The Clash song Joe Strummer never got tired of playing: “It’s a blast”
Nothing elicits a groan in concert audiences quite like a legacy act revealing that they’re about to play some new material, but countless artists over the course of musical history have grown to resent their older material – either through its insurmountable popularity or lack of artistic gratification.
Joe Strummer, however, was never one of those people.
In contrast, the punk peers they came up with within the confines of The Roxy club, The Clash were a constantly evolving entity. Even on their debut album from back in 1977, Strummer and the band were already incorporating elements of rocksteady, dub, and ska into their abrasive, anti-authority punk sneer, and they only seemed to expand their repertoire further as the years went by, embracing everything from experimental jazz to early hip-hop.
With that ever-evolving sound, The Clash prevented themselves from ever growing stale; a fact which is reflected in the very fact that they lasted until 1986 together, years after the punk boom had imploded in on itself. Seemingly, though, it also prevented Joe Strummer from ever growing tired of the material he wrote during The Clash’s heyday, even after he had moved on to other things over the course of his solo career.
When The Clash finally split in 1986, after the disastrous final album Cut The Crap besmirched their otherwise flawless discography, the respective band members wasted no time in getting stuck into other projects. Mick Jones, for instance, formed Big Audio Dynamite as a means of further immersing himself in the influences he had soaked up in New York, while Paul Simonon continued his bass mastery with Havana 3am, and Strummer commenced work on various solo projects.
Even though The Clash were never a band that was going to cash in on a big-budget reunion tour, the music of that era was never far from the heart of Strummer, and he revisited his earlier work on numerous occasions during his solo years.
During one 1999 interview, via Perfect Sound Forever, the songwriter reflected on the enduring enjoyment of blasting out those old Clash tracks, attesting, “I swear to you, the songs are so good, like ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.’ It’s a blast. It ain’t like some tedious chore. It’s like a joy.”
“These are songs that I have written, and I have loved,” he continued. “I love it because, back in the day, people didn’t know them. When we sang ’em, they’d go, ‘This is good’, but today, there’s more people who have studied it a bit.”
Out of all The Clash’s tracks, ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ is certainly among the greatest, and its relevance has never particularly waned, which perhaps goes some way to explaining why Strummer never got tired of performing it.
Aside from anything else, it is one of the greatest pieces of socially reflective songwriting to ever arise from the punk age, so what is there to get tired of in the first place?
