My Band T-Shirt

Sometimes over the years it’s felt like I’ve spent my entire life longing to own a Sweet T-shirt - and it’s felt like that because for most of my life I have.

It starts in March 1974 and I’m down East Lane Market, off the Walworth Road, with Mum and Dad looking for something to wear to my first ever wedding disco. I’m seven years old, about to turn eight on the day of the wedding itself, and my daytime look for Sherry and Jeff’s big bash – a navy needlecord knickerbocker suit with frilly white ruff and cuffs topped off with a Donny Osmond cap, also in needlecord – has been settled well in advance via the monthly payments miracle of the Great Universal catalogue. With foresight, Mum knows that when the evening gets going “the kids’ll get stuff all down ‘em” and so here we are, looking for something a bit more knockabout, a bit less ra-sha-sha to change into.

When I first spotted IT hanging up on some stall, this pink T-shirt with the faces of Brian, Andy, Mick and Steve and “THE SWEET” in capitals, I swear I’d never wanted anything more in my entire life. Being a pop-obsessed, inherently dramatic child, prone to screaming “Nodddy! Daaaaave! SuziiiiiI” etc., at night in my sleep, this shirt just seemed the next best thing to having Brian Connolly as your actual uncle and him taking you in his white Rolls Royce to Top Of The Pops to meet Noel Edmonds.

But Mum refused point blank to buy it. She refused on the grounds that it was; too big for me, too cheap looking, and, well, too bloody pink. Looking back, she was probably right – the shirt was almost certainly designed for teenage girls with burgeoning breasts and waists that went in - but I wouldn’t be reasoned with. Crying my eyes out, I sat down on the road in the middle of that crowded market and refused to budge. Possibly I chanted “We want Sweet! We want Sweet!” like they do at the start of ‘Teenage Rampage’. Anyway, eventually Dad clipped me round the ear and dragged me away and I ended up wearing an old yellow Mickey Mouse T-shirt to the disco. There was to be no Sweet T-shirt for me during the lifetime of the band and I’ve always found this sad.

I never forgot that shirt and I nursed the memory of it, like a lover I never had, right the way through childhood, adolescence, college, work… In the mid-90s, when everyone got computers at home, I decided to make my own version from memory using a scanned-in photo of the band, a good retro font, a software program called CorelDraw and some of that iron-on transfer paper. Now, I’m no Peter Saville but I reckoned I’d come up with something authentically passable (on the screen at least) but when it came to getting the image onto the pristine white shirt I ballsed it up somehow. I had the iron on too hot, or the instructions were wrong, whatever, but the end result was bits of melting The Sweet faces all over the place and an iron that had to be thrown away.

Then, in 2006 for my 40th birthday my friends Brian and Phil (Phil King, out of The Sweet aficionados Earl Brutus - scream!) turned up at my do with a fantastic T-shirt as a present. It was in an appropriately Seventies sky-blue and it had Steve Priest’s face in black on it and the words “FUCK OFF” underneath. I squealed and screamed like a happy pig when I opened it in the pub but on getting it home later I discovered they’d got me a small. It was the last one, they later said, and while it might have fitted someone really tiny, like Kylie Minogue, I couldn’t even get it over my head. Drunkenly, vainly, I struggled but it was no use and I ended up donating it to a nice diminutive dyke I knew. Denied again!

But finally – finally – last year my amazing boyfriend, via the miracle of those “contextual ads” that no-one looks at on the side bar of Facebook, found and ordered me, in secret, a Sweet T-Shirt. Actually, and do please try not to gag, he wrapped it up pretend-badly and pretended it was from our kitten. It’s not in pink, but in masculine - and yet still period - brown and cream and, well, it’s just about the best thing I own. I just don’t wear it too often because with my luck over the years it’ll probably fall apart in the washing machine.

Mark Wood