NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Joe Strummer discussion forum. Latino Rockabilly War, Mescaleros and more!
Flex
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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Flex »

Hey, it doesn't sound like we're listening to Joe sing in a bathtub anymore. Nice.
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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by JohnS »

yes, it scrubs up nicely... talking of which has anyone ever seen the film When Pigs Fly?
And more importantly did anyone get that Sara Driver DVD compilation which apparently has a half hour doc of Joe recording and mixing the soundtrack?!

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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by laxman »

Uncut magazine's reissue of the month. 9/10. Four pages devoted to it, including an interview with Lucinda. Yes there is plenty more stuff in the archives and yes hopefully there will be an 002 as long as 001 is a success.

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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Marky Dread »

Flex wrote:
14 Aug 2018, 4:00pm
Hey, it doesn't sound like we're listening to Joe sing in a bathtub anymore. Nice.
Are you all referring to the "When Pigs Fly" stuff. If so that's been up here in pristeen quality already.
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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Flex »

Marky Dread wrote:
15 Aug 2018, 3:15pm
Are you all referring to the "When Pigs Fly" stuff. If so that's been up here in pristeen quality already.
I was just comparing the two tracks side-by-side as Matey presented them.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead

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Marky Dread
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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Marky Dread »

Flex wrote:
15 Aug 2018, 5:57pm
Marky Dread wrote:
15 Aug 2018, 3:15pm
Are you all referring to the "When Pigs Fly" stuff. If so that's been up here in pristeen quality already.
I was just comparing the two tracks side-by-side as Matey presented them.
Ah OK for some reason I can only see the second old version. But those tracks have been available in great sound for some time now. They're the least thing I'm looking to from the new box as good as they are.
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Forces have been looting
My humanity
Curfews have been curbing
The end of liberty


We're the flowers in the dustbin...
No fuchsias for you.

"Without the common people you're nothing"

Nos Sumus Una Familia

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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Carpentologist »

Not yet available for pre order on iTunes in Australia and I can’t stream Rose of Erin either, comes up not available in this country on all the links I’ve tried...
I’m bummed as I’m hanging to hear it!
First two tracks were emailed to me because I’ve pre ordered the box but not Rose of Erin as of yet?
I don’t suppose anyone on here has the wherewithal to bung it on YouTube?!

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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by ohsoso »

the vocals on new version of rose of erin sounds entirely different to the ones i got. the acapella is also different than the others of various quality. or are my ears fucked?

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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Heston »

I ordered the online version of this month's Uncut for 99p on Google Play, here's the text version...

Pre- and post-Clash work anthologised, along with lost tapes found in Strummer’s shed. By Allan Jones

REISSUE OF THE MONTH 9/10

THIS is the thing about the charisma of premature death. Absolution usually follows. After Joe Strummer died in December 2002, the Strummer Legend was quickly burnished into a holy glow, a posthumous radiance. Joe was no longer The Man Who Broke Up The Clash and it was like he hadn’t spent the best part of a decade drunk or on holiday. In the way people always have, they saw him more clearly when he was no longer there. They regarded him now as they might the Burning Bush of Biblical repute or a tablet of stone inscribed with wisdom’s words, God’s hip voice. “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer,” Craig Finn sang on The Hold Steady’s 2008 track “Constructive Summer”, giving voice to the feelings of many.

Whatever the post-mortem hum that surrounded Strummer, the fact remained that after The Clash’s dismal end – for which he ever blamed himself, repeatedly, at length, especially over drinks – the adoring roar that he had once enjoyed was now silenced. If it was true, as he often said, that The Clash alone gave him purpose, it seemed as plausible that without The Clash he meant surprisingly little to anyone. His fear that his audience was gone was realised when his solo album, Earthquake Weather, was released in September 1989 to poor reviews and disastrous sales. Worldwide, Earthquake Weather sold no more than 7,000 copies. I spoke to him that Christmas. He sounded humiliated, more depressed than ever. What was he going to do now? “Disappear, probably,” he said.

