shindig

just got back from the rhythm riot!
we had a great time too, met so many good people there, a real sense of community(except for the odd square!), excellent music and style!

thursday night, and i'm packing of course... i never prepare for anything until the last minute(that way you only take the stuff you actually need!), this time i had a major wardrobe malfunction, in that our new built-in wardrobe system decided to infect some vintage jackets with mould(thereby restricting me from taking any woolrich coats!).
not to worry, we are soon on the train to camber sands(on the way i keep seeing the man behind rockaphonic, although you cant really miss a 6-foot bloke with a black quiff!, and ironically we catch a taxi from the station to pontins there AND back with him and his missus!).
friday afternoon is spent walking around the campsite, getting to know where everything is, catching-up with fiona+paul from notorious kitsch we hung around their stall, which was as well as good company, was a good vantage point to watch the people and the bands(plus the fact that we buy a lot of stuff from them, so it was like sitting in our house, with bands and a big crowd!)... but they're both veterans of the rockin' scene and weekenders, so it was great to hear their stories of previous events and chew the fat about music.

of course, we frequented the vintage stalls rather too often, but many good items were bought or perused, and i feel at home thumbing through racks of good vintage anyway(H. bought vintage hats and new knitted jumpers), i found some of my favourite films on dvd too!

so a boozy friday night, being entertained by bluesy, honkin' and stompin' bands.
saturday mornin' comes around too soon, and no one wants to leave the warm bed, to walk around a cold holiday flat(well, these buildings are designed to be lived in during HOT weather!), despite the double-glazing(must have been the gap under the door that H. could stick her hand through!
we dropped-in the surf exhibition, and i regaled anyone who would listen(as in H. again) with my own tales of derring-do on a wooden skateboard, back in the dark days of the 70's, when skateboards were nowhere near as good as they are now!
the evening entertainment kicked-off with carmen ghia & the hotrods, one band we were both anticipating, having seen them play birmingham before - sounding like a ramped-up wanda jackson, one of our favourites of the weekend.
we'd both spruced ourselves up, for a photo session with gordon ayres, the master to be honest. i do a similar style of portrait work, and this man is an influence, so it was fascinating to watch him work(another highlight of the weekend!), and i even got to lug his kit for him on sunday(being a fanboy, for a change!).

sunday morning, like saturday came round too soon, and this time it was even more difficult to get out of bed, thanks to double-duvets and hot-water bottles, but somehow we made it to the car cruise at 2 pm!

some excellent cars on show, enough to make you slightly jealous when you see them all heading off in a cloud of blue smoke(if you forget about the amount of work that goes into running a classic car!).

with the car-cruise over, most people headed off to the beach for a refreshing walk on camber sands(unless you run were running a stall!), where we visited the berlin-esquely named kit kat cafe, which sadly wasn't run by stern east german lesbians in bowler hats, but by two fat blokes with dirty mullets... although they made a cracking cup of tea!

sunday evening was the highlight, too many good acts to mention - including jackie wilson's son bobby brooks hamilton, who sounds/looks/walks just like his dad(uncanny like being in a room with a classic!)...

i also enjoyed nico and his rhythm dudes, but the big surprise of the night was top shelf jazz, whom we'd squeezed into the small queen vic bar to see... a taster for the forthcoming chap event we're going to in the next few weeks.

that's torquil arbuthnot of the chap, brandishing a fine weapon with which he'd dispatched several dinosaurs, who had earlier been running rampage. one of the people we met at various times on the weekender, along with minerva miller, fluer de guerre who's blog i've been reading for a long time, tod who produces vintage scans blog... and tojo's wife a vintage jewellery expert who informed h. she was wearing a £400 vintage brooch(which had fallen off twice on the weekend, and had ridden countless times on the no.11), also good to see dogger+miss blueflame who i'd done a photo session with, in our old house, which ended-up in my rockabilly photo-book.

i was actually quite sad to leave on the monday morning, but it was cool riding the train back to civilisation with rockaphonic people rusty and ali, reminiscing about the 80's and talking about vietnamese tailors!
more photos here!
can i just say - the staff at pontins were great - they made us feel welcome, even when we were being dense, tired tourists who wasted time at the tills!
nice people.
so until the next one, cheers!

