Post by Fuggle on Sept 16, 2007 13:52:25 GMT -5
The Polite Punk
Bernard Zuel
September 15, 2007
Joe Strummer
Joe Strummer of the Clash was a punk hero, but Julien Temple's new film paints him as a man of many personas, including middle-class hippie.
THIRTY YEARS AGO Joe Strummer was poised to become the central figure of Britain's music culture. In the Queen's jubilee year, as the Sex Pistols dominated media and public attention like pasty-faced, green-teethed titans, punk was the only currency worth holding and Strummer's band, the Clash, had wads of the stuff.
Strummer played in an R&B band called the 101ers but quit after watching the then little-known Pistols play as their support act. When Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the group London SS asked him to form a new band with him, he agreed. "It was a bold move for me to jump into something," Strummer told MTV 25 years later. "But I knew, you could tell by looking at them, you didn't even have to speak to them, Mick and Paul were different."
By the second half of 1977, with a debut album out, a fierce collective spirit centred around their Camden Town base and Bernie Rhodes, a manager as canny as (and crazier than) the Pistols' Malcolm McLaren, the Clash were rising just as their inspiration headed towards implosion.
The charismatic Strummer was ready, his eyes burning with the fervour of the newly converted, his lyrics, interviews and on-stage pronouncements laden with calls to shuck old thinking and rise anew.
Within two years the Clash would outstrip the term punk with their reggae-pop-rock masterpiece of an album London Calling, make large inroads into the American market. They set the template for politically committed bands for the next three decades, from the Celibate Rifles in Australia to Green Day in the US to London left-wing folk rocker Billy Bragg, who saw the Clash play on their first headline tour and has often said that for his generation the 1970s began in 1977.
"We looked at each other and it clicked and that was it," Bragg later recalled. "We realised that we were what they were, even though we weren't officially punks yet."
Along the way Strummer became the music industry's in-house philosopher and anti-racist, anti-right-wing working-class hero. Except, as it's explored in Julien Temple's new film, Joe Strummer: the future is unwritten, Strummer was a lot more complex, contradictory even, than this. His upbringing as John Mellor in a solidly middle-class family with a father in the diplomatic corps; his older brother's death while John was a teenager; his years as an itinerant, hippie-like searcher and occasional gravedigger who asked to be called Woody; and his almost brutal separation from and denial of contact with anyone from that past once he became Joe Strummer, are only part of the story.
If the future was unwritten, Mellor-Strummer always intended that he would pen his own.
"It started happening at school," Temple says. "At school you get a sense of him directing the other kids taking photographs of him, creating this persona. He was constructing some kind of image for himself even then, which is interesting."
Temple, a confidant of the Sex Pistols and director of two documentaries about them and the punk years, The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury, knew Strummer in 1977, though their friendship at the time was short thanks both to the Strummer contradictions and the rivalry between the Pistols and the Clash.
"It takes one to know one and I was someone who was a bit like him," Temple says. "I came from a middle-class background and he was very wary of exposing his past at that point so someone like me around was not necessarily the best thing. I got on with him fine but got on better with the others who were less uptight about the middle class.
"I knew him quite intensely in the punk moment and that was a very strange time for him because he was pretending to be something that he wasn't and was a difficult person to know beyond the punk accent and street persona that he adopted."
One of the fascinating things about Joe Strummer is he remained believable, liked even, by those he left behind each time he moved on. He was also respected much more than anyone who created three or four personas over their lifetime might expect.
"Well, I think the Joe [persona] was the real one," Temple says. "I think he was looking to find himself in a way and I think the Joe Strummer thing was the real thing.
"I think part of the attractive aspect of Joe is that what you become and where you are going is more important than where you come from. Unlike John Lydon, he showed that you could come from any kind of background and he lived his life pretty close to what he preached so you couldn't deny him the truth of what he was on about."
The contradictory elements within Strummer were most sorely tested in the Clash when he simultaneously achieved everything he'd wanted and began to fear what he'd found. The moment came at the apotheosis of the punk movement, the Clash's triumph in the US. After an astonishing 16-night residency in New York in 1981, the Clash's Combat Rock album sold more than a million copies, made it into the US Top 10 and the single Rock the Casbah became a hit. A band which had formed with the intention of bringing down the music establishment was now part of it.
