This week we’re in Paris for international fashion and menswear affairs. Last week, we rounded off our week by indulging in a trip down memory lane a little closer to home, paying our annual dues at the altar of Stone Roses. Then today, here we are looking at lemons. Can you find a link? We’re sure if you squeeze hard enough you’ll see it.
The Roses are famously linked with the yellow-tinged citrus fruit, it featuring on everything from clothing to their debut album cover itself. Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of messers Brown, Squire, Mounfield and Wren will point out the band’s lemony reverence doesn’t end there, with said fruit featuring in the lyrics too. You know the ones, don’t you?
Anyway, Paris, Stone Roses, lemons… it’s said the lemons on the cover and in the lyrics to Bye Bye Badman are a reference to a conversation Ian Brown had with a French hitchhiker, who told the singer how protesters in the 1968 Paris riots sucked lemons as an antidote to the tear gear being used to quell their disquiet. Hardened disciples of the band will know all this, indeed I can almost feel the presence over my shoulder of the OG music scenester and co-founder of this here publication, tutting and telling me I’ve not quite got my facts 100% right. People love the Roses and rightly so. They’re precious about them.
But as someone who was still out on my space hopper when their seminal first album hit the charts in 1989 (Ok, I was 11, maybe not space hopper, maybe my bmx) my real appreciation for the band came much later. And I’ve been playing catch-up ever since. You can get too much of a good thing, so I save this masterpiece for one airing a year, played loudly and fully appreciated from start to finish.
Paris beckons this coming week and while the lemons won’t play much of a role, maybe we’ll give Adam from Druthers a polite email asking if he’ll send us some new boxer shorts to mark this strange occasion.
The New York brand just released them and coincidentally, while thinking about Paris and listening to neo-psychedelic classics we found ourselves spotting these on the Druthers website.
We know google is listening to us, but a pair of undies somehow acting as a metaphor for us thinking about Paris while listening to a band refer to Paris via their lyrics about lemons was too much.
Instead of thinking about it too much, how about you click here and sweeten up your underwear drawer.
