Where do important things happen?

About twenty minutes ago a couple of nice and friendly twenty-somethings engaged me in a conversation which followed a standard format: What are you doing with all those newspapers?

I explained.

They understood why I was reading this stuff but didn't understand why I did it here (here being the Festival Hall). "Because one might see or hear something new, you never know." They didn't really get that, so I told them a true story, one I thought would chime with them. "Things happen in the most unlikely places." I said.

In 2005 I was in South Yorkshire visiting my sick mater. Some of you will know that I'm a long-distance runner and even though a visit to most places outside London is like visiting Lilliput (no hate posts, please, I'll just ignore them) the prospect of being able to fell-run and run through countryside was gob-smacking after the tedium of the rat-run that is the Thames.

I had quite a few runs up there: Barnsley / Ilkley Moor / Wentworth / Hoober Stand / being one. That's a big run. But one day I changed the route back and ran down the A61 on the return leg and I passed a club, the kind of low-grade provincial fun-palace every town can lay claim to in a place called Birdwell, which is on the outskirts of Barnsley. As I ran by I noticed the blackboards outside advertising the 'turn' for that evening (as performers are known in those parts) and I stopped. I stopped because I was struck by the name on the board: the Arctic Monkeys. Were they a novelty act? A ventriloquist? I'd never heard of them. But that performance – their turn at being the star turn – was a turning point for them. The rest, as they say, is history.

Even further back – the late 70s to be exact – one of the blokes in the year above me on the Graphics course at Art School cornered me one day and asked my opinion about something he'd just designed. He'd been asked to design the cover for a local band's first 45. A live job! That's a big deal when you're a student. He showed it to me. It was OK, but the thing that stood out was the name of the band, it was an outfit called, Def Leppard.

So. Everyone and everything has to come from somewhere and the most surprising things come from the most unlikely places.

Some venture people just got very lucky...

Last October I wrote a post Prime for a kicking?

Dr Martens had just been taken over by an investment group and I expressed the hope that they would respect, understand and propagate the brand because of the emotional connection people have to the product. There's good reason to fret whenever a much-loved brand is taken over because its welfare isn't necessarily top of the list for some investors. Read my post Knowing your arse from your elbow.

In years to come, Primera, the new owners of Dr Martens will be talked about in revered tones and referred to as those lucky bastards because, Peter Capaldi, the new Doctor Who, has been revealed as a DM wearer. I think there will be tea parties with cream cakes in their offices every day from now on. Let's see what the Doctor also does for Crombie.

Lunch with Johnny and Sue

Eyes down...demonstrating how design works. In this case a graphic solution to road signage.

We forget how much we know. We are only reminded of how much we know when someone asks us a question, the answer to which might be blindingly obvious, but we have to remind ourselves that there was a time when we too didn't know the answer, because we forget what it was like not to know.

A quarter of a century ago in earth years, we at The Fine White Line realised that there was a need for careers information for undergraduates because there was absolutely bugger-all out there, so we set about designing something. I'd been lecturing for a long time and the difference between what the powers that be thought that students needed to know and what we knew they needed to know was clear to see and demonstrated by just about every interviewee. This, remember, was pre-internet so the thing became an A1 brochure called Whitebait and having established the tone and style of it the task of making it so was handed over to our designated writers and a succession of student placements, or interns as they are now inexplicably called.

Whitebait was funny and chock-a-block with stuff – little things that can have a big impact – like holding your book in the opposite hand to the one you shake with so you don't deliver a sweaty one. Or making sure that you go to the loo when you're waiting in reception to check for rogue bogeys, toast in your teeth or panda eyes. (The horror of finding any of the aforementioned after the fact!) To sage nuggets from industry leaders such as the dangers of telling porkie-pies in an incestuous business: don't, you'll be found out! (I should add at this point that although this is about design the same can be applied to just about any industry sector or study area.) 

