Hello again, I hope you found some solace and happiness in the anniversary of Joe’s death yesterday. Its quite nice that the two little ones in this house are used to The Clash blaring out of my office but yesterday they might have been wondering about the overload. Lots of really nice things were written on Facebook yesterday about Joe and I think people are generally making a good fist out of a pretty crap anniversary.

Some nice Joe tributes I saw appear over at Planet Forward , Zani E-Zine , Consequence of Sound, Ickmusic (with a nice bootleg of the Montego Bay show from 1982), and Run Dangerously. If you have time they are each worth a read, especially the first two.

I’ll do my best to wrap up some more of these for you tomorrow. I really enjoy seeing people taking the time to remember seven years on and it fills me with hope that the influence of Joe Strummer / The Clash will last well into this century. Watching music history unfurl as we live is really a strange experience, at Christmas in 1979 I got my copy of London Calling and naturally as a kid you never consider where the album will stand in the pages of music history thirty years later. The aged anniversaries for Clash concerts, events and records keep becoming almost a relic in some senses. With that said the internet with you tube, websites, blogs and social media has become a place to not only keep alive the video and audio that exists but also to further the debate, share ideas and create some sort of unity and community.

Kirsty with The Pogues

Two short other things for you right now, if (like me) you live in a household where Christmas music is preferred this week over your normal indie and punk you could do  a lot worse than check out the free mp3s (no download needed) over at the Indie Rock Cafe. There are well over 140 songs from XTC, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, The Ramones, Belle and Sebastian and many more. It certainly beats Perry Como and Band Aid.

Finally a quick thumbs up to Billy Bragg who (with Florence and The Machine) ambitiously covers one of the best Christmas songs of all time – ‘A Fairytale of New York’. It’s nice to listen to but you can’t replace dear Kirsty MacColl no matter how hard you try, amazingly nine years have passed since we lost one of the sweetest voices I’ve ever heard. Still I get my Strummer references in with the Pogues plus check the acoustic guitars used in the video below.

Tim