Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

There's a lot of irritating stuff, yes. My favourite columnist is George Monbiot, by a mile. Something I like about the Independent when I do get it is that its liberalism is less metropolitan and more about the common good. Needless to say, though, the Guardian's series of articles on public service under that very title were awesome.

Today's G2 seems designed to add fuel to my (f)ire: one page of 'Style' after another, including a column on Why We're So Disappointed That Madonna Employs A Stylist.

Also good in Guardian: John Patterson re. cinema.

oh god, ask hadley today is just... tooth-grinding.

"today"

"At what age is a man too old to wear band T-shirts?"

Martin McCall, by email

"About 15 - that young enough for you, Martin? And to follow one rhetorical question with several more, what in God's name is the point of band T-shirts anyway? To show your allegiance to a band? Do you think anyone else cares? To impress onlookers with your esoteric musical knowledge? See previous reply. To make people stare at your bony chest? Again, I refer you to the first answer. To show that you once attended a live gig? Wow, like, a pair of golden headsets to the guy in the Nirvana '91 T-shirt. In case you happen to bump into the lead singer on the street, he sees that the two of you are kindred souls and therefore invites you to join his band and you then go on the road and have all the manly bonding sessions followed by groupies that your heart could desire? OK, I'll give you that one, although this does suggest that you still harbour the fantasy that you might bump into Joey Ramone in Waterstone's.

"As for ladies in band T-shirts, give me a fricking break. First, gals, a badly cut, poorly made, oversized T-shirt is good for nothing other than wearing to bed and the gym. Second, too often women who wear band T-shirts appear to be going for what we shall call Groupie Chic. It is a style amply modelled by Kate Moss in recent years, and can pretty much be summed up as skinny faded black jeans, ankle boots, a ripped band T-shirt and a cropped fur jacket. In other words, a girlified version of Marc Bolan's or Keith Richards' wardrobe, as though the woman has been so busy, um, sleeping on the band bus she hasn't had time to clean her clothes, so she's now wearing ones belonging to her musical companion. This column has no time for such nonsense."

Yeah, because women have *no* interest in music whatsoever except for sleeping with musicians. What CENTURY is this cretin from?

I think I stopped wearing band T-shirts by the time I was 23. It wasn't necessarily a conscious move tho. I doubt I will ever wear one again tho - I guess it seems lame unless it's an old obscure or overlooked thus hip act (even this I dunno about). I don't notice many people over 20 wearing them. Does Matt DC still have that Save Ferris T?

I only want to sleep with musicians if they are hot as they are (their musical ability is pretty irrelevant in fact).

dear teh grauniad - a long time ago/we used to be friends...

It went downhill after I left.

or were you PUSHED?

http://homepage.mac.com/alexinnyc/.Pictures/Photo%20Album%20Pictures/2007-09-02%2015.37.57%20-0700/Image-D15E03FF59A011DC.jpg

heh. (sorry alex, no harm intended)

http://www.abc.net.au/sport/thesportsdesk/images/200607/20060707henrydive_derblog.jpg

xp

i was being harsh really. i don't care what's on other people's t-shirts that much. just trying to work out why i stopped wearing/wouldn't wear band t-shirts myself.

Any t-shirt which isn't plain white clearly sucks that's why.

i couldn't agree less

I still wear band t-shirts if I like the band. Why not? I don't *define* myself or my personality by my music tastes any more, I haven't done that since I was about 18. But that's not the same thing as wearing a band t-shirt.

I suppose the fashion journalist in discussion cannot fathom the idea that clothes are just something you put on, rather than a definition of or statement about your personality.

This is definitely something that happens as you age - or rather, has happened to me as I aged. There's a subtle difference between Statement Clothes and just things you put on.

Guardian editorial worldview circa 2007:

http://www.astucia.co.uk/images/sce/galibier%20tunnel%20_three.jpg

why else would you buy a band t-shirt if not as a statement or definition of personality?

