A couple of things arose: firstly, that I didn’t use the camera for other purposes and certainly not for when I went on extended tours with various bands; secondly, that there appears to be a few trips where the negatives are missing, or perhaps I just didn’t take photographs?

I have written elsewhere on this blog about my hitch-hiking to fairs in my teen years, as I started to tire from the scene of following bands around. I’d generally stick my thumb out with a vague plan of a few destination fairs, and was prepared to pick off unexpected finds as I went along and divert a trip accordingly. I usually had a sleeping bag and rolled up foam so I could kip on the road if required.

My photographs on the whole were pretty bland, albeit an important document of a rapidly changing scene. They recorded what was on the fair and how it looked, and have been useful for the fairground ‘enthusiast’ scene which is akin to a trainspotter milieu. In every reel of film I’d generally have a couple of close-up artwork shots and perhaps something a bit more considered. I’d often shoot close-up with the wide angle lens to give a bit of dramatic sweep and intensity. If the light was good you’d have a sharpness than ran through a decent depth of field.

I started to weed out the more interesting photographs and convinced myself that these would have a wider appeal. I convinced myself to the point that not only would they have an appeal, they would also be purchased by arty-nostalgic customers. That was a mistake, but you have to try these things. I realised now I had over-invested my aesthetic emotions in the photographs, and that people generally don’t buy other people’s photographs to hang on their walls.

I did a couple of art markets and priced them up to make a small amount on the reproduction costs. I had used a professional printer so these production costs were quite high. This was apparently too much for the paying public. The first market I did I was positioned next to a stall doing cheap prints of AI sausage dogs hybridised into Peaky Blinders, bulldogs cocking their legs with the phrase “piss off”, and more dogs standing alongside a fresh turd saying “tough shit”. Finally, there was a print of the slogan “See You Next Tuesday” which was doing a roaring trade. I sold nothing.

Throughout July I had the 15 photographs on display in a shop/gallery under the grandiose title Form, Function & Fun. There was a bit of interest but no sales. Oh well, you live and learn.

Here are five of the images with a bit of context.

This is a dynamic view of a Skid car lettered as ‘Ride On’. It was taken at Rugeley, Staffordshire in June 1984. I came across this fair by accident on the way to the south west (starting out from Derby). There was a bit ‘tackle’ there that was quite scruffy and I didn’t photograph that. Looking back, I wish I did, as the other machines present quickly disappeared from travelling. I liked this Skid and its more vernacular artwork. Black is not a traditional fairground colour, but there was a craze for it in the 80s. Fairground art is driven by crazes. The phrasing on the cars was slightly dated to a 70s disco and glam era. Again, much of fairground art has subcultural residualism, celebrating music scenes that have passed into obsolescence.

This photograph was more local to me, taken in July 1984 at Chaddesden, a housing estate suburb of Derby. It shows the centre paybox of Albert Proctor’s Waltzer, with the ride in the process of building up such that light is flowing into the scene. This illumination gives a view of surplus details such as the scratched, working nature of the Jackson paintwork, the dated ‘No Smoking’ sign and fare of 25p, and a ‘Volvo Buy British’ partial sticker. There are a matching pair of health and safety signs curved into the paybox resembling the famous anamorph in Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors. In fact, Holbein’s anamorph of a skull was a vanitas object, reminding us of death - a kind of health and safety notice.

A lucky photograph, snapped just as the two girls are in frame ‘riding the bars’. This practice, outlawed not long after the photo was taken, involved pinning yourself to the safety bars of the Speedway. It was very much a gendered practice, with boys doing the daredevil stuff and girls sat on the bikes in admiration. These girls, in matching blue kagools and spray-on jeans, are taking things into their own hands. The location is Runcorn. The mid-blue of the artwork base is quite unusual, but matches the girls’ attire.

This was an accidental photograph, captured as I was finishing off a reel of film. It is not particularly well framed for representing the structure and detail of the ride, but instead freezes a subcultural moment as a mulleted spectator in fine 80s fashion overlooks a mulleted fairground worker leaning in to the Skid car to take a fare.

The final photograph is also not meant to be. It was taken at Mitcham Common in 1985 when I was doing a round up of the London bank holiday fairs. In the 80s this was a huge endeavour which I normally did over 2 days - north then south. I used public transport so it was a logistical ordeal, but I challenge that I relished. On this occasion the fairground worker demanded I take his photograph after he watched me clamber over the ride taking some composed photographs of the artwork. I couldn’t pretend to take his photograph, as his ears were tuned for the concerted click of the push-button shutter on the OM10. Ker....lick. I quietly reasoned with myself that it was pointless as the demanding subject of the photograph would never see the finished thing. But here it is, 40 years later. Slightly blurred through the movement of the car, but perfectly capturing the ‘geezer-dom’ of the person who sits at the pivot of rotation. Damon Albarn eat your heart out.

Instigated, organised and administered by Professor Russ Bestley, Tim Gibney, Roger Sabin and Kevin Quinn, it is published roughly on an annual basis and is free of charge. Whilst serving as a slick engagement/outreach tool for UAL and a great platform for early career researchers and writers, it is also a valuable source on both understanding a plethora of niche (and not so niche) subcultures and also how we might think about thinking about subcultures. The first couple of issues passed me by (not being a Londoner and all that) but I managed to backtrack them and work towards getting a piece in issue 3 (on MA-1 jackets) and also a piece in issue 4 (on that Heaven 17 sleeve and how the memory of the 80s has been custom-fitted to an interpretation of the sleeve).

For issue 5 I have a reworked piece on Rollerball and popular culture as well as a project report on the ‘Sex Pistols by the Seaside’ exhibition and series of events. Ive not lifted the work straight from my SUB>SUMED pages, but refined it and brought in a little more academic grounding as food for thought. SIG News is not profoundly academic, but it tends to avoid both promotional ‘puff-pieces’ and repeating unchallenged myths (which often abound in subcultural recollecting). So, for example, in the current bumper issue we have writing on Teddy Boys, Ibizan rave culture, Cliff Richard, Skateboard graphics, New Romantic revivalism, punk in the South West (of the UK), Futurama and post-punk ideology, flyer art, novelty music, and so on.

The launch for the current issue saw the confluence of three ongoing projects to record and contextualise youth culture and subcultures - SIG News itself, the venue of the newly minted Museum of Youth Culture, and a guest stall ‘pop-up’ by the Rock & Roll Public Library. Central to the evening was a pair of round table talks that discussed other projects in larger ‘formal’ museums to capture subcultural scenes (mainly a discussion on the recent Blitz culture events) and a chin-scratching dialogue on what counts as a subculture and how can academia have a role in either interpreting them or using them as critical devices to make a wider contribution to historical knowledge (or indeed the academic tensions glimpsed when subcultures are brought to the table by both the purse-string-holding higher echelons of the university and the ‘on the ground’ activists of subcultures who have a suspicion of the university). There were also a series of lightning talks by current researchers, much of this being autoethnographical (which is no bad thing).

I didnt have time to explore the Museum, but I heard good things about it and the ground floor which hosted the event looked smart. We were set out all over the floor space and it was good to meet many people who I had conversed with via SUB>SUMED. It made my project feel slightly more vindicated. I had a brief chat with Rob Mowbray who is looking at how post-punk probed the future and he remarked on how he had recently looked at the NME article on the 2002 Revue which I had written about in the previous post. I realised after talking to Rob that my piece was somewhat flippant, and there is definitely more work to be done on unpacking why the music press were so scornful and distrusting of ‘futurism’ in the music scene. Rob, who contributes the Futurama article in SIG News, is on the case.

The Rock & Roll Public Library was also much better than I anticipated. It is essentially a curated rewiring of Mick Jones’ (Clash/BAD/etc) brain via his hoarded collection of pop culture ephemera that informed his songwriting and creative output with his bands. The ‘Library’ moves from place to place and is reconfigured each time to dialogue with the space and the present moment in time. Each location produces a magazine which includes a mix of montaged sequences and new writing. This writing is punchy, quirky and well informed, resonating with the ephemera and bringing it to life. It feels like the more erudite and autodidactic output of the 80s as the punk fanzine movement flexed it muscles with publications like Vague and Rapid Eye, informed by situationism and errant art.

I’m struggling in the heat to wrap this up, to think about how as subcultures become a past-participle there is an auto-reflex to keep them relevant as either a revival, a perpetuality, or a memory that serves a role within either critical thinking or the more malleable realm of nostalgia. A few years ago I completed my PhD on how fairgrounds can serve as heritage, and they have a similar popular cultural ‘consistency’ of being complex, transient, hybrid, intersectional and intangible. SIG News, the Museum of Popular Culture and Rock & Roll Public Library all seem to do interesting stuff and share a similar outlook to remain unshackled by either the academy or the formal heritage industry. Subcultures and their timeframes move backwards and forwards, and we are invited (via praxis or intent) to think about how we instrumentalise the past.

Formed in 1979 as a stylised hybrid of earlier band The News merging with ex-members of X-Ray Spex – Classix never sat easy with a UK music press who harboured deep suspicions about the flowering futurist scene. When trying to conceptually differentiate themselves from this new scene Classix were often accused of evoking a return of pomp rock and, in particular, Queen. In short, they were damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t. The striking frontman Sal Solo, with his shaved head and avant-garde dress sense, drew particular scorn, with scything quotes of his vocal style and dress sense following him from feature to feature.

In their early days Classix were grafters, carving out a nascent fanbase with relentless gigging in the capital. They packed their performances with theatricality and energy, poaching a number of Ants fans as that band started to explore more commercial avenues throughout 1980. On the final Sunday of January 1981, as ‘Antmusic’ sat at number 2 in the charts, Classix announced the inaugural 2002 Revue at the Lyceum Theatre. The decadently decrepit theatre was a venue well accustomed to post-punk multi-bill extravaganzas, with events starting mid-afternoon and finishing before midnight. I have fond memories of entering the building in the glaring daylight and losing track of time, only to emerge in darkness, frantically trying to get a tube to St Pancras in the slim hope of making the last train home north and school the next morning.

Other early 1981 Lyceum Sunday events included Throbbing Gristle’s industrial evening (the band’s final UK gig), a chaotic Some Bizzare showcase where the co-headliners Depeche Mode and Soft Cell never materialised, and a one-off Mute Records night. It was a great time to be exploring new music and new scenes.

The Revue was Solo’s idea, an attempt to offer a consistent event rather than a hierarchy of filler bands. The ensemble included several bands who were around Stevo’s initial Some Bizzare album (Blancmange, Naked Lunch), oddball-amongst-the-oddballs Nash the Slash, the dance-performance outfit Shock, poet Martin Besserman, and a somewhat out of character Theatre of Hate (described in the press as “Spandau bootboys”).

The Revue (often misspelt Review) was critically savaged in the music press, with NME unsurprisingly quick off the mark to stick the boot in with Barney Hoskyns’ write-up ‘Posers and Baldies and Blitz Buccaneers’. He disparagingly described the audience of “Spandau fops” and “Ant punks”, referring to Shock as performing a “robotic dance of death, featuring nurses and doctors out of Horror Hospital”. Classix signalled their arrival with Solo scaffolded above the drum kit, described by Hoskyns as “Gothic-operatic” (the G-word was thrown around quite a lot during this period, though the subcultural stub ‘goth’ would not be coined until 1983).

It is worth gathering a few historical notes on Shock, as the contemporaneous reviews often single them out as being exemplars of this 2002 package. The band certainly looked the part, with outfits all designed by Birmingham duo Kahn and Bell, major players in the new romantic scene (and also a precursor to ONE strand of British goth). Their debut single ‘Angel Face’ is something of a cult classic, being a Glitter Band cover and produced by John Hudson who is associated with the glam glitter-best sound. It’s flipside ‘R.E.R.B’ is even more fashionable, being an initialism of Rusty Egan and Richard Burgess who provided twin drum programming. Shock included Tik (Tim Dry) and Tok (Sean Crawford) who both had a very stylised look. Not far behind was Barbie Wilde, who went on to have a role as a cenobyte in Hellraiser II. However, the strangest Shock story involves Carole Caplin who went on to be a lifestyle advisor to Cherie Blair (!).

After the Lyceum event Classix hit the road to promote their new single ‘Guilty’. The release was another chance for them to be savaged by the NME: “The band most willing to live with the dopey futurist tag are predictably the worst. Imagine a pub of the future with a revox tape programmed with Bowie parts replacing a battered piano and a drunken vocalist taking the mike to do his Saturday night Tom Jones impersonation and you’ll have some idea of how forced Classix Nouveaux sound”.

Fielding the brickbats, they headed north to take in the usual gritty post-punk venues such as Sheffield Limit, Scarborough Penthouse, Blackpool Norbreck Hotel, Liverpool Bradys and Retford Porterhouse – all places long gone. However, they were also arranging an ambitious UK-wide extension of the 2002 package, which launched at the end of March with events at larger venues including Bristol Locarno, the Rotters venues at Doncaster, Manchester, and Liverpool, Newcastle Mayfair, Leicester De Montfort Hall, Nottingham Rock City, and Leeds Tiffanys. After a week off there was a final flurry of Revues at Guildford, Brighton, and the London Rainbow (confusingly billed as the ‘2003 Revue’). The band Eyeless in Gaza were added to the bill but split away, and we also had more cabaret-style performance artists with Biddie and Eve.

Meanwhile, NME revisited the subject, devoting a three-page feature with a sub-heading inviting the readership to “meet the Tom Jones of the new blank generation”. Chris Bohn, who (as Biba Kopf) would go on to champion avant-garde post-punk artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and Einsturzende Neubauten, was given the task of articulating Solo and his band of merry men.

The scene is set in Doncaster, allowing the journalist some added snarkiness due to flat-cap-flat-beer nature of the place. Bohn describes an audience of “Elizabethan peacocks, Numanite androids, glam pirates and ersatz Scots”, apparently heaping praise on the Yorkshire crowd as wannabe pop-fans and Blitz-kids. Solo (in his “Ali Baba trousers”) is quickly typecast as looking like an “anaemic Armenian street pedlar”. However, his genuine persona and intent cannot fail to win any journalist over – Bohn included – though the writer remains steadfast in asserting that Classix (and the other artists) offer nothing to prompt a deeper thinking or reflection.

Running the same week is a Melody Maker double-page feature on futurism by Steve Sutherland, split between Duran Duran and Classix, who distance themselves from being pigeonholed as futurists. Two weeks later Sutherland reviews the conclusion of the 2002 Revue tour at the Rainbow, celebrating a return of “showbiz” and “ham theatrics” from punk earnestness. It’s praise of sorts.

Record Mirror also review the tour, alighting on the Newcastle gig. The reviewer singles out Theatre of Hate as being different, while the rest are dismissed as “dancing clothes-horses”. Shock’s miming pair (later rebranded as Tik and Tok) seem to inspire a journalist competition for the wittiest analogy, described here as “mummified petrol pump attendants”.

Scene lynchpin Tom Vague embedded himself on some of the tour, printing an interview and tour write-up in his Vague fanzine. At Bristol he observes locals transformed from Crass fans to Blitz kids: “they’ve rolled their football socks over their tartan trousers, got side-partings and make-up”. Tom always functions as a historical marker, adding social and cultural context. He remarks on the space shuttle launch televised in the pub before the Brighton gig, a beach taken over by tribal fans of the various bands, and an extended episode after the gig reminiscent of the 1979 film The Warriors as he huddles at the station and finds an early morning café trying to avoid potential trouble with a roving gang of local skinheads. He arrives in London the next day just as the Brixton riots commence. Welcome to 1981.

Things were hotting up on the scene, with April releases of Duran Duran’s debut and Soft Cell’s ‘A Man Can Get Lost’ and ‘Memorabilia’. The Classix single ‘Guilty’ sits just outside the Top 40, failing to attract the crucial attention of Top of the Pops. Classix do have some luck, landing a Smash Hits cover and feature in which they expertly extol the new romantic pose and poise with the quiffs, wedges and multi-directional askance glance group shot. They also bag a surprise feature in The Sun declaring Solo as “Kojak of pop”. Any publicity is good publicity.

By May the Revue concept is over, and Classix are back to regular touring (with Wasted Youth and Our Daughter’s Wedding) to promote their debut album Night People. The record is strongly reviewed in Sounds but unsurprisingly warrants more journalist ire in NME as they try to summon the end of the new romantic scene. Barney Hoskyns undertakes the demolition of futurism as a worthless scene and takes the criticism of Solo’s voice to a new ‘high’ by suggesting it resembles “Roger Chapman having a haemorrhage or perhaps the Gibson Brothers throwing up”.

A last gasp of hope is given with a New York cover feature in Sounds, as Classix take a very much new romantic visual package to The Ritz, but they then fade out of critical focus (good or bad) for the remainder of the year.

A clutch of singles follow – ‘Tokyo’, ‘Inside Outside’, ‘Never Again’ - all grazing the edges of the Top 40, until March 1982 sees them having their moment of success with ‘Is It a Dream’. Top of the Pops, Solo on Pop Quiz (with BA Robertson and David Gahan), a July 1982 cover-shoot for Jackie on new romantic fashion, an overwrought video in a gothic revival country house (Wykehurst Place near Brighton) with bushido fighting, Solo looking like a 2020s manifestation of Rick Owens and the guitarists flawlessly mastering the art of juddery swooping dance moves with feet seemingly stuck to floor.

Praise from the press is still scant, with Melody Maker’s Adam Sweeting attending a May 1982 return to the Lyceum and declaring “Queen have given birth to a precocious infant clone of themselves”. Meanwhile, NME’s Paul Morley gives the band a legendary savaging when reviewing their April 1982 at the Dominion Theatre - under the heading ‘Daft Air Raid Siren’ hw compares the band’s appeal to a “bursting sausage and warm beer”.

This is their famous 15 minutes, as follow-up single ‘Because You’re Young’ just misses the top 40 and the band flounder with second division tea-time appearances on Crackerjack and Razzamatazz performing the unfortunately titled ‘The End… Or the Beginning?’.

The 2002 Revue is now a distant past, overshadowed by the band’s hit single and their well-earned status on the European pop circuit – but it was, and remains, an important moment in our shared futurist history. Even with the robotic shenanigans of Shock.

(part 2 – Black Rubber)

In late 2025 I visited Leeds Art Gallery to investigate the noctambulism exhibition centred around the work of Atkinson-Grimshaw. He had painted a view of Scarborough Old Town and the Castle from a low harbourside vantage point which included the terrace we live in, necessitating a surreptitious copy for my personal collection. Upstairs, by chance, was an installation by Mike Nelson titled M62 (East, West) which consisted of twinned chamfered concrete bases, lengths of crash barrier, and the artist’s signature blown-out tyres.

Motorways have always played a role in my life, most obviously through the years spent hitching around the UK following bands or tracking down funfairs. I’ve written about this in an earlier post, which gives you an indication of how a crash barrier might have a homely rather than unheimlich feel. Sitting on them, waiting, and waiting some more. In a very early piece of writing, when I was unsuccessfully trying to establish myself in a new guise, I had called on the motorway to give an example of Foucault’s heterotopia whereby you step out of a car in an interminable traffic jam on the motorway and placing your feet on the tarmac feels… weird. Touching the crash barriers, sitting on them to get some fresh air outside of the car, feels like something forbidden.

Nelson’s work here is not really about the motorway as a heterotopia. It concerns the blown-out tyres that litter the out-of-touching-distance terrain, clustered on the slip roads, hard shoulders and embankments. The artist’s wider purview is equally dense and focussed. His recent retrospective, and accompanying publication, at the Hayward was entitled Extinction Beckons. This sounds very much like a black metal pronouncement, and the blown-out tyres form part of a wider ‘anthroposcenery’ – remnants and rubbish from a declining humanity.

