Instant Karma!
A sneak peek inside The Clash’s new retrospective celebrating 40 years of London Calling
The Clash, The Bad Seeds, Peter Ivers, North Mississippi Allstars, Arp
WHEN putting together November’s exhibition at the Museum Of London to celebrate 40 years of London Calling, curator Robert Gordon Mcharg III had access to the impressive archives of Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon as well as those of photographer Pennie Smith and designer Ray Lowry. But despite all that, Gordon says his most prized items might be the solitary objects from drummer Topper Headon. “Those two drumsticks are the crown jewels,” he says. “I would have thought Topper’s boppers would be everywhere, but those are really rare, nobody has them. We only have these two because his mum kept them.”
Gordon previously worked on an excellent pop-up Clash exhibition in Soho in 2013 called Black Market Clash as well as the recent Strummer boxset 001, so he was already familiar with the band’s collective archive. The Soho show looked at the band’s entire career, whereas this exhibition will focus on just a single album, allowing Gordon to zero in on selected items such as Simonon’s smashed bass, Strummer’s notebooks and unseen Pennie Smith shots. He hopes to put more than 100 objects on display and there will be an accompanying book, published by Sony, called The London Calling Scrapbook.
“It’s been fascinating finding how the songs were built, and that’s the story we want to show in the exhibition and the book,” he says. “When it comes to Joe’s writing, it is stunning how hard he worked at it. He never seems to have been satisfied with a first draft. He worked and worked and worked. One of the first notebooks has the words ‘ice age’ and it seems that triggered something that led to ‘London Calling’, and we’ll be showing older versions with different lyrics.”
The exhibition will be in a part of the Museum Of London that Gordon thinks already has the architectural feel of an area underneath the Westway. Meanwhile, a timeline provides useful context for the rest of the band’s heady 1979 – including their first US tour. “It’s the story of how such a great album was made and it also tells the story of 1979,” says Gordon. “The energy of that year was fantastic. We’re trying to tell the same story but with the instruments, lyrics, photos and stage clothes. We want to show a bit more than people think they know.”