In the intervening years nothing much has changed. 
I have the same conversations with school kids, students, postgrads and parents – all manner of people. Some may get lucky and get help from a clued-up tutor, or a parent or a contact in the business, but many don't. Then there's the prevailing view of the arts (since we all tend to get lumped together) as being a secondary or (in some quarters) useless activity – a Mickey Mouse degree, a degree in colouring in – one where no cerebral prowess is needed whatsoever, regardless of the considerable contribution that the creative industries make to the national GDP.

Run a search for careers advice on design and there seems to be quite a lot of it – the efficacy and value of which I leave to you to decide – although much of it seems a tad too po-faced for my liking. Official offerings come in the form of sites and films from bodies such as The Design Council, D&AD and the Government amongst others.

Design is everywhere and touches every area of our lives and so it follows that one should be able to talk about it and demonstrate it anywhere at all, so we have. My mate Johnny and I started making short videos at lunchtimes at the Royal Festival Hall. They're not big CGI ventures, nor are they meant to be. They are personal takes on information black holes and pet peeves. And that's key: personality. Design is a fun industry so why talk about it as if you're reading a mortician's rate card? There's no one view, that's one thing we do learn in college by dint of the conflicting advice we get from our tutors, so we'd quite like yours. Obviously one can't cover everything in a few short videos, but it's a start. If people watch we'll do more. If they don't we won't. If someone wants to know about something we'll do a video for them. I suppose you could call it a kind of careers surgery and that's where you come in. What do you wish that your younger self had been told? What do students need to know in your view?

If any of you would like to add something to the mix then please let me know, no matter which discipline you're working in or what the subject matter. Just send me a video (2 mins or less) plus a caption. In fact the more diverse the views the better since we all criss-cross in some way eventually, because there are no career paths just crazy paving.

Now that's what I call an anniversary!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember this?

In my last post I talked about this series in the context of the K-Tel and Ronco vinyl compilations. Unbelievably they are NOW! 30 years old. I remember the first incarnation (above) as if it was yesterday. But we're NOW! onto NOW! 86! And that makes me feel very, very old indeed.

As seen on TV!



So high-tech it makes your eye balls spin.

My last post was a dissection of a selection of the current major Yuletide ads on the box. But if you're of a certain age the BOOM! BASH! WALLOP! offerings from K-Tel and Ronco announced the approach of Christmas as concretely as the appearance of Selection Boxes on the shelves in Fine Fare. Indeed for me Christmas and K-Ronco (my 70s conflation and the one I'll use here) are inextricably linked. If these names are new to you, you can Tardis yourself back to those crazy days by dint of YouTube where you'll find a wealth of material. I promise you that It's well worth a look. 

The K-Ronco canon was a disparate one.
Vinyl music compilations were a staple and formed the early templates for the Now That's What I Call Music series. My favourites were Souled Out and Super Bad. I played them to death and scratched them to buggery and when they were no longer playable I fashioned them into a fruit bowl by holding the LP over the gas ring, as was the fashion at the time. Kitchen and household appliances offering miraculous escape from and shortcuts to everyday domestic tasks are probably the most memorable for many. Some of the contraptions were useful by degree and others were one-use only before being entombed in their garish boxes and buried in the back of the cupboard never to be seen again until someone died, moved house, had a car-boot sale, filled a bag for charity, or fancied an evening in with the Lambrusco, Abigail's Party and 'that thing of me mam's' as star turn in a pi*s-taking session. Sometimes both ends of the product spectrum collided, the progeny being the fantastically hi-tech Record Selector which was little more than a Rolodex for LPs (admit it...you want one don't you?) and millions of us bought them. And then they gave us the Record Vacuum, so we had to have one of those too. On seeing the pure magic that was the Brush-'O'-Matic, my Gran hot footed it to Woolworths and returned cradling one and it worked – in a fashion – and I remember the ad with its discombobulated hand wielding the same depositing collected cat fur on a black velvet cushion as if I first saw it yesterday.