There are connections to be worked here to the new materialisms, ‘necro-media’ and object-ontology theories in the world of post-humanities, where black metal could theoretically find an interpretive foothold if it so wished. I’m also in mind of thinkers like Timothy Morton whose own books pour out as skittish splurges to move between memoir, philosophy, pop culture, ecology, and everything else. Morton proposes a ‘hyper-object’ that is everywhere and nowhere, interobjective (in its space of interrelationship) and exhibiting an ‘expanded temporality’ that makes them “intermittently invisible”. Like Nelson’s tyres.

It’s impossible to do the artist full justice in a short paragraph, but his work can concern corridors and spaces, (male) subcultural environments (some crossover to Mark Leckey’s reconstructed motorway bridge hang-out space), and the status of artworks. Nelson finds it amusing that his installations of chaotically appearing but complexly labyrinthine realms are by necessity put into storage as part of art’s sense of importance of itself. He then started exhibiting ‘installations of stored (uninstalled) works’ and building deliberately approximately remembered versions of something previously completed.

Within this schematic he concocted a fictional biker gang called ‘The Amnesiacs’ who had forgotten their reason for existing. In Nelson’s stuttering narrative they retreat into a twilight of greyed out spaces falling between the Manson Ranch in the desert and maze-like structures of repeating rooms and spaces that conjure up the spatio-imagination of a dementia sufferer.

Let’s have a look at how M62 is contextualised….

Interestingly, like a real motorway crash barrier, we are not allowed to touch.

We can see the object-ontology of the tyres, but Nelson brings both déjà vu and mirroring into the mix. If you read deeper into the artist, you discover these are important themes. Nelson has a deep gratitude to Robert Smithson and tends to mimic and develop a number of Smithson’s methods and themes. Smithson (and Nelson) use mirrors in their work, but also undertake mirroring as a visual method. The motorway is a mirrored space, axial on the central crash barrier.

Nelson’s interest in déjà vu is part of a broader interest in memory and its malfunctioning… both forgetting and misremembering. Of course, the monotonous sameness of the motorway all but obliterates déjà vu, but Nelson suggests that the journey one way (east or west) is then mirrored when coming back (west or east). The M62, when travelled both ways, returns us to our destination, but Nelson’s installation slyly suggests we also go back in time.

This can be read as a fantastical reversal, or a staving off, of entropy. Nelson has already shown an interest in Smithson’s work that consisted of a thought-piece around a sandpit with half black and half white sand that is disrupted by a child running in frenzied clockwise circles through the pit to produce a scuffed up chaotic mix of black-white-becoming-grey. He then imagines the child running counterclockwise and asks whether the sand could return to its pure black/white state. Of course not, entropy prevails as time cannot be reversed. There’s a similar motif in the final scene of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Cameron jacks up and runs the Ferrari Spyder backwards to reverse the odometer. Entropy wins out.

Memory haunts all of Nelson’s works, also drawing a parallel to American artist Mike Kelley who explored the fallout from the ‘memory wars’ of the 1990s when implanted false memories were all the rage, making cases of abuse complicated and sadly uncertain.

So, how did M62 (East, West) work with my memory? Firstly, my memories of the M62 are quite sparse. It wasn’t a road that I tended to use. If I was going from Leeds to Manchester as part of following a tour I’d normally divert via my home in Derby and grab a shower and stash of food. In later years I lived in Sheffield and always used the Snake and Woodhead passes when going to places like the Hacienda. Yes, the M62 gets a namecheck in the KLF’s iconic single ‘It’s Grim Up North’.

However, seeing the work reminded me that I’d seen a similar work before in Birmingham and was equally moved by it. It was a memory, a memory of an artist who used blown-out tyres and motorway contexts, an artist whose name I didn’t make a note of at the time. I now knew the artist was Mike Nelson and also that the series began in Birmingham in 2013 with a work called M6. A bit of searching – the internet as mnemotechnic as per my ‘Memory Churn’ post last month – revealed that M6 ran from January to March, concluding on the 9^th (a Saturday). This corresponded with a football match I attended at Birmingham, and more Google map-searching shows gallery Eastside Projects (which hosted M6) was between the New Street Station and the St. Andrews football ground. So that would put form to the memory.

The internet even had some archived photographs and a context piece:

We lost the football match 3-1 (again, the internet records this). But I recall being impressed with the exhibition. Surprised, wrongfooted. I was in my ‘football mode’, travelling alone, and so this felt like a heterotopic moment. Doubly heterotopic – a psychic break from the codified regime of quasi-hostile and distinctively adorned (booted and suited) football attendance into a white gallery space, which in turns took me to the terrifying motorways of Birmingham.

Terrifying motorways and memories. Deeper memories. As a child I was obsessed with motorway junctions, even though we never had a car and in later years I never learnt to drive. We lived alongside the A52, and I recall hiking the hard shoulder armed with a bag of blackberries to stare in wonder at the triple layer junction where a roundabout is sandwiched between an upper road (the A52) and a lower road (the M1). I made plan sketches and imagined more complex junctions, sometimes glimpsing the expansive freeways on American dramas.

Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction was, to me, some kind of magic place that I’d quite possibly never see. As I started travelling more, following bands and so on, I travelled through the junction on occasion. It was always a buzz – it felt like flying.

A couple of years after the M6 exhibition my daughter moved to Birmingham. I’d get the train to see her and then bus/walk to her house. It involved going under Salford Circus, which is kind of an appendage to Spaghetti – an antipasti? In April 2016 I took some photographs.

Note – Nelson had a work A52 in the tyres series, but this is the Bundesautobahn 52 and not the dual carriageway between Derby and Nottingham (that then leads to Skegness)

(part 1 – Black Metal)

Last month we had the Fortress weekend festival in Scarborough. It wasn’t something heavily advertised and I only found out about it the week before in the general Spa Theatre brochure, nestling alongside things like Showaddywaddy, a Northern Soul musical and Scarborough’s very own Tony Skingle Elvis impersonator. Fortress is very much a niche black metal festival, and (I understand) is held in very high regard by fans of the genre. The weekend was blisteringly hot, which made one of those ironic counterpoints to the goth/gloom and cold-weather preset of the scene. I took a sequence of photographs which were somewhat contrived, and subsequently deleted most of them.

Even so, the sprawling of participants on the Spa Theatre forecourts was particularly eye-catching. It is a lovely spot. When we moved to Scarborough last summer we went to see PiL a few days after unpacking, and to sit on the sun court and sip a G&T felt like arriving in some odd, magical place.

Black metal as a popular genre/subculture with an advanced set of mythologies and ‘codings’ is a subculture that has passed me by - an indication of my retired status. I am aware of it, partly through its inclusion in Knausgaard’s recent Morning Star novels and partly because it toys with a bad reputation of extreme and specific lyrics and narratives that venture from amplified misanthropy, to Apocalypto-beckonings, to extreme-cold-fetishism, to (archaic) far right viewpoints. This is evident on the plethora of tee-shirts on display, as a black tee promoting an obscure band with a cryptic image or phrase is de-rigueur. Even though I had not bought a ticket, the public were free to pass through the open areas of the Spa Theatre and me wearing a black/white vintage Vivienne Westwood tee depicting ‘the British beehive’ (with what looked like ancient torture scenes) seemed to blend in and attract glances as people tried to decipher it… “what band could that be…?”.

As well as using Nordic runes (a stylised version being currently employed on the Norway World Cup shirts) the main typography for the bands is fairly streamlined. These have progressed from the Blackletter/Fraktur fonts to be dominated by designs by Christophe Szpajdel (see Lord of the Logos). It is distinctive, powerful and intriguing, resembling a splayed-out vivisected animal (or indeed the vivisected humans in the 1997 space-horror Event Horizon). It also gives me memories of the frightening character Raggety who made sporadic appearances in the Rupert annuals.

There is an obligatory chapter on black metal in the Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023), which has the honour of being the only book in the Cambridge Companions series that has a multiple indexing to “blast beat”. That’s a good thing on many levels.

The Companions book won’t get you too far for a black metal excursus. It does, however, include other chapters on punk-emergent scenes like grindcore, thrash and sludgecore that crossed my paths in the 1980s. Growing up as a punk in Derby and the East Midlands meant you were exposed to Potteries band Discharge most months on a multi-band bill playing at a decrepit theatre or discontinued bingo hall. I’m not claiming to be a metal fan, but these punk-adjacent scenes did garner my attention – as well as New York noise bands like Swans who toured the UK in 1985 with a punishing blast of noise. Swans were arty and experimental, but subsequent bands – like Prong – were more metal. I still dipped a toe in.

Black metal was apparently birthed by outlier metal band Venom and their 1982 album Black Metal. This album went under the radar – too punk for metal, too metal for punk – but was resurrected by Norwegian metal bands who crafted it into a distinctive genre. There followed an extreme sequence of murders, rituals and church-burnings that fired the scene into the public consciousness (and eventually the narrative arc of a Knausgaard series).

I picked up on black metal through Bill Peel’s 2023 book Tonight It’s a World we Bury on the Repeater imprint (a publisher seemingly dedicated to enact an unending Mark Fisher mourn-a-thon). I read Peel’s book in 2024 when things in my life were not going well, needing something to entertain me. My normal policy when reading a book offering ideas is to make notes and transcribe these into a set of indexed notebooks. After the Scarborough festival weekend I checked my author index and realised I’d not made any notes on Peel’s book. This sometimes happens when I read something that doesn’t move me. I normally flog/donate the book, but the title was still on my shelf – so it must have had some impact?

I read it again, and this time absorbed the ideas and arguments and made excessive notes. Peel acknowledges the far right links and doesn’t try to explain or justify them. He also doesn’t turn away for the scene, but looks at the mechanisms employed to give the far right aspects a free pass (what he calls “reflexive anti-reflexivity”).

Peel is very smart and has a flickering methodology that grabs at some big thinkers in short, sharp blasts. I can only assume he keeps better notes than me or has one of these ‘mind palace’ ways of existing. I had a PhD supervisor like that, who could apply ideas (backed up by references) as if plucking them from thin air.

He doesn’t try to bring politics into black metal but instead brings black metal into his radical socialist ideas. Crazy eh? This is done through the motifs (or dispositifs) of DISTORTION, DECAY, SECRECY, COLDNESS and HERESY. Each chapter uses theories of capitalist explanation or sociological normalness and applies a critical tool from black metal. For example, the chapter on secrecy dismantles the commercial confessional art of (say) Tracey Emin’s Bed (1998) and argues that secrecy and darkness (via the radical activists Tiqqun) can offer better mechanisms for undoing capitalism. Other chapters are less convoluted, such as contrasting capitalism’s obsession with heat (and resource extraction) against black metal’s favouring of coldness.

It has not converted me to explore black metal, but maybe I’m just past it. I did buttonhole an unfortunate punter enjoying a break on the balcony who looked like he could be a version of me having taken a different life path. He was the same age and had visible arm tattoos extolling various band logos that had informed my mid-to-late-80s: Einstürzende Neubauten, Husker Du, etc. He urged me to get involved, and assured me that the dodgy politics was a thing of the past.

Next – black rubber

It is just over two years of activity for SUB>SUMED, with periods of frenetic writing/posting and some periods of reflection and slowness. The remit of exploring how we write about subcultures, their associated styles and fashion codes, and the mid-00s period of avant-garde fashion revisiting the 80s punk and post-punk clothing has just about stayed intact. I have undertaken some mission creep to include a bit of straight up music writing, some of my fairground memories and associated research, and also a bit of diaristic blurb in the here and now.

I’m always encountering new people who might have a potential interest in one aspect of my writing, without wanting to go all in and read everything I put out. As the past two years and a bit have rolled on, a corpus of writing now sits there in little discernible order or logic, making it difficult for me to direct potentially interested parties to what might interest them.

With this in mind I’m going to create a themed index post which (I hope) I can make ‘sticky’ and keep updating as and when new posts appear.

1980s subcultures and styles

• Subculture Degree Zero - on how it all began (for me)

• Punk Fragment (part 1 part 2) - on my provincial punk stylings

• Uneasy Rider - on the biker jacket

• Heterotopic Shopping - on punk clothing shops

• Dead Men and Baggy Trousers - on the post-punk suit

• Legion (part 1 coda) - on following bands

• How the World Ends (part 1 part 2 part 3) - on goth

• Missing the Bus (part 1 return) - on assessing the new romantic scene

• A Field in England (part 1 part 2) - on anarcho-punk as style culture

• Combat Rock (part 1 part 2 part 3) - on military influences in subcultural clothing

• Haute-Goth (part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10) - on contemporary designers in search of lost goth and the 90s hinterland (phew)

• Bad Dress Sense (part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5) – on skateboarding

• Expedition Couture (part 1 part 2) - on outdoor wear as subculture

• Pivot (part 1 part 2 part 3) – on the changing 80s decade

Designer theory (reflecting the 1980s in the 2000s)

• McLaren/Westwood 1980s (part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5) - unpicking a fraught but creative partnership

• Barnsley, Being and Nothingness (part 1 part 2 part 3) - on discovering Pollyanna and the story of a black coat

• Bakhtu Barnsley (part 1 part 2 part 3) - on Yohji Yamamoto and Pollyannas

• Polychronic Birmingham (part 1 part 2) - buying a Rick Owens jacket

• Martin Margiela history/theory (part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4) - four linked essays on the elusive Belgian designer

• Clothing the Discontented (part 1 part 2 coda) - on Martin Margiela vs Joy Division

• Martin Margiela vs Donkey Jacket (part 1 part 2) - on a neglected classic

Music writing (and writing on music writing)

• 1980 - The First Pop Moment - on reinventing Adam and the Ants

• Tough Futures - on post-punk synth-pop

• Punk Funk Dust - on The Higsons and punk-funk

• Why the Long Face? (part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 coda) - on Heaven 17 and misremembered image culture

• Join in the Re-enchantment - on Nitzer Ebb and performative mourning

• Forever Then - a field report from a nostalgic festival

• Last Words (part 1 part 2) – on music writing and punk

• S/C (part 1 part 2) - on some books

• Punk Ghosts – on a Sex Pistols 1976 project

• 2002 Damnations - on Classix Nouveaux and press hostility

• Subcultural Super Collider - on SIG5 launch party

Fairgrounds

• 80s Pop Fairground - on a music themed ride

• Space is the Place - on sci-fi themed fairground art

• Start the Dance (part 1 part 2 part 3) - on fairgrounds and rave culture

• Leather, Studs and Fairground Thrills - on Rollerball

• American Epilog (part 1 part 2) - on Americana in fairground art

• Sailor’s Nightmare (part 1 part 2) - on the Octopus ride

• Waltzer Boy Breaks Free - on gafflads as art subject

• In Search of Rock City (part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4) – on artist Pat Doonan

• Swag – on fairground prizes

• Hold Tight Riders - on photographs

Memory and constant diary stuff

• Bedroom Function - on my teenage bedroom as pop shrine

• Daze of Future Past - on hauntological Leeds and a Yohji Yamamoto jacket

• Bakhtin and Bolshevism - on a pop music photograph

• A Trip to the Fair, May 1982 - on a photograph of some friends

• Reflecting on The Face - how the magazine came in and out of my life

• Greyed Out / Grey Doubt - an unwanted suit provokes a grey drift

• Outlaws, Peacocks, Cows and Dogs - on a museum trip back the new romantic scene

• Sleaze in the Attic (part 1 part 2) - on retrieving a 90s magazine

• Bonington Project - selected essay on photographing my clothes

• Nullscapes (part 0 part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4) - an extended essay on Eastern England

• Atomised (part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6) – on image culture and pop/art drifts

• Leeds Gothic (2025) - on a trip to see Psychedelic Furs at Leeds in Oct 2025

• Memory Kollaps – on missing records

• Memory Churn – on objects from the past and social media

• Black Metal / Black Rubber (part 1 part 2) - on extreme metal subculture and the artist Mike Nelson

My engagement with social media (and the Substack platform) has never been geared towards a self-gratifying replication of memories. I understand them as personal and specific, preferring to keep them that way. Utilising memory as a theme is more about understanding it as mechanism, as a way towards underpinning subcultural formations, and also as an enquiry into how memory malfunctions (individually and collectively) and mutates into myth.

Social media is powerful, exerting a pull to draw you towards embodying its purpose. What is that purpose? Well, that is open to dispute, but I see it as fulfilling a need to be seen and praised, to turn trivia into adornment, and to turn memory into ammunition for fulfilling illusory expectations. That is a simplification, but it offers some further considerations.

My social media, albeit engaged minimally, gives me prompts about my memories. It says to me have a look at this post you shared 1/2/3/4/5/etc years ago… wouldn’t it be fun to post it again? If my argument that the majority of such posting is a grasp for self-gratification rather than conveying information about a thing or instance, then these memory prompts follow the same pattern. They tug on your memory bank for you to recall the feeling of posting at the time, rather than a simple recollection of the event/instance. Not a memory of a memory, but a memory of a feeling geared towards repeating the feeling from the there and then in the here and now. A remediation of a feeling.

Around 10 years ago I was drawn to the writing of French theorist Bernard Stiegler. I was midway through a drifting change, moving from a period of a rebirthed interest in clothes and music towards something more fine-grained, a re-immersion in theoretical writing (and thinking). Stiegler was an interesting character, having a background in activist leftism, a spell incarcerated for armed robbery, and then becoming a post-structuralist professor rubbing shoulders with Derrida etc.

His output was prolific, and oftentimes difficult and/or tedious. What piqued my interest was his sequencing of work, in that he wrote temporally overlapping series on broad themes like ‘Technics and Time’, ‘Symbolic Misery’, and ‘Disbelief and Discredit’. Each series had significant overlap within a series and across to other series, such that volume 2 of a series would start with a revisiting of volume 1 – not necessarily to recap but sometimes to rethink and reorientate. Similarly, volume 1 of a new series would draw on various points of other series, but often in obtuse or destabilising ways. It was a tremendously shaky structure.

In some ways it reminded me of the Ordnance Survey maps which overlapped in their cartographic extent. This can be translated as a latitudinal overlap where adjacent maps correspond to a Stiegler series, and longitudinal overlap where adjacent maps correspond to the links between Stiegler series. My own OS maps are stored in a numbered sequence, in the way I’d store books (more on that later), with the overlap hidden. It feels like a neat sequent of coherent and homogenous information. It’s worth considering that Stiegler’s works are not necessarily comparable to maps, as each series tends to question itself and so it’s like a map evolving to include new measurables and objects, or perhaps even a totally new ontology or purpose as they go from adjacent sheet to adjacent sheet.

Anyway, Stiegler’s theories on mnemotechnics come to mind here, as he writes on how computers and networks become and replace (and eventually reprogramme) the functionality of memory. It is the ‘pharmakon’ theory of how something can be both good and bad for us at the same time. “Do not like or share this” was the headline of an article about him shortly after his death. Stiegler took his own life in 2020, a period when a few thinkers I liked (or used to like before I drifted again away from thinking and towards something else) expired – people like Bruno Latour for example.

2. Sloppage

Here’s the memory Facebook prompted me with last week: photographs of a trip to Great Yarmouth in 2018 for a bank holiday excursion. I would have just moved into the Eastern Counties, finishing my PhD (corrections completed spring 2018) and thinking what to do next. I had buoyant hopes of a career in academia but little did I know that 12 months later, after endless job applications for early career research posts and a post-doc funding proposal that trundled on for 12 months and then came to an undignified halt, I’d be back doing low-level shit-work in Cambridge libraries.

