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PORTFOLIO: JOE STRUMMER - Still Strummer after all these years Joe Strummer is drinking today, pouring himself a glass of brandy and coke. One per interview and I´m the sixth journalist he´s seeing. The alcohol hasn´t affected the Englishman notabely, unless you count the reflective mood he´s in. The fourty-seven year old veteran is talking to the press to introduce his new band Mescaleros and their debut album "Rock Art & The X-Ray Style”. A fresh platter full of interesting diversity, ambitious and rocking as the albums of his former group The Clash, one of the two most important punkbands of all time.Ten years Strummer (born as John Mellor) kept quiet, now he´s speaking, very clearly too: "I had to wait ´til the old contract with Sony was up. The bastards wanted records from me, but I just sat on my ass and did nothing", he explains, defiant as ever. Did he get any wiser in the ten inactive years, I want to know. "The truth is, no, I´m not any wiser. But I got a couple of clues as to where wisdom lies, that´s why I picked up on the phrase "Rock Art & The X-Ray Style” as album title. I got it from an archaeological book, it was a chapter heading. It refers to cave paintings where they began to paint the bones inside the animals. The professors decided to call this phase of cave-paintings the X-Ray Style. It began to mean something to me, I picked it up, it pertains the wisdom, the X-Ray Style of living I decided for me. It means being long in the tooth you can understand the patterns of the world, what´s likely to happen next because it´s happened before so many times. Even though I´m not very astute, even someone like me can pick up the patterns of the world. The X-Ray Style is when I use that knowledge of the patterns of the world and I see through a situation. Say someone came up to me at a gig and I can immediately tell what they are trying to put over like: "Come to my bar."" Has his low profile in the nineties to do with Strummer´s high profile in the late seventies and early eighties? "I think I had my say”, he nods in agreement. "It was compacted into five years, really, ´77 - ´82. A lot kicked off for us in those years, we were at the right time at the right place. I had my say, enough yakking, shut up for a minute, let other people do it, sit back and learn something. That´s what I try to do and it was a good thing to do to shut up for a while. I´m gonna have to mention Judy Collins now: ‘I looked at clouds from both sides now / from up and down and still somehow .....’ Replace clouds with fame and I looked at fame from both sides now, when you go down you go down. Going down the rollercoaster is when you find out who you really are, the same way you do on a rollercoaster. I mean the velocity of plunging from the top is terrific, the g-force is phenomenal and you hit the bottom and there ain´t no mat. Then you pick yourself up and and that´s when you go: ‘Right!’ I don´t have any fear anymore. I could run out and do a cabrank, I could run a cab out there, starting from now for 20 years, I´m not joking, I don´t give a fuck. I´ve earned that feeling.” By now Joe is the father of three daughters, aged fourteen, twelve and seven. Perhaps surprisingly all of them are punkfans, listening to The Offspring and the hardcore bands from California. Her father´s taste is quite different these days, the music of the Mescaleros is always based on strong rythms ranging from hard rock to soft acoustics to bouncy electronics. A couple of them incorparating a South American and Caribean flavour: "Check this out, this is cumbia.” He reaches for his getto blaster and plays me some lively latino music. "Columbian, it´s nothing like salsa, this is probabely recorded in 1964, I´m a fucking cumbia expert, this is probabely a band called Los Coroleos. Let´s turn our attention to politics, Joe. There is this saying be George Bernard Shaw who said something like, a young person who´s not a communist is inhumane. An old person who´s still a communist is a fool. "This is a great saying, it means, come to know the true nature of the beast that we are. Hey, we wanna own stuff. Communism is a theory to put it into practice it had to go to inhumane lengths to make the damn thing work, in fact it wouldn´t work unless you had a secret police enforcing it. As soon as you realize that than you realize it´s fucked. I was quite glad that Clash was over, we were leaning towards that and that is no direction”, he reminiscenses glumly. "When you´re young, like George Bernhard Shaw says, you´re enthused with the ideas and you don´t follow ´em through cause you have no tools to follow them through. There´s a lot of truth in that. I was expecting to get a lot more mellow but I wanna destroy all this (points at his hotel suite) starting over again. If we could wipe the earth clean before people were building this military industrial complex... I´d like people to be nomads. I think that would be the best life of a human being on the earth. It would be if you would travel with your people to find food, when the world was an endless place without fences and you just travel around, going up and down the mointains to the seasons, that to me would be proper living. We don´t have a chance, we´re not even alive...” |
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by Henning Richter |