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'
- a 1969 edition of Anarchy magazine
- A 1969 pamphlet by Trotskyist Ernest Mandel on 'The Revolutionary Student Movement: Theory and Practice
- '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'
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
'Bash the Rich - the Class War Radical History Tour of Notting Hill' by Tom Vague.
- 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.
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