That’s what Joe then did, like he’d evaporated. He later described the following decade as “The Wilderness Years”, a time of creative drought, depression and drugs. “The Wilderness Years”, such as they were, properly began in 1983, when Joe evicted Mick Jones from The Clash. From then, Strummer was apt to drift, project to project, often taking bit parts in films no-one saw for which he wrote a lot of music no-one heard. Anyway, it’s to those years that this expansive collection rather bravely returns us. Up to a point, the anthology makes plausible the view that, however flawed, there was more to the music Strummer made outside The Clash than its commercial reputation allows. CD1 opens with two tracks from Strummer’s pub-rock crew The 101’ers, the band Bernie Rhodes wanted eradicated from Joe’s past. But this is where it started for Joe, right leg pumping at the Charlie Pigdog Club and The Elgin in Ladbroke Grove, unforgettable nights. The following “Love Kills”, a lumpy punk-blues, recorded in 1986 for Alex Cox’s Sid And Nancy, is presumably here because it was the first time Joe had recorded with Mick Jones since The Clash split. Its fierce B-side, “Dum Dum Club”, might have been a better selection.

In 1987, Strummer was in Nicaragua with a beard and a small role in Walker, Alex Cox’s unhinged satire on American imperialism. He also composed a fabulous score for the film, represented here by “Tennessee Rain”, a campfire sing-along, not entirely typical of the soundtrack. “Trash City”, meanwhile, is a great slutty rocker from the 1988 Keanu Reeves film Permanent Record that introduced Joe to the band he called Latino Rockabilly War, who backed him on Earthquake Weather. There are two songs from Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s 1990 I Hired A Contract Killer, in which Joe again had a minor part. “Burning Lights” is stark, a song about travelling without getting anywhere, a familiar destination for Joe at the time. “Afro-Cuban Be-Bop” is Joe at his dreamiest, with a lovely fluttering vocal and sweet melody. Both tracks were credited to The Astro-Physicians, actually just Joe and a bongo player. Elsewhere, the straining earnestness of “Generations” is in sharp contrast to the uproarious Rick Rubin-produced “It’s A Rockin’ World”, composed for a South Park episode.

Still-born Earthquake Weather is represented by an affable version of The Tennors’ rocksteady tune “Ride Your Donkey” – mystifyingly when “Leopardskin Limousines”, one of Joe’s greatest songs, was available. After 10 years gulping for air, Joe fully found his voice again on the three terrific records he made between 1999 and 2002 with The Mescaleros (the third, Streetcore, completed after his death). There are no quibbles, minor or otherwise, about tracks included from them, especially valedictory dub epic “Yalla Yalla”. Further highlights of CD1 are two duets – the first, suitably grainy, with Johnny Cash on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”, the other with Jimmy Cliff on the rousing “Over The Border” and the sentimental version of “Minstrel Boy”, recorded for Ridley Scott’s gung-ho war film Black Hawk Down.

CD2 features 12 unreleased tracks, some sourced from newly discovered tapes stashed in Strummer’s ‘archive’ – actually his garden shed, full to the brim with all manner of artefacts. Not all of it’s great. Joe at times was inappropriately convinced he should form a blues trio. On the evidence of lamentable 12-bar slog “32nd Street”, this would have been an even worse idea than sacking Mick from The Clash, notwithstanding the fact Mick plays guitar on the track, an outtake from the Sid And Nancy soundtrack. Country pastiche “2 Bullets”, sung by Pearl Harbour, is from the same undistinguished source. More valuable is the version of a newly written 101’ers barnstormer, “Letsagettabittarockin’”, recorded in 1974 by Joe on a cassette in his room at his old Elgin Avenue squat, and “Czechoslovak Song/Where Is England”, a striking demo of “This Is England”, the only redeemable track from Clash swansong Cut The Crap.

Two tracks come from clearly tentative July 1984 sessions – “Pouring Rain” and “Blues On The River”, both plaintive, the latter with an insinuatingly atmospheric groove. “Pouring Rain” was reworked in 1993, dressed up with flute, accordion, fiddle, saxophone, for the soundtrack of the film When Pigs Fly at sessions featuring jazz-folk bassist Danny Thompson and Rockpile drummer Terry Williams. “When Pigs Fly” itself is lovely, busking pop, Joe sounding attractively weary, like a lot of late nights gathered together. “Rose Of Erin” has a similar Celtic swirl, but Joe’s constrained, a little uptight, like he’s singing conscientiously but without much feeling from a lyric sheet. “The Cool Impossible”, recorded separately with the same musicians, is quietly fantastic, Strummer confident enough to veer off on digressive vocal tangents, his eccentric phrasing dashingly spontaneous. “London Is Burning”, meanwhile, is an early version of Streetcore’s “Burning Streets”, brash in the manner of vintage Clash. But what to make of “US North”, produced by Mick Jones in 1986, a torrent of words delivered with a sort of wan passion over a shunting beat that goes on for 10 life-sapping minutes? You keep waiting for it to find a new gear, take off, any direction a relief from this corseted repetition of droning strings and watery guitar.