We decided that we couldn't live without the Veg-O-Matic and pondered how we'd ever managed with only the humble vegetable peeler and that product of thousands of years of R&D: the knife. The model shown below gave way to a plunger-like version you put over your onion or whatever and then bashed with the palm of your hand. Its place in history as the architect of wrist sprains extraordinaire and the arch enemy of A&E departments nationwide is second only to Clackers or Kerbangers, as they were known in the US. They are respectively King and Queen in the that wasn't such a good idea after all Hall of Fame.

 

 

In our comparatively, impossibly futuristic here-and-now, this stuff looks like what most of us who bought it then knew it to be: for the most part a heap of tat. But it was a different world then. The ads were in no way high concept, but boy were they entertaining. They showed you the product, what it did and explained why you needed it. It was refreshing and that's what I remember about K-Ronco, probably more than I remember what they were selling. In times when TV was king – the biggest, most powerful and persuasive medium – K-Ronco packs carried the endorsement 'As Seen On TV' because to be seen on TV was an endorsement indeed. It was a promise. It meant proper stuff made by proper people. It doesn't mean that now, does it? I think that it does. Online is intangible, it's unreal because there's no reality. That's why it was always inevitable that online concerns would move at some point into bricks and mortar. Products on the box sit alongside the people and programmes we trust and they benefit from the halo. That and the common knowledge that in order to have ads on the box you need to have a bit of brass, means you're viable. You're real.

 

When I think about K-Ronco ads I'm reminded of the Dudley Moore film Crazy People in which Dudley plays an Advertising Executive who has a breakdown and revives his fortunes and sanity by creating an agency peopled by crazy people, which tells the truth and what stuff does in a very direct no-frills manner. Over the years K-Ronco has been the stuff of parody on both big and small screens and very funny it's been too. And companies like JML and products such as Cillit Bang have picked up the mantle...but from the wrong end and minus the necessary wit, charm and self-awareness. But I think there's a place for this kind of approach now, since some, naming no names, who have over-sold and under-delivered might benefit from a spot of K-Ronco. As seen on TV!

Christmas? Get real.

Christmas ads on the box. Brace yourselves and loosen your belts because the servings have only just begun and there are 41 days to go to the Big Day.

I'm already feeling the way you do at around 5.30pm on the 25th when having being told to get your ar*e off the settee and your eyeballs off the box and your ar*e in the car, you're shuttled off to 'auntie' Betty's and others who couldn't come to yours because they have their own tribe at theirs, only to find that the turkey got there before you. And oooo, look! Turkey sandwiches...yum! By the end of next week we'll be yearning for the Thompson Holiday ads on the 26th.

The one that gives me a sore head is the John Lewis Bear and Hare effort. Like the Woolworths beanos of yesteryear, theirs is the most hotly anticipated ad and has come to be (for some) the televisual opening of the first window of the advent calendar. Looking at the Woollies ad above (and the others you'll find there) it's going to be very hard for some to believe that theirs was the ad of the season, but their strategies of booking entire commercial break spots and using the biggest names around are still very much in vogue, as incongruous as it was to see a celeb earning squillions caressing a £4.99 Pifco hair dryer! But back in the hay days of  Lenthéric, that was the wonder of Woolies.

Back to John Lewis. Well crafted and scripted, it hits all the right notes and for me that's what's wrong with it. It's mawkish and, I think, a little cynical and manufactured. Was the first line of the brief make it a two box of tissues per showing ad? If so I guess (judging by the number of views on YouTube and plaudits online) they were successful but all I see is something that's had money thrown at it. It reeks of what do we do to keep on top...that's all I see. It's not a patch on 2011's The Long Wait. Or 2012's The Journey.

Another great example of more is most definitely less comes from M&S. More money down the drain than down the rabbit hole. It's little more than a showreel for Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the best turn being Helena Bonham Carter who appears to be morphing into Sybil Fawlty. For all its gloss and cinematic production values it doesn't work as hard as their 2012 offering. At least it showed the products and the different audiences they're trying to reach, but this year's is little more than a vanity project for the marketing department.

And I'm not even going to waste time on Morrisons' effort because it's pants, other than to say that their reliance on Ant and Dec is beginning to grate and signals a lack of thinking at the heart of their operation.

