suit and leg warmers, put on some music, and jumped about, but one day I saw myself in the reflection of the window and thought I had better stop because I didn’t look much like Leroy.

What went on in my head always seemed so much better than what actually was.  In my head when the choir master  pushed down on the key in the middle of the organ’s keyboard at school I could sing like the men on Mum’s Puccini Masterpieces cassette, and when I told the class that I liked legwarmers and they laughed then I could do some amazing dance routine in the middle of the classroom and they would have all joined in like they did on Fame and it would have been totally awesome.

That would have been cool.  Cooler than what happened anyway which was embarrassing.  I suppose what I learned when I tried and failed to explain my dream after listening to Peer Gynt was that music was transporting and magical, but also temporary and illusory.

I think I was in secondary school when I heard that Mrs. Jeffries had died of cancer.  It made me sad.  She was rather wonderful in what was usually quite a drab, and anti-creative school week.  I remember you Mrs. Jeffries.  I always will.  I’m sorry you’re gone, but thank you for your gift to me.

Notes on a photograph

In order to be fair to the handful of people who are used to reading this blog I have put this logo at the top of this post to let you know that it resuses some old material.  I think that if Richard has to hear my legwarmer story again he will drive across town and slap me.

Anyway, as a few more people are temporarily reading my blog I feel like I should explain the photograph that usually heads my posts about the 1980s.  I want to avoid any suggestion that I actually look like this now, or that I have put this picture here because I think I’m some kind of male model (I know, I know, I could have been, but I went in another direction).

This photo was probably taken in the late 80s when I was about 15 or 16.  I grew up in a small New Zebra town called Paraparaumu (long name, small town).  I didn’t like it.  Actually there’s nothing the matter with Paraparaumu, but I was a teenager and it was small and I wanted to be a rock star.  Hell, we didn’t even have a local movie theatre.  I played roleplaying games, collected a pop music magazine called Smash Hits, and learned how to play the guitar.

Part of the plan for becoming a rockstar was to stand out.  One component in this plan was getting a rocking hair cut.  I decided to get a perm.  This is a photo taken the day I got my perm, and I am perm modelling if you will.  Perm aside I now take great delight in the fact that I have very un-rock’n'roll short pastel yellow shorts on and pretty hairy legs.  I don’t mean they’re “pretty” I mean… never mind.

I don’t really remember why, out of all the silly hairstyles in the world, I decided I would get a perm.  My mother took me to a hair salon  upstairs in Coastlands (the mall) and helped me  express myself (I was a teenage boy) to a hairdresser.  The hairdresser gave me some hair style books to look through and I obviously flicked though to the section marked “Poodles” and then we were away. 

I was amazed at how long it took to get your hair permed.  You had to sit with all kinds of gloop on your head for ages, and only then  did the hairdresser begin to weave her magic on my locks.  Looking back I think this was an insight into the gruelling life of a world tour with Bon Jovi in the 80s.  Those guys must have  spent hours every single day getting  their hair done.  I think I got two, maybe three, perms in total before I lost patience with this particular exercise in vanity.

After I had been freshly coiffed I had an attack of nerves.  Perhaps, I suddenly wondered, I sort of looked like a tit.  I snuck out of the hair salon and along the balcony walkway of Coastlands.  I aimed for a set of steps I knew were very rarely used  and darted down them.  Naturally one of my best mates was standing at the bottom killing  time.  There was an awkward moment when he registered what I had done to myself,  and then he pulled himself together and we had an entire conversation in which he said nothing like: “You look like a complete dickhead”,  or “I think there’s a dead poodle on your head”.  Sometimes it’s awesome  to be a guy. 

Actually I didn’t catch any crap for my hair do.  In fact, quite a few girls commented on my new “do” approvingly.  Not that I did anything about this sudden female attention.  There were further  aspects of my look to get right.

Here I am with my sensibly dressed Gran in full Kapiti coast, man-gear: stupid hair, long t-shirt (Iron Maiden = good, WHAM! = very, very, bad), black stonewashed jeans, and basketball boots.  I was not cool enough to have an Iron Maiden t-shirt.  I think the main problem was that my mother would see me wearing it and  laugh at me.  Iron Maiden t-shirts, if you are not familiar with the oeuvre, feature a corpse-like character looking satanic  and doing satanic things like hanging out in graveyards, satanically. 

I once bought an album called Masters of Metal in Coastlands.  It had an utterly ridiculous cover featuring some kind of corpse with green eyes  wielding a sledgehammer (obviously influenced by Iron Maiden), and my mother in an act of sudden generosity snatched the record out of my hand and offered to buy it for me.  I was mortified.  She went up to the counter where, for some bizarre reason, there was a very matronly looking older woman working, and put the LP down on the counter.  They both looked at it, rolled their eyes and laughed.  I was at the back of the shop trying to hide behind a cardboard display case of Piano by Candlelight cassettes. 

Possibly my lamest form of protest was through the previously ignored vehicle for youth rebellion: the knitted  jersey (sweater, whatever, we call them jerseys).  Once you tear yourself away from my shapely legs and deflated perm, you will notice the jersey.  This was the first in a line  of jerseys that I wore and I can tell you that this was pretty fashion-forward for Kapiti in the late 80s.  In my defense please remember that The Cosby Show was popular at this time and Bill Cosby was taking the humble jersey to strange, garish new places.  Anyway, back to this particular jersey.  I had a friend  who particularly admired it and asked for the pattern (Christ! this sounds so laughable – how could I possibly be cool if I had friends who were asking to borrow the knitting  patterns for my jerseys?).  So I gave him the pattern  and he passed it on to his grandmother who… refused to knit it because the picture on the cover of the pattern showed a woman wearing the jersey.

