Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home! Its fierce B-side, “Dum Dum Club”, might have been a better selection. The following “Love Kills”, a lumpy punk-blues, recorded in 1986 for Alex Cox’s Sid And Nancy, is presumably here because it was the first time Joe had recorded with Mick Jones since The Clash split. But this is where it started for Joe, right leg pumping at the Charlie Pigdog Club and The Elgin in Ladbroke Grove, unforgettable nights. CD1 opens with two tracks from Strummer’s pub-rock crew The 101’ers, the band Bernie Rhodes wanted eradicated from Joe’s past. Up to a point, the anthology makes plausible the view that, however flawed, there was more to the music Strummer made outside The Clash than its commercial reputation allows. Anyway, it’s to those years that this expansive collection rather bravely returns us. From then, Strummer was apt to drift, project to project, often taking bit parts in films no-one saw for which he wrote a lot of music no-one heard. “The Wilderness Years”, such as they were, properly began in 1983, when Joe evicted Mick Jones from The Clash. He later described the following decade as “The Wilderness Years”, a time of creative drought, depression and drugs.
That’s what Joe then did, like he’d evaporated. What was he going to do now? “Disappear, probably,” he said. He sounded humiliated, more depressed than ever. Worldwide, Earthquake Weather sold no more than 7,000 copies. His fear that his audience was gone was realised when his solo album, Earthquake Weather, was released in September 1989 to poor reviews and disastrous sales. If it was true, as he often said, that The Clash alone gave him purpose, it seemed as plausible that without The Clash he meant surprisingly little to anyone. Whatever the post-mortem hum that surrounded Strummer, the fact remained that after The Clash’s dismal end – for which he ever blamed himself, repeatedly, at length, especially over drinks – the adoring roar that he had once enjoyed was now silenced. “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer,” Craig Finn sang on The Hold Steady’s 2008 track “Constructive Summer”, giving voice to the feelings of many. They regarded him now as they might the Burning Bush of Biblical repute or a tablet of stone inscribed with wisdom’s words, God’s hip voice.
In the way people always have, they saw him more clearly when he was no longer there.
Joe was no longer The Man Who Broke Up The Clash and it was like he hadn’t spent the best part of a decade drunk or on holiday. After Joe Strummer died in December 2002, the Strummer Legend was quickly burnished into a holy glow, a posthumous radiance. This is the thing about the charisma of premature death.
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