In May 2018 the sun was shining and I got the train from Cambridge to Norwich and then changed for the Great Yarmouth Wherry Line. I know Great Yarmouth has a bad reputation, and at times you can’t help think it deserves it and more recently revels in it (with the rise of Rupert Lowe and his abhorrent Restore party). However, my spiritual guide here was WG Sebald, whose work on memory and the Eastern Counties I have flagged in previous essays (‘Nullscapes’ and so on). Sebald had tangentially touched my PhD so I was feeling smug with intellectual bravado as I followed his arrival into the resort.

I got off the train, walked to the seafront, and admired the extent of sandy beach. Standing on the same spot for a while, I realised there was a leg just at the lower limit of my sightline, and so this formed the first photograph, trying to capture that ‘Oh, there’s a leg’ feeling. The Ghost Train at the end of the pier was (I presume) undergoing a change, and so was primed in white like a Martin Margiela retail outpost or exhibition. It felt like a merging of past interests – clothes and fairgrounds.

I’d been to Great Yarmouth before as a child and recall being terrified by the plastic giant in the Pleasure Beach. He had a mechanical cudgel that beat up and down monotonously. Apparently, I couldn’t sleep all week. Facing my fears I sought out the giant, only to discover he (it) had been made a little more child-friendly by adopting a cartoonish character.

Going further back again, I had a flying visit in the 1980s on a fairground photographing trip (annoyingly my camera jammed the film resulting in a single image with a glowing double exposure blur). More strangely, I had a visit there in summer 2014 just before starting my PhD as I agreed to share a ‘coach holiday’ with my elderly parents – we were based at a conference centre in Bungay and did 4 days of frantic coachtripping (it was an experience, the type of thing that might make a good memory-based Substack post if that was my thing).

3. Stoppage

Like a mediatic revenant my record player returned last month after spending around a decade and a half with my younger daughter. Various circumstances contrived for the turntable (and amp) to leave my vicinity and find a new home with my daughter and her then partner. More circumstances have meant that it is now no longer required and has made its way north to my new home.

This is a good thing. I’ve had a stand-in record player for the last 15 years which is frankly a pile of crap, little more than a toy. It’s meant that my record collection has sat unutilised during the past decade and a half. This has also meant my period of no longer having an interest in new music has crept onwards over two decades.

The returning record player isn’t a great one, but it is much better than the outgoing one. The deck was actually part of a mismatched pair of pitch-adjustable belt-driven turntables twinned with a cheapo crossfader, the whole kit assembled around 1996. I was having another life change, this time partly imposed by a serious climbing accident when I bust up my leg and foot. My regime of the 1990s had been around combinations of keeping fit, rock climbing, skateboarding, touring-cycling and long-distance running. All of these were now forcefully curtailed.

In place I did a number of things. I was already going through a phase of writing and self-publishing (which will be the subject of a later post) and I had the idea to start a new publication that discussed and dissected music and other art forms. This meant I re-engaged with music after a hiatus of around a decade. I spoke about this blank period, and how such blank periods sit like a blind spot in your memory, in an earlier post on ‘rediscovering’ Einstürzende Neubauten.

Re-engaging with, and writing about, music meant that I suddenly fancied myself as a DJ and so started doing a couple of stints at a pirate radio station and also having a few ‘spots’ at pub and club nights. It didn’t amount to much as I tended to play awkward music, and I was terribly incompetent at mixing and so on.

One of the decks was scrapped, the crossfader went on eBay, and the better deck and amp went to my daughter. Now returning in 2026, it reveals tactile signs of my ambitions in 1996. A Jazz Fudge sticker from when I was pushing for freebies to review. The substantial wear on the sticker is because it is positioned where I rest my hand to manipulate the stylus and catch a beat (in theory). The side of my hand shuffles, and the general heat and nervy atmosphere of ‘playing live’ produces perspiration which slowly defaces the sticker.

The amplifier is thick with dust and paint splatter from when the upstairs room at my old house was redecorated. The DJ set up – on a cheap pasting table – was sheeted over but somehow paint got in. It always does.

My vinyl has always been neatly stored, even though it has spent 15 years unused. It has been slimmed down as various sprees of music engagement have been funded by selling material from earlier sprees. On reflection, I wish I’d not done this. I’ve half a mind to draw up some kind of genre-structured flow chart that maps when I had periods of buying records, when I had periods of inactivity, and when I re-engaged purchasing and whether I used previous tranches to fund new tranches. If I was someone like Mark Leckey or Jeremy Deller I could probably turn that into an art exhibit. Other than that it would serve little purpose, but I have a habit of doing such things.

When we moved last year we bought an IKEA storage piece for the unused record collection. Previously records had been in plastic crates which one by one got cracked, and then during my time in Cambridgeshire they were relegated to a cupboard with sliding doors that frequently jammed – discouraging any potential revisiting of vinyl on a bored whim. The 4x4 grid unit works in that the top two rows have post 1996 purchases, and the bottom two rows have my remaining 1980s records.

Whereas the 1980s records I arranged alphabetical by author, the later records are filed by micro-genre and label. This was how vinyl worked in the post-rave era. Once the old deck and amp was returned I grabbed something off the top (late 1990s) shelf to test the sound. This was the double 12” LP Carrera by Sluts’n’Strings & 909, on Cheap Records. Released in 1997, it gave me a memory rush on various levels – the plain gold sleeve, the inner label with hip cartoon character, and the tracks themselves which (in my review) seemed to explore a lost era of 1980s punk-funk by the likes of 400 Blows.

It struck me… the record is nearly 30 years old. Because this music buying in the late 1990s supplanted by early 1980s music buying, it still feels ‘modern’. But the time lapses between the two periods of music buying and the present are tripled from 10 to 30 years. The tracks still sounded (more or less) good. Somewhere in my zine of the time (which I will dig out for another post) there is a review of it. I got my materials from Jill Mingo of Mingo PR in Glasgow – an incredible force of life and entertainment. From around 1996 to maybe 2005 I was engrossed in this world of begging, getting, reviewing and publishing – in my own zine, in Magic Feet, in Datacide. I then I stopped.

One final observation. There are small spittle marks on all of my vinyl from this era, a Derridean trace of my leaning over the set-up, listening through one half of the headphone to the vinyl to be cued up while my unhindered ear listens to the track currently being played. I’m trying to beat match, but – through lacking confidence to make a simple aural judgement - this becomes a bodily process as I mouth a “ch-ch-ch” of the bpm and unbeknownst at the time small flecks of spittle fly out and settle on the platter.

4. (This is) Memorial Device

This post is not meant to be about memories, more so how objects come back into view and create memorial avenues, diversions and bifurcations. Changes in life, forced or otherwise, considerations of different futures developed by different changes or even absences of changes. Here are two of my favourite books in this regard by David Keenan, whose work is very much an inspiration to my methods of enquiry – to think about irregular flows of memory time, backwards and forwards, rechannelling and rerouting as they encounter prompts and barriers.

My exhibition at Scarborough Library is entering the final throes. I have an author evening tomorrow (Thursday 21^st) with Dr Mark Goodall who has written the 33 1/3 series book on Never Mind the Bollocks. I’m expecting this to be a good conversation (we had a dry run, as by chance Mark doesn’t live to far from here). The exhibition then runs another week up until Saturday 30^th. Hopefully it might re-emerge some time in the summer/autumn.

Two events have been completed – the opening ‘round table’ on seaside and subcultures, and a more interactive (anti) fashion evening. For the former I had local writer and curator Patrick Argent, local DIY punk activist Jonathan Dixon, and subcultural researcher Ian Gwinn all adding a different slant on the subject. It fitted together without either overlapping or leaving gaps, which was remarkable.

The fashion evening had short presentations by myself and Dr Sallie McNamara, and then a chance to share memories about how we constructed our desired punk looks, how we made them happen, and how these looks were taken out into various (often hostile) public arenas. In addition to talking in fine detail on women in punk, Sallie described how punk has infiltrated catwalk and couture fashion. It gave me a chance to dress up a bit. Not that I need an excuse. In homage to my original punk raincoat that was stashed in a plastic bag out of sight of my parents, I wore my Margiela caretaker caretaker coat. My partner Clare is not keen on this, but I don’t have to hide it in a carrier bag and bush at the end of the street.

There was an extra event as Northallerton Library made contact and asked for a talk to coincide with the actual FIRST non-London date by the band on 19^th May 1976. This gave me a chance to explore the site of Sayers nightclub, on Elder Road. In 2026 it was cold and raining, as it was in 1976. Northallerton is swanky, the county town, with lots of Georgian and early Victorian housing, though Sayers nightclub was behind the scenes, at the end of a nondescript row of garages. The club was rebranded in the early 1980s to ‘Carousel’ and then met the club-crowds of the 1990s as ‘Amadeus’. It is still branded such, though seemingly a new building with an extended area of entertainment.

The new building was more clinical, in that postmodern drabness of ‘less is a bore’ combining skeuomorphic (naff) elements of the past rendered in Lego-style aesthetics – the wall behind me has numerous era windows, including the bricked over ‘window tax’ effects. The entrance to the club has fake Greek pillars, etc etc. You get the picture.

However, there were remnants of the past. A strange printing shop that, while not evoking 1976, certainly felt like a remnant/revenant from the 1980s. I felt, momentarily, that I was stepping back, awaiting the spluttering Transit van that was ferrying the band around these northern outposts to perform (or otherwise) in front of bemused and ultimately enraged, but generally meagre, crowds.

After some lunch it brightened up, and the talk at the Library was very well attended. We even had the town mayor and local councillors in attendance who used the opportunity to announce their intentions to place a heritage plaque on the current nightclub building.

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I’ve written up the whole exhibition experience for the forthcoming SIG News paper published as part of UAL/LCC’s outreach. I’ve seen the issue (#5) and it’s got some incredible content. Here’s what I said about the project, as an attempt to sum up….

The Scarborough exhibition stripped things back to the everyday, to de-emphasise myth and instead recreate a contrast of worlds … the images and texts built a contrast between the everydayness of Scarborough and the deviant and decadent extraordinariness of the Sex Pistols. The exhibition also offered an insight into the motivations and ambitions of the band early in their timeline, in turn affording an opportunity to look at how history and memory are constructed through myth … In 2026 we will most likely see a public airing of standard punk myths, overused anecdotes and overembellished claims to importance. The intention here was to do something more quotidian and ‘honest’, to think about how punk grew at different scales in different places, and to understand how other – concomitant – narratives might apply.

I’ve just undertaken a Teams interview for the BBC, but I’m not sure it went well and whether I got the requisite points across. We got into a conversation about these five early gigs in Yorkshire, and the more myth-making gigs beginning with the first Manchester gig a few weeks after the Yorkshire tour.

The journalist was intrigued by the contrast, and whether we can ultimately take something from the poorly attended, bemused and harsh encounters between the band and the small audiences. Are we simply trying to create a false narrative and construct a mythical moment. My answer was in the negative, though I suggested it was more a “line in the sand”. Apart from us having a beach here in Scarborough, I’m not sure what that might mean.

Reflecting on this, you could ask what would have been different if these five gigs never happened. The trajectory of the Sex Pistols would quite likely be unchanged. Life in the Yorkshire towns would be unchanged. But they did serve a purpose. To allow the band to appreciate how the wider country would react to what they were doing. To force them to develop a strategy to cope, to continue, to infuriate further. I’d wager that there were large chunks of the small audience at Manchester gig 1 (and even gig 2) that were appalled by what they saw, and didn’t go home and make life-changing decisions and form new bands. These people get excluded from the myth-making of those gigs and the Pistols story.

In the exhibition I fixed on a line from Jonh Ingham’s early Sounds interview with the band, and Rotten in particular. The frontman rages against Top of the Pops, and the complacency it engenders, suggesting that his band strive to inspire something more reactive. By chance, Top of the Pops was airing on the night the band played Scarborough, and a bit of research backed up with YouTube searching showed Cliff Richard to be topping the charts.

This led me to develop a line of potential flight, rooted in the past, like a hauntological seed. I plagiarised Jamie Reid’s suburban “niceness” collage which was later reused for the reverse of the ‘Holidays in the Sun’ sleeve (advertising the b-side ‘Satellite’, itself referencing the satellite towns of London). Cliff Richard takes the hit in my crude collage. Then we have the Seditionaries patch “As you were I was, as I am you will be”. This is a variation of the memento mori epitaph, a stark statement of mortality…

But which mortality does this refer to? Are we (am I) wishing Cliff dead? I’d better say no to that to keep things above board. Perhaps, everything that Cliff, and Top of the Pops, stood for in May 1976. The process of producing the product, the transmission, and the banal and endless consumption. Perhaps punk was even declaring – and celebrating - its mortality before it had life? And it wanted to drag everything, Rotten and Richard, down with it.

I have tried to keep the posts here focussed around music, subcultures and clothing, although a few of my fairground essays have crept in. These have mainly been about how fairgrounds can operate alongside (or even as) a subculture, and how music and fairground aesthetics are intertwined. This post is from a published essay on fairground prizes – or swag. It made publication in quite a high-ranking journal, although shortly after this I gave up focussed on earning a living with a job that paid money etc. I feel there’s enough here to warrant something of interest to those of you invested in SUB>SUMED, and I have taken the decision to rearrange the text and remove the copious references to academic theories of material culture.

The fairground prize is a slippery object that shares some common ground of outlet with seaside stalls and temporary shops that occupy vacant spaces on the high street during Christmas holidays. I looked at an instance of this very early on in my SUB>SUMED project, recalling how buying saucy kay fobs, punk mirror badges and humorous tee-shirts at Ingoldmells helped form my juvenile punk becomings.

From a distanced position, the fairground prize could be considered in the realm of gubbins or detritus, material that is lowly, belittled or downgraded and operating in a grey economy. These retail objects which are then used as prizes are often branded to ephemeral cultural themes from film and television. They are known as ‘swag’ to the suppliers and buyers, offering connotations of piracy and plundering. Swag implies ill-gotten gains, perhaps won rather than earned, and this manner of acquisition is central to the fairground prize. The concept of winning rather than purchasing (with legitimate funds) introduces a more sensorial engagement with the object, demarcating it from a similar object purchased from a retail point.

The round stall and side stall traditionally formed the principal modes of access to the prize. Material swag forms part of the allure of the fairground, brought in as some kind of strange booty by the showpeople and arranged in intricate displays for the benefit of the punters, to be either purchased or offered as prizes in fairground games.

Swag pervades the fairground as either prizes (larger items) from stalls, small items from ‘Autogift’ vending machines, toys and games as winnable from various unstaffed devices such as cranes and grabs, and a multitude of items sold from vendors who circumambulate the fair or strategically line the entrance and exit interstices of the larger events. There is a topographical logic to the arrangement, with round stalls forming short avenues within the body of the fairground, side stalls lining the edge of the fairground, vending machines filling in any available spaces, and vendors floating around.

Whilst the mystery gift vending machines hid their booty, the modern-day grab games expose their prizes temptingly. Grabbing devices have a cavernous, mirror-backed and dazzlingly illuminated glass vitrine with a base of packing substance (polystyrene nuggets) and toys scattered, awaiting a lucky trier. Variations exist, but the basic system involves hastily positioning an open set of mechanical jaws using a joystick or button, watching the grabber descend, retract and hopefully grasp a prize rather than clasp at nothing or scattering nuggets. It then ascends and makes its way to the exit chute where it opens to dispense the prize. The customer is never certain that the prize is secure as the jaws seem to stutter and judder, often relinquishing its prey, making the winning of an object a tense occasion.

A different version of this game, one that is more corybantic but less controllable, takes the form of a large rotating disc of swag and a steel stylus that is activated to move from the circumference to the centre where a void is positioned allowing prizes to descend into the dispenser. This game looks simple to profit from, and the stylus briefly seems to gather numerous objects in its momentum sweep, but these are then dislocated from its clutches as it nears the centre.

Swag vendors are strategically bedecked in items that occupy various horizontal strata, with helium-inflated branded-balloons uppermost in huge clusters, stick toys and light sticks protruding at body level, and whistles, oversized dummies and felt animals limply hanging from waist belts. These resemble totemic or talismanic tribesmen, their bodies are totally submitted to swag by bearing its density and weight and maximizing its exposure.

Round and side stalls offer games where larger prizes can be won, although here the customer needs to be careful. Toys, figures and plush animals proliferate at all sizes, what is known in academia as ‘polyisomorphism’. The above image shows a range of sizes of plush big cat prizes on display, and there are always even smaller examples stashed in boxes and hidden from immediate display. These smaller prizes, known as the ‘bottom shelf’, are most commonly won, giving rise to the phrase ‘anything off the bottom shelf’ and its connotations of disappointment.

The scale of size maps to a scale of desire, with huge examples most sought after, and these are most prominently displayed in innovative stacks and arrangements hung from radial beams, pinned to uprights, and piled into a mountain in the centre. It is mimicked by neo art through its utilization of fierce duplication and symmetry of lurid objects as championed by Jeff Koons in his Banality series and performance artist Paul McCarthy through his use of discount illusions and shoddy remnants of popular culture.

Whilst these artists of the canon play with the seemingly kitsch readymade, creating a cultural enclave for an art-savvy audience to experience the common object, the real vernacular flourishes on the fairground where common objects are the building blocks of a craft of display. Showpeople take great pride in their arrangements of swag, assembling them as careful structures and often posing for photographs with the suspended toys proudly framing them as a mise-en-scène.

These stalls have evolved as a hybrid of skill and chance games with modern-day forms that include rifles, darts, pick (lottery), bingo, roll-ups and tubes, and a multitude of throwing and projectile games involving rings, balls, bean-bag toys launched using a mallet and catapult. Each game type then develops syntagmatically, slightly changing conditions such as darts thrown at standard dart boards, specialist dart boards and playing cards, with rules for winning based upon a myriad of combinations of high, low, matching and non-duplication, and small-print rules stipulating how fallen darts count as scoring so-and-so (to make winning by achieving the desired figure very difficult).

A parallel litany of fanciful mythology has accrued around the fairground game; air rifles with crooked sights, blunted darts unable to spear stiff playing cards, too-small-hoops, glued down shooting targets, diaphanous but tensile ping-pong balls skittering across cellular arrangement of goldfish bowls. Competing and winning becomes a monumental experience, drawing in spectators, and forming a memorable occasion.

Not surprisingly, there is a ritual of carrying home big prizes, celebrating being seen as a winner. As the fairground prize evolved towards the end of the last century, the sizing of toys took on steroid proportions. The sight of children or their parents grappling with huge snakes and tigers became a fairground spectacle in itself, acting as both an oversized trophy to indicate a successful achievement and an advertisement for the fairground prize.

There is a ‘backstage’ script which the public do not see. Swagmen will arrive at a fairground well before it is open to the public to allow show people to stock up on prizes and see new lines, indicating the increasingly influential role they have in determining the fairground prize. Prizes are purchased in bulk, squashed into polythene bags such that, if glimpsed by the public, their appeal and worth may be challenged. They are grouped on the pavement and hastily transferred from bagged bulk to desirable prize in the hours prior to the fair opening. At larger fairs such as Newcastle (June), Hull (October) or Nottingham (October), the swagmen will spend the duration of the fair in situ behind the scenes alongside the lorries and living wagons associated with the fairground. Swagmen set up selling points with other backstage service providers such as lighting suppliers, signage equipment and electrical goods in an impromptu area known as ‘swag alley’.

