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I'm the butt of many jokes in our house, but not having a good memory features prominently amongst them. See also being bald ("do you need a hat, Dad?"), wearing jeans that have elastane in them (they're very comfy but "oh look, he's got the jeggings on again!"), and finding joy in contorted puns ("no-one's laughing except you, you know that, right?")
Which is why it's interesting that I have a very strong, if admittedly not complete, memory of the first time I heard Run DMC. Raising Hell, their third album, was released in the UK in May 1986 and I bought it pretty much immediately after hearing it on the evening show on Radio 1, probably presented by Janice Long, while doing my homework. More listening than homeworking, if I'm honest. I would have been around 14.
I bought the two earlier albums, Run DMC and King of Rock, as soon as funds would allow, and still have and play all three today, despite selling a huge portion of my record collection a few years ago when we needed space at home.
Although I can place myself with confidence, I don't recall the show at all. I
have a hazy feeling it was some kind of interview mixed with live tracks but I
can't find a record of BBC sessions by the band. In passing I did find this kinda
charming
early interview for
the Old Grey Whistle Test, though.
It was common to get live sets from the Montreux Jazz Festival on the telly and radio at that time but the only Run DMC set list I can find listed there is from 1988 which is too late. Perhaps they were playing somewhere in the UK to promote the new album, I don't know.
In any case, the music I was hearing blew me away and Run DMC became my first musical love, followed shortly after by Pop Will Eat Itself, a local band who, in an odd coincidence were booked as a support act on the Run DMC European tour in 1988. It reached Birmingham, at a club called The Hummingbird, in October and I was there, my first ever gig. I bought a t-shirt, of course, and later I bought a cassette bootleg of extraordinarily low quality.
The band are famed for wearing Adidas gear and, although I don't think I knew it at the time I got into them, were sponsored by Adidas. Even before that deal the band wore Adidas Superstar trainers — shell toes — with no laces, but I have no recollection of that being important to me.
Sports brands were on my radar because the school playground was full of who had the latest Fila, Puma, Nike, Adidas, Lacoste, or whatever. I didn't even have table stakes for that game. My mum didn't believe in branded clothing ("You're just paying for the name. The trainers from the market and Woolworths are just as good.") and my paper round money didn't stretch very far.
At some point I remember getting a pair of Adidas Kicks, probably a birthday or Christmas present. They were the cheapest trainers in the Adidas range and nothing to do with the band but a lot to do with wanting to fit in. It worked too because, for a while at least, I wasn't wearing Woolworth's 4-stripe trainers that fastened with velcro. Later I picked up an Adidas cagoule from the sale rack at Harry Parkes and just about satisfied my teenage insecurity.
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If Run DMC were my first musical love, they were also my first musical break up. The fourth album, Tougher Than Leather, didn't do it for me in the same way that the other LPs had. Where they were raw, sparse, basic, and heavy, Tougher Than Leather was produced, flabby, complex and lightweight. For my tastes, at least.
I wouldn't say I ghosted the band from that point, but it's fair to say I only paid them sporadic attention. More like flipping through photos from the early days of a romance and sending a 6-monthly what's up? text than any kind of meaningful relationship. I'd check out each new record, feel let down, die a little inside, and crawl back to Raising Hell for comfort. This disenchantment culminated with the release of Crown Royal in 2001. By this time I was DJing and writing about music for various places including my own fanzine. The closing lines of my review stung as sharply as only an ex-lover can:
"Once, Run DMC used to slay Sucker MCs, these days they just bus them in to appear on the album. Run DMC are parodies of themselves and it's apparent that the only rock they know about these days is the one some distance from a hard place. It's hard to see how they're going to get off it."
Ouch. was I hurting.
On my pressing of the LP, My Adidas and Walk This Way are barely separated and, as the last beat of My Adidas pounds to a crunching halt there's a fractional pause, just enough to keep time, before the first hit of Walk This Way crashes in. Perhaps it's a strange thing to have a favourite of, but this is my absolute favourite transition on any record. I must have listened to it hundreds of times over the years.
