The Hairy Dad Chronicles #3: Daddy Day Care

Howdo!

Apologies for the unimaginative title, but I couldn't really think of a snappier one quickly enough.

So, our attempts at minimising our gender footprint also include the big one: childcare. This is the one that literally separates the men from the children.

Over the last twenty-one months we've tried to keep things as balanced as possible. Lou had six months of maternity leave from her job and was able to go part-time for another six and I was able to get a month off as a new father, combining holiday and my own statutory leave.

After the initial chaotic three months or so, where time felt close to nothing and sleep and feelings were fuzzy cousins to our reality, we settled into a routine of each of us looking after the little wizard every other night and me doing the bulk of the after-looking when I wasn't at work, while Lou watched over him while I sweated over a hot call centre. Noone got enough sleep and we were living against the clock, but it sort of worked. And Lou's parents helped out enormously, looking after him two days a fortnight, which meant we still had precious couple time and Lou could work.

We had fears about where our dollars would be coming from in a few months' time when Lou's job would be finishing, so when the opportunity for a full-time, permanent position came up in Leeds, we agreed the time had come to leave Manchester. Relocation, relocation, relocation. The job was considerably better than paid than what she was already on, and this opened a new door for us: a door we'd talked about for quite a while.

The wage I was earning was effectively the same as what we would be paying for full-time nursery care, and it wasn't a very expensive place where Jasper was spending his couple of days a week. It was a lovely place, but we felt we had a choice. We could try to carry on as we were, dropping the little bundle off and picking him up, with Lou somehow commuting the hour or so, and so on; orrrrrrr..... I could give up my work, we could move to Leeds and I'd look after Jabber full-time. Simplicity itself.

We talked about it a bit: my job was quite frustrating, I didn't really see myself progressing through the company, and Lou was sitting on some serious career tracks. It wasn't as though I was one of the country's leading neurosurgeons or a talented baker or a particularly enthusiastic traffic warden. And more "importantly", it would be a chance to walk some walk after talkng the talk for a while: some attempt at gender balance.

So, in January this year, the job was quit and I enrolled at Parenting High full-time. We were living "The Dream", but it was a dream with some dry, curled-up edges. Having been someone who spent most of his twenties and thirties unsure whether I could look after myself, it seemed a strange career move to look after a fifteen-month old creature. And here was something that I should have realised beforehand that still only dawned on me after a few weeks: I hadn't been trained for this stuff.

I know no one is trained for parenthood, I know. But this whole gender thing still has some teeth, I think. I can't pretend this is a universal truth and that every man is similarly poorly-equipped as I am in to take care of others; on the other hand, it feels as though there is a gender element to the whole preparation for life. That girls are encouraged to think ahead, see to the details and take care of business, while boys can explore and ponder their schemes for self-fulfillment. I've become more acutely aware of how others have seen to these details for me - and how often those others have been women. I've had to somehow make myself aware of what needs doing. So, that's a steep learning curve right there, which I've been clinging to despite enormous gravitational forces and my own incompetent fingers.

I don't want this to read like an excuse. I'm fully aware that as a grown-up adult, I should've been very much aware of what needed doing every day and who should have been doing it. I'm not sure how this happens, how these jobs become so invisible, but I want to try and disrupt the signal on the cloaking device for Jasper. Even if I don't feel like I know what I'm doing, by doing it I'll hopefully give him a positive example. And I'll make sure that I'll point out to him what needs doing as he gets older, so that he doesn't have even that excuse.

I'm pleased that I'm on the learning curve, that I feel I'm following my principles (which is a weird feeling to which I am not accustomed), but I cannot tell myself that a lifetime of applause and shiny medals awaits, because people just get on with bringing up families all the time.Just because I'm finally starting to grow up, it doesn't mean I can stroll about the world expecting my hero hugs. But I'm still pompous enough to have some ideas as to why we've gone this route as a family and I'd like to share these with you now.

The reward will hopefully be that Jasper sees things differently, that he feels more responsible for the details in his own life and takes care of things and other people accordingly. Hopefully, he will think that it's perfectly normal for a Dad to look after his kid all the time, which it is - really: even if it doesn't always feel like it. Conversely, the plan is also that he will be quite happy not to be the main breadwinner or blithely assume that his career will come first, take precedence over those careers of the women in his life.

Lou read some interviews a few months ago with women who had been confronted with the decision between childcare and career. She told me how fortunate these women felt that their partners had given them the choice between having a career or staying at home to bring up the children. Either of these options would certainly involve some sacrifice for the young families, not least fiscally, but it was remarkable to Lou that the third option of the husband looking after the child was not considered. Once the breastfeeding stops, it could be argued, there isn't much that the father shouldn't be able to do that the mother does: it ceases to be about anatomy but the culture and politics remain. In our case, the practicalties swung the role of primary carer in my direction.

The other thing which I've noted is the length of the "working day". Jasper generally wakes up between 6.30 and 8am, usually around 7.30. (We're very lucky that he sleeps as well as he does.) My day starts with his, as a rule. Our deal is that I also look after the house - the bulk of the household chores - although Lou still cooks frequently and will normally chose the menus for the weekly shop. After his lunch, Jasper sleeps for a couple of hours and I can get some work done - I'm also doing proofreading and writing CVs to earn our spending money - and then it's housework and keeping the littlun fed and entertained until he goes to bed around 7.30pm. Then, I often have proofreading or similar work to do for a couple of hours, soemtimes quite late into the night. I could be better organised and get things done quicker, but that's the shape of things so far. A full-time job of childcare and household chores plus a part-time job. All my sparetime is now monetised: the clock is ticking and it sits in the kitchen. I've no threshold to cross to go back to work; it's always at home.

Sounds a lot, and it can be knackering and a little alienating, but this is largely because I consider a job the kind of things that more responsible folk do when they get home from work anyway. It's another case of my dodgy mindset: why is doing a load of washing work? Everyone has to do washing. It's the assumption that I'm entitled to hours sitting on my broadening backside watching TV that's causing the problem.

Anyway, I must go to bed. This blog hasn't quite covered the points I wanted, I don't think. I may well have another attempt later in the year to undo some of this clumsiness. But part of the issue with my new role is that there's always something I could be doing with my time, something less self-indulgent.

Peace out.

Your pal in daycare,

Coc x

The Hairy Dad Chronicles #2: Tongue of their Fathers - Passing on my Bad Welsh to the Next Generation

Howdy! (as they say in Rhostrehwfa)

As the last half hour or so of St David's Day/Gwyl Dewi Sant trickles down the sandhole of time for another year, I'm shoehorning in the opportunity to explain a little bit about another one of the DECISIONS that was made about bringing up our little lad: namely, that I decided to speak Welsh to him.

I should explain that I'm not fluent in Welsh and not a native speaker: my Mam is from County Clare in the West of Ireland and my Dad was from Macclesfield, not far from Manchester. It was a happy accident that we as a family ended up at a kind of cultural midpoint between the two places - on the Isle of Anglesey. It was handy for the ferry, no doubt.

It isn't even that I'm capable of any decent length strings of Welsh sentences. Or proper communication at all, really. Intermediate language skills glisten atop some distant peak far up above my poorly-equipped base camp. I must sound like a complete idiot.