Most showman swag is purchased through the World’s Fair newspaper, an ongoing weekly publication established in 1904 that serves key functions: reporting on fairgrounds, facilitating the organization of the industry, and acting as a communication vessel for a transient community. The newspaper incorporates a dedicated section of sales advertisements where swag wholesalers offer bulk purchases to showpeople, serving as a primary resource for my research beyond simply trying to remember things!

Sample advertisements from this newspaper provide an insight into the changing nature of fairground swag in the post-war years, as it moved from the household goods depicted above towards strange novelties and cheap goods branded to fleeting cultural icons and fashions.

An early advertisement from 1955 sets the scene offering: Charlie the Spiv – rubber novelty – squeeze him and watch his eyes and tongue pop out, rolls of gun-caps, books, pencils, giant giraffe novelty, plastic trumpets, Japanese coffee sets, alarm clocks, luncheon cruet sets, linen, American type comics. Charlie the Spiv is a typical cheap and throwaway fairground gimmick that can cause a minor sensation, as such odd novelties and crazes do from time to time.

Moving on a decade, and January 1965 contains an advertisement for goldfish, a stalwart fairground prize being offered in quantities of 50, 100 or 1000. There is a continuation of the household prize with ‘wholesale glass and china, electric blanket craze’ listed, indicating how the tactic of attributing a craze to a novelty toy also applied to the more practical prizes. An advertisement from Novelties Wholesale (Bristol) offers a plethora of cheap goods including ‘crazy aerosol sprays, rubber rattlesnakes, blinking specs, squirting specs, plastic disguise sets, Okito magic coin box, real fur mice with corn’, whilst a rival swagman – Syd Cross of Hampstead – lists ‘fur monkeys, twin dolls, marshal and cavalry badges, large bubble pipes, teddy boy rings’.

These items capture a real slice of time and vivid sense of the fairground prize directed at younger boys and girls, and aspirational teenagers. The ‘teddy boy ring’ is interesting as a kind of subcultural wilderness object, with Sam Knee’s The Bag I’m In suggesting that the original movement had died out by 1959, and the first revival was not until 1968 with Bill Haley returning to tour the UK. It is either a case of the subculture stubbornly persisting in the geographical provinces to which styles are trickled down, or more likely a typical example of a cheap, pseudo-subversive fairground object that a teenager-to-be would relish as part of their time at the fairground.

By 1975 there is evidence of popular music and television influences, with an advertisement for ‘pop and tv stickers, screen-printed tee-shirts, wobbly wombles, toy components eyes and noses, jolly roger funny face balloons’. The ‘wobbly womble’ is, presumably, a fairground novelty that hybridizes the popularity of the Wombles (originally a book character from 1968, they were made into a British television series in 1973, and had a string of record hits produced by Mike Batt) and the popular wobbling weeble (an egg-shaped toy based upon a 1971 children’s television character), typifying surrealist exploration and improvisation transplanted onto the fairground. Note the inclusion of toy components, indicating the tradition for showpeople to construct their own prizes in the form of ‘gonk’ figures, vaguely anthropomorphized shapes made from fur fabric and plastic eyes.

By 1985 the culturally branded concept was starting to dominate, although the fairground still presented a unique take on this through the prize. An advertisement for ‘balloons – Roland Rat, A-Team, Super Ted, Masters of the Universe, posters – Wham, Boy George, A Team, Michael Jackson dollar bills’ is a useful cultural barometer of the year, but the inclusion of the branded dollar bill (alongside the more ubiquitous balloon and poster) shows how the fairground offered something different and apparently banal. These dollar bills were super-sized, akin to a ceremonial cheque handed over at a televised charity function, and featured figures such as popstars and cartoon characters from the Muppets series.

The modern fairground sees monopolisation by single themes. A recent example is the craze for Minions, which became ubiquitous as fairground prizes. On other stalls it felt like there was a consumer-craze, with branded boxes for perfumes and i-phones lashed to coke bottles with additional fivers and tenners. These sat on top of square boxes which required the punter to throw a hoop and fit it over the whole structure – including the base.

It felt a little like a loss of magic, but I don’t want to start sounding like a nostalgic old Brit. The fairground is often encountered during our teenage years, and thus the transitional nature of the self, combined with the polysensory fantasy space of the fairground – a world of nascent subcultures and furtive excursions into new sociability – imbibes the fairground experience with a magical essence. I wish I still had my Fonz mirror.

If the two parts to ‘Pivot’ represented me trying to unscramble and organise/legitimise my subcultural late-1980s, with skateboarding and outdoor wear, and ultimately a reflective look back at what I decided was a meta-narrative on the end of street style and its replacement with street wear, then this final short burst is a revisiting without any conclusion.

It was prompted by the book The Rise of the Stylist: Subculture, Style and the Fashion Image in London 1980-1990 (2024/2026) by Philip Clarke, a title that felt in line with what I was trying to articulate. The book is published on Bloomsbury who seem to churn out an inordinate amount of material on fashion, style and clothing cultures (as well as many other streams in cultural studies or whatever it is called now). I’ve got quite a few of the Bloomsbury fashion series books and my general observations are as follows: they can be expensive (unless you drop upon a bargain on one of the big platforms), they feel shoddily assembled in that it comes across as a print-on-demand file, and they feel shoddily edited in that they give the impression of being made straight into a book from a thesis. A thesis and a book are two separate beasts. Finally, you always get a glimpse of two other books in the lower left corner of the back cover to keep you hooked like a literary sequence obsessive narcotic. The Fashion Stylists edited collection glimpsed here with the cardboard box stomp cover looks enticing, but is way too expensive for me.

The Rise of the Stylist is an interesting book, and it more or less perfectly overlaps with the period and area of my concern in the pivot essays, even if it has a 100% London focus (as indicated in the title). Clarke tries, but ultimately steps back, from reaching a conclusion of either explaining the rationale of a dynamic or, at times, grasping the dynamic itself. It is slippery and muddy, fraught and freighted.

The stylist under investigation emerged as a dedicated role through the 1980s. These people were previously unacknowledged but crucial to the early 1980s shaping of street style magazines like i-D and The Face. It is these magazines, in their marking out of a fresh approach to documenting the convergence of subcultures and fashion, that change the dynamics of subcultures and how the ‘luxury’ style press and fashion ecosystem functions. In Clarke’s words: “shifting practices in fashion and subcultures”. As I discussed a few essays ago in regard to Caroline Baker – who takes a major role in Clarke’s study – the stylist simultaneously takes on the roles of “connoisseur, consumption engineer and subcultural stylist”.

Stylists were initially wedded to the independent magazines and operated adrift from the fashion companies, just grabbing clothes and customising them in a wider melange of visual cues and ideas. In this regard they were often unattributed in the features they created, with models, photographers and tick lists of clothing preferring to be recorded. Clarke attempts to locate a shift in The Face issue 27 (July 1982) when Sheila Rock is listed as both photographer and stylist as she works with Heaven 17’s Glenn Gregory and Scritti’s Green in a rather cringey wild-west special. The previous issue has Gregory doing a business fashion spread with Rock, and there’s no mention of a stylist. Actually, Gregory is also in the previous issue, doing something similar but with a business theme and shot by Rock – but there’s no stylist credit.

From this point onwards it is very muddy. The stylist flits between (or sometimes straddles both) clothing models and ‘image production’ – in regard to assembling a stage set and posing the models to create the desired photograph. Thus the ‘style’ is polysemic, being either a ‘real’ thing in terms of a set of clothes and a look for a consumer to go out and try to copy, or a highly-polished image – oftentimes both. I know that I fell for both, with my endless clipping and displaying (and worshipping) of these images.

Second extension

Alongside the proposal of what streetstyle isn’t – as listed in the preceding two pivot posts - a general agreement can also be made towards a positivist definition of streetstyle, in that it is (or was) a way of dressing that encompasses a subcultural approach. Now we have something to work with, something that finds traction in our past. It is also possible to fuse this with Clarke’s book, even if we have to counterintuitively strip away his main task of explaining the birth and dynamic of a stylist in all this.

Away from the slew of academic projections onto and interpretations of subcultures, Catherine McDermott’s overlooked 1987 book Street Style is a good place to start. It sums up the creativity of British fashion and post-punk design in the 1980s before the decade has ended, but also before the commercial forces take over – written before the change, and seemingly blissfully unaware of what is about to happen by over-celebrating autonomy! The book documents the cutting edge of subcultural creativity and leans towards questions of future marketability for named designers midway between street and high-end, but there is also a lesser documented strand of everydayness and creativity.

In contrast to current times, subcultural clothing and accessories did not proliferate into high street shops. A friend recently reminded me of how he had to repurpose brass-headed document holder split pins to fashion up a punk studded wristband as late as 1979 – you simply could not buy studs (used to adorn punk clothes) in any shops or market stalls in the city where he lived. He used masking tape on the inside of the wristband to stop the sharp ends of the pins scratching his skin.

It was forever messy and experimental. Whilst the prime subcultural clothing outposts tended to cater for a scene in the heat of the moment, subcultural fashions eventually trickled down to market stalls and chance dealers who would run up quick and dirty subcultural garments. In terms of the history of youthful subcultures, this trailing edge of opportunist, copy-cat fashions was vitally important. And it was still a radical fashion. As one of the key collectors and directors of subcultural clothing Roger K. Burton attested to in his recent book, this clothing was Rebel Threads.

Whereas Burton operated at the sharp end of subcultural definition, most of us scurried around searching and making do. But it was equally important, equally rebellious. This trailing edge created overlap, temporal drag, and even stasis of scenes as they spread into the provinces, evincing a muddying and dedifferentiation of periodic staging. This is the world that I dwelt in, and the world covered by the more autobiographical essays in SUB>SUMED over the past few years.

Subcultural engagement expressed a feeling that there is more to life than that prescribed for and expected of you. Investing time, energy and resources into a subculture was a praxis towards utopia, a working-out of a possibility, a line of flight. As well as offering a sense of belonging and a new purpose, subcultures questioned and re-arranged the structures of value. It was, fleetingly, a glimpse of a truly radical fashion. However, around 1990 we passed through the eye of the needle. All we see now are now are marketing opportunities that try to pass back though, as either nostalgised reality or glib simulacra.

A pivot moment via a screen grab. September 1988, a Top of the Pops appearance of the uber-fashion-conscious Pet Shop Boys performing ‘Domino Dancing’. As always, Neil Tennant wears a designer suit, boxy in construction, check in pattern, a single button fastened. I’m not sure of the designer, but it’s ‘designer’, it looks different to what passes as either the everyday suit or the expensive suit.

There’s an extra figure in view, backgrounded and so diminished between the main pairing. He supplies the flamenco guitar that gives the track a postmodern feel of borrowed elements, a bricolage of euro-disco and world music. Undistinguished in terms of visual prowess, he knows his place (sitting on a chair a metre or so behind the duo).

Next up, Chris Lowe stands sporting full surf wear like nothing seen before. It's a straight rip from the official video for the song. There’s no keyboard to lurk behind, so we get a full view – flipped baseball cap and shades, oversized surf print tee, garish Bermuda board shorts, and (via the aid of reflection) white sports socks and bright hi-tops (or trainers). His very unusual get-up evokes a typically snide comment from presenter Nicky Campbell, as he – or we - clearly isn’t ready for such a look being broadcast into our living rooms. It’s not the 1990s or 2000s sensibility looking back, it’s still the 1980s – such clothing is simply out of place.

Before they adopted their synchronised ultra-avant-garde designer outfits, the Pet Shop Boys were about two contrasting but complementing halves. Everything was suggested partly in denial and partly in the breaking of promises (to conform to norms). What we say, what we do, who we are. Fashion tribes, and those tribes outside of definitions and nomenclature, were beckoned – most famously the Paniniaro. That homosocial kinship and bonding glimpsed with Dexys. As an earlier song remarked: “But I don’t like to compete or talk street, street, street” – but the street (whatever that was) was always lurking in their imagery and evocations. Tennant in the designer suit, Lowe in something we were not accustomed to; who was in the fashion/style vanguard, who was in the street? As always, both at the same time and neither.

Let’s try to start again. We can easily imagine a post-Blitz pre-rave ‘interregnum’, when subculture goes into hiatus, meaning that fashion and style seek a new terra firma. But nothing is ever motionless, or existing in a vacuum. The more controlled and commercial worlds of prescriptive brand-led fashion (whether high-end Comme and Yohji for grown-up Blitz kids or mass-produced streetwear for an emergent generation) was always the endgame. If you were in the Pet Shop Boys you could show how these systems slipped around each other and were briefly exciting and seemingly under our aegis. But they never were, they were set out to consume us as the 1990s rolled in. We just let it happen. S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G, we’re shopping.

Back to the books to look for answers. Paul Gorman tracks some of this, with a London-centric bias, in his 2001 excursus The Look, ultimately prioritising the role of Stussy and new shops such as EndZone (in Newburgh Street), Bond and Passenger at the dawn of the 1990s. Stussy, as we shall see, were key. This is also picked up by a reflective article in Sleaze Nation magazine (a ‘Streetwear special’ feature from February 2001) which implicates Stussy as the “accidental architect” of the 1992 streetwear explosion.

Passing through to the other side of the mirror, the books of prominent commentator Josh Sims promise to be particularly insightful here. However, in one breath they simply list niche skateboarding and sporting brands, whilst Sims also tries to understand the factors in this change (the internet, digital photography, social media, globalisation all get bundled into the theory pot).

You could also bring in King Adz and Wilma Stone’s 2018 book This is not Fashion: Streetwear Past, Present and Future – a glorious mess of misconnecting ideas and threads, that sums up the confusing nature of understanding the movement between streetstyle and streetwear. So, what did really happen?

Let’s re-revisit a 1990 text as our pivot point, firstly looking backwards. Glancing over the previous decade, subcultural and streetstyle documenter i-D produced their bumper compendium A Decade of i-Deas: The Encyclopedia of the 80s, in which the themes, trends and principal players were set out in an alphabetical list. These were all drawn from a selective summary of the magazine which had been publishing exactly for a decade, launching in summer 1980.

Along with The Face (and to some extent Blitz), i-D had been at the forefront of documenting what we might now call ‘streetstyle’. That is, the individual tailoring of a look that worked within (and sometimes across) a subcultural scene, augmented by charity shop objects, military surplus, home-made artefacts, American college clothing via the Flip outlets, and pretty much anything else. These were tethered to music scenes (such that The Face was primarily a music magazine to start with) but the music scenes extolled certain styles and role models which were prioritised and foregrounded through shimmering photography.

This punk and post-punk bricolage approach to dressing was only really dominant in the first part of the decade. By the mid-1980s these magazines were featuring new designer labels that catered for the post-Blitz clubbing crowd and scenesters/self-appointed cognoscenti like Robert Elms. It was maybe a stretch to still call this streetstyle, give or take the odd Pet Shop Boys pronouncement.

In addition, the first babblings of brand-led streetwear were coming in, with surf, skate and sportswear brands creating label-fetishising scenes that were loosely attached to early hip-hop, house and pre-rave warehouse party scenes. If you say them fast enough, streetstyle and streetwear sound similar, or at least intimately related. This is not quite the case. What was essentially happening was that the role of i-D had shifted – from an impetus of reflection and reportage of ‘the street’, to a role of inspiring and nurturing a particular look in adventurous and inquisitive readers, and finally to a murkier and more insidious role of prescriptive brand pushing as the birth of streetwear ushered in the 1990s decade.

In 1990 it was at pivot point, although it is indicative that A Decade of i-Deas contains relatively little of this brand-affiliated streetwear fashion, even with the two ‘official’ years of the Second Summer of Love having passed and rave culture about to go rampant. There is a suggestion that rave culture, and its engagement of working-class youth, reversed this slow death of streetstyle - but that is a bigger argument for another day.

The Encyclopedia does contain a box-highlighted entry for skate/surfwear which suggests that “throughout the greenhouse effect summers of the late ‘80s, surf and skatewear became de rigueur street STYLE”, part of a dressing down phenomenon associated with acid house culture. It thus categorises this clothing as an extension of streetstyle, although history has proven it is something of a catalyst in the transition of streetstyle to streetwear. Surf and skate brands are part of the uniform at early raves, and more blatantly the company Stussy (along with Gotcha) is included in A Decade of i-Deas by virtue of a full-page (real) advertisement – this is clearly an immediate marker for what is to come in the 1990s.

In a similar pivot vein and at compiled at a similar time, Cynthia Rose’s Design After Dark (1991) assesses the roles of early 1980s subcultures and mid-to-late 1980s clubculture in the proposed design zeitgeist for a new decade to come. Within the greater work Rose tries to unearth a (UK) homegrown genealogy of skateboarding, lauding it as a pinnacle fashion movement with links to outdoor rave events such as Witchworld and Method Air which included a skateboarding element.

Rose has some background history in the early days of the 1980s revival of skateboarding, as she edited two significant features on this niche scene for music newspaper NME in 1987 (I discussed these in the earlier essays on skateboarding). In Design After Dark she builds on this to plot a DIY insurgence (labelled as “sound system theory”) through UK skateboarding culture with a profusion of home-movies and a celebration of the inane and mundane. It’s a great section of the book with fine layout. The roles of Slam City Skates and artists such as Ged Wells feature prominently. Although well-researched, it overlooks some key moments in the growth of this UK scene and its associated style, most significantly the connection to a thrash revival, which is surprising as Rose covered them in detail at the time in her 1987 NME articles. I’m not sure why she is airbrushing this from history?

The pre-rave aetiology of this surf and skate look as it courses through various subcultures is muddy at best. I have tried to put the argument across for a strong but secluded link up between early hardcore and thrash and skate/surf culture. But there are other tangents. I opened this essay segment with Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe donning full surf wear on Top of the Pops in 1988. Subculture researcher Peter Jachimiak unearthed another variant strand of this with his amusing exploration of the ‘Acid Surf Mod’ look (Subbaculture issue 8) briefly glimpsed on Paul Weller and his Style Council as they took the stage at the Royal Albert Hall in July 1989 also bedecked in surf shorts, Converse and calf-length white socks. A collective sharp intake of breath.

Jachimiak goes against the grain of attributing a broadly lumpen explanation of the surf gear grafting to rave culture (via Balearic Beats at Shoom going overground), instead pointing to Weller’s mod-ish glances to Italian culture via Style Council’s retooling in the ‘Italo house’ genre – a continuation of mod’s original longing gaze to the stylish Continent. It’s an interesting theory and would tie it into Pet Shop Boys with their Euro-culture gaze.

The period following the publication of A Decade of i-Deas and Design After Dark would see surf and skate culture as a main choice of clothing in a multitude of scenes, as well as a vibrant skating scene existing in its own right. More so, the precision marketing of Stussy in the UK by Michael Kopelman would quickly change the landscape of style culture from a fast-and-loose subcultural basis to a more prescriptive brand-led method.

Stussy was very much the litmus test for the changing roles of these magazines and how we understood streetstyle. Kopelman was a strategist with his eye on the prize - as the 1990s unfolded, skateboarding and this associated look reverberating in various music and clubbing scenes became big business. Stussy, the Tribe, and Kopelman’s marketing-of-cool prowess paved the way for streetwear shops such as Bond and Passenger.

Both Sims and Adz cannot overemphasise the role played by Stussy and Kopelman. The vernacular sense of streetstyling that defined the 1980s was somehow erased. That knack of mixing-and-matching, accessorizing, seeking out quirky brands from niche (non-subcultural) worlds, was suddenly replaced with a more prescriptive and driven agenda. Sadly, it’s been like that ever since.

