Rock and Roll Stories #19 - Posters, badges, t-shirts and fanzines

 Christmas is coming! Wanna buy me a present? I love a bit of Rock and Roll memorabilia. Much to the irritation of Mrs T (the Missus, not the former Prime Minister), I've spent my life filling the house up with the detritus of a rock and roll life. 

Our kitchen is plastered with posters I've half inched from various recent False Dots gigs. I call it "The wall of fame", she calls it "the eyesore in the kitchen". It gives me a great sense of happiness and well being and I look forward to adding to it after tomorrow nights gig!. When our classic number Action Shock is chosen as the theme tune for the next Bond movie and is No 1 and we are the biggest band in the world, the wall of fame will be worth a fortune and I'll gloat as I say "Told you so" to her (for the absence of doubt, my tongue is in my cheek). Our bedroom is strewn with badges from bands I've seen. For me these have the same love as my Dad had for his military medals. A badge of honour. I have an old Rock Against Racism badge that I've worn for every False Dots gig I've played (apart from one where a former singer called Mark the Fascist hid it. I do not count that as a False Dots gig in our official history). I have a cupboard full of T-shirts, most of which are faded, have holes in and don't fit me, from bands I've seen over the years. The Ramones, The Pogues, Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers, The Dickies, The Pogue Traders and best of all The False Dots. My Missus says "Chuck them out, you'll never wear them again". To me they are invaluable family heirlooms. Maybe one day I'll be a medium size, rather than a 2XL and they'll be a great fit again.

Then there's my collection of punk fanzines from 1977-80. Sadly I lost most of these. The fanzine I treasure most disappeared almost as soon as I bought it. It was a copy of Xpert-I and it contained the first review of The False Dots, back in 1979. Pete Conway was drunk and obnoxious to the interviewer. Our drummer Dave had just been thrown through the window of WH Smiths on Mill HilL Broadway and had a severed tendon and never drummed for us again. We played the interviewer some cassettes of rehearsals. He wrote "The only thing more immature than their sense of humour is their music". If you can get hold of a copy of issue 6 of Xpert-i, I'll forever be in you debt.

Cheaply and badly photocopiedprinted on the roughest quailty paper in black and white. Many of the top music journalists originally started on such fanzines. The punk movement really established the concept of the DIY music magazine, something I sorely miss. 

What am I saying? well for me, being a music fan isn't about having an interesting play list (or a good record collection, as we had back in the day and some of us still do). It is about going to gigs and collecting the junk that gets sold at them. If you see a band and you think they were great, you wanted the posters, the badges, the t-shirts and the articles in the fanzines. When I started watching bands, often the only place you'd see a decent review was in a fanzine. It was important to me to see that someone else had the same experience and shared it. There was also the music press, the NME, Sounds, etc. These were good but the articles were written by professional journalists and their writing was, to my mind bland. Fanzines were written by people who liked the music (except for Xpert-i and The False Dots). The passion came through. 

One of my 'lost posters' at the studio behind us

I have a confession to make. My collection of posters (again I lost the best ones a long time ago) was acquired by nefarious means. I'd always pinch the posters off the walls at gigs. No one ever stopped me or told me off and at one point I had over 200. I used them to decorate the studios in the early days, and they got defaced, nicked or destroyed. Silly me. I bitterly regret losing them, especially the early False Dots at The Moonlight ones. 

In the NME there was always an advert for 'Better Badges'. I'd look at this with disdain. I believed that if you didn't acquire them at gigs, they were fake and you were what punks would describe as a 'plastic', which was the worst insult anyone could level at a punk fan. I have another confession, Being a cheapskate, over half of the badges I owned I didn't buy. I realised that if you were in an audience that was pogo'ing violently, many badges would fall off. If you waited until after the gig and the floor cleared, you'd find dozens of them. 

As for T-Shirts, I learned a good trick. At first I'd buy them from the official seller in the hall. I went to see the Ramones at the end of their Rocket to Russia tour (I think at the Hammersmith Odeon). As I was leaving, I decided to look at the t-shirts. They were a fiver but I only had two quid left. I said to the merch bloke, who was starting to pack up. Mate, I've only got two quid, any chance of a deal? He replied "You're lucky, it's the last night of the tour, so we want to get rid of them" and he gave me a deal. A couple of mates also took advantage. I realised that if you time it right, you can buy what the merch sellers see as dead stock and get a bargain. I later learned the same trick works with the sellers outside. After the gig, offer them half what the sign says. You will nearly always get a deal. 

What I didn't realise then, was that for many small bands, the merch sales are what pays the bills. When you buy off the bloke outside, the band gets nothing. Is it really how you want to pay back the musicians you love by being a cheapskate. My justification when I was a teenager was that I was skint. Now I have cash and the knowledge. So if you go and see a small band, do consider buying a T-shirt, a badge or a CD. For me, the tat I've collected gives me a warm feeling and makes me happy. It also helped keep musicians on the road. What is not to love? I genuinely believe that all of these treasures (or rubbish as my wife likes to call it) is an aspect of music culture that is much overlooked.

Tomorrow night, The False Dots play our final gig of the year at The Dublin Castle. Please come down, We'll be on at 8pm. We'll have T-shirts and CD's of our new album on sale. They make great Xmas presents. If you can't be there, give our album a listen!