Meetings with remarkable foxes

I think anybody who has ever been a hunt saboteur probably feels that they have a special connection with foxes. I certainly do even though in my sabbing days I rarely saw one except as an occasional flash of red tearing fearfully across a field pursued by hounds. It took  me moving to London to become really familiar with foxes in daily life, I rarely go a few days without seeing one. Some people call them urban foxes as if they moved into our human dominated areas because they liked the takeaway leftovers, but actually I think it's more the fact that we extended our urban areas into their territories and they stuck around.

Anyway here's a few recent foxy encounters-

Actual fox in New Cross

Leonara Carrington - Woman with Fox 
(seen in the exhibition 'Last Night I dreamed of Manderley' in Alison Jacques Gallery, London, 2025)

Jennifer Binnie 'Fox Woman'
(seen in her Forest Visions exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, 2025)

Mick Jones' Rock & Roll Public Library

Over the years Mick Jones of  The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite has built up a huge archive which he has christened the Rock & |Roll Public Library (RRPL)  'including books, comics, magazines, musical equipment, literature, art, clothing, ephemera, as well as music and film in every format, revealing a wide network of influences that span the entire 20th century.' The latest incarnation of the project is an exhibition at the Farsight Gallery in London to mark the launch of an RRPL magazine.

It is a fantastic snapshot of popular culture and of the influences that have shaped Jones' music, which has in turn influenced so many others - not least my 14 year old self buying Complete Control on the day of release from F L Moore record shop in Luton just down the road from the Odeon Cinema where on that afternoon I had been on a school trip to watch the 1940s David Lean black and white film of Great Expectations. A couple of months earlier I had bought my first album - The Clash. But enough for now about teenage Clash obsesssion... 

As you might express there is musical memorabilia aplenty in Jones's collection, lots of  punk fanzines and press cuttings, but also his old guitar, Akai sampler and  the boombox painted by graffiti artist Futura 2000 that featured in the The Clash 'Rock the Casbah' video. Going back further there are the kind of  war story comics and toys that were a staple diet of male childhood in the 1960s. 

An effective way of displaying some of the material is grouping it together by colour creating some interesting juxtapositions. So the yellow display includes material from acid house club Shoom, a 1977 issue of anti-fascist magazine Searchlight and the 1983 programme for the play 'Another Country'

I was quite intrigued to see what kind of political material he has accumulated. I expected to see Rock Against Racism stuff  but there was a lot more than that including:

- a 1969 edition of Anarchy magazine with Che Guevera on the front and another issue from 1974 with Trotsky on cover

- A 1969 pamphlet by Trotskyist Ernest Mandel on 'The Revolutionary Student Movement: Theory and Practice'

- 'Pioneers of Women's Liberation' by Joyce Cowey - first published by Pathfinder Press in 1969

- 'The Menace of Fascism' by Ted Grant

'History and Revolution' by Paul Cardan, a 1971 pamphlet published by libertarian communist group Solidarity

Another Solidarity pamphlet on 'Paris May 1968'

A copy of  The 70s - put out by a Hong Kong based libertarian socialist group active in the 1970s

Jamaica: A Challenge from the Right by Richard Hart - a 1976 pamphlet from Caribbean Labour Solidarity

'Save the Sharpeville 6' - mid-1980s anti-apartheid publication

'Covert Action Information Bulletin'  - founded by CIA whistleblower Philip Agee

'Manifesto of Combate' - Combate were a Portuguese radical group active around the mid-1970s revolution there.

'Bash the Rich - the Class War Radical History Tour of Notting Hill' by Tom Vague.

'Boycott Quarterly' - 1990s US magazine.

 - And what of that A5 image saying 'Solidarity is Strength = Scabs are Scum'? I recognise that from my own 'archive' (pile of old pamphlets and papers) as the back cover of 'Barbed wire lies', an anarchist Tin Tin cartoon about the 1986/87 Wapping print strike.

All of this suggests Jones had at least a passing familiarity with radical left politics before and during his Clash/BAD days and I am guessing would have picked this kind of material up at London radical bookshops of the period including Compendium in Camden, Collets in Charing Cross Road and/or Housmans near Kings Cross.

The Rock & Roll Public Library runs at the Farsight Gallery, 12  - 7 pm from 1 -  16 March 2025. The gallery is at  4 Flitcroft St, London WC2H 8DJ - just at the end of Denmark Street. Those involved with the gallery include former club promoter (Club UK etc) and Jo Boxers drummer Sean Mclusky. They are putting on some interesting exhibitions and events there.

See previously:

Derek Jarman film night at Farsight Gallery

Sophie Richmond on the Politics of Punk 1977

Denzil Forrester in Lives Less Ordinary

Lots of great work in 'Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-seen' at Two Temple Place in London (25th January 2025 – 20th April 2025).

Denzil Forrester's Boys in the Hood (1989) is one of his early paintings that 'encapsulate the electric atmosphere of dub parties he attended in London during the 1980s. Based on quick pastel and charcoal sketches made in clubs and dancehalls, they were created to convey "the energy of the crowd, the movement, the action," and the liberating power of music. Forrester's work serves as an evocative archive of Black working-class nightlife in Britain, as well as the Windrush generation's expression and preservation of their diasporic roots through Jamaican Dub culture' (text from exhibition).

In an ArtCornwall interview Forrester has recalled this time in the 1980s:

'I grew up in Stoke Newington and Hackney, and a lot of the paintings...are to do with the nightclubs in the Dalston area, mainly Jah Shaka sound system; mainly the dub reggae sound systems in the early days... I used to go to the London nightclubs and make drawings to the length of a record, which is about 3 or 4 minutes.

So I'll have A1 paper, it's dark, and I can't really see what I'm doing, so I'm going for the movement, the action, the expression of the people. I'll make the drawings, and take them to the studio and use them for making the big paintings in the studio... London was a very active, vibrant, colourful place then. It was cheaper and freer to live there then too. You could squat a house. So I was in a squat for about 5 to 6 years in Clissold Road. It was easier because an artist could have lots of space. And there was an energy there. Particularly the dub nightclubs. Jah Shaka, the Rastafarians, basically they'd dress up, they'd dance and play their monosystems, and I wanted to capture that energy'.

See previously: Denizil Forrester's Jah Shaka painting at Tate Britain