I think I love Mike Scott
My wife and are holed up in a London hotel for a 3 day stopover before heading down to Glastonbury and this afternoon we had lunch in Pizza Express on St Martins Lane. We took a table by the window and, while waiting for our food, and between courses, and also after dining, we had a serious session of people watching.
At first we pretended we had just time-travelled from 1967 and were checking out, from that perspective, how the people dress today. Our 1967 selves were amazed to see so many people who looked hardly dressed at all - people in vests or singlets, guys with shirts hanging out of their trousers - as if on the way home from an athletics meeting or caught in the act of going to the bathroom; and why were there so many people with skinheads, and how come there were so many otherwise normal-ish guys with stubby mohicans on the top of their heads? And what was with all the people sporting rucksacks on their backs on a city street? And why were none of the men wearing ties, or even suits? And from what nether-hell did those multi-coloured anoraks come from?
It dawned on us that everyone today, unlike 1967, is an individual in terms of their clothing, and that almost everyone we watched was making some kind of statement with their clothes and hair; and yet, because everything was statement, nothing made a statement; nothing stood out from the colliding, jostling, clamouring statement-making mass. Our imaginary 1967 selves ruminated on how 'back then' there were conformist people and alternative/trendy/fashionable people, but now there are just people dressing however which way they like - which is a good thing (we're liberated from grey conformity) - and also a bad thing (we have no standard). Nothing stood out, and no one - save a couple of imaginatively dressed women - had any sartorial distinction whatsoever.
In fact, we began to realise just how many people walking around today in London were really very badly dressed - with little sense of shape, colour or style at all! We set ourselves the game of spotting someone dressed really well, and played it all the way back up Charing Cross Road, through Soho and back to our hotel. And we only spotted one person - the chap in the counter-culture bookshop on Cecil Court, who was raffish in a beret and character-ful overcoat (and a nicely malevolent twinkle in his eye).
And yes, we did turn the eye of discernent around and upon ourselves. Mr Scott sported sharp, dark blue moddish trousers, a lightly striped shirt, pointed black shoes and a well-cut velvet jacket. Mrs Scott was her usual beautiful, elegant self, in shades of brown and green, free-skirted, scarved, light-jacketed and loose-haired. We walked the streets, proud to be from 1967, holding our freak flag high.