Walker
Working for the Yankee dollar

Fifteen years ago, Alex Cox and Joe Strummer found themselves in a South American war zone trying to make a film about US imperialism. Chaos predictably ensued. By Clark Collis

It's 1986, and Alex Cox has problem. In fact, as the director is attempting to film a large and complex period drama battle sequence in the middle of war-torn Nicaragua he has quite a few problems. For example, there are the horses, 50 of them all toll, which have to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Then there are the hordes of extras-some English-speaking, most not-who are pretending to fight each other while avoiding the explosions the special effects crew have rigged up.

But Cox's real problem is that he's trying to organise all this with a guy from the bond company watching his every move. Somebody, somewhere has decided that his film, Walker, is in danger of going off the rails, and the bondsman whose bosses have insured Universal Studios against this happening is there to put it back on course. Cox believes there may be a little bit more to his presence than mere financial concerns because Walker isn't the kind of movie designed to have the American political establishment dancing in the streets. The story of William Walker who successfully invaded Nicaragua in 1855-is a thinly veiled comment on contemporary US policy toward the country's revolutionary Sandinista government-that policy basically being that the Sandinistas are a bunch of corrupt, Commie-loving baby-eaters who should be wiped off the face of the planet. And, in case anyone has any doubts over this allegorical subtext, Cox has stuck in number of anachronisms-Zippo lighters, the odd helicopter-just to ram the point home.

But, right now, Cox isn't all that interested in the who's and whys and wherefores. He just knows this guy is trying to fuck with his movie.

"I don't know much about films," says Joe Strummer, 15 years on from his stint playing one of Walker's troops. "But I would think that a historical war epic would have to rank as one of the hardest categories. And I thought Alex handled it pretty well. But rows would break out all over the shop. You had someone standing behind the director who's taken out an insurance bond, so he's going to make sure that you come in under budget, whether they break you or not. There was almost open war sometimes."

"There was almost open war sometimes - Joe Strummer"

The recollection of Strummer's fellow cast member, Miguel Sandoval, is rather more colourful. "We were up to our knees in pig shit trying to shoot the battle scenes," explains the actor, "when the 'executives' would turn up in their tennis visors and polo shirts. Each time we looked at them they'd have different coloured shirts on. They were actually changing clothes every hour. "On the way back to our bus, we were talking passionately about what shots we had and what we needed to do the next day and these bond company guys came running up saying, Alex, can we speak to you?" "At which point, Alex turned around and simply said, 'Get away from me or I'll kill you.'"

Even for the idiosyncratic, independent minded director of Repo Man (1984) and Sid And Nancy (1986) it has to be said that issuing death threats against Hollywood financiers seems more than a little rash. Cox denies the charge ("The problem is that if you kill one there's always another to take his place") but there's no doubt that he was determined to finish the film come hell, high water or any number of interfering West Coast suits.

The story of how Cox eventually succeeded in finishing his film is every bit as unlikely and deranged as that of William Walker himself. Made with yankee dollars in a country that the US had effectively declared war against, the result isn't just an extraordinary film but arguably the last truly political movie to be financed by a major studio. It would also be last time that any of those studios thought fit to employ A. Cox Esq. "I was pretty much blacklisted in Hollywood after Walker," says the director today, "Suddenly, I just stopped getting offers from major studios. But that's happened to a lot of people. It happened to Dennis Hopper. It happened to Monte Hellman. It happens to anybody who's got a fairly independent mindset."

Cox first became aware of the situation in Nicaragua while studying film at UCLA in 1979. A lifelong supporter of leftist causes, the British director was delighted when the Sandinista guerrillas overthrew the brutal, US-backed regime of General Anastasio Somoza. He even included footage of a pro Sandinista demonstration in his student film, Edge City aka Sleep For Cissies (1980). It was a positive view also shared by the American media-at least at first. "Initially, all the media reports in the States were very favourable about the Sandinistas who were getting rid of this dictator," Cox recalls. "And then, in a matter of months, the whole complexion of the thing changed and the newspapers were suddenly very hostile. Of course, the reason was that the Sandinistas were too left wing. They were a left wing revolutionary government, which is not acceptable to the United States."

