Kris Needs - Joe Strummer and the Legend of The Clash

All transmitters to pull. All receivers to boost.

This is London calling This is London calling

Joe Strummer, introducing his 1998 BBC World Service broadcast.

In 1977, you had to be careful what you said. Despite its anarchistic manifesto, punk rock had its own unwritten list of qualifications for acceptance, especially within the ranks of its originators and elements of the media.

If you were a working class teenager from a council estate preferably from a broken home with an alcoholic mother and survived on a crap job or the dole, you were considered okay. The shittier your circumstances, the better. But if your background was comfortably middle-class, youd attended a good school and were maybe tipping the scales in terms of age, there might be credibility problems. It was like you had no right to be a punk. Strange but true.

The fact that punk rocks two main management movers Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes were older and reasonably off didnt matter. The Sex Pistols were working class lads from Londons dodgier areas, even if many of their original followers were drawn from middle class suburbia.

As The Clash sprang to prominence in 1977, the Pistols werent looking at more than another year in existence. It was going to be down to The Clash to pick up the baton. But their singer, Joe Strummer, was already fielding jibes about his public school background, his fathers career in the Foreign Office, and even the shocking revelation that he was twenty-four years old.

It didnt matter that Joe had worked for several years at menial jobs like cleaning toilets and digging graves while he tried to kick-start his musical career. The fact that he was one of the most charismatic front men to emerge in years, a brilliant wordsmith and a ferociously riveting performer shouldve been enough. When Joe died in 2002, it was these qualities that he was remembered for. An avalanche of tributes described Joe as the ultimate punk, a spokesman for a generation, and an icon comparable with John Lennon and Bob Marley.

A quarter of a century earlier, as punk was picking up amphetamine fuelled momentum, Joe was more of a target than an icon. One music paper writer who knew about Joes background acted like he was in possession of classified information.

When I was getting involved with The Clash and reporting on the punk scene in 1976, I started to feel slightly guilty of the fact that I was twenty-two, married, with a job and came from a stable home with a reasonable education. Later, I didnt let it worry me, and it didnt most other people I befriended. If you heard certain individuals reciting from their personal arbitrary punk rulebooks, it paid to just say Bollocks! Im like this take it or leave it.

Recalling the zeitgeist, Clash bassist Paul Simonon told GQ, This was something that we had to deal with internally insofar as Joe went to boarding school but then again, at the end of the day, does it really matter? By the time I met Joe, he was as broke as I was. OK, he had a better education than me but so what? What youre doing with your life now is more important. I dont really buy that whether youre middle class or not its what you do with your life thats important. Thats the thing about punk. It changed their lives and it changed ours too.

Now see what those griping old punks are doing. Most of them are settled into exactly the kind of life they were railing against a quarter of a century ago. Married with kids in a normal job in a nice house. Meanwhile, Joe Strummer lived his last years exactly how he wanted to making music, performing it wherever he wanted, then going home to his Somerset farmhouse to see his wife and kids.

Streetcore, Joes final album, demonstrates that he never lost his edge and his enthusiasm to top everything hed done before. One of his last gigs was in aid of striking firemen. Joe was a true punk rocker all his life.

In 2004 I can write about how the man who came to be called Joe Strummer grew up without feeling like Im contravening the Official Secrets Act. But in April 1977, Joe felt it necessary to explain his background in an interview with Melody Makers Caroline Coon. Im not working class at all. My father was born in India. His father died when he was eight and so he was an orphan and he went to an orphan school. Then, because he was so smart, they gave him a scholarship and he went to university, and he was really proud that he had come from nothing, with no chance, to have a degree even though it was from the poxy University of Lucknow.