Catalytic Color Burst

February 10, 2021
By: fordrm

In 1978, shortly after my mum died, I started hanging out with a local punk band called The Spasms. I was pretty lost at that time, and they became like family to me. What I found interesting was most people measured them by how they looked, not by who they were, as friends who took care of each other.

I have to admit that we did look a motley crew, most of the time. Every Thursday, we’d buy The Derbyshire Times, and put together a game plan for how many jumble sales we would go to, between Friday night and Saturday. The girls in the group would often find great 60’s originals, like mod dresses and cool handbags. For the guys, we had slimmer pickings to choose from. Usually, it was a selection of well-worn suits from the recently-deceased or old collarless dress shirts. Given that I was already over 6′ feet back then, the only option open to me was to see if they’d just let me buy the suit jacket, or haggle on the price, and then give or throw the trousers away. The dress shirts were always good, though. I’d take them apart, dye the pieces different colors, and then put them back together again.

My favorite piece of clothing back then was my scarlet mohair jumper. I’d called around at Pete Monk’s house one time (Pete was the rhythm guitarist with The Spasms), and his mum was just finishing up a mohair jumper that she’d just knitted for someone. It was probably only the second time that I’d met her, and so I made sure to compliment her on the finished item. “I’ll make you one”, she said, pointing to a color chart on the table, before adding “pick your color”. It was almost as if I didn’t have a choice in the matter, and I certainly didn’t want to offend her, so I picked scarlet. I was over at Pete’s house again, a week later, when she proudly presented me with the finished item.

It was love at first sight for me. It represented the new identity that I wanted to slip into. What was even better, was the scarlet flares that I’d picked up in London, which I’d altered to turn them into ‘drainpipes’ (accidentally making them too narrow, so I wasn’t able to get them on, until I had the brainwave to fit zips into the bottoms), were exactly the same shade.

While I loved my new jumper, as you’ll see from the poem below, not everyone appreciated it. It could have been that was also around the time that my friend Ledder gave me a scarlet beret, which I believe ‘fell off the back’ of a British Parachute Regiment lorry. Oh, and the active-carbon radiation suit, and the gas mask he also gave me, Yes, it was quite an individual look.

I wore that jumper all the time, and it looked great, until the very quirky girl that I was dating at the time, decided to try and get inside it with me, while I was wearing it. She stretched it out of all proportions, and I was heartbroken. In desperation, I went over to ask Pete’s mum for advice. After quite a bit of tutting and eye-rolling on her part, she said “I’ll pull it back, and re-knit it for you”, and that is what she did.