Give the old band T-shirt a second chance – I'm 47 and I still love mine

Telegraph

2 hours ago

There are very few items that should remain in your wardrobe for 32 years straight. If you own an original Hermès Birkin bag or an Alexander McQueen suit designed by the man himself then feeling protective towards items of such venerable age is understandable – you'll be able to buy a yacht or six with them if you contact the right auction house.
But there's only one type of person who keeps a T-shirt that wears its age so nakedly that burns, tears and sweat marks can raise the eyebrows and crinkle the septum of complete strangers.
Band T-shirts are often cheaply made, occasionally have questionable designs, can lose their shape in the wash and seldom look good on anyone over 30. But yet I'm one of many music fans who just cannot throw these totemic garments of my youth away – despite not having worn any of them since the turn of the millennium.
Band T-shirts were never intended for the 47-year-old me. Their popularity is supposed to lie solely with teenagers who haven't yet learnt how to broadcast their passions and beliefs more subtly. But it's a summer of music nostalgia at the moment, as the Oasis reunion tour, Glastonbury featuring Rod Stewart and Neil Young, and the farewell tour from Ozzie Osbourne farewell show just before his passing demonstrates. The fervour right now for vintage band T-shirts – and Oasis – is such that Selfridges is launching the Summer of Sound this month, featuring curated, vintage merchandise from the likes of Oasis, the Rolling Stones, Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. Prices run to a staggering £3,395, so there's clearly an enthusiastic market for such things willing to part with huge amounts of cash.
When you're an in-betweener with mates and lust on your mind, a band tee is the difference between having a truffle and game meat dinner with your desired one then reciting EE Cummings by candlelight, or pinching their bum in a nightclub and necking tequila. One is a deeper, more thoughtful attempt to connect. But the latter is more likely, for better or worse, to yield instant results.
Finding your tribe
On my first week of university in 1996, band T-shirts were everywhere, and they made a useful barometer in terms of finding my neophyte tribe. My theories (which were mostly on the money) were that if you made friends with the blokes in Stone Roses and Pulp T-shirts then you were probably going clubbing later. People in Iron Maiden and The Cure T-shirts should be avoided lest I wanted three years of poor eyeliner, cider and conspiracy theories. And I was sceptical but curious about The Smiths and Nirvana tee donners; they could be the witty Oscar Wilde type but could equally be vodka-guzzling manic depressives.
I had my Blur T-shirt on of course, which I hoped made me look laddish but also moderately bookish – the kind of guy who likes lager but can also have a chat about Alexander Trocchi or Douglas Coupland. Pretentious and deluded? Let me count the ways…
But it was vital for me at that time to distinguish myself from the hordes of Oasis T-shirt wearers who (and I stand by my theory to this day, with the reunion tour currently in full flow) I was convinced were, underneath the swagger, reactionary bores who would all graduate to work on the lower rungs of the finance sector.
Then, as now, there were ways to wear a band T-shirt in order to ensure that you came across as a knowing fan, not a grumpy roadie. Naturally, tucking your T-shirt into your jeans was the first sign of a young adult who hasn't cut the parental apron strings.
A more common problem, for blokes in particular, was size. Back in the mid-Nineties, the only ways to get a band T-shirt were to buy one off a bloke standing outside the gig venue who would have them displayed on the pavement. Or you could head to the one 'indie' shop in your town which would have a mediocre selection of overpriced T-shirts hung above the CD racks.
The lack of choice, coupled with my devotion to the band or artist (though they were mostly bands back then) meant that I had quite a few band T-shirts (Saint Etienne, The Boo Radleys) that were ludicrously over-sized. My mates and I figured out (and God this seemed so important back then) that the way around it was to tuck the XL shirt in at the back, roll it up at the front so it caught very loosely on your belt and then wear a Harrington jacket on top. The problem came when we were sweating it out on the dance floor and couldn't take our jackets off – lest it looked like we'd got dressed drunk and in the dark. Which, actually, quite a few of us probably had.
A new era?
But that era of music being dominated by 'three, four or five white blokes with guitars looking like a gang' in the UK is completely over now. And, for some reason, single artists don't work as well when cheaply pasted onto a T-shirt. Taylor Swift concerts are proper dress-up events, not T-shirt conventions. Anyone wearing a Self-Esteem T-shirt would look like they're trying too hard and a Kneecap T-shirt would just make you look like a dilettante contrarian.
So Gen Z are mining the past. On a recent trip to Liverpool, the Resurrection store on Bold Street, long a northern hub for band tees, had infinitely more Nirvana T-shirts than anything for The 1975 or Idles. I saw two girls of no more than 17 wandering around, both in Ramones T-shirts, the ultimate example of a band who have sold more merch than albums.
Music snobs have long derided the Ramones T-shirt phenomenon; lambasting youngsters who wear the distinctive black tee with the presidential seal style emblem that was the logo of 'Da Brudders', despite having been born long after the premature deaths of Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee. It's the worst kind of musical elitism; usually practised by men who themselves own a Sun Records or Motown T-shirt, despite being merely a twinkle in their parent's eyes when Marvin and Elvis were first in the studio.
Yet these retro reproduction Ramones T-shirts that are ubiquitous in both Liverpool and Camden Market are chiefly of semantic value. There are mega-bucks to be had in band T-shirt land, but they're reserved for those with either the savvy or hoarding habits required to hold onto a tee from the era of loon pants and 18-minute drum solos.
Enter Led Zeppelin, and a T-shirt from their final UK shows at Knebworth in 1979. A special tee, screen-printed for that gig, was made for the road crew in lieu of lanyards. One of them sold on eBay for a whopping $10,000 (£7,400) in 2011. Though, Run DMC aren't too far behind; one of their 1980s concert tour T-shirts sold, also on eBay, for $13,000 (£9,600).
Don't look back...
Fast forward 40 years, and the same complaints on the quality of band T-shirts are extant, chiefly due to the continuing presence of the 'bootleg tees on the pavement' guy, still earning an illegitimate crust outside gig venues.
Yet there are sources online where better quality products can be found these days; EMP earn good online reviews for the quality of their tee's material – though the designs, mainly the pseudo-Gothic comic horror tropes of Iron Maiden, won't be too everyone's (or my own) tastes.
Banquet Records in Kingston are a bit more connected to the present day with high-quality T-shirts available on their website for Yard Act, Hundred Reasons and, inevitably, Oasis.
Donning my Blur T-shirt from 1993 (bought at a gig that two mates and I skived off school to go and see at the age of 15) for the first time in decades was a strange experience. First off, it did fit. But I still looked ridiculous.
It also triggered two entirely contradictory emotions. Firstly, an intense nostalgia for that teen era of cigarettes, snogs, cider and seven-inch singles. But also a feeling of unease: by wearing this now, I'm not broadcasting that I love a great band of yore; I'm transmitting that I haven't moved with the times at all.
So I took it off again pretty sharpish, knowing that, with age, comes more discreet ways of letting the world know your attitudes and beliefs via your garments.
Yet, it turns out, I might be in possession of a frayed cotton pension contribution. Online, the exact Blur tour T-shirt I own, from their pre- Parklife and pop stardom period, is selling for up to £400.
Will I sell? No, I don't think so. Having a band T-shirt makes me feel connected to my past. But, just like my teen adorations for eating fish finger sandwiches, reading Loaded magazine and applying Clearasil, a public display really wouldn't do me any favours today. But I'll never relinquish my tees, and all that they stand for.