Planet rock
A blurred, 16-track snapshot of Strummer’s solo years as a global visionary. By Pat Gilbert.
Joe Strummer Assembly DARK HORSE/BMG. CD/DL/LP
BACK AT the start of punk in 1976, Joe Strummer gave an interview to Sniffin’ Glue magazine that emphasised the need for urgent and sustained political action. “Maybe when we’re 55 we can play tubas in the sun, [it’s] all right then to enjoy yourselves,” the Clash firebrand allowed. Tragically, Strummer would never make it to his dotage, succumbing to a heart condition in 2002, aged 50. But towards the end of his life brass instruments and revivifying solar beams were still on his mind. In the 1999 song Tony Adams, Strummer hears the evocative sound of “saxophones and beach trombones” drifting down Broadway, while he stands “waiting for the rays of the morning sun”.
Released via George Harrison’s resurrected Dark Horse label, Assembly judiciously includes Tony Adams, a cornerstone of Joe Strummer And The Mescaleros’ Rock Art And The X-Ray Style, his 1999 ‘comeback’ album after a decade in the wilderness. That the song’s lyrics are suffused with mournful anti-nostalgia – a gnawing suggestion that, for all The Clash’s electrifying attempts to change the world, the new dawn had yet to arrive – should come as no surprise to fans familiar with Strummer’s post-Clash work.
Slow to rediscover his muse after The Clash split in 1985, and ever reliant on musical collaborators, it would be four years before a Strummer solo album appeared; and when it did,
1989’s Earthquake Weather presented an adrift and melancholy artist, self-exiled in a bubble of reggae, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon’s Graceland and contemporary rock, while EDM and hip-hop raged all around him.
Earthquake Weather’s final track, Sleepwalk, a ballad of exquisite sadness – “Matchbooks of lonely places I’ll never find,” it begins – clearly signalled that Strummer needed to go away to find himself, a 10-year odyssey that would take in new friends such as Keith Allen and Damien Hirst, Glastonbury campfires, and, critically, hours spent in his ‘woodshed’ in Hampshire making electronic recordings with The Grid’s Richard Norris, Bez and percussionist Pablo Cook.
But, really, when he eventually emerged for The Mescaleros’ Rock Art… (1999), Global A-Go-Go (2002) and posthumous Streetcore (2003), nothing much had changed except the dub, electronica, piano and percussion seeping into the mix. Strummer’s opaque, visionary lyrics still painted him struggling with a dystopian world – in the
cri de coeur Yalla Yalla, broken for at least another generation – all the while lamenting life’s beautiful confusion in that singular, hangdog slur.
Global A-Go-Go’s rousing work song Johnny Appleseed and doleful, cinematic Mondo Bongo suggested Strummer’s solo best was still to come – a notion borne out by Streetcore’s freewheeling Coma Girl, finished like the rest of the album after his death by fellow Mescaleros Martin Slattery and Scott Shields.
Assembly is, then, an edifying spin, baited for hardcore fans with an unreleased acoustic Strummer strum through Junco Partner and two live Mescaleros Clash covers.