My Adidas is on the playlist I share with my daughter for when we're doing the washing up and still, close to 40 years after I first placed the vinyl on my turnable, as it ends I am waiting for that next beat. It doesn't come, of course, and the emotional drop is palpable.
Back when young me was wiring his brain to expect that dopamine hit, he wasn't wearing Adidas anything. My Adidas? Their Adidas and, in fact, originally Jam Master Jay's Adidas: "The black hats is mines. The Adidas, that’s me. How I dressed in high school is the way we dressed."
Their Adidas, yes ... until New Year's Eve 2006, in Skegness. That's the picture at the top of this post. It's traditional to be on the town in fancy dress before everyone gathers at the Jubilee Clock Tower to sing Auld Lang Syne at midnight. The previous year we'd dressed as robots and I'd made a "brain hat" with bubble wrap and flashing lights I'd liberated from pound shop deely boppers. For reasons my memory doesn't release right now we dressed up as Run DMC in 2006.
I was responsible for costumes and props. Down the end of the garden, in the shed, I built a ghettoblaster out of a large box, knobs from an old telly, some tights if I remember right (for the speaker grill) and loads of silver spray paint. I trawled charity shops and eBay for second-hand tracksuits, cheap costume fedora hats, plastic gold chains, and what turned out to be a skanky pair of used Superstars.
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It may be hard to believe, but up to this point I'm not even sure I knew what
kind of trainers Run DMC were wearing. After I left school, branded fashion
stopped being any kind of priority in my life. Music took over and I'd most
likely be wearing a band t-shirt, jeans, and some Converse knock-off
basketball boots from the market. (So Mum was right, naturally.) I'd never
knowingly seen a pair of Superstars in real life. Now, though, holding this
tatty, dirty, smelly pair in my hands I fell in love again.
But why? Adidas make zillions of different trainers and frankly I couldn't are less about them. I'm not into sneaker collecting or fetishism. I'm not waiting for the latest collab to drop, I don't have a closet full of box-fresh kicks, and you won't find me with a toothbrush scrubbing scuffs off the outsoles of any trainers I've ever owned.
My trainers are for wearing and they get worn for every trip, every day until they wear out. I walk before work and again at lunchtime and on weekends I walk for a couple of hours. It takes a little over a year for a pair of Superstars to wear through from the bottom up, sometimes the toe shell comes away from the upper first but the inner heel always breaks down earlier.
I have two pairs on the go at a time, my daily drivers and a pair for doing DIY and gardening. There's a strict hierarchy too. When my dailies wear out they become the "working shoes" and the old working shoes go in the bin. I held onto a couple of pairs of old working shoes hoping to find somewhere that could recycle them so here's the last four pairs of Superstars I've had, oldest on the left to the ones I'm currently wearing on the right:
Maybe I identify with the brand itself? I suppose that's possible, but I don't kid myself that there is something romantic about the three stripes. Reading Sneaker Wars, the story of the Dassler family that splintered and took the town of Herzogenaurach with it, will dispel all ideas that Adidas is about anything other than the business.
Adolf (Adi) Dassler, the brother who founded Adidas, certainly had an altruistic yen for crafting sports shoes that were shaped by and extended the abilities of the athletes whose feet they graced. Despite this, even before the corporate buyouts that turned the company into the global behemoth it is today, he wasn't above underhand manoeuvres to put one over on his brother, Rudi, who founded Puma on the other side of the river. That's not to mention the question of worker's rights that affects Adidas like so many others.
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Historically, Superstars evolved from a couple of earlier shoes, the Olympiade and the Supergrip, via a high-top basketball boot, the Pro Model. (Take a look at this, or this, or this for the detail.) They revolutionised the sport and then crossed over into street fashion. I find this stuff interesting in the same way that I find evolution interesting, and systems thinking interesting, and iteration in software development interesting. But fascination is not enough to motivate my Superstar habit, surely? I mean, I'm not wearing Agile Manifesto trainers every day am I?
It'd be more realistic to wonder whether I want to be like them and, you know what, I would love to be even a fraction as cool as Run, DMC, and Jay but there's around zero chance of that happening. Perhaps less. My aspiration is to be myself in any situation and I've learned that dressing in a way that makes me comfortable aids me in that quest.
