There was a time when the music industry was a far more individual thing and not so wrapped up in its own brilliance. The industry largely left people to make and sell t-shirts, patches and posters. Trademarks didn’t seem to have existed and ‘brand protection’ was laughed at as a thing straight, uptight corporate types got involved in. So you could buy all this stuff off a market stall or in the back of the NME. Bootlegs were the only thing that bothered some, though some thankfully encouraged it as the business later hypocritically exploited when they’d run out of unreleased stuff. There was no ‘official’ merchandise and if there was we wouldn’t have wanted it. It would have seemed too ‘normal’ too corporate, not rock n roll.
Anyway, I took all this for granted, t-shirts were beyond my means so I branded myself with patches which were quite random designs. For example I had a circular one which featured sun rays bursting from behind a hill which said Pink Floyd. I was really lovely and was probably created by some sweatshop in the midlands.
You could get patches of even non mainstream bands. I even had a Groundhogs one. Did logos exist? I don’t think so like they do now. And while I bought posters from HMV, places like The Kard Bar in Newcastle had a far bigger range. When I was a student I got a small poster of Stevie Nicks there which got me through many long dark nights of the soul.
But it didn’t stop there. As a teenager I had a pencil case adorned with Jethro Tull’s Aqualung and a very modern for the times, baseball cap with Rainbow on. Where all these things came from, I have no idea but ‘rock’ merchandise of all sorts were everywhere. You could buy postcard-sized photos of The Beatles.
Badges were everywhere and cheap so as kids we had lots of them on our blazers of every band you can think of, often little more than a piece of an album stamped out. I had a ‘starkicker’ Whistle Test one, which I really wore with pride, thinking people would think I’d been on the show!
And I was delighted to find cigarette card type things with a brief biog of a band on one side anda photo on the other side inside the wrapper of my Zoom iced lolly. My Small Faces one was long a treasured possession and is probably collectible now
Then there were bubble gum cards. These were super popular, especially in the 60s. I wish I’d saved mine. There was a complete set of Beatles and Monkees cards that when placed together made a photo of the band. I was an assiduous collector of cards from an early age and had Land Of The Giants set and Captain Scarlet and Joe 90. Plus books of PGTips cards from packets for tea.
Of course these things were good and bad and everything in between but they were extraordinarily diverse. And we lost all of that with the modern trend for branding and ‘official’ products. It was the same with football shirts. There was no ‘official’ kit for £120, you got a red shirt off the market and just said it was Liverpool or Middlesbrough, perhaps adorning it with a club crest. My mam once got me a tangerine one off the market and I said, believe it or not, it was Blackpool!
The lesson here is about individual expression versus conformity. I know which one is more in the spirit of rock.
