Writing the name of your favourite band on your yellow canvas bag? Cool. Liking the Cure? Really cool! Decorating your bag with a lovingly rendered Cure logo? Kool and the fucking Gang!
However, make sure you finish the logo, and don't have a break half-way through the word, otherwise someone may write a crude "NT" after your lovingly crafted "CU". Well, they did to me, anyway.

My "Public Image Limited" logo became "pillock" thanks to someone's black biro, but it was such a shit insult, I didn't bother to scribble it out. Get me!

My mate got his mum to embroider the full Marillion logo on his bag in wool, proving astonishing dedication in the public advertisement of a shit taste in music. Sacks came from army surplus stores in yellow, blue or black, though the last of these was less good as it allowed less opportunity for decoration.

The truly hard could place theirs in the bus queue and saunter off to the shops, knowing that the personalized sacks, recognized by all like a medieval baron’s livery, would hold their place for them. Hopeless geeks like me, pathetic enough to draw the African National Congress flag on mine in a spasm of late 1980s adolescent political consciousness, could not.

There was a special way of writing 'the cure' that involved one of the letters (quite possibly the U) being higher (or lower?) than the others. What I didn’t realise, until too late, was that if you got it wrong it meant that you were gay and fancied Mr Bannerman.

Mark Hobson was so shit at spelling, he once scrawled: "THE HUMAN LEG" on his pencil case in honour of the Sheffield based Art-Pop-Electro outfit.