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JP Goatboy does houndstooth to the enth degree.. (MG)

Mike's Pith & Wind - Fashion
Looking at me today you might find it hard to believe that I was positively mesmerised by fashion when my first band, The Chants, was just starting out in Christchurch in the early ‘60s.
With the unavailability in New Zealand of most of the actual recorded music and very little television exposure the fashions worn by English bands, as pictured in the pop glossy mag FAB, were all we had to go by. I would take some pages from FAB down to Borrie the Tailor in Chancery Lane, (just off Cathedral Square) and ask him to reproduce a shirt or even an entire suit for me to wear. It was Borrie who created the houndstooth suit (mentioned in Soul Man, the tribute to Max Merritt on the Breathing Space As Well EP), the idea for which I’d filched from one of the members of The Downliners Sect, a comparatively obscure English band that inspired The Chants. Chants’ drummer Trevor Courtney often sported a deerstalker hat, the idea borrowed from the same band.
I caused a minor sensation just before we left Christchurch for Melbourne by commissioning a pair of trousers made of some loud curtain material I’d discovered and wearing them on our solitary Christchurch TV appearance. But wearing weird trousers was as bizarre as I got in Christchurch - remember that in those days simply having long hair invited a lot of unwelcome commentary and I was a relatively sensitive soul at the time.
The first incarnation of Ariel saw me (and the band) reviving some of that ‘60s spirit of.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - This is not Cadel
Given that I don’t like crowds I was surprised to find myself in the company of more than three thousand five hundred people who were freezing various parts of their anatomy off on the Geelong foreshore at 6.30 am at the very last day of January. All of us were on bikes of various descriptions, ranging from the sublimely beautiful to the strangely ridiculous. We were all dressed in the sponsor’s green lycra and so resembled a largesse of leprechauns wearing funny stretch pants and plastic helmets. The wind was strong and penetrating as we huddled together trying to look nonchalant and unconcerned. Whilst there were a large number of young athletic types practising their one thousand yard stare over their fashionably stubbled chins there was also a good selection of the proletariat mit lumpen. There were old people and not so old, thin people and people who were quite generously dimensioned. They were all cold and all waiting to get started, a process that took a large amount of time as the organisers sensibly started people by.. read more