Mick Jones: the rock ‘n’ roll public library

What are your musical influences? That’s the classic question from interviewers. The answer from Mick Jones of The Clash is this exhibition – the contents of a lock-up garage in Acton, West London.

There are toy soldiers, ancient tape recorders, Mick’s drawings from art school, VHS tapes of Only Fools and Horses and On the Buses, old tickets and concert posters. Album covers dangle on strings, dusty boxes of cassettes jostle for space with stacks of hefty non-fiction books and an empty pizza box. It’s not just any pizza box, though – it’s printed with a picture of The Clash.

Fans and art-lovers can rummage through most of the stuff, though the magazines (Creem, Rolling Stone and so on) are kept in plastic covers and displayed on the wall, to preserve them. Mick Jones himself pops in now and then to re-arrange things or to add new stuff from the lock-up. His dream is to have a public library of rock n’ roll, available for everyone. It will not be the sort of library where you have to whisper – his music plays constantly and there are squeaks of delight from the French teenagers and the eight year old Londoner whose fascination with the Clash prove that the spirit of punk is not yet dead. Of course there are sixty-somethings too, muttering and marvelling at those quirky little things that evoke strong memories of bygone gigs.

In the exhibition blurb, director Donald Smith writes “resolutely alternative and defiantly anti-corporate, it is like the dub-side of the O2’s British Music Experience”. It also makes you think about war and propaganda and the bloated self-indulgence of progressive music which punk set out to destroy.

The collection is a creation, in the spirit of Damien Hirst who was once challenged about his pickled  sheep by an interviewer who asked “Is it art?” “If it’s in an art gallery it must be art” was the reply. By collecting  and selecting certain pieces from the torrent of TV, films and music that has washed over him since 1976 Mick Jones has made a sort of life story that is unique to him. There are obvious ways in which his things inspire his songs – for example the toy soldiers doubtless marched their way into the lyrics of ‘Eton Rifles’. But the whole exhibition gives off more subtle messages too. It makes you feel somehow intimate with him and sends you back to your record collection to listen again with different pictures in your mind.

Next time he persuades an art college to host the show don’t miss it and check it out at http://www.chelseaspace.org/