Only pinheads wear pin badges

I was in need of a few drawing pins this afternoon (vital decorative work in the flat) and whilst hunting around for some I came across this little stash of ... er, pins.

Pins as in pin badges (or just badges where I'm from). Nice, aren't they?

The thing is with these little steel lapel badges - I've never felt much of an urge to wear them. I certainly did have a Stiff Little Fingers one when I was about 14-15, and I think I had a couple more at the time or soon after: Dead Kennedys? Undertones? But since then (since leaving school): my lapels have remained unadorned and totally badge-free.

Which is fine. As I mentioned years ago in a blog on band t-shirts, I'm not into the walking-promo-for-this-or-that-musical-outfit thing, though I can still appreciate the aesthetics of a well-designed t-shirt, a hoodie or indeed a badge.

The thing with band badges, I guess, is that the very small ones are a design challenge in their own right. How much info and artwork can you cram onto something that's about 2.5cm in diameter? Cram into it and still have something vaguely comprehensible.

Actually, I don't even know myself what some of these particular badges are about. I've acquired them quite haphazardly at various gigs (mostly in London) in the last 15 years or so. Which reminds me: the other day I read a comment from a person in a band currently doing the rounds in London in which they went out of their way to denigrate "London indie in 2006". Yeah, right mate. You're much better than that. Bloody indie bands from London doing stuff that was probably way better than your own over-hyped efforts in 2018.

I'm guessing that a fair few of the pins in the photo above are indeed from that golden year 2006 (Neils Children and Comanechi for example). I ought to start wearing them. Let's hear it for London indie from 2006. Let's hear it for pinheads like me.