Facing the music

The face chosen by Belfast City Council to grace last year’s Autumn/Winter Pocket Guide seemed at first glance to be a surprising but (for any old graduates out there) familiar one – the beret, the thick beard and moustache, the air of seditionary cool, and radical chic. It also proved to be the cause of some considerable comment in the letters pages of one of our biggest dailies.

One disgruntled reader considered it a disgrace that, at a time when three Republicans were facing terrorist charges in Columbia, the Council had chosen to align itself so explicitly with a figure bound up in violent Latin American politics. Others wrote in response that this decision by the good members to embrace such a friend of the working-class was to be welcomed.

“It started a huge debate,” says Chris Murray, owner of Apache Clothing, the shop responsible for the design. ”People were writing angry letters into the paper. They thought the Che Guevara thing was some kind of Republican statement, but they didn’t notice that it wasn’t Che Guevara at all – it was George Best and, you know, he’s the biggest hero Belfast has ever produced. Why shouldn’t we celebrate him? But that’s been typical, really. Since we put that t-shirt out, it’s just kept turning up in mad places.”

Like, for example, the current issue of Marie Clare, or on the back of just about every big name DJ or artist that comes to town. Aim, Pitchshifter, Sasha, Digweed, DJ Yoda, and Beth Orton have all been spotted wearing the George Best shirt, while Chris maintains he’s taken orders from Fatboy Slim and Keith Flint.

“It’s gone mental,” says Chris. “ We just ran up a few t-shirts that we thought were cool and funny and then, six months later, it just seemed to explode. At the time we were making it up as we were going along – Stop Wars, Lighter Thief, George Best, Hallion – but loads of people have really picked up on them. The Hallion one is perfect for the undercover Northern Irish person. It’s written in a really lovely font; it almost looks like Italian. Eminem uses the word in one of his tunes – I reckon there’s a bit of Belfast in that bastard. We’ve his manager’s address and we’re gonna make sure he’s wearing Apache when he plays in Ireland this year.”

Belfast doesn’t have many shops like Apache. In a consistently bleak and underpopulated city centre notable, mostly, for feral youths and bland mega chains, the graffiti-daubed Wellington Place store is a welcome and spirited presence. Over the years it has lent its name to CDs, short films, and various club nights, skateboard festivals and breakdancing competitions, with a zeal born equally from b-boy evangelism and hard-headed financial pragmatism.

Chris: ”Years ago a French graffiti artist came into the shop, told us he loved it, but warned us that we’d have to be careful because he could see Belfast opening up, and he knew the multinationals would come in and blow us away. You can’t beat a big chain, simply because of the financial clout they have at their disposal. So all these things, the CDs, the skate shows, the t-shirts – they’re a great laugh, but we really have to do them if we want to establish our own identity and keep going.

“And you just have to use your common sense and make sure that you’re selling stuff that people are going to wear. It’s just small, simple things – like, the pockets in our jeans face inwards so you don’t lose your change when you sit down. You have to pay attention to those kind of details because the big chains don’t. And they don’t have half as many good ideas as we have.”