May 2012
2 posts
103. Chumbawamba, Anti-fascist (1993)
There were too many of them. There had to be a cull.
It wasn’t that hard at first. Losing some was like natural wastage, a recognition that this collection of meaningful yet increasingly tatty garments was going to have to be slimmed down. They were overflowing out of the wardrobe, and in a similar way to how I required all my vinyl to now fit into one five-by-five Ikea shelf – necessitating...
102. Oasis, Last English Gig (2009)
I’ve been an Oasis fan for about half of my life now, and this is by far not the first t-shirt of the band – there must have been more than ten at some point. This particular t-shirt, however, tells the story of a long-lasting dream finally come true and of good timing.
Ever since I fell for Oasis my dream was to see them playing live in England. As this blog is written and published in...
April 2012
2 posts
101. Dodgy, Green, White and Blue (1996)
Britpop. As musical movements go, it hit the skids faster than it had hit the headlines for a couple of hours in 1996. For every Oasis there was a Menswear and with every Blur you got a Northern Uproar. And then there was Dodgy. Two Brummies, Matt Priest and Nigel Clark, and Londoner Andy Miller threw a few stones on the musical waters in the early 1990s and watched the ripples – they’d...
100. Orbital, Orbital 20 (2009)
The day Keith Drummond turned 40, he announced that he’d stopped wearing band t-shirts.
Leaning back on my office chair, grimy trainers on the table, jeans stained with copy-editing ink, my upper body in a bright green top bearing the legend “Woozy With Cider” – a James Yorkston album title on a bit of Fruit Of The Loom cotton – I despaired. Our art director in proper shirts? Word...
March 2012
1 post
99. The Chemical Brothers, Freestyle Dust (1997)
When Jude and I begun My Band T-Shirt, we thought it would be fun to celebrate some of the garments that brought back certain memories and occasionally rofl at our collective past misdemeanours such as ‘having a metal phase’ and ‘pretending that WE know we’re cool’ behind our occasionally ill-fitting merchandise. As the site grew, we got so much more than that – life experiences, marriages,...
February 2012
9 posts
Spent vs My Band T-Shirt - The aftermath
Thanks to all of you who came down to the Silver Bullet tavern in Finsbury Park and lost your shit at Spent on Saturday 25 Feb. It was a bloody smashing night, made all the more special with those of you who attended in a band t-shirt. It also witnessed the inaugural appearance of the Wadey & The Lady Mobile Disco Roadshow (basically us two in capes playing PUMPERS).
We also handed out CASH...
98. Morrissey, Motörhead-style (1998)
Spent vs My Band T-Shirt is tonight. Tonight! So here is a weekend special – Spent’s Anna Hyde with her own t-shirt confession…
I HAVEN’T GOT A BAND T-SHIRT - SORRY.
Oh, now its out in the open I feel so much better.
I did have one once. A Morrissey one in the style of Motörhead, similar to the one above, but with hard nut cap sleeves. I think I bought it at a gig –...
Tomorrow night - it's Spent meets My Band T-Shirt!
This weekend (tomorrow night in fact) us (Ian & Jude) will be taking the Wadey & The Lady My Band T-Shirt Mobile Disco Roadshow on the, er, road and will be playing records at the fantabulous Spent evening at The Silver Bullet tavern opposite Finsbury Park in that swinging London.
It promises to be an evening of fun, music and – OMFG – CASH PRIZES for the best band t-shirts on display,...
97. The Verve, T-Shirt Made On Hollywood Boulevard...
In the run-up to this weekend’s Spent Vs My Band T-Shirt extravaganza (http://on.fb.me/AabfDW), here is Spent’s John Best with his own tremendous t-shirt story…
OK, so it’s not exactly a band t-shirt, in that it was never sold on a merch stand anywhere, but it does feature at least one member of a multi-million selling band, in ‘Mad’ Richard Ashcroft, seen...
