SCENE: SOME GIG somewhere or other, c.1981, which may or may not have been headlined by The Specials. Everything’s landing on the offbeat. A fully kitted two-tone-checkered neo-mod is dressing me down, amiably enough it has to be said, for not dressing up right. Well, if it was that year I am almost certainly wearing red trousers, leg warmers, nylon bomber, ultra-crop, earring, the clobber finialed with a hesitant dob of eyeliner (yes, yes, you too — have a free hit, cruel reader, it’s no more than I deserve) — and it is not quite the look.
Not where The Specials are concerned, nor the 400 or so other buttoned-down souls in the featureless and properly dank venue in which, even when standing still, we shift from foot to foot to unstick our DMs from the rancid floorcovering. In fact, the Docs are bang on. The black bomber and crop take me close, but not close enough. The red trousers, the legwarmers and above all the eyeliner rule me out. Right out. He has my number, the King of Mod.
He is roughly my age and I am trying to impress on him that whatever our tribes may be (and I of course consider that I don’t have one), the deeper compulsion must be to discover the common ground that underlies all our dancing feet … and dance on it together — for is it not true that what truly binds us is our generation? Your generation. My generation. Our generation. As Pete Townshend said…
“Don’t talk to me about your generation, mate,” he half sneers, half chortles, looking me up and down. To be fair, he is not in the least intimidating. “You ain’t my fuckin’ generation. You’re fuckin’ middle class!”
Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027
You bang on about the eyeliner but Terry Hall wore it! (although I appreciate the 'It's alright on him' attitude, the flex on these matters afforded our entertainers, extending even to sexual preferences).