blues on the downbeat

another saturday to spend milling around in town, stuff to do and places to visit!
as you can see, style birmingham is in full swing(that's victoria square above), with harvey nicholls doing some sort of event from a metal freight container(painted white of course), errr, that was about it, apart from bumping into lots of grumpy, orange-skinned women carrying paperbags and wearing tiny denim jackets, everywhere we went.
there was a facebook-vintage fair on -

which is of course, more my personal idea of style, so we headed to the custard factory.
first i had a look around the cow vintage shop on digbeth high street(slim pickings there, since the last time, when i filled two big yellow bags with pendleton shirt! and i suspect they've got all the good stuff in the great new flagship store a few doors up from the skin-crawlingly odious urban-outfarters).
i love the cow vintage shop though.
always a pleasure going there.
we got to the custard factory eventually...
i was after a dark blue polka-dot shirt to replace a favourite one i'd had for years, and although i was initially sceptical about finding one, we ventured into the new urban village shop(ironically back in the location it used to be in).
this shop has improved in leaps and bounds, there was a real happy soul vibe about the place, and lots of good clothing and retro items to be had... and i even managed to find the exact shirt i was looking for(a pin-sized polka-dot, as opposed to the larger polka-dot garage-punk repro shirts that they do instore).
mods these days, seem to favour large sideburns and lots of loud patterns, kind-of a mix between early skinhead and later 60's mod... much different from my own cleancut jazz stylings(i wanted to be herbie hancock from the 60's bluenote sessions!).
so i was impressed by these people(who were all very cheerfull too, come to mention it! so another bonus!).
onto the regular fleamarket, and H. bought some 1950's doorhandles and some earrings(whilst i stood around loving the old school reggae someone was playing)... then onto the actual vintage fare - which wasn't as busy as last time, less stalls, but easier to move around... didn't find much to buy though as i was only after a long black raincoat.
the great paradox is that the regular custard factory shops, actually have better stuff than the fair that attracts hundreds of people, but the fair brings the people in, and they will visit the regulars, to swell the tills.

did i mention it was style birmingham today(most of this passed us by, despite H. running a successful clothing retail outlet!), we caught a glimpse of some knob wearing a dead animal on his shoulder.

 it would have been tastefull to maybe give it a decent burial, and a nice little headstone, if you ask me.
hardly a fashion-statement, this stuff didn't even look good on the victorians(who's obsession with death is probly the inspiration for wearing old animal pelts).
the vintage community is divided on the opinion regarding old fur(especially obvious old lady tatt like this), some say that the animal was killed many years ago, and that the fur-trade make no money from second-hand stuff, and other people say it is just tasteless, and should be consigned to history where it belongs(safe to say, that back in the day, there wasn't much in the way of humane killing.).

anyhoo... in a bid to escape the melee that is the city on a saturday afternoon, we went to the st martins tearoom for some restfull tea and sandwiches.
actually this proved to be a very good idea, plenty of seats(we commandeered a big sofa and table, unthinkable in the lifestyle cafes, mere yards away!), and had some restorative tea and sandwiches.

after some regular shopping, wondering if we should head home, i read a tweet from catnip about a new cafe that we hadn't heard of called shakes, so we headed off there, before going home!

it was here that some people had convened for ben waddington's invisible architecture tour(i'd contemplated on going to this, but had a back-doctor appointment this morning, which they had conveniently cancelled for me at the last moment!).
but instead i took the opportunity to photograph michael grimes flicking through a copy of heat... ironic, given that he is the most un-heat like person, to be photographed reading said magazine!
onward home then, as i had some piano music to listen to.

