‘This is beginning to fall apart – I think it’s just age.’ Words spoken on the evening of my 32nd birthday. Thankfully, my wife wasn’t referring to my body or our marriage. Almost as tragic though, it was another band T-shirt, the fourth in as many weeks to finally give up the ghost.
Big things, like turning 30 or becoming a dad, don’t really rattle me
This is no small thing for me. From about 2007 onwards, I had a reliable default outfit: band T-shirt, black skinny jeans, black Converse All-Stars (high-top). Unlike many of my peers, I escaped the early years of marriage without a wardrobe purge by my wife, and so this get-up served me well until fairly recently. But, as Auden wrote, you cannot conquer time. The jeans, sad to say, were replaced by corduroys a while back, due to a combination of Topman closing down, my waistline expanding after I hit 30 (or rather, after 30 hit me), and the Gen Z-ers in my life telling me that skinny jeans are now ‘millennial cringe’. The All-Stars are still going strong though, given the Youths are currently dressing like it’s the 1990s again, so my Cobaine-esque footwear seems to have passed muster.
My band T-shirts feel most significant of all, though. The first to go was my Sonic Youth T-shirt. A bright red variation of the cover art of 2004’s Sonic Nurse, I ordered it online, aged 15, after watching the film Juno (somewhat ironic, since the film involves a teenage Ellen Page trying to get into Sonic Youth and deciding it’s ‘just noise’). Sonic Youth broke up in 2011, after the lead singers got divorced. Ellen Page (who I had a huge crush on at the time) has meanwhile transitioned and is now Elliot Page. And the film’s screenwriter has said she wouldn’t make the film today because it would be hijacked by pro-lifers, given it’s about a young woman keeping an unplanned pregnancy. I guess if the movie came out now, Juno would have had an abortion and a bad haircut and screamed at some nuns about it in front of the White House. Not sure if I’d have bought the T-shirt in that case.
The next two victims were Los Campesinos! T-shirts – my favourite band for nearly 15 years. Dedicated fans explain them to people by saying ‘they had a song in a Budweiser ad.’ One of these T-shirts hails from my sixth-form days and their Romance is Boring tour. I’ve since worn it to three of their gigs. Back in 2010, I was in the crowd at their Shepherd’s Bush Empire gig with two friends, a couple. They broke up. I’ve lost touch with both, and wish I hadn’t. That night, we were all belting out lyrics about a girl who ‘could never kiss a Tory boy without wanting to cut off her tongue.’ Fourteen years later, I’m writing for The Spectator and I use that T-shirt for gardening. And the band definitely wouldn’t like that Ellen Page joke. Something tells me if they read this I’ll be in for the same treatment that David Cameron got from Johnny Marr after saying he liked The Smiths: ‘it’s not for you.’ Sorry guys, I thought the new album was cracking. I even bought the T-shirts.
The final T-shirt: Sigur Rós, 2012, from their Valtari tour. Now that was a gig. It was held at an outdoor venue in Vienna on a supremely memorable holiday for a mate’s 21st. Currently, there’s just a small hole in this T-shirt, but it’s the beginning of the end (good thing I’ve got so much gardening to do). A very reliable performer in the wardrobe, this one went with anything. I need to find a new all-rounder to replace it. Thankfully, two of the lads I went to that gig with are still among my closest friends – I was best man to one, attended the wedding of the other last year, and we’ve got another wedding in our group coming up this month. Plenty changes, but a few things stay the same.
I’m always surprised by what makes me feel the passage of time. Big things, like turning 30 or becoming a dad, don’t really rattle me. It’s the unexpected moments that age me out of nowhere. It all puts me in mind of another Los Campesinos! lyric, if they’ll forgive me for it: ‘Small steps down a steep slope exist as living proof: not right to call this old age but it certainly ain’t youth no more, it certainly ain’t youth.’
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