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[gentle ambient music]

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[grand theme music]

- This isAmerican Morning

for Monday, December 23rd, 2002.

- Legend of rock.

- Sad and sudden news.

Founding father of punk rock, Joe Strummer, died yesterday.

- Strummer was the guitarist,

vocalist and songwriter for the British punk band,

- The Clash. - ...home in Somerset

and apparently peacefully of a heart attack.

[reporter speaking foreign language]

[reporter 2 speaking foreign language]

- London Calling was named

the best album of the 1980s byRolling Stone.

[reporter 3 speaking foreign language]

- We need Joe Strummer more than ever.

- I wouldn't be in a band had I not heard The Clash.

- Joe, we're gonna have your name on screen.

Would you like anything under your name?

Would you like Mescaleros,

The Clash or anything like that?

[Joe] I'd like you to write "punk rock warlord"

with warlord being one word.

♪ White riot ♪

♪ I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot ♪

♪ A riot of my own ♪

♪ White riot ♪

♪ I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot ♪

♪ A riot of my own ♪

♪ Black men got a lot of problems ♪

♪ But they don't mind ♪

♪ Throwing a brick ♪

♪ White people go to school ♪

♪ Where they teach you how to be thick ♪

♪ Everybody does ♪

♪ Just what they're told to ♪

♪ Nobody wants ♪

♪ To go to jail ♪

[glass shatters]

♪ White riot ♪

♪ I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot ♪

♪ A riot of my own ♪

♪ White riot ♪

♪ I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot ♪

♪ A riot of my own ♪

♪ All the power's in the hands ♪

♪ Of the people rich enough to buy it ♪

♪ While we walk the street ♪

♪ Too chicken to even try it ♪

♪ And everybody's doing ♪

♪ Just what you're told to ♪

♪ And nobody wants ♪

♪ To go to jail ♪

[upbeat punk rock music continues]

♪ Hey you, standing in line ♪

♪ Are we gonna sign an agreement? ♪

[Joe singing indistinctly]

♪ White riot ♪

♪ I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot ♪

♪ A riot of my own ♪

♪ White riot ♪

♪ I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot ♪

♪ Hey ♪

[radio tuning] [static crackling]

[distant sirens wailing] [fire crackling]

[Joe] All transmitters to full.

All receivers to boost.

This isLondon Calling.

This isLondon Calling.

First of all, welcome to the program.

All peoples of the world,

this is Joe Strummer at the controls

in Bush House in the heart of London.

This land is your land.

This world is your world.

[upbeat music]

[Joe] ♪ A lot of people won't get no supper tonight ♪

[Joe] We're gonna say the unsayable

and play the unplayable,

broadcasting what needs to be cast.

If your radio's tuned here,

your radio's tuned right.

[upbeat music continues]

[electricity crackling]

My father was born in India.

He only became an English citizen

two years before I was born.

After the war, he came to London

and joined the Foreign Office.

- He was very, very left wing,

which we thought was quite surprising

because he spoke like a very Pukka Englishman.

- What on earth Ron was doing being a diplomat

was completely beyond me.

He questioned everything.

[Joe] My parents weren't musical at all

and I think if I've got any musical tradition,

it comes from my mother's side.

And she was born on a farm,

50 miles south of John O'Groats

in a town called Bonar Bridge

which is very highland and very wild.

[bagpipe music]

- Anna was just this Scottish heather.

And the great thing about Joe,

he's got those two combinations, you know,

of the generosity of Anna and the questioning of Ron.

[gong resounds]

- ♪ Fry's Turkish delights ♪

[Joe] My father was posted to Turkey

and that's why I was born there.

[soft music]

He was screaming in Turkish

when he was about three,

shouting down the stairs

some Turkish curse that he'd learned.

- David was 18 months older than Joe

and they were just like chalk and cheese.

[upbeat music] [Joe shouting in Turkish]

[The Clash] ♪ Sharif don't like it ♪

♪ Rock the Casbah ♪

♪ Rock the Casbah ♪

♪ Sharif don't like it ♪

[Joe] My father was then posted to Cairo for two years

and then to Mexico City for two years.

[mariachi music]

I went to a Mexican school

where they spoke no English

and then to Bonn in West Germany.

[Elvis] ♪ See, I got him ♪

♪ See the size ♪

♪ Stripped and cleaned before your eyes ♪

♪ Sweet meat, look ♪

♪ Fresh and ready to be cooked ♪

♪ Crawfish ♪

[Joe] That's the great Elvis Presley

and my favorite Elvis tune

because it's got that New Orleans flavor in there

and you can feel the heat on the street.

1960, I believe,

is the first time I saw him.

Johnny Mellor, he was called then.

He was obsessed with taking my sister's clothes off.

He said to me, "Let's take your sister's clothes off

and hide them in his uncle John's cupboard

'cause no one will ever find them in there."

David would just go along with us.

Even at that early age,

Joe seemed to be the leader

of the two of them.

[Joe] Then I came to England,

to boarding school.

I often think about my parents

and how I must have felt about it

'cause it was like being sent away

and seeing them only once a year.

It really changed my life because I just realized that

I had to forget about my parents...

[tense music]

...and deal with this.

[somber music]

It was a school where people hung themselves.

I quickly realized that you either

became a power or you were crushed.

I had a gang because I realized

you had to fight fire with fire.

It was either bully or be bullied.

I was one of the principal bullies.

[pig snorting] [chickens whimpering]

[Joe] And there was no protection

from anybody or anything.

[tense music]

I was happiest at school because

I was in charge of my own world.

My brother was very shy.

He was a little bit older than me

in the year above.

They used to say in school,

"He hadn't said a word all term,"

and I was the opposite.

I was a mouthy little git.

Joe kept himself out of trouble very cleverly.

I mean, we'd all been in the shit, weren't we?

- Most of the time. - Joe, Joe always,

he knew how to handle people,

even the people that were trying to hurt him.

[dramatic music]

[Harry Belafonte] ♪ Day-o ♪

♪ Day-ay-ay-o ♪

♪ Work all night on a drink of rum ♪

- We were put in the Scouts as a good way

of getting out of school for a weekend,

I think was the reason that we joined.

[Belafonte] ♪ Stack banana till the morning come ♪

- We used to spend a lot of time building camps

and campfires and all that.

[Belafonte] ♪ Come, Mr. Tally man ♪

♪ Tally me banana ♪

[Joe] That's Harry Belafonte with

the magnificent "Day-o."

Takes me back to the old times.

- In all the time that we were at school,

I never met his parents.

It was as if they didn't exist.

They'd go back for holidays.

[bright music]

[Joe] Come in, Africa, are you receiving us?

Now we've got Mzikayifani Buthelezi.

This is the sort of tune that's like honey to the soul.

[upbeat music]

Malawi made a big impression on him.

He liked the people.

I think it just gave him a wider perspective of the world

at a very early age.

- He would always bring stories back at the beginning

of each term, plus a new collection of records.

- I can remember hearing the Rolling Stones coming out

of this huge wooden radio in the day room.

[upbeat rock music] [fans screaming]

- Their sound was so different

from what we were living

in our actual day-to-day reality.

It was the sound of another world.

[rocket blasts] [girls scream]

[Joe] That's the moment I think I decided

to only follow music forever.

That would be the way to live.

I was a lousy student.

[stick knocking]

[donkey braying]

[Joe] I was always last in the class.

My reports would be really terrible,

the worst you can possibly imagine.

My relation with my father was even worse.

I began to dread seeing him, even the once a year,

because the report would arrive in the post

and then all hell would break loose.

I would say from my upbringing that authority

was something to be avoided, if possible, attacked.

If you could get in and attack it and get away

without being burned, I would say that was high

on the list of priorities.

[Rob Tyner] ♪ Kick out the jam, motherfuckers ♪

["Kick Out the Jams" by MC5]

♪ Yeah ♪

Bastards!

[machine gun fires]

[Tyner] ♪ Well, I feel pretty good and I guess that I could ♪

[Joe] In 1968, the whole world was exploding.

There was Paris, Vietnam, Grosvenor Square,

a counter-culture.

I think that gave me an edge to put into punk.

It was a great year to come of age.

[woman laughs]

[Tyner] ♪ You gotta have it, baby, you can't do without ♪

♪ And when you get that feeling, you gotta sock 'em out ♪

♪ Put a mic in my hand and let me kick out the jam ♪

[music continues] [crowds shouting]

♪ I'm gonna kick 'em out ♪

I can see in a way why Joe was the way he was

but I could never understand what happened to David.

- Almost on one day,

you know, you walked into his bedroom.

It changed from being a normal boy's bedroom

into being black, swastikas and fascism and Mein Kampf.

Ultra, ultra right wing.

- David just went into Regents Park one day

and took an overdose of pills,

and finally went onto this little island.

He decided that things weren't satisfactory.

- Joe being the first person to see him

and then had to identify the body which...

must have been a terrifying trauma.

He didn't talk about it.

I think he wanted to kind of keep a lot of stuff at bay,

just keep it at a distance.

[Tim Harden] ♪ I'm the family's unowned boy ♪

♪ Golden curls of envied hair ♪

♪ Pretty girls with faces fair ♪

♪ See the shine in the Black Sheep Boy ♪

[Joe] And that was the great Tim Harden,

perhaps a lost genius of music with "Black Sheep Boy."

["See Emily Play" by Pink Floyd]

♪ There is no other day ♪

♪ Let's try it another way ♪

♪ You'll lose your mind and play ♪

[Joe] I just walked straight out of

this dead strict environment where you'd have to,

like, really struggle to get out the gate

and straight into this seething LSD orgy.

[music continues]

No!

[Joe] There was only one answer to what you're gonna do

after school and that is art school,

the last resort of malingerers and bluffers

and people who don't want to work.

[Woody Guthrie] ♪ And the rustlers ♪

Joe, whose name was John, said, uh, "Oh, my name's Woody."

♪ In the dead hours of night ♪

- And I said to him, "Oh, that's interesting.

How'd you get the name Woody?"

And he said, "Oh, I just made it up on the spot."

[Guthrie] ♪ A battle to fight ♪

- I think 'cause of Woody Guthrie.

I met him at art college on the first day.

We lived together.

He was instantly charismatic.

Everything in the room focused around him.

He always had a different way of putting things,

a different, different angle on things.

- He was thrown out because he did a collage

of used Tampaxes as art.

That was too much for them.

♪ Bang goes society's door, locked and bolted so secure ♪

♪ Once we find our love and trust... ♪

[Joe] I started to follow a musician around

called Tymon Dogg, D-O double-G,

he had this years before Snoop Doggy Dogg,

first collecting money for him in a London underground

like a Mississippi blues man's apprentice.

- Tymon was a guy who taught and showed Joe

that music was the root.

[Joe] I bought a ukulele because I figured

that had to be easier than a guitar

having only four strings.

When I managed to get some chords together, I was chuffed.

[singer vocalizing]

- When we went down to play at some Tube,

and I said, "Joe, we can't go down

and busk the one song that we know."

And Joe said, "Why?

Because nobody's ever gonna pass twice."

Tymon and Joe were walking around in a park in Kilburn

and they came across a guy who, I think had probably

just come out of mental home.

He was a bit strange and he had nowhere to go

and he was very disoriented and they brought him back

to live with us and he stayed with us for a while.

I remember the name of the guy.

He's called "Savory."

And Joe installs this tramp

with huge generosity in my bedroom.

- When the landlady and landlord found out

about us having this Black guy,

the woman attacked Tymon Dogg with a stiletto heel.

And they just went berserk.

They threw us out, chucked all our gear out the window

and we called the police and said, "Look!"

And they said, "Fuck off, hippies."

I mean, he was bloody impossible to live with, frankly.

You never knew where you were, when you were.

He lived day for night.