Three more tracks come with the vinyl boxset, with much extra paraphernalia. A seven-inch single couples another early demo of “This Is England” with the clanging call-to-arms of 1984 demo “Before We Go Forward”. There’s also, finally, a cassette, a facsimile of one found in Joe’s archive featuring a song called “Full Moon”, a 1975 demo recorded in the basement of 101 Walterton Road, his old Maida Vale squat. It’s enormously touching – Joe at 22, late at night with his guitar, his future unwritten, so much unknown yet to come in the cool impossible.

HOW TO BUY...

NO ORDINARY JOE
Strummer’s musical journey from Ladbroke Grove to LA

THE 101’ERS
Elgin Avenue Breakdown (Revisited)

EMI, 2005

This expanded version of the original 1978 comp added a swathe of live tracks recorded at Camberwell Art School that captured the band’s legendary velocity. Includes their ecstatic cover of Slim Harpo’s “Shake Your Hips”, a deranged take on “Gloria” and a reworking of New Orleans classic “Junco Partner” that was not improved on by The Clash on Sandinista!. 10/10

BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE
10 Upping Street

CBS, 1986

When Joe couldn’t get Mick to reform The Clash because he had his own thing going with BAD, he basically joined the BAD crew for their second album, eventually installing himself as co-producer and co-writing over half the tracks. Joe gave 10 Upping Street a harder, more urgent sound that made it sometimes sound like a belated successor to Combat Rock. 8/10

WALKER OST
VIRGIN, 1987

Joe had knocked off some songs for Alex Cox’s Sid And Nancy and Straight To Hell, but petitioned the director to write the full score for Walker. Drawing on Latin and American folk traditions, Joe’s largely instrumental score was like nothing he’d done before. Comparisons with Bob Dylan’s soundtrack for Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid are not exaggerated. 9/10

EARTHQUAKE WEATHER
EPIC, 1989

Recorded over three months in Los Angeles with Latino Rockabilly War, who’d backed him on the Permanent Record soundtrack, Earthquake Weather was a critical and commercial disaster. It’s hardly perfect, but overall a much better record than usually admitted, as stylistically freewheeling as Sandinista!. It also boasts, in the hushed, intimate “Leopardskin Limousines”, one of Joe’s greatest songs. 8/10

Q&A

Joe’s wife Lucinda Tait and Joe Strummer 001 producer Robert Gordon McHarg III on the Strummer Archive and compiling an anthology

Why now for this anthology?

LUCINDA TATE: It’s nearly 16 years since Joe passed. Listening back to the music he produced over the last 40 years, it all seemed to be so relevant for today. We felt that the songs would resonate with today’s younger generation, especially with the tumultuous times we are experiencing.

ROBERT GORDON McHARG III: After many years of working on Joe’s archive, we’ve reached a state where we can share it. The archive has taken years to put together. Around five years ago, we started to build a digital archive of all Joe’s stuff. Two years ago, we managed to get all Joe’s archive of audio and written works turned into a digital state where we could finally see and hear what was in it. Before that, we had audio and Joe’s writings in spare boxes.

What do you hope the compilation will say about Joe and his music?

LT: That he was a wordsmith who was way ahead of his time, who had a gift for writing about the troubles of the world and that his message is that people can change anything they want.

Do you think people need reminding that Joe had a musical life outside The Clash?

LT: Yes, because he produced an enormous body of work before and after The Clash which was pretty much under the radar. And some of the featured tracks come from his work on films, which a lot of people will not be familiar with.

RM: Not so much reminding about the music as how interesting his life was. His interests and influences were so wide and diverse. Joe has a loyal following already and JS 001 is a great opportunity to introduce a new generation to his work.

Joe was incredibly prolific with The Clash; less so later. Was it post-Clash depression, guilt about his part in their dismal end or fear of failure that prevented him working?

LT: Perhaps all of the above. But the myth that he was in a wilderness state isn’t true, as this compilation shows. He was very prolific after The Clash – he just didn’t seek commercial success with his music.

RM: The archive proves that Joe was a prolific artist, searching and questioning everything, looking for inspiration. He was a grafter. Joe never stopped working.

