I think the main thing that's kicked off my idea for Leeds and how it thinks it needs to be cool is the arrival of these monstrosities as seen on Thunder Thighs so fetchingly above. Shiny leggings. I've only noticed these in the past few months hit the streets of Leeds but I have to say, and I think most people are with me here, they are ridiculous. Not only in gold and silver, but even the standard black. Makes the girl wearing it look like she's just off to audition for Fame, or Cats in the West-End. They are absolutely ludicrous. I saw a girl the other day in a silver leather jacket and a pair of silver leggings. She looked like Jimmy Somerville in that You Make me Feel (Mighty Real) video. That one where he's massively camping it up on the moon. (Genius vid, ridiculous clothes)
I used to be a busker in Leeds city centre. Not a glamorous job but it paid the bills for a while. It also gave me about six hours a day to stand around and do my favorite thing. 'People watching'.
I've always been a keen people watcher, and growing up in the Black Country this usually revolved around pointing at chavs with skinheads but a bit of hair left at the front in a tuft wearing full trackies and socks pulled over them at the ankle, or shaking my head at tramps who've passed out in shop doorways and shat their pants. Of course these characters also appear in Leeds, especially on Briggate on a Saturday afternoon. Now I'm not saying it's everyone in Leeds, as you get out of the city centre everything slowly starts to resemble normality, but there's something about Leeds city centre fashion I find intriguing, and somewhat ridiculous. It tries too hard! So hard in fact that at times I think the circus is coming to town.
You see the difference between Wolverhampton and Leeds is we never thought we were cool. We never had to be cool, we don't need to. We like beer, take aways, sex, football, catchy songs that everyone can sing along to and occasionally going somewhere warm on holiday. We never attempted to be anything else, and I don't think we ever cared about it. In fact in some ways we are behind the rest of the country with fashion and music, eg. I think skinny jeans hit Wolves about two years ago!But that's what we are like, and we couldn't give a toss to be honest.
Coming from this to West Yorkshires finest having thought that everyone was a bit like me came as a bit of a shock......
.....Leeds thinks for some reason more than any other major city I've ever been to it has to be cool as fuck in order to be liked by everyone else. Therefore it's city centre fashion has to adopt the guise to show this off to the rest of the U.K. apparently this on occasion requires dressing like a shit B movie spacewoman, or a backing dancer from the MC Hammer video archive.
Now, I'm not just being harsh to the place. I love Leeds, it's brilliant, but it's definitely not as cool as it thinks it is. I think some people in Leeds think we are living in some kind of Neo-Carnaby street in the 60's Sub-Londonite Utopia and therefore have to dress as ludicrously as possible in order to fit this 'cool' image they are desperately trying to convince everyone about.
I don't think people that actually live in Leeds realise what's going on. I've always found people from here appear blinkered to the negatives of the city and it's social culture, music and general attiitude becasue they are trying so desperately to be seen as cool by everyone else. I think this inadvertantly has let them slide in a few areas that other less cool towns and cities thrive on.
You see there are some things that none towns (something I'll discuss in another rant later) and none-cool cities really do better than Leeds does. Leeds appears to have let these things slide while it's doing it's hair in the mirror. You have to bear with me here, obviously this is me, so a lot of these are food gripes but we'll get them out in the air:
1. Kebabs - A kebab to a drunken man is like an angel. It's a ray of light at the end of the night. Such a paradise exists in Wolves where back in the day my mates Andy and Dave and I like a shit version of the three kings in the Bible would leave Blast off on a Saturday night and follow the star, well more likely the crowd of idiots falling over down to Chapel Ash, haven of all that is good in the kebab world. Brum, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh, they've all got similarly brilliant kebab house areas.
Leeds is different. Basically kebabs in Leeds are shite. Absolutely terrible. So bad in fact that I barely know anyone that ever eats them which has forced them into this weird pizza culture. Pizzas are big news here. I reckon there's more pizza shops in Leeds than there are anything else. This is solely because the kebab is not even an option here. I think the meat is made from rat. The chips up here in general are pale greasy horrible things and they don't do sauces properly so pizzas are the big draw at the end of the night. Pizzas in Leeds are absolutely amazing and also comically cheap. For a pollo special in Leeds I pay £4.50. I ordered the same pizza in Sheffield a few months ago. A tenner!...And it was far far shitter. Leeds could quite possibly be the unknown pizza capital of the U.K.
When you order a kebab in Leeds you get two options, both are given at the same time, it's not even a sentence 'Saladchillisauce?' Neither are worth it. the salad here will basically be a tonne of soggy old onion that's been lying around for about ten hours, and for some reason raw grated carrot. It's just dire, and the chilli sauce? Well that's something else. They seem to have this stuff in all the kebab shops here. It consists of what appears to be chopped tomatoes blended with a load of chilli powder and served with a ladle from a metal pot. It's weird. it doesn't work and I can't believe it ever caught on.. Shite. They don't even have those green chillis in most kebab shops. It's fully lame...Oh, and the chicken kebab meat. I think there's about three skwewered chicken meat shops in the whole city. Usually you get this odd dry chicken tikka, also out of a metal pot. Crap.
If you're still bothering to read this then you're probably wondering what kebab shops have to do with being cool. Well it's this....
There are a few passable kebab shops in Leeds, but people here are too cool to call them kebab shops, they are all a bit too Internationalist so they have to be something better than kebab shops. Now people don't have kebabs for £4 with chips and chilli and mayo, they have a Shawarma for £8!! It's not a kebab, it's a fucking shawarma apparently, you can't call it a kebab. That's not cool. It's not the Leeds way. Basically what a shwarama is is er..It's a kebab that's been given this poncy foreign name because were in Leeds and it has to be cooler than just a kebab house. Fucking Shawarma.. Pretentious bollocks....But at least you can get a green pickled chilli!
2.Curry, Leeds are terrible at it, but I'll save that for another spiel because it's a long rant. Put it this way, Leeds folk haven't got a fucking clue, I had a chicken tikka masala here once, hot as molten lava spicewise and brown in colour. Serve that in most cities and the waiter would get it on his head
3.Music. Leeds has spent so long trying to be cutting edge musically that it's actually destroying its own scene. if you write normal catchy pop songs in Leeds they won't look twice at you. You have to be some kind of weird freak to be considered part of the cool crew. Anyone that's anyone that plays in Leeds will notice that you only actually get any attention as a Leeds act when you play out of Leeds. It speaks for itself really..Bollocks. It's sapped its own coolness by trying to be so avant garde that noone else gives a shit. A few bands break through this, Pulled Apart By Horses, Kaiser Chiefs, Pigeon Detective. The first of which were totally embraced by the 'scene' in Leeds and to be fair have done pretty well. I used to work with the guitar player, good lad, although my initial thoughts were what a fucking racket, and why the fuck would you want to have a song about punching a lion in the face? They've grown on me somewhat. Their riffs are ace, and if I can get past the horrible hanger on scenesters that surround them at local gigs I might bother to go and see them live again soon. The other two bands are absolutely hated by 'the scene' for some reason. Not very fair I don't think. Both bands have done well. Some people need to crawl out of their own arses put down their Shwarma and appreciate that these Leeds lads have done well.
I'm fed up of trying to be cool for now. I wear cheap aviators, have a shite phone and listen to classic rock music. In fact I don't think I'm even cool enough for this thread. I don't even own a pair of those flip flops with a Brazil flag on............
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