Joe Strummer

Joe Strummer: The Diplomat's Son Who Sang for the Streets

In April 1976 a pub-rock band called the 101ers had the Sex Pistols open for them at a London show. The 101ers were the better musicians. Their singer watched the support act and concluded, correctly, that his own group was already obsolete. Within weeks Bernie Rhodes had prised him loose to front a new band with Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, and John Graham Mellor — boarding-school boy, gravedigger, busker, squatter — became the most persuasive voice in British popular music.

A Diplomat's Son in a Boarding School

He was born in Ankara on 21 August 1952, the son of Ronald Ralph Mellor, MBE, a Foreign Office diplomat, and Anna Mackenzie, a Scottish nurse. The postings moved the family to Cairo, Mexico City and Bonn before they returned to England. At nine he was sent to board at the City of London Freemen's School in Surrey, where he saw his parents roughly once a year. In July 1970 his brother David, who had become involved with the National Front, took his own life. Strummer rarely discussed it at length and it shadowed everything afterwards. He went on to the Central School of Art and Design in London, considered becoming a cartoonist, bought a ukulele and started busking instead.

Squats, Gravediggers, and the 101ers

In 1973 he formed a band called the Vultures in Wales while working as a gravedigger, calling himself Woody in tribute to Woody Guthrie. By the mid-1970s he was living in a squat at 101 Walterton Road in Maida Vale, which gave its number to the 101ers, the rhythm-and-blues group he fronted from 1974. He wrote "Keys to Your Heart" for them, and in 1975 settled on the name Joe Strummer — a self-deprecating description of his own rhythm guitar playing, which he considered adequate and nothing more.

The Clash

The Clash played their first show on 4 July 1976 and signed to CBS Records in January 1977. The debut single "White Riot" arrived that year with the raw, compressed fury the moment demanded, followed by the albums The Clash in 1977 and Give 'Em Enough Rope in 1978. Strummer wrote or co-wrote material about social decay, racism and police brutality, and the seriousness was not a pose; Britannica identifies his commitment to a populist ideology as the thing that gave the band its passionate, politicized sound. Where the Sex Pistols offered nihilism, the Clash offered arguments.

London Calling

The double album released in 1979 remains the case for the defence. London Calling abandoned punk orthodoxy for reggae, rockabilly, ska, jazz and soul, and Britannica notes that it earned the Clash a reputation as masters of a stylistically diverse sound; Rolling Stone later named it the best album of the 1980s. The triple album Sandinista! pushed the eclecticism to the edge of coherence. Combat Rock in 1982 pulled it back and produced the two songs that made them a stadium act in America, "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go."

Success did not agree with him. Before Combat Rock was released Strummer vanished to France, a stunt that damaged the band and that he later said he regretted. In September 1983 he fired Mick Jones, removing the melodic intelligence that had balanced his own. Cut the Crap, released in 1985, was poorly received, and the Clash ended not long after.

The Long Wilderness

For most of a decade Strummer worked at the margins of other people's projects. He scored Alex Cox's Walker in 1987 and acted in Cox's Straight to Hell the same year, then appeared in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train in 1989. He released one solo album, Earthquake Weather, in 1989, contributed to soundtracks including Sid and Nancy and Grosse Pointe Blank, produced the Pogues' Hell's Ditch and stood in as their guest vocalist in 1991. He was not obviously going anywhere.

The Mescaleros, and the Last Two Years

The recovery, when it came, was substantial. Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros released Rock Art and the X-Ray Style in 1999 and Global a Go-Go in 2001, records that folded African and Caribbean music into his writing without the anxiety that had marked Sandinista!. He hosted a programme on the BBC World Service called London Calling, playing music from everywhere; material sampled from the show turned up on Streetcore, released in 2003 after his death. He co-founded Future Forests, later the Carbon Neutral Company, planting trees to offset emissions, and became the first artist to make his recordings carbon-neutral.

His last regular performance was at the Liverpool Academy on 22 November 2002. He died a month later, on 22 December 2002, at fifty, of a heart attack caused by an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. The Clash were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 2003, a month afterwards. His widow, Lucinda Tait, founded the organization now known as the Joe Strummer Foundation to support musicians and music-based projects worldwide.

Why Joe Is Called a Genius

The claim does not rest on musicianship, and Strummer would have been the first to say so — the stage name itself is a joke about the limits of his guitar playing. What he had was a rare compound of two things that seldom coexist: an omnivorous ear, and moral conviction that survived contact with money. The ear is the more demonstrable of the two. London Calling moves through reggae, rockabilly, ska, jazz and soul in a single sitting and holds together, a compositional and editorial achievement rather than a technical one; Britannica's phrase, masters of a stylistically diverse sound, is precise. The BBC World Service show at the end of his life was the same faculty without a band attached.

The counter-case has to be admitted. He was not a virtuoso on any instrument, and the Clash's best songs were collaborations in which Mick Jones supplied melody and structure; the evidence for that is Cut the Crap, made after Strummer fired him, which is generally regarded as the band's worst record. His politics could be sloganeering, and the tension between a Foreign Office childhood and street-fighting lyrics was noticed by critics from the beginning. He abandoned his own band in 1982 and effectively wasted the decade that followed. What survives all of that is a body of songs in which the arguments are real, the sources are unfashionably wide, and the conviction never sounds purchased — and that combination is rare enough that people reach for the word.

Legacy

Strummer's influence runs less through guitar tone than through permission. He established that a rock band could be politically literate without being humourless, and that punk's restrictions were a starting position rather than a creed. Every subsequent group that mixed reggae bass, hip-hop rhythm and protest lyrics is working in a space he opened. The Mescaleros albums have aged better than almost anything else made by a punk-era survivor in his forties. He died with a radio show, a reforestation project and a rebuilt career in progress, which is a considerably better ending than the movement he came from usually allowed.

Achievements

• Instruments: guitar
• Genres: rock music