After making that rare honour (the culture page) with my first choice this week, a very good friend sent me this poster of an Orange Juice gig, and it got me to thinking. I've always been a bit of a collector of gig posters, some of which I had to let go and later regretted, even though they were much too big to have on display. I guess you are supposed to leave them behind, along with other flotsam and jetsum from your youth, but I'm thinking, in particular, of my wall-sized Steve McQueen tour poster and my (even more wall-sized) The Queen is Dead album sleeve poster, which I suspect were thrown out by my ever-loving mum; not to mention the lovely (again wall-sized) Coffee and TV promo poster, which I left in Finland - well, I did leave the country in either case, after all!
Has anyone at the Spill still got any interesting concert poster pics they'd like to share? I have quite a few - I will try to dig them out if I can although they are quite hard to track down. Love to see any which you do have.
16 comments:
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Look down to my Well She Started It! thread for the poster I miss the most.
I've had hundreds over the years, but I don't have any of them left now, I don't think. Don't make me scan and upload any more old bedroom pictures, please!
I have a big poster from the 1996 Venice Carnival next to my desk, and a couple of smaller memory-joggers, but that's about it.
Actually, the aforementioned 'very good friend' is actually a former colleague of our very own Paul Mac. Hilary says 'hello' by the way Paul!
I don't have any posters but I still have some programmes from the '70s, they're interesting to look back on. Don't have them to hand at the minute (I don't think I threw them out)- things like The Strawbs, Camel, Dr Hook and bands of that era. I kept ticket stubs too, which are in a scrap book. Sad, sad, sad ...
Why sad though? I kept 100's of ticket stubs back then too - still got them somewhere. Music is special - and we keep all kinds of junk to remind us of stuff; why not music?
I went to the big anti-Vietnam war demo in London in '68. At the LSE there was a hall where they were screenprinting anti war placards on the backs of the most wonderful psychedelic posters for gigs at places like Middle Earth, by designers like Hapshash & the coloured coat. I thought it was a shame, and squirrelled a few away. After the demo I went back to collect them. Gone...
It's not a concert poster, but probably an equally rich vein to mine...I've got an REM concert T Shirt. It's beautiful. I'll see if I can find a picture of it. But it was the 80s, so I cut the collar off... sigh.
Steen, you just made me remember that I did the same to a perfectly good (imported!) and very original/expensive Jonathan Richman T shirt, containing a design Jojo had actually drawn himself!
Not since punk had it been cool to take a pair of scissors to the collar of a concert t-shirt - and this was 1985 - and it certainly was no longer fashionable in the UK to do so, but, from my then girlfriend, studying at Connecticut College (New London - how posh!) I heard about this 1980's north American tradition (of cutting out collars) and copied it; partly because the imported (U.S. quality, well-made) shirt in question was just too starchy looking in its original form and I wanted to make it even cooler - as if that were possible! I then proceeded to wear the bejesus out of it - which, without a collar, was easy peasy.
The crazy things we all did (tut!)
I have a pic of myself wearing it somewhere - before I cut the collar. I shall did it out..
that should of course be 'dig'
Such a shame to hear all these stories about our collective memorabilia collection. Okay, so I'm about the only single man at the Spill, and (by default) you could say I have a license to keeps what I likes - except for the small matter of my itinerancy and high tolerance level of parents and friends for looking after 'stuff'- but still, I have clearly hung on to more than most. I will try to get some stuff posted here.
DD and I in particular would surely have had one or two mutual t shirts way back - Rush 1980 tour (Permanent Waves, grey with red and black lettering); Thin Lizzy 79; the odd UFO tour shirt, perchance?
T-shirts? Hell, yeah!
The first one was the light brown (WTF!) UFO Strangers In The Night tour. I was so young I bought a Medium size (DOUBLE WTF!!), and before long had to cut the sleeves off in order to continue wearing it. Trouble is, I never had the muscles to carry off that look.
AC/DC Highway To Hell tour was the plainest of the plain, just the red logo on a black tee, but of course with Bon Scott dying three months later, its 'cool' value increased exponentially almost immediately.
My first long-sleeved one was a 1980 Van Halen tour, in what we called a baseball shirt - really just a 3/4 length uncuffed sleeve in contrasting colour to the body.
I wore the T-shirt from the very first Monsters Of Rock down so much you could hardly guess there was any cloth left of it: it looked like a few spiders' webs held together by a scrap of a collar by the time I had to admit defeat and throw it away.
And I know what you mean about how posters etc all seem to have got lost over the years, but I do still buy T-shirts at gigs a lot of the time. Must be good quality, though. If it says Fruit Of The Loom on the label, FORGET IT!
Right, off to Buxton for the rest of the weekend. See yuz.
@ sourpus - I think I have the very same Jonathan Richman T-shirt. I'll try to dig it out later.
I also have a gig poster that I suspect you'd kill for! Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, Everything But The Girl and The Woodentops at the Brixton Miners' Benefit Gig, 1984 - Orange Juice's farewell gig as well.
And I have a few posters from the band I used to play with. Somewhere in the attic.
I've got a poster of a Miles Davis concert I most definitely did not attend at the Concertgebouw, shall post a pic of it over the weekend.
When the cuban missile crisis hit in '62 my wife and I left the US not intending to return but unthinkingly I'd put everything we owned into storage. Thereafter every month a bill came from the storage company and we finally returned if only to resolve that issue. When I started going through all our 'valuables' I came across a box of concert programs that I'd carted with me across the Atlantic, they were from jazz concerts in UK during the 40's - '50's and many of them were autographed, obsessive that I was I'd inserted typed comments and playlists in each. The autographed ones included Louis Armstrong, Count Basie , Lionel Hampton, Big Bill Broonzey, Humph, Jimmy Rushing, and Bro. John Sellers, he even wrote an essay dedicated just to me across his picture.
As I stood there staring at the pile I said [to myself] 'Why the bloody hell are you carting this stuff everywhere you go": I put it all in the bin!
Just lost my comments. Sourpus, you're right, it's not sad if it's meaningful to you. I'll try and dig out my scrap book and post something if it's suitable - won't be till next week though.
three years ago- the time before last when we moved - I found an old wallet with a Pixies ticket, a Sugarcubes ticket and ticket for the wedding Present doing the Ukrainian sessions all fantastically well preserved - scanned them and made them into T-shirts.
I have got Tees - posters - STUFF kicking about.. I keep them for the design.... and I just can't get rid of things that might come in useful - green as you like me!
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