Doo Wap: Fashion.

The obvious tenet on which the concept of Fashion is founded, is the principle of the fewer the more fashionable, achieved through either exhorbitant prices or extremely sophisticated (good?) taste.

As a life long fashion no-go area sartorially, I cannot begin to pretend to speak with authority on fashion; but as a younger chap, remember it well. Lime green kecks (pants) at the barn dance. The very memorable goon of dropping a full cup of hot chocolate over myself at nine ten am on the first day of sixth form, where I had appeared in white canvas trousers, spending the rest of the day unable to compete.

Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and Wah! (with the exclamation mark) LP's in the fifth-form dinner break when the final year had access to a record player - clutched and paraded with the covers out. Wedge haircuts, reversable parkers (blue and yellow) - kicker boots, la coste, fruit of the loom, watching Not the Nine O'Clock news before everyone else and cottoning on first to the next big thing; like listening to Boy: U2.

All these activities, I was a failure at getting right and didn't even try, drawn as I was to Elvis and the Wolfe Tones instead of the Liverpool lips and rock gods, still going, like JCC, exactly the same, still ranting about the working class not getting a break and stuck in a time warp, John Cooper Clarke's brain and fashion sense trapped in 1983. Groundhog Day. God Save the Queen. Sid and Nancy: nothing changed, everything remains the same the more change happens.

Fashion: turn to the left (1997). Fashion: turn to the right (2010) - perhaps, when Dave (Cameron) becomes the new Tone (Blair) as squats and general poverty get trendy again: perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Day and Hudson, Rock and Doris, drainpipes and quiffs, long hair and skins, swings and rondabouts, men and women, the impelling desire for love and nothingness held in equipoise between head and heart, between the legs and ears, always fashion steers us along to what we become - and on the cobbles its distressing for a fee: ripped jeans jack and sean and Johnnie G, auld ear air sings free, hears above the cocophony toing and froing about the table: benevolence or sneer on the blank and empty canvas.

Fashion what's within to be, original and uniquely wee ewe eyes of blinding night's epiphany and scream for moi, moi moi before the stock's all gone and nothing's left but God fashioning us.

~

barks the word verification.