Meet the Gang
I looked at my brother. He was stood in the doorway of my cellar room. He had called me this morning when he had finally made it in to work and arranged to come by and meet me for a late lunch. Being in the “fashion business” suited my brother and by loose association me as well. This particular arm of the “fashion business” was a gentleman’s outfitters with a shop right in the centre of the highly trendy Covent Garden complex. The shop was one of those places that displayed no prices on the items in the store. The owner followed the thought process that if people needed to know the prices before they came into the shop then they couldn’t afford to be there in the first place.
Most of the clothing was aimed at the type of people who lived in Chelsea or the Royal Borough and made a Bee-line for the M3 or the M4 on Friday afternoon in their Chelsea tractors, putting behind them their jobs as Stock or Bond traders and donning their green willies somewhere around junction 6.
Obviously not the usual place for a couple of loutish twenty something’s from a Hertfordshire new town to go shopping, but then a staff discount is a staff discount and a monthly free staff clothing allowance was also not to be sneezed at.
What we had managed to do was to blend certain items from the store into our existing wardrobes to create a kind of country gent meets urban decay kind of look. It was almost the diametric opposite of the crumbling country pile. Those who come from the landed gentry often dress impeccably but live in a crumbling mansion where the roof leaks and the central heating packed up sometime before the Great War; we just felt we bought the mansion with us in our style of dress. Take my brother as he stood before me in the doorway. On his feet was a pair of handmade leather black boots that retailed at about £200, a pair of Levi jeans that had definitely seen better days, a cashmere sweater, a battered biker’s leather jacket and slung casually over his shoulder was a designer raincoat. My own attire was similar, although I had been working inside and it was hard physical labour humping heavy boxes of sheet music around so I was wearing a handmade linen shirt instead of a cashmere sweater.
It all added to the confusion whenever we were out together. Girls like to be able to spot class or money in a guy and this analysis process often starts as soon as you walk into a place.
So these two guys walk into a bar. What they are wearing or some of it at least could pay the month’s rent on their one bedroom flat in east Ham and the rest should be confined to a dustbin. So what exactly are they facing here? A couple of very rich guys who are slumming it, or a couple of poor guys who have knocked over a designer clothing store?
A charge that was levelled at the two of us on one occasion by two policemen when we were apprehended leaving the vicinity of Covent Garden at five thirty in the morning both carrying canvas holdalls containing crowbars, pump screwdrivers, hammers and a whole range of other tools. Oh did their collective eyes light up. You could hear them both mentally sharpening their pencils and trying to remember whether or not there was one or two e’s in the word “proceeding”.
We had to let them down gently and told them that we had just finished work at a theatre in Drury Lane where we had just spent the last day and a half demolishing a set and packing it into trucks and if they both didn’t mind we had about four hours off before we were due to be back in the theatre to start construction on the new set for the next show and we wanted to get home, have a shower, change our clothes and get our heads down for a couple of hours. A quick phone call to the stage door keeper, who was thankfully still at his post, confirmed our story and we were back on our way in search of a night bus, with a grunt of disapproval from the two friends in blue and not a hint of an apology from either of them. This particular incident had happened a few years before, now we had both given up the theatre work, instead preferring to go out in the evenings and simply confusing the hell out of women and not suffering too much from all the attention.
My brother stands a little shy of six feet and from his long blond hair to the tip of his expensive handmade boots he was a heartbreaker. This had been the major reason I had stood aside when we had formed our first band together, that and the fact that he had the better singing voice. Until then I had always been the front man and lead singer in any band I had been a member of. Stepping to one side and taking over the backup vocals and rhythm guitar duties had somehow improved my song writing. It seemed that in some perverse way I still had to be the leader.
At just under five foot eight and with dark hair and dark eyes I offered the Mediterranean option, for girls who like the dark mysterious man.
But we followed a set of hard and fast rules. We never made a play for the same women, and although there are probably a few women out there who can claim to have “bagged” us both, it was never at the same time. Nor did we compare notes afterwards, except on one occasion, but I am not going to divulge any more details on that subject except to say that it was such a bizarre experience for us both that we felt we had to discuss it afterwards, if only to verify that what had actually happened, had actually happened.
