Twice in a day…yeah I know but the last post was a bit introverted. So welcome back to the Blog and I hope your day was better than Iker Casillas‘ (if you don’t know who he is just ignore me). I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how best to keep the blog flowing recently and wanted to try something new in the days ahead. My biggest issue frankly might surprise some of you – there is really too much Clash related news coupled with related news of other bands, Clash history, events, exhibitions and personal contributions from many people who visit the blog. However that’s a good thing, we never run out of matters to cover, interviews to share and history to review. I want to keep the blog balanced but unfortunately don’t always manage to cover everything in a timely way. I do want your ideas to keep coming in as the interaction from you has made the blog the collective resource it now is, but I’m going to break up the newsflash stuff as a post every 24-48 hours and try and get to a better piece of writing about 4 to 5 times per week.

I really want to be able to persevere with The Clash Cup, cover the events related to Strummerville, follow what Mick, Topper and Paul are up to while also looking back at the music and the concerts that The Clash crammed into that remarkably short period of time. I want to keep bringing exclusive news and ideas to the blog and really welcome your comments. The comments make me realise just how many knowledgeable fans of the band are out there and really liven up the site. Without comments I sometimes feel like I’m just typing. I do follow some other blogs and the comments section is often as good as or better than the post when people share their ideas. So I’ll write the longer pieces when events justify them and time allows, in the meantime there are literally 5 to 10 pieces of new Clash related stories or features online each day. While I can’t dig into each one in detail its meant that a lot of things slip through the cracks which is a shame in itself. When we mark our first anniversary next week we’ll look at what works and what can be changed – but for now I wanted to introduce ‘Westway Traffic‘.

Every 24-48 hours I’ll post a ‘Westway Traffic’ update to cover all of the smaller stories that I never really got to comprehensively in the past. It will be a lot of links but at least you’ll be able to choose what you fancy reading. It should make the site a more valuable resource and save you from subscribing to alerts, following newswires and going on mad searches. Hopefully it will be a good addition to the site. A year into it and I can’t believe we’ve never really drilled into the bands who played with The Clash, really looked at the venues The Clash played in, and just touched on the many great projects they’ve been involved with since The Clash came to an end. I’ve had to hold off on some interviews because I’ve not had the technology relegated some ideas for lack of cohesion. Hopefully a post every day or two that is more of a news feed will make the site work better for you. I never expected we’d have so much to cover in the last eleven months but from Clash postage stamps to a new Joe Strummer mural makeover in New York, The Mick Jones R+R Public Library, Strummerville events, Paul and Mick with Gorillaz and so much more it’s been anything but dull.

Best of all though is your efforts and ideas to help make TheClashBlog something worthwhile and worth sharing. If one more person buys an album or a DVD, picks up a guitar, takes a photograph, starts a blog, reads a book or is otherwise inspired by the band that inspired us so much then we are making progress. Collectively the fine readers of this blog know essentially everything about The Clash, you come from every corner of the globe and I bet almost every concert The Clash played was attended by one of us. We know the music inside and out, we have our favourites and our reasons why. There’s an old saying “I never met a Clash fan I didn’t like’ and it’s essentially true. They were a special band and they found a special audience.

One of my favourite assumptions that has been proved very wrong is just who would read the blog? I thought it would be about 90% from the UK and US and while those two cover the majority (66%) it still means 34% come from other countries (36% this year!). I’ve made friends with Clash nuts in Argentina and Spain, Australia and Italy, Israel and even Glasgow. The global Clash fan base is exciting to me…just today we had visits from 33 nations including Poland, China, Chile, Yemen and Norway. In the UK you visited today from Didcot and Chatham and in the States from Omaha Nebraska and Vienna Virginia. We’re all over the place and that to me is just great – what do you have in common with someone in Yemen? You like The Clash…it’s a good place to start! Thanks for continuing to visit the blog – we just had the 150,000th visit ever. Let’s keep that ticking along.

More tomorrow including another excellent art exhibition and for once its not in London.

Tim