Cultural currency is £995 for an old Prodigy T-shirt

Stephen Armstrong reports on the latest merchflation trend involving Nineties bands, which has left him regretting throwing away his Massive Attack tee now worth £500...

- Stephen Armstrong

Dan O’Connell, the Radio X evening show DJ, has a cheerful Instagram page filled with clips from and promos for his show, but two weeks ago, he filmed himself in Selfridges, where he found a secondhand Prodigy T-shirt on sale for £995 and an original Oasis Definitely Maybe top for an eye-watering £1,280.

“I had a £50 Selfridges voucher so I was wandering around looking at what I could get for that,” he explains. “I saw these two rails and the prices and thought - they're just band T-shirts, what's going on here? It was the Prodigy T-shirt that caught my eye. Everyone had that. So I talked about it on the show because merch matters to our listeners and they were as shocked as me.”

If only the Gallagher brothers had kept a few crates of old merch, they wouldn't have to go on tour. But Oasis aren't even in the super top tier of vintage merch. On Etsy, you can find a Stone Roses top for £2,720, a Nineties Death Row Records shirt for £3,106, and a 1991 Nirvana Nevermind album cover tee for a cool £3,882. Hopefully it's not been overworn, or it'll need a blast of Teen Spirit to get rid of the smell.

If you read a certain weary bitterness in that last paragraph, dear reader, there's a good reason. I went to see Oasis at Earl's Court in 1995 just after the release of (What's the Story) Morning Glory?