In the UK Stussy tribe we have a few musicians - 23 Skidoo’s Alex Turnbull who was a genuine skateboarder and punk-punk-industrial pioneer, and Mick Jones from Big Audio Dynamite. Jones might not have been a skater, but he was certainly at the forefront of exploring the confusing mess (and eventual burnout) of subcultures in the late-1980s. So our next port of call is the style trajectory of Big Audio Dynamite. But before that, there’s another new 1980s book to review…

There’s probably going to be a glut of events, exhibitions and publications to mark the 50^th anniversary of punk, or at least the UK’s naming and acceleration of the scene through 1976. I’ve been somewhat caustic on the Last Word book and also expressed an anticipated weariness of what might be coming next. However, this is an official announcement that I’m throwing in my lot.

In May 1976 the Sex Pistols played their first gigs outside of the London and wider area of art colleges. They left their relative safety net where punk was about to be named, where they had a fanbase of avant-garde expressive dandies and cultural reprobates. They went all or nothing and headed to Northallerton, Scarborough, Middlesbrough and Barnsley for a quick-hit series of dates. Unsurprisingly, McLaren stayed behind as he had ‘other business’ to attend to.

The band playing Scarborough in 1976 seems an interesting thing to explore and query. It works as both a moment of history for the place, a moment of history for the band, and also an opportunity to look at how history and memory are constructed. These are things that interest me in a subcultural sense.

The plan is to produce six display panels at A0 size and show them in a few public spaces with maybe some reproduction punk artefacts from the time. If the conditions are right I’ll add in some ‘engagement’ events such as fanzine workshops and hopefully get some author friends to do talks. This depends on costs, and - at the moment - I’ve not managed to get any funding or support. Of course, the revived 75% Sex Pistols roll up in Scarbados for a showpiece gig in August, so it would be nice to also have the boards on display in some capacity and have a free event alongside that. I’m even thinking of getting some seaside punk rock confectionary made.

I’m drawing on a bit of previous experience in display creation. Things I learnt are to make the displays visually appealing, have some consistency that creates an intuitive flow between panels, and to keep the text within a tight word count. This threshold restriction isn’t my strong point as I like to waffle, to draw in interesting tangents, and to play with language.

The six proposed boards move between looking at Scarborough and looking at the band as they come together on the day in May. As usual, I’m drilling down into everyday factors and occurrences, demolishing myth and nostalgia and resituating it within more mundane circumstances. The mythical antagonisms are replaced with new frictions.

Below are the first four texts that go up to the evening of the 1976 gig. The fifth text will cover the return of the band to Scarborough in 1977 as part of the S.P.O.T.S. tour. The sixth and final panel will look at more lasting links between punk and the seaside, souvenir punk grot, etc, but I’ve not wrote that yet.

Please let me know your thoughts on the texts. If the project gets a green light for cooperating venues and I get a designer who can spare the time to put something together, then I’m hoping it can go ahead.

BOARD 1 – A HEATWAVE ON THE HORIZON

The summer of 1976 would turn out to be one of the hottest on record, with pubs running out of beer and road surfaces melting. On the last day of May the BBC director Gerry Tonya filmed a documentary of 24 hours in the life of Scarborough. Broadcast in September as a late-night regional programme on BBC1, it captures the precursor to the heatwave.

Tonya’s documentary is a nostalgic treat, though it has the unsettling feeling of the earlier film O Dreamland by Lindsay Anderson, with a slightly contemptuous undercurrent. We are confronted with obtrusive close-ups of pallid faces munching chips and elderly gents squirming in the sun as they adjust starchy shirt collars. Without narrative, the prowling cameras reveal the town setting up, the trains and coaches arriving, busy landladies, hotel guests tucking in to a fry-up, clinking teacups, amusements, sunbathing, donkey rides and the eventual nighttime clean up.

News items, snippets of traffic reports and incidental music from Radio One are caught in diegetic drifts of sound. Nice pop, to soothe and placate. There’s an extended segment of Paul McCartney’s Wings hit ‘Silly Love Songs’, with its inane chorus of an elongated “I love you”. We catch a glimpse of a middle-aged woman in a kiss-me-quick style beach hat branded to the Bay City Rollers – this is pop music in 1976.

Any evidential imprint of punk rock, set down by the Sex Pistols performing in the town in the previous week, is understandably absent. However, prompted by hindsight you can feel it lingering like a ghost bearing discontent and disarray. Within a short period of a year, the cultural climate would shift. Love, and its fluffy pop silliness, would be redefined, as American punk upstarts Richard Hell and the Voidoids declared – in a two-minute salvo – that ‘Loves Comes in Spurts’. Everything was up for grabs.

BOARD 2 – WE’RE INTO CHAOS

In spring 1976 the Sex Pistols prepared to venture north to play their first gigs outside of the relative sanctuary of the capital and immediate conurbation of art colleges. Punk as a scene and a music genre was still bubbling underground. If you read the music papers carefully, you may have seen reference to the band causing trouble at their London appearances, upstaging the headline band on the night and instigating numerous scuffles. By April the term punk was being loosely applied, covering the Sex Pistols, a few rough-and-ready pub rock bands, and the impending arrival of American band The Ramones. The Sex Pistols would get an unexpected feature in Sounds newspaper at the end of April, effectively lighting the blue touchpaper.

There is a convincing argument that the band were originally conceived as a vehicle to sell clothing, the principal business of their manager Malcolm McLaren with his partner Vivienne Westwood. As a creative pair they were a whirling dervish of mischief and invention, plundering the explicit and taboo, the subcultural and countercultural, the political and the downright weird. This was sold from their shop SEX at the end of King’s Road. It would soon be rebranded as Seditionaries as their punk look took shape.

Photographer Ray Stevenson attached himself to the band. In the spring, around the time of the North Yorkshire excursion, he photographed the quartet cutting a swathe through London’s pop-tourist hotspot Carnaby Street. Johnny Rotten holds the focus, dressed as a roughed-up Teddy boy on day release from borstal, gurning and goofing like a Dickensian projection of Albert Steptoe. Everything about him is screaming “I don’t care”. You wondered, would the rest of the UK be ready for this?

BOARD 3 – NEVER MIND THE POLLOCKS…

On Thursday 20^th May Scarborough fishermen had one eye on the Cod War. Others in the town were anticipating a more amicable Euro-battle, the Seadogs later defeating Udinese in the Anglo-Italian Cup with a thumping 4-0 victory. Elsewhere life rumbled on as NorthEast Co-op offered Silver Soft margarine and new Daz washing powder. The Armstrong-Massey showroom on Ramshill Road was excitedly displaying the brand-new Triumph TR7, Seiko digital watches were the latest must-have thing at Sizer Jewellers, Don Robinson had big plans for Marineland and Woodheads Bakery were taking on new staff.

The Capitol cinema hosted a mix of sex and thrills, with The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones on one screen, and the Spielberg debut Dual on the other. The former was nothing to do with the ‘sex bomb’ Welsh popstar, but an X-certificate comedy romp featuring the ubiquitous Joan Collins. The cinema poster strangely foreshadowed the 1980 film The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle which told a heavily mythologised story of the Sex Pistols through a tableau of licentious period vignettes.

Look closely at page 5 of the Evening News and you would read a small announcement for a little-known band at the Penthouse – The Sex Pistols. It quotes frontman Johnny Rotten letting everyone know how he is going to change the face of music. It comes from a Sounds feature, with the journalist Jonh Ingham noting how Rotten fixed him with a non-stop “sneer and direct-eye blitz”. Rotten concludes the interview by declaring: “I’m against people who just complain about Top of the Pops and don’t do anything. I want people to go out and start something, to see us and start something”.

As the Sex Pistols were preparing for their gig, Top of the Pops was broadcasting its weekly instalment. It concluded with host David Hamilton introducing the number one single, Cliff Richard’s ‘Devil Woman’. Wearing tight jeans, a tee-shirt announcing his LP I’m Nearly Famous, and sporting oh-so-nice hair he enraptured the studio audience. Other people were thinking of just maybe starting something…

BOARD 4 – …HERE’S THE SEX PISTOLS

“We were so intensely disliked, there was no real audience outside of the 100 Club. Anywhere else you were taking your life in your hands. We’d go up north and we’d be lucky to return. We played all sorts of weird places like Scarborough and Barnsley.” John Lydon

The four musicians and two staff headed north, with McLaren staying behind in London. Memories fades and myths cohere from exaggerations, the mundane becoming the epic. The hired van was unable to climb hills, making the journey from Northallerton a challenge and conjuring up a vision of colourful, rag-tag delinquents cursing and kicking a stubborn vehicle like a misappointed scene from Last of the Summer Wine. On arrival in Scarborough, bassist Glen Matlock recalls being hastily ejected from a hostelry as he and Rotten sought shelter and a pre-gig beverage. The punk pioneers felt as if they were from Mars.

Situated at 35 St Nicholas Street, the Penthouse club occupied the top floor of a splendid Georgian townhouse that had served as the town hall, a ballroom, a billiards hall and a cinema. Whitby businessman Peter Adams converted it to a bespoke club, motivated by an incident when he was spurned entry into a club due to his clothing style. The Penthouse was thus defiantly imprinted with Adams’ countercultural vision that merged Afro-futurism, Art Nouveau and Tolkien fantasy – ready to embrace the 70s.

In May 1976 that vision was about to have time called upon it, as a punk advance party arrived in the provinces. They were received by a meagre crowd, most of whom were not prepared for what was to follow. The Sex Pistols were well-versed and skilled musicians, but they chose to play on the cusp of disorder to wind up audiences. Tonight was no different, the band spending a deliberate eternity messing about with tuning at top volume. Patience frittered as Rotten, looking the part in a pink drape jacket, set about insulting people. A few numbers were dutifully performed, confrontation bristled and they beat a hasty retreat to the besieged dressing room. Seemingly insignificant, but a moment in history.

Here’s the link to the Scarborough May Bank Holiday film - it’s worth a watch.

A personal embrace of quotidian and utilitarian hiking and climbing clothing at the start of the 1990s signalled – after the brief craze for wearing surf and skateboard garments – an end to any subcultural affiliation or ambition. A pipe and slippers moment. We know that outdoor wear had infiltrated casual culture through the 1980s, with backdated claims from regionalised fans in the contemporary moment saying they were first with Peter Storm, Berghaus, etc etc. Ontologically, the football casual scene existed in a ‘zone of indiscernibility’, neither mainstream nor streetstyle, and I wouldn’t try to untangle it here. As we also know, hiking and climbing gear then stepped up and emerged as a packaged niche fashion under the name ‘gorpcore’ in the 2010s. This is very much not a zone of indiscernibility. As John Lydon’s PiL might say, it entered a ‘Commercial Zone’.

I’m going to take a slightly different tack and avoid the trajectory of branded outdoor wear. Instead, it is my argument that the affordances offered by surfing-via-skateboarding fashion, with some key manipulators at work, that set up a new fashion ecology such that packaged trends gorpcore could arrive fully formed and take rapid root. It represented a semantic shift from streetstyle to streetwear.

Recap

Sidestepping their self-indulgence, the previous pair of cursory explorations of my rather damp squib sartorial ‘becomings’ in the skateboarding and rock-climbing scenes can now serve a wider purpose. There is an argument that later 1980s subcultures (and beyond) were more about appearing to be something (or part of something) rather than the real, immersive and commitment-demanding thing itself. Blame it on Jean Baudrillard and his theory of simulacra. So, I pulled off the look of a skateboarder and dropout climber, but not necessarily the requirements and sacrifices to be one. I did try, honestly, but it was so difficult. And the clothing felt good (briefly).

This is no great revelation in the already heavily theorised ‘Society of the Spectacle’ – being and doing replaced by having, only to be further replaced by appearing. Technical outdoor clothing and fashionable skate labels are currently big business in fashion and lifestyle promotion. Gorpcore is a major thing whereby people dress up in ridiculously over-technical outdoor clothing to take photographs in their bedrooms for Instagram. They might venture out to dwell momentarily amidst some brutalist architecture for a quick photograph, or indoor shower-test an expensive waterproof like a segment of niche porn. Something has clearly gone wrong there.

And, as stated somewhere in the previous essay, skateboarding – initially through the brand Stussy - instigated a major change in fashion cultures from an ad-hoc post-punk understanding of streetstyle, towards a more prescriptive and brand-focussed regime of streetwear. This streetwear regime, which swelled through the 1990s, now presides as a normality. How can we gain a conceptual grip on this?

Let’s go back to get our start point, the early 1980s. We can again revisit our Christopher Robin advertisement to confirm that, even with its third-rate knock-off clobber, it was an exciting time with clothing-code driven style tribes. As the decade commenced there was a critical mass of niche but clearly demarcated subcultures in the UK. Equally important, there was also a strand of dressing-up ‘from below’ so to speak, with style-led elements of post-punk ingenuity and new romantic (or whatever we wish to call it) defining new looks at gigs and clubs. This has been the mainstay of my SUB>SUMED writing so far.

Subculture, fashion, street clothing and style were distinct ontologies and forces that impacted upon each other and pulled each other in different directions. Subcultural dressing was admittedly in the form of a more prescriptive uniform, but it may also have involved elements and experimentation within a particular subcultural niche, cross-pollination between subcultures, or it may have existed outside of specific subcultures and celebrate a weird dressing up that still inhabits the subcultural world. An outlier on the inside so to speak, what writer Adrian Dannatt gloriously labels as “sartorial stuttering” in his introduction to the photography of Jane England.

Hyphenated, compounded or separated - streetstyle was (retrospectively) broadly defined in this mix, as recently celebrated in the informative book Rebel Stylist which covers the career of Caroline Baker as she moves through the 1970s and a raft of underground fashion magazines to briefly steer a direction for i-D magazine in 1980. Streetstyle is (or was) subcultural with added oomph – dressing up, mixing and sampling, bringing in a bit of charity shop vintage or army surplus or a random accessory from a chef’s outfit. Bricolage in the purest sense; innovative, detached and resolutely stylish amongst your peers.

If the term fashion perplexes in finding an agreed and apposite definition then streetwear and streetstyle are equally dissensual. The term streetstyle was not in common use at the time of the Sounds back page advertisement from Christopher Robin. According to Brent Luvaas, in his 2016 ethnography of streetstyle bloggers entitled Street Style, it is said to originate with Ted Polhemus in 1994.

Polhemus (pro)claiming it in 1994 is an important moment, but it was certainly in use before then – for example with Catherine McDermott’s 1987 book Street Style written for the Design Council (more on this below). 1987, 1994, or Luvaas’ very different understanding and reclaiming of it in 2017, by the time the term is coined it has changed very much from its possible meaning in the period we project it backwards to cover. The disparity in writing about streetstyle importantly hinges upon an author’s ability to understand the nature of this back projection of the term.

Staying in the near present, Caroline Cox’s bumper summary from 2017 titled The World Atlas of Street Fashion argues simply that the term street signifies where things are worn. Furthermore, her work is geographically driven, allowing her to focus on relatively anachronistic scenes in obscure places and use the old anthropological argument of the coeval.

The V&A publication Surfers Soulies Skinheads & Skaters from 1996 is interesting in that it situates the pluralistic 1990s very well but misremembers the 1980s (I briefly flagged this up with their reference to skateboarding fashion history). From its 1990s post-subcultural vantage point the book at times overlooks the self-directed creativity necessary in the 1980s and now supplanted by label-driven consumption under the guise of ‘street’.

The V&A book is an example of the common tactic of seeking a definition by expressing what it isn’t - that is, clothing associated with neither high street fashion nor catwalk fashion. We can then easily map this exogenous definition to the time of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such that high (catwalk) fashion was solely luxury brands for a cheesy James Bond type fantasy world, whilst high street fashion was a grey and brown spectrum of nonexistence with the odd ski-jumper thrown in. This gives the impression that there is an intuitive and simplistic continuity between early 1980s streetstyle and the plethora of looks in the 1990s…

It is not so simple. Streetstyle, or at least the something we now know as streetstyle projected back to the 1980s, could flourish away from this… in fact, it was a necessity. Early 1980s streetstyle was worked at through taking a chance, exploring clothes, following links and clues, observing and copying (or ‘sampling’). It existed in crevices and interstices that had to be sought out through exploration and observation, and the wearer would put themselves in the direct firing line with their “sartorial stuttering”.

The counter argument to a 1980s-into-1990s frictionless semantic transition suggests that streetstyle has passed through the eye of a needle and been thoroughly incorporated into both high fashion and the high street, making it effectively meaningless as a movement ‘owned’ by its activists and participants. As the 1980s concluded, the hybrid dressing up that blended or extended subcultural codes with extraneous bizarreness gave way to new both new designer labels AND also the first inklings of surf/skate/sportswear brands.

Avant-garde advertisements for Comme des Garcons rubbed up against cheesy beach-smile ads for Ocean Pacific and Haring-lite ads for 100% Mambo in the pages of The Face. Over in i-D, regular advertisers Flex promoted Life’s A Beach shorts for their summer 1986 fits. At the same time there is a movement from King’s Road and Kensington Market to Hyper Hyper and Dover Street and South Molton Street (Crolla and Yohji were the first brands from this new world to take root here).

Anarchic innovation and ingenuity gave way to a more prescriptive method, meaning that quirkiness and the ability to stand out could be purchased by those both in the know and flush with cash. In the 100^th issue of The Face from September 1988, closing out the first chapter of the magazine’s existence, we get a mournful look back in which street fashion derived from “Flip, Oxfam, and Blitz improvisation with curtains” has now been poached by South Molton Street, with (according to the author) only the customised MA-1 jackets and DMs holding the old ground.

I’m struggling to articulate this messy mix of scenes and post-hoc reflections and interpretations without it coming across as a sixth former’s cultural studies essay, so I will pause for a break before looking in more detail at the crucial role of Stussy in defining the shift from streetstyle to streetwear.

Here we are in 1990 (I think). Maybe 1989. Either way, it’s the cusp of the 80s decade and a rare photo of me on one of my ‘expeditions’. By this point in time I was rockclimbing pretty intensely, combined with running, cycling, some distance walking and wild camping etc etc. As I stated in the first part of this essay, photographs of these pursuits were rarely taken – in fact I don’t have a single photograph of climbing. It’s not surprising really as we weren’t ‘stars’ looking to document new achievements, even if we were having long days of thrill, scenery, exposure and adrenalin. Taking (and using) a camera on this type of venture was not even considered. So it’s an era confined solely to (fading) memories.

As I also stated, I was buying (or acquiring) lots of branded gear. It felt vaguely like a subculture, a mission to look good or at least to look like you were investing in specialist labels outside of general reach. The 2025 publication of Mountain Style, a labour of love by Henry Iddon and Max Leonard, backs this up and emphasises the label-driven aspect of this period of my life. Reading the book, which meticulously chronologises UK gear from the 50s to the end of the millennium, served primarily as what David Keenan would call a “memorial device”. Not only did it bring back things forgotten, it made me uncouple how I’d compartmentalised this period of my life as a time when I stopped caring what I wore and what I looked like. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

The photograph is from a sponsored cycle ride down the west coast of Scotland for a homeless charity in Liverpool. Half of the people in the photo are from the Liverpool anarchists, the rest from Sheffield. There might be a couple missing (someone took the photo obviously) and my dog Barney was also on the trip. If he could have cycled he would have done, second idea would be for him to run alongside us for the duration, but as it was he travelled in the van which served as a living space, shelter, etc.

