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.

Good afternoon to you and thanks once again for visiting the blog. A lovely grey and rainy weekend here punctuated by cooler than normal weather has been quite nice. Just a couple of short things to get into this afternoon so let’s get started. The first news is a few days old and I meant to cover it more immediately, plus it’s also a pleasant surprise compared with where things stood just a month ago. Here is a link to an older post that I wrote in November that explains a lot more.

London’s famous 100 Club has apparently been saved from closure at the very last moment when it looked like time had run out on the old venue. If you’ve been following the blog you know we covered that quite extensively last year and the extreme increases in overheads looked likely to see not just another London venue but one of the most historic ones come to its conclusion at the beginning of this year. This despite a huge response to a call for donations from both the famous and the rest of us, it didn’t like owner Jeff Horton was going to be in a position to keep the doors open any longer. In the first weeks of 2011 it was reported that although an impressive amount of funding had been donated unless a corporate sponsor stepped in it looked as if time was up.

It was reported last week that the sponsor has been found – Converse (the shoe people) have stepped in with the intent of shareholding as a partnership rather than outright ownership, according to Horton he is now 90 percent confident that the 100 club faces a stable long-term future once again. I probably don’t need to retread the history of the Oxford Street nightclub but I’m sure you’re all aware of its connections to The Clash and the Sex Pistols as well as hundreds of others both before and since. I know that a lot of people worked long and hard over the last four or five months since the club faced closure to the news will be exceptionally well-received. Also, it doesn’t appear that it will be renamed the Converse 100 Club or have trainers in the title. As for me I haven’t bought a pair of Converse for probably 15 years but I think I will now as an act of solidarity.

I’ll be back soon probably with a post in the morning as it’s a holiday here tomorrow. Cheers – Tim

Glen Matlock, Mick Jones and Steve Diggle at the 100 Club – 26/7/2009

Hello again and cheers for stopping in at the blog. This apparently would be Friday so I hope you navigated your week successfully and have an exciting weekend in store? Seems like it’s feast or famine when it comes to Clash related news in the ‘proper’ newspapers but suddenly there are a number of features which I’ll have to get to over the weekend. Speaking of features I’m still waiting for my local bookshop to get a copy of the most recent edition of Uncut magazine which had the special Clash exclusive concerning the anniversary of the release of Sandinista! In the UK and Europe you’ve had it for weeks already so I apologise for the late coverage of the article via the blog. Last weekend as a substitute for not finding the magazine I did pick up the new Marcus Gray book ‘Route 19 Revisted…’ about the making of London Calling which so far is rather good and I’ll add it to my list of things to review when I get through the 500+ pages.

Terry Hall prays it will stay open (on the 100 Club stage)

First off there has been a really good level of response to what I wrote about yesterday, the potential impending doom for the 100 Club in central London. The very concept of closing down such a historic venue seems ludicrous and wrong on many levels; a complete slap in the face for the musical heritage of England. What makes it all the more strange is that for over 45 years rock music has been one of the most successful exports that the UK has had. The country that used to make almost anything and export it successfully is now just a memory and in terms of international impact you could make a great argument for music being the single most important export from Britain over the last 4+ decades. Closing down historic establishments that are part and parcel of that heritage is just shortsighted and nonrecoverable once a decision has been made. Much like people go to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Anne Hathaway’s cottage (not the actress!) many people wander through the streets of London, Manchester and Liverpool to see the places where musicians who impacted their lives grew up, the studios where they recorded and of course the venues where they played. You couldn’t convince me for a moment that in 25 years time New York won’t still regret closing down CBGB’s and I’m sure London would face the same dilemma in hindsight if we keep tearing down everything that is old or not making enough profit.

There simply must be somebody or some collective that can step in and save the future of the 100 Club, we’re not talking about a giant venue that takes up a whole city block and could be converted into a luxury condominium tower but a basement venue tucked away behind a major shopping street. Part of me thinks Richard Branson or the chairman of Sony should cover the overheads for the foreseeable future just on the basis of what the Sex Pistols and The Clash did for those respective labels, throw in the head of Polydor while you’re at it – I’m just really annoyed that it is even up for discussion as it seems so completely wrong to me.

Anyway as for the response in the media it is encouraging and hopefully a benefactor or organization will step in to resolve this partly as a result of the heightened awareness and the fact that three months or so remain to find a solution. In less than 24 hours that Facebook group to ‘Save the The 100 Club’ that I mentioned yesterday has gone from 4,100 to 6,650 members and continues to spike. London has already lost The Marquee, The Astoria and so many other places too lengthy to mention, let’s hope that list doesn’t continue to grow.

The musicians union were quick to come out with a condemnation of the news and a reminder about the heritage of the venue.

Altpress also put their weight behind a headline story about the potential closure

Mick Jones in an exclusive interview with Spinner said someone should really step in to save the club. Yes Mick, let’s all do it together!!
No less than you’d expect from Jones he even offered to lend his time to assist

“”If someone’s going to do something and I’m available then I’d love to help. You have to balance it with the fact that life changes, but I’d love to help.”

John Robb over at the NME wrote a good piece about why it must not close and even inferred that Mayor Boris should get involved

The list of stories about it continue to grow, in the interim I’m thinking perhaps Elton bloody John could donate half of the money that he received for doing this. That might be a Facebook campaign we can all get behind.

I’ll have to save those other stories for a bit later, as I didn’t expect to rant on about this again so much this afternoon though I do think it’s really important and shouldn’t be ignored.

The 100 Club last year, Jones, Matlock, Diggle and Ascott playing ‘Pretty Vacant’