I began writing this yesterday before Sainsbury's launched their pitch for our collective sobs and at that point Tesco was my favourite. The basic idea is not an original one but it is very nicely done and much joy is to be had in spotting the tank-top you used to wear or identifying with the scenarios shown. It's well cast and there are some wonderful micro-moments within it. But then I saw this from Sainsbury's, which is going to make that Bear fall out with his mate the Hare because he got up and got cold for absolutely nothing at all.

Both Tesco and Sainsbury's have chosen the 'real' route, staged, in the case of the former, but Sainsbury's had the sweet idea of asking customers to submit footage of their Christmases and, John Lewis, that did make me cry. It's a mirror-ball for the nation. Which of us can't identify with it? The little chap leaping around going into meltdown in his jim-jams made me LOL! and I saw my own small brother doing exactly the same thing all those years ago. The don't like it's are there alongside the I love it's. The prospect of a traditional fall-out in the offing. It happens. And the chap planning and cooking Christmas lunch with military precision only to sit and eat it alone broke my heart. But that's what happens. And then the squaddie dad returning to his totally cute and unsuspecting children broke it again all within the space of a few minutes. That rarely happens. Functional or dysfunctional, we can see through this that we're not so mad, bad, odd, not that much different at all.

Sainsbury's, you're the orange in my stocking this year.

Framestore

How it began, Framestore 1986

I had a conversation with someone I hadn't seen for a long time last evening. We talked about who was doing what and where and the changes we'd seen and experienced in the 30-odd years since we last met. One of the biggest strands of conversation was, inevitably, technology and the way it has transformed not just design but everything else, which brings me to the above.

 

My best friend on Central's MA Information Design course was a chap called, Mike McGee. His area of study was this new fangled thing called computer graphics. I had no idea what he was going on about most of the time, but, like a kindly uncle indulging a toddling niece, he never once threw me a pitying stare or called me a dullard. (Would you have dared, Mike?) He was evangelical in his belief in 'this' technology and he 'knew' that it would change everything.

 

A year or so after Central, Mike called me to tell me that he was part of a group who were setting up something called, Framestore, and would I like to design their corporate identity? (We didn't talk about brand identities at that time.) So I did. It was a literal representation. A low-tech foil to the new and cutting-edge tech nature of it. A kit of parts, which could be used together (above) or separately. It was bold, in-your-face, unapologetic and very different to anything else at the time. Just like them.

 

Back to the conversation.

My friend hadn't heard of Framestore, so I reeled-off the list of films they've worked on and won Oscars for and his jaw dropped a little. And it made me think. It's not often that you get to play a very small part in history. Get to see something grow and move from a couple of rooms in Earlham Street to Hollywood and beyond. It pulled the passage of time and change of pace into sharp focus. And it made me think about how Mike framed the future for me all those years ago, but I was looking out of a different window.

Life is smelling of Aqua Manda...again!

 The Times, today, 25/10/13.

After the bad news comes the totally fab-tastic I'm still in love with Donny Osmond news. Aqua Manda is back! Yay!

Some two years ago I wrote about this scent. Just seeing the bottle on an episode of The Sweeney brought back more memories than any photo album ever could.

Suddenly I feel much younger and a little happier.
Isn't that the way brands are supposed to work?

Aqua Manda: OMG! Mexborough Grammar School 1975!

        
Why was I watching Jack and George batter down some "slag's" door at 6.30am? Sarah Montague. It was her turn to sit in the big chair and her over-enunciation and total absence of interrogation skills (like witnessing a hamster 'offer-out' next door's Rottweiler) makes both my teeth and hair curl, which would be self-defeating, since at that time of the morning I'm usually running the GHD's through it. It was company I didn't have to share the facilities with.

