Every movement in the history of Rock "and" Roll has spawned it's own look or uniform. Bill Haley and his disease-ridden, drug-crazed Comets had their Army of Teddy Boys swaggering around aggressively in Edwardian style trousers...the punks of the mid seventies had people with safety pins and Oxfam clothes, the new Romantics had effeminate cross dressers of indeterminate gender and Mike Reed (TV's Frank Butcher) had middle aged men in suits who told jokes in hotel bars.

Vasco da Gama were no different in this respect - but while many of their contemporaries were trying to look like Nigerians from Hartlepool, Gama fans (or Heads as they came to be known) were pioneering a new look. The illustration shows a typical Head - you may think he looks like a beer-bellied loser - and you'd be right! What kept the Heads apart from their contemporaries was a disregard for personal hygiene - ironic when one considers that the earliest fashion accessory for the Head was a sanitary towel which would be worn stapled to the neck (not illustrated). It is noteworthy to recall that when the Queen Mother sang for her supper in front of an invited audience at Clarence House in 1980, she was wearing a sanitary towel stapled to her midrift. When the news broke, sales of Gama records remained static.