If you've ever been to one - or even if you haven't but you've chanced upon a Corries album in a charity shop - you'll know that folk gigs are not the places to go if you want to hear clothes discussed or fashions dissected or get any sort of style advice at all.
You'd get more of that kind of chat on a nudist beach or in a seminary after lights out. But it happened on Monday at a performance by august folkie Martin Carthy, one of a series of concerts being mounted at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre by the Soundhouse Organisation. I know because I was there, one more punter in a hand-knitted sweater supping hand-crafted artisan beer through a straggly beard.
Carthy, if you know your folk family trees, is the father of musician Eliza Carthy and the husband of Mercury Prize-nominated singer Norma Waterson, a scion of the famous Waterson folk clan which also includes brother Mike and sister Lal. Mike Waterson died in 2011, and as Carthy prepared to sing a song his brother-in-law had taught him, he told a story he'd heard from him. This is where we get to the clothes.
The Watersons are from Hull and many of Mike Waterson's schoolmates, enticed by the prospect of good wages, had enlisted for service on some of the last whaling ships to sail from that once great fishing port. As Carthy told it, Waterson would sometimes go out drinking with his friends on their return from these dangerous expeditions. And not only would he find them flush with money, he'd find them decked out in exquisitely-tailored drape coats in the sort of pastel shades you didn't see much in the pubs of northern England in the late 1950s.
It's hard to picture and even harder to credit. I've spent hours this week trying to do both, digging around on the internet in an attempt to unearth more information about this odd trend. So far I've uncovered nothing, but I suppose it's to be expected. Folk songs being part of an oral tradition, it's likely the recollections and stories associated with them are just as maddeningly nebulous. No cameraphones to document the lads' nights out in those days, of course. No Pinterest, no Instagram.
The closest I can get, then, is an educated guess: this peculiar 1950s subculture which had whaling as its source and Liberace as its style icon was another example of male, working class dandyism and was essentially an amped-up version of a look which was popular at the time, that of the Teddy Boy. I could be wrong, of course.
Here's the best bit, though, and this is definite: on one of these drinking sessions, Waterson encountered a pastel-coloured suit-wearing young man who also had on a single black glove. Thought Michael Jackson dreamed that one up? Think again. When Waterson asked about it, the lad whipped off the glove to reveal his hand. Three of his fingers were the same colour as the glove. "If they go green," he beamed, "they have to come off."
Now that's what I call real style. Someone should write a song about it.
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