I didn't know it was a band t-shirt okay?

because you're cold xp

In the past I've usually just bought them as a keepsake of a gig I've enjoyed. The piece tracer quotes is idiotic fluff, obv. I'd be embarrased to admit I'd written that.

Because you like the design? Because you like the music? Because it was given to you (this is where most of mine come from)? Because it was a souvenier?

x-post

you wouldn't actually buy a band t-shirt because you liked the design but not necessarily the band tho...would you?

because you like the music = statement/definition of you/your taste

given to you = not you buying

you wouldn't actually buy a band t-shirt because you liked the design but not necessarily the band tho...would you?

No, plus I've only ever bought them @ gigs.

because you like the music = statement/definition of you/your taste

Probably yeah, but w/smaller bands there's also the knowledge that in buying it, yr helping to supposrt the tour.

i actually bought a comets on fire t-shirt solely because the design was so awesome. (it was at a gig, but they hadn't come on stage yet.) then i heard the music and i liked that too. i suppose if i hadn't liked their music, or thought it was boring, it would have posed a problem.

a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless so that alex in nyc doesn't stalk and kill him, bought a huge iron maiden patch when he was 14 and sewed it across the shoulders of his denim jacket. he had never heard a note of iron maiden, but he wound up becoming the biggest iron maiden fan i know, and even sung in a band later, where his vocal style was almost inseparable from bruce dickinson's.

my take on this: do not read hadley freeman.

this resolution made some time ago, stands as strong today as it ever did.

it's a crass and deliberately invidious piece of writing. such an attitude, if sincerely held, could be turned around on pretty much ANY choice of clothing. so forgeddaboudit

the last band t-shirt i bought - robyn!

alan i can't help myself, i know i'm sick and need help.

is there a thread for best band t-shirts? must see

Taste is something that I have. It does not define me. Clothes are something I wear. The statement I am making is "I don't really care about clothes any more."

If I'm going to make a statement about clothes, I'll wear a bright green paisley jacket to a dronerock festival where everyone else is in leather.

I suppose my Hawkwind t-shirt is a statement, it says "ha ha, I'm wearing a Hawkwind t-shirt, I care nothing for fashion, I am wearing the shirt of a band so deeply uncool you can suck my left one because I love them!" But it's certainly not a statement saying that I want to f*ck any of Hawkwind or that I have a musician boyfriend whose Hawkwind t-shirt I'm borrowing, which is the assumption of that article.

> I don't notice many people over 20 wearing them.

*SOBS*

> you wouldn't actually buy a band t-shirt because you liked the design but not necessarily the band tho...would you?

EAR t-shirt with the putney on the front = great. EAR live = terrible. (EAR on CD = ok, plus pram and stereolab were supporting)

"Do you think anyone else cares?"

the core MOTOR of fashion is YES OF COURSE I THINK OTHER PEOPLE CARE THAT I AM WEARING... WHAT'S "IN". no less dumb than wearing something else that forms part of your identity. so it's just a puerile throw away bit of nonsense. heh. fashion in 'being puerile' shocker.

I gave up caring whether I was too old to wear band t-shirts or whatever a long time ago. Really, if you're getting that worked up about what other people are wearing, the joke's on you, I think. To paraphrase - "Do you think anyone else cares?"

Yesterday I wore an X-Ray Spex t-shirt. I am 31. Oh noes.

If a FAC 51 Hacienda T-shirt counts as a band t-shirt, I am wearing one NOW. I am more than 31.

Unless you buy shirts at arena shows or whatever they cost a tenner or less which is cheaper than t-shirts tend to be (aside from plain ones from Primark or something). I guess it bugs fashiony people cos it's fashion for people who don't give a shit about fashion

you wouldn't actually buy a band t-shirt because you liked the design but not necessarily the band tho...would you?

whoa there, people do this All The Time! witness all the motorhead/def leppard/poison tees on sale at top shop/debenhams/whatever.

