Revealed! Secret Strummer

Joe’s secret vaults yield a cross-career box set of rarities and unheard treasures.

DURING THIS summer’s World Cup football coverage, former Clash manager Bernie Rhodes contacted MOJO to demand that This Is England, the band’s valedictory 1985 hit, “should replace God Save The Queen as our national anthem”. The famously radical-thinking Rhodes may be pleased to learn that two extraordinary and previously unheard early versions of the song form the centrepiece of Joe Strummer 001, the first-ever compilation of the Clash frontman’s solo work. Together with familiar studio material by Strummer and his pre- and post-Clash groups The 101’ers and The Mescaleros, the 2-CD collection, released on September 28, features a rarities set spanning home demos, film soundtracks and unreleased Clash demos from the period after Mick Jones’s dramatic departure in 1983. Several of the tracks were discovered among the vast trove of unfiled tapes, lyrics, letters, stage clothes and other ephemera Strummer left when he died unexpectedly in December 2002. “Joe kept everything in an open-sided barn at our home in Somerset, in old tea chests and suitcases,” explains Strummer’s widow, Lucinda Tait, who curated the set with artist and Clash sleeve designer Robert Gordon McHarg III. “Our front room was a dumping ground for the plastic bags he brought back from touring or the studio. I would try to tidy them up every now and again, but he would say, ‘No, leave them. I know exactly where everything is!’” Visiting Joe and Lucinda’s home soon after the singer’s death, artist and family friend Damien Hirst was so taken at the strange, anarchic beauty of Strummer’s artefact-filled home studio that he received permission to dismantle it for future reconstruction as an art installation and set his archivist to work on preserving Joe’s ephemera, now stored in a special facility in Dublin owned by U2. “I was blown away by the way Joe annotated everything he did in his notebooks, even jotting down the time he would enter or leave a studio,” says McHarg, who is indexing the archive. “You get a sense that he was interested in documenting his own story.” Among secrets surrendered so far are demos made by The Clash – Strummer, Paul Simonon and drummer Pete Howard – after Mick Jones’s exit, including a reggae prototype of This Is England, titled ‘Czechoslovak Song/Where Is England’, dated August 1983, the month of Jones’s sacking. Among other gems: unreleased Clash songs Pouring Rain and (on the deluxe special 7-inch single) Before We Go Forward, both recorded in July 1984, and another version of This Is England from that session. “Hearing Joe’s lyrics is very poignant,” says Lucinda. “He was great at empowering, invigorating and inspiring. They’re still so relevant. Imagine what he’d come up with today about Trump.”

“Joe kept everything in an open-sided barn at our home in Somerset.” LUCINDA TAIT