I did, however, grow up in Welsh-speaking Wales. I did learn it at school and even got a GCSE in Cymraeg: Ail Iaeth (Welsh: Second Language), although at Foundation level. I did acquire a near proximity to a good accent when speaking Welsh as a result. I did leave school with better German than Welsh, despite the fact I had lived yng Nghymru for thirteen years and never once been to Germany or Austria or Switzerland or even brushed their umlaut-draped borders.

I did think Welsh was a language for chapel-goers and committees and teachers and nought that was cool for most of my school years until various Welsh-language bands like Datblygu and Llwybr Llaethog showed me where I had been going wrong. And that's the "I did" section neatly covered.

So, why did I decide to pass on someone else's culture to my son, who seems likely at the moment to spend his entire childhood living in the North of England? Dyna'r cwestiwn...

Firstly, even though I was an immigrant to Wales, I realised when I did finally travel to the former Holy Roman Empire and other mildly exotic parts of the world that I did actually identify myself with Wales and Welsh people, that I did have some knowledge of Welshness - even if as an outsider. I was maybe a bit like those colonial types who grew up in Kenya or Sri Lanka and were caught between the mother country and the locals - fish that swam comfortably in neither water. I am, as my bio suggests, living at least partly in the Wales of the mind.

Secondly, and perhaps this is related to the first answer, I feel that a language is a tremendously valuable thing to let die out. There are languages in places like Australia that are almost literally on their last pair of legs, as the final native speaker is old enough and unique enough to breath the last living words of that language any time soon. With the disappearing language goes a whole view of the world, a whole philosophy encoded in the very words themselves that is almost impossible to replace. I frequently feel the need for continuity and this is one of those times.

Thirdly, I like Welsh - the way it sounds in my half-stopped ears and feels in my clumsy mouth. There are some great words and ideas, and I love the fact that knowing there is more than one language early in life means you understand that much more quickly that a chair isn't a "chair", it's something some people call a "chair". If that makes sense.

The secret fourth reason (a secret reason only dimly perceptible to myself) is that it feels a clever thing to do and all the more so for my complete inability to perform the task. I like the sense of difference, of awareness of alternatives that it can lend. But like I say, that's a dark path of thought I chose not to follow in public...

As I say, my Welsh is appalling: a combination of ineptly-taught and poorly-received GCSE Welsh, some song lyrics, some internet resources and watching S4C every now and then with straining ears. I cannot hold a conversation, cannot add clauses to a sentence convincingly and can barely remember how to use past and future tenses.

My friends and family-in-law that speak Welsh mostly live in England and rarely speak it - except in phone calls to their own families. It's always a slight annoyance to me that the census doesn't even recognise the fact that they exist as Welsh speakers with the relevant section omitted from the forms outside of Wales. The fact they don't speak Welsh to their children is sad but completely understandable as the kids are very unlikely to use it. My best friend effectively learnt English at primary school and his Pennsylvanian mother learnt the language on arriving in Wales, and yet he rarely has a Welsh thought pass through his head these days after over twenty years living in England.

And yet, I think to myself that if I say enough words often enough, then at least the perception of another language is there. Even if it's a non-Welsh Welsh-like Daddy Language rather than the real thing. I try and speak some to him every day - mostly "Are you OK?"/"Come here."/"Do you want some milk?"; simple questions and instructions. Sometimes a random (and no doubt grammatically disastrous) sentence will pop in my head and I'll let it drop out of my mouth. I tell myself that if he at least tunes his ears into it, he will able to pick it up more easily and pronounce it more convincingly if he ever takes an interest in future.

My Mam had her entire schooling in Irish (as was the received political wisdom at the time) despite the fact her parents claimed they had no Irish and none was spoken at home*. She loved it and has often told me she felt as a student there were some things she could express in Irish that were impossible in English. By the time I was old enough to notice, all that was left were a few welcoming phrases, toasts and descriptive words: the rest had been swept away. She wasn't even able to really read it very confidently as the spelling and the script had been changed since she was at school. Another linguistic dead end: there are loads of them around when I stop to look.

So far, there has been one minor triumph for the project: Jasper says "dooo" for water, which I choose to interpret as being like "dwr", the Welsh word for the same. He's not really using words yet, so you could argue it's a stretch in logic, but it's a stretch I'm happy to make.

I've no idea how much he might pick up. His cousin has English and Japanese spoken at home and all his schooling (still at pre-school, but all the same) is in Welsh, as they live on the Lleyn Pensinsula. I'm fascinated to see how that will develop. My brother says he has recently become aware of the different languages and which word belongs where, so it'll be interesting to see what choices he makes.

What I can describe more easily is the way that I use the language with him even in a one-way verbal exchange, which in itself is really interesting. When he was very little, most of the use was when we went out together - sometimes whole trips to the swimming baths would be in mumbled, inept Welsh. Now that I'm spending most of my time with him at home while Lou works (another post in the offing for that one) my use of Welsh acts as a very reliable barometer of how much pressure I am feeling: the more Cymric vocabulary that spills out, the more on top of things I feel. This makes me even more determined to speak in Welsh in order to convince myself how very well I'm doing as a parent.

So we'll see how I get on: it's been sixteen months of Welsh every day so far with a proto-word in response. I am nourished by the (probably apocryphal) story of the architect of the Hebrew revival in Israel in the 1940s and beyond, who was so convinced that a language based on the Hebrew sacred texts was the future that he refused to speak anything else to his family the moment his foot stepped on the boat to the Holy Land. And now there are millions of speakers, where there was once a dessicated religious language as dead and restricted to scholars and priests as Latin. He must have been impossible to live with, but you have to take your inspiration from where you find it.

And as I type this, his raw gums are kicking in and parental duties call again. Best be off!

Hwyl fawr!

Eich cyfaill,

Coc x

* I did see a copy of a County Kerry census not so long ago that dated from 1901 and said that my infant grandfather did have Irish, so there is a story to be told there one day.

The Hairy Dad Chronicles #1: Naming the first born

So another mouth bleeds unimportant business into the blogosphere. This on top of the already unimportant stuff that I bleated about albums a couple of years back. Sheesh!

But I never learnt to knit or draw or sculpt or paint or network to the point of it becoming a science: all I know is words, spoken ones and written ones. And so begins my piece...

Lou, my wife, and I have been trying to do this whole marriage and family life deal with as even a couple of pairs of hands as we can manage. We got married in August 2011 - the ceremony was as DIY as possible on the Irish Sea coast in extreme Anglesey, which was only possible because of the generous donation of time, talents and energy of our friends and families. We did all we could to keep things as balanced in terms of gender as we could, because it was the way that made sense to us.

We were both given away by parents, rather than Lou being handed over to me. We both kept our names, rather than any double-barrelled business or sublimation of one name into the other: we both liked** our names as they were, we identified ourselves by them, and didn't feel the need to change them. We both spoke at the wedding feast and we both had Best People, even sharing one: this made for a lot of speeches, but we felt we had a lot to say. (We almost always do have a lot to say...) It all felt like we were making the decisions, that we were arranging our marriage and our futures the way that we wanted.