i have taken-up playing music again, after a break of a couple of years(spent being busy doing other things, i'm happy to say).
recently i had one of those pivotal moments, watching the martin scorsese blues films, and i thought "i want to get back into this!" whereas before, it was booker t. organ-jazz and herbie hancock all the way... now i'm learning to play blues piano(think pinetop perkins), i have an excellent tutor book, which i am working my way through(in one week, i have learned more than i ever knew, which admittedly was mostly instinctive playing), although knowing my way around the blues scale is helping immensely.
i'm going to work on this book, until i feel happy with mastering the great material in it, then get myself a teacher, once i can break out of my small repetoire of jazz-riffs.
this time, i'm going to concentrate on actually learning songs, whereas before i tended to grab snatches of tunes, and mesh them together(which worked, but meant i never remembered whole songs!).
and by this time next year, i want to be proficient in playing, enough to do a gig... i won't need much, maybe just a drummer and a piano....
but before any music(and writing this), some green+mint tea with home-made cup-cake.

anyway, here's a dude in a good hat playing pinetop's boogie woogie.

one day... right now, i'm working my way through fats domino and mose allison riffs!

home of the blues

i am rarely stunned by anything on the internet these days, but this site is the exception.

record label design by decade... how much work goes into collating something like this?
i don't know, but i certainly appreciate all the effort!

anyhoo... what a week it's been at eightball-villa...
saturday night found me listening to the straycats whilst riding a late night train home in the dark, there have been hospital dramas, and a much awaited job-interview(yes, i got the job...), i finished-off an article for these nice people(with photography) over the last few days too... sleepless nights and stressfull days.
i wouldn't want it any other way.
there's a planned european trip coming up next month, and a planned off-the-cuff trip for the end of this month... in that i've got an idea, but no location, so i'll just grab a camera and go(deciding on a destination the day before..!).
book #2 is in production, and people are already looking forward to it(i'm looking forward to handing out complimentary copies to some of the people who are actually in it!).
and photo project #3 is in progress...

mystery train

BIRMINGHAMRETRO by PHOTOGRAPHY by Gordon Eightball | BOOK INFO

old clothes a tortured artist do not make

this weekend was definately a bit of a vintage event - i spent yesterday (friday) mooching around vintage shops in town, and of course top banana in kingsheath - where i bought myself a classic A2 flight jacket(brown, and without the fur...), and some unbleached linen converse(very vintage looking).

today - was supposed to to be taken up by waiting for boilerrepairman to come round and sort out our heating with a new boiler(etc...), but they reneged at the last minute, so we suddenly had time to spend.
luckily when i was in top banana, i picked-up a flyer for a vintage fair at the custard factory(even though i didn't think i was going), so we went there instead!
as usual it was in the old library, which despite us arriving within five minutes of opening time, was already filling-up.
there was humourously quite a crush going on, in the aisles(i'm a veteran of the rag market and jumble sales though, so i'm used to it... the trick is not to move out of the way all the time when people cough in your ear, otherwise you will get nowhere! remember YOU bought the ticket.), and i wasn't going to be buying the same stuff as the young hipsters anyway(get thee to urban outfitters, dammit!), so there's no need to worry.
i'm kind-of bemused by the way most people there seemed to just throw the different decades together though, into a sort of pre-millenial mish-mash of 80's and 90's symbolism(very odd)... i came of age in the 80's, and i seemed to have spent most of my time+money in a shop called flip! that sold vintage american clothing(no surprise there)in glasgow, i fcuking worshipped that palce, it was my mecca/lourdes/vatican/whatever all rolled into one(or two if you are counting the basement...).
but some of the ironic 80's stuff i see people wearing nowadays, was only, and i repeat ONLY worn by squares who worked in offices, or skinny boys who thought that tom cruise or the karate kid were role models.... and who spent most of their time fruitlessly chasing the girls i'd hung out with... i remember one xmas night, when i spent the whole evening fending off a square girl, who was wearing a pink denim jacket!
at the fair though - not much in the way of men's clothing(this had been mentioned beforehand, and they are trying to resolve this issue), - but a good cake stall, selling cups of tea and coffee.
admittedly it was a fight for somewhere to sit, but cupcakes were consumed and bought again(in a box to take home), as they were very good.

