//Top: Entrance to Ealing Club stairwell with jeweller’s to its right, early 1960s. Photo: ealingclub.com. Above: The entrance as it is today//

“Suburbia is the breeding ground for the richest and most innovative cultural production of the 20th and 21st centuries” Rupa Huq, writer and MP for Ealing Central & Acton, 2013

An advert in the New Musical Express for a “Rhythm & Blues Night” staged 55 years ago today – on St Patrick’s Night, March 17, 1962 – sparked the British musical revolution which soundtracked youth culture in the West for decades.

The ad proved a lure for suburban London teenage r&b fans including Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, while Eric Burdon, soon to be vocalist with The Animals, hitchhiked the 300 miles from Newcastle to join them in witnessing the main performance by Blues Incorporated (in fact he and Jagger traded verses on stage during a rendition of Billy Boy Arnold’s I Ain’t Got You).

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Tags: Alexis Korner, Art Wood, Billy Boy Arnold, Blues Incorporated, Charlie Watts, Cyril Davies, Ealing Club, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood, Rupa Huq, The Animals

I’m really proud of my niece Esme Bradbury, whose exuberant handmade designs via her label EsDes have received a boost with inclusion at the Craft Council’s Established East London pop up shop at Westfield Stratford.

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Tags: Charlie Watts, Crafts Council, David Allen, EsDes, Esme Bradbury, Established East London, Harrow Art School, Malcolm McLaren, Pamla Motown, Westfield Stratford

//Robert Watts in front of Products by Implosions Inc. Photographer: unknown//

Malcolm McLaren’s adaptation of the infamous Tits t-shirt is one of punk’s most familiar designs, as applied by he and Vivienne Westwood to shirts sold in SEX and Seditionaries, worn by members of the Sex Pistols and replicated hundreds of thousands of times since.

Such is its distorting androgynous power that a version was chosen along with another McLaren/Westwood design – the Cowboys shirt – to represent the core aesthetic of the movement when the forthcoming Costume Institute exhibition Punk: Chaos To Couture was announced earlier this month.

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Tags: Alice Cooper, Andy Warhol, Charlie Watts, Costume Institute, Fluxus, Jizz Inc, Mrs Gorman, Punk: Chaos To Couture, Robert Watts, Shopping, The American Supermarket, Thomas Kellein, Zandra Rhodes

I haven’t had it confirmed – nor seen this in any music history – but I believe this line ad to have been placed by Jerry Nolan three years before he replaced Billy Murcia as the drummer in the New York Dolls.

It appeared in the June 14, 1969 edition of Rolling Stone, the “first British issue” of the magazine produced in collaboration with newly recruited staff in London.

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Tags: Billy Murcia, Charlie Watts, Frendz, Friends, George O'Dowd, Jack Bruce, Jann Wenner, Jerry Nolan, Mick Jagger, New York Dolls, Paul Tickell, Pete Townshend, Peter Green, Roy Harper