Day 259

I must admit, I was genuinely perplexed when I studied this T-Shirt donation from James at SPUK when it first arrived. I unraveled it from its packaging, laid it out on the table and stared at it for several minutes with a friend as we tried to decipher the narrative.
Something didn't quite add up.
Ok, we'd deduced that vinyl record sleeves were coming to life and were placing their innards on a turntable to hear what their souls sounded like.
Got it. Great. That made sense.
We saw that they were drawn in a naive cartoon style, with faces portraying joy and mischief.
Still good. Happy cheeky records. Ok.

But why the thought bubble?

One of the cardboard sleeves has a thought or speech bubble protruding from its head professing his opinion on... a box of records. Huh?
We could not place the meaning of this for the longest time. I tried every record and music pun I could think of, I thought of every record shop I had ever set foot in- nothing seemed to hold up the illustration though.

Defeated, I began to fold up the tee designed for SPUK to store it away until its day to appear on my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE challenge. But as I twirled the garment around, I noticed something. Something I hadn't spotted initially. Something that would unlock the mysteries of the narrative once and for all.



It was an additional print, lurking at the base of the reverse canvas. It was the first part of the story; the print on the back explained the one on the front!
Suddenly this was like a Dan Brown novel or something from the National Treasure movies. I had become that Welsh pizza customer from the viral ASDA sound bite! If only I'd looked on the back sooner, I would have seen the print of the records leaping from their forgotten confines on the shelf, running towards the player in a break for freedom. The box of records in the bubble represents a prison! It all makes perfect sense now - when the master's away, the records will play.

Themselves.

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