Then, a few months later, Lou was pregnant, which is what we'd dearly hoped would happen - although we were a little surprised it happened so quickly. We gradually realised that there were a few issues to be resolved for the next generation if we wanted to do everything we could to preserve the gender balance. First up, names: we didn't know if they were a boy or a girl, so we looked into possible names for either result.

The name Jasper came to us out of the ether and I don't think either of us is still sure how it arrived*. It sounded cheerful - it's actually quite hard to say Jasper in a grumpy way, although I personally have had a great deal of practice since he arrived - and it was a little unusual without being obscure. After all, this is what every aspirational middle class parent wants, isn't it? A uniquely branded kid, tagged with a name that oozes elegant originality. (Sheesh!) It was also the name of a lot of family pets and a range of Marks & Spencer tables, but you can't plan for this stuff. (You can.)

The girl's name though was more of a poser: we couldn't agree on one for ages. One of the main issues was the vast number of names that meant "beautiful" or "princess" or were simply a feminisation of a male name: however hidden the original meaning, that kind of etymological shit sends a message, and we wanted it as unDisney as possible. We searched various languages, hovering around Welsh for a long time for reasons that will become clearer in any future blogs - but all the girls' names I read aloud were quashed by Lou for sounding too weird, for want of a better word on my part. Angharad probably doesn't have the same ring to it if you weren't raised within the sound of Menai Bridge: a bit of a duff and rusty ring, perhaps.

Eventually, we found Mabli - the Welsh version of Mabel, which comes from the Latin for "loved". Still perhaps a bit passive, but without doubt along the right lines. It sounded a bit stranger, a bit more foreign than Jasper - but was still as cheerful. And it wasn't a name I'd come across growing up in north Wales either, which appealed to us both.

So, we were sorted for first names. But the thornier issue lay ahead - the family name. We were pretty sure that we weren't going to go down the route of calling them either Harvey (after Lou) or Egan (after my family), as it would be choosing one parent's line over the other. Again, this is not a criticism or a judgment against how anyone else has named their kid. There are a lot of good arguments for the whole family having the same surname; it just didn't make sense to us to choose one of ours. We take names very seriously, as many people do, and we didn't want the identification tag to sit on either the father or mother.

We couldn't settle on a double-barrelled name. It felt like we were just putting the decision off to the next generation. And we didn't really like the sound of either Harvey-Egan or Egan-Harvey. (Incidentally, we have some friends called Wright and Mighty who got married recently; in their case it would seem a travesty for them not to go by the name Mighty-Wright.) The idea of fusing them together into a new surname like Harvigan seemed a little outside our comfort zone. We talked about it with many of our friends and privately banged our heads against subtle brick walls about how we could resolve this.

Welsh culture came to the rescue again. Many of the people I knew at school and a friend of Lou's from the Lleyn Peninsula went by different surnames than their siblings, often a second first name, rather than the Jones or Williams that was generally their official surname. For example, a Dafydd Thomas could be known as Dafydd Wyn  - or perhaps Dafydd Mon if they were from Anglesey (Ynys Mon in Welsh). So we set about trying to think of a suitable surname for our firstborn.

We lived at the time (and still do for the moment) on Henley Avenue and so Jasper Henley became a possibility, recognising their Traffordian roots and the fact that we were so happy in our family home on that road. But Mabli Henley didn't really tick our boxes, so we put Henley to one side and thought on.

After some months, we suddenly thought of using the name Firswood - the small suburb of Trafford where Henley Avenue lies - and it felt as though something clicked. Jasper Firswood sounded like a woodcutter; Mabli Firswood sounded like a mysterious, witchy kid - both sounded good to us. It was also a very normal sounding name: Firswood. We'd found what we after!

The next stage was discussing it with our respective in-laws - after all, it was as much a decision to spurn their names as it was ours. The issue came up of identification - the idea that the child would be confused if they didn't have the same name as either Mam or Dad. It seems quite common for a kid not to share a name with at least one parent, but then that doesn't mean it cannot be used as a bully stick for beating them. The other objection was that it simply wasn't the way things are done.

We don't mind so much not doing things the done way - and this issue of identification seems important enough to stick our neck out for. Although we are aware that it isn't just our neck we will be sticking out. Perhaps a few other people have come to the same conclusion and it might become a more normal thing during the child's school career anyway. (That's what is known as wishful thinking, but if you can't start a kid's life with some hope, when can you be hopeful?) We decided that any other children we had would also be Firswoods, so that they could identify and be identified with each other. We also designate ourselves as the Family Firswood, even though Lou and I won't be changing our names to Firswood either.

If the worst came to the worst, we could change Jasper or Mabli's surname when they get old enough to want to anyway. A decision had been made.

So come October 2012, a little lad arrived - almost a month earlier than expected but big enough and beautiful enough to look after himself already. He arrived by C-section and as he was passed over to Lou and myself, his final name took shape - Dominic Jasper Bertie Firswood.

You might have noticed something. That first name that has somehow slipped into pole position: Dominic. See, the gender battle lines still had another kink to keep us on our toes. It was possibly the most pernicious and divisive issue that we had to work out, skulking about in the shadows the whole time.

The third name - and we always wanted two middle names - was the name of our friend, who was a student midwife at Manchester and was there to receive Jasper into the world. The fact it was a woman's name and also a bit gender-playful was also good for our purposes. However, that was the easy bit, the sideshow to the main attraction.

My first name is Dominic. So was my Dad's. And his Dad's. His Dad was also Dominic and it seems likely his Dad before. Despite the idea of a patronymic being pretty much the completely opposite attitude to all the other gender-based positions we'd adopted, I didn't want to be the one that dropped the name ball. (A suitably daft sporting metaphor for what is arguable a daft masculine thing to cling to.) His given name was always going to be Jasper, but Lou and I discussed the Dominic issue over and over again, never really resolving the conversations one way or the other, the mood occasionally being punctuated by a hurt silence or weary sigh. It was a choice between letting down my dead forebears or my egalitarian-minded principles: it shouldn't have been any choice at all. But the nagging feeling wouldn't leave me alone...

When that noon in October arrived, however, bringing a long, reddish pink Jasper with it, I confessed to Lou as we cuddled our first of many tens of thousands of cuddles with our new Firswood that I wished my Dad was there. He had died in 1997, so long ago that the vast majority of my friends (Lou included) had never met him. I felt acutely that I wanted him there, to let me know that this whole Dad business was going to be alright - in the way only a Dad could. Lou agreed that Jasper could be DJB Firswood*** and (barring a wobble at the registry office a coupe of weeks later) that was the decision made official.

It still sticks in Lou's ears, nose and throat a little, I think, when "Dominic Firswood" is called at the doctor's, but his everyday name is Jasper (or Jibber, or Jibber Jabber, or Jaspergers, or Jasperilla, etc.) Firswood - and he seems happy enough with it fifteen months later.

We managed up to a point to sell the name Firswood to our folks with the idea of it being a very old way to name a child - "Jasper of Firswood", and they seem sold on the reality of the name, at least, if not the idea behind it. My Mum still sends letters to Mr & Mrs Egan anyway, so she's unlikely to catch up completely, but she doesn't complain about it when she does remember I've kept the Egan name virus to myself.

