Protest singer Billy Bragg said last night that Strummer fired his youthful political imagination after seeing The Clash at the first Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park in London's East End. He first changed his name to Woody Mellor, in honour of Woody Guthrie, the American folk legend, before evolving into Joe Strummer after forming a pub band called the 101ers - named after their squat at 101 Walterton Road, Maida Vale - who ending up playing support to the Sex Pistols. While Brixton boy Jones fitted the bill more, Strummer was in many ways an early prototype of a radical Notting Hill trustafarian. Not that Strummer, born John Mellor in Ankara, Turkey, the son of a senior diplomat, was your textbook working-class punk hero. The Clash followed up London Calling with Sandinista!, which attacked American attempts to undermine the Nicaraguan revolution and berated Mrs Thatcher the year after she walked into Downing Street. Notting Hill was then the home to ethnic tension, incendiary street-protest politics and reggae legend Bob Marley, a powerful social and political brew from which Strummer and The Clash drank deeply. The music he created with songwriting partner Mick Jones - the "Sound of the Westway", as he dubbed it - was equally revolutionary, mixing dub, rockabilly and ska into a multicultural roar of anger against poverty and racial discrimination. His leftwing credentials, forged in the Elgin Avenue squatters' occupation in west London in the mid-70s, were heartfelt and real and never left him. Unlike the Sex Pistols, with whom they were often compared, Strummer and The Clash were not the result of clever media manipulation but the authentic voice of protest and rebellion. London Calling, The Clash's third and greatest album, was the US magazine Rolling Stone's album of the 1980s and was regularly voted one of the best of all time.īut a poor early record deal, and The Clash's commitment to leftwing causes, meant that neither Strummer nor the rest of the band fully reaped the rewards of their success.īono, who was about to work with Strummer on a tribute to Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and who never made a secret of how he modelled his own band on The Clash, said: "It's such a shock. Tributes poured in yesterday for the rebel with a cause who wrote such rousing and intelligent songs as Death Or Glory, Should I Stay Or Should I Go?, White Riot and Spanish Bombs. His passing at the age of 50 leaves Shane MacGowan as the last man standing of the songwriting tyros who turned the music industry upside down in the late 1970s.
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