Mick Jones Rock n Roll Library

Mick Jones’ Rock n Roll Library,

Chelsea Art Space. April 2009.

Mick Jones was in The Clash. For boys of a certain age, ahem, this bestows on him Godlike status. I loved The Clash and they are still the best band I’ve ever seen live. But that’s not important right now.

Mick as a form of protest against the British Music Experience at the O2– the Starbucking of British Rock – has put on display a tenth of his Acton lock-up. Thus we get old Clash flight cases, books, real-time Punk fanzines, videos, scribbled notes, shirts, toys, guitars, movie posters, mix tapes and ephemera from a Lifetime.

Mr Jones says all the artefacts go some way to explain where he came from and who he is. A lot of it will be familiar to anybody born before 1980 and had even a smidge of interest beyond the mainstream. A time before all our groovy, modern ways of accessing culture, when John Peel and the NME were pretty much the only ways of learning about the world, beyond whatever small part of the UK you lived in.

Is it Art though? Does the fact it’s on display in a “proper” Art space confer Art-ness. And if it wasn’t Mick’s stuff would it mean anything? OK, I’m Fan Boy but I think it transcends its Clash-ness. As an exercise in cultural rippling, blending nostalgia with the here-and-now, it’s like a giant scrapbook or Pop Art installation. Images that were transient, temporary, fleeting now resonate against eachother. Calling up ghosts at once familiar but intangible. Memories bubbling up from the cortex.

So, yeah, it was kinda Art-y. It had that Thing-ness about it. You know, form and content, the thing itself and then what the thing represents, or could represent to whomever, depending. All that Art critic malarkey.

Mick wants to create a proper library where people could look at stuff or just hold it for a while, use it for reference or just shits and giggles. Coz in 100 years most stuff like this will be lost or in land fill. The “everyday” in this collection will one day tell us more about yesterday and today. Bit like Art.