He'd go off somewhere to Glastonbury

or to the Isle of Wight

or somewhere and he'd turn up a week later,

completely unaware that you might

have actually expected otherwise.

- They'd had their Summer of Love, and by '72-3,

it was all over.

I always felt that it was like coming on the field

of a great battle 12 hours after the battle was over.

So the casualties were all lying on the field

but the battle was gone.

- ♪ Come on, come on, come on, love is comin' on that train ♪

♪ Come on, come on, come on ♪

♪ Love is comin' on that train ♪

♪ Oh, don't you wanna go ♪

- He did have a very strong "boy's own" attitude

to things.

He'd have this kind of spirit of adventure.

He'd sleep out under the stars when it

was totally unnecessary and he said,

"I'm gonna be a rock star."

So, he was right.

- ♪ Oh, don't you wanna go ♪

[Joe] That was Bukka White and it's the syncopation there,

all that provided by one man which I really liked.

- It was very difficult 'cause I still really loved him,

but I knew I had to get away because he was dropping out

and I was absolutely determined to carry on

with art college.

[Joe] And I hitched down to Cardiff and she told me

to shove off and so I started to hitch back

and the first stop-off is Newport

and I had some friends there.

[ship horn honking]

- Newport in 1973 was a very working class town.

You had the second-largest steel works in Newport,

you had the coal mines still active, docks,

there were boats coming out.

As far as the art college,

there's nothing PC about Newport in those days.

You'd go out and there'd be some punch-ups in the streets.

It was a tough place.

He'd come down from the south of England, the leafy suburbs,

and he, suddenly he found himself

in this industrial South Wales town which

was completely alien to anything he'd experienced

in the past.

But he loved it.

[bright music]

- He just appeared one day in the entrance hall

of the college looking for me.

He came with his guitar on his back.

- I had a feeling that he was getting away

from or going to somewhere.

He didn't sort of exactly fit in.

- He used to come back to my bed sit

and we'd just used to literally sit up all night

while I played my records.

["Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole]

[singer vocalizing]

- He just looked at me and he said,

"Is your mother proud of your eyelashes?"

[Joe] That was Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

from Hawai'i.

[metallic clanging]

- He used to sign on and he got various jobs.

- He was working in a carpet factory

and a rubber factory and come back with rubber

all over his hair.

- He took a job in a graveyard.

[Joe] I wasn't strong enough to dig graves.

First morning, they told me to dig a grave.

When they come back, I'd gone down about three inches.

- He'd got the sack when he was found asleep

in the grave.

[Joe] Although I wasn't at the art school,

I'd crash my way into the art school rock band

that became known as The Vultures.

Really make it nasty and homemade,

do you know what I mean?

[guitar strumming]

Do you think it's loud enough?

- This is one of the first songs he wrote.

[Joe] Everybody ready?

Take four.

[instruments playing out of tune]

[Joe] I drew a cartoon saying how brilliant we were.

♪ I been sittin' here thinkin' in a corner drinkin' ♪

♪ A lot of stinking cars and a lot of stinking things ♪

♪ He flied all around me like ♪

♪ There's a jamboree ♪

♪ Then go, I don't mind ♪

♪ I don't mind for me ♪

♪ But that was all he done there ♪

[singing indistinctly]

♪ I'm sorry sir ♪

[singing indistinctly]

We conned this poor booker to book us

into a big blues club-type place in Bristol.

The crowd weren't having it.

They pelted us with beer glasses.

[crashing and jeering] [cymbal crashes]

So after that night, I just realized I had

to get back to the capital.

And now we're gonna turn over the controls

at the tower here to the great originator of all rap and ting,

Mr. U-Roy, let it roll.

["Natty Rebel" by U-Roy]

- ♪ 'Stead of fussin' and fightin' ♪

♪ Why not get together and live ♪

♪ With one love and one I'nity, you know ♪

- By this time, they had this really huge squat scene

rolling in West Nine.

In 1974, there were rows and rows of buildings

all boarded up by the council and just left to rot.

There were hordes of people in London who couldn't afford

to pay rent.

There was an estate agent's

called The Ruff, Tuff, Cream Puff Agency

which put out a newsletter of available houses.

- 18 Portland Road, West Eleven,

access through the back door.

Has 11 large rooms, but needs enormous attention.

There's a basement flat corried up

at number 10 Paris Square, West Eleven.

And at 56 Pembridge Villas, West Eleven,

is totally corried up except for the basement window

and you need to saw through under the cover

of convenient bushes.

- The only thing to do was to kick in

these abandoned buildings and then live in them.

[U-Roy singing indistinctly]

- Joe decide to open up a squat and went down there

with crowbars and opened up 101 Walterton Road.

[Baaba Maal singing in Pulaar] [bright guitar music]

- It wasn't just squatting because we were down and out.

It was a political act that you can't leave buildings empty

when there are people homeless.

[Joe] Like bathing in the cool water of a fragrant ocean,

and that was the sound of Ernest Ranglin

and the voice of Baaba Maal of Senegal.

I gathered the best people, i.e., people who were completely

out of their minds into one squat

and we formed a rock 'n roll band,

The 101'ers.

♪ Down the road come a Junco Partner ♪

- And so a house band got going

and there was about six, seven of us in it.

[Joe singing indistinctly]

- There were some people

running from the regime in Chile.

I had a Chilean drummer called Antonio,

but when he went on holiday, Richard "Snakes" Dudanski,

he took over after Antonio split.

I think he'd heard me banging around.

I had a pair of bongos.

He said, "Look, the drummer's gone.

We got a gig in two weeks."

[Joe] I thought we could mount an attack on stage

and like, actually get paid.

[upbeat rock music] [Joe singing indistinctly]

- They were playing for the scene.

That was their contribution.

Communal entertainment, initially.

- When we get short of enough money for food,

Joe would go out and busk and come back with money

to buy provisions for the whole group.

- And he was, like, half a community.

In fact, Julian was the lead singer.

[Joe] Well, I got him in to sing

'cause I thought I was chronic.

I really did, right, 'cause I thought he was better, right?

And Mickey Foote who was working with me back then,

right, he said, "That other singer you got in,

he just sounds just like you."

I thought, "Well, fuck it."

So I become the singer again.

- You got taken down to the pub for a drink basically,

and then you got told if you'd been fired.

- I remember I had to tell Simon,

Simon the saxophone player.

"We're not having saxophone anymore, Simon."

- We had harsh decisions.

We, you know, we got rid of our mate, Mole, the bass player.

- I remember Joe saying, "Well,

I think we're gonna take Mole for a drink."

- It's the process of forming. You know, that's what happens.

[Joe] I figured out that I'd sacked 48 people once.

- And then my sister came in with her Bolivian boyfriend

and he said the day he saw her,

"I want to make this girl mine," and so he did.

- He took me on a date and he said,

"You see that pub over there?

The Windsor Castle."

He said, "One day we're gonna play there."

- We had the nerve to rent a room

above a pub and charge people 10p to get in.

That's how we learned to play, by doing it for ourselves

which is like a punk ethos.

I mean, you've gotta be able to go out there

and do it for yourself

because no one's gonna give it to you.

["Shake Your Hips" by the 101'ers]

[Joe] ♪ Wanna tell you 'bout a dance that is goin' around ♪

♪ They're doin' it in New York City ♪

♪ They're doin' it in South London ♪

♪ Don't you lose it, baby ♪

- It soon became like a real big mashup

[Joe] ♪ Don't use it, baby ♪

Gypsies would come and rip everybody off.

- Handbags would be flying out

of the window and somebody would be catching them

at the bottom.

[Joe] ♪ New York town ♪

- We were onstage playing

and the police raided the place.

And they didn't know who to search with all these,

like, filthy squatters and gypsies and God-knows-what

in this room.

Mayhem broke loose.

We carried on playing to this crazy thing going on.

[music continues] [crowd clamoring]

[music ends] [crowd cheering]

Yeah, that was fun.

- He was never bothered about money, never.

Money didn't mean anything to him, but he did like fame.

- He decided to change his name to Joe Strummer

and, of course, it was really difficult for everyone

because we were all saying, "Hey, Woody!"

And he'd just blank you.

He wouldn't respond.

He'd just say, "I'm not called Woody,"

you know, "My name's Joe."

- Well, it was either that or Johnny Caramello.

You know, I think Joe Strummer sort of won,

just by a little nose.

[Joe] I still can only play all six strings or none,

and not all the fiddly bits,

which is why I called myself "Joe Strummer."

- Joe was a great inventor of names.

He called me "Snakehips Dudanski."

I got no idea where he got it from.

- He called me "Dick the Shit"

because my Christian name's Richard

and "Richard the Third,"

it was "Richard the Turd," then it was "Dick the Shit."

[upbeat rock music]

[Joe] We realized that we had to start writing

our own material so I wrote "Keys to Your Heart"

and I was just overjoyed that it came out good.

- Well, it's a love song, isn't it?

For Paloma.

["Keys to Your Heart" by The 101'ers]

[Joe] ♪ They say that love can move a mountain ♪

♪ Love's gonna bring down trees ♪

♪ It's on this that I'm counting ♪

♪ 'Cause for your heart ♪

♪ I found keys, keys, oh, the keys to ♪

♪ Your heart, heart ♪

♪ That I got around ♪

♪ My chain, chain ♪

♪ When the doors come apart, part ♪

♪ Now we'll never be the same, same ♪

♪ Ah ♪

[music continues]

♪ I ♪

♪ I changed the lock on your heart and I got the key ♪

♪ You call that a crime ♪

- We'd seen Joe play over

at the Akam Hall and the Windsor Castle

and quite a few other places.

[Joe] ♪ Big, blue policeman, little black book ♪

♪ Wrote it down but he didn't look ♪

- Even members of the Sex Pistols ended up there.

They were watching our stuff while I was unaware

of them because it was the only jumping spot

in West London on a Thursday.

[Joe] ♪ I didn't look, baby ♪

♪ I didn't look, baby ♪

- I liked the band, but Joe was something special.

Best frontman out there.

- The 101'ers were about to be the top band in London.

- They were at a point that they were really making it.

Like, with the Roundhouse,

but that was not really enough for him

and he just felt he needed a breakthrough.

- Get off!

[explosion booming]

- The Pistols had to come in and blow everything away.

They were the stun grenade into the room

before the door could go.

They came out of nowhere and they came

to support us one night at the Nashville Rooms.

[Johnny Rotten singing indistinctly]

[fast-paced rock music]

- It was electrifying.

[singing indistinctly]

- It was that different.

They were like a million years ahead.

- I think Joe was the only one that saw anything in it.

- They destroyed everything that was going on in town.

It was completely over the second they came out on stage.

- I imagine he would have saw us play and then figured,

you know, the rockabilly thing weren't working.

This was the way to go.

- And right at that time,

Bernie Rhodes walks into the gig.

- We went to see him at the Golden Lion,

all of us.

Keith went backstage and went,

"Can we talk to you?" [laughs]

[Joe] I think it was good luck to meet Bernie,

the best bit of luck I ever had.

And he drove me down to Shepherd's Bush.

There, in the rear bedroom, was Mick Jones,

Paul Simonon, Keith Levene.

And me and Bernie walked in and he introduced me

all around and then we sat on whatever bits

of furniture we could find and we kind of stared

at each other.

And he said, "I think you should form a group."

And I thought about it.

I said, "Can you give me 24 hours?"

And he said, "Sure."

- Sid and Keith Levene came to the squat.

There was meetings in rooms and people mumbling

and groaning.

- It was very obvious that

it was two different kinds of people, really.

- He said, "Oh, I just love the way you play guitar."

And I said, "Why don't you be in the band, then?"

And then he went, "I will, I'll do it! I'll do it!"

- That was it. He came out and he said, "Right, that's it.

The 101'ers is finished."

[building crashing]

- It was a bombshell to the rest of the band.