96. Morrissey, New Morrissey Express (1992)
Ah, 1992 … the year of the Maastricht Treaty, the L.A. riots, the New Musical Express’s fortieth anniversary and George H.W. Bush puking into the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister. On a more personal level, it was the year I took my GCSEs, consolidated the previous year’s experiments with smoking and drinking and witnessed, outside a Ned’s Atomic Dustbin gig, an exceptionally wasted girl...
95. Alien Sex Fiend, Black With Holes (1994)
This shirt was my favourite from my goth period, which began around age 16, or 1994 in the rest of the world’s time. It met all my style requirements: dark, messy, and obscure. Though people probably read the name and wondered whether I was indeed an Alien Sex Fiend, I rarely got hassled in the same way I had when I started dressing in band t-shirts and tie dyed petticoats some years...
94. Madness, Christmas Party for Greenpeace (1983)
Ladieeeeez and gentlemen! Roll up, roll up for the greatest show on Earth. London’s Lyceum theatre proudly presents for one night only…The Madness Christmas Party!!!
It is the year of Our Lord Upminster 1983. Accompanied by my new mate, Paul G, as uber-fans of Madness, we had decided to get to the venue nice and early in the vain hope we might meet our heroes and nab their autographs.
Paul G...
93. Little Fish, Wonderful (2011)
This is the only band T-shirt that I own. And I will never wear it. It marks the transition of a band that I fell in love with, to – I’m sad to say – just another band.
I first encountered Little Fish in November 2008 at my favourite venue, The Abart, in Zürich. The Abart only holds about 600 people, yet still regularly manages to attract great British bands. We were there to see Supergrass, and...
92. Pulp, I'm Common (1995)
Of course, my mother hated it. It was bright, acid-custard yellow, with a 70s style navy blue trim around the neck and arms, a discreet Pulp log on the back and I’M COMMON emblazoned across the chest.
Although we lived in a small industrial town in the armpit of the North-West – my sister and I went to the local comp and our dad was a welder – my mum had worked very hard to make sure I wasn’t...
January 2012
6 posts
91. The Leather Nun, Totenkopf Rock 'N' Roll...
The city of Oxford during the mid 1980s, pre-Radiohead, pre-Supergrass, pre-Ride, pre-just about everything, was a surprisingly quiet place for a city that was home to a disproportionately large number of young people. Despite the presence of a world famous university, a large Polytechnic (the consolation prize for those who couldn’t make it into the posh place) and a College of Further...
90. The Jam, In The City (1977)
Some mates and I set up a t-shirt printing company in 1977, designing and hand printing punk rock inspired t shirts: X Ray Spex, Penetration, The Beat, The Clash, the Pistols, all became our inspiration and our clients.
As we hand-printed everything back then, we were able to make some quite unique t-shirts, with oversize images bleeding off the edges, and off-registration prints blending all...
89. Bauhaus, Eyes (1982, bought 1987)
When I was a kid I felt surrounded by uniforms. My father was in the American Air Force and we lived on a military base where literally everyone had a uniform of some description.
We were a staunch Roman Catholic family, so there was no escape even at the weekend. We would dutifully go to Church and Sunday School where the priests wore their vestments, Nuns would herd us around like angry...
88. Denim, Back in Denim (made 2007)
Barely any of my friends really understand my obsession with Lawrence, the reclusive obsessive genius behind Felt, Denim and Go-Kart Mozart. Somewhat unsurprisingly, my fixation on this surnameless recluse began at an early age, simply by reading anecdotes. Did he really disown his father for being bald? Did he never let people do anything other than urinate in his toilet? Did he really stagger...
87. The (International) Noise Conspiracy, Eye Of...
The (International) Noise Conspiracy is a revolutionary band from Sweden. With the singer Dennis Lyxzén from hardcore band The Refused, and musicians from four other Swedish punk bands, T(I)NC is a real supergroup. They’ve put out five albums: The First Conspiracy, Survival Sickness, A New Morning Changing Weather, Armed Love and The Cross Of My Calling. The last two have been...
