onionbagblog

“This is it for me, and I say that with an exclamation mark!”

So said Mick Jones in introducing Black Market Clash, the Soho pop-up shop [URGH] for the Last Gang that has just completed a two-week run at 75 Berwick Street.

Ahh, but that’s what Paulie, George and the Other One said about Anthology, before the beauty of The Beatles became a Las Vegas circus sideshow.

COMPLETE CONTROL, etc Comrades.

It’s always hard to define the London footprint of The Clash. The Westway and W12 have a rightful hereditary claim. Down in South London and the Academy and the surrounds have a strong sense of history for Mick Jones. Soho was always the hunting ground for the Sex Pistols. So it’s a little strange that The Clash pop-up has sprung up at 75 Berwick Street.

Operating under the title of Black Market Clash, it’s a clever marketing trick that has been pulled off by the three surviving members. Cut the Crap, etc - this is an overt sales pitch for Hits Back and the Sound System box set. It is no coincidence that the artefacts of The Clash are being displayed as shrines, just as the new releases are made available.

There’s not a left of the legacy in which to pick away on before spewing it out once again. Sound System is an ACE anthology [URGH] for Clash completitsts, albeit with the omission of Cut the Crap (which isn’t as… crap as the Year Zero revisionists would have you believe.)

You suspect that the entire target audience for Sound System has passed through Berwick Street over the past fortnight.

Job well done, then.

Fender is even in on the act, offering demo sessions, not to mention a helpful sales pitch if you want to learn a chord, and another, and then form a band…

There’s some similarity here with the Mick Jones Rock and Roll Library that was exhibited at Chelsea Space back in 2009. No product to flog for yer man Mick three years ago, but the same sense of eulogising over the relics of the punk DNA.

Plus there’s more than hat tip to David Bowie Is - although the queues thankfully can’t compete with the V & A silliness; the content isn’t halfway up its own arse, either.

Anyone expecting a minimalist post-modern museum experience of white walls and calling cards offering up an explanation of the art will be disappointed.

And thank the chuffers for that.

Black Market Clash is basically a pop-up record shop upstairs, and then a warehouse where you are left to wander downstairs. Chronology is kept to a minimum. It’s like Mick Jones’ dear old Ma has asked the naughty teenager to tidy his punk rock bedroom. The dirty clothes, album covers and Clash doodlings have been lobbed inside the back of the public display wardrobe.

But WOH!

What a wardrobe for misty eyed men of a certain age that like a little bit of political posturing with their three cords and the truth.

I was pretty much blown away.

Late middle-aged blokes showed their teenage grandchildren the corpse of a long lost youth. Is this what they meant by the 5th Generation of Rock and Roll?

A lone bondage boy shuffled awkwardly between the social histories on display. It wasn’t quite downstairs at The Roxy. Punk’s not dead, but it has certainly grown old gracefully.

The cash from chaos upstairs was keeping the Black Mark Clash tills ticking over. Vinyl, CD’s (oooh - nostalgia…) and posters. You too can construct your own Clash shrine back in your bedroom.

It feels incredibly out of place in Soho during the back end of 2013. The global economy is something that The Clash sang about, yet they had to leave London in order to experience and ridicule it. Oh the irony of a pop-up shop to sell Black Market Clash, a band that always tried to lose any sense of hipster coolness.

A stroll back along the badlands of Oxford Street and the shitty tourist trap shops are still selling Clash T-shirts to all the Top Shop kids that see that lifestyle-changing band as a brand.

As Comrade Wolfgang observed:

I saw someone in a skull & crossbones FC St. Pauli shirt in Peckham recently. I turned to him and piped, “Alright mate, come see Dulwich Hamlet!”

He tried to walk past. Hang about.

“We got links with [Hamburg non-league side that a lot of St. Pauli fans adopt as a second, more leftist, team] Altona 93…”

He looked at me baffled.

“Dulwich Hamlet Football Club, about twelve minutes walk that way…”

Confusion etched on this poor sod’s face.

“Football! Do you like football?!”

His eyes begged me to leave him alone. I chased him chanting “Football motherfucker! Football!” past no doubt several postcolonially-Jay-Rayner-reviewed bistros.

Like punk never happened.