Mom Est.1993 Grammy Est.2021 Shirt
The local T-shirt printers in the band’s sleepy hometown of Hadleigh, Suffolk, certainly agreed. “My wife actually worked for a T-shirt printing company in the village where we were,” Filth remembers, “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. 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 Cradle of Filth’s popularity began to rise, so too did the popularity of the “Jesus” T-shirt – a 1999 Kerrang! profile of the band estimated that more than 25,000 of the shirts had been sold in the six years since its introduction. (Filth tells Rolling Stone he has no idea how many have been sold since then.) It was really only a matter of time before such an extreme expression rubbed somebody the wrong way; in 1996, a 29 year-old Cradle fan named Rob Kenyon was arrested in London for wearing the T-shirt. Found guilty of committing “Profane Representation under the 1839 Act” by the Bow Street Magistrates Court, Kenyon was fined 150 pounds.
Mom Est.1993 Grammy Est.2021 Shirt
The band itself ran afoul of the law due to the T-shirt in May 1997, when Cradle’s then-drummer Nicholas Barker was arrested for wearing it at the docks of Dover, England, while the band was waiting for a ferry to take them across the English Channel to the Netherlands, where they were due to perform at the Dynamo Open Air festival. Happily, Barker – who had initially been charged with creating a public disorder and resisting arrest – was released without further proceedings after only two hours in custody, and the band was able to make its gig.