Soon the gang that had coalesced in the Camden Town enclave began to unravel. First drummer Topper Headon was kicked out for his debilitating drug dependency and then Jones was forced out by Strummer and Rhodes. There were many reasons for the falling out between Strummer and Jones but the bitterness was exemplified by one explanation given by Strummer. "He said he should check with his manager before writing songs," Strummer said of Jones. "So I said, 'Go write songs for your manager then. Piss off. Leave.' "
The Clash made one more album after Jones's departure but the spirit had gone and soon so had the band. For the next decade or so Strummer struggled to find the interest from without and the motivation from within. His first marriage fell apart, his occasional forays into soundtracks were only partially satisfying and he seemed not just rootless but directionless as self-doubt all but crippled him.
During the mid-1990s, he explored his love of Latin American music with a new band and reconnected with music culture, becoming a fan of the rave scene, a fixture at the Glastonbury music festival where he'd organise giant, communal bonfires and a BBC World Service music broadcaster.
In Temple's film there's footage of Strummer cheerfully spruiking his band via handbills at a seaside resort, eager just to be heard rather than glorified. His music wasn't selling a fraction of what it had in the Clash 20 years earlier but, when he died of a congenital heart ailment in 2002, aged 50, it seems he was genuinely happy.
"I think he didn't know what to do with the persona but I don't think he ever doubted that persona," Temple says. "I watched him coming back into a cultural role again and allowing his persona to come back when he was no longer worried about people knowing about his hippie past. He didn't feel the need to be guarded about that any more."
Temple reconnected with his old sparring partner when Temple's wife, Amanda (who co-produced the film), invited her best friend from school and her boyfriend for lunch, only for the Temples to discover that the boyfriend was Joe Strummer.
"It was bizarre seeing him come through my front gate but Joe was very good at breaking the ice," Temple says. "I was making a hot air balloon with the kids and not doing a very good job and Joe said, 'Let's get stuck in' and he and I spent all night doing it, with a little fire and a few bottles of wine. By morning we were getting ready to fly this thing and were the best of mates."
It is a classic male thing of bonding over an activity rather than some sharing of open emotion. "The [Glastonbury] camp fires were a bit like that. Very much everyone had to keep the fire going, get the wood and Joe would be making sure everybody had what they needed. There was a very practical side to Joe that came from way back in his upbringing. He was very much the diplomat's son, the manners he had, the politeness and the concern that other people were being looked after. It was very un-punk like."
Joe Strummer: the future is unwritten opens on Thursday.
Bernard Zuel
September 15, 2007
Joe Strummer
Joe Strummer of the Clash was a punk hero, but Julien Temple's new film paints him as a man of many personas, including middle-class hippie.
THIRTY YEARS AGO Joe Strummer was poised to become the central figure of Britain's music culture. In the Queen's jubilee year, as the Sex Pistols dominated media and public attention like pasty-faced, green-teethed titans, punk was the only currency worth holding and Strummer's band, the Clash, had wads of the stuff.
Strummer played in an R&B band called the 101ers but quit after watching the then little-known Pistols play as their support act. When Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the group London SS asked him to form a new band with him, he agreed. "It was a bold move for me to jump into something," Strummer told MTV 25 years later. "But I knew, you could tell by looking at them, you didn't even have to speak to them, Mick and Paul were different."
By the second half of 1977, with a debut album out, a fierce collective spirit centred around their Camden Town base and Bernie Rhodes, a manager as canny as (and crazier than) the Pistols' Malcolm McLaren, the Clash were rising just as their inspiration headed towards implosion.
The charismatic Strummer was ready, his eyes burning with the fervour of the newly converted, his lyrics, interviews and on-stage pronouncements laden with calls to shuck old thinking and rise anew.
Within two years the Clash would outstrip the term punk with their reggae-pop-rock masterpiece of an album London Calling, make large inroads into the American market. They set the template for politically committed bands for the next three decades, from the Celibate Rifles in Australia to Green Day in the US to London left-wing folk rocker Billy Bragg, who saw the Clash play on their first headline tour and has often said that for his generation the 1970s began in 1977.
"We looked at each other and it clicked and that was it," Bragg later recalled. "We realised that we were what they were, even though we weren't officially punks yet."
Along the way Strummer became the music industry's in-house philosopher and anti-racist, anti-right-wing working-class hero. Except, as it's explored in Julien Temple's new film, Joe Strummer: the future is unwritten, Strummer was a lot more complex, contradictory even, than this. His upbringing as John Mellor in a solidly middle-class family with a father in the diplomatic corps; his older brother's death while John was a teenager; his years as an itinerant, hippie-like searcher and occasional gravedigger who asked to be called Woody; and his almost brutal separation from and denial of contact with anyone from that past once he became Joe Strummer, are only part of the story.
