As part of Ausmusic Month, this Friday, 18th November triple j will be celebrating #AusmusicTshirtDay. If you want to participate, put on your favourite T-shirt by an Aussie artist this Friday, snap a photo and tag it with #AusmusicTshirtDay.
To help celebrate the occasion, we’ve had a look back at one of the most well-known (perhaps for the wrong reasons) and controversial band T-shirts of all time. Yeah, you probably know the one we’re talking about…
Last year, Tone Deaf reported on the attempted defacement of a T-shirt exhibit at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand. An unidentified woman had stormed into the museum and proceeded to black out the Perspex barrier covering one of the displays with spray paint.
As Rolling Stone notes, her target was the single most controversial T-shirt in rock history.
It’s a T-shirt you’ve probably seen at some point in your life, perhaps even donned yourself during a particularly rebellious period in your teenage years. We refer, of course, to Cradle of Filth’s infamous “Jesus Is A Cunt” shirt.
It’s been 22 years since the English metal outfit first printed the T-shirt with which they would become synonymous, yet it still makes headlines. The Canterbury Museum incident was just the latest flashpoint in a long history of controversy.
The T-shirt in question features an image of a masturbating nun on the front, alongside the words “Vestal masturbation” (the T-shirt is also commonly known by this name) and the words “Jesus Is A C**t” in large lettering taking up the back.
The T-shirt has been the cause of numerous arrests and prosecutions since it first went into production 22 years ago. Politicians have denounced it, while pop culture has absorbed it. Some metal fans regard it as a flag of defiance, while others think of it as the mark of a try-hard poser.
“Who would have thought?” Cradle frontman Dani Filth now tells Rolling Stone. “Twenty-two years, and still so much upset!” As the singer recounts, the infamous shirt began as a joke between band members as they geared up to embark on a tour.
“It was all very silly, I suppose,” Filth recalls. “It was 1993, and we were about to go on tour with Emperor. We had a different T-shirt at the time – it had a picture of my wife, who was all done up in black metal regalia, and it said ‘The Black Goddess Rises’ on it.”
“We needed to get a new shirt done quickly for the tour; we’d already come up with the ‘Vestal masturbation’ image and phrase, but we still needed a back print for it.” During a brainstorming session, someone uttered the words that would eventually make it onto the backs of heavy music fans around the world.
“We all were laughing about it, like, ‘Oh my god, that’s so anarchic – can you imagine that on a T-shirt?’ We looked at each other conspiratorially, like, ‘Shall we?’ And yeah, we did it. Even at the time, we thought, ‘Well, this is pushing the boundaries a little bit.'”
Naturally, they had trouble finding a willing printer. “My wife actually worked for a T-shirt printing company in the village where we were,” Filth recounts, “and the guy who ran the shop flat refused it – ‘No, I’m not printing that!'”
“We ended up trawling around loads and loads of T-shirt printing places, and eventually found one in another village who kind of did it on the sly; it was literally a cash-in-hand, out-the-back door kind of thing.”
Image: Behold, the most controversial T-shirt in music history
“I remember distinctly going to pick it up, and it was all very covert; the guy was like, [whispers] ‘Here’s your T-shirts,’ and then he gave us the screens as well, because he didn’t want those hanging around. Yeah, it was quite funny!”
As the band’s popularity grew, so too did the popularity of the “Vestal masturbation” shirt. A 1999 Kerrang! profile estimated that more than 25,000 of the shirts had been sold in the six years since they were first printed and the number no doubt exploded with the advent of the internet.
In 1996, the shirt had its first run-in with the law, after 29-year-old Cradle fan Rob Kenyon was arrested for wearing the garment. He was found guilty of committing “Profane Representation under the 1839 Act” by the Bow Street Magistrates Court and fined 150 pounds.
Since then, the shirt has acquired an extensive rap sheet. Fans around the world, from Dorset to Florida, have been arrested and often prosecuted for donning the shirt. In 2001, Alex Mosson, the then-Lord Provost of Glasgow, Scotland, campaigned to have the shirt removed from the city’s Tower Records store.
Filth isn’t surprised the T-shirt is the subject of so much ire. “I’d have to be an idiot to think that the shirt wasn’t offensive,” he says. “It’s a dangerous T-shirt to wear, full-stop. Personally, I wouldn’t walk around in it now – I mean, I’m 41 years old!”
“I did walk around in it back in the day, but people don’t understand that there’s a time and a place for this sort of thing. Going to a gig? No problem. But some of these people are all like, ‘I don’t understand, I was in a mall and got arrested for wearing it!’ It’s just poor judgment on their part, really.”
Controversy inevitably follows the shirt wherever it’s worn, even Down Under. In 2008, an Australian teenager was arrested and charged with offensive behavior for wearing the shirt, the same year it was officially banned in New Zealand by the country’s office of the chief censor.
“It’s more amusing to me, than anything. This whole thing that happened in New Zealand, it was so ironic,” says Filth. “By doing what the woman did, she was just furthering the cause, really; she was drawing attention to it. She didn’t want people to see it, so she covered it up; but by covering it up, she brought it to the eyes of the world.”
“I know Sharon Osbourne wasn’t that keen on it, but I think it was probably due more to the fact that it might have outstripped Ozzy’s sales; I think that was more the truth of the matter. And that’s the thing – people like it! I know people who have bought it, and they don’t wear it, but they’ve got it – they’re like, ‘It’s a piece of history!'”
Filth is even willing to concede that the shirt has made a bigger mark on pop culture than the band’s music. “Well, that may be true, yeah,” he laughs. “That’s something that should piss me off – but I suppose it’s like Christopher Lee, who played Dracula, and who just died.”
“He fought quite a lot the whole ideology of Dracula. He didn’t want to be typecast; he wanted to be remembered as more than just another Dracula. But unfortunately, he was so good at it that it followed him to his deathbed. So I suppose it’s a similar scenario, really, you know what I mean?”
“Don’t get me wrong. We’re not a ‘shock rock’ band that does that sort of thing all the time; if anything, we’ve had as much hardship from people for being too Goth-ily poetic. There are some times where we get out of bed on the wrong side of the proverbial grave and piss people off.”
“But that’s just the way it goes, isn’t it, when you’re a bit of an extreme character, or a bit of an extreme band? I think if we kept doing that sort of thing, it would become very contrived.” As for whether he feels the shirt will affect his chances with the Big Guy, Filth isn’t worried.
“When I actually do get dragged before the pearly gates,” he tells Rolling Stone, “I would like to defend myself on that one, and say, ‘Well, to be fair, it could have been anyone. You’re lucky we chose you!'”