we visited the regular flea market(which was free to get into, and actually spent most of the money there, at one stall which had piles of 50's exotica( i want to go back to that one!)... plus a fruitless search around a snooty mod section(too many plastic zips on the plaidjackets and strangely a LOT of tweed for my liking).
the living embodient of paulweller/stevemarriot gave H. a really dirty look, which amused me no end, as 1. he was wearing a suit like one i used to wear, back in the 90's, 2. we both wrote mod-fanzines that won "fanzine of the month" in record collector(one month after the other), 3. i once had a long conversation with johnny moke about the whole mod thing, which i can never divulge without fear of a lawsuit 4. i still have a vespa(albeit off the road for the time being - i'd rather have a 650 cc motorcycle these days!, 5. i was born in the damn 60's and - an original revival type(although i was more into the blues+soul than anything)... the first person in my hometown to order a copy of the re-issued my generation album... 6. H. herself is mates with an old rocker who knew steve marriot - need i go on?
thanks to my melungeon head shape though, i never really mastered the paulweller/stevemarriott haircut, i always looked like ronnie lane's taller goofy brother... i look much more comfortable with my hair smothered in grease.

this was a good vintage fair though, bereft of attiutde - but i'd actually forgotten the attitude that some traders (not the ones at the vintage fair, i might add, who were all very pleasant) have towards customers(i think it's a collective insanity brought about by hoarding all this crap that they think is going to be their pension), even though in the past i've experienced stallholders being openly rude(which usually involves yelling that you should be looking at their stall/shop in case you dare to walk past without buying one of their mouldy suede overcoats), and in brighton, one disgruntled shopowner even bellowed down the street to the owner of the shop we WERE heading to(i think it was because we had spent time in his shop the day before without buying any of his mouldy suede jackets!) telling him that he had some customers coming who were going to buy his stuff.
muppet.
i even got a few sideways looks for wearing my A2(i guess some people don't care, that i wear this stuff because i like it, not because i think it's trendy), and my new york hat company gatsby style cap, even got a salacious remark from one sniffy fart... (woah, a clothes snob... but that's "me" isn't it?).
on the whole vintage retailers are nice people, who do it because they like old items and like to sell stuff to people who appreciate vintage, they are always interesting to talk with... funnily enough while on a weekend trip to haworth(a small hillside town that is the home of the brontes) we came across quite a few vintage shops, on the cobbled mainstreet, and wasted a few hours in them, when we should have been soaking-up the literary atmosphere.
at the flea market - our faith in humanity was restored by the nice bloke with the 50's exotica(see pictures), so we left the venue... only to be confronted by a queue heading round the block(they have a facebook group of about 2,000 people, i later discovered, which explains the numbers!), and headed home to enjoy our new old stuff, and imbibe cocktails( i made a cool manhattan).

rock lobster

and so we found oursleves heading out to the fringes of coventry airport on saturday afternoon, to a photoshoot using some old aircraft.
the other half was there to be in a model shoot, for a group of local photogs who had an interest in classic aircraft, and i tagged along at the behest of the organiser, just to take photos of the machines.
and while the others were doing their model pose thing, i mooched around grabbing images.
an odd place to shoot though - very security conscious, as we were next to the taxi'ing runway, so i had a few volunteer-organisers making sure i didn't blindly stray into the path of a cessna(or the annoying helicopter that buzzed back and forth on a training flight at low level...). all good fun though, definately the largest pieces of machinery i have had to photograph, i was more than impressed by the old planes(mostly 1950's...), and i am planning to go up in one for a pleasure flight at some point(in the next couple of months).
i must've spent about three or four hours there, just marvelling at the majesty of these things... and spoke to a few of the people who run and maintain them(who were mostly impressed that i'd spent the previous weekend rummaging about in an old tramshed, taking photos of vintage trucks and coaches)... we had lunch in between the hangars(where i sneaked a peak at some of the bi-planes they had in there... wow, is all i can say.)
yet again, it was hard work, tramping around, being carefull where i walk, getting followed by one bloke in a hi-res jacket, catching some odd images of the aircraft... i'm no spotter, i was looking for images i hadn't seen before. but despite that - couldn't resist taking some classically inspired shots(especially of the bomber)... i gather it had been sold, so we couldn't go inside, which would have been too much to take-in.