86. Blur, Hyde Park (2009)
I have always had an aversion to band t-shirts. I never wanted to be labelled according to my music taste. I wanted to show a broad spectrum of music appreciation and not be pigeonholed into the music genre of the band I happened to have a t-shirt of. My record collection could speak for itself, but not my t-shirts.
This changed on 3rd July 2009 -The date announced for Blur’s reunion concert...
December 2011
7 posts
85. Björk, Human Behaviour (1993)
I was muddling my way through the first year of university, trying to find my feet. Desperate to be cool about music and anything else that’s life or death essential when you’re eighteen. Goldsmiths was achingly hip and I’d never been more aware of my small town upbringing. I’d been to pub backroom gigs and seen a few bands on tour in Portsmouth and Southampton, pored...
84. First Avenue (1990)
First, several disclaimers. The picture here doesn’t show the exact T-shirt I’m going to be waffling on about. Nor, for that matter, am I the handsome chap with the finely chiselled features. If only. The T-shirt whose praises I’m singing is now sadly long-deceased. Equally sadly, I’ve searched and searched but I haven’t got a single photo of me wearing it. The logo on this here shirt is at...
83. Capdown, The Final Tour (2007)
In my teenage years, Capdown were one of my favourite bands. Bringing together hardcore punk and ska, they were faster, harder and angrier than all of the classic ‘punk-ska’ alternatives like Less than Jake, Reel Big Fish and Goldfinger, without coming off as trying to hard or sceney. I saw them several times at festivals and gigs, always having fun and getting bruises, with a...
82. Pixies, Death To The Pixies (1990)
I was introduced to the Pixies in 1989, when my mate Mike came back to Leicester Poly from summer break with a radically changed taste in music. He played two albums to me - The Stone Roses and Doolittle. From that moment I too was a changed man. I was 19 and had discovered there was music beyond The Cult and The Darling Buds.
Doolittle in particular changed my life. I know it sounds...
81. Mudhoney, Superfuzz Bigmuff (1991),...
I had been a well-behaved boy and an excellent student all through high school, but the cracks were beginning to show. My mate Tim and I had started sneaking out to all-ages thrash gigs during high school, but once I started university everything had started getting out of control. It being 1990, I had grown my hair and bought a pair of army-surplus boots. My marks were dropping off...
80. Megacity Four, Astoria 90 (1990) (and...
It is a common story, but it was the sight of another Hollywood (or maybe Essex) ‘celebrity’ sporting a Ramones T-shirt which finally pushed me over the edge in 2008.
It was as if the cover of Heat magazine was following me around all day. Taunting me with images of prissy actors or actresses falling out of clubs and rehab clinics, decked in shirts displaying the logos of all the bands I’d...
79. The Cribs, Funny Pose (2003)
This was the first time I’d seen the brothers Jarman play and they struck a chord with me straight away.
They were all wearing tight colourful women’s catsuits and cheap plastic sun-glasses.
They stood out. They made me listen and take note.
The racket they made was a cacophony of chaotic melody, pure pop-punk music bleeding through the feedback and drunk punters.
They also gave the...
November 2011
10 posts
78. Radiohead, Kicking Squealing Gucci Little...
Radiohead were basically the first ‘grown-up’ band I got into, although I’m pretty sure there was an amusing crossover period when my love for the Spice Girls and my new mature appreciation of Radiohead overlapped in 1997/98. At the time, I was well into my school magazine, proudly bearing the rather fanciful title of ‘Music Editor’. So after reading an article in Just Seventeen about zine...
77. Killing Joke, What's This For...! (1981)
1981. the 4th year of Allerton Grange High School. We were the Post-Punk Punks. Saving up your lunch money, bus fares and anything else you could scrabble together to pay for the new album, a gig ticket, and the holy of holys - a t-shirt at the gig itself - was so much more important than anything else.
I don’t think I ever managed to buy a t-shirt at a gig. When you think that albums...
Some exciting news...
Last night at the Record Of The Day Awards, My Band T-Shirt won the Innovation of the Year prize. We (Jude and Ian here, hello!) were both totally gobsmacked, as you can see from these pictures!