It is an interesting cross section of outdoor wear, confirming the period that Mountain Style pinpoints as the change from generic rainwear to branded technical gear. There’s a quote of a quote on page 17 which states “For all the functional advice, style was indisputably important. ‘It is well also to remember that, in all mountaineering, we are to form the foreground of our companion’s holiday views of great scenery’”.

So, let’s go left to right. We have the trio of Sheffielders – myself, Eddie and Dan. Helmet hair withstanding, I’m branded out with multi-colour Berghaus Gore-Tex ski smock, a Patagonia snap-tee fleece in purple and blue, the luminous Ron Hill Tracksters (horror), and some Zamberlan mountain sports boots with futuristic Velcro top fasteners. Full kit wanker. Eddie is channelling the old-skool Sheffield-punk-climber look with a Dennis-the-Menace knit and climbing rope. Dan is next – he was a fellow student up from London who was always on point for style and has a red Gore-Tex coat. Dan was a good skateboarder and stylish dresser. For this trip in 1990 he smuggled in an Espresso maker and would make a ‘private coffee’ in his tent. I’d never even seen an Espresso coffee before.

The four Liverpool anarchists – I can’t recall all the names – are not suffering from the Sheffield style remit, and we have old style Peter Storm sweatbox cagoules. It’s a subtle difference between the style camps, but it so much confirms the narrative of Mountain Style.

Mountain Style is an absolute memory rush, a shot of adrenalin, a rearrangement of my ordered sensibilities. The Annapurna is in there of course, like a well-thumbed centrefold, and that is hardwired into my own understanding of my subcultural/sartorial self. But other things come leaping out, reminding me of things I hunted down and wore briefly before something else came along. A ‘made in Sheffield’ pink pile-and-Pertex Buffalo top which I had displaced from my memory until I read this book.

Other things are backed up by photographs. Apologies for the self-indulgence, but let’s have a look at some.

I’ve used this photo before in an earlier post, to pinpoint the Nike Internationalist trainers with regard to the cover of a punk-funk album. I can dredge a bit more detail now. I’m sure I’d have been unhappy with my hair, but it actually looks passable as a grotty Sheffield-punk-climber look. The outerwear is my first experiment with branded gear, celebrated with a crimson red Javlin pile jacket (also made in Sheffield) and some cuffed Mountain Equipment Ultrafleece trousers in dark blue. Both of these are in Mountain Style! I’m on the path by Burbage North, with Burbage South in the background – cold, gritstone climbing. I’ve got some climbing gear in a duffel bag which isn’t really a climbing thing, more something you’d take to The Leadmill. The yellow tee is my favourite G-Force one, which seemed to accompany me through the 80s.

A year later, Christmas 1986, we are doing the Dales Way. This was the cooking of the Xmas dinner in Grassington. Yum yum. I’m looking pensive, but more importantly I’ve invested in Berghaus in a big way, with the Redpoint rucksack and a Gore-Tex Mistral jacket. There’s possibly some Yeti gaiters somewhere on the bench, an item that never crossed over into casual culture. However, I’m ahead of my colleagues, who still have Peter Storms etc.

Step forward another year to December 1987 – a very windy trip to Ribblehead and another Berghaus technical coat in grey-on-grey. The tracksuit is a matching Nike twinset in deep ultramarine which was quickly nicknamed the Brookside look and then cut down to make some skateboarding shorts.

In fact, you can see them here, taken in Northumberland in 1989. It’s a crossover between climbing style (a black Berghaus fleece) and skateboarding (Vans hi-tops). The final year of the 80s would be the last time I dyed my hair…

… by 1993 I’d settled down and was working. But still following a climber-style path. This is a very early Rab Kinder smock. I think, from memory, it was found by my friend while he was out running, blowing around with no-one in sight. It fitted me perfect and stayed with me for over a decade until it was stolen from the changing rooms at the University climbing wall. Easy come, easy go.

This period of the second half of the 1980s was precious to me. Acquiring these expensively branded specialist garments was a big thrill, on a par with my G-Force buying in the early 1980s. It wasn’t until I’d read Mountain Style that this came back to me. Memories of clothing coming adorned with a bundle of technical labels as cut-out diamonds of cardboard featuring vector diagrams of chemical symbols and flows of moisture and heat represented by arrows and blobs of moisture passing through membranes and bouncing off surfaces. Thinsulate, Holofil, Sympatex, and on and on.

Mountain Style acknowledges the “giro-driven dirtbags with punk attitude” that formed the mainstay of the Sheffield 1980s scene. I wouldn’t say I was part of this, but I tried to channel its look. But I knew where to draw the line. If I’d overstepped sartorial codes with some of my beach-wear skateboard clothing I baulked at purchasing the Troll jester climbing tights.

The book concludes with a short piece by Glenn Kitson who documents the transition of outdoor wear to the new scenes of football casual culture, streetwear and the rave scene. It ends, wisely, in 2000. Since then things have exploded as style becomes heavily mediated and prescribed by social media driven feeds and influencers.

Duvet jackets and technical performance clothing are now part of everyday life, a precursor to the current trend of ‘athleisure’ where functional-specific clothing blends into your daily wardrobe, and we have a portmanteau neologism for every lurch of the fashion movement. Furthermore, outdoor gear as cutting-edge fashion now has its own niche term as ‘gorpcore’, coined in 2017 as an acronym of ‘good ol’ raisins and peanuts’ which apparently draws from the energy-rich slow-burn dried food used by hikers (we used to call this ‘trail mix’ or rabbit food in our youth). Gorpcore joins numerous other ‘cores’ such as normcore, or parallel terms for coexisting fashion movements such as ‘techwear’, in which certain outdoor brands (Arc’teryx, The North Face and Patagonia being prime examples) are heavily fetishized and collected, and functional clothing is worn a number of contextual moves outside of its intended use.

It doesn’t matter, so long as you get your ‘fit’ onto Instagram or TikTok. I’m never sure about who is fooling who with this nomenclature of micro-trends – I was suspicious when the fashion media laid claim to the ‘cottagecore’ look, apparently inspired by David Beckham (who else) depicted with scythes and actively building bee-hive in search of some bucolic and pastoral idyll.

I’ll end on a slightly positive note. For better or worse my age-old and old age fashion sense has been drawn towards the work of contemporary designer Craig Green. He does incredible things with duvets and I shelled out and bought a ‘rope and pillow’ duvet which is a bit like working a climbing tableaux into an actual garment. Green also does strange constructions that resemble someone overburdened with wearable tents and rigid appendages. It evokes the very rare Robert Saunder PakJak system which makes a welcome appearance in Mountain Style. I’ve nicked the picture, so I hope they don’t mind. It’s not a look I can say I alighted on in the 80s.

There were moments, glimpsed in odd photographs, when the style codes came together. A photograph taken at Hathersage, Derbyshire, in 1989 (ish) with the outdoor look punctuated by the skate-punk ‘MDC’ tee. As a bonus here’s a photo of me with my dogs in the local park sporting a Berghaus Gore-Tex cagoule, jeans and Rucanor boots (which were partly post-punk but I was trying to adopt them to skateboarding). The hiking socks were a leftover from a general early 80s trend for chunky socks outside of your trousers (Haircut 100 etc etc).

Whilst there was no proximal surf beach to Sheffield, the wilderness and great outdoors was close at hand. More specifically, the city’s bordering on to the abundant gritstone and limestone crags in the Peak District meant that teenagers with a passion for climbing often veered towards Sheffield as a higher education option, and then dropped out and became part of a niche subculture of dole-dependent ‘full time’ climbers.

In the early 1980s there was a very specific look and manner to this that extended to not just signifying you were a climber but that were also a dole climber – punk style string vests, climbing tights with rips and tears, and dirty outerwear. Around this, the wider look of wearing outdoor clothing – down duvet jackets, high-performance waterproofs, technical fleeces, the dreaded Tracksters (discussed at length in a previous essay) – was something that tended to exist quite naturally in Sheffield with its plethora of specialist shops. It was quite an easy look to fall into, and it had a curious subcultural aura.

This outdoor look is now very much commonplace as a general low-level dress culture. At the same time it permeates fashion with tactical intrusions such as the recently named ‘gorpcore’ scene (explanation to follow). The coda to this essay, essentially the closing of the 1980s and my subcultural years coming to an end, attempts to explain these niche consumer scenes and their wider impact on streetstyle culture. I’m trying to understand how we might have got from here to there. But first I want to dwell in mid-1980s Sheffield and dredge up some recollections, to keep it vaguely subcultural.

From a modern-day vantage point where every man, woman, child and even sausage dog has a duvet jacket it is hard to imagine any other way beyond this proliferation of Rab and North Face branded gear. However, in the 1980s, duvet jackets were incredibly specialist and uniquely formed an integral part of mountaineering gear, as opposed to something you wear when you go to Tesco Express or gargantuan retail malls such as Meadowhall, Bluewater or the Trafford Centre. You may find that hard to believe, but it was the case.

A duvet was a specific and technical piece of clothing with little or no orientation to fashion – and it had an associated expensiveness. It allowed you to keep a balanced body heat in extremely low temperatures without having to wear a multitude of layers. Thus, they were used in alpine expeditions or mountain climbing endeavours where you might generate sudden excessive body heat through bouts of exertion. There was little attention to fashionista detail such as branding, bespoke colourways or quirky pocket flaps. They were bulky, bright and espoused function over form. Not something that is ideal for that short trip from zone 23 of the car park to Café Nero at the mall.

When I moved to Sheffield in 1984 there was an intriguing and new-to-me subculture of climbers, mainly dropouts from the University and Poly who were surviving on the then possible dole payments and Sheffield’s last bastion stance of cheap facilities (10 pence buses, free clubs, subsidised cinema, benefit gigs, and cafes and curry houses funded that flourished in the ‘People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’).

This was the first subculture I encountered – with a sense of dress, activities, ways of being and a coded language – that existed outside of music scenes. They were scrawny, scruffy and incredibly fit with a kind of punk edge akin to the Kyle Reese character in Terminator (1984) when he dons an ill-fitting trench coat. In the film Kyle robs these from the store, and there was a healthy economy of robbing going on in the dropout climbing scene…

Climbers had a vestigial counter-cultural heritage, with roots in the 1960s/1970s hippie dropout culture. A dedication to rock-climbing offered a quasi-existentialist route for fulfilling an antipathy to the expected regularity of job and life, a choice made clear in the 2014 film Valley Uprising which documents the US beatnik crossover into climbing.

This dropout dynamic was essentially condensed and continued in 1980s Sheffield. In this period there was a further punk and anarcho-punk crossover, with new routes named by the first ascendant crossing over into those cultures as everlasting reference points: ‘Let the Tribe Increase’ (the title of an album by The Mob), ‘All Systems Go’, ‘Punks in the Gym’.

The duvet jacket was the synecdoche for being part of the climbing subculture, the equivalent of the military parka for a latter-day mod. No-one else wore one as either a general item of clothing or as a subcultural piece – absolutely no-one - so if you saw someone wearing one you knew they were a serious climber.

Duvet jackets from the Mountain Equipment brand were popular, the blue and yellow Annapurna jacket being the crowning glory. You could get them relatively cheaply from the Magic Mountain factory shop in Glossop, about 15 miles west of Sheffield on the Snake Pass. A couple of other suppliers such as Berghaus also did duvets, but the item of clothing was seen as so specialist that it never warranted general production.

Outdoor wear for hobbyist ramblers was limited to fleeces and cagoules, and as fashion accessories these were generally confined to regionalised niches of football casuals such as with the North-West casual culture documented by the authors Phil Thornton and Bill Routledge whereby previous reserves of branded tennis, golf, ski and sailing clothing had run their course. I’ll come back to this casual enclave in the following parts.

Naturally being drawn towards subcultures of any kind, and enjoying living in a new city, I slipped into the climbing subculture. As well as flaunting references to punk standards by having scruffy dyed hair and sporting heavy-duty string vests, Sheffield climbers integrated themselves into the local clubbing scene, and it was not uncommon to spot posey climbers sporting karabiner clips on their belts when dancing into the late hours at The Leadmill nightclub.

Ben Moon was a particularly important Sheffield climber – he was both very good at climbing and had a distinctive look with anarcho-punk dreadlocks, though probably wouldn’t have considered himself a poser. After attending a party in Manchester he was asked to appear in a Simply Red promotional video for ‘Open up the Red Box’ and uncomfortably fulfilled this request to give the impression Mick Hucknall was his close friend. Further to this, in December 1986, Ben and his dreadlocks (captioned as a “ranking rock-jock”) and well-toned climbers featured in the debut issue of fashion magazine Arena.

As with most of my athletic endeavours, I never actually became a good climber in those early years, but I looked (and acted and talked) like one. Most importantly, I made a supreme effort to purchase a Mountain Equipment Annapurna jacket. I never went to the Himalayas and neither did many others, but duvets were used for dossing in caves at Stoney Middleton and the like when climbing. The trend was to get them really dirty, ripped and patched up with bits of gaffer tape. You couldn’t really wear them in a nightclub – you would melt down.

At the end of the 1980s I revived my seemingly indestructible Annapurna for solstice trips to Arbor Low, the exposed stone circle in the Peak District (I would argue that Arbor Low is technically colder than the Himalayas, even on Midsummer Eve). There was a traveller and rave culture crossover that suddenly catapulted solstice type events into the foreground.

Duvet jackets had slowly attached themselves to this traveller free-party scene, part of the attempts for the early rave scene to define a look that bridged styles like surfing, skateboarding, large silhouette bomber jackets. It was a weird time for fashion and subcultures, with many divided opinions as to what actually occurred when, where and why.

At Arbor Low, the assorted drug casualties and sound-system crews from Nottingham and Manchester’s Hulme Crescent squats woke up with teeth chattering, huddling around fires trying to make a brew or construct a roll-up with numb fingers. Many years later I learnt that ex-Throbbing Gristle frontman Genesis P-Orridge was at the event with some of his Psychic TV acolytes.

Well-groomed gorpcore, Instagram ‘fits’, and its embrace of the duvet was still some distance from being conceived, though we get glimpses if we dig in the pop culture archives. Conceptualist rave band KLF sport full oilskins for their ‘3AM Eternal’ video, a number one single that kicked off 1991.

With their ultra-choreographed technique, Cauty and Drummond seem natural heirs to Bruce McLean’s 1970 Nice Style project. As with most of their visual presentation, everything is meticulously constructed in terms of source and connotation, and it’s not clear whether they wear off-the-shelf waterproofs from a local Millets – something similar to the clothing my dad utilised to cycle to work when it was pissing it down.

By the midsummer of 1991 there’s an appearance in an episode of Top of the Pops with The Shamen performing their breakthrough hit ‘Move Any Mountain’ – frontman Colin Angus models a Robocop sculpted puffa jacket and Mr. C dances and raps away wearing what looks like an all-in-one waterproof suit designed for potholing. If the mountain won’t move then tunnel underneath it.

The picture here of my Annapurna is a self-sponsored two-day Christmas expedition to the cafe next to the launderette at Bakewell, from around 1985. Truly hardcore. The coat lasted well beyond its shelf life. It was always there, just to slip on over a tee-shirt when you needed to pop out to walk the dogs or take the kids to the playground. It quickly got grubby to go with the various repaired rips and tears. That’s putting it mildly, filthy would be a better word.

I was afraid of washing it as I was convinced the down would stop functioning. I know it extended into the early 2000s because both my daughters, now grown up, have fond memories of the ‘dodgem coat game’. This was named because of a game we played based upon the oversized and inflated construction of the garment. I’d hook each arm into the opposite sleeve to create a fully enclosed body and then bump into my daughters like dodgem cars in a pinball or bagatelle arena. I’m sure Chris Bonington would have been proud of me.

In part 2 I will briefly look at the modern concept of ‘gorpcore’ and give a review of the 2025 project book Mountain Style.

Russ Bestley, along with Alex Ogg, produced the large format Art of Punk in 2012. It was reprinted, with some additional introductions, in 2022, though both versions are now relatively hard to source and maintain a high price on vendor sites such as Abe Books. Art of Punk did what it said on the tin, presenting a steady and expertly explained history on the visual tradition of punk via sleeves, adverts, flyers and posters. It was not a coffee table book per se, but it could certainly function in this regard. It was told through the visual output – this is what you want, this is what you get - at a number of (meta-)levels from the visual subject nature of punk corpus under examination to the book itself as a product.

Turning Revolt into Style feels like the book that Bestley has been wanting to write for many years – not so much as an ‘unwriting’ of Art of Punk, but certainly a hard reset. Punk coagulates into cliches and tall tales, and the visual of punk is no exception. In fact, it is an exemplar for cliche. You feel that this irks Bestley, and he sets out to dismantle and destabilise unchallenged and spurious constructions and conceptions.

This idea of a circumscribed and hermetically sealed punk rock in which a product sits inside which is ‘punk’ no matter from which angle you look at it or no matter how hard you tear it apart. The bits from punk, and the bits from the bits from punk are punk through-and-through. Sub-atomic cliches. Similarly, things that aren’t punk as a coherent assemblage cannot have punk components when you break them down. This is clearly not the case, and Bestley sets out explore this with an equally calm and even-handed approach as to that taken in Art of Punk.

There is structuralist approach that plumps for a combination of the synchronic (full and complex analysis of a structure at a point in time) and the diachronic (an examination of an aspect of structure as it is subjected to external conditions over time). Combining the two can be a bit dangerous, as a body of work representing a structure can quickly get out of control. A snapshot of a system does not change over time in a neat and synchronised manner – some bits go in different directions at different speeds resulting in new snapshots. It’s like pedalling backwards while changing gears on bike – something that is quite likely to lead to a grinding noise and a chain wedged into a derailleur.

However, Bestley keeps the punk pushbike moving forward. His proposal is that design can be split between absolute novice or non-designers who are swept up with the wider DIY ethos of punk, a new breed of emergent designers who are inspired by punk and take on board different degrees of contextualised playfulness and antagonism, and finally an established family of designers in the industry who both bend to the will of punk and take it into directions of their choosing as commercial pressures from major record labels bear down.

His diachronic remit covers a technologically and politically shifting period of the late-1970s and early to mid-1980s. Each of the design cohorts responds and navigates challenges and opportunities differently, shifting what is actually an amorphous whole of design in a gloopy fashion – even if mainstream punk histories offer us a homogeneous picture. Finding a middle ground between structural chaos and a prefabricated ur-punk involves breaking down numerous fallacies such as the myth of abundant photocopying opportunities concurrent with punk’s boom period and re-examining the over-attribution of art schools.

For the purpose of linking Turning Revolt into Style into the previous two books I reviewed, Bestley lurches towards the awkward territory of new wave and new pop at various points in the text, heading towards a concluding chapter that feels like new pop signals the end of something – because it both absorbs punk design and negates it.

Taking the mischievous spirit of punk design, he christens an early chapter ‘New Sounds, New Styles’ well in advance of mentioning the short-lived magazine of the same name which is often seen as some kind of simulacra of The Face and Blitz. What Adkins might consider as new wave design (either music itself or visual wrapping) hinges upon notions of the postmodern. Bestley grapples with the temporal staging of modernism and postmodernism, acknowledging that it is not hard and fast and depends upon geography and the discursive investments of the authoritative academic voice.

What interest me, and also resonates with my own youthful record purchasing, is the gradual emergence of what we might call new wave sleeve designs (and advertising) in advance of actual new wave music. The incredible Bill Smith cover for The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys is a case in point – a record that I bought in 1979 and still have. I felt (and still feel) transfixed by the whole visual package from the abstract cover and coded jigsaw of track-title hieroglyphs.

