All you need is Stuff

I loved it when years ago a sage called Joe Strummer said “Like trousers like Brain…” a truism, that means essentially what people wear represents what they think…..well there’s another true rock and roll proverb that says to get output you need input – you need to continually read, look, seek, understand and be inspired if you’re gonna stay creative, and well…. stay alive in this business. So let me tell you a story…… For as long as I can remember, everyday MJ would arrive at the studio carrying these old carrier bags… carrier bags full of STUFF, stuff he’d just picked up, bought or plain old found in junk shops, second hand book stores, charity shops or skips…..it became our kind of understanding that each day the bagman would arrive with more books, toys, posters, old records, comics, bits of redundant equipment, black and white photos of London past..all sorts of stuff…….and we’d smile………………………………………………… and while we were recording all the Carbon Silicon music, we’d stand things up in the room, flick through them, or spot an old photo that would somehow seem so relevant at that moment and it would inspire and inform the work.. then it would go into the room next door, like the biggest kids messy bedroom in the world…… and the pile of stuff grew and grew..it seemed like a madness.. and every day more stuff came.. and it wasn’t just during the Carbon/Silicon time, this has been going on for years and years…. and archive systems on cards preceding computers were set up and lost……computer lists on old Ataris, shelves got built, things were ordered and boxed and slowly a kind of order began to appear……………………………………………………………… I think it was earlier this year that we began to realise what we had..that here in this room of madness was a kind of archive.. an archive of popular culture across such a broad spectrum from the last fifty years and suddenly a light dawned……. It wasn’t mad..it was ..AMAZING… all that stuff was the greatest library of ideas imaginable and what had been formally and very affectionally known as “the library of a madman” was suddenly becoming “the Rock and Roll Public Library..” suddenly we had this amazing store of knowledge and that this store was part of the band and it’s ideas……………………………………………………………………… The idea for the album sleeve of “The Last Post” came from the movie “55 Days in Peking” where they built a barricade of books. So we built a barricade of piles of stuff from the library one afternoon in July and got a young photographer down, one of my son Sebastian’s best friends,Oleg Tolstoy – to take the pictures……the fact that one of Oleg’s distant relatives from the past, a certain Leo Tolstoy just happened to be a part of the barricade, gave it the sort of glorious symmetry that only fate can decide….. Now you’d need a pretty big magnifying glass to read wha’s in that wall on the CD sleeve, so we’ve put a huge jpeg file in the Artwork section of the website gallery so you could, if you were mad like us, see a few of the titles and catch a few of the ideas.. ..and then maybe you’d get inspired too…or just as mad…..