(l-r Ian and Jude, Eamonn Forde, MBTS contributor (no. 27, Saxon!) and Mark Ellen, Editor of The Word Magazine)
But here’s the thing: we really couldn’t have done it *cue the strings,...
76. Various, Homemade Metal T-shirts (1992-96)
For the longest time, I considered that metal was simply. Not. Cool.
I generally listened to punk, rockabilly, jazz, blues and some hip-hop. But during the early nineties,. a big format change from vinyl to CD was occurring and people were pitching/donating/selling old records everywhere. My interest in British blues was shifting to heavier and heavier artists so it seems logical - looking...
75. Manic Street Preachers, Backwards Rs (made...
It might seem cheap to have a handmade band t-shirt, but fourteen years ago I would have told you grandly that the Manics were more about a way of life than about buying official merchandise. “We’re a mess of eyeliner and spraypaint,” James Dean Bradfield sung on Stay Beautiful, “DIY destruction on Chanel chic”. I took this as inspiration, and when the same...
74. Whitehouse, Cruise (2001)
Have you ever read a music magazine feature and without hearing a single note decide that they’re the band for you? In 1992 I read an interview in the industrial/ experimental fanzine The Empty Quarter entitled “Masters of the Overviolence”. The focus of the article was the “Power Electronics” band Whitehouse, discussing their fearsome live reputation and...
73. Marillion, Script For A Jester's Tear (1983)
Here is my oldest surviving band T shirt from 1983. The gig was at Portsmouth Guildhall – I was living in Pompey at the time, having stayed on in the town since graduating the previous summer. I was also working in a hideous job as a Credit Control Clerk for IMB up at North Harbour, on the princely sum of £50 a week. A CCC, for those of you that don’t know, was a thinly disguised euphemism...
72. Siouxsie and the Banshees, Eric's (1978)
These were dug out from a drawer, where they have been festering for a decade or three. The first is from a Siouxsie gig in 1978.
It is possible that I got the Siouxsie t-shirt at one of the ‘Janet and the Icebergs’ gigs at Eric’s. I can remember seeing her there - it was an edgy performance, and she didn’t look too happy, though the crowd loved it. I was a regular at...
71. Dartz! Age (2005)
If you have large breasts then band t shirts are not going to be your friend. The high necks can be uncomfortable and you have to take a pick from oversized (where there’s always an air of maternity shirt) or skin tight (basically asking the world to take a look at your rockhard nip-on when it gets a bit chilly). At the age of 23 I have only four band t-shirts to my name.
1) A beaten up...
70. Red Hot Chili Peppers, By The Way (2002)
It all started with a text late one Sunday afternoon: “Do u wnt 2 go n c the chili peppers?” I was 16, living in a rural village outside of Ipswich and had never left Suffolk without parental supervision. Red Hot Chili Peppers were one of my favourite bands, had just released By The Way and were playing an enormo-gig at London Arena – of course I wnted 2 go n c them!
My friend somehow persuaded...
October 2011
9 posts
69. Carcass, Heartwork Tour (1991)
I had been writing to Bill Steer, guitarist and founder member of Carcass for quite a little while after finding his address on the inner lyric sheet to the album Scum by Napalm Death. That band had fascinated me as I had never heard anything like them before, but when I saw the cover to Carcass’ ‘Reek of Putrefaction’ LP I nearly dropped the bloody thing in horror.
...
68. Placebo, Slave (2001)
The more I reflect on my band t-shirt history, the more I realise that it somehow connects with the development of my personality over the past ten years. Of course, this is quite a heavy hypothesis, and to assume a direct link between one and the other takes it a bit far. I guess it’s more accurate to say that as I grew older, my views on wearing band t-shirts (both myself and others)...
67. David Bowie, Aladdin Sane (bought 2003)
David Bowie. Unquestionably a God of Rock. I fell in love with the man who fell to earth at a young age, from the first moment I borrowed a crackly Ziggy Stardust LP from Norwich City Library and heard the tripping drum intro to the wondrous Five Years. He was my man, and I inhabited all the glam and the angst and the funk entirely - I wanted to be David Bowie. Almost as much as I wanted to be...