One other happy coincidence of the whole thing is that common as it sounds, we haven't been able to find anyone with the name Firswood on the internet or local 'phone books. It seems we've accidentally stumbled on a surname that sounds as English as oak and chips, but is virtually unique. So, lucky auld Jibber there, eh?

Anyway, this post has been considerably longer than I intended - and I need to go and wake him from his post-prandial snooze. But I will strike again! Next time, perhaps, the topic will be my abysmal attempts to pass on my abysmal Welsh to him.

Am y tro nesf!

Your pal, Coc

x

* There was a possible link to Jasper Tudor, uncle of Henry VII and a descendent of the powerful Tudur family that came from Anglesey themselves.

** I apologise for the lazy and liberal use of "we" in this post. We don't think in unison like some Stepford unit, no matter how similar many of our ideas are. There is much discussion behind each joint decision: discussion far too tedious and protracted to share, even on here.

*** This is also the way his name appears on the cricket scorecards and literary masterpieces of our imagined futures for him. (Triple sheesh!)

(Longer unpublished version) of Article for DUPE Magazine's Dark Side issue: "Pop Goes The Evil"

POP GOES THE EVIL
Pop music, like the Force, has always twinkled with an alluring dark side.

The Devil was there right at the beginning, at the crossroads with Robert Johnson, teaching him the basics of rock’n’roll. Elvis twitched suggestively that he was “All Shook Up” and Western civilisation quivered at the sexual rumble that had waited for this moment. At its core pop reflects the yin of love twinned with the shady yang of desire. And what’s darker than the despair of wanting something you can never have?

The Sixties wasn’t all “All You Need Is Love” and R&B civil rights anthems. The liberating rush of psychotropic experiments troughed into crashes and burns of many a pop meteor – The Stones’ own brand of groovy Satanism (“Sympathy for the Devil”) lost its mojo as the counter culture imploded at Altamont; Syd Barrett moved from the whimsical “Bike” to shining on into his own musical black hole; Lennon went from screaming “Twist & Shout” to just plain primal screaming on his psychoanalytic solo material (“Mother”). The rediscovery of childhood wonder through a psychedelic lens soon darkened with the arrival of half-buried childhood trauma in its wake: the desire to go back proving an expedition into a darker continent than they had planned for.

And there was Lou Reed, writing surging love songs to “Heroin” while other pop writers (and Lou was definitely a writer of pop songs, however distorted) coyly nudged the listener in the direction of cheeky amphetamines. “Venus in Furs” pretty much instantly cornered the market in sado-masochistic kink – although Iggy Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” hunts in the same pack a few years later. Lou wrote Bohemian love songs to That Which Should Not Be Loved – with “Perfect Day” being the perfect example – dragging the shattered self-image of the painter or novelist into pop’s Tin Pan Alley and showing us the broken glass on the pavement.

And if we’re talking dark, what gets any darker than metal? None more dark. The West Midland factory of heavy, industrial, Mephistophelean sounds pumped out group after group that glistened with grimy black humour and references to mental illness and The Dark One. “Paranoid” is packed with pop hooks even as it seems to twist them into its own flesh – and it remains the fetid fountainhead of all the metal subgenres in its wake. Though Ozzy’s matter of fact lyrical approach (“Finished with my woman ‘cos she couldn’t help me with my life”) got jettisoned as the genres became more complicated and the imagery more baroque and involved.

Some musicians took the whole devilish business very seriously – although the Norwegian black metal scene still seems undecided whether the murders, suicides and church burnings that took place in the Nineties were to pledge undying allegiance to Beelzebub or boost footfall into Oslo’s Helvete record shop. Slayer threw themselves into the inverted spirit of things with “South of Heaven” and the immensely riffed, Holocaust-referencing of “Angel of Death”.

However, the suspicion remains that all the gory stage shows, corpse-painted faces, fanciful Norse back stories and Cookie Monster growling betray the fact it’s all a dark, energetic Pantomime. Scratch at the rusty paint of Cannibal Corpse, and spy the inner Spinal Tap glint beneath the surface. Lordi won Eurovision, for Satan’s sake!

A couple of eerie, thunder-clapped valleys across from Metal City stands Mount Goth, fringed in broody clouds of funereal black and suburban self-loathing. Sharing some of the heavy rock audience, Goth ramped up the camp side of adolescent alienation, adopting sunken-cheeked, vampiric glamour and BDSM leathers in a more passive aggressive attempt at self-expression. This was indie rock’s sallow attempt to invoke H.P. Lovecraft and J.G. Ballard while metal was still digesting J.R.R. Tolkien.

Joy Division and Siouxsie & The Banshees sowed the dark seeds in the years immediately following Punk’s nuclear assault on popular culture, referencing Nazis bluntly in their early imagery and more obliquely in their lyrics (“Warsaw” and “Metal Postcard (Mittagessen)” for example); but it’s Sisters of Mercy who really take the goth biscuit, all paranoid amphetamine swagger and romantic literary pomp. Wagnerian sing-along anthems like “This Corrosion” and clammy, bombastic hymns to escape like “Temple of Love” underline how much of a warm refuge the music was for its audience. Contemplating death aged nineteen isn’t quite the turgid horror show of a mid-life crisis; it’s more like a kohl-eyed version of a chat line.

Nine Inch Nails flew the flag hardest for Goth’s Industrial cousins, typing the aggressive in bold with albums about serial killers (“The Downward Spiral”), songs about addiction (“Hurt”) and alternative dance floor smashes about shitty relationships (“Head Like A Hole”). Its allure falls somewhere between metal’s obsession with disease and failing bodies and Goth’s paranoid indecision and desire to strap on sexy bits of leather and metal. Nineties sci-fi fantasy movies lapped it up like liquid shorthand for decadent dystopian abandon in strobe-lit clubbing scenes (“The Crow”, “Blade”, “The Matrix”, “Johnny Mnemonic”).

Hip hop is arguably almost all dark side – but its response to urban problems has mutated over time. The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was a disco-based party tune; Afrika Bambataa & The Zulu Nation had formerly been a violent street gang but made records fusing Kraftwerk with Funkadelic and dressed like an intergalactic Village People. Then Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five introduced a more realistic reminder of what they were partying to forget (“The Message”), perhaps partying a little too hard (“White Lines”), and the street had crashed the bash.

Darkness came from all angles: Public Enemy’s feverish paranoid fantasies of crucifixion and global conspiracies on “Welcome to the Terrordome”; cartoon gothic weed-infused nightmares from Cypress Hill and Wu-Tang Clan; murderous beefs between Biggie Smalls and Tupac plus their entourages; Ice Cube and Ice T depicting themselves as actual Menaces II Society on “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” and “Cop Killer” respectively, turning the moral panic of white, suburban America into gold discs.

Once menace and genuine tales of gangster hardship and chicanery became a commodity to market, the whole game changed. Now the threat to civilisation is almost completely gone, and businessmen like Jay-Z and Kanye sit on thrones on top of global corporations; they are society, and high society at that. Perhaps these lofty, coke-streaked towers are where the real darkness dwells?

