These days clothes don’t seem very important to me. As long as I look vaguely presentable, that’ll do. This is even more the case, post-stroke. It seems more superfluous than it ever did.
But while I was never a slave to fashion and was always pretty laissez-faire about it, nevertheless as a teenager it was an identifier and so that made it important in those years. Of course designer fashions didn’t really exist for us. You had to craft your own look as best you could.
For anyone seeking to project as a rock lad, some items were essential. An army coat from the Army and Navy Stores were a basic and preferably smelling of patchouli. It used to get cold in winters and the chances were that you’d be queuing to get into a gig or sleeping out to get a ticket for a gig, so it was essential to have a big coat to survive. They were also anti-fashion and showed the world that such shallow nonsense was beneath you. So we thought.
The next thing we needed was patched washed out jeans. This often took years of cultivation to get your mam to apply said patches. The look you were going for was Neil Young’s jeans on After The Goldrush, but somehow that was quite hard and you ended up with something less imaginative.
That said, I went to college with a pair that were covered in scraps of colourful material and really looked the part. But they were a 28 inch waist which was about 2 inches too small at the time and I almost gave myself a hernia and castrated myself pulling them on. By 1979 they were more of a statement than in 1975. It said as the world was celebrating new wave, ska and god help us, the mod revival, you were still listening to Camel and Jeff Beck. And that felt important. As was wearing them with a rugby shirt and an army jacket if it was summer. My army jacket was an ex-Afrika Corp - a controversial choice, as my dad had fought them in the African desert.
When worn with suede desert boots, this was almost a uniform and was worn on every occasion. Other things came and went; afghan coats, cheesecloth shirts, battered old jumpers, baseball boots, leather jackets if you were a biker, the occasional band t-shirt, though they were far less prevalent than now and scarves of different hues and composition. But our wardrobe was small.
If you went to a gig it was all hair and denim jackets, almost unanimously. The heavy rock uniform.
I had inherited a brown sports jacket from my brother if I needed to be smart, but I didn’t have anything smarter than a newish pair of jeans and I didn’t until 1987. I did have a pointy pair of patent leather boots which were shiny but you couldn’t meet the bank manager in them, so baseball boots were my only option.
Gradually as I left my 20s, these things became less important, though I still had patched jeans into my 30s.
But these photos are typical, army jacket, denim shirt, old jumper and jeans in one ‘smart’ jeans and a plaid shirt in the other. Basically, looking like the Grateful Dead’s roadie, and by the time I was 31, things hadn't progressed much.
