The counterfeit Clash

Joe Strummer – Obituary

Born 21 August, 1952 in Anakara, Turkey

Died 22 December 2002 in Broomfield Somerset. Aged 50

At a time when such thoughts seemed plausible, Mark P, editor of the fanzene Sniffin' Glue, wrote that the first album by The Clash was his life. Around the same time the exuberant American critic, Lester Bangs, whose life was loosely memorialised in the film Almost Famous, noted a "persistent humanism" beneath the groups "wired harsh landscape."

A year later, as the sound of the Clash was fine tuned for the American Market the rock theorist Greil Marcus interviewed the groups leader Joe Stummer and detected a "wearied, bemused intolerance for frauds large and small, and a biting eagerness to wipe them out". Punk was a movement unconcerned with posterity, and it will have been of limited consolation to Strummer, and the other members of the Clash - the most dynamic, articulate, and musically adventurous of the mainstream punk groups - that their records have made the most impressive contribution to the rock canon. In the end, it is not the speedy r ‘n’ b of their first album which endures - though there is no doubting the kinetic power of What’s My Name?, or I'm So Bored With the USA - but the generous, free-spirited rock ‘n’ roll of their third album, the double set, London Calling, and their fourth, the triple, Sandinista!

Even to call it rock ‘n’ roll is to undersell it. The Clash, at their peak offered a library of world music, playfully overlapping: a rumble of reggae, a blast of delta blues, a tip of the hornburg, to the swinging jazz-raps of Cab Calloway. They didn’t just rock they jived!

The Clash was a group, and it relied for its power on the chemistry between its four members. Strummer, though, was its soul. He was a fearless singer, with a voice that knew no embarrassment. It was a rough-throated thing, a blues instrument weathered by smoke-filled dance halls which flitted between characters, competing narratives and comic cat calls. It never sounded better than on Straight To Hell, which chronicled the fate of Asylum seekers years before the term was invented.

Strummer once claimed that for a year, at the age of 16, he listened to nothing but Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart. If The Clash never quite attained Beef Heart's knack for implosive deconstruction, they understood how to shift between styles, engineering something new from used components. As a lyricist, Strummer was a romantic, whose wit was sometimes overshadowed by his sense of politics. The world described in London Calling ("the ice age is coming /the sun zooming in ... a nuclear error but I have no fear") may sound disturbingly prescient. But it should be filed alongside the Clash’s more humorous political interventions, such as Koka, Kola, which catalogued the influence of cocaine in music industry boardrooms. "Your snake skin suit and your alligator boots" Strummer sings, "You don’t need a launderette – you can send them to the vet."

At first Strummer's credentials as a punk were questioned but it is possible to see in his biography the roots of his worldview. His father worked for the foreign office. Joe – real name John Mellor - was born in Ankara and lived in Cairo, Mexico and West Germany before being sent to boarding school in Epsom, Surrey from the ages of 8 to 17.

He saw his father once or twice a year. "As to whether I felt cheated by his absence" he told one interviewer, "I didn’t bother with that, because I was in a hard place. You know Tom Brown's Schooldays? Imagine being in a second-rate boarding school in South London in 1961. You had to punch or be punched!"

He dropped, out of art school and did menial jobs – washing dishes, digging graves, cleaning toilets - before forming the 10lers, named after the address of the squat (101 Walterton Road)where they rehearsed. He was in his mid 20’s in 1976 when he saw the Sex Pistols and decided to leave the 101ers and form the Clash with Mick Jones and Paid Simonin

The group operated under the slogan "three chords and the truth" and reflected the social disintegration of the time. But their fine principals often operated against commercial orthodoxy. Their refusal to play Top of the Pops now seems arcane, as does their bold declaration "their would be no £5 Clash Album, ever". Their ongoing battle with CBS was characterised by the group's insistence that their fourth album, Sandinista!- a 3 record set - be released at budget price. The result was that the group made no money and the public got a record that needed editing. This ambivalence about success may have provoked the group to split just as the American marker was about to acquiesce, and it sometimes found its way into the songs. In Death or Glory, Strummer sang "Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world and ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl."

The end of the group in 1983 was suitably enigmatic. Strummer disappeared to Paris and when he re-emerged with a shaved head he sacked Jones and formed an ill advised Clash. His new Clash toured the UK busking for free. In 1989, Strummer released a solo album Earthquake Weather, but he was silent for most of the Nineties, his muse weighed down by the significance of his early work.

He was also alienated with the electronic music which dominated the last decade, complaining that he wanted to jump back to 1948 to the music which originally influenced rock ‘n’ roll. The political legacy of the Clash was a further difficulty and a frequent complaint.

"The fact is that we were drug addict musicians first and foremost. We loved Chuck Berry, Slim Harpo. We never heard of Friedrich Engels." Still, Strummer found time to support Class War, playing on their Rock Against Rich tour while never being in any doubt about the influence of music on the political process. "We never had any real power other than in an abstract, poetic way" he said.

"What I wrote on a piece of paper might influence some-one somewhere down the line ... but it would’ve been nice to have the power to say, 'Fifty thousand people down to the Houses of Parliament now!" We might’ve been able to get 1,500 people at the height of our power, but ultimately it's the big money men who have the power."

Strummer's real influence was poetic, and on his recent records, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style and Global A Go-Go, he shows signs of having come to an understanding of his talent. On the comic rap Bhindi Bhagee he offers a menu in place of a manifesto:

"We got rock, soul, okra, bombay duck-ra/shrimp, bean-sprout, comes with or without/ bagel soft or simply harder / exotic avacado or toxic empenado / we got akee, lassi, solami waccy baccy/ I’m sure back home you know what tikka all about/ welcome stranger to the humble neighbouhood."

In the song, as the journey continues, the singer is asked what kind on music his band plays: "I said, it’s erm…erm… well it’s kinda ragga, bhangratwo step tango / Mini cab radio music on the go!"

Now that posterity has beckoned, perhaps strummer can be seen for what he was: not a punk, but a dide and a democrat, a beat poet with a battered fender.

Alastair McKay in the Scotman 24/12/02  www.scotsman.com

e-mail: counterfeitclash@sky.com