Good evening Clash people of the world, how goes it then? A very warm (108f) day here and tomorrow is supposed to be a bit warmer still so forgive me for my current feeling of dehydration. If you’ve never been to Phoenix the city in the world with the most similar weather is Dubai which should give you a good idea of our summers, here it’s a bit greener and you can be a bit more reckless from what I can tell. However they’ve got that stupidly tall building so its swings and roundabouts I suppose.

In case you didn’t catch the comments on my last post I wanted to quickly share a few words from Pete in London who has been so generous with his time and photography so many times before for the blog. He was out and about in West London at the weekend and stumbled across a certain chap. Here’s his tale:

Taurus Trakker, image courtesy Pete Stevens

On Sunday evening I chatted briefly with Mick on Portobello Green, right by The Westway, prior to his gig with the Rotten Hill Gang. He’s looking forward to this Thursday’s gig in Bournemouth and Glastonbury with B.A.D. I thanked him for the AAA pass back in April at Shepherds Bush Empire and departed with the line “I’ll see you at the seaside on Thursday….”

There are many images of both bands if you click on this link. The password is: portobello

The first is Taurus Trakker, who feature Mick’s cousin Martin with the gold Fender Stratocaster and the second are The Rotten Hill Gang. It gives all of you some idea of the locale in which Mick still lives and one or two of the people still living in the area. In some of the images you can see the elevated flyover, which is The Westway. The recently closed Inn On The Green looked over Portobello Green. The now threatened world famous market is right behind the stage.

Hope to be able to post a brief review and some photos of B.A.D. in Bournemouth on Thursday….

Thanks for that Pete, I encourage you to check out the link and go through the gallery, many pictures of Mick performing with the Rotten Hill Gang but so many other excellent shots that really do capture the neighbourhood. If I could capture one picture quite as well as every single one of Pete’s I’d be a happy blogger. I’ve included a few of my favourites on the left and then beneath. My thanks as always to Pete for the images, the words and the time he spends chronicling events in London. Incidentally you should always check the comments, as often as not what you have to say is far more interesting than my usual dirge. I’ll leave it there for now but some rather large news tomorrow – so come back! Thanks for reading and being involved, please share the blog with others. Tim

The Rotten Hill Gang with Mick Jones

The setting of the gig with The Westway looming large

Mick Jones showing Pete how it's done. This might be my favourite image of 2011 so far

Good morning it’s Saturday at last I believe? Must be otherwise the usual detritus of life would never have afforded me the eleven hours sleep I’ve just had, either way I needed it and feel refreshed for a weekend of football, music, watching Walker again and garage converting tactics. It did mean I didn’t get a new post out last night but we’ve been inundated with fair weather Les Paul fans the last 48 hours anyway.

Tomorrow I’ve got some guest input from the recent Joe Strummer exhibition at the frankly wonderful Subway Gallery in London and news of a forthcoming Clash exhibition on the other side of the Atlantic too. Tonight should see the long overdue return of The Clash Cup to the blog as firstly its proven to be rather enjoyable and secondly I really want to get the idea progressed to round 3 and 4 when the decisions get harder. In fact now that the football season is over I should have more time to blog both here and elsewhere seeing as I’m not getting up at 5am at the weekends to watch Arsenal lose another match.

I’ve a few quick things this morning which will go nicely with your coffee although its probably siesta time already wherever you’re reading this.

Endless Strummer Tour: I don’t mind a slice of plagiarism if its coming from the right place and in this case it is so it would be worthy of a mention. The Surreal McCoys are back on America’s stages for the first time in years with a tour they’ve deemed ‘Endless Strummer’. The band tag themselves quite accurately as Johnny Cash meets The Clash and having listened I’m on board with that definition and also agreeable to the resultant sound. Check out this review of their gig in Los Angeles last week which featured a cover of the cover ‘I Fought The Law’ and see if they are playing in a barn on pub near you soon.

