The filmmaker and longtime chronicler of punk remembers his own relationship with the former Clash frontman, and says his new documentary is really all about friendship
The filmmaker and longtime chronicler of punk remembers his own relationship with the former Clash frontman, and says his new documentary is really all about friendship
"I never had the idea of doing this film before Joe's death," says director Julien Temple of the documentary about his mate, the late, great Clash frontman Joe Strummer. "I couldn't stick a camera in his face or anything like that. And I didn't really have the idea for a film after he died either. I was too much in shock, like everyone else who knew him."
Strummer's sudden death at the age of 50 in December 2002 came just as the singer was enjoying a renewed sense of purpose, and his first significant success for a decade. With his band the Mescaleros he had found a vehicle into which he could plough a range of cheerfully eccentric influences that ran from rock 'n' roll to world music via songs about comas, curry and Cricklewood.
"Joe brought other things to punk," says Temple of the man who defined, yet refused to be defined by, the righteous ire of 1977. Though The Clash sang 'I'm So Bored With The USA', Strummer worshipped Captain Beefheart, Bob Dylan and Bo Didley. When punk first broke, he turned his back on his mates if their trousers still flapped in the wind. Twenty years later, he was proudly declaring himself an old hippy. The boarding school-educated son of a diplomat, Strummer - born John Mellor in 1952 - embodied both the idealism and the contradictions that lay at the heart of punk.
"I knew him from being in the crowd at the Elgin," says Temple of the Notting Hill boozer which in the mid-1970s served as HQ to Strummer's first band, ferocious pub rockers The 101ers. "He was squatting right round the corner from where I was squatting, and I used to see him in the street. The 101ers were a big part of that scene. They did a lot of benefits and they were playing with a pretty outrageous energy. Dr Feelgood and that kind of thing had started to happen but The 101ers were pushing it even further. Joe was a very, very manic stage presence at that time. The energy coming off him was extraordinary."
Next page • "Joe had an extra purity and an edge, because he always had to prove who he was"
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