In 1981, the then American president, Jimmy Carter, suspended vital economic aid to Nicaragua, but worse was to follow when Ronald Reagan succeeded Carter later that year. Aware that the American public had no stomach for another war so soon after Vietnam, Reagan ordered the CIA to train and arm the anti-Sandinista contras, who then proceeded to raid Nicaragua, sabotaging the bridges and oil facilities while using CIA coercive techniques, including "direct physical brutality against civilians." The idea was to "make the bastards sweat," as then CIA director William Casey informed his operatives. But, despite this intense pressure, the Sandinista government held democratic elections in 1984. One of the international observers who witnessed what turned out to be a Sandinista victory was Alex Cox. "The Sandinistas are always portrayed these violent revolutionaries," says the director. "No one remembers that they won a democratic election in 84-the first democratic election in Nicaragua since the Americans invaded in the Twenties. This really pissed off the Americans, who became determined to destroy that government, even if it meant destroying all of Central America in the process."

Now a hot property thanks to the recent success of Sid And Nancy, Cox had long been looking for a project that would not only show the plight of the Nicaraguan people but also provide them with some much-needed hard currency. It was a quest that ended when he accidentally stumbled over the story of William Walker. "I was one of the election observers in the city of Granada," Cox elaborates. "Which is the city that Walker allegedly burned to the ground. And there was a plaque in Granada about Walker and his misdeeds. So I started to find out who this guy was."

Photo: Strummer's "Nobody gave a shit. Who knows why."

"The problem is that if you kill one there's always another to take his place" - Alex Cox on Hollywood financiers

What Cox discovered is one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of Central America. A lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-adventurer from Tennessee, William Walker led a band of 58 mercenaries into Nicaragua in 1855 with the intention of annexing the country for the US. Backed by American businessman Cornelius Vanderbilt-who obsessed with keeping the country strife-free to facilitate the transportation of merchandise across this vital trade route-Walker established a blood-drenched dictatorship which lasted for two years until he was finally removed from power and executed by a Honduran firing squad in 1860. Cox immediately knew that he had found his next film, and the media's continued demonising of the Sandinistas only strengthened this resolve.

"One of the strangest things about the US at that time was that people didn't get passionate about the situation in Nicaragua," says Peter Boyle, who played Vanderbilt. "The media spun it in a certain way, which meant people didn't get what was going on there."

Although the Hollywood studios were part of that self-same media, Cox had surprisingly little trouble persuading Universal to cough up the film's five million dollar budget. "Universal had a reputation for being a very bad studio," says the director. "It had a particularly film-maker unfriendly image. And so I think they had a desire to show that they could work with independent film-makers. Plus I think they wanted to demonstrate their liberal inclinations. It just turned out that those inclinations weren't as strong as they'd imagined." "The Walker video cost £79.99! They really don't want anyone to see this!"

When Cox began pre-production work on the film back in 1985, however, the portents could not have been better. The director recruited Rudy Wurlitzer, writer of Sam Peckinpah's classic Western, Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, to pen the script, and he assembled a powerful cast that included Ed Harris in the role of Walker and Marlee Matlin, who had been awarded the Best Actress Oscar in 1987 for Children Of A Lesser God, as his wife. Cox also persuaded Joe Strummer-who had appeared in Cox's 1986 Spaghetti Western, Straight To Hell, and contributed to its soundtrack-to take a cameo role and also write the score for Walker. Strummer's own Nicaraguan sympathies were well known, having named the fourth Clash album after the Sandinista government-although, when he actually arrived in Central America, the singer was somewhat disappointed with what he found.

"I was there about 10 weeks," he says. "It was very, very poor. Even a bottle of beer was a valuable commodity. By the time we got there, the Sandinistas had deteriorated into factions. You got the feeling it was just another government. But it's pretty hard trying to run a country when you're being embargoed by America."