I am pretty sure it's something aesthetic about Superstars that attracts me and the fact that I have a similar inexplicable attraction to the Adidas trefoil logo (left, below) and disaffinity for the angular Equipment logo (right) supports that idea.
Although these days it feels eternal, the trefoil has only been around since the 70s. The Equipment logo was introduced in the 90s and my negative reaction to it is very strong. I wouldn't buy clothing with it on even if it was identical to clothing with the trefoil in every other respect. I can't make any logical sense of this.
And if logic is out I wonder what I'm doing here. There's a whole field of philosophy around why different people find their joy in different things and, other than as a subject of study, I don't think I've got much to add to it. There is literally nothing about the classic Superstar that I don't adore and I'm unapologetic about it. Just hold the trainer in your hand and look at it:
Start at the bottom where the sole's herringbone pattern is sliced in tripartition by sinous curves, snaking across the heel, balls, and toe of the foot. Originally intended to grip tightly onto a basketball court's surface for pirouette turns, sharp changes of direction, and the sure-footed launch into a slam-dunk, this is not utilitarian physics-dictated functional engineering, this is beauty for beauty's sake.
Flip the sneaker over and realise that from the side you could recognise a Superstar by its silhouette alone. Iconic does not even come close. The universally-known three stripes, originally a device for strengthening the sides of the running shoes that launched Adidas, have perfect balance vertically and horizontally, whose eye would not be pleased by this shoe?
The heel bulges and curves down into the sole which then juts out coquettishly before resolving into the embedded stitching that draws the eye from back to front along a descending contour. The shape invites languorous study, an unhurried focus on each detail, lingering for a moment on the dogleg support stitching, the embossed name, the alternating stripes and pinprick punctures, and finally arrival at the toe.
The toe! If the shoes themselves are iconic, then the toe is the icon's icon. Unique, surprising, a cross-hatched shell playfully caressed by light, enriched by the curvature of six radial arcs, their symmetry perfect, the manner in which they disappear into the laces and tongue beguiling.
The laces as a ladder or, if not a ladder, then a ramp. On this visual trip around the shoe we are now racing up the forefoot to the padded tongue replete with a logo that is often tweaked to tie in with whatever other design elements are in play. As we reach the top we leap over the open foot hole and grasp the heel pad, again logoed and again ripe for customisation, but often perfect with the simple trefoil. Exhausted now we slide slowly down the rear towards the underside, ready to go again.
Erm. Ahem.
For sure, there are colourways that I wouldn't touch, designer collaborations that mess with core elements to the detriment of the shoe, and ill-advised brand extensions that stick the name onto something other, but the classic can not be challenged.
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I didn't quite know where this was going when I started and it's largely been a stream of consciousness punctuated by excursions to track down a reference, find a picture, or check some detail. I think it's time to ask whether I'm any closer to understanding why I love the Superstar so much.
Well, if it wasn't for Run DMC I wouldn't know Superstars at all. It's only because I got into their early music at an impressionable age and then later dressed up as them for a party that I held a pair for the first time.
That definitely counts for something and perhaps there's some nostalgia and halo effect thrown in for good measure. However, I know that when I wear my trainers I don't feel all Jam Master James and I'm self-aware enough to know that no-one else is thinking "woah, cool chap alert!" so that's not the core of this story.
I'm not passionate about the brand. Adidas makes commodity footwear using corporate practices in a capitalist system with all the downsides of those things. When I buy a pair of trainers I'm certainly buying into some kind of branding, even if only because it's clear to anyone that looks at my feet who made my shoes, but I don't feel like I'm part of some exclusive club, however many limited-edition flavours they create.
And so I come back to the strange concept of things that bring us pleasure. Superstars bring me pleasure in a way that I cannot satisfactorily explain, Yes, I know that's a let-down at the end of an essay like this at least, if an explanation is what you need. Superstars bring me pleasure and comfort, both physical and mental, and that counts for a lot. They're the shoes I like, worn the way I like, when I like to wear them. They're my Adidas.
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