Saturday morning, welcome aboard. It’s cold and sunny, I’m tired and thirsty and the coffee has just brewed. I won’t waste your time but will launch straight into today’s unexpectedly good news.

Have you ever wanted your thoughts or memories of Joe Strummer and The Clash to appear in print? This is your ideal opportunity. I’m really pleased to announce something new and exciting for Clash fans worldwide, and more importantly something to which you can all contribute.

image the exclusive courtesy of Pete Stevens (click to enlarge)

Photographer, regular contributor and a great friend to the Clash Blog Pete Stevens, who is based in London, is currently looking to complete his book, which is documenting last year’s ‘Strummer Of Love’ festival in Somerset, UK. If you’ve followed the blog for any length of time you’ll already be familiar with his excellent work. He has now edited down his photographs to a manageable number and would love to add some written contributions from fans worldwide. It doesn’t matter whether you attended the festival or not.

There are already a number of exclusive new stories going into the book, occasionally from sources you might not expect and if you would like to be part of it, then Pete can be contacted via this link. I really encourage you to get in touch as I don’t know of a better community of music fans than the ones that read the blog.

As far as writing something, Pete’s keeping the theme very wide indeed, but it can be related to Joe specifically – he had a great story from a fan who gate-crashed a gig at Manchester Apollo in back in 1978, where Joe stopped the bouncers chucking them out at the soundcheck and gave him and his mates a load of T-shirts. Alternatively it could be a Clash related story, perhaps something from one of their gigs which you attended or something about Joe’s lasting legacy and influence. What it must be is personal. Everyone who contributes will be credited.

There are no chapters as such. All the photographs are from the festival, and will include Billy Bragg, Seasick Steve, The Pogues, Alabama 3, Glen Matlock, The Farm, Pete Wylie and Mick Jones with the Justice Tonight Band. At the moment it’s following festival proceedings in a kind of chronological order with lots of crowd and other general festival shots.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be more than a few sentences. Let’s go for it. Be immortalized in print! When you send your contributions please, whatever you do, please ensure that you tell Pete your name, town/city and country. Pete’s also requested that it’s written in English, but he wants to bring people together from all over the world.

He hopes to be able to raise some money for Strummerville from the finished book. So please get cracking, if you have any questions let me know and I’ll have more updates about the book in the weeks and months ahead. Please share this post to all who might be interested. Don’t forget you can keep current or communicate via the facebook page, twitter or get the blog sent direct to your inbox as a feed via the RSS. Thanks – Tim

image the exclusive courtesy of Pete Stevens

The future is unwritten, so share it

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