Spandex

At fifteen, I was an anorak-wearing indie kid. At that time there were many bands in which pale young men with cheap guitars would perform jangly, badly produced songs about love, usually failed and chaste love. I fell for these utterly, and even today the odd tune from that era will leave me floored and sobbing. I was as near then to being part of a scene as I ever came. In those days before the internet, the whole thing ran off fanzines, which would distribute music in flexi-disc format – ask your parents – and rave disproportionately about the latest bunch of sixteen-year-olds banging saucepans together somewhere in a broom cupboard in Bristol. To my isolated, small northern town they would come via SAE. I would avidly read these fanzines, and correspond with bands and editors, although I hadn’t yet conquered my innate shyness sufficient to summon courage to contribute to any of them, or start my own band of teenaged, bowl-haircutted fuzz merchants. Ah, regret.

The scene had a few names. To some it was twee-pop, while retrospectively the historically inaccurate label of C86 seems to have stuck, but to me it was always anorak pop. The anorak, a sexless, trainspotterish garment, was an (ill) fitting emblem of this least sexy, most introverted of pop movements. In photographs of the time I am never without my prized blue and green anorak. I look at them now and see this dark eyed, kinda cute, if I may say so, but horribly confused and uncertain stranger. I wish I could get hold of that boy now and tell him it was all going to work out eventually, and by the way, Julie in 5F really did fancy him so he should just go for it.

But I already knew then that clothes must be important, that they could mark you out as belonging to something, or as rejecting something else. It was also in my teens that I acquired, without prior consultation, something to rebel against: a step family. Assimilation was uncomfortable. I was very unforgiving of difference.

Chief among the differences was music. My steps were in thrall to the very thing which was my sworn enemy: heavy metal. It’s hard to get this across in these post-ironic, relativist times when all things are equal and every Hoxton wardrobe contains at least one tongue in cheek AC/DC t-shirt, but how I felt about heavy metal was political. It was the opposite of anything I liked, a handy negative definition. And dear god, to my dying day I refuse to yield on this point: the heavy metal of the video age was almost all awful. The steps liked bands with umlauts in odd and ungrammatical places. I studied German, and I knew they were wrong. This was big hair rock. It was bare chest rock. It was, in a time when we actually used to worry about these things, sexist, the videos objectifying scantily attired women, and yes, post hip hop, I do realise how old-fashioned this sounds, but we used to wear badges against these kind of things, albeit partly in the hope of attracting girls.

It was, in short, cock rock. I hated it. The steps played it.

And if my uniform was the anorak, they had theirs: spandex. Much of their conversation seemed to revolve around the obtaining and wearing of spandex trousers. This were highly valued items. This was their badge. I, cloistered and head in clouds kid that I was, D H Lawrence in one hand, Razorcuts seven inch in the other, had never even heard of spandex. I didn’t bloody know what this stuff was, and I wasn’t going to ask them.

Gradually I learned. They got their trousers through specialist mail order – adverts in Kerrang magazine – or certain shops in Manchester. A particularly revered pair, yellow and black, had come all the way from California. Years later I would see something similar, but baggier, being worn by the person whose job it was to warm the food in a chain pub kitchen. One of the steps was even in a band, and this got as far as gigging at venues across Lancashire and Yorkshire, at which the Californian pair would be worn, with pride. A demo tape was recorded and circulated. All this was, of course to my chagrin and envy, because even though I hated their music, I had never got that far.

I’d encounter the spandex trousers around the house more often than I’d like, and every sighting was an interruption, would remind me of my own exclusion. They underlined what I was not. It felt like an invasion. I’d see them drying against radiators in their lurid colours, alongside my customary dark brown or dark green corduroys, which I would hasten to move further away, as though there was something contagious. Perhaps the steps would be off to some gig that night, to whoop and sing along to Def Leppard, Aerosmith or Poison in some concrete arena in Sheffield. I would be certain the next day not to ask them how it had been.

I was glad when I moved away to university, where an enduring fascination with alcohol revealed itself to me, and I grew progressively less precious. But I was still the only one in my student house who didn’t go and see Hawkwind. Over the years I’ve shed the more stifling aspects of my musical snobbery, and can now confess to at least a grudging fondness for, say, Motorhead. Even with the umlaut. Although they were always at the more proletarian end of things, a speed rather than a cocaine sort of band. Poodle rock, and the occasional dubious attempts to revive it – oh how we all laughed at the Darkness for all of five minutes – continue to leave me cold. Yet when drunk at a wedding, I’m not averse to a blast of Europe’s The Final Countdown, surely the apotheosis of the form. And the singer out of Quiet Riot, Kevin DuBrow, died not so long ago and I read his obituary and ended up rather liking him, so there’s hope.

Meanwhile, spandex, at least as an item of beyond gym outerwear, seems to have died out. I have this fear even now though that it may be due an ironic revival, and Truman Brewery shops will soon be awash with imagined retro items at significant expense. The word kitsch may well be used in this connection.

And the steps have moved on, and I sort of get on with them now. Some of them have kids, some of them like the odd good record, and you don’t see any of them in spandex any more. But then, I threw the anorak away too, in a public toilet in Leeds, shortly after I got my first serious girlfriend.