Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

[Lucia Lanigan]

Bloody millions of them.

[G-Man]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

Oh, I started a blog series on great moustaches in rock once. I covered David Crosby, Village People (did you know that Leatherman was straight in real life?), John Oates, Dr Hook & the Medicine Show, James Brown and possibly others.

Anyway, I have a longish list of future candidates, including Lemmy and Animal, Yello, Sonny Bono, Midge Ure, Kid Creole, Lionel Richie, Prince (well, bumfluff 'tache), a couple of 'taches in Frankie Goes To Hollywood (the dancer and the curly haired gimp), Lee Hazlewood, Nick Cave and the Beatles in Sgt Pepper's mode, among others.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

Village People (did you know that Leatherman was straight in real life?)

I read they all were, with the exception of the Red Indian

[G-Man]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

Cop: Hetero
Cowboy: Gay
Indian: Gay
GI: Gay
Leatherman: Hetero
Construction Worker: Never disclosed

[Jon]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

Loudon Wainwright in his (attempted) moustachioed phase:

[adams house cat]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

I saw Saxon about 25 years, in Gainsborough or Goole or somewhere like that, and the guitar player had a quite extraordinary 'tache - equal parts Jimmy Edwards and Baron Hardup.

[WOM]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

G.Man wants a hyphen wrote:

Cop: Hetero

He was Phylicia Rashad's first husband. (She was Mrs Huxtable on the Cosby Show.)

[adams house cat]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

He was replaced by the brother of Valerie Simpson of Ashford and..

[G-Man]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

Here's what I wrote about the Village People's 'taches, and Cop's claim that he didn't realise that the act was a bit camp (though, on reflection, he might have left the group by the time the VPs were, erm, releasing Milkshake):



The Village People sported a whole catalogue of facial horticulture, to the point of cliché, in a bid to assert their collective homosexuality. Take Leatherman’s droop-growth, carefully styled to assessorise his leather chaps and caps in to evoke the stereotype of a San Francisco clone (you don’t hear the word clone anymore. Send in the clones!). His luxurious shrub is supposed to communicate that he’ll like a bit of rough in the hole (the club’s hole; your filthy mind!).

Cowboy’s ‘tache was less scary but still exquisitely gay. In the picture here, Randy Jones looks angry (to the apparent astonishment of Leatherman), but usually he wore a smile so open and engaging that quite conceivably he’d have stood with Gary Cooper in facing down the bad guys in High Noon (that would be Gary Cooper the dead actor, not Gary Cooper the “ex-gay” fellow who founded a Christian ministry to cure homosexuals from their “affliction”).

By comparison, Construction Worker’s moustache is rather unremarkable. To compensate for his mediocre snotabsorber, he camped it up even more furiously than the other villagers. Watch him: he prances this way, he strikes a macho-gay pose that way, he gurns in a show of rampant homosexuality. Construction guy David Hodo has not disclosed his sexual orientation, as is his right, but my guess is that he’s straight. As was, you guessed it, Leatherman (who died in 2002).

If you have concentrated, you will recall that I qualified my applause for straight Village People doing gay with a caveat. Lead singer Victor Willis, the Cop (who, in a bitter twist of irony, has since had serious trouble with the law), left the group when he worked out that he was fronting a novelty gay act, with his objection centering on the latter attribute. None of the hits, he claimed, had a gay subtext. And with song titles such as Hot Cop, Macho Man, Action Man, Fireman, Milkshake and, for crying out loud, I’m A Cruiser, who could have thought so?

Of course, when Y.M.C.A. and In The Navy were hits, the gay subtext did sail straight over many people’s heads, such were the naïve times. And that was the subversive beauty of the Village People. When the US navy sought to use In The Navvy as a recruitment anthem, they really must thave thought that the Village People were totally ungay (nice ‘tache, by the way, Leatherman), not a clue to be had. Willis – who was married to the Crosby Show’s Mrs Huxtable, incidentally – cannot have any such excuse as it was him who camped it up big time in the camp shanty with that line of being afraid of the water, and the nudge-nudge-wink-winking question: “Oh my goodness. What am I gonna do in a submarine?”

I presume the Young Men’s Christian Association was grateful for the publicity on the back of the Village People’s biggest hit. Oh yes, “you can hang out with all the boys” and “do whatever you feel” surely was a reference to good old-fashioned male camaraderie. I bet you won’t have Gary Cooper the “Ex-Gay” [who heals people of their gayness] putting those lines on his pamphlets.

[adams house cat]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

'When the US Navy sought to use "In The Navvy". Opens new horizons...

[erwin]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records



(Well I liked it, so there ...)

[WOM]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

G-Man, I like the transposition of Cosby Show with Crosby Show. One about a black man doing a great job of soberly raising his brood vs. one about a whiter-than-white man drunkenly neglecting his.

[Gangster Octopus]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records

G.Man wants a hyphen wrote:

In The Navvy

Que a whole slew of seventies Irish jokes...

[linus]

Lots of moustachioed white men made good records



Baris Manço - Best pop moustache in Europe/Asia (depending on which side of the Bosphorus he happens to be in)