i was wearing a vintage flight jacket(oddly enough), so i kind of looked the part to anyone who would know these things... thankfully i didn't get asked to take part in the modelling... as i was happy enough to just wander around, taking it all in.
more images to follow, through the week, but i think i may pursue this path a little more, as i'm happy with the images, and they are ever so slightly more impressive than old buses.
now, if i could get myself up in the air in one of these things and get some amazing images of them in flight(using my various retro techniques...), that would be impressive!
watch this (air)space for more developments on this. i did manage to clamber into one old flyer and had a few moments to catch sight of the cockpit, which for the size of the airplane was really small.

for the teams that meet in caffs

hah! my lowepro slingshot arrived today, doorstep delivery... lovin' the net for a change.
can't stop playing "this is soul" compilation on atlantic records vinyl from 1972... listening to blues/rockabilly on the eightpod whilst on the move and hearing this stuff when i come home.

love the cover shot...
the sort of album that only sounds good on a mono record player from the sixties.

occasionally it occurs to me, that i could have bought a car or a new motorbike instead of all this.
rather that spending my time shuffling around in vintage clothing shops for that one item that will inspire me, searching out an image that says something or digging the crates for an old guitar/record/camera, i could have been sitting in some posh restuarant sipping a glass of chilled cat-wee, congratulating myself on my choice of starters.
so i sit here typing, with the dansette next to me, playing some old vinyl recording that talks to me, deep down, great stuff!
i always think back to that scene in the blues brothers (belushi and great music, you wan't more!?!), when they are cruising in the cop car, and sam+dave comes on the soundtrack...

sometimes i think i could have taken some dumb accounts degree and could have been a fairly average accountant as opposed to a fairly average photography-geek.
but you know, that wouldn't have made any difference... i'd still be taking photos or making some sort of creative contribution to the world.
this stuff is important to me... like breathing.
something i've always done... i can remember being stuck for the summer in kilmarnock whilst at college, with no money to go anywhere on holiday(no sunning myself on foreign shores like some people), and heading back to college at the end of the summer with an armfull of ideas that kept me going for the rest of the year.
ps: remember, old clothes do not make a tortured artist.
to quote dexy's midnight runners, who i've been listening to recently.

what a week for learning.
i got hold of the book "understanding exposure" by brian peterson and i'm beginning to think that i'm about to enter the "second phase" of my photography.
it's never too late to learn, and if you think you know it all, then you're only fooling yourself.
i'm kind-of blown away by the possiblities of now being able to work out exactly what the f.stop is for(i used to shoot in RAW and would correct it all in PP), and it led me to a lot of articles on histograms, which i have mostly ignored - coming from a film background... this is not unusual for photographers who made the transition from analogue to digital - that we tend to stick to exposure meters to get our readings from.
i used f.stop and so on quite a lot, but it was always something i did on the run, and never took the time to sit down and understand any of it... i mean, if it works, why try to fix it?

now, i can see that my photography was particularily more haphazard than it should have been... those gigs where i struggled to get good readings, or the recent incident when i was trying in vain to get a good shot of O. against a black background...
show image.
i was metering with the camera's light meter for the whole image, when i should have used my own and metered O's face, and not tried to include the background - which is why it was an impossible task, as i was trying to aim for a balanced histogram on such an obviously extreme dark+light image.
that damn little wheel that i never really understood - on the body of the canon camera... the olympus has it built into the menu function, and i operate it from there, used it loads - but there are so many things to condsider when you take a photo, it's art+science!
alchemy.

long tall sally

well, a busy day - right from the off!
got up and listened to the big paws - surprisingly slick sounding, i say surprisingly as i didn't know what to expect, but it was quite successfull i thought, and seamless... so good work for a first radio time radio show.
made me laugh to think of my own attempts at radio-presenting when i did shows as a bored teenager - and my own brief appearance on pirate radio back in '99...
just to be in the loop - i started up a twitter account(only days after deleting my first one... i made the mistake of having too many people i didn't know, and got snowed under with a barrage of in-jokes and witty one-liners.... i got tech-fear and deleted it, damn you alvin toffler)
anyway:tweetball!
on another technical aside - i even managed to get this blog at work for a day, before the stalindroid found it and banned it's ass out of existence.
back to the show - plenty of odd bits of music and a few old coldcut type tracks(i want Bhuddafinger!).
looking forward to hearing more - and it's more than a radio show as both presenters are tech-savvy, so there's lots going on beside music and chat with twitter updates and web forums... i had this theory about ten years ago that technolgy would become more sublime and at the same time more interactive, and so far it's proving me right.