The embargo also made life difficult for Cox who, despite being allowed to spend millions of dollars in Nicaragua, was prevented from sending the film directly back to the States. Otherwise, the shoot ran smoothly at first-with Cox able to get far more value for his money than he would have done if the film had been made in the States. So it was that Cox found himself filming a vast battle scene on the day when the bondsman turned up. And said he'd like a word.

In truth, the bond company's concerns that Cox might have gone off the rails were not that fantastical. There were plenty of recent precedents for film-makers disappearing to distant climes and going wildly over budget, from Francis Coppola's experiences on Apocalypse Now in 1979 to Michael Cimino's studio-bankrupting Heaven's Gate the following year. Elsewhere, articles written by journalists visiting the set did little to dampen Universal's growing fears that Walker had become one long drink and drugs bender.

"I have nothing but contempt for the journalists that came down to Walker," spits Cox, still riled a decade and a half later. "We flew these fucking English and American journalists out at our expense in the hope that they would generate good publicity for the country of Nicaragua in its war against the United States. And these wankers get pissed, try to pal around with rock stars and then fly back and have an imaginary version of what they saw. I got really tired of it. Because we were doing something that in actual fact could conceivably have made a difference had these reptiles swallowed their desire for a big party and paid attention to the reality. And if there were any drugs down there they fucking brought them with them. Which I know they did because the [names television crew] were selling drugs out of their hotel. It was a big problem, too. It really fucked me up. Because we were spending five million dollars of Universal Pictures' money to make a film which said that democracy is a joke and that the Americans are a rapacious bunch of monsters. Now this is not exactly the message that a big American corporation wants to succeed in the minds of an impressionable population. I was just disappointed that the reptiles were monsters, too."

Ironically, Cox believes it was a relatively benign New York Times profile of Ed Harris which inflicted the most damage. "There wasn't really any interference at all until the Times ran a piece on Ed saying he was making this film in Nicaragua. After that article came out, a guy from this bondsman comes down and tries to shut the film down. He accused me of this really bizarre crime of enhancement. I'm going, 'What's that?' He said, 'Well, look, you're running three cameras on this scene.' I was like, 'It's a battle scene with 50 horses and the Sandinista Army in period dress galloping into battle with all these guns and special effects. Of course we're shooting three cameras!' He said we weren't allowed to shoot three cameras on any scene in this film. We just told him, essentially to bugger off. "But that was a very uneasy situation which I felt was being manipulated by other forces. I would think that, after that article, the word went out that this is not a film we want to support or even see finished. I'm not talking about Universal-I think it came from a lot higher up than that. Because if the film had fallen apart in the middle that would have been further ammunition for the idea that the Sandinistas are an unreliable and dangerous bunch and no one should get involved with them. This isn't me being a paranoid. There was definitely an international movement afoot to discredit the Sandinistas and cause problems for those who were their collaborators,"

As Cox continued work on his visuals, Strummer was finding inspiration for his soundtrack. "I just let Nicaragua speak in my mind," he says. "Because after about 10 weeks you can really feel the pace of the afternoon-it becomes your pace. An endless sunbaked time when everyone retires indoors, closes the shutters and not a dog moves on the streets. And that helped a lot in making music that you can almost feel the heat coming off."

The result would be a suitably epic combination of acoustic Tex-Mex-flavoured soundscapes and a brilliant clutch of vocal performances that still rates among Strummer's best work. Unfortunately, by the time the cast and crew had completed their shooting in Nicaragua, it seemed like nothing could please the bigwigs at Universal. "They didn't like the film when they saw it." Strummer admits. "We were working on the score up at Francis Ford Coppola's place in Napa. And everyone was well aware that they hated the film."

