Band & Music Tees

Music Tees - the Windows to Our Soul

Music T-shirts are ace. What better way is there for showing the world around you the music you love - and by extension the kind of person you are? (It's far superior than anally listing your fave bands on MySpace or wherever, or just going around shoving your ipod display-screen in strangers' faces - that just isn't going to win friends and influence people.)

The music you listen to is (in theory) the best kind of short-hand for who you really are. If you're wearing a Franz Ferdinand teeshirt, we might imagine that you're a suave twenty-first century wit (or at least possess an ounce of irony). If you're wearing an Oasis T-shirt, we might conclude that you enjoy a pint of lager (or ten) and a boorish night out with the lads.

Of course, this method isn't full-proof (in fact, it's usually way off) but the point is, right or wrong, music tees lead a fair chunk of us to make snap (often subconscious) judgements. (It sounds superficial, but if you met someone in a Cliff Richard t-shirt, wouldn't you find it virtually impossible not to arrive at some form of conclusion about them?)

But one reason why this method of judging strangers is seriously flawed is because of the recent (the last ten years, anyways) trend of wearing music tshirts solely as fashion items. Fashionable music tee-shirts over the last decade have included Motorhead and Ramones tees (both classic pieces of graphic art). There's certainly nothing wrong with this very post-modern practice, but it does rather throw out the natural order of things. Once, wearing a Motorhead tee meant you shared an affinity, at least in some small way, with the Nazi-memorabilia-collecting Lemmy. Now it just means you merely want to look "a bit grungy".

T-Shirt Badge of Honour

And it's not just music t shirts that receive this superficial treatment. The iconic Jack Daniels T-shirt (the classic white logo on black) was once the signature clothing of hard rockers, such as Axl Rose (of Guns N' Roses fame), who had lived punishing and self-abusive lifestyles. It was the coat-of-arms of choice for the seasoned hell-raiser. But these days, thirteen year-old girls are wearing them - with the designer slits from the collar down - to go down the roller-disco. It's the language of clothing being turned on its head.

We're not suggesting that fashion junkies need to know, by heart, the lyrics to Blitzkrieg Bop before they can contemplate wearing a Ramones shirt (although it would be fun). But what we are saying is that this post-modern fad of wearing music tee shirts (solely because they look good) does somewhat undermine the more fervent, ideological music fan, who would never ever wear a music t shirt lightly - the Morrissey nut, say, whose life you would have to threaten before he would even consider removing his Viva Hate tee. So, the sanctity of music tee-shirts and what they stand for has been seriously eroded, but, hey, I'm sure we'll get over it.

Fashion God or Fashion Victim?

In fact, it's fascinating how music tees dive in and out of mainstream fashion - it's very much a cyclical affair. One minute, the ill-fitting tour tshirt (with dates for Bergen, Rotterdam and Copenhagen printed on the back) will only be worn by die-hards down the local indie toilet. Next minute, Jo Wiley's swanning round a BB2 studio with her Cure Pornography tee on. The litmus test for whether or not music t shirts are actually in fashion is if bands are actually wearing other bands' tees. In some eras, wearing a Pixies tee is the single coolest thing a bass-player can do - in other times, donning a music tshirt is an astounding faux pas that will have you black-balled from the music glossies in a heartbeat.

Of course, the laziest and often best way to conjure up graphics for a music tee is to simply slap the record sleeve artwork on the shirt. U2, The Smiths and the Manic Street Preachers tees have had a good run doing this, as have countless others, but there are so many pieces of classic sleeve artwork that have never graced a tee.

Here's our top three record sleeves that we wish were on T-shirts:

1. Can't buy a Thrill - Steely Dan. The mind-messing sleeve for the Dan's debut was put together by Robert Lockart (who won a Grammy in 1971 for his B.B. King sleeve). If Split the Atom printed this zany art, we would jettison the photo montage and just stick with the astonishingly kitsch text. It is quite endorphin inducing, and would bring sunshine to any tshirt.
2. Another Green World - Brian Eno. Cool and sophisticated - just like the arch knob-twiddler himself - this sleeve features some "space age" lettering (that now looks like it fell out of a Krypton Factor repeat) and the image is a detail from the oblique Tom Phillips painting, After Raphael. (It's also worth noting that this record is the only great album to ever feature Phil Collins.)
3. A Wizard, A True Star - Todd Rundgren. Bonkers Dali-esque collage that commemorates the psychedelic Toddster's creative zenith. Features more clichés than an episode of Diagnosis Murder. Nutty stuff. (If you wore this image on a T-shirt, your own mother would cross the road if she saw you strolling towards her - which is not necessarily a bad thing.)

And, as a bonus, here are our top band shirts of all time: a completely arbitrary top-three list of music tee-shirts that we've loved and lost.

1. Pavement. Any of their tees will do. (Except for the navy-blue one with fried eggs on the breasts - that was a bit naff.) Wearing a Pavement tee makes you feel ultra-geeky cool - California style. (This correspondent had a mustard-yellow Pavement tee with a chaotic ketchup-red doodle on it. I loved it dearly and wore it till it became so threadbare it was practically see-through.) Also worth a mention is the Domino Records tenth anniversary tee. It features a wonderful family tree of the record label's stable history - which sprouts up with Pavement and branches out to Four-Tet, The Kills and the Silver Jews et al.
2. James. This is the daddy - the behemoth, in fact. Big flowery 'J' and an 'a' on the front, 'm' on the sleeve and the 'e' and 's' on the back. Genius, ruddy genius. The band had become wannabe stadium-rockers, but the modern hippiness of the design was more in tune with the acid-house fashion of the time.
3. The Bluetones. Very American retro shirt - which was kind of odd for a second-gen Britpop outfit. Blue sleeves, white body, logo in silver - a glorious piece of clothing. (Shame the music was sub-par Stone Roses jangle.)

So, hey, long may the power of music tee shirts keep in thrall those who need to let strangers know exactly which bands they're listening to. It's what they're there for.