So, in short, there is a lot of dark music out there. But this is all the obvious stuff: skinny dudes and chicks trying too hard to convince us of their evil, having too much fun with leather and drugs, quoting too much Aleister Crowley, rocking out too hard, spitting too fiercely about the drugs they bought and sold. There is another darkness, a black hole duller than these other sinners could possibly have imagined…

Picture the scene. It’s the Millennium and popular music is all about partying - hedonism is firmly on top.
The curiously bland is all.  There’s no danger or rebellion to be found in rock, in hip hop, in dance music. Every revolution has failed. The dominance of chill out compilations and Dido and Moby's "Play" album underline the fact that the world had no cares in the world. It is coffee table music piped in directly from Sunday supplements.

This was a darkness of sorts, a cultural dead-space: a gap between the End of History that the Berlin Wall’s collapse had granted us and the neo-conservative machine of perpetual war coming back into focus after 9/11. A pop culture gap year, just chilling out and planning to enjoy the twenty-first century.

Even the most crepuscular of genres was getting into the festive frame. Rock’s adolescent angst had mutated into the frat boy “sports metal” of Blink 182 or Limp Bizkit – all nob jokes and stamping. Hip hop had followed the advice of KRS-One and largely quashed all beef in favour of making some serious cheddar:  the non-threatening, hook-laden party jams of Mystikal (“Shake Ya Ass”) and Pharoah Monche’s “Simon Says”; the show business sleaze of Puff Daddy and Bad Boy Entertainment; and, of course, Will "Willenium" Smith. Hip hop was full of gents with bristling portfolios looking to entertain, not to threaten or educate. With the notable exception of Eminem, a hip hop Elvis who shocked and delighted tens of millions by melding white frat boy attitude and black beats into one enormously successful package.

Dance music sums up the changes best, because not many pay attention to what dance music says. The earlier, darker, more complicated Nineties had given us the dark brew of drum & bass but when Old Father Time rattled around the Y2K it had slumped into UK Garage - music to sip champagne and eye up girls to. It was all dancing and twirling and Craig David going "Boing". It was about money.

But it was a happy time, wasn’t it? It was “Sweet Like Chocolate”. It was about dancing and enjoying yourself – Modjo and Cassius and Daft Punk telling us it was all that mattered. Kylie didn’t sing of love like she did back in the Eighties; she’d put her creative struggles in the Nineties behind her. She was now a disco machine with music stuck in her head, singing about the tune stuck in her head; just “Spinning Around”. It was empty, but it wasn’t dark.

So, what do we have now; now that we’ve an Orwellian War on Terror still raging to focus our attentions? UK Garage warped into Grime, which is pretty dark – but in a familiar, urban stories kind of way - and Dubstep, the drop into the k-hole: the sound of Salvia crushing the air out of our brains. Music that you less dance to than stagger underneath.

Dido dropped an octave and within a dozen years became Lana del Ray singing about “What Makes Us Girls” - a pin up for the numb. Metal has disappeared underground almost entirely; indie music now seems the preserve of rich kids; and chart pop is being run by Simon Cowell and the Brit Academy. Neither Simon nor the Academy graduates seem to be enjoying it very much.

"Bulletproof", "Titanium", "Diamonds": these chart-topping tunes are about being watched on the dance floor rather than actually just dancing, about surviving rather than partying - as though stranded in some apocalyptic nightclub. They are about commodities and war and dance music as obliteration rather than community.

Recent research has shown that pop music has got slower and sadder over the last fifty years - almost 60% of hit American tunes now in a minor key - and its lyrics more and more narcissistic and anti-social. “We” has become “I” and “our” “mine”. Black music in the US and Caribbean built up a musical momentum in tandem with their civil rights and independence movements which has gradually dissipated into individualism and apathy. Rock and pop music in the UK reflected and amplified the social mobility of the times until these forces also ran out of steam and working class artists are increasingly dependent on the patronage of rich businessmen and institutions.

This is cultural entropy - the musical Big Bangs of jazz and pop and reggae and hip hop and house music running out of energy as they diversify and dissolve into a thousand different sub-genres. Pop is about the release of energy: the death of energy is its dark side, its deathly shadow.

For a year or two we actually thought we'd broken through into the future and were partying like it was 1999 Recurring. Now, the hangover has us in its teeth - and what a skull-crushing comedown it is.

TOP TEN FROM THE DARK SIDE

The Rolling Stones – ”Sympathy for the Devil”

Siouxsie & The Banshees – “Metal Postcard (Mittagessen)”

Nine Inch Nails – “Hurt”

Sisters of Mercy – “This Corrosion”

Public Enemy – “Welcome to the Terrordome”

Lana del Ray – “What Makes Us Girls”

Body Count – “Cop Killer”

Slayer – “Angel of Death”

The Velvet Underground – “Venus in Furs”

John Lennon – “Mother”

Thoughts on the Dawn of Hop & Bass - Posterity Groans under The Strain

Some two months or so ago a woman wandering in the grassy heartland between friend and acquaintance, snagged on a shared love of All Tomorrow's Parties, asked whether I'd be interested in speaking to radio people about my initial impressions of the Golden Age of Hip Hop and to run through a quick appraisal of the tin lid that was drum & bass while I was at it.

She had heard I had knowledge that I'd been carrying about with me in between yellowing strips of newspaper in a wallet unpicking itself at the seams. This knowledge had been carried over the grassy grapevine from another acquaiend*. Her disabuse of this heavily-mistaken notion must have been swift as this was never mentioned again.

But by then it was too late; my mind had begun. Diseased springs twitched and cogs spat teeth as they tried to find a common forward movement. On the train from Manchester to London I summoned my immense intellect and scrawled some ideas on a clumsily-folded piece of paper. Just the act of doing that felt good, writing semi-arcane notes to myself about the fevered impressionist thoughts I was having.

But being the sweaty creep that I am, writing some shaky words on a piece of paper is not enough. I have to share these malformed ideas with the world; and so here I am. The BBC Four Friday night retrospective will be sure to follow. In time.

So. The glory and appeal of Old School Hip Hop.

Firstly, it's all about the breaks - even if they were profoundly transmuted. Early hip hop hits were heavily disco-inflected, reflecting the block parties the music had sprung from. It was party music at first, good time stuff. And that was how Grandmaster Flash was received at my primary school discos in distant, damp north Wales. Fancy dress on TOTP: a cosmic version of The Village People. Stop start rhythms ideal for musical statues.

The toughness must always have been there, as the parties must have got rough at times - for all of Afrika Bambaataa's attempts to chill everyone the fuck out. Gradually, this toughness asserted itself as it became clear that hip hop was for telling stories too. "Funky Drummer" sounds like light entertainment, but spun out into endless space in front of a Public Enemy crowd at the Hammersmith Odeon, its breakbeat has dramatic power. There is nothing to match the tension of a drum machine, the bite of a drum loop.

Early Def Jam music sounds too sparse: LL Cool J and Run DMC. The excesses of disco were pared back too far, driven perhaps by the need to escape the gravity of that sunken novelty cruiseliner. (Were I more erudite I would juggle the idea of hyper-masculinity about - even in the face of the fact there were women MCs too at this point. But my erudition is flagging chequeredly.) It was just about words and a solid stance. People were expected to listen. But once sampling technology really got involved and layers and layers of sounds began to be added, the words were scrawled across great, chaotic soundstorms. It all became so fucking tumultuous!