- I mean, I knew.

It was in the air, you know.

The 101'ers were, there was a problem with the bass player.

We'd just got rid of the guitar player.

So, I knew something was happening.

Anyway, the following day, I bumped into Bernie Rhodes

who was there.

- Let me say something really quickly.

- Yeah. - I formed the Sex Pistols,

not Malcolm.

You know that, don't you? - Yeah.

- I found John. - Yeah.

- Auditioned him. - Yeah.

- Put him in the group.

You know, I don't take the credit now, I take it later.

- And it was very clear that he was the kind of guy that...

that called the shots.

- I'm the philosophy of it. I'm the great engine of it.

I am punk.

- Yeah. - Without me, there's nothing.

- I said, "Joe, you know, right, The 101'ers is finished

but I'm not going with this guy."

And he said, "It's not possible, Snakes.

We gotta do it with this guy." And that was it.

[loud crashing]

[Joe] You're either for punk or against it,

and there's still people today that don't talk to me down

in West London for going over to the other side.

[ball crashing]

- To go on to this new bit of his life, he...

he had to stop associating with us,

and that was quite hurtful.

- It was a bit like walking out on a whole lot of beliefs.

The house didn't really last long after that.

[Joe] The day that I joined The Clash

was very much back to square one, Year Zero.

- It was a bold move for me to jump into something different,

two guys in a back room with a squat in Shepherd's Bush.

But I knew, you could tell by looking at them.

You didn't even have to speak to them.

Mick and Paul were different.

I think we started to rehearse that afternoon.

[upbeat rock music]

[Joe] Bernie hired a warehouse off British Rail in Camden town.

Sometimes, Bernie would come down and throw us out

at night and we'd break back in when he'd gone.

We were that keen.

- It was very much being like in a 24-hour gang, you know?

We only had each other.

- I knew I wasn't fitting in and I wanted to be in the band

and it really got me down 'cause I realized,

"Shit, this isn't my band."

[fast-paced rock music]

I left the band.

And then it just worked.

It just made it that it was gonna work.

- Paul was just admitting that he couldn't play

and he admitted to me

that he had no idea what this instrument was, right?

And for a minute I thought, oh, God, a whole room of people

with no idea how to play anything.

- Uhh!

Is Millie supposed to be the producer of this?

- Yeah, he is.

- Get on with it. Cut it in. - You've got to be joking.

- Oi, shut your mouth and cut it in.

[guitar tuning]

Don't tell me to shut my mouth.

- Oi, Mick, come on, do this.

- They'd get really frustrated because I had

to quickly rush over and do all this, "Give us an 'E.'"

[mimics guitar tuning]

[guitar strums]

- He just picked it up.

He could play as good as me in about three weeks.

- One, two, three, four!

[electric guitar music]

- The one who can really play in The Clash

is Mick Jones, more than I'll ever be able to.

["What's My Name" by The Clash]

- ♪ What the hell is wrong with you ♪

[Joe singing indistinctly] - ♪ Ohh ♪

- What happened to your teeth?

[Joe] My teeth? - Yeah.

[Joe] I've never brushed them.

I'm a walking advocate for brushing teeth.

♪ What's my name ♪

- ♪ Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey ♪

[Joe] ♪ What's my name ♪

- ♪ Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey ♪

- That was what was good about punk:

if you were ugly, you were in.

[Joe shouting]

- Sounds like a load of shit.

- Sounds great to me.

- At first, we will have to work more and eat less.

- So you know in the next couple of months,

this country's gonna have it really hard the next couple

of years, maybe.

We ain't started yet, right?

But I do believe that if you do it in your own way

and you have two years of hardship,

and I really mean hardship,

you might get out of it all right.

- I'd been writing with The 101'ers

but with no focus or idea what to write about

and Bernie Rhodes said, "Write about what affects you."

- The Clash, for me, right, is a chance

to get some great words going.

And for Mick, he's really into the music.

Like, he can hear arrangements.

You know, he knows what the bass should do,

he knows what the drums should do,

he knows what the guitar should do.

He can hear it in his head, right?

I can't hear that stuff.

All you have to do is look out there to write,

write a song, really.

You know, I mean, it's all out there, isn't it?

What I'd see is a set of words and a tune was sort of there

for me anyway, you know?

I could hear the tune coming out of it.

- There's a roar of the city.

It does sound like our music.

[Joe] ♪ London's burning ♪

["London's Burning" by The Clash]

♪ London's burning ♪

♪ London's burning with boredom now ♪

♪ London's burning, dial 9-9-9-9-9 ♪

♪ London's burning with boredom now ♪

♪ London's burning, dial 9-9-9-9-9 ♪

♪ All across the town and all across the night ♪

♪ Everybody's driving with full headlight ♪

♪ You're Black or white, you turn it on ♪

♪ You face a new religion ♪

♪ Everybody's sitting 'round watching television ♪

♪ London's burning with boredom now ♪

♪ London's burning, dial 9-9-9-9-9 ♪

♪ Come on, come on ♪

♪ Yeah, we'll call the shots ♪

♪ London's burning ♪

♪ Let's call the shots ♪

♪ London's burning ♪

- I really believe that you got to live something

to sing about it in a convincing way.

Whenever you hear a great song, someone's torn

that piece out of their life.

- You couldn't go the full way with Joe.

There was something hidden that was a very deep thing.

- I run up to him and I jump on him.

He's with his cool friends and they're all punked up

and there's this long-haired hippie girl jumping on him.

And so he was kind of different, like, a little awkward

and we never were like that.

We were always very close.

He was just very different, like, troubled and,

like, serious, you know.

He'd say, "These hippies are old farts smoking pot

and all that," and so I changed.

[punk music]

He had encouraged me to be in The Slits.

He was showing me how to play the drums.

He was supportive,

but very soon it became not a good thing between us.

[music continues]

- We were almost Stalinist

in a way that you had to shed all your friends

or everything that you'd known or every way

that you'd played before.

- So that all might see and agree:

The laws are inscribed in a prominent place

to be remembered and obeyed forever.

- I mean, do you have a moralistic view

of anything you do?

- Hmm, yeah, I wouldn't steal money off of a friend.

But I'd steal his girlfriend.

I think too much or not enough.

I mean, I think all the time.

I think thinking is, like, real fun, you know?

I get a lot of fun out of thinking.

I mean, I can't see any other point to getting up

in the morning, doing everything and going

to bed and getting up again.

Just, just thinking it makes it, a point to it, you know?

["I'm So Bored With the USA" by The Clash]

[all shouting]

- ♪ Yankee detectives are always on the TV ♪

♪ 'Cause there's a murder in America about every 10 seconds ♪

♪ But don't you think I care ♪

♪ About your poncy baseball shirt ♪

♪ I'd rather wear nothing than look like ♪

♪ I'm ready to bat ♪

♪ I'm so bored with the USA ♪

♪ I'm so bored with the USA ♪

♪ What do I do ♪

♪ Do ♪

♪ What do I do ♪

- And then The Clash came along

and I went to see them.

- Happy New Fucking Year.

- "Hi, Joe, it's Dick.

It's Dick!"

And this shutter, you know, came down.

It would have been nice if Joe Strummer had said,

"Hi, Dick, how are you?" But he didn't.

[audience shouting]

- It was almost impossible for him to get out of character

and go back.

The next chapter had started.

- The only way you can really change anything is

if you don't repeat your mistakes

or other people's mistakes, right?

So I can look back at Jagger and all that lot, right,

and I can really pick their mistakes out quite clearly

and I'm determined not to repeat those mistakes.

["Best Dressed Chicken in Town" by Dr. Alimantado]

- ♪ Yeah ♪

♪ The best, the best, the best ♪

♪ The best dressed chicken in town ♪

♪ The best dressed chicken in the town ♪

- I value my existence by what I achieve,

you know, by what I create.

That's it.

Creation is everything, you know.

- Yeah.

- Anything special? - No, just blanket coverage.

I don't know what I'm after.

If I knew what I was after, I'd probably wouldn't bother

to go after it.

- Give it a good hammering, Joe!

[singer vocalizing]

[Joe] And this is Joe Strummer'sLondon Calling

on the World Service coming out of one

of these basements we have here in London,

throbbing in the summer heat.

That was "Best Dressed Chicken in the Town"

by Doctor Alimantado.

Well worth checking out him.

- See, kids like me didn't really read newspapers.

He kind of informed us about events that were going on

in the world.

It made us politically aware, I guess.

- One of the things I'd like us to do tonight is

to try to stop loads of kids joining up

to the national front because of ignorance.

["1977" by The Clash]

♪ It's 1977 ♪

♪ There's knives in West Eleven ♪

♪ It ain't so lucky to be rich ♪

♪ Sten guns in Knightsbridge ♪

♪ Danger, stranger ♪

♪ You better paint your face ♪

♪ No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones ♪

♪ It's 1977 ♪

♪ You're on the never-never ♪

♪ You think it can't go on forever ♪

♪ But the papers say, "It's better" ♪

♪ I don't care ♪

♪ I'm not all there ♪

♪ No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones ♪

♪ It's 1977 ♪

♪ In 1978 ♪

- ♪ Hate, hate ♪ - [Joe speaks indistinctly]

♪ In 1979 ♪

- ♪ Hate, hate, hate ♪

- ♪ In 1980 ♪

- ♪ Hate, hate, hate, hate ♪ - ♪ In 1981 ♪

- ♪ Hate, hate, hate, hate ♪

- ♪ In 1982 ♪

- ♪ Hate, hate, hate ♪

- ♪ In 1983 ♪

[chanting continues]

- ♪ In 1984 ♪

- Big Brother really is here.

It's worse now than ever, even your oyster card.

They can tell where you were.

They can tell where you're going.

I haven't got one.

- There was a moment where the world stopped.

I mean, everything just stopped.

1976, 1977.

Suddenly, ideas became more important than guitar solos and

a certain integrity became more important

than driving a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool.

Rock stars were like Greek gods.

You were lucky to be in the room with them.

- Oh, look, that's me!

That's me there!

- All that came to an end after The Clash.

[gun firing]

There was a feeling that if The Clash could do it,

you could do it.

[feedback whines]

- I just want to preserve, right, my personal freedom.

I just want the right to choose, right?

I'm, it ain't no use me having the right to choose, right,

and not everybody else to have it, right?

Everyone's gotta have it.

- I just thought, I joined a band to go to parties

and have fun, not to argue about politics night and day.

It would feel like me versus everyone else.

That's why I left

because it's such a grueling onslaught the whole time.

- Mick found Topper and Topper came down

and it just smoked.

["Garageland" by The Clash]

- It wasn't the sort of music I was into.

You know, when punk first started,

it was against all the music that I was into.

And I thought, well, I'll join, make my name

and then move on to play proper music.

Paul said, "We gotta cut your hair off," then Joe said,

"We gotta dye it."

I went home to me wife, right.

I left her in the morning with long hair and flares

and I went home with short and spiky blond hair and zits.

And I called him Woody for some reason.

But I know the reason, okay?

Joe had little pointed ears at the top

and I thought he looked like Woody Woodpecker.

Now, I didn't know that he'd been called Woody in,

before and I said, "Oi, Woody!"

And he went, "Don't ever fucking call me that."

And I thought, God, he's sensitive.

["Garageland" by The Clash] - Fuck off!

♪ I don't want to hear about what the rich are doing ♪

♪ I don't want to go to where, where the rich are going ♪

- It's not a bad thing to have The Clash

be your first ever rock show.

- ♪ You look very punk ♪

- 17 years old, hanging out with my mates.

We got into Trinity College Dublin.

At the back of the stage, they had a picture

from the first album which was a load of bobbies

running down the street with truncheons,

which was what was going on in London with the race riots.

Well, in Ireland, it looked like Belfast,

so it was a very, very, very tense moment

as this backdrop was opened up.

