Cavalorn (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} cavalorn) wrote,@ 2008-09-20 12:11:00 |
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Sit around and I shall tell ye a tale. A tale of iridescent fabrics, youthful exuberance, and a fashion sense so far in the negative it were swimming with the crawly things on the ocean bed. Yarr.
Back in the early to mid 1980s, my adolescent world was turned around by Mr. Gary Numan and his Tubeway Army. Before that, I had been mostly into heavy metal such as Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and all such sounds that eventually cause young men to grow their hair long and begin painting armies of orcs. 'Are Friends Electric' excited me so profoundly because it was all synthetic, autistic and unemotional. It was like the nerdy digital heart of everything Cyborgy and Micronautish I had loved until that point, finally grown up and given a credible voice. When it got to number one in the charts I was ecstatic.
Then several years later I saw Tik and Tok and decided I had to learn robot dancing.
There was nobody around to teach robot dancing in Heathfield, Sussex. Combine harvester maintentance is about as close as they get. So I practiced for hours in front of a mirror and after many weeks of practice I had achieved a basic level of incompetence.
My mother decided to help me in my newfound android career by buying me an item of clothing. At the time, I thought it might as well have come straight from Arcturus. It was that cool. I remember it as cold, black, futuristic, shimmery and metallic. Perfect for doing the robot in.
It was gay.
I don't mean that in the youth-of-today sense of 'ghey'. Fuck that noise. It was brazenly, glaringly, proudly homosexual. It could not have been a more gay garment if it had a big, inverted, pink lurex triangle on the front.
Oh wait, it DID have a big, inverted, pink lurex triangle on the front.
And I couldn't have looked more of a nonce in it, at the tender age of 15 or so, if I'd turned up to the teenage party of the year wearing it and carrying four cans of alcohol free lager.
Oh wait I DID... yeah, you can guess the rest.
Anyway. The point of this story is that on a recent visit to my mum's, she informed me she'd kept it. The black has faded to brown with time, and it's a bit rumpled, but you can still feel a glimmering of its essential power.
Back in the early to mid 1980s, my adolescent world was turned around by Mr. Gary Numan and his Tubeway Army. Before that, I had been mostly into heavy metal such as Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and all such sounds that eventually cause young men to grow their hair long and begin painting armies of orcs. 'Are Friends Electric' excited me so profoundly because it was all synthetic, autistic and unemotional. It was like the nerdy digital heart of everything Cyborgy and Micronautish I had loved until that point, finally grown up and given a credible voice. When it got to number one in the charts I was ecstatic.
Then several years later I saw Tik and Tok and decided I had to learn robot dancing.
There was nobody around to teach robot dancing in Heathfield, Sussex. Combine harvester maintentance is about as close as they get. So I practiced for hours in front of a mirror and after many weeks of practice I had achieved a basic level of incompetence.
My mother decided to help me in my newfound android career by buying me an item of clothing. At the time, I thought it might as well have come straight from Arcturus. It was that cool. I remember it as cold, black, futuristic, shimmery and metallic. Perfect for doing the robot in.
It was gay.
I don't mean that in the youth-of-today sense of 'ghey'. Fuck that noise. It was brazenly, glaringly, proudly homosexual. It could not have been a more gay garment if it had a big, inverted, pink lurex triangle on the front.
Oh wait, it DID have a big, inverted, pink lurex triangle on the front.
And I couldn't have looked more of a nonce in it, at the tender age of 15 or so, if I'd turned up to the teenage party of the year wearing it and carrying four cans of alcohol free lager.
Oh wait I DID... yeah, you can guess the rest.
Anyway. The point of this story is that on a recent visit to my mum's, she informed me she'd kept it. The black has faded to brown with time, and it's a bit rumpled, but you can still feel a glimmering of its essential power.