My first experience listening to Public Enemy was on a Walkman on the way back from a school trip to Lancaster in 1989. It was "Nation Of Millions"; and it was enormous. This was the moment when hip hop stepped away from memories of primary school discos and became what I would know recognise as the Golden Age of Hip Hop. Layer after layer of panic and solid noise, slipping and sliding against each other; black music history (and some metal too at times for a paranoid edge) re-configured and laid out in front of me in its new Chimeric form, torn into its component parts while still fizzing with life and urgency. Comparing "Yo! Bum Rush The Show" with "Millions" only a year or so later shows how fertile and explosive hip hop was in the Golden Age. Just like the period of five or six years when pop music split into rock and pop and everyone had a plan on how to push further and answer harder the music that went before. Nuclear fission still glowing forty five years on.

Listen to the way Kanye samples soul and R&B music these days in comparison to the (now impossible) piracy of the vinyl seas that De La Soul and PE explored so excitingly. For De La and producer Prince Paul  it was a game, stitching together tunes from childhood and exotic yet familiar pop sources just as they were facing down the dookie gold chains and restrictive practices that went on around them. Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad wanted to show you everything and the wide-ranging paranoid scramble of facts and mottos was reflected in the music. All the tension has been drained from the music by the time Kanye gets his sticky fingers on it - it's just a pompous backdrop for his globe-trotting; a bored, Ray-Bans wearing yuppie version of hip hop. Count your beans with a yawn on your bored looking face, you drippy cunts. Your aspirations have gone all to cock.

Still to this day, nothing will get me dancing more promptly than classic hip hop - even the "throwaway" stuff like House of Pain or Cypress Hill. Today's chartbound sounds are so limp and complacent by comparison. Even when someone of the standard of Killer Mike comes along and launches "Reagan", you can't really dance to it. It has the same leaden-footed keyboard shuffle. "Fight The Power": that's a tune you can shake serious body parts to. Yes, sir.**

Another thing about hip hop is its viral accessibility. Cultures all over the world have adapted it to their twisted ends; it has spread everywhere like some hydroponic pondweed. Even in a distant outpost of the Western cultural experiment like Eighties Anglesey it forged a connection between a pale and uninteresting sixteen year old lad and packs of angry, educated Afro-American New Yorkers. Its DNA can be reproduced in every part of the world, taking on mutations as it adapts to survive in different cultural climates. It goes native, becomes unexotic; it becomes us. It can be bolted onto anything and in so doing will subtly or unsubtly change the essential nature of its host nature.

And as a result of this chameleonic quality, as in all good bodysnatcher movies, up rose a panic about authenticity. At first the battle was between neighbourhoods in New York, Queensbridge and Brooklyn, as to who invented what. Then it was deemed the property of New York until gangster rap definitively opened up the West Coast as a second front. Still today (despite hip hop's global relevance) the sound of hip hop with non-American voices can cause a frisson of novelty-hunting excitement or a stinkcloud of ridicule. But the reality is that anyone can pick up a mic and spit their brains out over repetitive loops. Party jams became tales of urban deprivation became rants at the global poltical military industrial complex became whatever the fuck we want. And there is nothing anyone can do about it - the fatty acid chains are out there, shagging everything they touch.

Compare the career of hip hop's uncle, reggae. How despite being loved around the world and even copied by acts from highly non-Rasta/non-Jamaican cultures, reggae and its immediate descendants (roots, ragga, etc.) has an impenetrable, uncorrupted core that keeps its exoticism integral. It never assumes the identity of its host in the same way. Perhaps it doesn't offer the same opportunity to relate your own story. There is still a strong flavour of Marcus Garvey and Afrocentric spirituality that turns its head from any attempt to completely sublimate the music. It's not just about the patois, as plenty of hip hop vocabulary crossed cultural barriers within a couple of years. It's about access.

So hip hop is huge now, that's agreed. It's able to spawn and reproduce itself in a way that even rock music hasn't quite managed - adapting itself to agendas from Welsh cultural resistance to Jihad to Eminem's white boy parenting issues. It isn't about the Five Elements anymore, although you can probably trace the remains in what is going on now; but why do I think the Golden Age still holds my imagination in a way that Hova and Eminem never have?

It must be partly where the music fitted in with my own adolescent development. The timing of that Public Enemy experience, coinciding with being sixteen and beginning to form an idea of how I'd engage with the world again, couldn't have been more perfect. But I think the enduring quality is the energy, the sense of momentum - as with post-punk in the late seventies. A fresh culture (if you'll pardon the pun) breaking out, people living on their wits and kind of doing for love - as the money wasn't in hip hop yet and there were no fucking CEOs of rap music. It was vital, unrestrained by music piracy laws and responding to the civil rights optimism of their parents' generation represented by their choices of musical samples.

As hip hop had grown in confidence to express itself, it was showing me exactly what I needed to do myself. Round the corner waiting for me in the early Nineties was Hardcore/Drum & Bass, but I can't get into that stuff right now.

Yours in think

Your pal

Coc x

* Surely there must be some kind of daily spot prize for coming up with the internet's most awkwardly-jizzed neologism? No. Then I fall back on my genetic research as a back up plan for notoriety.

** Perhaps this is because the all-encompassing Illuminati-style paranoia of much of hip hop these days already feels defeated by the military industrial delusion of democracy and so dancing feels pointless. PE were still riding ripples set in motion twenty five years before with Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan and perhaps that also reflects why the use of soul music was still vital. They'd been swimming in those civil rights Motown Stax waters at first hand.

Article for Dupe magazine: "The Pop Physics of The Road"

My friends, there is driving; and there is The Road. Any fool can drive a few miles, or tool their honey wagon around the block on a summer’s afternoon; but only a beatnik fuckstar from the edge of cool takes to The Road. They walk the walk of the troubadours, then sing the song of what happened so we might wring wisdom from the tale.

Driving represents sex, freedom or both. The Beatles “Drive My Car” doesn’t leave much doubt about what stick they are looking to get shifted. Rihanna wants her fella to “Shut Up And Drive”  - all those raunchy revving noises! R Kelly’s “Ignition” illustrates where he wants the key inserted. Grace Jones suggest we pull up to her bumper and slide it in between! Prince sings about a “Little Red Corvette”, but Squarepusher makes things a bit more explicit – “I want to fuck you with my red hot car”.  And of course there’s the slasher semiotics of the Dead Man’s Curve songs’ mixture of teen sex and death.

If you want to feel the freedom in your hair, just crank your shaft along to Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” and gun your hog down the freeway, “looking for adventure/And whatever comes your way”.  “Route 66”  plots economic migration westward and leaving old prejudices back East, even while it talks about “kicks”. Tracy Chapman wants to escape her life altogether in a “Fast Car”, also reflecting a musical tendency for women (and Iggy Pop) to sit in the passenger seat. Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” brings the freedom of the freeway and the lure of the booty call into one joyful splash of hi-hats and brass.

But which musical genre best describes the getting from A to Z?

Pop isn’t well equipped to deal with travel. Gruff Rhys started driving late, so tingles with the simple joy of “Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru (Driving Driving Driving)” – but this is not The Road. Madness were the same, just enjoying driving about in a car bought in Muswell Hill.  New England punk-ish popster Jonathan Richman feels “in love with the radio on” driving around Massachusetts at night on “Roadrunner”. This is not the physics of distance and destination; pop cannot defer that gratification. It needs to burst; it goes in circles.