[crowd cheering]

- We'd like to roll the tanks, cue the Air Force,

roll the Army and the Navy.

- And there was...

a real sense of jeopardy.

There was a violence in the air.

I was terrified, I was excited

and rock 'n' roll was not entertainment in that moment.

It was not a matter of life or death,

something much more serious.

- One, two, three, four.

["Blitzkrieg Bop" by Ramones]

[overlapping singing]

- So me and my mates stayed up trying to figure out

how we could all be in bands that meant

as much as The Clash.

- ♪ Let's go ♪

♪ Hey, ho ♪

♪ Let's go ♪

♪ Hey, ho, let's go ♪

♪ They're forming in a straight line ♪

♪ They're going through a tight wind ♪

♪ The kids are losing their minds ♪

♪ Blitzkrieg bop ♪

- Being in the right time at the right place

with the right shit, it's just explosive.

It was like pirates slashing their way through.

- We just got completely out of control.

- ♪ Blitzkrieg bop ♪

- We had crews of people stealing cars,

hopping rides, just following this thing.

♪ They're piling in the backseats ♪

♪ They're generating steam heat ♪

♪ Pulsating to the backbeat ♪

♪ Blitzkrieg bop ♪

- I remember once a local TV station came

to shoot us in the dressing room before the show.

We always used to let people in because, hey,

the audience were our friends, you know what I mean?

And behind me, it was like one of these jokes

where 19 people get out of a baby car.

Someone had opened the dressing room window

and people were climbing in from the alley

and there was like, I'm not joking, 50 people,[laughs]

climbing through this window like a Charlie Chaplin movie.

- ♪ Hey, ho, let's go ♪

♪ Hey, ho, let's go ♪

♪ Hey, ho, let's go ♪

[all screaming and cheering]

[Joe] All right, "Blitzkrieg Bop"

by the godfathers of punk rock.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Ramones.

- If the kids didn't have money to get home,

he'd give 'em money to get home.

If they didn't have money for drinks at the pub,

he'd give 'em money for drinks.

- The police would wait

till we were driving across the mountains.

After a few motels, we'd started

to borrow the pillows 'cause it made it easier sitting

in a coach seat overnight, if you had a pillow.

So when they couldn't find any drugs,

the police searched the bus and they came up

with something like 30 pillows.

And then they found hundreds of hotel room keys.

- And they said, "Right, that's theft,"

and then they threatened to charge every one

of us individually with one each

and keep us there all night.

I said, "Joe," I said, "I'll do the pillows,

you take the rap for the keys."

And we were locked in the same cell for, like, three nights.

- You're going to room 101.

- We really got close and we just talked honestly

and I got to speak to the real Joe.

Now, every time I've spoken to him before,

there were people watching or people listening,

then he wouldn't drop the act.

We both said we were scared because at the time,

they were making a big thing about the punk thing

and we thought, you know, we might end up

in more trouble than we were really in.

You know, we just got honest with each other.

He still had this thing about, he was a punk rocker

but he'd been to a public school.

That always fucked him up right from the beginning,

you know?

- I don't care what he's from, he ain't a phony,

you know what I mean?

And he weren't acting of a role.

You know, he believed what he was doing.

- I think Gaby started going out with Joe

and I just remember this guy walking around the flat,

our council flat, with his shoulders up here

in his black leather jacket, mumbling.

He never said much.

They moved to Ladbroke Grove.

I'd go there and then I got to know Joe

and he was a great host.

He was a brilliant host, making sure everybody had something

to drink and chairs to sit on.

- Coming from a family of diplomats, he'd been taught,

you know, to bring out the cocktails for other guests

when he was staying with his parents.

- Hey, Mick. - Yeah?

- You want some LSD? - Yeah.

- Better have three. - Yeah.

- If you want to really get out there.

- I definitely believe, because of punk,

that you can have whatever you want, you know.

You can say, "Fuck off, this is what I think."

I definitely think that's what formulated me as an artist.

- I was a Clash fan.

Seen them in '78.

They came and played at the Apollo and there was a riot.

The bouncers, they were big Glasgow thugs

who really hated the punks.

The Clash had to keep stopping the gig.

- I couldn't sing if I felt that people

were being brutally mistreated.

- They're fucking dancing!

- All right, listen. - They're dancing, not fighting!

- I really loved them because they stood up to the bouncers.

- The audience are your friends

and you know better than them.

We were one with the audience.

You should never feel above anyone.

["White Riot] by The Clash]

- ♪ To go to jail ♪

♪ White riot, I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot, a riot of my own ♪

♪ White riot, I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot, a riot of my own ♪

♪ White riot, I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot, a riot of my own ♪

[mic whines with feedback]

- When punk first started,

it didn't seem particularly Black friendly.

["Police and Thieves" by The Clash]

And so when The Clash's first album came out

and they got "Police and Thieves" on there

and they'd got singing from the carnival,

it sort of made punk accessible to me.

- ♪ Police and thieves in the street ♪

- Felt like it was a way of saying

"Yeah, you know, come in, this is for you as well."

- White music has always taken from Black music.

The difference was with people like The Clash

is that Strummer and Jones were inspired by

people that were living next door.

So the effect was a lot more direct.

♪ White youth, Black youth ♪

♪ Better find another solution ♪

And they were saying "You can't hear the words."

But the words are really great, you know?

Really great and you can't hear them.

Don't you think that's ironic?

- Joe had a way with words.

His sense of narrative and drama.

Joe would have more ideas in a rhyming couplet

than some people have on their whole fucking album.

- I really connected with Joe's lyrics,

anti-establishment, anti-military, anti-work,

especially the anti-work bit, you know?

Because I was working in a factory then.

I thought, am I gonna have to do this

for the rest of my life?

[music continues]

- ♪ Punk rockers in the UK ♪

♪ They won't notice ♪

- This is why we came up with so much idealism

because we feel we was gonna need that much

to combat a situation like being rich and famous.

- All I had was those blokes.

I had to do something with them, right?

I did as much as I could.

- Now, I used to consider Bernie as a pain in the ass.

He always just seemed to be stirring it up.

He always wanted trouble.

- Joe, I didn't realize was such a coward, right?

Mick, I didn't realize was such an egomaniac.

Paul, I didn't realize was such a pussy-whipped guy

and the other one, I couldn't stand.

- He called me, what was it?

- Provincial tosser.

- 'Cause I came from Dover.

- Bernie got sacked.

All of a sudden we were on our own,

as if like Daddy had gone away

and I think this is where we proved ourselves.

["London Calling" by The Clash]

- We stayed in some shit hole in Pimlico for five months.

We were in trouble.

We'd lost our management.

We just sat there every day and wrote and wrote

and we got that thing down so good, we ran into a studio

and we knocked the whole thing off in, like,

three weeks and two days.

- ♪ London calling to the faraway towns ♪

♪ Now war is declared and battle come down ♪

♪ London calling to the underworld ♪

♪ Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls ♪

♪ London calling ♪

♪ Now don't lecture us ♪

♪ Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust ♪

♪ London calling, see, we ain't got no swing ♪

♪ Except for the reign of that truncheon thing ♪

♪ The Ice Age is coming, the sun's zooming in ♪

♪ Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin ♪

♪ Engines stop running ♪

♪ But I have no fear 'cause London is drowning and I ♪

♪ Live by the river ♪

- At the time, I was living right by the Thames.

I was following a lot of the doom prophecies.

You know, the scientists having a big argument

about who's right and who's wrong.

One lot was saying, "The Ice Age is coming"

and then another lot was saying,

"We're gonna collide with the sun,"

making you feel like, I'm just an ant.

Is it worth living?

But then they were going on,

"Well, you better watch out down there on the Thames.

You're due for a flood on the spring tide

and you're all gonna drown."

I was cheering myself up by putting

all these ridiculous things into one basket.

- Played it to Mick and he said he loved the song.

He tapped the lyric sheet with his finger.

He told me to write the message

that we were gonna call out around the world.

- ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪

♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪

- We needed to break out and reach America.

- ♪ Now get this ♪

♪ London calling, yes, I was there too ♪

♪ And you know what they said, well, some of it was true ♪

♪ London calling at the top of the dial ♪

♪ And after all this, won't you give me a smile ♪

♪ London calling ♪

♪ I never felt so much alive, alive, alive ♪

- It says "The Sex Pistols landed here, in 1869."

We're not particularly talented, we try hard.

- What is it in terms of the energy?

I mean, you put on more energy.

[Joe] We give it all we got, that's all.

It's as simple as that.

Everybody's used to paying eight dollars

and getting half measures and, like, going home satisfied.

Well, in England, they gave up being satisfied

three years ago.

You gotta give it all you got or forget it.

[strumming bluesy song]

- He knew the, the culture of America,

he knew the literature, he knew the music of it

backwards and forwards.

And so we hit it off immediately.

[guitar music continues]

- Here was this unlikely meeting of guys

that grew up thousands of miles apart

but the same things moved us.

♪ Robbing - people with a six gun ♪

♪ I fought the law and the, the law won ♪

♪ I fought the law ♪

- He was passionate, he sang every word like he meant it.

He sang about things that were deep down in his soul.

He sang about injustices and he sang about everything

as if it was urgent.

- ♪ Guess my race is run ♪

- I don't know if his politics could be separate

from his art.

They're kind of a spiritual politics.

He didn't ask you to just question authority,

he asked you to really explore the very nature of authority.

What does it mean to be free?

- ♪ I fought the law and the law won ♪

♪ I fought the law and the law won ♪

- ♪ Yeah, I fought the law and the, the law won ♪

♪ I fought the law and the, the law won ♪

♪ I fought the law and the, the law won ♪

♪ I fought the law but ♪

[crowd cheering]

- I suppose the initial effect The Clash

had on me was... was the proper effect.

You know, you were experiencing a sincerity,

not only in the lyrics but in the music as well.

You know, there was a, there was a truth in the attack.

- They sort of pretended that they hated America,

but Joe loved cowboy stuff and big cars

and big pizzas and when you went to the bar,

a single was a double.

[glass breaks] [men shout]

- "Honey, I forgot to duck."

- So there was a lot of things that they liked about America.

- I came out of the Vietnam war

and I was very much into people's liberation struggles.

In '76, they got very involved with the Sandinistas.

- It was a sort of teenage revolution

where there were people actually, for once, took control

of their own country for the first time.

- I was given, as a gift,

these streetfighting scarves that they used in Esteli,

Esteli's a small town in Nicaragua,

so that the Somoza troops wouldn't know who they were.

Then I gave these to Joe and Nick.

- We decided to call the recordSandinista

to redress the lack of information

that was in the papers.

- I never knew who the Sandinistas were

or where Nicaragua was.

The lyrics of Joe Strummer were like an atlas:

They opened up the world to me and to other people

who came from a kind of blank suburbia.

- ♪ It's up to you not to heed the call up ♪

♪ I don't want to die ♪

♪ It's up to you not to heed the call up ♪

♪ I don't want to kill ♪

- As soon as the people got hold of the idea that,

"All right, it's punk.

We get it.[growls]

We got it!"

And then when we started to play other things,

you get a lot of abuse, especially in Britain.

- My favorite Clash record isSandinista,

and the whole concept of that record,

of people standing up for their brothers and sisters

and not taking any shit.

There's, like, the same ethos of punk rock,

but they couldn't have been my favorite band

of all time if every record hadn't grown

and hadn't gotten better and hadn't changed.

And it's the biggest inspiration for me with our band,

with the Chili Peppers, I mean, 'cause there's,

like, there's no point in carrying on

if you don't have something new to say.

- ♪ Over Kiev and down to the sea ♪

- Sandinista, the triple for the price of one.

- We wanted it released for a low price

because we felt that records were generally overpriced.

- And that's when the record company freaked.

They were quite happy to bury that one, I think.

