Mods, rockers, skinheads, hippies, punks, goths – whether you subscribed to a specific subculture or not (maybe you’re more a fields of wheat type), the chances are that you ‘grew out of it’. Joined the rest of the norms, and moved forward into a more sedate look and life at some point. But that’s not the case for everyone.

Pauline Grace, 51, Goth, Birmingham

Young Pauline

I’m a lecturer, and when I first started working at the university it was constantly assumed that I was a student rather than staff because of how I looked. I’ve been dressing much the same way since the 1980s. I was a huge fan of the New Romantic sound, and the idea that music, fashion, and way of life could be something other than blonde highlighted hair and a suntan was deeply appealing to me.

I was also really influenced by punk even though I was too young for the movement. The anti-authoritarian swagger, and the fact that women were not meant to be pretty or quiet drew me in. I hated school, and was defined by the state as a ‘chronic non-attender’. But I would go to the local library instead and read DH Lawrence or Sylvia Plath. I was never going to be ‘trendy’ or ‘normal’, but my sense of adventure and artistic expression firmly found a home amongst my goth tribe. I loved the gender-bending nature of it, too – some of my boyfriends wore more makeup than me!

Pauline now

I do not give a flying feck what people think about my style

Before I became a lecturer, I was a youth worker, and my appearance helped me build relationships with young people who may also have been considered outsiders. A shared interest in alternative music helped, too. I still listen now to the bands of my youth – Bauhaus, Alien Sex Fiend, the Cure and The Sisters of Mercy.

The sense of freedom that I found in my teenage years has been amplified in my 50’s. I do not give a flying feck what people think about my ‘style’. I dye and cut my own hair, and although my obsession with black has lessened, I am still heavily influenced by the colour, and my old outfits – I still have my first pair of Dr Marten boots. They are in a sad state, but man, have they seen some action!

Ian Blyth, 73, Rocker, Stratford upon Avon

Ian then

I joined the rocker youth culture in 1962 after admiring a Triumph 350 motorcycle. I decided there and then that motorcycling had to play a part in my life. Then came a gradual slide into the world of the leather clad rocker. The jacket and jeans became a recognisable uniform, and identified youths of a like mind throughout the country.

The social scene was changing rapidly at the time, most noticeably the clashes between Mods and Rockers. I was quite happy to bask in the reflected notoriety of lurid press reports of mayhem caused by youths on motorcycles! My first clash with the ‘establishment’ was when I had a job with the Ordnance Survey. I could see nothing wrong with going into work on a Friday in my studded leather jacket and jeans, ready for the off at the start of the weekend. The OS was not quite ready for this though, and after a few months of my obstinately sticking to my unconventional dress code, we parted company.

The bikes and the culture have lasted a lifetime

Now I’m in my 70s, I don’t do group riding anymore, but I still own two bikes, and attend themed meetings at the Ace Café.  I still dress the part, and choose events that reflect the culture I grew up with – the 60s and the Cafe Racer bikers of the time.

Ian now

I have eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren, and while the ‘greats’ are too young to know what drives their great grandad, the grandchildren tell me to go for it. My contemporaries may wonder if I’m getting a little too old to be cavorting about on two wheels, but no one has actually inferred that I should sink sedately into my dotage.

I think the only limitations are my own inhibitions as, unlike in my youth, it concerns me now as to how I am perceived. There’s no rocking and rolling now, and to borrow a line from Blackadder, the days of roaring, rogering, gorging and puking are long gone, if they really existed in the first place. The bikes and the culture have lasted a lifetime though, and I hope will stay with me to the last.

Louise Bolotin, 58, Punk, Manchester

Louise then

At 18 I acquired the leather biker jacket I still wear. It turned 40 on my last birthday, and looks more battered than me. The jacket was a present from my parents, who hated how I looked and threw me out at 16 for dyeing my hair grass green. It’s my second skin and it’s rare I go out without it.

I was 14 in the summer of ’76, when punk splattered its way into public consciousness, and that was the start of cementing my look. I was already dressing myself with charity shop finds as I hated the ugly 70s sartorial norms of hippy flares or Bay City Rollers tartan. Never a girly girl, punk enabled me to be as butch as I pleased, and it pleased me a lot.  I made a lot of my own clothes back then, supplemented with 60s vintage.

My hair is currently metallic purple

In the past I toned down my look a bit for staff jobs, but after turning freelance, I donated the office wear to charity shops and I now dress as I please. My look has evolved over the decades – more grown up and polished, less overt punk but still ‘me’. My base uniform is the biker jacket, skinny jeans (or drainpipes as we called them back then) and Chelsea boots, with a rotating top half of funky print shirts, tunics or hoodies, plus a lot of animal print, although I also still wear my punk mohair from 1979.

Louise later

My hair is currently metallic purple and I get a lot of compliments in the street, from younger people as well as women of my age who sidle up to tell me they wished they had the balls to colour their hair. My husband loves how I look, but I really don’t care what anyone thinks – I’m very comfortable in my skin and dress only to please myself. I like what I see in the mirror. 

