The most popular band to sport on a T-shirt is AC/DC, as 21.4 percent of the participants in Rush Order Tees survey of 1,017 people say they own at least one of their shirts. Aerosmith, Queen, Pink Floyd and Green Day were the other contenders in the Top 5. Heavy metal fans own the most band T-shirts with a whopping 17 on average.

Cultural critic Steven Hyden discusses the no-band-t-shirt-to-that-band-gig rule in his latest blog post. He first makes a distinction - it's quite ubiquitous on a metal show, but a no-no at an indie-rock show. His point: "When you go to show, nobody cares about what you are wearing. If there is one quality that all humans share, it’s that we’re all too wrapped up in ourselves to think about the shirts on the backs of strangers".

Vintage dealer and a dedicated metal fan Harry Cantwell has - using his sense of history, style, and a deep love for skulls - picked up his top 10 metal shirts of all time for GQ. One of the T-shirts is from a joint Venom/Metallica 1984 tour: “I chose this shirt as an example of [one] that really captures a place and time, to show how much history you can convey with a T-shirt. It’s just a really interesting convergence of metal history that encapsulates a small period of time that's really, really important: the passing of the torch British early ’80s British [bands] over to thrash".