If the future was unwritten, Mellor-Strummer always intended that he would pen his own.
"It started happening at school," Temple says. "At school you get a sense of him directing the other kids taking photographs of him, creating this persona. He was constructing some kind of image for himself even then, which is interesting."
Temple, a confidant of the Sex Pistols and director of two documentaries about them and the punk years, The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury, knew Strummer in 1977, though their friendship at the time was short thanks both to the Strummer contradictions and the rivalry between the Pistols and the Clash.
"It takes one to know one and I was someone who was a bit like him," Temple says. "I came from a middle-class background and he was very wary of exposing his past at that point so someone like me around was not necessarily the best thing. I got on with him fine but got on better with the others who were less uptight about the middle class.
"I knew him quite intensely in the punk moment and that was a very strange time for him because he was pretending to be something that he wasn't and was a difficult person to know beyond the punk accent and street persona that he adopted."
One of the fascinating things about Joe Strummer is he remained believable, liked even, by those he left behind each time he moved on. He was also respected much more than anyone who created three or four personas over their lifetime might expect.
"Well, I think the Joe [persona] was the real one," Temple says. "I think he was looking to find himself in a way and I think the Joe Strummer thing was the real thing.
"I think part of the attractive aspect of Joe is that what you become and where you are going is more important than where you come from. Unlike John Lydon, he showed that you could come from any kind of background and he lived his life pretty close to what he preached so you couldn't deny him the truth of what he was on about."
The contradictory elements within Strummer were most sorely tested in the Clash when he simultaneously achieved everything he'd wanted and began to fear what he'd found. The moment came at the apotheosis of the punk movement, the Clash's triumph in the US. After an astonishing 16-night residency in New York in 1981, the Clash's Combat Rock album sold more than a million copies, made it into the US Top 10 and the single Rock the Casbah became a hit. A band which had formed with the intention of bringing down the music establishment was now part of it.
Soon the gang that had coalesced in the Camden Town enclave began to unravel. First drummer Topper Headon was kicked out for his debilitating drug dependency and then Jones was forced out by Strummer and Rhodes. There were many reasons for the falling out between Strummer and Jones but the bitterness was exemplified by one explanation given by Strummer. "He said he should check with his manager before writing songs," Strummer said of Jones. "So I said, 'Go write songs for your manager then. Piss off. Leave.' "
The Clash made one more album after Jones's departure but the spirit had gone and soon so had the band. For the next decade or so Strummer struggled to find the interest from without and the motivation from within. His first marriage fell apart, his occasional forays into soundtracks were only partially satisfying and he seemed not just rootless but directionless as self-doubt all but crippled him.
During the mid-1990s, he explored his love of Latin American music with a new band and reconnected with music culture, becoming a fan of the rave scene, a fixture at the Glastonbury music festival where he'd organise giant, communal bonfires and a BBC World Service music broadcaster.
In Temple's film there's footage of Strummer cheerfully spruiking his band via handbills at a seaside resort, eager just to be heard rather than glorified. His music wasn't selling a fraction of what it had in the Clash 20 years earlier but, when he died of a congenital heart ailment in 2002, aged 50, it seems he was genuinely happy.
"I think he didn't know what to do with the persona but I don't think he ever doubted that persona," Temple says. "I watched him coming back into a cultural role again and allowing his persona to come back when he was no longer worried about people knowing about his hippie past. He didn't feel the need to be guarded about that any more."
Temple reconnected with his old sparring partner when Temple's wife, Amanda (who co-produced the film), invited her best friend from school and her boyfriend for lunch, only for the Temples to discover that the boyfriend was Joe Strummer.
"It was bizarre seeing him come through my front gate but Joe was very good at breaking the ice," Temple says. "I was making a hot air balloon with the kids and not doing a very good job and Joe said, 'Let's get stuck in' and he and I spent all night doing it, with a little fire and a few bottles of wine. By morning we were getting ready to fly this thing and were the best of mates."
It is a classic male thing of bonding over an activity rather than some sharing of open emotion. "The [Glastonbury] camp fires were a bit like that. Very much everyone had to keep the fire going, get the wood and Joe would be making sure everybody had what they needed. There was a very practical side to Joe that came from way back in his upbringing. He was very much the diplomat's son, the manners he had, the politeness and the concern that other people were being looked after. It was very un-punk like."
Joe Strummer: the future is unwritten opens on Thursday.