The Peter Blake art-bus – as exhibited at Vintage Goodwood – is a pop art symbol of our recent past, present times, and imminent future. With its vast, exterior images of – among others – Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse, it is a perfect temporary home and gateway for Mick Jones’s The Rock & Roll Public Library, drawn from the musician’s legendarily vast archive, an endlessly evolving project. In this vision of life, the creator of the iconic sleeve of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band meets the creator of The Clash, on a bus, the event transmogrifying into Mick Jones’s Magical Mystery Tour: we’re all going on a Summer Holiday! Yet the deeper, more pertinent truth of The Rock & Roll Public Library is that it is concerned with the invisible force that manifests visible effects in life, and the inner truth of an individual which also has an invisible influence, good or bad. In this case, the manifestation is entirely positive: And the weather’s good…
This boutique version of the library on display at Vintage Goodwood pays tribute to the legendary Faces, performing in their reformed line-up at the event. The Faces were an immense influence on Mick Jones, who saw them on numerous occasions: a series of classic images of the group is a feature of the Vintage Goodwood version of the library. Otherwise, comics are a central theme of The Rock & Roll Public Library at Vintage Goodwood: among others, an entire section is devoted to a display of Commando comics, whilst Valiant comics of the early 1970s are also featured; a selection of 60 classic paperback books will also be exhibited. Meanwhile, such staples as the poster for the final Hank Williams concert advertised – he passed away the night before – remain; and there is a continued strong presence from the film Zulu.
This 3-day exhibition serves as a trailer for Clash founder Mick Jones’s long-cherished The Rock & Roll Public Library which now has had four extended exhibitions, twice at the Chelsea Space gallery, in Norwich, and – most memorably – in a Westway building on London’s Portobello Road The Rock & Roll Public Library, a testament to popular culture, springs directly from the enormous personal archive of Mick Jones, a collection that began well before he formed The Clash in 1976, to eventual colossal international success. As such, it forms an invaluable guide to the edifying influences that informed The Clash and Jones.
Located in a lock-up in North Acton, where it has resided for the past eighteen years, this collection represents a collision of cultural influences, of which Jones’s formal art-school training is but one. The Acton property is a veritable Aladdin’s cave of our age. But it also stands as testament to the manner in which pop music came to its first full fruition at the same time as pop art. And as to how Mick Jones, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of popular culture, is a pop artist, in both senses of the word, living – as the rest of The Clash did – ‘in the gap between art and life’, to employ Robert Rauschenberg’s celebrated phrase. Envisaged as a permanent reference library for use by both the local and international community, it comprises, believes Jones, ‘a personal, cultural and social history of our times, and through that it extends beyond the local to the global.’ Popular culture is now established as part of the curriculum of many universities: it is intended that the library will be an invaluable and essential aid to academic research and personal inquisitiveness.
Among many other strands, Mick Jones’ collection contains almost 10,000 books, on a multiplicity of culturally-related subjects – music, film, art, drugs, crime, sport, war (In common with such rock’n’rollers as Keith Richards and Lemmy, Mick Jones has long been fascinated by the details of warfare.). It also includes most significant editions of music and film-related publications of the last forty years. These range from 1960s’ teen magazines like Fab 208 to obscure punk-era fanzines, taking in all the noteworthy music publications of our time. Much of the early parts of the collection was created from material sent to him by his mother, who lives in Michigan in the USA. ‘She’d send me all the early copies of Creem magazine, which was published in Detroit,’ he recalls. ‘And she’d send me Rock Scene, that New York magazine edited by Lisa Robinson, in which the photographer Bob Gruen’s pictures first appeared en masse.’ In the Acton lock-up there is a similarly enormous array of films, around 5,000 of them, mostly on VHS video. Related artefacts embrace a complete collection of Clash stage-wear and posters. Comparable material from other significant musical acts is also included.
Constrictions of space at Vintage Goodwood inevitably have led to a condensed version of The Rock & Roll Public Library. Yet one that captures the very essence of the experience. Mick Jones’s Magical Mystery Tour at Vintage Goodwood: better than watching the World Cup!
