JOE STRUMMER: OUR GREAT POET OF PROTEST

JOE STRUMMER: OUR GREAT POET OF PROTEST
By Duncan R. Shaw, PhD

Madrid, 1 August 2022

This long hot ‘Summer of Discontent ‘ has seen presidential palaces and parliaments stormed by people inflamed by global warning and corruption – and furious at rising prices.

In countries as diverse as Sri Lanka, Argentina, Libya and Iraq, the buildings of the political elite have been assaulted by angry citizens alienated from the neoneoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’ by growing inequality, corrupt privatization and elite indifference  towards devastating climate change.

Therefore, this seems an appropriate moment to pay tribute to one of the great apostles of peaceful protest (along with Gandhi,  Martin Luther King, John Lennon and Paul Weller), on the 20th anniversary of his early death from a rare heart defect: Joe Strummer.

The massive legacy of the great Strummer was not really done justice by the rather unbalanced, excessively contrived 2016 film London Town; the provocative trailer promised much more than the film actually delivered.

A much better understandinng of the importance of Strummer can be gleaned from The Future Is Unwritten, in which Mick Jones and Paul Simonon (Strummer’s bandmates from The Clash), among others, pay full tribute to Strummer.

I was 14 when punk rock exploded in 1976 – another long hot ‘Summer of Discontent’ in England. Strummer and Simonon were caught up in the riots which resulted from the brutal policing of the West Indian Notting Hill Festival in London.

Thus began Strummer’s identification with the downtrodden, abused and mistreated – an identification which soon took him to the Caribbean concert hall Hammersmith Palais, and to Kingston, Jamaica.

Strummer’s lyrical genius lay in protesting against discrimination, injustice and corruption, whether in Britain or the wider world.

“Rudy went to London Town, where the police they beat him down” (Safe European Home).

“White youth, black youth
Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood
And ask him for some wealth distribution?                                            All over people changing their votes
Along with their overcoats
But if Adolf Hitler flew in today
They’d send a limousine anyway”                                                  (White Man in Hammersmith Palais).

“Yankee dollar talk
To the dictators of the world
In fact it’s giving orders
And they can’t afford to miss a word”                                                      (I’m So Bored With The USA). 

Strummer’s immense achievement was to, as leader of The Clash, to fuse political protest with elegant rockabilly, reggae, dub, ska, funk and rap.

As an impressionable 15 year-old, I remember reading these immortal lines of Strummer, written on a lampost with a felt pen  by my friend Peter Monk (who became the bass player in Chesterfield’s leading punk band Spasms):

“White riot, I wanna riot
White riot, a riot of my own
White riot, I wanna riot
White riot, a riot on my own                                                                      Black man gotta lot a problems
But they don’t mind throwing a brick
White people go to school
Where they teach you how to be thick                                                    And everybody’s doing
Just what they’re told to
And nobody wants
To go to jail…                                                                                                All the power’s in the hands
Of the people rich enough to buy it
While we walk the streets
Too chicken to even try it                                                                          And everybody’s doing
Just what they’re told to
And nobody wants
To go to jail” (White Riot).

Strummer – who also liked to call himself Joe Public – was an unlikely street rebel. Born John Graham Mellor in Turkey in 1952, the son of a minor British diplomat, he was packed off to an obscure English private school (“I went to this school where thick rich people sent their thick rich kids”).

The suicide of his Nazi-obsessed elder brother David in 1970 turned Strummer firmly against racism and authoritarianism. He drifted around art schools and North London squats in the early 1970s, learning the guitar (never a great player, actually) and forming the pre-punk band The 101ers.

His growing reputation as a captivating, charismatic, tireless front man led Simonon and Jones to recruit Strummer for The Clash in 1976, after running into him at the unemployment office (hence ‘Dole Queue Rock’).

The Clash (‘The Only Band That Matters’) quickly became my firm favourites, in a way that neither the nihilistic Sex Pistols or the childish Damned never could be.

To the chagrin of my poor mother, I dyed my hair green and  ripped up my nice leather bomber jacket. I painted Revolution Rock Against Thatcher on it – one of Strummer’s many protest songs.

I finally managed to see The Clash in 1978, at the memorable  Rock Against Racism festival at Victoria Park in East London in 1978 – the first of many Clash gigs for me.

Strummer’s stand against racism was important, at a time when the ugly National Front was on the rise; “If they’re black, send them back!” was the NF’s mean slogan.

In my youthful naivety, I was totally convinced that Strummer’s songs of revolution and redemption were destined to inspire my generation to overthrow the hated ‘Thatcher Regime’…

However, by 1983 Strummer looked increasingly jaded and frustrated – the revolution had not happened. He petulantly sacked Jones – and The Clash were effectively finished.

Strummer brought in three admiring young kids, to replace Jones and heroin-ruined drummer Topper Headon, but the magic of the Strummer-Jones partnership was gone; the Clash finished in 1985.

A few months later I actually ran into Strummer in Notting Hill Gate, when I was collecting money for the striker coal miners on a cold morning. Strummer took pity on my and took me for a pint – always so generous and  welcoming.

He told me how much he regretted having sacked Jones. We moaned about Thatcher, Reagan, miltarism and capitalism for a pleasant hour…

Then came Strummer’s ‘wilderness years’: wandering around Europe and America, dabbling in film and poetry. He enjoyed an elegant swansong with The Mescaleros, then a long-awaited rapprochement with Jones just days before his death in 2002.

In November 2002, Strummer and the Mescaleros played a benefit show for striking fire fighters in London. Jones was in the audience and joined a delighted Strummer on stage for White Riot.

A month later Strummer was dead, at the age of 50. But by no means forgotten – especially during this long hot summer of anger and protest.