What's a putney, Andy?

I bought a Mega City Four t-shirt the other week. I bought it cos I like the band and I like their logo, and out of nostalgia.

witness all the motorhead/def leppard/poison tees on sale at top shop/debenhams/whatever

really? since when do those shops sell (official?) band merchandise?

but how do you know people buying them don't like the band (even if it's 'ironic' or just liking the idea OF liking them, if that makes sense) anyway?

i can imagine some people, not just kids or people buying for kids, buy band t-shirts because of the design and without really knowing about the band but can't be that many really. this is even more of a facile 'want to look cool' statement tho isn't it? that sense of knowing what to buy but not really knowing why...

remember the 'little girls wearing Nico 'Chelsea Girl' t-shirt thing (altho i approved of this ha)

Uhm yeah, there were tons of high street chains selling classic rock tees (I presume they just bought a load wholesale).

i figure these are aimed at and bought mainly by teenagers

really? since when do those shops sell (official?) band merchandise?

since AGES, honestly. i doubt your "average" 14-year-old Miss Selfridge customer would have a clue/give a shit who Def Leppard/insert 80s hair metal band here are. it's just a noisy "cool" design that'll make her look a bit like Peaches Geldof or whoever.

I'm sure I remember even Primark licensing some lame/classic 80s band tee designs recently.

and As Matt DC has admitted, sometimes people buy band tees without even realising that's what they are!

nb this whole discussion is clearly on the wrong thread.

Someone was selling MC5 shirts a good few years ago and it was the only place that you could get MC5 shirts so I know loads of people that bought them as they had been desperate for years to get them.
I got mine online but it was probably the same shirt.

a putney

http://www.vintagesynth.com/misc/vcs3.jpg

so called because they were made in putney (not far from you actually, there's a website that gives the actual address of the place they used to make them, cottage industry style, deodor road, sw15).

http://www.ems-synthi.demon.co.uk/snaps/everynun.jpg

Hang on a second, I went to primary school at 49 Deodar Road!!

Oh, I didn't, it was 95-97 Deodar Road (since moved). My best friend at the time lived at 50 Deodar Road, though.

I've got a Synthi t-shirt but my god, I want a t-shirt with that nun on it.

I am currently wearing a T-ahirt of a band that I saw live but didn't like much. It's a pretty design and the band aren't well known enough for many people to even know it's a band T-shirt.

I have had it on since yesterday so should probably take it off soon.

Also, Holden says Crerar told him the paper had seen information that he was being investigated by security services. Yet The Guardian now reports there was never any investigation. So did Crerar fail to verify Labour Together’s bogus claim and plan to run the smear anyway??

— Karl Hansen (@karl_fh) February 21, 2026

writing style here is horrible, it's like an AI-gen daily mail article

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/07/ian-huntley-death-the-summer-we-watched-a-senseless-tragedy-unfold-in-soham

lol it's so fucking weird, I was posting about it on Bluesky earlier. It reads like a terrible poem. Also this holy tone that's so clearly meant to imply it's something more than grim clickbait.

"In the corner of our eyes, you’d catch a glimpse of him"

setting aside its many far grosser flaws (perhaps-capable one-time crime correspondent takes on the so-called fancy true-crime novellsts* at their own game) the pronoun deployment in this particular sentence is very special; it could be genuinely uncanny in the right context (which to be clear is very much not this piece)

*there's enough of these now that i'm not going to say they're all bad (i know some ppl like the gordon burns book for example, tho i do not) but there are definitely way too many and this piece is why they're a menace

(first “its” means the whole piece lol, yes i am a professional copy editor)

the gordon burn books 🙄

Noncesploitation, is that something?

Tbf to Burn his prose is pretty robust. That article is just a wet plastic bag.

