All in your Jeans.


There’s a point in the early hours of the morning when jeans become noisy.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment, but it tends to be when you sneak into your bedroom after a gig, at 2am, in pitch darkness, trying to be quiet so as not to wake your wife.

It’s at this time that denim is at its swishiest. It doesn’t make that much racket during the day. When I walked through Hitchin town centre this morning, the streets were packed. Most of these people were wearing jeans. Despite their abundance, I didn’t hear a single example of thigh against thigh. Perhaps I wasn’t listening hard enough.

What is it about the dead of the night that makes walking in jeans so dinful? Maybe it’s a sound we’ve got so used to during the day, we just blank it out. It’s like Hoppípolla by Sigur Rós: it’s on television so often we never hear it.

Thank God I wasn’t wearing cords. Then I would have worked up some serious friction.

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