It was hardly a surprise, then, when Universal declined to invest much money in promoting the film's release. Even so, Cox admits that the public's response in America was less than enthusiastic. "I think people in the States were happy to watch Vietnam movies because that was something that had happened in the past." Cox argues. "Whereas we were telling them about something that was still going on. "At the end of the day, though, I think the people in power just wanted it to disappear. I remember going into HMV on Oxford Street when Walker had been out for about a year. I'm walking down the video racks thinking maybe I'll buy a tape of it for a friend. And the prices are like £9.99, £7.99, £3.99... Then I get to Walker and it's £79.99! I thought, 'Wait a minute-they really don't want anyone to see this!'"

Fifteen years after its release, Walker has become a largely forgotten film. Not only is it rarely seen on TV and is currently unavailable on video but, while the Universal-financed Repo Man will shortly debut on DVD with an accompanying documentary, there's no sign of Walker receiving the same treatment. Perhaps most shameful of all is the fact that its soundtrack has also been unavailable for years, although Strummer says that he's "working" on a re-release. "The film didn't appeal to people who weren't interested in the subject," says the singer. "Nobody gave a shit. Who knows why? The music is excellent but I don't think the film could be described as that-I know that's immodest of me to say but I'm just trying to be factual."

He has a point. Despite a compelling central performance from Ed Harris and the magnificent Kurosawa-inspired battle sequences, Walker is far from being one of the greatest films ever made. But its central indictment of America's policy towards its southern neighbour remains as powerful today as it was back in the mid-Eighties. Perhaps more so. In 1990, after a decade-long war which cost 90,000 Nicaraguan lives, the Sandinistas finally lost power and were replaced by a government willing to do business with Washington-a diplomatic stance that has been maintained ever since. "Its message is just as pertinent now as it was then," Strummer concludes. "Definitely. Not that anyone cares any more. But America can do what it likes in whatever area it likes. And you can bet that it is."

PHOTO: Cox on location for Walker PHOTO: Walker allegorical war epic

JOE STRUMMER
Walker – The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Virgin)

ALEX COX's latest movie may have its share of problems but the soundtrack is definitely not one of them. Seeing Joe Strummer, garage warrior and punk sellout, rehabilitated as rocker par excellence in a temporary pre-Christmas Pogues line-up was one of last year's genuinely moving, heartwarming happenings. And this record is the affirmative payback, proof that sentimental tears were not shed in vain.

Using a cast of 16 musicians the soundtrack was recorded in San Francisco but it's obviously a result of his time in Nicaragua where he acted in Walker, soaking up the atmosphere, putting it into music. You may be a little stunned and staggered at first (I was), to find the man with the demon bark and three chord bite has composed every note here. But, from lustrous samba, percussion, through flamenco horns and country inflections, it's all gorgeously effective and superbly detailed. Crikey, whoever thought old Joe would be a worthy labelmate to Uncle Ennio Morricone?

Perhaps the chance to stretch out was what he's always lacked, certainly the new set-up serves well his delirious dreams of western imagery, unites them with an intuitive grasp of all things ethnic(!) and a pervasive warmth and humanity. One of only three vocal performances "The Unknown Immortal" tells the tale of a forgotten soldier. Where past Strummer set-ups would have had it oafish and browbeating here it's plaintive and shrewdly resonant. Elsewhere the horns have a manic charge and zip on the self-explanatory Sandstorm while Machete is all pounding heartbeats, raw syncopation and an undertow of tension.

It's an album of contrasting moods, purveyed with empathy and attained with the minimum of fuss — "Nica Libre" is an open rejoice, "Tennessee Rain" a country cajun lament while the spartan piano spine tingles and unsettling offbeat perfectly conveys "The Brooding Side Of Madness".

Deftly poignant and haunting, "Latin Romance" acts as a blueprint for all the love songs he never got to write before but will hopefully nurture in the future. Drink a toast to a fine compadre, one copy of Walker will wipe away the bad memories of a thousand Sandinistas.* (8)

— Gavin Martin

JOE Strummer used to cancel entire Clash tours simply by walking out and disappearing for weeks on end.

So it’s appropriate he’s been asked to write the music for a film called... “Walker.”