Can I take issue with the phrase "senseless tragedy", the opposite would be a sensible tragedy which is absurd. So the word senseless could and should have been excised from the headline.

i disagree about the opposite and about the idea that you can't have tragedies that are in some sense explicable or noble (hello the history of classical drama) but i'll cosign on yeah it's more ugly rhetorical slop in this context

Liew moving to politics from sport is a move.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/14/food-israel-gaza-war-london-protest

I don't of The Guardian needed another piece about Gail's tho'

He might just live in Archway?

There are a lot of independent cafes nearby, and it is gentrifying, so of course there’s a new Gail’s. Nobody I know would go there for BDS-adjacent reasons and also because fuck VC-owned chains.

feel like he's done v political sport pieces but also some similarly separate political stuff before? can't precisely remember but i think so.

doesn't really land anything significant in that one i guess.

xpost

Yeah he tends to lay quite a lot of politics in his sports pieces (my favourite one was on trans rights in athletics iirc) but here it feels lacking.

Nobody I know would go there for BDS-adjacent reasons and also because fuck VC-owned chains.

The prices would keep me out!

I can't remember him doing much.

Looking at his archive there are a couple of things on Reform in the last three months.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/22/reform-uk-matt-goodwin-gorton-and-denton-nigel-farage

Otherwise -- from a scan of the headlines -- everything has a sports angle.

xps

I note that Gail’s sells hamentashen during Purim week for £3 per cookie, which is definitely some kind of hate crime.

Either I buy them at Grodzinski and Daughters in Stamford Hill where £3 gets you 250g of hamentashen, or I make them myself.

less than year since that The Guardian sold The Observer, now this:

The Observer Opens Voluntary Redundancy Round
https://www.amediaoperator.com/news/the-observer-voluntary-redundancy-tortoise/

people did warn at the time of selling The Observer to Tortoise Media

Amazing column...just see Trump out is such a brainless thing to write.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/02/donald-trump-iran-us-constitution-world-response

Only 20 more years

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/apr/07/search-perfect-kids-menu-restaurants

Kids won't eat? Why not take them out to eat almost every day in multiple cities, including a Michelin-starred restaurant

They should have put comments on that, just so the rage could be enjoyed.

Read this yesterday and I can't get my head around the central "joke" which seems really iffy but idk if I am missing some element of it or not seeing the point being made.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/06/do-we-really-need-truncheons-and-pepper-spray-to-fight-off-londons-feral-teenage-shoplifters

When Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the local MP, posted on Instagram that the intimidating scenes were inexcusable, the replies … well, let’s not call anything a cesspit, but put it this way: opinions were divided. If the constituent who suggested focusing “on supporting the next generation and giving them a world to grow up in” ever met the one who described London as a “Vile city full of immigrant scum! We need a referendum on a new capital!!!”, we would have a civil war in Clapham, which would be way more serious than a few hoodlums half-inching a Southern Fried Chicken wrap. I’ve been told off socially, more than once, for minimising the offence of shoplifting by naming the wrap, and I take that. And yet it always, always is Southern Fried Chicken.

Yes, that is very baffling. Feels like a racist dogwhistle but nothinh else in the article suggests that, is she highlighting how unbothered she is by focusing on the most trivial element?

Had exactly the same response. Read the excerpt and thought 'oh that's weird and racist', then read the article and think given the context it's intended to be a sort of mockery of racism, but it's impossible to untangle or understand on all sorts of levels, including that one.

She is clumsily trying to say that the locals with ‘views’ who comment online about shoplifters always mention fried chicken from a particular shop and yes, it’s a dog whistle.

I'm not seeing how it could be about other people? She says she says it. Just don't see enough there for that interpretation.

We Must Stay In This Country and Read Zoe Williams Columns Forever

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/07/artemis-ii-space-travel-moon

love a bit of Gradgrind liberalism

I don't read Guardian op-eds, but I salute the headline writer here:

Trump needs to go. If we can’t use the 25th amendment, I have another idea
Arwa Mahdawi

only if the other idea involves assassination