Band t-shirts? Nope I don’t do them anymore. Just t-shirts in plain solid colours but I do still wear badges. On one of my worker jackets I wear a badge that used to belong to my wife. It’s depicts a portrait of Emily Bronte. Donna bought it many years ago on one of our visits to Haworth, she was a bit of a Bronte fangirl. On a completely different worker jacket I have a pin badge from the Parrot Club. On my Belstaff I sport a Hope Not Hate pin. I have been unconsciously collecting badges of all sorts for many years. I seem to have accumulated quite a few.
Anyone else still sticking pins in themselves or is it just me?
Stinkin’ Badges!
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Have this pinned on my weskit at the mo.
I have several other badges which are in a tin in a removal box somewhere including a Fezco badge and a 3 Mustaphas 3 badge which I daren’t wear in case I lose it.
And a rather natty Professor Elemental “Make Great Art” badge with a flamingo rampant.
On one of my jackets I have a small silver badge representation of a hovering kestrel.
I have a neat little Undertones black and white metal badge that I sometimes wear to gigs.
I have a few badges from the great small Irish business Deadly.ie They make an excellent enamel badges including a cute street sign style – This Must be the Place, that got an outing at David Byrne’s recent Dublin appearance.
Is the kestrel badge the YOC symbol? I was a member of the Young Ornithologists’ Club and wore the same badge at middle school in the early seventies.
I did wonder that too.
I’ve looked that up. It isn’t. Cool emblem though. Mine is silver and is more of a side profile of a hovering kestrel.
Like this?
That’s the one but I think it’s going the other direction.
I was wrong @hubert-rawlinson That’s the exact one. Is it a symbol of something or other? I have it because kestrels are my favourite creatures and my only superstition is that a hovering kestrel is a good omen. I’ve had a design picked out for a tattoo of a hovering kestrel for around a year now, originally intending to get it done once I turned 60. That was last August and I still haven’t taken the plunge.
TBH I just looked up kestrel side view on the Internet and that was suggested. It’s pewter. There’s a really good one of a swooping kestrel*.
* was known as the windhover then became the motorway bird, though I think the red kite now has that accolade.
The vinyl edition of Chuck Prophet’s Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins came with an eponymous badge that never ceases to cause bewilderment whenever I wear it.
I thought this looked familiar…
Nothing new under the sun.
I like a lapel badge and tend toward them. Favourites are a tin Running Man Oysterband logo, a Strummerville button and my trusty At The Barrier identifier.
Given the expansion of my forehead I now have to wear some sort of bonnet outside, and wil attach one of those to add a jaunty note.
I used to have a massive tin of badges from the 1980’s, as always wore a jacket in those days. I recall getting stopped at Customs because I was wearing a discreet Be Stiff badge. But wife number 2 got rid, as well as most of my then existing wardrobe of T shirts. However I seem to have now nearly as many, even if, like Pencil, my preference is for a blank monochrome, usually black, and long sleeved at that.
I remember having them on the underside of my blazer lapels at school. CND, the Peace Pledge Union, “nuclear power – no thanks” and stuff like that. I was a serious young man.
At the age of 30 a birthday present from a so-called friend was a badge he had made just for me. It said in block capitals “I Can’t Stop Wanking Off!” . I wore it for a laff in the pub but forgot to take it off when I went home on the tube. I didn’t realise I had it on open display on my jacket all the way home. Cringe.
Having a root through my box of badges I found a couple of the badges Drakeygirl made to hand out at mingles. Ah the nostalgia.
I’ve still got them too.
I still have my badge collection from college – “Hunt is a four letter word” etc. A fairly pornographic one for Throbbing Gristle. One of my favourites is “Martian Liberation Front – fight for the right to land”.
My current regular is on one of my jackets – a small one which just says “whatever”.
I used to wear a ‘The Owls Are Not What They Seem’ badge on my lapel at work in the early 90s. Most colleagues were completely nonplussed, the rest just thought I was an idiot.
https://share.google/PJ8mwmZys0kdZH39y
That’ll be the one.
I noticed at the weekend that I still have an Armistice Day poppy badge pinned to the collar of my micro-fleece, which I suppose last came out of the coat cupboard in early November.
My FIL and BIL were/are in the CWGC trade, and my support for the organisation is undimmed by 30+ years of it “being in the family”.
Wear your poppy with pride. I always do.
Two of my winter jackets have enamel poppy badges permanently affixed.
I had a large Beatles one when I was about 14, I remember buying one at my first Bruce Springsteen show (The River tour, along with a programme), latterly I was given one for Wilco’s Solid Sound festival in Massachusetts in 2024 letting people know it was my 4th time there. I wore it proudly all weekend *
* Will not make my 5th one next month because of the orange dictator 🙁
I’m meeting up with an old Word chum mid month for lunch and blethers so badge selection will be integral for completing my wardrobe. I don’t think my old Soviet party badge of Lenin will make the cut or will it?
I had hundreds of badges at one point in my latter schooldays (the post-punk years), and presume they are still in a box in the attic somewhere… does anyone else remember Better Badges? They advertised in the music press weeklies back in the day (I think they even had a badge “chart” in Smash Hits), and had a catalogue you could get by sending them an SAE… such innocent fun…
I had a Music For Miners badge pinned on my long overcoat (natch), acquired at the New Order fundraising gig in 1984 at the Royal Festival Hall. Kept it on there for years.
I have a few trade union / railway badges, and a full collection of ‘Friends of Chester Folk Festival’.
I have lots – love them and stickers too.
My favourite badge reads ‘back in five minutes’.
I still have a badge collection somewhere in my attic (see 2016 thread referenced above) – but the one on my jacket at the moment is an enamelled PCUK badge which hasn’t been removed for a few years – it looks like a flower if you don’t look too closely.
Other recent badges actually worn include a small white Rickenbacker 4001 bass and a SAHB logo.
I’ve got a lovely hand painted upside down Gibson Firebird badge amongst many other musical ones.
Correction: it’s PCA, not PCUK – and it is meant to be a flower (a pansy, apparently) – although it seems to have vessels or ducts or something…
https://imgbox.com/TVeV7DpF
I have two badges that I never wear but they are displayed in my studio. One says Ban The Bumb and is from my student days in the early seventies. The other one says Death To Disco. from later that decade. I was definitely in the, er, “new wave” camp, not the Saturday Night Fever mob.
I love badges, my current one
https://i.haasie.com/wIn.jpg
My latest addition. A gift from one of my great nieces.
Postie just rung my bell and to my great delight I have received a gift from a guitar god.
Diolch yn fawr iawn. 🙏
They look cool!
They do though don’t they.
Greensward rising!
They are the future and the future is now!
I have a Dr Feelgood badge bought from Jake Riviera himself from a very small merch stand at the Newcastle Mayfair in 1987.
At least I hope I have. I haven’t seen it in a couple of years. Hmmm….