Since the first publication of this article, Louise sadly passed away from bowel cancer in 2022. You can read an obituary here. It was noted at her funeral that “she never put up with anything just because convention dictated that she should.” Louise Bolotin, 1961-2022

Chris Wheal, 54, Skinhead, London

Chris then

Riding motorbikes, as I have done since I left home aged 18 on Vespa scooter, means a skinhead cut has always been most practical for me. My look has always had to be compromise between what I wanted and what I could get away with. I once came home with a Mohican and my mum made my sister cut it off, but as I’ve got older, and society has become more accepting of different styles, I compromise less.

My mum taught me to sew when I was young, and I have modified my clothing ever since. I no longer taper cricket whites like I did when I was a teenager, but every new pair of Levis gets the legs taken in to make them into drainpipes.

My brief full-on skinhead spell coincided badly with the association of skinheads with the far right

Throughout my working life I’ve had to conform with suits and ties, but these days offices are full of people in different fashions. I might still smarten up with button-down collar shirts, but the jeans and DMs always get an airing – I first started wearing them at school when I convinced my mum that everyone else did. I do posses a suit, but it’s a Ben Sherman, and I bought a pair of oxblood brogue boots described as ‘Hard Mod/Smart Skin’.

Chris now

My brief full-on skinhead spell coincided badly with the association of skinheads with the far right National Front, so although I’d really got into reggae and ska, people would make the wrong assumptions. Never smart enough to be a Mod, I loved all the bands (I still go to see The Chords UK regularly). I was really a late punk. I saw Belfast punk rockers Stiff Little Fingers for the first time in 1981, aged 15, and last  year I went to Glasgow with my wife to see them two nights in a row.

When I look back and see photos of me in my black jeans and oxblood DMs on my wedding day 27 years ago, I wonder have I been consistent, or just boring? I do know though that by wearing the same clothes for all these years, I have come back into fashion three times…

Read Mark Little’s article on the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Stella Ralfini, 73, Hippy, Hertford

Stella then

My dress style now, at 73, remains psychedelically bold, to express the colour of my hippy soul.

There was never a question of me toning down with age, and as a youngster, my parents loved the ‘Ban the Bomb’, flowers-in-hair young woman that I was. There was a point where I embarrassed my daughter, but these days she regards me as cuckoo but cool.

I am a bit too hippy for most guys though, which affects relationships. Whilst they accept me blinding them with my colourful clothes, they don’t tend to share my wanderlust sense of adventure, and have mostly never lived in a hippie commune, smoked cannabis or protested for world peace like I have, so they find me odd.

I will fight to keep hippy love alive until the day I die

In the 70s, I was working in the music business as personal assistant to the Rolling Stones – I like to think I balanced their wild side with my hippy calm! Earlier this year I published a book called Rock ‘N’ Roll Mayhem 1970, the proceeds of which will benefit people in Africa, because a hippy represents the embodiment of love, something sadly missing in today’s world.

Stella now, in her ‘70s dress

Had it not been for Covid, I would have been attending a very special hippy love gathering in Hyde Park last year.  I would have worn a dress which was made for me in 1970 and has lots of memories attached to it. I wore it when chatting to George Harrison about spiritual teachers in India, and at a party where Cat Stevens was strumming Peace Train.

Imagine droves of folk in their sixties and upwards dressed in hippy threads coming together to picnic, and share world love. That dream may have been temporarily suspended, but it will happen. And I will fight to keep hippy love alive until the day I die.

Kelly-Rose Bradford

The post It wasn’t a phase. I just never grew out of my subculture appeared first on Silver Magazine.

Therefore this is a far from fresh look; but even so, though I may be silver I am not stale yet, because despite everything, I have NOT got off the bus . . . still FURTHER . . . I sit hunkered down in a cafe on the edge of Edge City and I finish it for the second time, an old friend . . . The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test . . . Vale Tom Wolfe 2018 ::::::

I love reading for its own hallucinatory power. Even so there is only a handful of novels that have grabbed me by the synapses and thrown me against the wall. Melville’s colossal Moby Dick; the pure dread of Janet Turner Hospital’s Oyster; Burgess’ dystopian fairytale A Clockwork Orange; Thompson’s terrifying and hilarious Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (my first adult book, 1979) and more recently the mad The Sell Out by Paul Beatty.

And of course Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

This became more than a book to me . . . more a template for my work as an agitprop performance artist prankster

This became more than a book to me and way beyond any sort of bible . . . beyond catastrophe . . . more a template for my work as an agitprop performance artist prankster through the punk years of the late 70s to the dreadful yuppie 80s and the Generation of Swine, to the present-day swamp that is the New Dumb.

I am by no means a student of Tom Wolfe. There are many of his works I ain’t read, but maybe it was my childhood desire to be an astronaut, or maybe it was my late teen desire to rebel that drew me to Wolfe and The Right Stuff, his expose of the early American Space Program, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his expose of the early American LSD program.

