Philosophy Football/Dave’s Part: Clash T-shirt competition
Posted on Monday 18 June, 2007
Filed Under Punk Rock
Look at these fabulous T-shirts, which form part of a range of four produced by the eurocommunist dudes at Philosophy Football to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the summer of punk.
Cool, aren’t they? You want them, don’t you? Well, Dave’s Part has gotten together with the Sporting Outfitters of Intellectual Distinction to give away a complete set – worth £80 – to one lucky reader.
All you have to do is explain in the comments box why you deserve to bear such fine apparel on your chest. The DP/PF decision is final, and the closing date is next Friday.
Aaaah, but what if you don’t win? What if somebody else thinks up some wittier words than you do? All is not lost. You can of course purchase this wonderful merchandise from the Philosophy Football website.
Part of the profits will go to Billy Bragg’s Jail Guitars Doors project, an initiative to provide musical instruments to inmates in prisons across the UK. And how good a cause is that?
Bragg himself notes: ‘Ex-prisoners who have actively participated in such [jam] sessions have a re-conviction rate of between 10% – 15%, compared to the national average of 61%.’
Right then, let’s see what you can come up with.
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50 Responses to “Philosophy Football/Dave’s Part: Clash T-shirt competition”
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From a Labour family but it was the Summer of 77 that put me in touch with true “street politics”- the music, the youth, any colour all jumping and dancing to any type of music- punk-the jam-regga- it didnt matter what you liked- all together -anti-nazi league and making sure that Enoch’s words did not come true- 1984 and by then it was just Paul weller and Billy Brag trying to do the smae thing to support the miners- and then we tryed again – red Wedge- but it came to nothing. Copy T shirts from that era at stupid prices in shops for people who wwould not ahve been seen dead in 77 or 84 on our side- t shirts purchsed by people whose families made money from Mrs thatcher-
At least we now have authentic t shirts from a firm taht believes with us- the profits going to a good cause, just like their range of shirts to remember those who fought for t freedom in Spain in the 1930;s– Jerusalem- London Burning- Tubestation at midnight- Jamming with Marley- hope for all of us
(Does that win the shirts???)
London calling, yes, I was there, too, An’ you know what they said? Well, some of it was true! I was leader of the young Tory wing of the Anti-Nazi League in 1980 and organised the Blue Wedge campaign in 84 and 85. I think I really deserve those tshirts as they embody the spirit of my youthful rebellion and serve as a symbol of my resolve to return this country to the traditional British values of discipline, obedience, morality and freedom …
I am the singer with Cardiff band Sicknote who are putting on a party on the Thames next week, to celebrate Tony Blair leaving office- ‘Taxi for Mr Blair’.
He is invited, but I doubt he will come…
Check out http://www.sicknote. tv for more information…
Plus I work part-time as an art teacher in Shrewsbury prison, and understand the importance of music to the boys…
Please can I have the T-Shirts now? X
TONY BLAIR… THE END OF AN ERROR
I am a pie-munching bloater and none of my T-shirts fit any more.
The Clash represent(ed) the worst type of decayed bourgeois music – a reified, phony artistic and “pseudo-individualization” of cultural rebellion that takes the place of organized political or social revolt. It is music which has an exchange value, but no use value.
Likewise – for Clash ‘fans’ – the reason for attending their concerts was always the cultural importance of being seen at the ‘right’ performance rather than the pleasure of listening, along with the superior self-righteous feeling that everyone but them was missing the obvious. The musical event was transformed into a means that constituted a worshiping of status, stuck in a voyeuristic ritual of spectator-ship over and above the joy and privilege of attending a musical event as an end in itself.
As a social character figure – the Clash fan is histrionic and artificial. Easily excitable, with large doses of egocentricity and sophomoric-transgressive bluster, he is superficial, malleable and compliant. These traits are displayed often exaggeratedly, accompanied by a penchant for, and a general ease to emote in public over their public-schoolboy idol fantasy figure.
I’ve run out of dusters and my windows need cleaning. Please give me the shirts.