The Sweeney: a socio-economic photo-fit. Every domestic adornment: the Crying Blue Boy; Auntie Betty's house in Harlington; Joker's Wild; Homepride flour graders; Caramac biscuits; Embassy coupons; Heinz Beans and Pork Sausages; and avocado green - lots of it. Every car: the Ford siblings, Granada and Capri – did we really think they were so cool and play that spotting game? Every item of clothing: cheesecloth shirts and flares – never throwing them away - can't anyhow; they're the boomerangs of high street couture. And on the "slag's" dressing table sat the distinctive Deco brown glass bottle of Aqua Manda.

Aqua Manda: Mexborough Grammar School 1975. We all wore it; our skunk-like trails merging to form one giant invisible stink-cloud that permeated the entire school. Why did we all want to be the same?

So many memories were being let out on day-release.

And then came the most persuasive exhibit illustrating just how far we've come and why we'll be in no hurry to go back: a branch of MACE in all its GUM-esque glory (it made we feel very moist eyed about Tesco) complete with a hanging banner near the checkout proclaiming, "We give Green Shield Stamps."

Green Shield Stamps: Doncaster Watergate Centre; ABC Cinema; Chelsea Girl; The Arndale Centre and that mad semi-pornographic gold statue of 'The Lovers' we used to take the 'p' out of.

For those not of a certain age, Green Shield Stamps (GGS) were a kind of prehistoric Clubcard. You had a book into which you stuck the stamps, how many you got each shop depended on how much you spent, and the books became progressively Dairylea-shaped as they got full. These were then exchanged for whatever you had set your heart on in the GGS catalogue. The barmy bartering rate meaning that a new cruet set would require the pulping of forestland the size of Bluewater to provide the necessary books. Night's in flicking through the GGS and Embassy catalogues!

There are those who think that the use of retro references is lazy. I disagree. Used creatively, even the haziest reference can prove to be very clever and effective indeed. (Check out Gordon's 'Yes you can' campaign. See what I mean?) They provide us with a direct channel to the heart and the means with which to tap into the emotions locked within memories. 

I remember reading a quote from a well-known comedian in which he slated (rather peevishly) Peter Kay. He said that Kay doesn't do comedy; he does 'remembering'. There's something in that, but it works. And it continues to work. His shows sell out as soon as they are announced and his DVD's and books are record-breaking best sellers I seem to recall. It seems everyone wants to re-taste Rolla-Cola.

Sometimes our best memories are the things we can't remember. We need a spark, someone or something to draw them out, just like the newspaper and shovel my gran used to put across the fireplace to draw the fire. (What would HSE make of that today?) That's Peter Kay's genius.

And it’s no accident that his material is heavy on brands, because brands are the very best accelerants. They are conversational firelighters. They make people glow, just as Jack and George made me glow, all day, just like the Ready Brek Kid: Reginald Molehusband; Pineapple Chunks...

Dr. Martens: prime for a kicking?

The Times, today, 25/10/13

People buy things. Brands, companies, buildings and so on. And when they do one wonders what will happen. If you're working for a company which is bought by a behemoth, you wonder if the company you bought into will survive. In common parlance, will they f*ck it up? Sanitise it, merge and dovetail it to the point where it means nothing at all? After all, why buy something for its specialness and then homogenise it? But they do.

Which brings me to this. DM's. 
OK, they began life as a German product but they're as British as fish and chips, deep-fried Mars Bars and Alan Partridge. They've been sold to an investment group, Premira. That in itself is a worry, since history is littered with stories about investors who bought something that meant a lot to others but nothing to them except money and so they screwed it up because they had no real empathy with what they had bought. One recent example is that of Little Chef, which has featured several times in this blog.

They should be very careful with this one. DM's are not mere shoes. They are the keepers of souls, lives, beliefs, times, fashion history, happiness, tragedy...for many, they're soulmates. They don't just contain feet. They lace together people around the world who love this product...have grown-up with this product. They'd better show some respect.

Heritage. In this climate, what does that mean?

Her parents were probably born in 1972.

This waitress from, Maxwell's, a modest grub-factory in a fantastic location, opposite the Apple Store in Covent Garden, on an (undoubtedly) well-earned break got me thinking.

