Issue No. 6, Pop - Pretty in Pink Indeed

Andie Walsh worked at a record store called Trax. Her boss, Iona, stapled LP’s to the ceiling as decoration. A child tried to snitch a cassette and Iona shot a staple at him. “This ain’t the public library,” she said.

Mid-eighties Chicago was overcoats and indie rock. School wasn’t school, but being bullied by a rich kid. And work wasn’t work, but sitting behind a counter and turning the pages of a magazine. Andie did that a lot, but I could never figure out which magazine it was.

I know Andie liked fashion, but what music, what movies? She would like the films of the British New Wave, those late-fifties black and white townscapes of kind-hearted young people stuck on the wrong side of the tracks; like Andie, stuck, and the train never comes for London.

Critics argue that for all their contemporaneity, the New Wave filmmakers turned a deaf ear to pop music, relying instead on jazz scores that compromised their progressive intentions with a conservative’s lust for the past.

Funny thing, too, that the New Wave films have no pop music, because where would modern indie music be without the New Wave? Belle and Sebastian’s “The Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner” from Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Smiths’ “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” from Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, the Arctic Monkeys’ “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

In the mid-eighties, a sixteen year-old boy named Mark Taylor sorted out connections between pop music and the New Wave cinema for a fanzine he wrote called Smiths Indeed. Staying up late in his Bristol bedroom, he kept his parents awake as he tried to lay out headlines using Letraset on his typewriter.

It’s possible Andie was reading Smiths Indeed when she should have been shelving new seven-inchers. There were posters for the The Smiths all over Trax and Duckie, the poor boy who loved her, listened to the group when it rained.

H.B. Gilmour wrote a novelization of Pretty In Pink in 1988. I’ve worked with the reference librarians at my local public library but we can’t find it anywhere. Still, my nostalgia will not abate and I’ve stolen a typewriter and a record player so I can spend my bedroom nights writing my own novelization. “If you’ve no world of your own,” John Osborne wrote in Look Back in Anger, “it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.”