- You learned a lot about life,

getting shafted royally.

- And anyway, afterSandinista,

I realized that I wanted Bernie back.

I still think Bernie's a creative individual

and I was missing his inputs.

- It was a question of either Joe was gonna leave

or Bernie came back.

So Bernie came back.

- With a vengeance.

- The Clash, it was a rusty old wreck

and I had to grab it and do it up and put my engine in it,

my updated engine in it.

- Would you like to interview our manager while he's here?

Catch him while he's-- - Bernie.

- Bernie. - Bernie.

- Leave him, leave him, shh.

- So that's Bernie Rhodes.

- Sorry about that. Come back.

- He invented punk, it's obviously too much for him.

- The Clash became like a family.

It was like warring brothers.

I think the others kind of looked up to Joe.

Joe was like the big brother.

He was a bit older, I think that made a difference,

and he was probably the most forceful.

- Then we found our greatest success

in commercial terms.

- The Clash invade America, nextOff the Record.

[trumpet music]

- People still hate us in England for making it

in America.

Somebody had to break out and prove

that this thing was a global thing.

It wasn't just a neighborhood thing.

[crowd cheering]

- Only half the people could get in.

They started rioting in Times Square.

It was right across the states,

the first time since Frank Sinatra

that they had to close off Times Square.

- It's a madhouse in there.

It's crazy in there!

- The bond's manager, Joel Hallard,

denied his club had done anything wrong.

- [stammering] I cannot say that we overbooked.

- All over New York,

you could hear our stuff coming out.

There was a Black mix of "Mag Seven"...

["Magnificent Seven" by The Clash]

...that was coming out of every ghetto blaster

in the city every hour.

That summer, that moment, we had New York.

- ♪ You lot ♪ - ♪ What ♪

♪ Don't stop, give it all you got ♪

- It was a romance that The Clash had with New York

at that period in time.

I remember bumping into a guy called Jack Checker.

He was a cab driver and he told me

that they weren't like other rock stars

who came to New York.

Their limousine was Jack Checker's cab.

- Oh, he just wanted to see the city, wanted to see Harlem,

he wanted to see Brooklyn.

He just wanted to see the people and inter-react

with the people.

- Does this man deserve to be in jail?

[all chanting and singing]

- ♪ You lot ♪ - ♪ What ♪

- I mean, they, they took New York and all the artists

wanted to see them and wanted to check them out.

- The Clash was a revelation.

It took us back to the first, the first excitement

of hearing rock 'n' roll for the first time.

- And all that sound about Raging Bull.

- Interestingly enough, inRaging Bull,

the music that is there is music from the '40s

and '50s and opera,

but the place I went for the source for creativity

came from The Clash, really.

[crowd cheers] [camera shutters snap]

- I did see The Clash at Bond's

and Grandmaster Flash opened for them

and they were practically booed off the stage.

- It was crazy, like, 3,000 people.

Like, "Everybody say, 'Ho!'"

And it was like, "Fuck you!" Say, "Yeah!"

"Get the fuck out of here!"

- When The Clash came out,

Joe reprimanded the whole place, you know, and said,

"You know, you gotta give him a chance.

You know, you gotta fucking, you gotta listen,"

you know, like, "Don't do that!"

You know, and the whole crowd was, like, "Oh, shit!

Strummer just, like, did a number on us."

[camera shutters snap]

- Even when I'm vomiting on a carpet in an airport,

he was standing up for me, having a go

at the journalists, saying, "He's ill.

Leave him alone."

- Shut up, will you, you stupid cunt!

- Oh, thanks very much--

- Yeah, that's what you deserve with that sort of crap.

What do you think we are?

Do you think this is 1976 and you're talking

to the Sex Pistols?

Piss off or I'll fucking piss all over you.

If he feels like throwing up,

it's because his stomach hurts.

He don't need your jokes to fucking contend with.

If you haven't got something serious to say, piss off!

- But it is serious.

- Well, you tell me about life and death,

never mind who pukes on stinking carpets.

- ♪ The dance is going all night long ♪

- There were parts of his character

that I didn't like.

I'd have my girlfriend on the road with me.

Had a big argument with her somewhere and said,

"Right, well, you're not sleeping in my room."

I woke up the next morning, she had spent the night

with Joe, you know, and that kind of really hurt.

I felt really betrayed, and he did it with me,

did it with other people as well, you know?

We'd lost that unity.

I was already starting to disappear up my own ass.

Joe was having doubts.

Think he was already becoming embarrassed

by the fact we were so successful

and Mick wouldn't travel on the bus unless he had a spliff.

- Everybody's got their weaknesses, you know? [laughs]

- ♪ I'm-a having a nervous breakdown ♪

- We got so fed up with each other.

We'd been living in each other's pockets

for a year, full year.

We never had a holiday.

Groups now have a holiday.

They go away, they get their heads together.

We never had any of that.

We just continually worked.

- And Mick thought if he didn't want

to play "White Riot," none of us could.

- ♪ Nervous breakdown ♪

- I made a comment, which was probably out of order

and probably shouldn't have said it, but I did

and that's what sparked the whole thing.

It was directly related to his...

presence on the stage.

[Joe] You know, "You've got no respect for the stage."

I said, "Don't fucking tell me about the stage."

And then he threw his vodka and orange in my face.

- ♪ You're a total wreck ♪

[Joe] So I hit him as hard as I could

in the center of the forehead. [laughs]

- [laughs] It was one fuck of a punch

and it drew blood, you know?

That's what people called "musical differences," ain't it?

Mick didn't like "White Riot."

But Joe looked as shocked as Mick did.

"Fuck me, what have I done here," you know?

- ♪ I'm-a having a nervous breakdown ♪

[Joe] Well, I'm no boxer, but I guess that

was a triple-hook combination with a double uppercut.

Eddie Cochran there, "Nervous Breakdown."

- And then it was over and the next thing,

I was laughing my head off.

[audience laughs]

- Suddenly, you're onSaturday Night Live,

you get onJohnny Carson, you're on talk shows.

We weren't prepared, funnily enough,

after all the years of struggle to actually be there.

Everybody began to get big-headed.

[audience shouting]

- It was just falling apart.

Never at any one time were the four of us

in the studio at the same time.

I'd turn up at Electric Ladyland Studios

and no one was there.

I've got this idea on the piano.

If I put the drums down and I put the piano

over the top and when the others come in,

I can say this is my idea.

So I put the drums down, put the piano down

and still no one was there.

So I picked up the bass

and put the bass down quickly and I did the percussion

and by the time they came, I said,

"Listen, I've got this idea."

And I played it

to them and it was, it was virtually completed.

It was Joe that actually said, "Well, that's brilliant."

- Bernie came in and he said,

"Why does everything have to be a raga?"

And we went, "What?"

He said, "Everything's going on for six minutes.

How are we gonna get this stuff on a record?"

And then he left, and we started to laugh about the raga.

I went back to the Iroquois Hotel on 44th

and it was already daylight again.

I had a typewriter in the room

and I went over to the typewriter and I typed,

"Now the king told the boogie men,

'You have to let that raga drop.'"

I was tired out of my mind and that paper sticking

out of the typewriter was irresistible.

I just sat down and I did the whole lyric

to "Rock the Casbah."

There's no tenderness or humanity in fanaticism.

That's what I was trying to say in "Rock the Casbah."

- Mick and Joe's relationship

had become really difficult, you know.

We used to drive around there and he used

to post lyrics through the letterbox.

He didn't want to see him, he didn't want to write with him.

- I got worried at that point that Mick

would lead us into disaster

through his complete idealism and refusal

to compromise in order to operate in the real world.

[funk music playing]

- You know, Mick's an emotional guy who wears his heart

on his sleeve and, quite often, was the fall guy

for things that Joe was actually responsible for.

Mick took a lot of undue flak and that was Joe doing

his Machiavellian maneuvering number so

that he wasn't the bad guy.

- Well, we're not very good at making life

easy for ourselves.

We never have been.

We keep going because, like, we are the real McCoy.

We're not just gonna fold up and in a few weeks,

you wonder what all that was about.

We're gonna be here and continue and get harder

and rougher and tough, dreader than dread, you know?

- It was the eve of the tour.

The tickets in the UK

were not selling that well, so Bernie Rhodes said,

"Look, you've got to disappear."

I said, "Well, Bernie,

if you really think I should disappear, I will.

Where do you want me to disappear to?"

And he said, "Well, I don't know.

Go to Austin, Texas.

You know, that, that fellow there,

Joe Ely, the country singer."

I said, "Okay, Bernie, I'll be seeing you."

I took the boat train to Paris instead

and I thought it would be a good joke

if I never phoned Bernie at all.

He was gonna be thinking he was gonna be acting,

you know, "Oh, where's Joe gone?"

When really, he was going, "Where has he gone?"

And I ran the Paris Marathon, too.

Eventually, they hired a private detective to find me.

- What is he up to and what news is there

of his whereabouts?

Who can answer that, Cosmo?

- We don't know where he is and we can't find him.

If you're listening, Joe, I said this before,

please get in touch. We need to talk to you.

- So in no way is this any kind of publicity stunt?

- None whatsoever, I'm telling you.

- He was just proving "Without me,

this band can't go on,"

and when he came back, it was either me or Topper.

- ♪ Who's got all the blood in your hands ♪

- I can't deny

that I wasn't firing on all cylinders.

[coughs]

When you use drugs, you don't care anymore.

I was self-seeking, I was dishonest,

I was, you know, I didn't really give a fuck about anyone.

You'll have to undo my boots, Micks, I can't undo 'em.

Oh, right, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Joe singing indistinctly] [all laughing]

- I've gotta go sunbathin'.

- See you, then. You go and sunbathe.

Good-bye, Topper.

Down the railway track.

- There wasn't a lot of choice, really.

You can't have a band where the drummer is so out of it,

he can hardly play sometimes and he's always late.

[metal clangs]

I burst into tears, right?

Mick was crying and then Joe kind of softened.

He said, "Listen, it's not the end.

If you pull yourself together,

we'll say you've been sacked for,

you've got nervous exhaustion

and if you get yourself together

by the time we come back, you got the gig."

I tried to stop and about a week

after they started the American tour,

I think Joe got drunk and he said,

"Oh, we had to get rid of Topper

because he was a heroin addict."

And overnight, you know what I mean, I was Topper

from The Clash, resting through nervous exhaustion

to being sacked for being a junkie.

And that's when I started injecting.

- While I was playing hooky, everybody had a row

and Topper just decided that,

he obviously didn't think that I was ever coming back.

And he decided to cut out.

We're playing with a guy called Terry Chimes

who played on our first album,

and maybe we'll stick with him.

- I was living in a squat in Fulham with no windows,

sleeping with the dog under the carpet.

I'm seeing my song, a video

with some other bloke playing in it.

- ♪ Sharif don't like it ♪

♪ Rock the Casbah ♪

♪ Rock the Casbah ♪

♪ Sharif don't like it ♪

♪ Thinks it's not kosher ♪

- I don't think we played a good gig

after Topper was fired.

- "Rock the Casbah" cracked the top five in America.

- We want to be number one in every country in the world.

Seriously, we do.

- Wake, made me wake up to a lot of things

that are happening in the world.

- Kick-ass band.

- Revolutions, uh, nuclear arms race, individual rights.

- But if that's gonna destroy us,

then we're not so sure we want it.

- What do you want to be doing when you're 40 years old?

Do you want to stay into this and continue to play?

- I want some dignity left. - Yeah.

- They're not punk rock now.

- What are they now?

- They're just what the Stones are.

- Obviously, life's full of sick jokes

and we could have seen that one coming, I guess,

but it's still of a shock when it actually happens.

Now, we turned into a load of pop stars.

I couldn't believe that we turned

into the people we were trying to destroy.

I'd rather go back to busking, be a nobody,

than carry on like that.