Old school hip hop was most bothered with the parish boundaries. Even the most escapist journey (Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day” or Jazzy Jeff’s “Summertime”) only aspires to circle the neighbourhood at a slow pootle.  The new boys jet from ritzy location to cocaine-streaked fortress (“N***as in Paris”) and even uber-conscious  Public Enemy  only set out to Arizona to right political wrongs, not for fun. Only A Tribe Called Quest really got the idea of the exploratory road trip on “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” – forgetting stuff, bad food and the zen of long distance travel. But then they were pretty beatnik types, eh? “Peoples, Instinctive Travels and The Paths of Rhythm”, you say?

You can’t think about musical journeys without tipping the brim of your dusty pith helmet to Kraftwerk. They have most means of transport covered: bike (“Tour de France”), train (“Trans Europe Express”), even submarine (“Das Boot”). “Autobahn” though, a mumbling Teutonic resurfacing of the Beach Boys’ surf pop, is a byword for highways.  (Or a highword for byways.) But all Florian and the boys want is the metronomic thrill of movement: there’s no drama. The Road is too flat.

Blues waits by the road for the Devil to pass through and meet up at the crossroads. The wanderers in Blues stride out of folk tales like  “Stagger Lee” or Biblical passages like rolling stones gathering no moss. It’s too ancient; just fighting and fucking – no poetry.

Speaking of poets, Jack Kerouac casts a long shadow over a certain kind of thoughtful rock and roll. Many have had a punt, but Bruce Springsteen is the bard of the highway, mainlining the romance of the road on “Born To Run” (“The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive”) and also the less-documented desperation of the dead Tom Joad or “State Trooper” from his famously introspective meditation on the empty road and big skies, “Nebraska”. Begging “Mr State Trooper/Please don’t stop me” over and again is not Steppenwolf.

Rock is about the dynamics of tension and release and freedom is a lyrical obsession; but things break down and subvert expectations at times. Tom Petty’s “Night Driver” sounds dangerously sleepy, “drifting home again”. Bob Dylan’s “On The Road Again” seems more about pacing the floor in rooms and being bored than travelling itself, “till everything becomes the same”; perhaps his motorcycle accident curtailed any boyish enthusiasm for tarmacadam.  Buzzcocks’ “Fast Cars” has the adrenal rush of driving, but the chorus is “I hate fast cars”. The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” draws out the Ballardian scene after a car crash with “broken glass/In the underpass”.

The UK has its motorway mythology too. Chris Rea is very much the Springsteen of the service station. Not only has he captured the weary excitement of “Driving Home for Christmas”, but he has also given us a “Road to Hell” – transposing the bluesy meeting with the Devil from dusty Mississippi into a traffic jam hallucination. And there’s The Proclaimers who send “Letters From America”, walk “500 Miles” and even cover Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”. Which brings us to Country & Western.

Truckers and country: no faster bond exists between a genre and its audience. While rock bands tour and express their freedom, truckers and country musicians feel the pain of separation and distance. It’s hard-wired into the genes, imagery and traditions of country, inherited from homesick Celts plucking banjos in the Appalachians. Aside from cheating men and women, reflecting on the home left far behind is a country staple.

Hank Williams set the template in the Forties with “Lost Highway” – loneliness, sin and bad choices. The lyrical themes are still close to the Blues, but the distances are already greater. By the time the Seventies had come along, country was burning  ascendant and sweating self-confidence. Box Car Willie’s “Convoy” is so pumped with self-belief that the police and the National Guard are nothing – “Ain’t nothing going to get in our way/We gonna roll this convoy across the USA”. By the power of Burt Reynolds’ luxuriant moustache, it has the whiff of reactionary politics! Jeremy Clarkson must roar it out on long journeys.

The Road is a defining part of many musicians’ daily lives. Willy Nelson can’t wait to get back out “On The Road Again” and “make music with my friends.. seeing things I may never see again”. Canned Heat sing the same title in a brittle falsetto voice underpinned by a bluesy raga-like drone that supports the idea this “lonesome road” is the path of life. Motorhead’s “(We Are) The Road Crew” pays tribute to the repetitive life of the roadie – another this, another that; bad food and bleeding ears. Typically earthy and literal. The Stone Roses’ “Driving South” is another update of the Devil at the Crossroads, this time hinting of dealings with the London-based music business types. The drudge of doing what you love for a living, eh?

Back in the days before our experiences were compartmentalised into boxes of scientific this and human experience that, the ancients took Natural Philsophy as one cosmological whole – the stars, medicine, personality disorders, politics, navigation. Music was the expression of the movement of those spheres; art and science meshed together in pursuit of the same explanations.

Each experience finds its expression in a different genre of pop, a circulatory system mapping out the different fault lines and pressure points of human emotion. Each genre sees The Road differently. For pop, there is the simple joy of being on the move. Techno is similarly mindless – but with a mechanical fetish (understandably). Rock senses freedom – and the exhilarations and fears that freedom brings. But perhaps Country is the perfect genre for illustrating our feelings about being on The Road, far from home and reliant on our own instincts and character.

And who says travelling has to be by motor? Lee Marvin sums up the itinerant itch of The Road on “Wandrin’ Star”: “Home is made for coming from/For dreams of coming to/Which with any luck will never come true.”

COC’s TOP TEN ROAD TRIP TUNES 
Steppenwolf, “Born to be Wild”
Kraftwerk, “Autobahn”
The Normal, “Warm Leatherette"
Gruff Rhys, “Gyrru, Gyrru, Gyrru”
Canned Heat, “On the Road Again”
Box Car Willie, “Convoy”
A Tribe Called Quest, “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo”
Hank Williams, “Lost Highway”
Motorhead, “(We Are) The Road Crew"
Lee Marvin, “Wandrin’ Star”

Article for Dupe Magazine: "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Rollers: A rock/pop hairpiece"

The four pillars of youthquake rebellion:  firstly, loud repetitive beats – “This isn’t music!”  “Get bent, Daddy-o!”; secondly, drug consumption – don’t leave home with the intention of a new musical genre without it; thirdly, the correct tribal clobber – a quarter inch too much on the hem of your straights and you could get your head caved; and fourthly, HAIR!

From Teddy Boy ducks-arses to the hipster Hoxton Fin, the language of the hair has been plaited into the DNA of pop culture and identity. Uncursed by male pattern baldness and the inevitable thinning of later life, the young youths can and did manipulate their flowing manes into badges of honour and identity. But where are the tunes to celebrate their achievements?

You generally have to go to the margins of rock society or to the more restless songwriting minds of our generations to get any hirstutial mentions at all. Facial hair in particular is almost nowhere to be seen.

Moustaches are viewed  with suspicion. They’re either symbols of failed hypermasculinity (Nirvana’s high school nightmare “Mr Moustache” or The Locust’s “Teenage Mustache”) or the marker of a cad (early rockabilly standard “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache”) or some Carry On gender benderation (The Fresh Prince’s “The Girlie Had a Mustache”). The best a moustache can hope for is weird admiration, like on The Monochrome Set’s “The Man with the Black Moustache”; and they seem to crop up most in music with double kick drums – Anal Cunt, Rollo Tomassi and Secret Fun Club’s “The Ghost of John Bonham’s Mustache”, which sums up the whole rock manliness position nicely. Soupstrainers have fallen off the radar, their battleships sunk. Fit only for hipster scum and Robert Mugabe.