I was struck by the loud and proud 'since 1972' embroidered on her shirt. It made me chuckle because I live in a city where it's difficult to walk down a street and not see an 'established in 1659, 1597, 1473' sign and so on: this is an ancient city. It made me wonder how we define heritage and longevity in these strange economic times. 

In the UK we have Blue Plaques on buildings, placed by National Heritage, to signify that persons of historical importance lived there, or that something of importance happened there. Perhaps we need a new strand, that being something to acknowledge the businesses who rode the fiscal Helter Skelter of the last 30 years and emerged without being sick.

Making a total hashtag of it

Independent, today, 22/10/13

Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair on Twitter yesterday and making, as usual, a total hashtag of it. What do you do when the biggest clown in your circus is the CEO? From an employee perspective how does that feel? He's like the balloon performer you book for your nipper's birthday party, who, instead of making dogs, produces polychloroprene meat and two veg. He's as toxic as some of the stuff in the back of your fridge. Time he was binned.

Expressing herself...

You're an established corner shop, nothing fancy, and then the behemoth moves in over the road. In this case, on New Cavendish Street. What do you do? 

That's right! You indulge in a bit of piss-taking to underscore
your credentials and longevity and to make sure the interloper knows that you won't throw in the towel. I suspect that the locals played their part in this, which is good and apt, because as Tesco knows, every little helps. Lol!

Rendered.

I am fortunate in being able to say that I did my BA at Ravensbourne, a place where (if nothing else) one learned an awful lot about type. Back in the Jurassic age we hand-rendered (that means draw type by hand using a Rotring pen over cell or tracing paper from a Monotype typesheet featuring the typeface of your choice) the type for our posters or whatever, which is unimaginable to those at the younger end of the scale reading this. Computers didn't exist then and photocopiers were at a premium, so we did everything by hand, or we used Letraset. Or we knocked out a bit of calligraphy. And we spent an awful lot of time learning how to set hot metal and then we used that. I love type.

Around London and other places, beautiful, grand and expensive houses, traditionally have sign written numbering and lettering. Some are superbly done and others less so. If you've ever watched a signwriter at work you'll understand my unabashed admiration for them. Walking through Mayfair yesterday I saw the following.

 

 

And then I saw this.
Rendered speechless!

There are no more words.

This banking thing is out of proportion two.

In the dark days before the National Lottery we had other things to waste our money on. The pools for one, the gee-gee's for another, one-armed bandits and my personal fave, Spot the Ball, in which one had to mark an 'x' where you thought the ball was on a shot from a football match or indeed another sporting occasion.



Pre-digital entertainment. Eat your heart out, Grand Theft Auto.

I've created a design and branding-based modern day variant. I give you, Spot the Signage. Dah-da!

TSB at the junction of Holborn and Southampton Row.

 

Yes, it's the newly rebranded TSB again. Now don't get the wrong idea, I don't have it in for them. They didn't diddle me out of my pocket money when I was a nipper, thus seriously curtailing my ability to buy copies of Whizzer and Chips, or scoff myself silly on Aztec bars. No. I'm wondering why the signage is so hopelessly out of proportion to the building it's sitting on. Obviously some twonk has ordered standard sized signage and used it willy-nilly and it looks ridiculous. If this is their idea of budgeting then it's a false economy, because they'll end up doing it again.

 

Tut, tut! less than a month old and already such a checkered history.

 

The Canadians got this (wo)man

We're all branded.
I'm a Brit, so I'm supposed to be reserved (haaa!) and superior. If you're American, then you're brash and boastful (allegedly). French? You're rude. Italian? The same. Irish? A right laugh. Australian? A bit raw round the edges but a good sort. Scottish? Totally incomprehensible but hospitable. And the Canadians? For some reason they're boring. Everyone says so, so it must be true.

I've lost count of the number of times when helping visitors in London find what they're looking for (and providing an impromptu history lesson because I always go the extra mile for Brand Britain) I've been asked if I'm British. And on replying in the affirmative they always look surprised, because I'm "open", "friendly", "loud" and so on. They have an expectation. An expectation based on folklore. On a single encounter, or a second, third, fourth-hand experience. So then we're all branded as being this or that. It's all bunkum, of course. Well, for the most part.