The retired punk, who also plays a small role in the film (cheese and tomato, with no mayo), will know public reaction to his work this week, when the soundtrack is released.

“Walker” is the story of American mercenary William of that surname who travelled to Nicaragua and declared himself president... rather like old Corwaoy Ron is trying to do just now (ooer, Ben Elton, eat your heart out).

Unfortunately for William, his rule ended suddenly when the local executed him.

Director Alex Cox reckons the action, which took place in the 1850s, is very similar to what’s going on today. NEVER!

My advice - don't buy it. WALKER: The Sound Track (Virgin). This is a big disappointment coming from ex-Clash member Joe Strummer. Like most film soundtracks it simply isn't good enough to stand alone. There is no doubt about the musical quality of Strummer's creations but this offering is boring in the extreme.

JOE STRUMMER: Walker (Virgin). Debut solo album from fiery ex-Clash mainman, which is actually the soundtrack to Alex Cox's forthcoming film, also titled Walker, about an American who became Nicaraguan dictator in the last century. Atmospheric music in the Ennio Morricone vein, and listen out for a killer country song called Tennessee Rain.

There’s nothing wrong with Walker (Virgin) however, the film soundtrack album composed and performed by Joe Strummer. The film, by Alex Cox, details the life of nineteenth century American, William Walker, who had the idea, long before Reagan, of governing brave little Nicaragua. Capturing the flavour of Central America in his salsa and samba rhythms, and featuring only a trio of vocal numbers, former Clashman, Strummer proves himself to be a surprisingly gifted composer. Its rare for a soundtrack album to be able to stand alone but Walker is complete unto itself; poignant, emotive and delightfully varied. Viva Strummer.

Taking liberties with a liberator

IF A MOVIE studio is the best train set a boy ever had, then a movie crew on foreign location is the best set of toy soldiers, and one can understand why even the most bien-pensant directors have a tendency to get out of hand when loosed on projects about mad imperial adventurers. In the latter phases of Apocalypse Now, Coppola started going the unrestrained way of his own Colonel Kurtz, while Herzog’s Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo were clearly on-screen surrogates for their autocratic creator.

So it was not surprising that when Alex Cox took his crew to Nicaragua in 1987 to film the story of William Walker (the American adventurer who ruled that country for a brief period last century), reports began to reach the press of wild and wilful behaviour. The end product, Walker, was treated to derisive reviews in America, and has been in distributor’s limbo for 18 months.

What does come as a surprise after such a preamble is that Cox’s film, though shambolic and sometimes very daft, proves to be full of quirky interest. Walker’s battle sequences are vividly staged in gory slow-motion that owes a lot to Sam Peckinpah. The script, by the piquantly named Rudy Wurlitzer, takes some crazy liberties — such as introducing VDUs, Newsweek and a troop-carrying helicopter into the year 1857 — but is also genuinely inventive in the course it steers. Much of Marx’s quip aside from farce and adventures derive from tragedy.

The action is fleshed out decently by Ed Harris, who plays Walker in a soft-spoken manner that begins in touchingly comic mania and ends in frightening megalomania. And Cox makes good use of an unusually sombre (or sombreado) musical score by Joe Strummer, particularly in an impressive climactic sequence in which Walker puts his capital city to the torch.

Tequila Sunrise also ends in flames, though most of Robert Towne’s romantic thriller is stronger on conversational romance than spectacular thrills. At the simplest level, its story concerns two men (Kurt Russell and Mel Gibson) competing for the affections of a beautiful restaurant manager (Michelle Pfeiffer). Before long, though, matters are becoming almost as complicated as in Towne’s classic script for Chinatown.

Gibson is a drug dealer who may or may not have gone straight, while his high school chum Russell is in charge of the local narcotics squad; loyalties become scrambled all round when Gibson’s other old friend, a Mexican drug baron (Raul Julia) tries to pull off one last coup. After that, things begin to be seriously complicated.