Clash bootlegs without the downloading: If I had enough time in my life I’d probably already have a giant collection of Clash live bootlegs and I admire those who have amassed such collections over the years from tapes and bootleg vinyl back in the 80′s, burned CDRs in the 90′s and of course downloads since then. I’ve never been a fan of downloading music and at Camden Market I was always saving my cash for vinyl rather than tapes of recorded concerts. As a result my music collection of studio work by lots of artists has grown and grown but I’ve few Clash live recordings. Black Market Clash is the place to go for downloads with a remarkable collection gathered over years. If you’re like me and don’t want to fill your hard drive(s) with downloads YouTube is becoming increasingly more reliable as a place to find live versions from these same recordings. Of course you’re going to need to weed through duplicates but one of the primary sources on YouTube is TheDudeStrummer’s YouTube site (Nicola from Italy) who has recently added Clash concerts in Tucson, Jamaica and San Antonio. Check out the link below with a typically electric version of Magnificent Seven from San Antonio on May 22, 1983. Make sure and comment if you can as these people spend a lot of time adding these clips online and helping spread the availability of the music.

Ted at the Controls: From the Daily Mail (sorry) comes a rather cool tale about a 12 year old boy (below) named Ted Lavender (dilly dilly) who is a DJ with a growing pedigree. He recently manned the deck at a Strummerville event organised by Lucinda Strummer and today will be the DJ at the wedding of Joe Strummer’s god-daughter Lily Allen today. You can read the whole story via this link and then of course clear your browser cache so nobody can accuse you of reading the Daily Mail – fascist!

Ted at the Controls (image courtesy Solent News)

Books to get: In addition to trying to see more concerts this year I’ve been also trying to make sure I read more books and drag myself away from the computer more often (also a success, 15 books read since September). I’ve been trying to brush up on my music history especially 1975-1990 and I’ve found another that sounds like it would be worth the time called ‘Retromania’ by Simon Reynolds. Much of the focus looks to be pre-punk but I’d like to read more about his ideas based on this review in the Telegraph. It may help answer why music seems to many to have stalled in its progress. If you get to it before me let me know.

Finally a small favour to ask, as you know I want to make sure as many people as possible know about the blog and help keep it growing. You’re already aware of the help you can give it via facebook, twitter and the other icons at the top of each post. I’ve just added another one called Google+1 which is google’s answer to ‘facebook likes’ but will also appear in search engines. So if you have a google/gmail account I’d appreciate if you can click on the +1 button if you like the post you read. If you don’t like the post you read…comment and tell me why. Thanks.

Enjoy the weekend, do something out of character. You can catch up with the blog in the comments, on Facebook and Twitter. You can also daily blog fix mailed direct with a nice cup of cocoa by subscribing to my RSS Feed here.

Where does the time go….seems like 5 minutes ago I was filling up the filter in the coffee machine in urgent need of a brew and now suddenly the shadows are getting long up towards Camelback Mountain as I look down the street and another day in the desert draws to an end. I really must stop making excuses and get started on my novel, at this rate there won’t even be books being printed by the time I get finished. Bad planning….

Enough of that we’ve got matters Clash related to attend to, one of which is the continuing adventures of Big Audio Dynamite. While we’ve yet to see any update about how/why the website now reflects the band as having four members in the meantime they’ve added another gig in Southern California. This time in Orange County at the ‘Grove of Anaheim’. Never been to the venue before so can’t tell you much apart from the fact that the concert is Thursday August 11th and tickets will be on sale this Friday at noon. Such information puts me in a quandry as I can find a good reason to attend either or both concerts and begin round two of ‘in search of Mick Jones’. The very exciting part one took place last October if you’re new to the blog, go back and read it if you like. Right, I’m now officially an expert about the Grove of Anaheim. It sits a few miles from Disneyland if you’re keen to visit and sits in the car park of Angel Stadium of Anaheim which apparently is a good place for a music club if you don’t consume enough beer at the baseball stadium. Strange how so many things in Anaheim are called ‘of Anaheim’ as in if I were to live there I’d refer to the Clashblog dog as ‘Winnie of Anaheim’…..or not. Seems like the town has a Disney sized inferiority complex. Anyway the venue holds 1,700 which seems quite large with the Los Angeles gig on the calendar so we’ll wait and see. Here’s the link to get tickets.

I’ve got to make some dinner – I’ll be back soon with more oddities and some great features later this week.

Finally click the image below – it’s pretty cool and you can do the same for any website. See you in the comments, thanks for dropping in.