after breakfast - i helped box up some haiwian shirts to take to the stall in the rag market(after we'd done the post-office run) - didn't see anything i wanted to buy there, so we got paid for the shirts and left in profit(for once).
we went to jessops and i bought a graduated nuetral density filter from the PSY there, for tomorrow's flickrmeetupthing: i'm planning to do some long exposure landscape images(and have been practising at home with various f.stops), so i need one of these to darken the sky and bring out the cloud shadows - i've never been a filter-type, i used a starlight filter ages ago on the olympus:

i wasn't too wild about the effect - i've always thought filters can be a bit gimmicky, and should only be used in PP... but i'm leaning to them this year, as i'm still learning after nearly 30 years of photography... so i'm starting with the basic ND filter.

we had some M+S vouchers - so went shopping for sensible stuff for 10 minutes... and i saw the saddest sight: some poor bloke being made to buy smart-but-casual old man's clothing by his missus... there should be a law against it.
ironically H wouldn't let me buy the old men's Y-fronts they had on sale(even though they are cheaper than any other style!)

off to kingsheath next, and the vintage clothing fair... nothing there for me i'm afraid, it was all a bit too ironic... i'll never get why people want to wear those little leather jerkins(and i've yet to see anyone wear one) that vintage shops have loads of... they were only ever worn by those creepy smooth types in the 80's, who figured that if they had an airbrushed image of a testarosa on their bedroom wall... they would get to see some girl action...
bussing up kingsheath high street, i was dismayed that i didn't get to see my old house-mate trudging around dogwalking in green wellies, carrying a poop-scoop with a kill-me-now look on his face....
the vintage fair was ok though - H. had fun sifting through the stuff.
i took us off to top banana next, and we stayed for ages, chatting to gregg the owner, having a much needed cuppa and i bought some vintage converse for the summer(as planned) and a repro-vintage bowling shirt(no, i don't need a bowling shirt, i have loads - but this one was more than nice!).
hopped on the bus and got ourselves home...
i need to play around with the filter and such for tomorrow, and get batteries charged.
there is a rockabilly all-dayer on today, i could've gone and stood around all day watching some bands(which is ok by me), but i wouldn't be able to do all the other stuff that i want to do(like go on a photo-session tomorrow and get myself out of the studio... where i've been all winter.)
roll on spring and summer!
speaking of being in the studio - last weekend was a session with maya aka: classique.
which is proving popular on flickr, as there aren't many vintage styled images like this on there...

it was her first session with a photographer, and i think i got some good images out of it - 10 worthwhile photos out of a whole afternoon is good going, and a lot of hard work went into it from everyone's perspective, but she's since said she's very happy with the images, so that means a lot...
anyway, courtesy of the big paws, a link to this:

'59

Miss O. looking very streamline moderne(good cheekbones - i saw her getting her hair done for the shoot and noticed the angle) - not only looking the part but a damn good photographer in her own right (she took some photos ages ago for the music project i was recording with H. for).
i took my cues for this from hurrell as usual - heavy lighting on the side of the face to bring out the neckline, and slightly off-centre lighting on the other side to give a diffused face with little shadow... it looks good in colour - but this has a very classic quality to it, so works well in sepia(with a little contrast added for emphasis)...
more to follow, as i work on them.

i spent the rest of the weekend immersed in "on the waterfront"... surely the greatest film ever made - classic imagery and loads of great jackets (lots of woolrich style coats and leather jackets).
one of those films that had an immense effect on me, the first time i saw it - and i'm still influenced by it today...