I am the singer with Cardiff band Sicknote…
Next week we are putting a party on a boat on the Thames to celebrate Tony Blair leaving office…
‘Taxi for Mr Blair’
He has been invited, and although a taxi will be sent to Downing street to pick him up, I doubt he will take up the offer… Shame, as it will be his last chance to get down with the people and prove his true rock’n'roll credentials…
We intend to park up outside the Houses of Parliament and make a right old racket…
Check out http://www.sicknote.tv for more information.
I also work part-time teaching art in Shrewsbury Prison and fully appreciate the importance of art and music to the boys inside… I think it’s a worthy cause; there are no music fascilities in HMP Shrewsbury, and I know several guys who would really appreciate some instruments and the chance to play, rehearse and record…
Anyway, thanks for your time, and if you’d like to join the ‘Taxi for Mr. Blair’ party, please let me know…
Oh, and can I have the T-Shirts please… I am a 42 year old punk who never laid down and died, and therefore fully deserve them… Thank you,
Doghouse X
We heard you the first time Jason. Hit refresh and your intial comments will show up.
Just had a flashback to those Gramsci T shirts that they used to flog in Marxism Today in the late eighties for some reason.
Is it the same Arthur Daley from the old CPGB marketing the revolution with a small r?
You’re repeating yourself Darren
http://socialistunity.blogspot.com/2006/09/make-your-front-popular.html
I cannot allow Cameron to claim the heritage of the Clash (public school sensibilities aside). It is I who first amongst politicians identified this essential socio-political culture in 19 (please fill in date for me).
Punx not dead – although I nearly am
“You’re repeating yourself Darren”
But not as much as Jason aka doghouse, apparently.
Christ Will, like I remember what I wrote five minutes ago. And I thought you didn’t like the SUN blog?
Sometimes having a good memory has it’s bad points.
Like recalling a post at SUN blog.
[shiver]
Christ Will, you’re right about me repeating myself.
Profuse apologies at my rehashing of old material. Put it down to the SPGB’ism coursing through my veins,
I missed out on the whole ‘summer of punk’ because I was only born in 1988.
Since I missed out on the real thing and like punk music I should get the t-shirts as a consolation.
Will: “Sometimes having a good memory has it’s bad points.Like recalling a post at SUN blog”.
Ahhh, you love us really. You just need to admit it to yourself….You know you want to.
Oh, and Will if you reply to this please don’t swear toooo much as I blush easily…
I agree with Will
)
Funky t-shirts though.
What an utterly irrelevant critique of the Clash.
No wonder that music/cultural historians have mainly given up on Marxism if that’s the most interesting thing the left can say about a band like them.
Maybe you should send them to Geoff Martin, who is often found to be praising The Clash – see http://geoffsez.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html – Amongst other things he writes
“Police and Thieves turned me on to reggae and, at a time when punk appeared ambivalent to fascism, sent out a message to us young, white wannabe punks that a line was being drawn in the sand. Any misunderstandings we may have had about what White Riot was all about were blown away. And we got turned on to Rock Against Racism and never turned back.
And now another anniversary. This November it will be five years since Joe Strummer trod the boards at Acton Town Hall in support of the striking firefighters.”
I preferred The Jam to the Clash but any musician who does a benefit for workers on strike deserves some praise. Also, they called an LP “Sandinista”, a fine act of awareness-raising in itself.
My posting above referred to Will’s, not Dave’s, by the way.
I was going to have a crack at this until I saw David Cameron’s comment. In all honesty, I think he deserves the shirts and I look forward to seeing him wear one while being interviewed in the next TV punk retrospective.
Yep, Dave Cameron is the early leader … but there’s plenty of time for other people to catch up.
My comment’s much better than fucking Cameron you bastard!
Me windows are filthy man! Gimmee!
Matthew:
“Police and Thieves turned me on to reggae”
Reggae music turned me onto reggae.
