Martorial elegance # 39

Okay, so the whole skinhead-to-psychobilly metamorphosis in This Is England '86 is on-point judging by what I remember of my old childhood pack of cheeky little bastards getting legged by former local skinheads who'd made the transition to horse-shoe hairdoos and Guana Batz t-shirts (is there anything which quite signifies BRITAIN IN THE MID EIGHTIES! like a powerstation with The Meteors daubed onto it in white emulsion paint?), but what's up with Shane Meadows giving that kid a Bad Music For Bad People Cramps tee to wear and then raiding the old Brookside costume department box at the C4 studios for Jimmy Corkhill's black pleather jacket and stonewashed jeans for the rest of his outfit?





"My fresh, don't it look nice?
Your DNA ain't the same, pimp, so, nah, you don't look right.."

As far as movie-to-tv conversions go, the first episode of This Is England '86 was more the "you don't think you're stretching the format a bit too thin here, guys?" Ferris Bueller show than the Anthony Michael Hall helmed Dead Zone series which was spawned from Cronenberg's flick (the third best Stephen King movie adaption after The Shining and Carrie? Difficult to choose between that and Stand By Me, personally), but I'll stick with it because there's nothing else on tuesday evenings and the breezy who plays Lol somehow manages to pull off looking pulchritudinous despite the fact that Meadows apears to have based her '86 steez on what Rhona Cameron with a bottle of bleach would look like.

The Cramps - Sunglasses After Dark



My stomach churns when people lump The Cramps in with British psychobilly bands because it's just so abhorrently wrong to compare the group of Ohio-to-New York fuck-ups who made Sunglasses After Dark to bands of quiffed up, double-bass strumming Waynes & Kevins knocking out Stray Cats karaoke numbers (yo, don't worry rap dudes, we'll be back to posting videos of the time Masted P & The No Limit Soilders joined WCW and made their wrestling debut against La Parka and Psychosis soon). I read an interview with Ian MacKaye once where he talked about a Cramps show in DC sometime in 1979 being the entry point into punk for him and Henry Rollins and thought it was an interesting revelation because, while that means The Cramps were the impetus for Minor Threat/Fugazi and Black Flag, it also means they were evenutally responsible for Ian's terrible this-is-me-and-my-missus-farting-around-on-acoustic-guitars-and-a-toy-drum group The Evens and Rollins's many terrible books of self-pitying twaddle (every book of his bar Get In The Van, basically). What a tarnished legacy to leave.