reel around the fountain

well, a fine day out - a last minute decision to head north, and i'm listening to buddy holly on the train looking over stockport... feeling like i'm in a 50's film (thanks to the never changing scenery).
we were intending to do some serious vintage shopping in manchester - and of course started off at afflecks palace, which is/was how quiggins used to be in liverpool back in the early 90's(a maze of stalls selling vintage clothing and contemporary antiques), just before the spectre of gentrification tried to kill off it's individuality... lots of little shops on many levels, selling clothing and stuff that appeals to the hordes of emo-kids... it used to be a bit more individual, but there seems to be a trend now for lots of stalls selling branded alternative wear(£20 for a labelled wallet?) and the actual vintage stuff being sidelined and priced way above it's value(you aint gonna sell it if it's a lot cheaper on ebay, y'know)... still it's always worth spending a few hours in afflecks as the remaining vintage clothing stalls are filled with pure gold and we ended-up having lunch in the top floor cafe... then off to american graffiti, a vintage shop selling mainly ornaments and women's wear, but i thought it was a bit too fancy dress hire(which they sold), so sidled out and into rockers, which sells a lot of stuff that gets sold in the other-half's shop... i did eye-up some lucky 13 t-shirts, out of the piles of black clothing, but nothing in my size... then over the road to cafe pop, which always throws up a good selection of vintage goodies in clothing and furniture(but again, £300 for a vintage dining table that may be repro..?), we had a good look around and i spotted a shirt-jacket i had been after in a certain flannel pattern(the exact one!), but it was way too big, so back on the racks it went...
there was a young hipster girl handing out flyers on oldham street, for blue rinse, so i spotted the sign for tib street, and we were in like flynn... very basic inside, racks with vintage clothing everywhere, no attitude and just more racks of stuff... reminded me a lot about how a clothes shop like this should be... good prices too, and although mostly 80's revival casual clothing, there was a fine selection of denim and hunting jackets(where i picked-up an early version of the Woolrich Lands End hunting coat, for £20... a bargain!).
see photo below(this is the modern version, virtually the same except that the jacket i got is shorter, with a zip and side pockets...), been after one of these items for a good few months now, and i wish i'd had one over this freezing cold winter(i would've had it with me in spain!).
but i liked it in there - thumbs up.
so that was that - a good day's shopping over(the other half got some wool, so happy), and we went off to urbis, for a toilet break and a well-earned cup of tea... and sat in the great little cafe with a plate glass wall that afforded views of yet more groups of emo-kids, all looning about in the mild weather in the open square...
this is a good gallery, and i cant recall having been here before... saw a baulleaqxy exhibition by some lad who had gone to all the trouble of taking urbex shots very expertly with a good looking camera set-up, which he then proceeded to warp and fork around with, spoiling the shots... pity - could've been good.
then downstairs to the middle foor for a look at the art of emory douglas - i liked his stuff, he was Minister of Culture for the Black Panther movement, and his work was very reminiscent of Ben Shahn, who was himself a bit of a revolutionary, who in turn was copied by almost everyone, most especially david stone martin, who did all the great artwork on the early blue note covers... now i used to read straight no chaser and often bought it more for the artwork than the writing(which was usually about some gig in london that about 5 people in the know attended), but at their very best, i can see they drew a lot of inspiration from the art of emory douglas...
so, that was good, discovering how it all ties in with jazz and emancipation...
nice gallery, plenty of indoor space to chill-out in, and i wish we'd gone there for lunch as well, a plate of chips and two teas for £6 in the city centre..?
madness!

