1990, a raver's dream
New-old Tank Girl T-Shirt, and a memory of a free festival...
1992, Glastonbury Festival. Our mothership magazine Deadline had a whole tent to itself, from which it sold merchandise and copies of the mag to a zonked-out, post-Baggy, pre-Britpop audience. The scene then was murky, undefined, and still had traces of 80’s hippie, acid-house, and the original incarnation of indie. I liked it, it was one big tribe, and (mostly) nobody acted like an arsehole.
Jamie and I did a Tank Girl signing in the Deadline tent, along with our friends The Senseless Things (a band that we had met through mentioning them in a Tank Girl comic). Nearly everyone that queued up to see us was wearing either a Thing’s “Pop Kid” t-shirt, or a Tank Girl t-shirt, and the majority of those were shirts featuring the artwork from the cover of our debut 1990 graphic novel collection - Tank Girl Book One. The image of Tank Girl, holding a baseball bat and kicking out a biker-booted foot, set against psychedelic, fractal spirals seemed to fit well with the spirit of the times. I remember walking around the festival, spotting hundreds of those shirts, they were everywhere. At that point in time, Jamie and I were making more money out of t-shirts than we were out of publishing. T-shirt-cheque-time was always a good cause to head to the pub for a celebration (not that we needed much encouragement).
That t-shirt has been out of print for thirty years now, and it has been high on many TG enthusiast’s wish lists. So we’ve beavered away, overcoming printing problems and fading issues, and come up with a shiny new version. It’s a real trip, seeing so many of those shirts all in one place again. Our printers (Fifth Column, who printed the original shirts in 1990!) have done a bang-up job, screen printing a precise seven-colour print onto organic cotton, FairWear shirts.
We’ve printed a goodly amount, and they will go on sale tomorrow at 11am BST/GMT.
AND once again, we have gone for another print run of the incredibly popular 5ft tall Tank Girl/Deadline Door Posters, which we are hoping will turn up in time to go on sale at the same time as the t-shirts.
Ok my lovelies,
See you in a minute
Alan
Still have my original, loved getting the story about my Senseless Things - Lost Honey shirt Hewlett artwork from you when you did the signing in Newcastle.
I was there in 92!! I hung around that Deadline tent when I wasn't ripped to the tits!! I have fond and dusty memories of Jamie drawing Sevrin Slipper Sniffer from Fireball on the back of my Dirty Old Sold tshirt...which I still have btw!!
Any plans to do some Fireball merch?! My old Fireball long sleever has long since departed from too much wear :(