“and, at a time when punk appeared ambivalent to fascism,”
Which is why I was never a punk – punk rock (or more accurately, white-boy pub rock in the UK – for that is what it was – less so in the USA) actively flirted with fascism and a grotesque nihilism (and was not just ambivalent to either).
“…sent out a message to us young, white wannabe punks that a line was being drawn in the sand.”
The rap music emanating from New York at the same time did a much better job at this, all the while being genuinely new and exhilarating, both modern and dialectical, and a truly collective form of
expression – and you had fun while listening to it! Punk was nothing but ancient ritual (teen angst and anti-parental vengeance played out for your peers), a circus performance (a gallery of freaks), non-serious, and illiterate with its sub-irony and individualistic ethos, whose animating spirit was the anarcho-egoist Max Stirner. In contrast to Rap music and hip-hop culture more generally, punk represented a blind rejection of science, rationality and technology and openly embraced the primitivistic, reactionary impulses of the hippies they supposedly despised.
“Any misunderstandings we may have had about what White Riot was all about were blown away.”
The fact such misunderstandings existed in the first place speaks volumes! If brains were ladders then your average punk wouldn’t be able to climb into his bunk-bed!
And lastly (maybe – honest) I reckon Jason should get the shirts. He obviously has a passion for the band in question, he’ll put them to use (even if it is to indulge in more anti-Blair hysteria of the kind all too familiar), and he obviously wants them very much. Hate to see anyone (with exceptions of course) disappointed.
Fuck sake, give the T shirts to Will before he outs himself as Paul Morley.
Cheeky twat.
I’m a bit worried as Will is directly on the money again, for the second time, with his comment that “The Clash represent(ed) the worst type of decayed bourgeois music…”
I can do no better than reproduce what I wrote elsewhere on that band.
“I’ve always found the cult of Joe Strummer, on the Left. strange. I remember people would do things like carrying Beatboxes playing Clash songs in the mid/lates 80s on demos. I thought it had gone but I have seen some revival recently…A little of the music is ace, much so-so – … the political line throughout is soft Left or third-worldist (so admittedly better than the non-political stuff from now).
My memory of the Clash, growing up, was a very few good tunes but the laughable posing – the ‘guerrilla’ ‘ style photos in scenes of urban deprivation which even us 14 years olds could see through … and, when I did see the band, them being worse than the (laughable) Theatre of Hate who supported at The Manchester Apollo in 1980.
But the life – Strummer was a Chilterns dwelling Squire with kids in public school. A hypocrite.”
But I can do better in talking about punk as a whole and people who wear t-shirts like that. I can quote Jah Wobble, writing in the Independent on Sunday yesterday.
He was talking about an Alan Parker (a hack biographer of Sid Vicious). He said that he is “is one of a coterie of blokes that eke out a living by stripping the last remains from the carcass of punk. Most of them are from the provinces and the majority of them seems to be in their late thirties/early forties and therefore would have been no more than 12 or 13 when it happened…They all gather at the funerals of punk luminaries, where they adopt the personae of old soldiers attending the wakes of fallen heroes…Rest assured Sid would have hatred them all… It is the absolute antithesis of the punk scene in 1977.”
The past has gone. Out with old and in with new. Burn it down and start again.
The pleadings by others to win the tshirts are both risible and very fucking sad.
If awarded the shirts I promise to BURN all of them straightaway, photograph the whole process and publish a comprehensive set of photos of the action on my website or a linked one.
I’ll even throw in a shot (if I can get it sent to me in time) of me, aged 15, pogoing to a long forgotten Manchester punk / new wave band to conclude the ‘Who is Southpawpunch? Poll’ on my site.
“I’m a bit worried as Will is directly on the money again, for the second time”
The feelings mutual.
Let’s form a new sect.
“He was talking about an Alan Parker (a hack biographer of Sid Vicious).”
If anyone deserved a ‘hack biographer’, it was that arsehole.
