Norman Wisdom, Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee

I see a lot of these on my travels. Young people, under half my age, wearing teeshirts or carrying bags with this logo. The Ramones logo is a fashionable logo. In fact, I probably see more of these than Kurt Cobain's miserable face. The Ramones are cool. Cool dudes. Yeah.

There was a time when band logos on teeshirts were uncool. When I wore them, of course.



My first band teeshirt was designed by Roger Dean and illegally traced by my dad. It took him bloody ages in the garage, after work in the evenings, at weekends, to get the Yes logo onto a silk screen. It was a totally illegal operation because the materials were nicked from work, but it was done out of love and a need to get away from the rest of the family in the garage when he could have been watching Benny Hill or The Generation Game with the rest of us.

And after all that work, he only used the screen once to print a blue logo onto my cheap yellow teeshirt, my only teeshirt at the time which didn't have those awful capped sleeves.

Did I look good in my tight yellow Yes teeshirt, my hair cascading down to meet the top of the crew neck?

Of course I didn't, but I wore that damned teeshirt for most of my teens.

Until...

Ohmygod, rockin' Dire Straits came along with their Making Movies sweatshirt. I loved that subtle red creation. It was so comfortable I even wore it in an ironic way long after I'd stopped digging The Knopf's finger plucking. Even when he was wanking around with Sting on that cancerous Brothers In Arms album. Yes, I was that perverse. And as an added bonus, it certainly kept all those horrible women at arm's length - as a late developer this suited me right down to the ground.

Since then there has been the mistake of the Prince Lovesexy Tour Teeshirt which was totally unsexy, worn once, and not really suitable to iron. The nineties and the noughties have so far been band-teeshirt-free for me. I have matured and I am slowly growing up, too.

So what now? What should a middle aged man be wearing?

I've got my eye on a nice little Trivium number.



We'll buy the hoodie from Primark. Who fancies a few months in my dad's old garage?