- When The Clash got really, really huge,

it must have on some level, you know,

have been frightening, you know.

I mean, it must have scared them on some level, like,

maybe they weren't ready for it then.

Just afraid that that degree of success or money

would taint their purity, their ability to be honest.

- What is the question?

- I'm asking about the kind of responsibility

that you feel that you've got towards the fans

as the public figures that you are.

- I just don't feel strong enough to carry anything

at the moment, let alone anything like that.

- Are you discouraged with rock 'n' roll

in general though?

- It's no worse than any other prostitution business.

[crowd cheers]

- What we got for you tonight is,

we ain't got no baseball, no baseball tonight!

We ain't got no football, they're on strike!

But what we have got here is a little bit

of what's going on in London at the moment,

so will you welcome, all the way from London town,

London W-10, The Clash!

Come on!

[crowd cheering loudly]

- One, two, three, four!

["Career Opportunities" by The Clash]

- ♪ They offered me the office, offered me the shop ♪

♪ They said I'd better take anything they got ♪

Standing there singing the songs while it got bigger

and bigger towards the end, for some reason,

I began to feel worse and worse.

It had something to do with what those songs are saying.

♪ Career opportunities are ones that never knock ♪

♪ Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock ♪

♪ Career opportunities are ones that never knock ♪

All right when we were part of the audience,

part of a movement.

♪ I hate the army, I hate the RAF ♪

Once it became thousands of miles removed from that

I began to freak out.

♪ I hate civil service rules ♪

♪ I won't open letter bombs for you ♪

- Mick was probably comfortable with success.

Joe was uneasy with it, but didn't know

why he was unhappy and it was just a struggle

inside him that couldn't ever be resolved.

You know, he couldn't be happy

because he wanted the band to be successful,

but when it was successful, he wasn't comfortable, so,

there was nowhere to go.

[blowing air]

- The thing that The Clash don't understand,

and the thing that a lot of these bands don't understand,

is that you can't take life so goddamn seriously, honey.

- "You make, you buy, you die."

That's the motto of America.

You get born to buy it.

And if there's anything gonna be in the future,

it's got to be from all parts of everything,

not just one white way down the middle of the road.

I need some hostility here.

You know, grr.

[crowd cheers]

Yeah! I need some feeling of some sort.

Hey, we're all alive at the same time at once, you know.

["Should I Stay or Should I Go?" By The Clash]

♪ Should I stay or should I go now ♪

♪ Should I stay or should I go now ♪

♪ If I go, there will be trouble ♪

♪ And if I stay, it will be double ♪

♪ So you got to let me know ♪

♪ This indecision's buggin' me ♪

Seven years ago, we decided

that we were gonna be bigger than anybody else

but still keep our message.

♪ Exactly whom I'm supposed to be ♪

♪ Digame tengo ser ♪

- ♪ Do you remember which clothes fit me ♪

- ♪ Sabes que ropa me "quedrá"? ♪

We had fallen into every pitfall

that you could possibly fall into as a group starting

from nothing and becoming something,

probably invented a few new ones along the way.

- ♪ Waah! ♪

- The "Success Goes to Your Head" pitfall,

the "ego trip" pitfall, you think you're geniuses,

you become drug addicts, you make overindulgent records,

you overdub the sound of ants biting

through a wooden beam, all these things,

we've gone through each and every damn one of them,

and that's why we come out a depleted force.

- ♪ Should I stay or should I go now ♪

- ♪ Yo me enfrío o lo soplo ♪

- Mick was pretty hard work to work with.

He was in his prima donna phase.

- ♪ If I go, there will be trouble ♪

- Bernie turned round to me and said,

"Look, why don't we sling this guy out?"

And I figured it was a good idea,

'cause I don't like being bummed out.

You know when you go to work in a good mood

and there's some guy always bumming out?

We weren't about to make any music like that, so I thought,

"Fuck it, why not?"

[metal clangs]

- I think it was Joe it was who managed

to muster up the courage to say

that he didn't want to play with me anymore.

And when, when somebody says that to you,

you know that you just, I just packed my guitar up

and just, "Well, hey," you know, "Okay, bye."

And that was it.

I walked.

And Bernie come running out after me with a check

in his hand, you know, like a gold watch or something,

you know, which added insult to injury.

But I took it anyway.

It was right at the time of the carnival. [laughs]

It was awful, you know?

I mean, walking around the carnival,

and you might see someone, and you're, like, trying to,

I did everything.

I grew a beard.

I dyed my hair, you know, blonde, for about two days.

It was a complete, traumatic shock. [laughs]

But then, then that's character-building, you know,

when those things happen to you.

[Joe] I hadn't understood that the manager suddenly wanted

to become an artist.

Bernie conned me to get rid of Mick to lay the way open

for him to step in.

Stupidly, I allowed that to happen.

It's my fault about the end, definitely.

- So he kind of thought, "Yeah, well, maybe Mick

was the problem," like he thought Topper

was the problem, you know?

He didn't maybe at that point think,

"We're all the problem."

- And he was a coward too.

You know, there you go, I'm gonna say it.

I mean, Joe, you know, he was a coward

and didn't like confrontation.

- What pisses me off about The Clash

is that this extraordinary band should still be here.

["[In the] Pouring Rain" by The Clash]

- We had to restructure our group

to get rocking again.

- Wessex!

♪ The ships were gone and the pit fell in now ♪

This is Pete Howard, the, the drummer, and Vince White,

guitar, and up top, Nick Sheppard, guitar.

- Pete Howard and Vince and Nick Sheppard,

they all felt really intimidated,

which I can't blame them,

'cause they were entering this scene

that was already so big.

- How do you feel about the band

at this point in time? - Great!

Can you hear me?

Great!

Everything's bland-o, bland-o, bland-o, you know?

Let's have a revolt from the bottom up.

Drugs are over from this minute now.

Anybody who takes a drug is a hippie,

and hippies can shove off.

Accountants and lawyers are writing the songs.

Attorneys are playing the lead guitar solos.

♪ I can hear the sharpen of the pain ♪

♪ Some lucky stranger in the rain ♪

♪ Hear the sharpen of the pain ♪

Bernie Rhodes wanted to really take over big time,

and he wanted to be the producer,

and I let that happen.

Everything was wrong.

There was no vibe.

It was all Bernard's ego.

Eventually, I snapped.

- Strummer, he was a bloke to do the job.

He was temporary.

He wasn't permanent.

[metal clangs]

[Joe] And that was the end of it.

[metal clangs]

- ♪ Corrina, Corrina ♪

♪ Gal, where you been so long ♪

- They used to ask me, "So you think you schmucks

can change the world," they'd say to us.

They said it so often that you began to believe them,

which is fatal.

Trust thyself.

- ♪ Baby, please come home ♪

- Joe came into Manada in 1984.

He was looking for the Federico Garcia Lorca things.

Quickly the gossip spread in the city that this guy

who is like a hippie, he's so dirty,

he seems to be Joe Strummer.

So I went to the bar and said,

"Hey, are you Joe Strummer?"

He told me in Spanish, "Sí hombre, que quiéres beber?"

"So, what do you want to drink?"

He told me that he felt so frustrated, so alone, so lonely.

He wasn't satisfied with what he was doing,

and while watching the Alhambra, said,

"My brother should be here.

If he knew Granada before,

he probably wouldn't commit suicide."

And suddenly he told me how wonderful it is to be alive.

[Joe] That's Bob Dylan with "Corrina, Corrina"

and his wild scratching posse of hip-hop artists,

recorded live at the Village Vanguard down in old Manhattan.

- Even though Joe was a natural preacher,

and even though he was a really righteous preacher,

the very fact that he became a preacher in some ways

was maybe a betrayal of his own best instinct,

and I always sort of felt like he spent

those kind of wilderness years almost doing penance.

- You know, I had to really disassemble myself

and examine all the pieces and put myself back together.

I really felt completely destroyed by that,

that experience, and also

my father had died while we were on the last tour,

and when I came home, my mother started

to sicken and then she died after the end of that year.

You know, I'd lost my parents, my group,

you want to think about things, you know?

You become a different person.

No more was I an adolescent.

I am a London parent.

I've got kids now.

- Joe had to really exorcise the ghost of The Clash.

It was a journey that he had to take from where he'd been,

what he'd achieved, and his part in it all exploding.

[upbeat rock music]

[Mick screams] How 'bout it?

- It's ironic that, you know, after Mick was cast

out from The Clash, he was really the first one

to break big, with Big Audio Dynamite.

- ♪ Whoo ♪

- And Joe seemed to be spending his time

doing a little bit of acting work and the odd soundtrack.

- [inhales deeply] The desert's beautiful at night.

Beautiful but lonely.

Some people don't believe in God.

That was my first week on the picture, you know,

and you have, gun twirling is, takes about a month.

- I was 18 when I made Straight to Hellwith Joe.

[coyote howls]

I was broke, I was busted,

I was in love with a total loser,

and I had no place to go in London, and I called Joe.

And him and his wife and his children,

took me in like I was, you know, their family.

- Aah!

[Joe] It's great having kids, 'cause that

brings you back down to earth.

You do find yourself shouting, "Turn the bloody music down!"

You know, "Turn that row off!"

I guess it's some sort of learning thing

that we've got to go through.

Us rebels thought[chuckles]

that we could somehow escape, you know?

But it's all in there somewhere, isn't it?

We become our parents slowly but surely.

- I saw him withdraw.

He would just completely cut off and go to his cabin

or his cell or his whatever he created

that was very private, and he'd retreat to that

and he'd do his thing, so I suppose

in the conventional term, he wasn't a 100% brilliant father.

When he was on, he was fantastic, and when he was off,

he was just not available.

- He really loved those girls.

There were a lot of uncertainties with Joe,

but that was one thing that was very clear.

- You were lead singer

of The Clash for many years, and--

[Joe] Many, many. - Now you're hanging around.

Are you looking to form another band?

- No, I'm kind of just doing some, a bit of music for film.

But I'm just, I'm not really looking at that as something

to do long-term.

I'm more, like, trying to get my bearings, you know?

It takes a while to recover from, 10 years

on the road with one group, you know?

I can't seem to snap into it that quickly.

- I got a phone call from him, like, you know,

"Zander, we're up here in San Francisco,

you know, at Russian Hill Studio and I want you

to come up and bring your Spanish guitar,"

you know? [laughs]

It was, like, that was the message.

That was my call to arms to be a part

of thatWalker soundtrack.

[cannon fires]

- I thinkWalker was one of the finest things

that he ever did.

He was really proud of that.

[Joe] No one's ever heard it, but never mind.

I am actually in it as an extra.

I grew a beard and grew my hair really long.

I used to run about wearing rags.

[women shout]

[man laughs]

[man blows raspberry]

- Whenever he tried something new,

people weren't really prepared to listen with new ears,

because what people wanted was Joe Strummer

and they wanted The Clash, and that spoiled a lot

of the work that he did.

[Joe] One day I was standing on Portobello Road

and I thought, "You know, it's time to cut down

on my drinking," and I walked home and the phone rang,

and it was the Pogues going,

"Hey, you've got to come on tour," so I did a US tour

depping for the rhythm guitarist in the Pogues.

Okay, I'm gonna go out and get vibed up, all right, guys?

- I think the Pogues gave Joe a good appetite

to start playing live again himself, you know?

[percussive music]

[Joe] ♪ In Trash City, on Party Avenue ♪

I put together a nice little group

for thisPermanent Record film.

I called it the Latino Rockabilly War.

I wrote the music and then I went out

for three nights looking in all the little clubs

and bars and little underground scenes happening

in Los Angeles and I just picked the musicians

from watching them.

I already knew Zander because he worked onWalker,

but I picked the rest out from jazz clubs

and Bohemian dives.