I’ll sell the T-shirts for fighting fund, allowing me to donate to Dave a free place on the Devon Socialist Party Rugby World Cup sweepstake (First prize £10, not bad for a one-in-sixteen chance). Failing that obvious bribery, give it to Duncan so long as you think the shirts won’t make it too easy for the fash to spot him…
I vote for Jason Doghouse, a fine post and sentiments
Give them to me. for the reasons stated below:
1) One more machine wash and my St Pauli T shirt will fall to bits.
2) I smoked out Paul Morley on this thread.
3) I’ll strut up and down past this mural in the East Village, making the hipsters jealous with my oh so exclusive T shirt.
Fuck their $150 Stranglers T shirts.
Southpaw: If awarded the shirts I promise to BURN all of them straightaway, photograph the whole process and publish a comprehensive set of photos of the action on my website or a linked one.
Would you be wearing them at the time? we could sell tickets for that.
Darren: “2) I smoked out Paul Morley on this thread.”
No you fucking didn’t.
You funny little ginger bearded robbing our city and knocking down our defensive wall little git.
southpaw still mad: “Would you be wearing them at the time? we could sell tickets for that.”
oh – come on – I thought that was very KLF of him (and quite witty – fairs fair and all that).
KLF came to mind when I read the comment as well, but I was too polite to mention it. Could Southpaw really be Bill Drummond, and does that make Voltaires Priest Julian Cope?
Will,
you cheeky bastard. The beard is strawberry blonde.
“knocking down our defensive wall’
For the last time, I had nothing to do with Titus Bramble’s loss of form.
I like The Clash and I appreciate punk’s importance (though post-punk was better), but I do thing Will’s got a smidgeon of a point. And I think a rather stultifying orthodoxy’s grown up around a certain generation on the left around The Clash, an orthodoxy that is very, well, un-punk.
They were a great band, and Strummer was a great bloke who walked the walk, but they weren’t the be all and end all of political pop. And I think they’re over-deified.
Darren: Me and you have ownd this thread comrade.
Let us put mere trifles of ideological flim-flammery behind us and unite for one purpose and one purpose only!
Give the shirts to me and Darren pussies!
Fuck all the sycophants – give us the commodity to dispose of as we wish!
You can take our freedom but not our ability to talk shite on the intertubes!
Just give them to me. I was a Clash fan from early 77 and an extra in Rude Boy. I just resent paying money to Mark Perryman.
I want to wear them to mark the 30th anniversary of my first demonstration on August 13th. I would wear my original RAR T-shirt which I wore that day but alas, it no longers fits me.
Who were the clash, were they some sort of beat combo?
Will:
“”Police and Thieves turned me on to reggae”
Reggae music turned me onto reggae.”
Give yourself a gold star then. Heaven forbid that someone (who was probably in his mid-teens at the time) can be stimulated into finding out more about music by listening to a cover version (especially one sung by an ex-public schoolboy, the thought of it).
“Punk rock (or more accurately, white-boy pub rock in the UK – for that is what it was – less so in the USA) actively flirted with fascism and a grotesque nihilism (and was not just ambivalent to either”
Really? I think you will find that flirtation with fascism was down to idiots like Sid Vicious and some followers of the Sex Pistols (probably encouraged by Malcolm McLaren) wearing swastikas on their t-shirts. Bands like The Clash and Jam had nothing to do with that.
“reified, phony artistic and “pseudo-individualization” of cultural rebellion that takes the place of organized political or social revolt.”
Good grief, they were rock bands that appealed to young people, they were not an organised political movement. However, they did give a major boost to Rock Against Racism which was linked to the Anti-Nazi League.
“Punk was nothing but ancient ritual (teen angst and anti-parental vengeance played out for your peers), a circus performance …..whose animating spirit was the anarcho-egoist Max Stirner. Punk represented a blind rejection of science, rationality and technology.”
Oh yeah? This bit should be entered into Psueds Corner.
By the way, I’m not making the grandiose claims for punk and The Clash, that was Geoff Martin, former UNISON convenor for London. I had a few Clash records when I was 13/14 but ended up giving them away. I can appreciate why others did like them so much. And I don’t want the t-shirts. Now, if the t-shirts were of Victor Jara (socialist martyr and artistic genius), then I think we might even get 100% agreement on a thread for once.
