The band that Joe Strummer always secretly loved: “Pretty fucking cool”
For a musical revolution so ingrained with leftist politics, solidarity was pretty hard to come by during the punk rock boom of the 1970s. Rather than banding together in defiance of the musical mainstream, virtually every band was out for themselves, and even Joe Strummer and The Clash were no exception.
While the punk landscape was quickly filled up with bands dealing almost entirely on shock value and phoney safety-pin rebellion, The Clash set out with a clear moral and artistic code, and they seemed to stick to it throughout their time together, with the potential exception of their dismal final album, Cut The Crap.
Whether it was their essential role in the Rock Against Racism movement, or the endless political commentary packed into their discography – spanning everything from unemployment to the Spanish Civil War – Strummer and the band never attempted to hide their calls for political resistance and unity. Even still, The Clash fell victim to the arrogance of youth during their emergence, truly believing that they were ‘the only band that matters’.
Punk, in a general sense, does tend to foster a lot of unwritten rules over what you can and cannot listen to. Even in the modern age, there are still certain sects of the scene who will gladly crucify you for listening to the ‘wrong’ thing if they deem it not punk enough. Strummer, on the other hand, was a lover of all walks of the musical world, and The Clash drew upon everything from Jamaican rocksteady to New York hip-hop over the years.
The many joys that his extensive record collection brought about some degree of regret in Strummer for dismissing certain other groups within the early punk scene, as he once relayed in an anecdote to Blink-182’s Tom Delonge. “I asked him, I go, ‘Well, what is like being in The Clash? What was that like?’” Delonge recalled. “And he goes, ‘You know, we used to walk around saying ‘fuck you, we’re The Clash’,” reflecting the attitudes of The Roxy Club during the early days.
As he matured, though, Strummer’s view of the music scene became far less self-obsessed. “He stops, and he goes, ‘But now that I think about it, the Talking Heads were pretty fucking cool,’” the Blink-182 songwriter remembered him saying. “Don’t close your mind.”
Not only did that message impact Delonge at the time, inspiring him to open his mind to all the fruits of the musical world, but it is also a good motto for the rest of the punk world to take heed of. Punk might have been the musical revolution that the rock world had been waiting for back in the 1970s, but it is not the be-all and end-all when it comes right down to it.
If Strummer had gone on closing himself off to the rest of the scene, after all, he would never have experienced the weird and wonderful joys of David Byrne and his art-rock new wave mastery. Equally, he could have very easily avoided the experimental jazz sounds that inspired much of Sandinista, or the infectious beats of early hip-hop that soundtracked the band’s journeys to New York City.
There is no shortage of great music out there in the world, so why would you bother to shut yourself away in a world exclusively made up of barre chords, safety pins, and spikey hair?
