Jun. 11th, 2002

Nostalgia

Jun. 11th, 2002 07:35 am
zotz: (Default)
This was going to be a comment on one of [livejournal.com profile] zoo_music_girl's posts, but it got a bit above itself.

Patchouli. Is it a gothy thing?

It was for a while. I remember it mostly from the late eighties. Things did get a little hippyish around then for some people. All those peasant skirts with fringes . . . where are they now, eh? One year the annual year-end poll in one of the music papers asked "What is the worst influence on the eighties?" I made sure that the Potterrow's copy had "The sixties" in for that one. Mainly to annoy all the tedious indiekids. Oddly, the worst influence on the nineties was probably the seventies, and A Certain Scene's odd obsession with the eighties now seems to be creeping into the mainstream. Earlier this year I saw one of those weird robotics people on Princes Street. Truly there is no lower form of life than the street performer. Popular culture never picks up on the right bits of past decades when it does a nostalgic retro trip.

I went to the 1989 Reading Festival (not my review, incidentally - I think I had a better time) with my friend Glen and he got sold a tape by a band called (I kid you not) Saffron Dreamshadow. I sometimes wonder what happened to them. They sounded dreadful. To a twenty-year-old Buttholes fan, anyway. We took the piss out of their name for months. I'm not sure I've been back to Reading since then, although I certainly went through it on a particularly grim train journey in 1997 which ended up involving proper hippies and a new Iain Banks novel. The Thames valley is still terra incognita as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, Reading. World Domination Enterprises. Head of David (who had a song with exactly the same rhythm line as Headhunter. Actually, I was in London the other week and I heard Headhunter coming out of a tape player on a stall selling hair ornaments in Chinatown. I feel like mentioning William Gibson now, but perhaps I'd better not.)

I suppose it's a bit like asking whether ludicrous spandex jeans are a Metal thing. They used to be. Most of those involved would probably rather they were forgotten. Some of those involved probably have forgotten. And in another ten years, those too young to remember it the first time will look at the pictures and (instead of keeling over laughing) say "Kewl!"

And yet another nightmare retrowrong will be born.

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