♪ In Trash City, at Party Avenue ♪

♪ I had a girl from Kalamazoo ♪

♪ In Trash City on a transit line ♪

♪ I put you on hold but you're lookin' fine ♪

- He was looking for a drummer in his band,

and he said, "I've got the guy!"

I said, "Who?"

He goes, "Ramon Bajaranda!"

I said, "Is he good?"

He goes, "I don't know, but his name

is Ramon Bajaranda, man!

He's gotta be good! We gotta hire him!"

Of course, he was not in the band, unfortunately.

[Joe] ♪ Wanna see a movie 'bout a creeper on a house ♪

- He hired my former drummer, Jack Irons,

and he's a pretty phenomenal beat keeper.

[Joe] ♪ In Trash City, on Party Avenue ♪

- I thought that was pretty amazing,

because at the time, Jack was in a mental institution,

and so Joe was like, "That's okay, that's okay,

we'll, you know, we'll get him a ride to

and fro every day, and he'll come into the studio and,

you know, he'll have a job and we'll make this record."

- ♪ And one time more, oh, oh ♪

- I think if your projects

are consistently failing, if they weren't selling records

or people weren't really listening,

I think ultimately that wears you down.

[Joe] I'm still signed to Epic from The Clash days.

- Mm-hmm.

And you have no great desire to do a record for 'em?

[Joe] For Epic? - Yeah.

- Well, you know, I expect sometime in the last four years,

someone would ring me up and heavy me, but nobody ever did.

[interviewer laughs]

- He was quite depressed.

He was not happy.

The whole process of Earthquake Weather,

in retrospect, I see it as he had masterminded

his own death at Epic, you know?

"Just fucking release me once and for all.

I mean, I'm gonna take a $500,000 budget

and make a $500,000 art record."

And they hated it.

- I had the head of the label and a bunch

of the, sort of, brass from Epic assembled

at Baby-O studios in Hollywood to hear the record.

I can't find him anywhere and he's not at the studio,

and I go to the house and I see in the driveway,

there's a yellow piece of legal paper nailed to the door.

"Dear Gerry," colon, "Don't be mad,"

dash, I wish I still had this.

"I've gone to the desert.

Will be back on," colon,

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,

Friday, Saturday,

and then he circled Thursday.

Joe couldn't just write, "I'll be back Thursday."

He probably didn't even know until he saw

all the days of the week written out in his own hand,

"Oh, Thursday."

And he came back Thursday and it was too late,

everyone had gone back to New York, and he sort of...

he made that record

a self-fulfilling prophecy, I think.

He didn't have his confidence back yet.

- The guy fucking intended on shooting himself

in the foot, sabotaging his career and possibly

any kind of relationships that he had

that he didn't want to be in.

He needed to make some serious changes in order to be happy.

- He had to find a place in himself

where he was happy with just being Joe and letting go.

[Joe] Part of the reason

why I shut down shop after "Earthquake Weather,"

'cause I realized I was contracted to these people

on a never-ending contract, so I was kind of fucked,

and I decided to bore them out.

For the next eight years, I figured out how

to get out of the contract.

[gun firing]

- I guess it was kind of a dark period for him

in some ways when we became friends, you know.

He had, a lot of frustrations, about his...

his life in general.

I'm sure other people have brought up, you know,

the Strummer's law of no input, no output,

'cause he was always interested in taking things in.

You know, that period maybe was very important

for him and fertile,

but I think maybe a little painful at times.

- And I cornered him in the kitchen,

and I said to him,

I said, "Joe, do you think we'll ever work together again?"

And it's one of the most brilliant things he ever said

to me, he said, "Don't be stupid, man."

It was like... [laughs]

Jesus, and it was like one of those ambiguous,

like, Joe, Joe-isms.

It was like, "Don't be stupid, man, of course,"

or "Don't be stupid, man, move on, it's over."

- Jim asked me to be in his film,Mystery Train.

He said that Strummer was gonna play one of the parts.

I was as nervous to work with him

than if you told me I was gonna work with Marlon Brando

or De Niro or somebody, you know? [laughs]

That it was Strummer.

I was like, "All right, just, just calm down,

it's okay. [laughs]

You can, you can do this."

[Joe] I was hoping that maturity would arrive.

I'm still waiting at the station for it.

You know, I found you can't just walk in there

and expect to get a result.

- Sorry.

[Joe] A bit like you couldn't really walk into a studio

if you've never thought about music

and put down a good album.

- He used to go from high to down easily.

He was, he was really emotional.

- Good, morning, Saudi Arabia.

["Rock the Casbah" by The Clash]

[men shouting]

- Kicking off Desert Shield Network, FM107,

and we started off rockin' the Casbah.

- I saw him crying because he saw

in the news a bomb, an American bomb,

prepared to be thrown in Iraq

was written "Rock the Casbah."

He was crying.

He told me, "Hey, man, I never could think that a song

of mine could be written as a death symbol

in a fucking American bomb."

[strums piano strings]

[light piano music]

- I used to call him Chief Thundercloud,

'cause he was in a very dark space.

[Joe vocalizing]

[somber piano music]

I did this film calledWhen Pigs Fly,

and I benefited,

because he was so anxious to make music.

- ♪ Way down in a working town where the boys you might find ♪

♪ Some happy and some sad, but some drunk all around ♪

♪ But the breeze is blowing in from home ♪

♪ The door is shaking in the wind ♪

♪ Now, that's when the boys are singing ♪

♪ To the rose of Eirin ♪

- He hadn't been in the studio for a very long time,

and he kind of went nuts and he, he gave me nine hours

of music in four days.

[Joe clapping rhythmically]

- Oh, no!

Bollocks.

I've forgotten the words.

Every time you get something happening,

you always go over it, later, you know?

In the fury of it.

Could you play me the rest of the,

you haven't run back, have you?

Could you go right to the end?

See what's left after that stupid fool clapped on it.

Bloody hell!

What a pillock!

Imagine that you're a rock 'n' roller,

and say you were in a big band like I was and what have you,

and time goes by, and then you meet a 17-year-old guy.

He's never heard of The Clash, and that's the moment

that my feet touched the ground again.

I've got ideas for the new role.

I can't go back.

It would be like living in a museum.

No, I just want to go out there and do something new,

and then you get your own energy from the newness of it.

I think it says in the Bible,

"There's a time to dance to techno and a time not to."

[upbeat techno music]

We've got new, fresh sounds every week.

You can't even keep up with it.

Have you tried keeping up with, like,

techno, hardcore, trance, intellechno?

It's a hotbed of creativity, and that's a fact.

[music continues]

Standing in a kitchen listening to rave music,

I couldn't understand it.

I had to go to a rave to understand it.

And after about four hours,

we were supposed to go into a trance.

In fact, I was going into a trance,

and I thought, let's just say we were in a forest

and there was nothing to do but these big, empty logs,

say we were pygmies or something, we'd end up,

what we'd be doing by about lunchtime,

we'd be standing 'round a log with big sticks

and we'd be going, "Dong-dong-dong."

[music continues]

There's an anti-criminal justice act in England which is

banning parties, raves, repetitive beats,

more than 10 people in a field,

and it's only made the underground stronger

because you have to band together

to fight the common thing,

it was a case of that as well with punk.

- You can see the hippie thing about it,

you know what I mean?

Punks were hippies with zips.

- People began to kick hippies around,

but, quite frankly, I am a hippie.

I want to be a hippie, you know?

Punks and hippies are now fighting together

here in England.

It's the same thing they want.

In fact, you can't tell 'em apart,

and they're coming together in some new, strange style.

- The first, original Strummer Campfire

probably started at Glastonbury.

He loved the kind of community aspect

and the techno thing he certainly got,

once it was there, once it was instilled in his brain,

he instantly understood it and became a champion for it.

- There is no better place to be

on this whole island than right here, right now.

I think this is some sort of gene memory, this is my theory.

It's in our blood over here to have these kind of big needs.

I bet you, if we were standing here, like,

maybe 2,000 years ago or whatever, you know,

there would be something like this going on.

- But Joe was looking around the world

for different inspiration.

[Joe] This is Andrés Landero, the King.

- Colombian music, African music.

- Jason Mayo brought this lovely music to us.

We are riding on it.

I love it, I play it all the time.

- Joe was marrying Luce

and I just felt really happy for him

'cause he seemed very happy.

It helped to ground him and to help focus him

and give him a base to grow from

and to start his new music and give him

a bit more confidence in himself,

and I think Joe really appreciated being Joe Strummer

and not being the ex-Clash member.

- Joe was a very spiritual person.

He always had an interest in, kind of, American Indians,

the Incas, Mexicans, he did love the image

and the symbolism attached to a campfire.

It was very, very important to him.

He saw it as a great opportunity to express himself,

but in a really quiet way.

I think Joe was fed up with shouting,

and there's nothing better than people wandering through

and sitting down, 'cause that campfire itself

is a very comforting thing.

You sit there, you get warm and you talk.

- ♪ Last train to Nashville, girl, you got on board ♪

♪ You packed up your medicine and you left without a word ♪

- He would go off for hours on end and come back

with people from all walks of life, none of whom we knew.

He just enjoyed talking to people, he enjoyed listening.

He used to learn so much.

- ♪ You don't dance to techno anymore ♪

- He was always thinking of other people all the time,

about extra tents, extra sleeping bags for everyone.

- It was an extension of the whole ethos of Glastonbury.

For him, it was a form of alternative living

with your friends.

- In Rastafaria, we say, "More fire,"

and it's not supposed to be a violent thing.

It's about purging and cleansing and rebirth and rising,

phoenix-like out of the ashes.

So maybe that's what he was tuned into.

- ♪ No, you don't dance to techno anymore ♪

- He had a lot to teach about life in general,

and, like, sort of, the real world, not the perfect world.

- Well, Joe's campfire was utopian.

It was re-exploring the rules, re-exploring

how you can make music, and it's like going back

to the Druids.

Yet the experience was pushing the envelope,

trying to find something new.

- ♪ Misty morning memory... ♪

- Well, we hadn't seen each other

for nearly 25 years, and Joe bumped into my daughter

and he gave her a note and it just said, "Nothing's changed.

We're all old hippies at heart.

Come and have a campfire."

- The campfires opened up the idea to Joe

that he could form another band and it didn't have

to be Clash-type music,

that it could be an amalgamation of everything

that he listened to.

It gave him the confidence to think,

"Hey, maybe I can find like-minded people

to play with me."

- Joe challenged you and he provoked you.

In fact, the last time I saw Joe, I had an argument

with him because he was trying

to tell me not to stop smoking.

[Joe] If you took cigarettes away from the 20th century,

we wouldn't have any

of the writers you go on about or anybody worships.

They just would not exist, and I want this acknowledged.

In fact, I think non-smokers should be barred

from buying any product that a smoker created.

[Latin music playing]

- We spent a long time trying to get Joe

back on the road.

We're talking about two years here.

I mean, it started off, we were trying to get him

to re-form The Clash, but he was really adamant

that he wouldn't, that he would not go back out

on the road again.

[Joe] If that was no toe-tapper or no body shaker,

boy, you need to see the undertaker.

That was Andrés Landero, el rey del acordeón.

- I had my daughter on my shoulders and I said,

"What's going on?" And she said,

"Ooh, Dad, there's a naked man dancing on the stage."

So I said, "Let me see!"

So I threw her on the ground and stood on her recumbent body

so I could see, and this is my first glimpse

of Anthony Genn.

[crowd cheering] [upbeat rock music]

And then I met him after that performance.

- I was kind of drunkenly saying to him,

"Come on, man, you're fucking Joe Strummer.

Get up off your ass and make a fucking record," you know?

"We need you." [laughs]

I just didn't expect him to turn 'round

and say, "Yeah, okay.

I'll do it with you."

[Joe] If you leave it too long,

there's a sort of magic moment when it's too late

to come back and I think I just got in

before the door closed.

