Good Sunday evening to you wherever you may be reading and I hope that your weekend went well, in fact I hope that it went very well, the sort of well you feel when you find a few notes of cash in the pocket of something you haven’t worn in a long time. I love that feeling, it’s like robbing yourself with no victims – just free found money.

Over the years on the blog I’ve found myself lamenting the closure of music venues and pubs, record shops and other spots that I think are a crucial part of our collective musical heritage. It seems that the vast majority of the time greed and ‘progress’ win out and another building filled with irreplaceable memories is turned into dust to build new flats or more shoebox retail or coffee shops. Therefore it’s pleasing to sometimes report that the odds are defeated such as the famed 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street surviving what looked like imminent closure when I wrote about it fairly recently.

A less celebrated but still Clash related venue earlier looked doomed in South London and I wrote about The Ivy House back on January 24 of this year. The locally famous and historically significant pub hosted Joe Strummer when he was with the 101′ers, Dr. Feelgood and Elvis Costello along with many others.  Great news then that the pub is the first to be saved in the UK under the auspices of a new law that allows residents to demonstrate that the building is vital to the community. The building which holds Grade II-listed status looked almost certain to face the axe when the owners placed it on the market a year ago, a property developer purchased the building for close to £500,000 in October and later placed it back on the market with the intention of a conversion to flats at a significantly higher price.

As I mentioned in the previous post local residents formed an active group that used the Localism Act to put pressure on Southwark council to protect the pub from closure. Under the law residents can cite to the local governing body that the building merits being listed as an ‘asset of community value’ which halts any plans to change the property and allows local groups the opportunity to purchase the site.  According to the London Evening Standard:

“Southwark subsequently have approved the application and last weekend The Ivy House Community Pub Limited, formed by the campaign group, completed its £810,000 purchase of The Ivy House with the help of a £500,000 loan from the Architectural Heritage Fund (AHF) and another grant. The group has launched a community share issue scheme under which people can invest anything from £200 to £20,000 to help reopen and run the pub as a going concern”

It’s great news in terms of holding onto musical heritage but also keeps alive an important part of the community. Another location to add to my (still to be written) Clash Blog guide to the world!  I do hope that the end result is as positive as it now appears it may be, but I can’t help wondering how many other important buildings might have been saved if this law was already on the books. You might find interesting this interview with Paul Heaton (ex Housemartins/The Beautiful South) about the struggles being faced by British pubs throughout the land. My sincere apologies that it’s in the Daily Star.

The only other thing this morning is a huge thank you – I made a commitment to writing more often this year and so far the blog(s) have received a 12% increase in traffic over the first 3 months of last year, especially from countries outside the top 3 (US/UK/Canada) so thank you so much for reading, commenting and sharing. It’s nice to know the audience keeps growing, in fact March saw the most visits in the last fifteen months which was excellent. Thank you.

I’ll be back with more soon, don’t forget to enter the competition from the last post if you haven’t already done so and keep an eye on the sister site for more updates too.

  The Clash Blog News | Twitter | Facebook | Google+| RSS feed 

The future is unwritten, so share it

• 
• 

Congratulations you lot, you’ve navigated your way to the cusp of another weekend. I must confess to being pleased at the prospect and in a more laid back country than this – this would even be a holiday weekend wouldn’t you think? Not since we’re all being pushed to work and work, then work some more though. Sigh…enough of that.

Long term readers of the blog may remember one of my very eariest posts was about the project ‘Let Fury Have The Hour’ by Antonino D’Ambrosio. As you’re probably aware the project evolved into a book and documentary that is a little tricky to describe, so with artistic license I’ll borrow from what the L.A. Times wrote back in January as they do a better job than I’ve done previously:

“Kudos to writer-director Antonino D’Ambrosio for taking such an eclectic and disparate number of aims, thoughts, subjects and mediums and creating the smart and inspiring — and uniquely whole —documentary that is “Let Fury Have the Hour.” A kind of think/performance piece about what’s termed here “creative reaction,” the film hears from a stirring swath of socially conscious artists whose work largely emerged as an anger-channeling counter to the Reagan-Thatcher era of conservative individualism”     -Barry Goldstein Los Angeles Times

The book was an interesting narrative seeing as the content came from so many angles and the word is that the film, pulling  its content from the essays within the book creates a stronger whole within the setting of a documentary. The movie was featured at film festivals in the spring of 2012 and drew strong praise from many quarters for accomplishing all it set out to do – take a modern look at activism and the arts from the mouths, pens, art and instruments of those impacted by our (horribly) big society. You can learn much more about the book, the film and the overall concept via the official website.

Naturally I’m not writing about it again just for the sake of it, but to alert you to the fact that the film is now available via iTunes download and I’m excited to announce I’ve got six posters for the film signed by Antonino D’ambrosio to giveaway below which feature the stunning artwork for the film featuring Joe Strummer at Victoria Park in 1978 as created by Shepard Fairey. What do you need to do to receive such kindness? Just answer the question below and also please share the news about the films iTunes release simply by sharing this post via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Pinterest if that’s your bag – I’d just appreciate it you can help spread awareness. Please share your tweets with @letfuryhavehour and @obeygiant if you’d be so kind and if you can share the short-link http://bit.ly/ZzRB4m I’d appreciate it, it helps make the prizes available to you good people.