Walking though Mayfair recently I bumped into these three Canadian Naval Officers and being struck by their smartness, I asked if I might take a photo of them. They obligingly stopped, but the chap on the far left (being the most junior of the three) seemed to be unsure as to whether he was required. On spying that his name was, Pile, I told him to 'pile-in', which they though was hilarious. They were such funny chaps and good sports. So when I teasingly asked them which part of the States they were from, they faked a flounce. So funny. The most senior chap leading the other two guffawing guys off and leaving the alfresco diners who had watched the scene unfold in giggle-fits. Not so boring after all then. 

And so the moral of the story is two-fold:
1. Every encounter matters.
2. I must stop picking up sailors in Mayfair.

Pile-in, Pile (left).

"States!" "We're outta here!" Nice chaps.

 

Prêt à Cri

We all have our favourite examples of brand mangling. You know, where someone gets ever so slightly carried away and injects a little bit too much of themselves into their work environment. It's usually either because they've done it off their own bat, or it's the result of someone's desire to create their own personal fiefdom and in doing so they skew, distort and water down the brand and – on occasion – decimate it.

Transgressions can range from clipart notices (replete with those vile and infantile cartoon figures and characters, sun and starbursts and the Smiley face) 'designed' by someone in the office and plonked on the shop floor or pasted onto the windows. (Fitness First in Charing Cross station does a good line in that stuff.) To 'Greengrocer Bold' handwritten signs stuck on very expensive and beautifully designed doors and interiors – often misspelt – thus adding insult to injury. To customisation and highly personalised interpretation of corporate and brand guidelines in regional outposts of organisations, inflicted by those determined to make their mark, rather like a dog marking their territory. (In my experience, this is much more prevalent when HQ is based in London.) And my personal favourite, the sugar-paper lovers who imagining themselves to be back in primary school adorn the brand environment with collages of photos of the last company 'do' and clipart and all within eyeshot of the customer and often at the expense of the expensively produced materials lying beneath. 

But I've never come across anything as destructive as the impromptu B&Q-esq tableau abomination created by the manager of this branch of Pret A Manger on Fetter Lane. I first encountered it yesterday morning. I told him what I did and remarked that it wasn't what I understood Pret's brand to be about. He agreed and said that his manager had approved it and he described it as a special place where special customers can try out new products. I describe it as a sackable offence. The visual language of Pret A Manger is about clean lines and a pallet of certain materials and surfaces to underscore hygiene and trust factors. Surfaces you could eat your dinner off, which is the whole point. Velvet flock curtains, static inducing cushions and tablecloths and what looks like odds and ends from Next's last sale, don't do Pret any favours.

Do head office know? I doubt it.
And if they do, what the hell are they up to?

 

The altar of very bad taste.

For those of you who have never visited a Pret, their interiors were originally

all brushed steel and latterly a fusion of wood (warmth/please stay) and tiles (we're clean).

This is as foreign to Pret as a big dog turd would be atop of your sandwich.

You can see the visual anomaly in this picture. Farcical..

This banking thing is all out of proportion...

So TSB leave the Lloyds stable and spend a fair bit of wonga on a rebranding regime, which of course means new signage, part of which I accidentally nicked (and returned) a couple of weeks ago.

The shot above is of a branch mid-way down Holborn. I spied it yesterday. It's a disgrace. Nice signage, and then some buffoon creates a stick-on thing to cover the area around the ATM on the right, which is contrary to what is happening on the left. What a dog's dinner. Did someone in procurement get the printers to knock something up? Because if it's the Frankenstien-child of an internal design unit, or heaven forfend, a designer, they should be fired.

As we say in Blighty: buggered already!

Faithless? Not me.