Bestley covers this sleeve in the middle of the book, as there is an inclination to have a chronological underpinning to the whole work. Bill Smith’s backstory as both art student and employed designer is set out, and we see someone who draws from proto-conceptual (or quasi-politicised) pop artists such as Richard Hamilton. What is amusing is that the sleeve emerged as (Bill) Smith’s project and was not well received by (Robert) Smith and the band. It stands now as a towering moment of new wave design, with the added twist that it resonates uncannily strongly with concurrent(ish) work by a just-starting-out Jeff Koons. We are not sure if one informed the other, or whether it was a serendipitous shared something in the post-Richard-Hamilton zeitgeist.

Sub-Archaeology

Max Décharné published Teddy Boys in 2024, and the book has just been printed in paperback format meaning that you can pick up cheaper copies of the hardback for a month or so. I don’t know much about Max Décharné, but he has a great name that resembles a superhero with diacritical powers, dispensing accents like Spiderman shoots sticky web. He started out as an underground writer and then played drums in the post-punk band Gallon Drunk who staggered through the 1990s as a counterpoint to Britpop. By the turn of the millennium Décharné was finding his feet as a writer, leading to numerous publications including a book on the subcultural history of King’s Road which is on my to-buy list. This is because he is a great writer that holds your attention.

Teddy Boys is incredibly well written and sourced. Décharné acknowledges the Teds as the inaugural subculture, and the fact that they occupy by rote a starting point in the numerous guides to post-war subcultural scenes in the UK. At the same time he notes that most things written about them increasingly functions like a chunk of AI, uncritically buttressing the oft-repeated myths. Like Bestley tackling punk design in the book above, Décharné dismantles much of this very carefully and slowly, not wanting to gloat about disproving an immense body of work, but to simply get the story right and explore the niches and nuances of the 1950s world for young people.

His writing is confident and lively, digging into newspapers, popular culture artefacts like pulp fiction books, films and documentaries, whilst also adding testimony from a number of interview subjects. Thankfully he also steers well away from the bizarre trend for overdetermining Teds with Marxist struggle connotations as feverishly undertaken by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s. Décharné is capable of writing a robust and informative book without reaching for spurious academic concepts and language.

The book commences with Décharné’s own youth in the mid-70s, with the residual potency of Teddy boy ephemera like bootlace ties, drainpipe trousers, fluorescent socks and brothel-creepers polluting all the subcultures around glam and early punk like demonic totems. With punk it was a double-edged sword, with some punks utilising the menace of Teddy boy insignia whilst at the same time an anti-punk resurgence in Teddy boys occurring which seemed to be a groundswell of people too young to be 1950s Teds but too old to be newly-minted punks. These would be the characters in Chris Steele-Perkins 1979 book Teds.

They were even around into the 1980s as can be seen from the press clipping that formed the start point of my own project in the first SUB>SUMED essay.

Young people dressing as a tribe, setting out against the mainstream, has been explored in a pre-Ted context by Jon Savage, whilst the history of popular fears surrounding young gangs in British history was backdated in Geoffrey Pearson’s Hooligan (1983). Décharné’s main takeaway is that Teds as a working-class style movement pre-dated its attachment to rock’n’roll. His second argument is that society was desperate to constantly pin a threat on a strata of delinquent youth, conjuring up a variety of shock-tactic names that flowed through the newspapers and parliament-speak of the time – spivs, wide boys, hooligans, cosh boys. As soon as the Teds emerged with their distinctive style of dress their name became a byword for everything relating to terror, fear and decline of societal values. The media scare fell into place with the July 1953 fight and subsequent murder on Clapham Common involving a gang of young Teds.

It takes around half of the book for a music element to emerge, and this is right as Décharné argues that Teds as a working-class style tribe flowed through popular culture in numerous dramatisations and newsstand paperbacks. When the seminal music moment occurred, the start of Blackboard Jungle (1955) featuring the stirring opening strings and drum roll of Bill Haley and Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’, it was the cinema-going Teds who latched on to this and began spontaneous dancing and rioting in cinemas. This meant that the die was cast for the music movement, as it cemented itself to the Ted scene. The rest, as they say, is history – even if Décharné will argue that there was an important pre-history.

If there’s a consistent autobiographical thread to SUB>SUMED, then I can’t claim that Teds have ever intersected with my own subcultural journey. As Décharné observes, the 1980s Ted was a sad caricature symbolised by Russ Abbot’s Vince Prince abomination and Hi-de-Hi’s time-trapped Ted Bovis. Tragic figures. I’m including this book in the quartet of reviews as its simply a great example of research and writing.

Can I possibly extract a new wave theme from the story to round off the continuity? Décharné doesn’t venture too far into Ted revivals and fractions, with the cursory mention of Steele-Perkins’ iconic 1979 book of photographs and short essays. However, there was a rockabilly revival/scene around 1980 with bands like The Polecats who grabbed my attention. This felt like, to me, a natural follow-on to new wave with an emphasis on visuals, coloured vinyl, pink overkill, incredible clothes. It was, momentarily, my own way out of punk. Tim Polecat has always stressed his affinity with punk, and this is what drew me to the band and they style. They were an intermediary to the likes of Theatre of Hate, part of my own sartorial path.

In the period between Christmas and New Year I read a selection of books that are central to the SUB>SUMED project, detailing the close-knit nature of UK music and clothing subcultures. It seems that this subject area still generates printed output that is both based on memory and anecdote, and (less frequently) on critical reflection and dissection. What are we to make of it all?

Of course, with punk celebrating an approximate 50^th anniversary in 2026 we can expect much more whilst anticipating that quality control will not be at a premium. I would say with certainty that this applied to the Last Word book that I read and reviewed last month.

The quartet of books up for review here are:

• Robert Elms Blitz: The Club that Created the 80s (2025)

• M. King Adkins New Wave: Image is Everything (2015)

• Russ Bestley Turning Revolt into Style (2025)

• Max Décharné Teddy Boys (2024)

Blitz Revisited

I have bemoaned the paucity of the writing quality on the Blitz scene in previous posts, and the recent proliferation of museum and gallery exhibits commemorating this scene has garnered a few more titles. Has this instantiated a change?

The current exhibition at the Design Museum has prompted a reprint of the originally crowdfunded title We Can Be Heroes and a new monograph by scene stalwart and self-appointed chronicler Robert Elms. Published on the Faber imprint – who also publish the other 80s spokesperson Dylan Jones – this new title is sadly relatively threadbare when placed under scrutiny. You feel it was ever thus, and forever will be…

Blitz stretches to 284 pages, but the line-spacing is like a pensioner’s novel, and the content seems to disconcertingly repeat and loop - suggesting that the editing is poor and the author is running out of new things to say and replacing them with new ways of saying things (something Elms is VERY good at). Throw in a cluster of (mainly Graham Smith) black-and-white prints in the middle which you will have seen many times before, and you have a Christmas product for the memorabilia stocking.

I’ll try and get into a bit of detail of what is included, what is good, and how (and why) the book starts to peter out quite quickly. Elms has a tight remit; to document the second new romantic club night Blitz that ran from 1979 to 1980. The Blitz midweek night followed the brief tenure of the autumn 1978 club night Billys which set out a blueprint for the next decade with Steve Strange dictating front of house and Rusty Egan directing the music. The attending crowd of artsy-disenfranchised-punks and soul boy / Bowie refugees make up the story, coagulating into a subculture of sorts with Elms firmly ensconced within as the orator, interpreter and archivist of the ‘scene with no name’ (having, at the same time, many names).

Make no mistake, Elms is a good writer. Sometimes his flowery prose gets the better of him, and it can come across as death by alliteration or a bludgeoning by PR puff-pieces. However, approaching the historification of this scene at a surface level is inevitably a feast on thin gruel dressed up as caviar. Elms at times recognises this, and the circumscribed narrative of the Blitz era is something he struggles to transcend – in turn offering a little more testimony beyond the usual oft-repeated anecdotes whilst at the same time resorting to the repetition of recollections and assessments. It’s the linguistic version of an early-80s synth-pop 12” mix that fills out space by just picking up mid-track and starting again.

Elms is strong on subcultural clothes and their hold on us. His first book, The Way We Wore (2005), is a must-read for its detail, passion and bleak honesty of being fascinated by clothes for the simple reason of looking good, belonging to a tribe and giving your life a narrative. He expertly recounts the acts of pondering, purchasing and daring when it comes to clothing choices. The best parts of Blitz expand on this initial book, casting a more intense eye on Elms’ new romantic phase. He tries to unpick a logic of clothes, delineating between getting dressed up and simply dressing up (p64) and making some important distinctions that, in his opinion, have reverberations on the 80s birth of British designer culture.

His attempt to weave a narrative of Thatcherism-or-not onto the Blitz crowd (whose residency overlaps with the Iron Lady’s coming to power) doesn’t gain traction, and he vacillates wildly between positions. Perhaps it is simply too difficult without turning the book into something else that involves more mundane sociological enquiry and epistemology, something Elms doesn’t really invest in.

Finally, there is a constant hum of exclusivity and insularity cast onto the scene and Elms himself. It is as if he fails to make the switch from subcultural geocentrism to heliocentrism – everything revolves around his tight coterie of London fashionistas with a collective narcissism and groupthink. In this regard the wider targeted audience – maybe people like myself who were never in the know to attend these clubs – seems to be perpetually mocked.

I Can’t Get No Dissatisfaction

Adkins’ book on new wave came out in 2015, a decade ago. It was mentioned in brief passing in a presentation I attended and I sourced it on the dreaded Amazon at a discounted price. It is from the sprawling series-driven world of academic publisher Palgrave who churn books out at high prices with often little concern for aesthetic value. Books can feel (and this one does) as if it is simply a large document printed on demand and bound as a hardback. Everything is badged up as academic and titles fulfil requirements for discursive reach, interdisciplinarity, and proper sourcing and referencing. Oh, and there’s no images. A table or a graph if you are lucky.

Here’s the plot twist: the book is surprisingly good and offers some strong writing on the author’s understanding of the new wave. As we know, this is something of a slippery term that is generally seen as a bad thing that describes the poor relation of punk – a defanging so to speak. Adkins doesn’t make such a value judgement, and I’d shamefully agree with him as my way into punk was through its glibly commercialised wing of picture sleeves, coloured vinyl, popstardom, and glossy magazines. In this regard, whilst Adkins covers an overlap of context with Elms in regard to image-driven post-punk-pop, it is the dry academic approach that resonates more strongly with me and there is a tangible centrality to Adkins subject, and his treatment of it, that strikes a chord.

One reason for this is that the author makes the move of including new-pop within a broader new wave definition, thereby allowing him to situate new wave as a lens for the postmodernism becoming of the 80s. In Adkins view new wave encompasses and is eventually subsumed by the “ascendancy of the image” (p5) and a “self-contained system of empty signs” (p89). This reaches a zenith with a band like Flock of Seagulls who, according to the author, are based on a vague awareness that they are in turn “made out of thin air” (p101). Adkins asks us to hang on to this rather than simply dismiss it as the end of meaningful or well-meaning punk – he wants to reclaim adjectives such as “vapid”, “surface”, “glitzy” and “stylized” from their pejorative prison.

Postmodernism as a critical construct is ever always descriptive rather than prescriptive, and this allows Adkins to neatly demarcate between new wave acts (such as Gary Numan) who remark on the coming-to-be of a Baudrillardian hyper-reality, and later acts (Duran Duran) who simply bathe in the emptiness of signs without referents. He calls this latter status “pure postmodernism” (p65).

We get deep deconstructions of Frankie’s sloganeering transformed into tee-shirts, the non-politics of ‘Wham Rap’ (about being on the dole), John Lydon’s PiL as a kind of foreseeing sage of the scene, and of course some references to Scritti Politti. All of this is examined through pop videos and the image culture of the bands. The whole thing fits alongside my own experience of building up my poster shrine in my teenage bedroom (as documented in one of my early SUB>SUMED posts).

Adkins makes a few clonking errors similar to the ones I harshly picked out in Last Words (mentioning Duran Duran as having a residency of sorts in Manchester rather than Birmingham), and he also makes some dubious leaps of faith and broad-brush assumptions to support his wider social-cultural-philosophical construct. For example, his splitting between punk and new wave (modelled as an evolving response to punk’s failure) sees him casually state that DIY moved (almost overnight) from being about a space for freethinking and doing to a money-making exercise. I’m pretty sure such a caesura did not occur.

That said, it is a book I’d highly recommend, and I felt by pure chance it complemented Elms’ Blitz in what I’d tentatively propose as a dialectical pairing.

On that heady note I will break off and return with a review of the other two books in a second post. I will leave you with a photograph from Andy Weiner’s 1988 series A Rake’s Progress, based upon the famous original idea by William Hogarth. Weiner twists photography to depict and dismantle itself, which is also how Adkins sees the relationship between new wave and imagery (photography and MTV videos). Created before the era of Photoshop, Weiner uses masks of himself to impose a collage effect onto the content of the photograph (sealed under the picture plane) rather than cutting into the picture plane surface after the photograph is produced.

The final image in the series is titled Sometime After the Marriage, and here the images of the images of the protagonist (popstar) collapse in front of a further image on the TV screen, taking us to the nihilistic/utopian conclusion of the Adkins text on new wave.

Let’s go.

Ende Neu is cleverly titled and constructed - everything by Neubauten is. As if planned over a decade in advance, it sits within the name of the band like a cryptic crossword clue, whilst also having great meaning to indicate an end and a start: Einstürz(Ende Neu)bauten. I’m not sure if it really was an end and a start, but I guess it was a title too good to pass over. It’s hard to pin Neubauten down to patterns and shifts – it is just a consistent stream of challenging noise, weird improvisation (of resources), and Blixa Bargeld’s strange narratives.

1986

I’d say that Neubauten were one of the artists I followed religiously through the 80s, along with many other post industrial acts who were latterly gathered in the 1987 book Tape Delay. My record collection still holds large swathes of vinyl by Laibach, Swans, Mark Stewart, etc. Digging out my copy of Tape Delay, it appears I have the 1992 reprint. This is interesting as 1992 marks the year when my first child was born and would be as good a point as any to state that something definitively ended – record buying, clothes buying, having a subculture and an ‘image’. It is as if my purchase of Tape Delay was a parting gift to myself, because no records were purchased from this point onwards. Like a retirement gift, a carriage clock or something similar, for years of service etc.

Above is my haul of LPs by Neubauten, spanning the 80s. I also had some singles on the original German labels, but these were sadly sold in the early-00s after I had engaged record buying again. I’ll get to this in a minute. As well as seeing the band in various cities in their early days, I recall having a Neubauten tee in black with their white logo. I also recall cutting the sleeves off this like we did back then in the 80s. I have zero photographs of this tee, and this irks me. It is pretty unlikely that one will turn up, but I keep looking, asking old friends on the off chance for photos.

My last Neubauten record I can honestly say I anticipated and embraced would be the 1989 release Haus der Lüge. It neatly closes off a decade. I also have a copy of the ep ‘Interim’ from 1993, which I recall picking up on a purely serendipitous and (by then) uncharacteristic browse through a record shop bargain bin in Nottingham. Old habits die hard.

‘Interim’ was accompanied by a proper album Tabula Rasa, but I clearly never felt moved to purchase this – indicating that my serious record buying ended in with the closing of the 80s. This, in turn, would make Ende Neu the first Neubauten album that I didn’t just not purchase, but I was not even aware of. A consequence of winding down and eventually stopping buying records during the 90s when things like having kids took precedence. So, not buying this, or even being aware of it in 1996, was definitely The End(e).

1996

At the same time, 1996 was also a start – something ‘neu’. As well as having kids in the 90s I had also started trying to write and publish various zine projects. I’ll gather that period in another post in 2026. What is important now is that a trio of things happened in 1996: I had a second daughter, I had a climbing accident in the autumn and broke various bones, and I started a new zine called Autotoxicity that I intended to include music.

I wasn’t sure what music I should include, but I do know that it wasn’t a continuation of what was curtailed in the 80s. Even though Ende Neu would have been out and in the shops, it didn’t cross my thoughts. From the mid-90s onwards there was a fallout from rave culture and dance music. New artists had emerged, older artists had retooled, and we had something that was clumsily bundled as ‘electronica’. This would be electronic music, principally structured with beats (but with ambient and soundscaped intrusions), much of it pioneered by Sheffield’s WARP Records.

In the same way that I remember my first punk LP purchases from 1978/9, I recall going into WARP’s shop and buying two compilations: a drum and bass thing called Rumpus Room Volume 1 and something a bit more diverse and adventurous titled Electric Ladyland Volume 2. The drum and bass thing didn’t engage me and I guess I took that back or sold it on. The other compilation I liked, even though I was unsure about the correct speed for a couple of tracks. It felt like a new version of the old music I liked back in the 80s.

As it turned out, I became on good terms with the label owner Achim Szepanski who supported my new zine with lots of review copies from his sub-label Mille Plateaux. He was trying to combine post-structuralist theory with post-dance music, and it felt like a start point I could get on board with.

2006

As a phrase, ‘ende neu’ summed it up for the time. No looking back. I purchased and dissected records through the last four years of the 90s and into the 2000s, pushing out my own zine and reviewing for other publications. Then it just stopped again, around 2006. What happened for this second hiatus? I’m not sure – it wasn’t having children! I got into clothes for the second time and wanted to write about them.

2026

However, it’s good to have Ende Neu now I’m old and retired, and I can start completing my Neubauten collection. A couple of observations:

The opening track ‘Was Ist Ist’ is certainly (to my ears) a rework of The Adverts’ ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’, which is absolutely no bad thing. It feels like 1976 (ish) if we want to keep a theme of decades ending in ‘6’.

‘The Garden’ - oh wow - what a beautiful song. The sleeve notes (for the CD booklet) by the ubiquitous Biba Kopf (who occupies much of Tape Delay) quotes a moving recollection by Bargeld: “I was in the Prado Museum shop, when suddenly I heard an elderly English woman next to me saying to her companion, ‘You will find me if you want me in the garden, unless it’s pouring down with rain’. I was just amazed by the sentence, taken completely by surprise by it.” (Kopf adds) Her words slowly evolve from repetition into a meditation on time passing...

It is an intriguing exchange, or statement to be more precise. It is not about the power of art, since Bargeld tells us that the moment occurred in the shop – so typical wry irony there from the poetic Bargeld. There is also some disconnection from inside and outside, as no one is sure whether it is raining. Finally, the elderly woman is self-effacing, prefacing her possible whereabouts with a doubt about whether she even counts in the grand scheme of things.

That’s very moving, and the narrative that Bargeld develops for the song does shift to a grander philosophical remit. But, it also takes me back to Michael Bond’s children’s TV series The Herbs and comes across as a homage to Parsley and Bayleaf intoning their signature rhymes. They are also very self-deprecating, the whole programme is… melancholic Britishness.

As I listened to the track for the first time following the recent purchase it was also raining. I stood at the window enjoying the view over my garden and the wider vista of coast and horizon. Obviously, you would not find me in the garden, even though there are leaves to pick up etc etc.

I’ve just finished Knausgaard’s fourth novel in his Morning Star series: The School of Night. I could waffle all day about this and get nowhere, but what is pertinent to this essay is that the story is set predominantly in 1986 and written in first person by a post-punk narcissist. Whilst this makes the narrative itself intriguingly unreliable, thus undermining the rationale for any book (in the pre-(post)modernism era, shattered by Joyce’s Ulysses). Knausgaard’s character is born in 1965, the same as me, and he also mentions Neubauten (as well as Throbbing Gristle and numerous other artists I proudly consumed and extolled during the 80s.

