Well, it's been 23 years since we started and now I'm 64. I don't know how. Last time I looked it was I had a 28" waist and it was 1979. In November 2023 I had a stroke which has affected my walking and disabled my left hand and legs. It's a drag, but it hasn't stopped me rockin'. In fact rock music and the spirit it embodies has inspired me to heal.

My whole life has been infused with rock music. I'm a vinyl collector with a 13,000+ collection of albums and 3500+ collectable 7" & 12" singles.

This isn't a regular t-shirt site which sells product in a cold, uncaring way. It's more akin to a homage to my lifelong passion and culture. It's personal and only me and Dawn work here. No one else. We care. I can't put it more simply than that. We're in our 24th year now and have been through many incarnations. It's all driven by my obsession about and love of the music of the 60s and 70s in all its forms

We're located on the west coast of Scotland. In 2002 me and my missus of now 45 years, Dawn, set up DJTees. Back then no-one sold rock t-shirts that were not black and XL. They came in big boxes of 72 and were screen-printed as stock to hold. That seemed clunky and inflexible to us. Tying all your money up in stock that might never sell looked an inefficient and outmoded way to do business. It meant you couldn't do niche stuff and we loved the niche stuff best of all. So we worked out a way to print everything to order, then you only needed to hold stock of plain t-shirts. 

From day one, we realised that we'd only manage to make a living by selling small (and I do mean small. 5 is a hit for us 10 a very, very big hit) amounts of hundreds of different designs and even all these years later, that still holds true. Our best seller in 2024 was the Whistle Test shirt. It sold 12. Many designs never even sell, probably because we have so few visitors.

We decided giving people a choice of size and colour would be a good idea too, as would having women's tees as an option (though very few buy them) We didn't know at the time we were inventing the future, but now, 23 years on, its how the whole industry operates. If you see designs identical to ours, they're usually often cheap rip offs. We don't have any other websites. People have copied the site wholesale but they don't have big enough artwork because they've just right clicked a low resolution image from our website, so it's all pixelated and blurred. Maybe I should be flattered, of course they wouldn't know Bobby Whitlock from Rick Grech. So there's nothing personal or soulful about what these people do. It's all just product to them, when it's anything but, to me. I treat it like it's all holy relics 

We then hooked up with great rock photographers so we could get photos to work into t-shirt designs on, working with Jorgen Angel, Tony Mottram, Steve Goudie, Mark Diamond,
David Plastik, Keith Morris,, Jan Persson, Jordan Zevon and members of the public as well as using photos in the public domain , uncoyprighted album adverts and under Creative Commons licences..

For 10 years we rocked it.

Then in 2012 we sold DJTees to pursue our writing and art careers. I've since written 21 novels and 3 non-fiction books about football, two of which were long-listed for Sports Books of the Year prizes. I didn't win (boo!). I was also short-listed for Football Writer Of The Year (I didn't win. Again) Dawn has become an artist of some reputation selling monotypes to art lovers all over the world.  

But on 15th Feb 2018, we took control and ownership of DJTees again, climbed back into the managerial chair and started to do things our way. We set about getting the whole operation lean and efficient once again. Today, though only a tiny, part-time business, its the best its ever been and I don't say that lightly.

We redesigned the website and Dawn is back designing and I'm in charge of admin, celebrating classic rock and writing about it. While the whole operation is tiny, it is more focused and direct. If you write to me, I write back. There's no hiding behind corporate-speak, chat bots or AI and none of the other ways that companies have to keep the public at bay. It's just me. I sort everything out. If it goes right or wrong, I get all the glory or heartache.

It's true that we don't sell much of anything, and we don't even get much traffic to be honest, just a few hundred people per day, but I don't mind. That's not the point. This isn't big business. We know we're very niche and we like it. We're not pretending that these t-shirts are artist endorsed. The point is to share the love of the music many have long forgotten, with people who still love it too; to celebrate the sounds of our lives and write about it in blogs too.

I've made loads of friendships through mutual love of often niche music. We have a customer, for example, who was at The Roundhouse to see Man on the night they recorded Maximum Darkness with John Cippolina. I love that and find it very enriching.

We get many people everyday offering to write blogs or something commercial but they don't understand that this is personal. I don't want any of that stuff. That's why there are no adverts. This is less a commercial place than a place of love and culture.

I think we are one of the few online businesses that's customer base average age is over 60-years-old, though most feel they're still 21. I know I do. We are the classic rock generation and our musical culture is often ignored, but we're here to balance that out in our own small way.

This is a simple wee business based around our collective love of music and the culture that surrounded it. This isn't just a marketing thing, it's a life-long passion, as having over 13,000 albums probably proves.

I hope you'll read some of my blogs, they often document a time now long gone, the victories and losses of the counterculture and a rough upbringing and those long, cold nights camping out in a queue for tickets, along with my thoughts on the culture, days gone by and rock life experiences

When we started in 2002, we used hand-weeded, single-colour digitally cut vinyl, these days everything is printed using huge state-of-the-art Kornit DTG (direct-to-garment) printers. These massive machines cost our printers a small fortune but allow beautiful bright & sharp full colour prints. 

Somewhere along the way, I hope we can do something you like, but if we don't, hey, that's fine too.

Thanks for sticking around and like Spinal Tap, I think you’ll enjoy our new direction...

Cheers, Johnny

July 2025

Just to restate, none of our t-shirts are endorsed by the musicians or bands and we've never pretended they are.