I ask you, does this jersey look feminine to you?  I was incensed.  My manhood was impugned (my permed, jersey-wearing manhood).  I raged against such judgements.  I ordered another jersey from my Gran for next winter.  It was massive, it was lurid, I wore it defiantly in front of my friend on muftiday.  I rubbed his face in the yarn of gender-bending defiance.  Oh, the heady, heady days of youth.

What am I saying here?  I’m saying, on my knees, hands clasped, “don’t judge me”.  I’m saying, sitting forward, chin cupped in hands, “you must understand this photo in its proper context.”  I’m saying, hand caught in doorjam, crying big man tears, “man it was great to be young.”

Arthur

Arthur was a big hit in 1981.  It was nominated for four Oscars and won two.  The Listener in February of 1982 carries a two star review of the film, and I’m with The Listener; two out of five seems about right.  The most astonishing thing about this movie for me is that John Gielgud won an Oscar for best supporting actor.

I think the film can best be summarised this way.

A well-dressed, hunky man,

who is sober and sensible,

and likes well-dressed, sophisticated women

almost marries a crazy weirdo

but eventually ends up with the woman of his dreams instead.

The Listener reviewer describes Liza in the scene above this way: “When Linda comes to Arthur’s engagement party… she’s wearing pink ruffled silk and her sleekly groomed black head sits above it like a bumble bee on a hibiscus.”

Maybe.

Personally I found it hard to decide which out of two cheeky little numbers was my favourite fashion masterstroke in this movie.  In the end I decided that the father of the bride’s party jacket comes in second,

to Liza’s splendid opening ensemble.

Hello the 1980s.  In the 80s we said YES to colour (unless we were an extra in a movie and then we said, “dress me in your drabbest grey”).

I didn’t like Arthur.  The first ten minutes were hard to watch because the lead character made bad jokes, laughed his head off, and was drunk.  It was a bit like being with a drunk who made bad jokes and laughed his head off.  Maybe this is a great movie to watch when you’re drunk.  Maybe it works like parties.  All the drunks enjoy it; all the sober people get tight smiles, and mentally judge people.

John Gielgud was fairly good.  I imagine he greeted his Oscar with bemusement.  The title song also won an Oscar and is pretty famous.

When you get caught between the moon and New York City
I know it’s crazy but it’s true
If you get caught between the moon and New York City
The best that you can do (the best that you can do)
The best that you can do is fall in love

When you get caught between the moon and New York City?  Isn’t that everyone in New York?  Why is this bad?  What’s the worst you could do?  A hate crime?  Probably.  Hate crimes are bad.  I’ll admit it doesn’t scan as well to sing:

If you get caught between the moon and New York City

The worst that you can do

The worst that you can do is assault a handicapped person.

Has impact though.

Arthur did have its moments.  Well, a moment.  I laughed out loud once, and it was a big laugh.

 

Well, not that big.

The Human League

In January there was a guarded but good review of Dare by the Human League in The Listener.  I bought Dare a few years ago on vinyl because I had heard it was good, and because it was cheap.  Outside of Britain the Human League were probably most appreciated in New Zealand although not hugely so.  I have just finished watching the videos for the four singles off Dare and I would like to present my findings.

Finding One

The Human League achieve a higher position on the chart when the lead singer looks like this:

rather than this:

Finding Two

If you’re in a synthesizer band there is often a guy standing around who doesn’t do anything.

And same guy, different video, in the centre at the back,

Interviewer: What did you do in Human League?

Guy in Human League: Impressions of police constables mainly.

Finding Three

Earrings became important for dudes in the 80s.  In fact I recall a number of boys I knew being obsessed with getting one, and making sure it was in the correct ear (one side meant you were gay apparently).  Frankly I don’t think it matters which ear a guy wears this earring in, I think he is sending a pretty clear message,

While we’re piercing stuff how about a nipple?  (Probably the punks are to blame for this.)

This kind of things has always just looked sore to me, also I don’t like imagining any kind of situation where I might be led around by my nipples.

Finding Four

If you run out of ideas for videos just do the same video again.  Love Action features a lot of people watching projected clips, and spying on each other, and Don’t You Want Me features a lot of people watching clips and spying on each other.  What symbolises modernity has moved on quite a bit in thirty years however.

Actually those two videos fit nicely with a theme in the Human League’s music, a theme that The Listener reviewer picks up on.

A song about John Lennon, his own confessional “Love Action” and the closing track all indicate how reality always ends up surpassing our attempts to control it.

Nicely said, and the video for Don’t You Want Me is really quite clever at playing with reality and our expectations based on TV conventions.  Not to mention it’s a great song.

Dare is full of great songs, but talking about that would be dull, so let’s look at the video for Open Your Heart in all it’s angular, flourescent glory.

So much to enjoy although this is possibly my favourite shot:

This either represents the lead singer’s fantasy that the dude who just stands around doing nothing gets eaten, or it might be the guy who stands around doing nothing’s fantasy about being a penis.  Your call.

We could talk about how this video is another version of them mucking around with reality, we could choke back the vomit and talk about the colour palette they used, or we could talk about hair.

Personally something about this shot strikes me as revolting.

But even the chicks join in.  Look at the blonde girl (I think she’s about 18 in the video) here:

Pretty normal huh?  Look what she’s hiding at the back of her head:

Really?

Anyway, I would like to conclude with my favourite member of the band in action once again.

Interviewer: No, seriously.  What did you do in Human League?

Dude: (pulls out Korg) I pushed this button (pushes a button)