66. Captured! By Robots! Captured! By Robots!...
I was at the tail-end of a relationship that wasn’t working very well, and had a series of ‘Is this what my life has been leading up to?’ moments, when I found Hoarders on Netflix. For those of you in the US who haven’t seen it, shame on you. But just to bring you up to speed: it is about people who compulsively fill their house full of stuff. Sometimes it is ...
65. The Rakes, Eine, Zwei, Drei, Vier (2005)
This shirt dates back to the year when I fell in love with music for the first time. At 17, I started earning for the very first time too, with some shifts at a local pub. I also moved from my shitty, narrow-minded school to a cosmopolitan local college, and a new set of friends who expanded my social horizons. The Rakes were - for a short while - one of the bands of the mid-noughties indie...
64. Bad Religion, Cross Buster (found 1997)
Washed-out, already ragged with wear and belligerent from a hundred paces, the Bad Religion t-shirt fitted perfectly with the ill-formed political smuggery I wished to visit upon the Northern Irish seaside town where I lived in the early 90s. A town where I was an insufferably precise facsimile of Rik Mayall’s character from The Young Ones, or Student Grant from Viz. I was hoping for...
63. Carter USM, Sheriff Fatman (1990)
It was my older brother’s, of course, or maybe our even older sister’s originally, but somehow it wound its way into my house, probably through the hurried, last-minute pack of a house move, or left over the morning after a party. Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, the Sheriff Fatman t-shirt. A true classic. A black and white photo of Fruitbat’s guitar, neck-down in a...
62. Julian Cope, Droolian (bought 2006)
My uncle Tony had tried, at some point in the 80s when I was about 11 or 12, to get me into The Teardrop Explodes by offering me a white-label 12” of Sleeping Gas. Why oh why did I not take it? He sold it down the record & tape exchange for about 50p…GAAAAHHHHH!!! He also tried me on the Bunnymen, and for some reason that took hold, but not so with JC and the rest going bonkers. It...
61. Pet Shop Boys, Behaviour (1992)
Given how distant that time feels now, it’s strange to think I can still remember buying it. Remember holding the packet in the t-shirt section of HMV in Chester, the fear that I might run into someone from school (there was always someone from school in HMV in Chester). Looking again at the white t-shirt in the packet: did I really want to buy this? Deciding I did. Making my way watchfully...
September 2011
8 posts
60. Arthur Lee and Love, Forever Changes (2003)
It’s a sign of how I’ve become a grown-up in that this is pretty much my only remaining band t-shirt. But we have history, those five melded faces emblazoned on this t-shirt and I. Forever Changes was one of those benchmark albums that I discovered as part of my burgeoning Byrds-Beach Boys-Neil Young obsession with all things 60s and West Coast that took up most of my student years. It was an...
59. Runrig, Runrig Live (1986)
In 1986, my bedroom wall was covered with posters of Sade, The Police and soft-gothers Balaam and the Angel. I’d been pouring over the soon-to-be-cancelled music magazine The Hit and had just purchased the first issue of Q. However, my burgeoning passions for music was satisfied vicariously. Growing up forty miles north of Inverness, gigs weren’t really an option unless ceilidhs...
58. The Rolling Stones, Voodoo Lounge (1995)
The t-shirt itself went a long time ago. And I wish with all my heart I’d held onto it. However, when you move around a lot, like continent to continent, you tend to ‘downsize’. My Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge Tour t-shirt, bought at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium in 1995, must have been deemed ‘uncool’ (probably ‘97-’99: the disco years) and hit the charity bag. One hot February day...
1 tag
57. My Life Story, One Goodbye (2000)
I sold off all of my band T-shirts last week. Along with my entire record and CD collection. Feel free to reach for the smelling salts in outrage at learning of another person who’s become One Of Them, at renouncing my membership of Us.
The reason is common enough – moving in with my girlfriend, and the resultant haggling for space entailed. Were we rich enough to afford An Actual House, maybe I...