Few things from our early lives stay with us. Likes and passions come and go: Bay City Rollers on Monday and David Cassidy by Saturday. Allegiances and devotions switch and fade: Everton 'til I die! But in reality only until Alan Ball went to Arsenal: Arsenal 'til I die! But sometimes you get caught up in something which ends up running through you like a stick of rock, dictating attitudes and behaviours and making you forever an active or passive ambassador for something the values and attributes of which, once lived, are never ever forgotten.

Monday marked the 40th anniversary of the first all-nighter at Wigan Casino and all over the land circle skirts and Oxford bags will have been neatly pressed and donned to mark the occasion. I didn't go anywhere to celebrate, but I had a bit of a shuffle around to Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes' classic, Get Out. R. Dean Taylor's, Ghost in my House and Esther Phillips', What a Difference a Day Makes, amongst

Essential dance floor kit for smooth moves.

others — making talc-angels on the floor as I spun around and ignoring the kids from Fame staring at me from the 3rd floor of The Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. (Eat your heart out would-be hoofers!)

Northern Soul. For most of the 70s it ruled my world. It fashioned what I wore, where I went, how I danced, who I was friends with; it really was a way of life and for many it still is. It never fades away. One of the sweetest proofs of this can be seen on YouTube, wherein a dressing-gown and PJ-clad mum is persuaded on the morning of her 50th birthday to soul dance for a £50 bet. 

What wasn't to like? The sounds were eclectic, the beat and pace being the identifying features and, looking back, I realise that it pandered to the adolescent need to be different, in that the more obscure your record collection the more respected you were. The charts! Pah! Alan Freeman can take a running jump.

We shared with our cousins,The Mods, a love of heraldry, and our clothes and accoutrements, be they a bowling bag, shirt, or a Vespa, became a canvas on which we could display our colours as each club you belonged to or all-nighter attended was thereafter forever commemorated by virtue of the embroidered badge sewn onto your bag or slim-fit cardigan.
They were the most graphic of movements.
      
And the clothes! 
Blimey did people look smart! There was a uniformity to the look, but customisation lay in the flourishes you added (buttons, badges etc) and in the way you wore it. So made-to-measure suits were teamed with crisply ironed bowling shirts, Fred Perry's and Ben Sherman's. And who could forget Harrington jackets and Oxford Bags, the width of which could be anything up to 18 inches (and if unpicked would provide sufficient fabric to run-up a circle skirt) and the weight of which was trebled by dint of the dozens of buttons sewn onto the back pockets. Bowling shirts, cap-sleeved 'T' shirts and vests allowed ease of movement on the dance floor. And footwear. Platforms, Brogues (with segs) and Chelsea Boots. Bowling shoes, mochassins and beetle-crushers for dancing.

And the moves!
The athletic and balletic qualities of Northern Soul dancing are a wonder to behold and, interestingly, the blokes were always the best and most enthusiastic dancers. Watching some of the links I've provided and others you will find, it's not difficult to see how Northern Soul dovetails into hip-hop, break-dancing and disco. The strength and fitness required to be able to perform some of those moves is breathtaking and if we made it compulsory in schools the obesity problem would simply dissolve away. The moves once learned are never forgotten (back to our birthday girl above) and they're likely to resurface in the most unlikely places: supermarkets in my case (and it seems I'm not the only one, take a look at this chap in Japan) when someone in charge of the music knob has an unexpected bout of good taste and plays a 'tune'. Coded!

A recent feature film Northern Soul The Film contains some truly fantastic dance sequences produced by veteran 'soulies', professional dancers and (encouragingly) very young converts. Perhaps the latter 'found' soul or it's an adopted brand, rather like the Brillo pads you buy because your parents did. And there continues to be a sizeable market in Soul fashions and all-weekenders at various holiday camps around the country have always enjoyed high attendance.

To commemorate the anniversary mentioned above, BBC2 will be showing a documentary about the Northern Soul movement as part of its Culture Show strand at 10pm this evening. And if you're stationed elsewhere in the world, you can now use the BBC iPlayer service to catch up. Do watch.

Northern Soul. It's a way of life.
Who knows, it might become yours too.

Keep the Faith!