Both books dealt with opposite ends of the American Dream. The Super Straight world of the American Astronaut to the Super Freak world of Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters. Both these subjects have informed all my work as an artist, from the sheer prankster joy of bringing civil disobedience to the stage, and the daring bravery that is necessary to take a revolutionary stance while all around the innocence and enlightenment of the 60s and 70s was being stomped by Thatcherism and Reaganism and the reactionary world of profit and the free market.

WTF . . . even the coppers wear Day-Glo NOW . . . KAPOW!

Tom Wolfe dies . . . immediately I am moved to read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test again. I was gifted a first edition copy by my wife Cathy this century as she, more than anyone, was aware of The Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey’s influence on my work. Almost simultaneously this very mag, Silver, approached me to do a review of this classic. In the early 60s in the world of Tom Wolfe’s masterpiece this would have been called ‘beyond coincidence’ — the ‘collective consciousness’ — ‘intersubjectivity’, BUT cynical old 21st-century me knows it’s because I posted condolences to Tom Wolfe on Facebook.

No need for Cosmic Collective Consciousness, our metaphysics has been turned inside out like a gutted animal . . . it’s called the social network . . . nothing cosmic about algorithms . . . pure mathematics . . . like rolling news . . . rolling soullessness 24/7. . . DM me.

WTF . . . even the coppers wear Day-Glo NOW . . . KAPOW!

So . . . a review . . . Ha! I can honestly say I have never seen a review of the Bible or the Quran or the Torah or the Talmud or the Tripitaka or the Upanishads. They are taken as read. As an Anarcho-Utopian Neo Pagan, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is sacred text . . . a masterpiece of New Journalism that looks at the transition from not only beatniks to the birth of hippy, but also the very discovery of LSD itself and its mind expanding abilities to reopen the human doors of perception that modernity was quickly fusing shut with a slam.

An amphetamine-fueled, embedded ride on Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus as it careened and giggled in and out of control down the metaphysical superhighway of modern America

For the new psychedelic generation, Tom Wolfe had quite literally created the beatnik Kerouac’s On the Road on acid. An amphetamine-fueled, embedded ride on Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus as it careened and giggled in and out of control down the metaphysical superhighway of modern America . . . It is a trip, an innovative literary masterpiece capturing those heady Head days of the American Freak that would eventually seep into the collective consciousness of a whole generation and spawn the Hippy Movement, a movement that had the power to warp culture . . . The Counter Culture . . .

WTF . . . even the coppers wear Day-Glo NOW . . . KAPOW!

Reviewing this book creates similar hazards that Wolfe faced when writing his account of Kesey’s adventures with ‘The Pranksters’. How do you describe an LSD trip? How do you describe the first LSD trip? How do you describe a whole commune on LSD before the world even has a whiff of its existence. . ? KAPOW . . . When I read this book at 19 years of age it was all about Kesey and the Pranksters. I was enthralled and wanted to, like Kesey, go beyond acid and spread the enlightenment amongst all. But . . . but . . . but 40 years on?

The reading is all about the genius and bravery of Wolfe to create his own style, an amphetamine stream of consciousness spiked with LSD. Joyce on Acid . . . and by God, hang on tight . . . because it takes all ones intellect and spirituality to Keep up . . .
. . . Keep up
. . . Keep up…

Are you on the bus . . ? Or are you off the bus . . ? KAPOW!

I was born in 1959 and I have never identified as a baby boomer. As a late ‘boomer’. I identify more as a punk than a hippy of yore. Except for these hardcore frontier people, these hipsters who stir a similar feeling that punk did for me as a teenager.

Brave, adventurous pioneers with a sense of danger and fun as they ploughed new cultural furrows. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a story of daring

Brave, adventurous pioneers with a sense of danger and fun as they ploughed new cultural furrows. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a story of daring by those who dared. Only by daring in the face of the Right can they wipe away the smear and the ugly stain of fascism that was seeping back into the culture. Wolfe’s book also comes with a warning. BEWARE THE NEW RIGHT. . .They will stomp or steal every nuance the counter culture creates.

WTF . . . even the coppers wear Day-Glo NOW . . . KAPOW!

So if you haven’t already, come and meet The Pranksters, Babbs, Hassler, Mountain Girl, The Hermit, Gretchin, Mal Function, Cassady (the driver), Augustine Owsley Stanley the Third (the Chemist of the World’s most righteous acid of the day), and of course, Chief Broom, Ken Kesey himself, as he hovers over the cuckoos’ nest as the Neil Armstrong of LSD aboard an old 1939 International Harvester school bus daubed in Day-Glo paint and innocence.

The Pranksters shake the very foundations of conservative modern America off their gourds on LSD, speed and marijuana. It is a trip . . . not only a trip down memory lane but also a trip of possibilities for a future rebellion against the new modern conservative America . . .

Take the Test . . . Take back your freedom . . . KAPOW!

Mark Little

The post Mark Little picks up The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test again and finds… WTF . . . even the coppers wear Day-Glo NOW . . . KAPOW! appeared first on Silver Magazine.