You can purchase the film via iTunes download for $9.99 via this link. Here’s some more of the official word and then onto the prize giveaway.

Rough, raw and unapologetically inspirational, LET FURY HAVE THE HOUR is a charged journey into the heart of the creative counter-culture in 2012.  In a time of global challenges, big questions and by-the-numbers politics, this upbeat, outspoken film tracks the story of the artists, writers, thinkers and musicians who have gone underground to re-imagine the world – honing in on equality, community and engaged creativity – in exuberantly paradigm-busting ways.

“Exuberant… a thoughtful and entertaining debut film”
-Adam Schartoff, The New York Times

“Rousing… You’ll leave the theater wanting to create something LOUD.”
-Rachel Maddow, MSNBC

“A thrillingly articulate wallop of ’80s-era rage… refreshing”
-Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

“Let Fury Have the Hour is a cinematic movement, not just a film.”
-E. Nina Rothe, Huffington Post

“Explosive blend of vision and expression”
-Indiewire 

To enter into the prize drawing for one of six signed prints you just need to answer the question below. I regret that I can only offer the prize to readers in the US and Canada at this time. I’ll do my very best to have a follow up drawing for a free download of the film open to everyone who isn’t in the US & Canada. How’s that sound?

To enter – all you have to do is answer the following question and email me the correct answer.

“In the same song that the film takes its title from – what colours does Joe Strummer warn that you might start wearing as you grow up and calm down?”

Please email your answers here and enter ‘Fury’ as the subject line. Winners will be announced and picked at random next Friday and naturally you’ll have to provide a mailing address if you win. I’d like to extend my thanks to Snag Films for the prizes and good luck and thanks for taking part.

‘Let Fury Have The Hour’ trailer

Check out the award-winning film Let Fury Have the Hour with Van Jones, Eve Ensler, Lewis Black, Billy Bragg, Shepard Fairey, Chuck D, Thievery Corporation, Antibalas, Gogol Bordello and other amazing artists, musicians and great minds. Now on iTunes! http://bit.ly/ZzRB4m

The future is unwritten, so share it

• 
• 

Let me try and phrase this correctly, in America there seems to be a desire to have ‘official’ or ‘hall of fame’ type things. It’s a curious need and I’m not suggesting that it is unique to the USA but just something I’ve noticed. From ‘the official shampoo  of women’s basketball’ to ‘the preferred banking partner of the Milwaukee Brewers’ it seems labels and branding run through to the core of almost everything. I can’t say I understand it any more than I like it but assume it comes to down to what the higher ups consider to be subtle sponsorship. However it’s not really is it?

On a similar yet different level I totally endorse national institutions like The Smithsonian and The Library of Congress and I’ll pretend for the purpose of this post that these examples are less sponsored than the ones I’ve bleated about in the opening paragraph. Well they are, but politicians certainly are not.

I wanted to write about the annual ‘inductees’ for the ‘National Recording Preservation Board of The Library of Congress’, to my mind it’s a cool enough concept to archive music and audio recordings that are deemed to be “Marked for preservation because of their cultural, artistic and historic importance to the nation’s aural legacy“. A lofty goal certainly but you can’t hold that against them. Dating back to 2002, each year recordings have been nominated for inclusion into the library and they’ve ranged from a foghorn sounding to poetry readings and radio broadcasts. Inevitably the library has expanded to include more and more music ranging from folk and classical through to rock and roll. This years new additions include the most diverse list yet and a little more modern music including Simon & Garfunkel, Pink Floyd and Philip Glass. Far more earth shattering is the news that the first recording that can be called punk has found a new home in the Library of Congress as The Ramones debut album from 1976 has been selected.

The optimist in me says that in a few hundred years time this cements the long term future of the documentation of punk music for generations far from being born today. To include The Ramones as (relatively) early in the process shows a greater awareness of heritage than I would have expected, also they don’t limit the recording to being American in origin as evidenced by the previous selections of The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones. My point being of course that The Clash could one day be included, better still The Library of Congress accept nominations from the public. So I’m going to pen a few words about either London Calling or the self-titled debut and set it up on the website as an e-petition soon that you can all sign and then we’ll submit to to Congress. They’ll have to listen right?

First of all I need you to help me decide which album we should nominate – answers below please and in the interest of not splitting the votes I’ll focus on the most likely two to have a good chance. Then next month I’ll get the e-petition launched.

You can learn much more about the National Recording Preservation Board here and I must recommend a great article on Oregon Music News about this years additions to the archive. I am completely serious about nominating The Clash so please help me choose.

 The Clash Blog News | Twitter | Facebook | Google+| RSS feed 

 Loading ...

The future is unwritten, so share it

• 
•