It is anazing how long ago 1977 was, thirty years before that was 1947.
Back in the 1970s, my Dad actually still did used to wear part of his old uniform to do the gardening: his shorts from when he was in the Indian army. And to me when I was a teenager in the 1970s the 1940s seemed like something from pre-history.
So for someone under thirty now, I am sure the Clash seem like a part of tradition like Val Doonican. (though obvioulsy Val Doonican had more artistic integrity)
They are a strange choice to celebrate punk, because the memory of the early Clash has been overwritten by the bloated ego-rockers they later became.
Having said that, a lot of people do like them.
the 1940s seemed like something from pre-history
The 1970′s are pre-history though…
Southpaw hates The Clash. That’ll teach them not to sign up to the SWP 30 years back.
“Strummer was a Chilterns dwelling Squire with kids in public school. A hypocrite.” Where does leave factory manager Freddie Engels then?
“If awarded the shirts I promise to BURN all of them straightaway, photograph the whole process and publish a comprehensive set of photos of the action on my website or a linked one.” Not as amusing as you doing the same with a pile of unsold copies of “Socialist Worker.”
When are The Redskins going back on tour then?
I am a bit disappointed with this thread so far.
Perhaps Will’s bile and Southpaw’s cynacism has dampened the competition.
I would actually be interested in reading why comrades like the Clash, what it means to them, and why they want tht T-shirts.
Can we have a little less cynacism and showing off, and actually have some people entering the competition?
It’s *cynicism* Andy.
Jaysus you bunch of boring old farts! The Clash are dead and gone, when will you superannuated dullards realise! Boring and balding most of you and thats just the women amongst you.
Dave
If you give them to me I promise to wear them to work where my job is to promote some PFI school building projects.
Situationist. Post modernist.
Take your pic.
Career opportunities – the ones that never knock!
Miles
Mike
Before you start I’m not superannuated.
I’m a part-time casual worker.
I’m not bald.
Andy,
The boring old farts like The Clash becuase it reminds them of their long lost youth before they lost their hair and got mortgages.
Time for more cynicism I says. Face the facts and realise that Genesis are the current best selling act and that punk long ago blew itself out.
Andy,
The boring old farts like The Clash becuase it reminds them of their long lost youth before they lost their hair and got mortgages.
Time for more cynicism I says. Face the facts and realise that Genesis are the current best selling act and that punk long ago blew itself out.
Mike, for a Genesis fan (“Face the facts and realise that Genesis are the current best selling act”: compared to whom? Girls Aloud? The White Stripes? Sugababes? Shakira? The Arctic Monkeys? Chas’n'Dave?) to slag off anyone for being bald is a bit rich.
I was 7 in 1977, have still got plenty of hair on top and haven’t got a mortgage. However, despite all that, I think THE CLASH WERE FUCKING GREAT. By all accounts, so does Kate Moss, and she’s a damn sight more cool than anyone who has ever contributed to the comments section of this blog. Including you Mike.
My dear Anglonoel in 1977 I saw The Clash several times and had a fine old time. In 2007 I would rather go to see acts such as Sunno)), Boris, etc than live in the past with my old punk 45′s. That is my complaint in relation to the boring old fart lefties.
You see the same people display a similar attitude to their politics which they seek to push into the same tired unsuccessfull avenues that failed them in the past. Frankly its dull and boring. I’d rather look to the new emerging sections of the working class who will not swallow the same old guff that the boring old farts have been pushing for decayeds,
Mike
PS Kate Moss is about as cool as your smelly dead Granny and I loathe Genesis. But consider Shakira far more revolutionary than The Clash ever were and better looking into the bargain!
“And the winner is … (cue drumroll) … Alasdair Ross”
The first comment won the T shirts?
I bet Dave couldn’t be arsed to read the other 48 comments (+ this one).
The last time I was this surprised by a result was 18 hours ago when the Deputy Leadership result was announced.