Why did Joe have so much self-doubt?

LT: I don’t know – I thought he was a genius.

Was he so preoccupied with the idea of reforming The Clash that for a long time he couldn’t get on with anything new?

LT: I don’t think that’s true. He loved his time with The Pogues, and scoring music for movies became a passion. He enjoyed exploring different musical genres and working with other talented people, like the crew from the Latino Rockabilly War.

RM: There’s a lot more to Joe than The Clash, and this release of his work preand post-Clash is a testament to that.

Would it be true there were times Joe welcomed distraction – going on holiday, partying with Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Bez – to working on new music?

LT: Those were indeed happy days, but they invigorated him. He wrote so many lyrics and so much music during this time that I suppose it’s fair to say it was a very welcome distraction.

Was one of Joe’s problems that he had such a big idea of himself, it was hard to live up to?

LT: I wouldn’t agree with that.

Tell us more about the Strummer Archive. What’s in it, where did he keep it, how was it ordered?

RM: The archive was a collection of boxes, tea chests, plastic bags and suitcases, containing books, lyrics, poetry, sketches, cartoons, clothes, memorabilia and assorted ‘stuff’. He kept everything, it seems – newspaper cuttings, sugar packets, matchboxes, lanyards, tickets, set lists, call sheets, scripts, you name it. Plus, of course, we have his working studio, which has been preserved. In itself, it’s a work of art. It appeared to me to be a complete mess, but when we started to get organised for the archiving we realised that each bag, suitcase, etc, contained a defined period – either a studio session, a tour, a period of time in his life – and it became easier than we thought to process everything.

How much more unreleased music is there? There are reportedly hours of music he recorded for various film soundtracks that have never been heard.

LT: We do have a lot more music, yes.

How did the tracks hidden on various cassettes come to light?

RM: I did four trips to Toronto carrying Joe’s original tapes with me – master tapes, multitracks, cassettes, etc. When Peter Moore, who was restoring and mastering the tracks, was transferring one 8in tape of “This Is England”, he found at the end of the tape that Joe had used tracks 1–4 for one demo song and tracks 5–8 for another. That was “Blues On The River”. On my return to London, we found the full lyric sheet for it.

What future plans are there for the archive?

RM: We’re working on a major touring exhibition…

LT: …and also to re-create his studio – and hopefully, if 001 is successful, we can release 002.

INTERVIEW: ALLAN JONES
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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Chuck Mangione »

Great read. Thanks for sharing.

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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Silent Majority »

Nice one, mate. Thanks for sharing that. No wonder Luce has avoided the public eye for these years, avoiding pseudo wankers like the reviewer and his penny-dreadful psychoanalysing.
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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Marky Dread »

Silent Majority wrote:
16 Aug 2018, 1:49pm
Nice one, mate. Thanks for sharing that. No wonder Luce has avoided the public eye for these years, avoiding pseudo wankers like the reviewer and his penny-dreadful psychoanalysing.
Yep he comes across as a complete hatchet man. That said Luce comes across great with her answers.
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Forces have been looting
My humanity
Curfews have been curbing
The end of liberty


We're the flowers in the dustbin...
No fuchsias for you.

"Without the common people you're nothing"

Nos Sumus Una Familia

Flex
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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Flex »

Really nice read, thanks. I admit, cautions from Jandek aside, my stoke levels are pretty high for this at the moment.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead

Pex Lives!

Marky Dread
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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Marky Dread »

I'm going to do Heston's archive when he leaves this mortal coil. I expect to find boxes and boxes of of Panic Report badges that he never quite got 'round to sending. Oh and every single flavour of super noodles packaging available.
Image

Forces have been looting
My humanity
Curfews have been curbing
The end of liberty


We're the flowers in the dustbin...
No fuchsias for you.

"Without the common people you're nothing"

Nos Sumus Una Familia

Heston
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Re: NEW JOE STRUMMER ANTHOLOGY?

Post by Heston »

Silent Majority wrote:
16 Aug 2018, 1:49pm
Nice one, mate. Thanks for sharing that. No wonder Luce has avoided the public eye for these years, avoiding pseudo wankers like the reviewer and his penny-dreadful psychoanalysing.
Agreed, what a fucking stupid set of questions.
There's a tiny, tiny hopeful part of me that says you guys are running a Kaufmanesque long con on the board

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