In the 90s you could find me in the garden, or more so the allotment. Even if it was raining. These are the missing years, the ‘memory kollaps’ of no culture, no records, no fashion. I’m salvaging some photographs and this is one, from August 1994. The onions look fantastic and I miss that Sheffield soil that gave us a bounty of produce. But the scarecrow brings back a memory of the destination for my post-punk attire. Raincoat, jeans, and maybe even a Neubauten tee-shirt under there.

As I proposed in the previous essays, the third wave of skateboarding in the UK had a certain look, hitched to a mix of garish surf brands, band tee-shirts, and a handful of dedicated skate brands that started in the US (Bones Brigade, Zorlac, Vision, Stussy, etc). I will impress again, in 1986/7 these surf brands were unheard of and certainly did not permeate mainstream fashion or occupy the High Street such as we are used to in the present era. We now see labels such as Quiksilver or even Fat Face where the appearance of being a surfer is a desirable lifestyle attribute – this aspirational fantasy purchasing being a gradual but key part of modern marketing.

My first dedicated piece of skateboard clothing was the red Bones Brigade jacket – something like a classic Harrington in red. Purchased on Valentines Day 1987 (oh, what I romantic I am), it reminded me of my red Harrington from the early 80s. I have no photographs of the garment and can’t recall wearing it too much for skating. It was more of a ‘scene’ thing that I wore to thrash gigs, or clubbing. Here’s a contemporary vintage image – the price is an eyewatering £1000+. I’ve paired it with my single image of the red Harrington, another jacket I can’t remember much about.

In March 1987 the surfwear purchasing went into overdrive. Key brands being advertised in R.A.D. included Gotcha, Town and Country, Ocean Pacific, 100% Mambo, Life’s A Beach, Jimmy’Z and Local Motion. You would normally have various stickers in the branding and packaging to apply to your deck. As well as photographing my new skateboard set-up in April 1987, I also took the time to lay out my new clothes on the bed and photograph them. There is a strange echo to my excited photographing of G-Force clothes back in 1981, which were similarly arranged on the bed. An echo of intent, but not an echo of enduring significance.

The photograph shows my purchase of some Gotcha patchwork trousers and a soothing blue Local Motion hoodie. The trousers have the legs splayed and folded back to emphasise the full extent of their patterning. The hoodie has the arm folded back to show the novelty duplication of branding down the arms. The latter is not too bad, a little more discreet, even if taken outside of a surf geography and argot the name Local Motion conjures up images of alleviating a troublesome bowel condition, a phrase that might come up during a consultation with a GP. However, the trousers are grim. I even noted at the time a questioning of what the hell I was doing.

The mise-en-scene of purple nylon bedding doesn’t help matters. I don’t have any photographs of these trousers being worn, and no memories – quite likely a complete waste of money. I was sensing the end of this unexpected late-blooming subcultural adventure, a sunset and fanfare of youth. There’s a bit more in the photograph, with a hand-knitted chunky Aran sweater taking up the top section. These were acquired from various mills in Derbyshire, along with three-button knits from John Smedley. Post-post-punk, searching for a look, anything to avoid the tweeness of the ‘C86’ movement that NME was peddling.

This nascent surfwear design was, looking back now, terrible – like an explosion in a children’s television presenter outfitters. The randomly panelled neon Gotcha trousers were like those worn by new-agers or right-on types who wanted to over-signal their championing of various ethical and moral causes. The more muted garments from this craze for surfwear merged with the football casual movement of the 80s (who had already embraced Ronnie Corbett style golf sweaters) and Ocean Pacific were placing full-page advertisements in The Face through 1988, quickly followed by 100% Mambo and Converse All Stars (where you had to ring a number to find out the limited number of stockists). I’ll pick up on this wider shift in another feature.

As a rule, 80s surf-skate-crossover wear involved an attack of garish colour and horrendous mix-and-(un)match patterns and segments, pushing the vestimentary codes (as coined by Roland Barthes) past their logical acceptance and congruence. Again, we were in the shadow of the American movement, who had naturally evolved a look from origins in the West Coast surfing scene. Attributes from the US surfing culture that carried across to US skaters included a feeling of perennial youth, a rebellious spirit, and a palette of loose-fitting clothes, beanie hats and screen-printed tee-shirts.

We had an outlet in Sheffield called Boatworld which sold – unsurprisingly – boating accessories. It felt odd in such a landlocked city. The shop quickly fastened on to the rise in skateboarding and its association with surf fashions. Other outlets were few and far between, with places like the skate shop at the Warrington half-pipe often being a port of call for the Sheffield skaters.

Other skate-fashion clothing items were sourced and purchased by myself through 1987 and 1988: three pairs of Vans hi-tops (all imported), the much-sought Jimmy‘Z board shorts that utilised Cliff Westermann style military hatching patterns, early items from Vision Street Wear (the brand later satirised by Henry Rollins) including a green and black ‘Gator’ pattern hat based upon chef’s headwear. I was momentarily a ‘full kit wanker’.

I also hunted down first examples of the brand Stussy as it moved its underground popularity in the US over to the UK, but that opened the gates to a wider shift from streetstyle to streetwear. For his part, Stussy’s UK director Michael Kopelman has always maintained that the brand emerged as a discreet and hard-to-find endeavour. Talking in 2015 to the style website Mr Porter, Kopelman recalls that he sourced small amounts of Stussy for his M-Zone (freestyle BMX) outlet in Croydon, and that only word of mouth ensured access to the goods. I managed to procure a single tee in a mint green branded with the Stussy logo – it lasted a long time, including a few years with the sleeves cut back in a punk-vest style. Again, there’s no visual documentation of this.

Back in Sheffield, skateboarding exemplified an emerging semi-vernacular of the streetstyle genre. Bundled in with branded surf garments we added merch from visiting thrash bands and some home-made bits. I made (or had made) at least two pairs of shorts, choosing the most optically garish patterns.

I have spoken about a few streetwear history books that overlook this period, but Sam Knee’s ever-observant The Bag I’m In carefully delineates the mid-to-late-80s scenes that challenged the flea market driven post-Smiths and indie scenes. Knee carefully distinguishes a concomitant thrash scene from the hardcore scene, and it is within the latter that he identifies surfwear and homemade shorts.

The character on the right looks to be wearing a typical jokey surf tee-shirt, whilst the style guide by Florence Bamberger captures key elements such as the Gator optical deck, the bad shorts, the check-shirt-over-tee and the Swatch wrist adornments. It’s pretty accurate.

In Sheffield one of our crowd had a friend of a friend who could print hoodies, so we copied the Jim Phillips Santa Cruz Slime Balls and Zorlac Pushead advertisements from Thrasher to run off as editions of 5 or 6. Phillips became something of a legend on the scene, with his designs keeping popularity in the sticker-seeking fraternity. His artwork is celebrated in Sleaze magazine in 2004.

I skated – in a fashion – through 1987, 1988 and 1989, possibly beyond that with sporadic revivals and urges to find the open-air top floor of a car park in the city and just carve around. I recall linking up with a small grouping in Sheffield, the ones depicted outside the Duchess of York in the Bannerman Bayles photographs, who were also in a thrash band of meagre ambition. Strangely, I knew some of them from hunt-sabbing a few years earlier. I made a short Super-8 recording of this crew skating around Sheffield, but it has sat for over 30 years on an unassailable media. As said, my diaries end in 1987 and my memory is murky, working more on the involuntary method of random prompts and drifts.

Though I enjoyed the free-flowing movement of gliding and carving around depopulated cities during the downtime Sundays and crepuscular moments of midweek, I was hopeless at acquiring any of the required tricks and skills. By 1989 there was an influx of younger skaters who quickly mastered a repertoire of difficult tricks that required an inherent coordination and deftness that forever evaded me. But the look was always there to plug into.

Clothing memories stand out - streetstyle (proper) elements always carried across: home-made tee-shirts, ex-army surplus, cheapo baseball caps, alongside oddities like painter and decorator overalls worn as trousers with the upper part tied at the waist like a wind-sail (one of our crew worked in this trade).

There were sporadic trips to London when I took my deck and met up with friends who had also shifted onto this scene, and we spent unproductive but enjoyable hours at Kennington Bowl with its gentle geometry and secluded nature. By this time Slam City Skates, as an adjunct of Rough Trade, had expanded and I spent much of the early years of the 90s in a hard-wearing Slam City black hoodie.

We travelled to numerous skateboarding competitions in the fledgling scene, but memories are fragments illuminated by the bright colours of surfing clothing. Nondescript places like Warrington and Preston to watch British skaters such as Sean Goff, Lucien Hendricks and Neil Danns – the latter who used to model the technicolour clothing for Gotcha. The pinnacle of enthusiasm was a 600-mile round trip to Plymouth for a weekend competition – we arrived as the event was cancelled due to rain, passed time at a dreadful disco, got into a fight with some sailors, and then slept in the car. Quintessentially British in that downbeat way, like a looped segment of Carry On Camping: rain – disappointment – comedy violence – awkward bodies in compressed spaces – fart noises - sniggering.

I can only assume that this initial year of skateboarding was more casual amongst a selection of other distractions (going clubbing, going to gigs, hunt-sabbing, posing around as an anarchist, etc). I am also guessing that I skated on an old 70s set-up salvaged from the shed back at my parents’ house – a narrow deck, narrow trucks, and big pink Kryptonic wheels. Finally, there’s also no mention of any skateboarding friends (a ‘crew’), buttressing the idea that it was more of a fad rather than a dedicated subcultural or lifestyle switch. However, this would all change in a short period of time.

For this essay I want to focus hard on objects that are out of reach and to try and recover them and see what happens - to see what else emerges when you make an effort to recall objects. In this regard I can always recommend the material culture memory object work by the academic Sherry Tuckle. I have a couple of her books – Evocative Objects from 2007 and An Inner History of Devices from 2011, though neither of them refer to the material memories of (or prompted by) a skateboard. The skateboard does make an appearance in the Bloomsbury ‘Object Lessons’ series, but the title is somewhat disappointing in what is now a vast series of titles. It should be otherwise, so I’ll try and redress that with this essay.

Skateboards, as a carefully curated and purchased assemblage of a deck, grip tape, stickers, trucks, bolts, bearings and wheels, are incredibly material and evocative, triggering deep and affectionate memories. In terms of having a rationale or sense of purpose, they signify marker points for a person’s progression (or otherwise) through a moving subculture whereby as the participant’s skills and involvements to the scene develop so too does the scene itself. It’s an odd fascination for a subculture where you feel you are constantly sitting a practical exam of proficiency (I had a similar relationship to rock-climbing).

My first proper deck is acquired on 2 December 1986 – the important date. From shorthand notes in the diary it looks as if I was awaiting a board from JE James cycle shop in Chesterfield but gave up when I discovered some in stock back at Derby where I regularly visited to see family and friends. Skateboard decks were hard to acquire at this point in time, and you had to place orders and go on waiting lists. JE James was a bike shop that had pioneered mountain bikes and freestyle BMX, and so it was a natural fit for them to branch into the nascent skateboarding scene. They had a branch in Sheffield close to where I lived, but it seemed that you had to go to their Chesterfield branch for early skateboarding hardware.

I am confident that the Derby shop was Rollersnakes, which was connected to the roller-skating rink on Mansfield Road. For some unbeknownst reason me and a friend used to go roller-skating on Sunday afternoons around 1981/2. We were generally groggy from Friday and Saturday night clubbing and gig-going and treated the afternoon as a bit of a laugh. It was disco- and pop-themed, so we didn’t really fit in with our punk-rockabilly sensibilities. Never mind.

Rollerworld had a promotional boot-vehicle, which is photographed here undergoing repairs in 1986 – around the time I purchased my skateboard. I recognise the lad in the tee-shirt as the proprietor, and he was also a decent skateboarder who I used to cross paths with on the Broadmarsh Bumps/Banks at the rear exit of the bus station. This was the structural remnants of an old playground that had been repurposed by graf artists, BMXers and skaters in the 80s – a bit like an English Heritage abbey in ruins. Around 1986 and 1987 the Nottingham skate scene was quite connected to the hardcore punk scene, and the subcultural crowds around The Garage club. It felt happening.

Below is a bizarre photograph of the deck completed with trucks and wheels, proudly displayed as an ensemble of initial skateboarding essentials, resembling a Fantin-Latour painted arrangement of flowers and vanitas objects. An imported Thrasher magazine with an only-in-America photograph of gleaming white pipe structures, a pristine pair of pink Converse (again, these had to imported, hence their pride of place in the photograph), some spare wheels, a bottle of champagne that was nicked from a posh off-licence, and my first deck.

I can date this photograph to shortly after the purchase of the Converse (18 April 1987), since they look relatively pristine. I’m clearly VERY pleased about this whole set-up, although I’ve not made an effort to create something of a more requisite mise-en-scene – we have glimpses of the grotty furnishings of a rented house let out to four adolescent males. The less said the better.

Let’s talk about the deck, as it has changed since its purchase in December 1986. The deck was a ‘blank’ which the buyer customised. It was obviously celebrating its wideness to mark it apart from the late-70s skateboard dimensions, but it had little finesse in terms of concavity. There was slight bulging in the front half of the board to emphasise the size, a rounded nose, and a kick-tail.

The first thing you did was give the underside some graphical identity – unless you were very esoteric and skated a blank as some kind of anti-materialist quasi-Buddhist mindset. Me, I couldn’t wait to give it an identity that reflected my music tastes, so (after undercoating the whole thing in a cheap flesh-coloured paint) I reproduced a Savage Pencil (Edwin Pouncey) cartoon - the artist associated with Blast First and Sonic Youth. I have a vague memory of it coming from his Nyak-Nyak comic and lo-and-behold an internet search finds the exact image, dating the comic to 1985. A bridge of 40 years.

As well as obligatory side-rails (for both gripping in flight and protecting the artwork during a ‘grind’) I have added a Thrasher sticker and Gotcha sticker (free with the purchase of a pair of trousers to be deconstructed in part 5). There’s the very faint remains of a duplicated pair of heavily ground down stickers for the thrash band Heresy on the kicktail – all you can make out is a red ‘H’ by the rear wheel next to the champers. We had a bundle of these stickers from the Nottingham gig. A stratigraphy of stressed stickers.

The photograph below taken a month later in May 1987 shows my girlfriend Carol holding the deck during a hitch-hiked day trip to Mablethorpe. There’s a new Heresy sticker added to the main area between the trucks, allowing me to cross-reference between the two pictures.

There are no obvious photographs of the top of the deck, but I know it was intricately detailed with cut grip tape such that it spelled the word ‘Sonic’. Applying grip tape was something of an artistic statement, and I recall applying the tape in lengthways stripes (like a Paul White designed Swans record sleeve) but I also cut out the word sonic such that it stood out in negative space. It was meant to reference the band Sonic Youth, but any credibility attached to the original intent was instantly evaporated when out of nowhere the boy-band Westworld hit the charts with bubble-gum pop track ‘Sonic Boom Boy’ in summer 1987. Fuck, chronic timing. “Lame”, as they would say in 1987 skateboarding parlance.

Actually, here is a partial glimpse of the upper design, taken from zooming in on a photograph taken on the same Mablethorpe trip when I’m bumbling around on the promenade and Carol is trying to capture me on the old camera. The word SONIC appears to be capitalised with a back-to-front letter ‘N’ – ooh, how edgy. It may also have been spelt with a ‘K’, but that remains out of forensic reach. It’s worth noting that the pink Converse are now more battered and I’m wearing a pair of home-made surfing shorts which are proudly recorded in my diary for the date of 25 April. I’ll get onto (bad) clothing in the next essay.

I’m not sure how long this board was in use. By the time Westworld had polluted the word sonic(k) I had bought a ‘proper’ deck: a Zorlac model purchased at the end of April in 1987. I don’t think it was a branded skater deck, just a ‘house model’ which most of the companies did. However, I do recall that I found this Zorlac deck very hard to skate with – it was heavy and unresponsive. Zorlac skaters were gnarly and aggressive ex-surfers, the exact opposite to me. Thus, I kept on with the trusty sonic blank, such as shown with the Mablethorpe photographs.

There are some later photographs taken of a July 1987 trip to Denmark – a madcap scheme to get seasonal work strawberry picking that went disastrously wrong. I decided to take my skateboard along even though I was hitching all the way with a mate. The photographs show us skating at a Danish service station and also an impromptu concrete bowl in the agricultural region… full of manure. It is the Zorlac deck and some new high-top boots of uncertain make and branded surfer shorts by Quiksilver – in 1987 these were very hard to source, unlike now where they have High Street ubiquity.

The Zorlac deck didn’t last. I was determined to break it as I admired skaters who snapped decks doing hardcore tricks. I couldn’t do hardcore tricks, so I tended to hurl or shove the Zorlac deck into concrete fixtures after failing to do apparently trivial tricks. It seemed unbreakable but eventually succumbed. It went in the bin.

My diary for 1987 sees a plethora of purchases, some of which are vague memories and not recorded as far as I know in photographs. A Kevin Staab deck in July 87 (on my birthday) which I have zero memory of and then a Monty Nolder deck in September which has fonder memories. Monty was a deaf skater and was signed to Schmitt Stix who had a quirky approach to art. On 23 December I got a John Lucero deck, but this didn’t seem to stay around. Likewise I did a brief swap of my red Bones Brigade jacket for a Neil Blender deck, mainly because I liked his odd graphics where he was reclining with a cup of tea.

Yet the original sonic blank survived as a relic. Here is a photo from spring 1989. It’s another student house, but I’ve moved on maybe 5 times. Carol has gone. Other girlfriends have come and gone, but the sonic blank is mounted on the wall. And I’m pretty sure it is alongside the Monty Nolder one.

There are points to make, their clarity of actuality diminished by the vagueness of the photograph. The orange deck with blue grip tape (note - applied in a precise manner) is the Monty Nolder deck. It is mounted face upwards which is odd, but I recall that Monty’s artwork wasn’t particularly engaging and so it is more a case of celebrating the innovative grip tape. It looks to have an array of skate stickers, though anything placed on the smooth topside region between the sex bolts is liable to get worn away by your footwear and dancing feet.

Turning to sonic, we see it preserved at end of life. Trucks and riser pads are removed showing the homemade design in full whilst at the same time most of the artwork is scratched off. It was skated in its final days without grab rails, obliterating the paintwork. Thrasher, Heresy and Gotcha stickers are hanging in there, but there are a few new ones – something about anti-art and a white circular sticker with some illegible text, three words. Lost information.

The photograph is composed at an off angle. You can see the line of the wall/ceiling junction in the top left corner if you want to get a correct orientation, meaning that the two boards were mounted in an upwards angle. I don’t recall there being any other preserved decks, so obviously these two very redundant objects MEANT SOMETHING. Skateboarding that I enjoyed ‘in itself’ rather than the normal perpetual struggle to keep up to standards.

Heading right there is a montage of music and art centred around the One Little Indian showcase gig at London ULU in November 1986 with Flux, D and V, Tackhead, AR Kane. Wow, what a bill. Coincidentally, that was the week before the sonic blank was bought, so it has the same age. My diary also says that six days after buying the deck I got a kitten and then three days later I bought a Judge Dredd tee. I recall skating in the Judge Dredd tee, and that Phil Oakey from Human League had one. There’s a Some Bizzare advert, a home-made xmas card of a dog with a festive hat and various bits of mail art which my friend used to send me, a friend who still reads these SUB>SUMED posts. It’s all partial and out of focus.

It would be the last student house, as the 90s commenced with a change in my life. From this point onwards no skateboards, no skateboard relics.