Interview: Unearthing Joe Strummer's lost gems

“Iam representing, as best I can, a group of people, in fact a large section of the population who I will call the dispossessed. The people who have been denied. These are not only young, there are old people who will rise to these words.”

That was Joe Strummer writing in the dog-eared notebook that he carried with him everywhere during the last decade of his life.

For those of us who stood on the right side of rock history during the ‘70s (punk rather than the Electric fucking Light Orchestra), Joe was both the teller of great truths (the “If Adolf Hitler flew in today…” line from ‘White Man In Hammersmith Palais’ foresaw Trump with eerie accuracy) and deliverer of dumb but oh-so-great one-liners (‘Sten guns in Knightsbridge’, ‘Hair gel revolutionaries’, ‘Creative violence’ etc. etc.)

While the Clash back catalogue has been mined to the point of exhaustion, this is the first time the songs Strummer recorded before and after his tenure with the Westway Warriors have been gathered together. Crucially, it includes twelve previously unreleased tracks that his artist friend, Gordon McHarg, found when Joe’s widow, Lucinda, asked him to catalogue the boxes and carrier bags full of tapes that he’d left strewn round the house.

“It wouldn’t have happened if Joe was alive,” McHarg proffers. “He wouldn’t have been bothering about what he’d done years ago; he’d have been ploughing on with new stuff. Joe was always in a hurry. He’d finish one thing and then immediately move on to the next without necessarily telling other people what he was up to. When I got involved a year after his death, Joe’s studio had been packed away but his rough storage area, known as ‘The Pig Barn’, was still untouched. I didn’t know what I was getting into, but 15 years later we’ve finally managed to catalogue all these un-indexed cassettes and tapes, a lot of which had to be brought over to this amazing guy, Peter Morrow, in Toronto to be restored. Joe was very frugal and practical – if he didn’t need six inches of Gaffer tape he’d use three inches because he knew he might need the other three inches tomorrow – and would use tracks 1-5 of a tape for one demo and 6-8 for another. One of my album favourites, ‘Blues On The River’, was discovered by chance during the restoration process when for some reason we flicked between tracks. Then, when we got back to England, I discovered the handwritten lyrics to the song in Joe’s notebook, which has been reproduced as part of the box-set.”

Gordon met Joe in the early ‘90s after he’d relocated to London from his native Montreal.

“We bonded over a Hank Williams book,” he reminisces fondly. “Joe was such a music fan. My son and his daughters are roughly the same age, so they hung out while we talked about this Mexican ranchera band he’d just discovered. I was very honoured when in 1995 he wrote ‘Sandpaper Blues’ as an accompaniment to an exhibition of mine.”

Another box-set standout is ‘U.S. North’, the 1986 song Joe co-authored with Mick Jones for the Robert Frank and Randy Wurlitzer film, Candy Mountain, but which never made it onto the soundtrack.

“I didn’t know of its existence until I was round at Mick’s and he played me a lo-fi copy. He said, ‘Please find the master ‘cause that’s the only time me and Joe sang together rather than doing our separate parts.’ So, I went looking for ‘U.S. North’ and felt totally elated when we found it because it documents how Joe and Mick were still hitting it off musically after The Clash.”

Joe’s temporary fronting of The Pogues in 1991 appears to be the inspiration for ‘Rose Of Erin’, which finds him hobnobbing with such folk royalty as Danny Thompson, Tommy McManamon and James MacNally.

“He wasn’t renowned for being a collaborator but Joe loved working with people who took him off in different musical directions,” Gordon notes. “One of his proudest moments was recording ‘Redemption Song’ with Johnny Cash. Joe had worked on a couple of the tracks from his Streetcore album with Rick Rubin who, when they found out Johnny was in town, hooked them up. It all happened very organically and they got on like a house on fire. A similar thing happened when he got to record ‘Over The Border’ with another hero of his, Jimmy Cliff. What struck me is that Joe’s songs are so relevant they could’ve been written today. In ‘Pouring Rain’ from 1984, he sings, ‘The future pointed to the weather vane’, which was him talking about global warming before the term was coined. Joe was always ahead of the pack.”