The Clash’s iconoclastic frontman would have turned 70 years old today. His birthday is being marked by two releases that no doubt would have made the sometimes irascible Strummer smile.
, from 2003—which boasts deep dives into the rock and roll, rockabilly, reggae, hip hop, electronica and EDM Strummer loved so dearly, they also feature a healthy helping of the world music one of the true giants of punk rock was so enthralled by, from Celtic to, you guessed it, Cumbia.
“I can still choke up when I hear his voice—especially when he’s in the studio and he’s just talking—it hits me, absolutely,” Tait tells me of revisiting Strummer’s late-career work. “But so much of it is funny, too, that it makes me laugh and it makes me smile. So, it’s still raw. That doesn’t just go away with time. But he was very proud of his work, and I think it’s relevant to hear today, especially some of his more political lyrics.
“It was a big undertaking,” Cheuse confesses. “How do you do Joe Strummer justice? How do you have the right balance? How can this thing encapsulate a working relationship between two friends who got along, when obviously, he was also a mentor to me and taught me so much? Those questions loomed large. But then, he also taught me to just get on with it. So that’s what I did.”
Cheuse’s photographs begin with the shots he took as a teenager during The Clash’s infamous 17-show stand at Bond International Casino in New York City’s Times Square in 1981, when the band brought the city to a standstill and set themselves on the trajectory toward superstardom, through the mixing sessions forthe following year, Strummer’s work with Mick Jones’s post-Clash band Big Audio Dynamite, his days in Los Angeles making his first solo album, through family trips to Glastonbury and his...
“It would be really great to have him around right now, because he would have a great take on things,” Cheuse says, a bit wistfully. “I always thought that we would be old dudes sitting in the pub with a dog having a pint, going, ‘Remember the time we were at that Prince concert, and you were sneaking people in, and they threw us down the stairs?’ I thought we would be old geezers. I never thought that he would bow out when he did.
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