Shag! Tits! Erection! Knickers! Explosions! Kaboom! ETC!!

Did that get you attention? Good. Because today, if I may, I'd like to talk to you about pricks.

For once, when in discussion about pricks, it's not in reference to those who come twilight curdle like confused little turds outside Bargain Booze on their BMX's looking as though they'd struggle between them to spell the phrase 'lower than average I.Q', nor do I refer to the life-giving appendage anatomically inflicted upon one half of the population, to be aesthetically inflicted upon the other. No. Unfortunately, I am referring to someone much closer to home....You probably know one. Yes, you, with your carefully cropped inner circle of acquaintance, perhaps even like one - perish the thought – and here you were merrily oblivious to their overpowering, eye-gushing levels of prickness (not a word, I checked).

'Twas a favour to a friend, you see, to hop in his car and make the never-Google-Streetmapped-by-stoned-people-for-fun skip down the M18 from Doncaster to Sheffield (if you've never made this journey yourself you are lacking any true definition of the word 'mmmnngh...') to see his cousin's band play in a cheeky little retro dive somewhere near the university that wasn't once a polytechnic. All well and good, as venues like this with the unenviable task of turning profit by staging live bands rely on people just wandering in to see what's on, and for their services I am happy to part with six pounds safe in the knowledge that in the long run it is Sport Relief that will suffer a net loss of six pounds, not I. Call that a Corden Tax, you bastards.

Approaching the door to the club my friend spots his cousin, lead singer and one half of his band, supping on a Red Stripe. Now I admit I was ill-prepared for him, having lived a sheltered life amongst people with frequent access to mirrors and honest opinions, but the stranger's appearance actually made me point and laugh out loud in his face. As someone who is extremely prone to retrospective social guilt I now regret this profoundly, but he honestly did look like a complete pillock. Envisage:

HAIR: Garth from Wayne's World raped by an embarrassed Agnetha from ABBA
GLASSES: early gold Richard Whiteley-chic
POLONECK: black, tight, liberally adorned with gold necklaces, worn under:
SUIT: grey, presumably more than one previous victim
SHOES: Spatz, buffed, black and white, feeling very sorry for themselves
IRONY: none

Inside the venue things got worse, and quickly at that. There was the chap wearing what appeared to be nought but an intricate arrangement of feather boas, the Wayne Hemmingway lookalike who wore trousers so tight you could see what he was going to have for breakfast tomorrow, a flailing glam mane in a creased velvet smoking jacket, men wearing berets – BERETS – with frilly trousers to complete the presumably desired look; it was like the acid trip from Fear and Loathing with innumerable added pretensions. Each person in there looked as though they'd all been caught inside the blast radius of a devastating explosion at a SCOPE shop and had just crawled from the wreckage with all the garish paraphernalia still thermally fused to their skin.

But far be it from me - an admittedly balding chap in his mid twenties badly in need of a shave - to comment on fashion. I thought I may be the one in the wrong and actually found myself feeling quite depressed, realising I was now so out of touch I didn't recognise street couture even when it blew a lungful of Drum tobacco in my face and talked about pate in the gents. Sullen and old, awaiting a free bus pass and watertight undies, I waited for the bands. Well, fuck me sideways.

The first was visually startlingly reminiscent of Dave Lister from Red Dwarf's band Smeg and the Heads, those that brought us 'Om', a song which seemed to be painstakingly repeated verbatim here. Next up was a quartet (half of whom were the beret wearing imbeciles dutifully hated earlier, on preposterously superfluous percussive duties) whose female vocalist had decided to write lyrics in French to appear clever, only her French wasn't very good, so one song's choral refrain consisted solely of 'voulez vous aller a la plage avec moi?', mewed meekly and sans-irony as if delivering the profound message of a tortured suffragette, which inexplicably met with esoteric nodded approval by every spiky little tossbank in attendance. I am honestly not making any of this up. Then it was my mate's cousin's band who, to be fair, knew how to pen a tune, but insisted on defecating all over them with swathes of sticky synths making every one sound like Future Sailors. I heard his previous band who got a bit of airplay on Radio 1 before they went belly-up (the band, unfortunately, not the station) and they were a decent hard-working indie troupe; now he's dressed up like a simpering extra from an episode of The Prisoner, over-egging a wobbly electro pudding that will only end up making someone very sick indeed. For fuck's sake.

Watching these abominations to music, youth, fashion, irony, everything, we were honestly waiting for the lights to come up, the cameras to come out and some beardy bloke with a child's hand to shove a microphone in our grills but, alas, the tiny hand never came, leaving me with the bitter realisation that these people are not only for real but so far up their own arses it's a wonder they don't fold in on themselves like a bowline sailing knot. Style over substance, without style, leaves what exactly? A void, like a smug piss-filled cherry condom, or a silent fart trapped in a Waitrose carrier bag.

What gives me the right to judge, though? You may be thinking that I am just some inconsequential tosser spewing down petty diatribes from the top of an imaginary ivory tower safe from refute behind the digital anonymity of the internet, and there is admittedly some truth to that, you perceptive bastard, you. Whether they look like utter tools or not is of course entirely subjective, but as a collection of bands – namely, some of some of the worst bands ever inflicted upon the sensitive clicking arrangement of bones found in the mammalian inner ear - they cannot back up their, let's say, 'bold' clothing statements with the quality requisite in order to be such insufferable tits.

My girlfriend - a Londonite, if you will - tells me Shoreditch is like this every day, filled to the brim with wankers so impressed with their own brilliance they would pleasure themselves right there in the street if evolution had only gifted them a few less ribs, and subsequently I have absolutely no inclination to go there. Because music happens to be something I hold dear, and these straight-faced arseholes piss all over it using the banners of music and bands as merely extensions of their 'crazy' anti-conformist, whispy-'tached necessities, feigning interest and ability in music in order to promote themselves above their peers in some arbitrary pissing contest in which a 'niche' may serve to atone for and/or distract from an alabaster-dull personality and a perennial need JUST TO BE SEEN.

Dressing like a dick when everyone else does likewise is still conformity, dears, it's just another uniform, isn't it? I know we're all dicks a little when we're young, because the liberation of a lack of compulsory proximity to a school's social doctrine finally allows the individual within to materialise, and this isn't usually a problem, except when it presents itself as a Bullingdon Club full of Nathan Barley's idiots, pooh-poohing and frowning upon those not in the know.

So, despite the vast likelihood that all this is just the inevitable materialisation of age-related bitterness, SCOPE Shoredicks - just fuck off.

Posted In Gobshout Classics, Jul 12 2011. Words - Luke