Please welcome Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros!

[crowd cheering]

- ♪ On a techno D-Day, a techno D-Day ♪

♪ Out on Omaha Beach ♪

♪ Where the troops believe in a life of freedom ♪

♪ This is all about free speech ♪

- Because he hadn't been on the road

for a long, long time, he'd put a few pounds on.

[laughing] You could see he was knackered after three tunes

because he hadn't paced himself.

He was giving it all, you know what I mean?

He was just sweating, but nobody cared, it was Joe.

- You've got to fight for your...for your crowd.

Excuse me, girls, I'm trying to promote

a rock 'n' roll show tonight, rock 'n' roll.

When you hustle, you've got to have a hard shell.

Like Captain Beefheart said,

"One cold vibe won't stop this here boogie."

I'll leave you with a flyer in case you fancy going.

- Okay.

- It's the hippest place in town tonight.

[both laughing]

- Okay.

- Great, we're building.

When I got back on the road, my expectations were zero,

zilch, because I don't like to be disappointed

so I keep my expectations at a bare minimum.

[crowd cheering]

- It was constantly about reinvention.

[Joe] All right, let's go!

♪ Tonight, there was a power cut in the city of madness ♪

♪ And the conversation died in the burst of a solar flare ♪

♪ In the darkness ♪

- Yeah, he loved it, he loved it, he absolutely loved it.

He loved the whole deal.

Just as a beginning chapter of a new period in his life.

- ♪ And shorted out the eastern shore ♪

♪ We're left to shout out ♪

♪ We all need a little more ♪

Songs don't tend to come to you, I mean,

if there's no outlet for them.

Because I couldn't get any records out,

songs would occasionally come but I knew that as soon

as we had a contract, the floodgates would open.

I'd got reams of lyrics, carrier bags full

of twisted napkins with insane things written on them.

When you get a great idea for a lyric,

just push people out of the way, throw yourself

on the floor and write it down,

because it only makes sense in the moment.

- He would always just walk 'round the studio

and he had an A-4 sheet of paper and a pen

and he'd just write reams and reams of lyrics,

and it went on for a few hours and then, about midnight

or whatever, he went, "Okay, I've got a song,"

and he'd just written a song about his walk

from Willesden to Cricklewood.

And during that time, I was fiddling around

with this little tune.

I wasn't thinking for a second that Joe was going to go,

"Yeah, that's good." I was just messing around.

There was Joe Strummer and there was John Graham Mellor.

He talks about his children in that song.

[all chattering]

- Go on. Do it! - No, Dad!

- Do it!

One, two, three, action!

- Maybe that night I wrote a song with John Mellor.

[Joe] ♪ Thought about my babies grown ♪

♪ Thought about going home ♪

♪ Thought about what's done is done ♪

♪ We're alive and that's the one ♪

♪ From Willesden to Cricklewood ♪

♪ From Willesden ♪

[girl laughing]

[Joe] So I'm pinching myself sometimes.

Actually, you've got a record, you're traveling,

you're going around, you're in countries,

you're talking to people, you're playing shows.

It's such a change from 10 years in the wilderness.

Yeah, it feels great.

I'm having Christmas every day.

- Now here's Joe Strummer! Whoo!

- You know, when The Clash were on tour

and we lost the beat, chef would be, like, at the side

of the stage going,

"Don't forget, pump your loins, children."

You know, that was, like, his motto or something.

- Whoo!

♪ Well, it's a rockin' world ♪

♪ Make no mistake about it ♪

♪ It's a shockin' world ♪

♪ Could be what's so great about it ♪

♪ It's a rockin' world ♪

- What the hell is this?

- Whenever we hung out, all of us brought sunglasses

when Joe called, saying, "We're going out," you know?

'Cause you knew you'd be up at dawn somewhere with Joe.

- You would get a message, like, "I'm coming into town,"

and you would take your vitamins and get your rest.

- And if Joe could find a piano,

he would play "Junco Partner."

Like, it's, you know, five o'clock in the morning

and we're all singing to "Junco Partner"

in some ground floor apartment in the East Village.

- Slowly but surely my drug addiction

became much more severe.

He's seen that movie.

He knows how that movie ends, so there's only thing to do

and that's [blows raspberry]

cut that, cut that guy lose.

- I was staying in Portsmouth at the time.

I hadn't seen Joe for a few years,

and I saw him in the bar and he kind of looks

at me, like, "Have you got an instrument with you?" [laughs]

[Joe] I just said to him, "Where is your violin?"

He said, "In the car." I said, "Go and get it!"

[gentle music]

- And then we did like that at every gig after that.

- Which part of life do we find the truth?

Is it the beginning, the middle or the end, or is it all,

quasi-truth?

I approach everything in my life with a tranquil attitude.

In fact, being grown up means exemplary manners

to your fellow human being.

I have a record program on the world service.

I just play records for half an hour.

When I asked, "How many people are listening to the slot?"

And he flicked through a book and he said, "40 million."

And I said, "Are you kidding me?"

And he said, "No, 40 million."

It just brings the idea of the globe sharply into focus.

Maybe that opened my eyes to hearing things

that aren't in the complete Western Music Groove.

I've always kept that going, finding strange records

and trying to learn from them,

so as not to keep it too narrow,

'cause if you keep it very narrow,

it's gonna kill the life in the music.

- ♪ Hey ♪

♪ Down along the road ♪

♪ Hey ♪

♪ Down on the road, down on the road ♪

♪ Hey ♪

♪ If you're after getting the honey ♪

♪ Hey ♪

♪ Hey ♪

♪ Then you don't go killing all the bees ♪

[crowd cheering]

♪ Let the summertime sun ♪

- I saw Joe play with the Mescaleros quite a bit.

I remember it being just blissful.

There wasn't anywhere else on the planet

I could conceivably want to be.

[crowd cheering]

- Tokyo, typhoon coming in.

[fireworks exploding outside]

And the city is saying...

[laughs]

[woman speaking foreign language]

I love you.

- I think he knew he had something else to do

and he hadn't found it, and then with the Mescaleros,

he found what he wanted to do again.

I think it was as important to him as The Clash.

[Joe] I don't have any message except,

don't forget you're alive, because sometimes,

when you walk around the city or when you yourself are

in a bad mood, you can think,

"Hey, wait a minute, we're alive.

You know, we don't know what the next second will bring."

[crowd cheering]

- ♪ Distance no object ♪

♪ Rasta, for I ♪

- We all thought it might be we would play

at the Rock 'n' roll Hall of Fame or something, you know,

we'd get back together.

[car horn beeps]

But it wasn't to be that, and it was something,

more appropriate, in a way.

- The 2002 strike, we felt we deserved more money.

We didn't think it was being greedy,

we was actually going for the average wage

of that particular sector.

We wasn't seeming to get our message across.

Joe realized that there was more to our cause

than what the papers and the government were saying.

For Joe to come out and do such a gig

for us was a great morale booster.

- In the key of "A"!

[crowd cheering]

- I didn't really intend to play.

Joe and I never discussed it beforehand

and we didn't pre-arrange anything.

It was just I felt completely compelled.

I said, "Hold me coat.

I'm going out."

[Joe singing indistinctly]

♪ White riot, I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot, a riot of my own ♪

♪ White riot, I wanna riot ♪

♪ White riot, a riot of my own ♪

[crowd cheering]

- Mick Jones, ladies and gentlemen.

- That was actually the first time that Mick

and Joe had appeared on stage together

since the break-up of The Clash.

- Well done!

- It was kind of cool, 'cause they did it

for the firemen and not 'cause somebody paid them

two million quid.

[Joe] And that's the end of the first series

ofJoe Strummer's London Calling.

If you want a second series, please write in.

In fact, I'm not even going to wait for you to write in.

I'm going to kick off the second series, right now.

Let it roll with Nina Simone.

["To Love Somebody" by Nina Simone]

♪ There's a light ♪

♪ A certain kind of light ♪

♪ That's never shone on me ♪

♪ I want my whole life to be ♪

- He did this incredible Christmas card.

They were a series of islands with campfires

on them and people heading towards them,

drawn by the campfires, in little boats.

- And it was his vision of heaven, I think,

this place where people joined and worked together.

- It was all done very last-minute, as always.

I think I posted them on December the 21st,

so a lot of people received them the day he died.

- He was a genuinely happy man.

There was no pressure.

There was just joy in what he was doing,

and he just went like that, on the sofa,

readingThe Observer, I think.

- He died of a congenital heart defect which

we were all totally unaware that he had.

It could have struck him down at any time.

- None of those things can really last forever and I think,

in a way, it's kind of greedy of people to expect it

to last forever because that's people like,

that's their fire burning, at extra strength,

for us, you know?

And that's kind of a lot to ask of people,

to burn like that.

- Tens of thousands of e-mails that came

in were saying, "Joe, thank you.

You changed the way that I thought and felt about life."

- His mythology is cast in reinforced concrete,

and it's probably helping

to hold up the Trellick Tower right now.

- You know, when I, you and I carried him into that chapel,

he felt like he'd put a bit of weight on.

I think that strat must have been in there.

[stammers]

It's like Hemingway said about Paris,

"There's never any end to it,"

and um...

it's the same with Joe.

[Joe] And so, now, I'd like to say,

people can change anything they want to,

and that means everything in the world.

People are running about, following their little tracks,

I am one of them, but we've all got to stop

just following our own little mouse trail.

People can do anything.

This is something that I'm beginning to learn.

People are out there, doing bad things to each other.

It's because they've been dehumanized.

It's time to take the humanity back into the center

of the ring and follow that for a time.

Greed, it ain't going anywhere.

They should have that on a big billboard

across Times Square.

Without people, we are nothing.

That's my spiel.

["Get Down Moses" by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros]

♪ Once I got to the mountaintop ♪

♪ Tell you what I could see ♪

♪ Prairie full of lost souls running ♪

♪ From the priests of iniquity ♪

♪ Where the hell was Elijah ♪

♪ And what do you do when the prophecy game was through ♪

♪ Na, na, na-na-na-na-na ♪

♪ We gotta take the walls of Jericho ♪

♪ Na, na, na-na-na-na-na ♪

♪ Put your lips together and blow ♪

♪ Na, na, na-na-na-na-na ♪

♪ To the very top ♪

♪ Na, na, na-na-na-na-na ♪

♪ They say the truth ♪

♪ Crystallizes ♪

♪ Like jewels ♪

♪ In the rock ♪

♪ In the rock ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ Part another sea ♪

♪ Carve another tablet out of LSD ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ Out in Tennessee ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ Down in the street ♪

♪ The blood is washing down all the gravel to our feet ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ Down in the pit ♪

♪ Lying in a dream ♪

♪ Cross battlefield ♪

♪ Crashing on a downtown strip ♪

♪ Looking in the eyes ♪

♪ Of the diamonds and the spies and the hip ♪

♪ Who's sponsoring the crack ghetto ♪

♪ Who's lecturing ♪

♪ Who's in the know and in the don't know ♪

♪ Na, na, na-na-na-na-na ♪

♪ You better take the walls of Jericho ♪

♪ Na, na, na-na-na-na-na ♪

♪ Put your lips together and blow ♪

♪ Na, na, na-na-na-na-na ♪

♪ Going to the very top ♪

♪ Na, na, na-na-na-na-na ♪

♪ Where the truth crystallizes ♪

♪ Like jewels ♪

♪ In the rock ♪

♪ In the rock ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ From the eagle's aerie ♪

♪ We gotta to make a new friend out of old enemies ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ Back in Tennessee ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ Down with the dreads ♪

♪ They got a lotta reasoning in a dreadhead ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ Down in the street ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ We need to eat ♪

♪ We gotta chew it over with our wisdom teeth ♪

♪ Get down, Moses ♪

♪ Chuffin' ♪