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Band T Shirt blog. Look! Here...is! This entry made me laugh and wince
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27. Saxon, Crusader (1984)
Throughout my teenage years I was a roaring fucking idiot.
Between 1983 and 1990, I went to St. Louis’ Grammar School in Ballymena in Northern Ireland (look it up on the internet – it’s a real place).
I’d come from Martinstown (eight miles away in the countryside) and was desperate to fit in with the ‘townies’ of Ballymena (population: 30,000). I most certainly didn’t want to be seen as a ‘culchie’ (i.e. what anyone who grew up anywhere near a field was called).
So I had a plan. Not a very well structured plan, admittedly. But a plan nonetheless.
The plan was that I would somehow or other confer ‘cool’ upon myself. Through thought, action or deed, I would become cool and elevate myself out of the swap of balls that I imagined was the destiny for anyone with the vaguest trace of culchie blood.
But how to achieve this? I’ll not bore you with my numerous failed attempts to become cool – except this one.
I’d figured out pretty early that music was cool. So, naturally, liking music made you cool. But it was hard at school to display that beyond badly inked band logos on jotters and schoolbags. And everyone did that.
So I was going to “move it up a gear” and simultaneously avenge the enormous awkwardness I felt during PE lessons where I was as much use at sport as someone trying to knit a sweater with piss.
The plan, in all its Machiavellian glory, was to wear a heart-punchingly cool T-shirt under my school shirt so that all the boys in my class would see it in the changing rooms.
Then, in my mind, they’d raise me above their heads and take me on a triumphant tour of the school while screaming, “Eamonn is the apotheosis of cool. If only we could be as cool as him. Look! Look how cool he is!” And then all the girls would kiss me and the teachers would let me smoke their fags and they’d cancel sport forever just because I hated it.
It didn’t quite work out like that. And the scheme, I realise now, fell down at the first stage.
My idea of a cool T-shirt was a grey Saxon number with the Crusader album artwork on the front.
I wore it under my school shirt every Wednesday (PE day), imagining myself like a New Wave Of British Heavy Metal version of Superman. Every Wednesday, I’d display it in the changing rooms, waiting for someone, anyone, in my class to spot not only it but also my reticent cool.
No one noticed. For the entire year I pursued this futile ploy.
My mum eventually used it as a duster.
That, in a way, is a metaphor for my school years.
I’m still a roaring fucking idiot. Move along. I don’t give refunds.
Eamonn Forde