Beards do a wee bit better. Impenetrable and mysterious they evoke more fear and respect than the contempt for their upper-lip cousins. But there is no warmth, just Bohemian freakery from Devendra Banhart (quite the stranger to the razor himself), A Hawk and a Hacksaw and The Olivia Tremor Control (“Glass Beard”). Too outre for the bulk of the youth dem. Too much for the older man, too dusty and oak-panelled and Old Testament. Pop demands a shinier face and rock too is complicit in this uncover-up.

So defeated at the face, we march our columns of think to the crown itself, the top of the head. Even here, the coverage is wispy at best. Where I’d expect a thick, glossy expanse of hair-related pop, there are merely a few pubes in the bathtub. So out with the tweezers and let the examination begin...

One hairy Colossus casts its massive bouffant shadow over this question: “Hair” the musical. Sure, they sound keen on the “flaxen, waxen” stuff; but I’m not sure how straight they’re being with us – “A home for fleas/A hive for the buzzing bees”? Really? Even coming from tie-dyed-in-the-man-wool hippies, that’s a pretty extreme naturalist philosophy. Musical theatre: always so much to teach us.

To Pop! Madonna may be silent. Jacko may have nothing for me. But Lady Gaga, fetishist extraordinaire, won’t let me down. She feels herself  “shorn of my identity” when her mam cuts her hair. Gaga is never knowingly understated and her follical commitment is no less powerful: “I am my hair”. She recognises the power of fabulous hair-chitecture.”This is my prayer/That I’ll die livin’ just as free as my hair”. To be fair though, she seems to keep it on a fairly tight leash.

Best-forgotten MySpace sensation Sandy Thom bobs past briefly on a tsunami of faked nostaligia for a time without computers and “flowers in my hair”. McFly point out the rebellion in the girl with “Five Colours in Her Hair”, but point with cautionary fingers – as the polychromatically-barneted lass can’t handle the notoriety and goes mad. For Willow Smith, whipping her hair back and forth is an act of precocious performance. Hair is the extension of the self: if you cut my hair, do I not bleed? And so much for pop, the musical movement that brought it us A Flock of Seagulls, the American byword for funny-looking Euro-fag hair. All that New Romantic preening and not a tune to show for it. Unless “Fade to Grey” was a metaphorical reach for the Grecian 2000.

And therefore to rock. What about the politics of long hair? T.Rex said that if you “wear your hair long/You can’t go wrong”. Sound advice. Classical Californian rockists Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young dramatise the whole dilemma of trimming an inch or two off like its Vietnam. Excuses fly (including man ‘flu) about why Mr Crosby “Almost Cut My Hair”, before deciding to leave it and “let my freak flag fly”. He realises that he needs to “separate the wheat from the chaff/I feel like I owe it so someone”. Whoa! Heavy business at the barbers.

No-one can imbue the most casual cultural decision with maxium heaviosity qute like Pete Townshend of The Who and on “Quadrophrenia” he too struggles with the same problem. “Why should I care/If I have to cut my hair?”, he asks. Because of “the uncertain feeling” that keeping up with the crowd will lead him nowhere. PJ Harvey knocks this up another notch to Biblical proportions with her “Hair” seeing Samson betrayed by Delilah and shorn of his God-given strength. Pavement put it all down to record industry aesthetics on “Cut Your Hair”: “No big hair/...Career, career!/Did you see the drummer’s hair?”

And it’s not just posh white kids that fret over their follicles. Over in Jamaica the battle between Babylonian shineheads and righteous dreads rages over acres of shiny vinyl and acetate. Marley named a whole album “Natty Dread” in 1974. Dillinger marks out the dreads on “Commercial Locks” as something that “white man want to take away” just like everything else a Rasta has. Religious faith – Rastas like Sikhs should not cut their hair - colours pop culture from the outside here, which is maybe why it’s richest source of hairy lyrics in pop or rock. Because it’s not pop or rock.

The Observers “Rasta Locks” and King Tubby’s “Hijack the Barber” dub out instrumentally on the subject of religiously observant barnets. Scratch Perry sets his stall out with loads of tunes about dreadlocks. He even hits a romantic note with wobblier menace on “Curly Locks” where he asks a woman to choose between himself (“a natty Congo dread”) and “a baldhead”. Cutting to the chase.

Let’s not forget the hair of The Other either. Whether Syd Barrett’s spooky version of the Joyce poem “Golden Hair” or America’s “Sister Golden Hair”, the hair can mark out the exotic differences. Morrissey is certainly one to fetishize the slightest pop cultural detail and “Suedehead” signifies the whisperings of club membership, the doors the right hairdo can open up. Hairdoors, if you will.

Glasgow twee indie kids The Vaselines spit out their disgust with the “Hairy”: “I don’t want/To look like you/Greasy hair/And ugly too”. Those clean-limbed, smooth-faced types that wear coats that people remember from primary school playgrounds – duffel coats, parkas and the like – call hair as they see it: unclean and thick with adolescent dirt! A little adult for their fragile pre-pubescent sensibilities perhaps? (Speaking as a shambling hedgerow of a man myself.)

Sometimes it’s  just about feeling smart. The Smoking Popes’ “A Brand New Hairstyle” is a simple prayer for a haircut that “I can wear with pride/When I go outside”.  Jonah Lewie consider getting his haircut to cheer himself up after being turned down by a woman, “then maybe I’ll be in luck”. Sometimes it’s impossible to fathom what it’s about – Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut” leaves me scratching my head. (Oh, I’m sorry. One pun too many?)

Two indie rock bands manage TWO tunes about hair each, neither of them afraid of excessive foliage themselves. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion indulge themselves in some rock semiotics with excess  and no due caution - “Haircut” (“Cut a lot of hair!” and not much else lyrically) and “Afro”. Super Furry Animals (suitable bandname for hair songs) fill in a bit more lyrical detail. In fact they can’t say enough about “Ice Hockey Hair”, although I’m not sure what the whole song is about. “Torra Fy Ngwallt yn Hir” (“Cut My Hair Long”) is pretty clear though: “Wear your hair long/Right down to your arse/...And don’t make any fuss.” And that’s without taking their album “Mwng” (Welsh for mane) into account. Finally a band that take hair seriously! Thoughtful about their rock they are.

The sooner I get my own hairy pop opus “Mammalian Tendrils” out of the pipeline, the better. The world of rock needs my help.

COC’s TOP TEN HAIRY TOONS
T.Rex, “Ride A White Swan”
The Smoking Popes, “Brand New Hairstyle”
PJ Harvey, “Hair”
Super Furry Animals, “Torra Fy Ngwallt yn Hir”
Beck, “Devil’s Haircut”
The Who, “Cut My Hair”
Pavement, “Cut Your Hair”
CSN & Y, “Almost Cut My Hair"
King Tubby, “Hijack The Barber”
The Vaselines, “Hairy”