FLIP

i used to worship this shop... no word of a lie. there was one in glasgow, just down the street from the MOMA, and across the street from the rock garden pub(where sundry glaswegian popstars would get very, very drunk... even although the cool indie stars would be a few streets away in the griffin, but i digress), don't know when it opened but i was there in the 80's, gleefully chucking money at them for all manner of stuff.
it was in FLIP that my love of old clothing really took shape, where i finally honed my skills in choosing a look that i was comfortable with...
it all started with my schoolfriend jim, taking me to my first ever oxfam shop back in 1981, when i discovered that if you spent enough time trolling around the thrift shops on a regular basis, you could amass a wardrobe that looked not too shoddy.
luckily for me the 50's mobile urban dodger look(as defined by the then very streetwise i-D magazine) was in fashion, so i got sucked into levi jeans and plaid shirts... whilst worshipping books on US custom car culture.
i can't remember who first took me to FLIP, or which year it was exactly.
all i have is this impression of "red river rock" blasting out over the PA, with row after row after row of jeans, check shirts, bomber jackets, cord car-coats, badges, patches, raybans... you name it, i bought 'em... i remember the smell of stale hamburger that emanated from the jackets that had obviously once belonged to poor working class americans, who never would have dreamed that their cast-offs were so revered in a far flung colony of americana... once i bought a cord jacket and was delighted to find cinema tickets to some sleazy NYC cinema in a pocket.
my fascination with the cafe racer motorcycle jacket was also stirred around that time... and i used to fantasise of owning one of FLIP's brand-new NYC police jackets.
ironically today, i own a nice old battered and lived-in police motorcycle jacket, which cost me the same price now as those ones cost back in the 80's

sure enough, not all my friends shared this fascination... who would want to go shopping with me to the great mecca of glasgow, when all i did was hang around in the basement of some old clothes shop, greedliy sifting through piles of workshirts or sorting through tie-pins shaped like one of the US states...

eventually fashions changed - but i kept right on going there, even when the main floor became slightly mainstream(and the staff had despaired of the little JD's coming in all day...) with the vintage items being relegated to the basement, it was still the highlight(and more often that not, the only point) of a trip to glasgow, besides the bookseller i knew who sold old copies of jack kerouac books(i wasn't a poser, i loved this stuff!)...
even though i had to move away to attend college, i snuck back one summer, and tried to blag a vacation job in the shop... but the manageress with typical glaswegian suss didn't want to hire and train some goon for a few weeks, only to see him disapear when the leaves turned brown... one of life's regrets i suppose was that i didn't chuck in my course and move back to glasgow to work there in my dream job... but it wouldn't have been the same, the staff were a bit clubby by then and mostly resented having to play old rock'n'roll records.

that's me in the mid-80's wearing a jacket from FLIP with some friends out partying

so it was a missed opportunity to work there, even though i discovered the newcastle branch(in chinatown?) back in 1989 when i was living in carlisle but was way too skint from being at college to do any damage to their stock levels.
at the arse end of the 80's, vintage clothing was on the way out, new age threads and early hiphop styles started to come into fashion, grown men wandered about in floppy tracksuits with silky perms, like it was 1982 all over again... which meant of course that all the retro outlets started to shed deadstock 50s' and 60's clothing like no tomorrow... so there i was in the early 90's, back in the shops like birmingham's Razors Edge(now moved from hurst street and called Yo-Yo, but still selling fine vintage clothing)and retro markets like Quiggins in liverpool - which had miles of suede jackets, gleefully buying all the same old styles that i'd seen back in the 80's, only now it was a fraction of the cost.
i'm still buying this stuff... i was in the famous Rag Market in birmingham last weekend, and bought myself a mustard coloured baseball jacket with letters and leather sleeves... needed a dryclean but scrubbed up nice enough.

styles came and went, the grungers bought up all the plaid shirts in the early 90's, the fashion became very 70's for a while, then everyone wanted to live in the 60's and and now i help the other half to run our own mail-order retro clothing shop, we've got piles of old stuff around the house and FLIP is still going strong in it's newcastle shop.
and i'm still a vintage obsessed throwback who owns too many jackets to be practical.
it's hard to stress just how cool these vintage shops were back then... for the time being, you can wander about in camden and find plenty of outlets for retro clothes, but at the time, up north, places like this were very few and far between.
FLIP was a very important shop for me, it fed my passion for the clothes i needed as a retro obsessed vintage geek and kept me sane through the bad fashions of 80's excess, so i salute you Mr FLIP for all your hard work!
this one's for you:

good times and great clothes...
i wanted to be that guy in the jeans advert, who goes into the laundrette to wash his jeans... except of course i always looked more like buddy holly than nick kamen.