Still in rough demo form when he died, Joe Strummer’s last will and testament has been finished off for him by The Mescaleros. There’s been a tendency to write them off as hired hands, but as anyone who caught their last Olympia show will testify, a genuine bond and creative chemistry had developed between leader and new backing band.
Whether that would’ve eventually lead to a commercial renaissance we’ll never know, but Streetcore is far more than an exercise in nostalgia.
The powerchords long since consigned to history – ‘Coma Girl’ and ‘Arms Aloft’ are the only songs that could’ve sneaked onto a Clash album – Strummer adopts the same global jukebox approach that made his two previous Mescaleros-assisted outings so hard to pigeonhole.
Needless to say, there’s a hefty dollop of reggae with the main talking point a Rick Rubin-produced cover of ‘Redemption Song’. Tackling somebody as iconic as Bob Marley is a dangerous business, but Strummer’s empathy with the song is so total he pulls it off handsomely. Less successful is ‘Get Down Moses’, a “Jah be praised!” affair that’s just too cod for its own good. Joe Strummer had many virtues, but sounding Jamaican wasn’t one of them.
Rubin is also on hand to marshal ‘Long Shadow’, an emotions-laid-bare slice of Americana which, to make things doubly poignant, was written with Johnny Cash in mind. I tell you, by the time the closing “Always in my soul, there’s rock ‘n’ roll!” refrain comes around, you’ll be diving for the Kleenex.
Other highlights include ‘Ramshackle Day Parade’ with its lazy township sway, the London-by-way-of-Mississippi ‘Burnin’ Streets’ and ‘Midnight Jam’ which is equal parts U.Roy, Ry Cooder and Tony Fenton. No, really!
Sure, he’ll primarily be remembered for what happened up and down the Westway in the ‘70s, but Streetcore proves that Joe Strummer wasn’t just yesterday’s hero.