Album Review: Joe Strummer 001

The last time I saw Joe, in the Olympia Theatre, he was urging a band half his age to catch up with him as he tore in to ‘White Riot’, unable to slow down. Is it any wonder that lion’s heart gave out, way before it’s time?

This generous compilation covers Strummer’s solo adventures, the work he did when he wasn’t in one of the greatest rock n’ roll bands of all time. Disc one stretches from early efforts with the sound of seventies squats, The 101ers – ‘Letsagetabitarockin’’ is his first great song and a motto for life, and there’s nothing wrong with ‘Keys To Your Heart’ either – through the Sid And Nancy soundtrack, his seriously underrated Latin/folk work for Alex Cox’s Walker in 1987, ‘Trash City’ with the marvellously named Latino Rockabilly War in 1988, and his first solo album proper, 1989’s Earthquake Weather. Biographies like Chris Salewicz’s excellent Redemption Song refer to this time in the eighties after The Clash fell apart as Joe’s lost years but you’d have a hard time telling that from listening to this.

The second half of the first disc is devoted to the roots, rock, reggae, raga, ragbag of The Mescaleros, his other crucial group. Their contributions here – the make-a-grown-man-cry passion of ‘Yalla Yalla’ (“Distance no object, Rastafari!”), ‘Johnny Appleseed’, X-Ray Style’, 'Coma Girl' and their lump-in-your-throat version of  ‘Minstrel Boy’ – are more than fit to stand beside the best of The Clash. The three Mescaleros albums all remain essential, Joe and his gang shoe-horning musics from everywhere and anywhere into the old rock framework. It might not be an obvious connection but one of the only high-profile acts doing this kind of I-don’t-give-a-fuck genre hopping/melding on a similar level today is Robert Plant. There’s one for all the young punks.

There are rarities aplenty like the duets with Johnny Cash and Jimmy Cliff, and B-side ‘15^th Brigade’, a distant, banjo-driven cousin of ‘Spanish Bombs’, in the first half, but it is the unreleased fare on disc two that should really make the serious Strummer supporter salivate. The story that Joe left it all behind in the barn in his back garden for his window Lucinda to uncover doesn’t even have to be true, it just fits his mythos.

We get an early demo of ‘This Is England’, the last great Clash song, Mick Jones-featuring Sid And Nancy outtakes, and the long lost When Pigs Fly soundtrack including the lovely ‘Rose Of Erin’. 93’s ‘The Cool Impossible’ and the headnoddingtoetapping ‘London Is Burning’ with The Mescaleros from 2002 are more than worth having, as is one of the real finds here, ‘U.S. North’ - a ten minute epic presumably recorded while Joe was helping Mick out with Big Audio Dynamite’s underrated No. 10, Upping Street in 1986. “In my time, I drank a lake of hobo wine” – if anyone argues against Strummer as one of the greatest rock n’ roll lyricists of them all, then they’re a fool.

If you haven’t already seen it, seek out Julien Temple’s brilliant Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten documentary from 2007 for more in-depth background information on the periods covered here. In fact, take the rest of the day off and go watch it. If the boss doesn’t like it, quit. Do it for Joe ‘cause he would have done it for you. To quote The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, “Raise a toast to St Joe Strummer, I think he might have been our only decent teacher”. We won’t see his mighty, life-changing like again.

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