My Band T-Shirt

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 earlier.

The darker and stranger I looked, the less likely men were to tell me my Doc boots were “kinky”, though now they yelled “Addams Family” from cars as they drove by. By now my Doc boots had lost their embarrassing newness and were well worn in. I’d changed the colours of the laces a few times, at some points being alarmed by what shoelace colour was meant to signify. Did white laces really mean you were a Nazi sympathiser? I stuck to purple or blue, which meant you were a lesbian.

The ASF shirt was one of the rare band t-shirts that, after sewing machine surgery, actually fit in a flattering way and wasn’t like wearing a sack. Wearing it I felt I was a real goth. Although I wore only black, listened to goth music and read everything I could about goths and goth interests, my feelings of having made it were easily destroyed when I saw someone more goth. Goth band t-shirts were crucial in displaying my authenticity.

The ASF shirt soon developed holes and this pleased me, as I could wear it with ripped stockings and layers of black lace petticoats and feel appropriately post-apocalyptic. I felt pretty happy with myself in this outfit, as I went to see local goth band Neuropaque at Feedback, (a venue above Newtown Station in Sydney that has remained boarded up since the 1990s; I imagine it still would be the 90s if you broke in). When I got to the show, as happened with every gig or club I attended, I saw the goth girls in their 20s, who wore beautiful gowns and had excellent control over their liquid eyeliner. They floated past, majestic, and I felt like a little rat. An Alien Sex Fiend rat.

Alien Sex Fiend were a trashy electro goth band from London whose core members were a couple known as Mr and Mrs Fiend. My favourite song of theirs was Now I’m Feeling Zombiefied, a song that culminated in screaming out the title over and over, as many of their songs did. Who knew more about being zombiefied? The majestic older goth girls or me, still in high school, having to sit through things like Maths classes?

Most of my favourite goth times were spent in my room listening to cassettes of songs I’d taped off Sacrament, Sydney’s one goth radio show. I was a “bedroom goth”, a term I used to describe teenage goths who, rather than hang out at clubs like older goths, spent most of their time in their caves. One of the things that appealed to me about goth was that it was a subculture in which it was acceptable to inhabit an imagined world, separate to the real one. It was also acceptable and normal to spend the majority of one’s time inside, reading, with the occasional cigarette or slice of toast to keep you alive.

The remnants of my goth wardrobe, along with other evidence of my past lives, have been stored in a suitcase under my mother’s house for many years. Sometimes I would wonder what was happening to them under there: growing mould, being eaten by mice and through decomposition becoming even more goth. They’d been in storage for about a decade, packed away a few years after the above polaroid, in which I loaned my ASF shirt as an instant goth-ifying spell for my friend.

So when I decided to make a zine about my teenage years told through band t-shirts, I finally had a reason to exhume my goth clothes. Among the lace gowns with tiny waists I found my ASF shirt, faded, with holes down one side, the demonic faces of the band members leering out at me, saying to me, “we knew you’d be back”.

In my band t-shirt zine, I wrote the story of my teenage years from my first Cure shirt, through my goth period (Joy Division - the Unknown Pleasures shirt that is probably the world’s most iconic band t-shirt, so much so you can even get it as a g-string), Alien Sex Fiend, Bauhaus, ending up at indie-pop with a Cannanes t-shirt I bought from an op shop for $2.

I have no memory of getting rid of any of my many band t-shirts; all I know is that now most have disappeared. Each one persists strongly in my memory, though, and like with many of the entries on My Band T-shirt, my shirts are connected to bittersweet stories of fandom, love, record stores, gigs, cities, and wearing one’s identity on one’s chest.

Vanessa Berry
http://vanessaberryworld.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/the-band-t-shirt-zine/