The Orange Juice T-shirt, as modelled so very fabulously on the cover of the first Pooh Sticks album, is just a Polydor promotional item from when that “L.O.V.E.” thing came out in 1981: nice enough, and no you can’t have it. On the other hand, despite the fact it says “100% cotton”, the MC5 shirt is a magical garment actually woven by actual unicorns from actual fairy dust and actual rainbows.
One night, probably after hours spent trying to engage someone who actually just wanted it to end, please, in a discussion of the pros and cons of the great Moby Grape first-album singles-experiment, Steve showed up at The Coach House in Swansea, to watch local pub-rockers The Squirts do their thing (I liked them best doing “Fireball”, the Ducks Deluxe number), only to find the singer, Paddy, wearing an MC5 T-shirt. Steve asked Paddy to sell him the shirt. Paddy said Steve could just have it (he was probably just looking to keep the conversation short to avoid Steve attempting to continue anything along the lines of the great Moby Grape debate… again). Apparently Paddy had been given the shirt by Sean Tyla (he’d been in The Tyla Gang), who himself had been given it by Marc Zermati of Skydog Records (The Tyla Gang had been on Skydog). As if this pedigree wasn’t already solid-gold, it subsequently turned out that Zermati had worn the shirt to the Mont de Marsan punk festival: there’s a photo of him wearing it on page 30 of that Caroline Coon ‘1998’ book.
These days, the shirt comes out only every now again. I can always tell when because of all the finger-cymbals, chanting and muffled sobbing I can hear.
"Think Bubble" is an album (LP only) of 1995 demos for an unreleased Pooh Sticks album.
See 'About Me' for details.
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