What seems to have interested Towne most in his material is its scope for dramatising the difficulties which longstanding friendships meet when they come into conflict with other loyalties. Yet the film’s approach to such conflicts remains as mechanical as a script-conference memo. Towne is a talented writer and his first directorial venture, Personal Best, was badly underrated; it’s a disappointment that his Tequila Sunrise is much less enjoyable than a glass of the real thing.

Novels about people who are writing or reading novels are decidedly vieux jeu these days, and the idea of a film which dabbles in these notions might sound more dismal still. Oddly enough, Michel Deville’s La Lectrice, which positively oozes with such dated conceits, manages to be both diverting and (save opponents of on-screen nudity) inoffensive. Taken from two books by Raymond Jean, it stars the likeable Miou-Miou as the eponymous narrator heroine Constance Marie, who, reads passages from Baudelaire, Lenin, Sade and Lewis Carroll to all kinds of oddballs. Much of La Lectrice is directed at regions well south of the brain, but it’s one of the few French movies-about-fictions which can be called “playful” without that word implying “insufferable.”

Some of the circumstances of Rain Man crop up again in Robert M. Young’s Nicky And Gino, in which aspiring doctor Eugene Luciano (Ray Liotta) is being put through medical school by his brain-damaged twin brother Dominic (Tom Hulce), who works as a dustman. Nicky, whose chief interests in life are his pet dog and the Incredible Hulk, starts to feel threatened when Jamie Lee Curtis wanders into Gino’s life. This all gives Hulce the opportunity to indulge in the kind of barnstorming emoting which calls for drool and mucus as well as tears. The key moment comes when Nicky and Gino have a heart-rending row, and Nicky turns to see his dog being run over. Tragic.

Kevin Jackson

Sunderland Echo, Saturday, February 27, 1988—11

Walker, Joe Strummer (Virgin)

DO MY ears deceive me? Can it be that the angry young man whose utterings stirred a punk nation is capable of such a stroke of genius?

Providing soundtrack albums for the record shelves is, in most cases, like giving a bicycle to a cheetah, but this long-player provides the perfect foreground or background filler with its brilliant fusion of Spanish guitar and lightweight jazz.

This work finally puts paid to those memories of the ex-Clash frontman as some kind of hand-grenade in the control of another — the man is talented in his own right.

The film, directed by Alex Cox, goes out on Monday and tells the story of 19th-century adventurer William Walker who tried to set up an empire in South America before being executed by the Nicaraguans.

Strummer has worked with Cox before — on the soundtracks to Straight to Hell and Sid and Nancy. Making good use of brass, piano, organ, and a wide range of other instruments, he takes on the role of an Ennio Morricone and tackles the project with great zeal, conveying atmosphere and excitement.

Written and produced by Strummer and recorded in San Francisco, the album features a few pleasant surprises. Soundtrack albums are always difficult projects: generally they're supposed to be a taster for a much greater event and not designed to be a huge success in their own right.

In this case the man in control achieves a fine balance, though, hopefully, it won't be too overshadowed by the film.

The Spokesman-Review Spokane Chronicle,
Friday, Jan. 15, 1988, Spokane, Wash.

RECORDS

Strummer scores again with ‘Walker’

By Ethlie Ann Vare, Newspaper Enterprise Association

It’s actually only a coincidence that the front man of the band whose pivotal work was named Sandinista! ended up writing the soundtrack music for a Hollywood movie about American involvement in Nicaragua.

The man is Joe Strummer, the band is The Clash, and the movie is Walker — the story of a 19th century incursion into that nation by U.S. mercenaries.

Strummer says that no one in Nicaragua seemed to have heard of his work with The Clash, which broke up on Aug. 9, 1984.

“I think two people came up to me over three months,” smiles Strummer, who is currently recuperating from a grueling road trip as a substitute guitarist with The Pogues. “Radio Revolution down there plays all Madonna and Bananarama.”

Nicaragua amazed Strummer with its friendliness despite an ongoing war.

“Women can walk alone anywhere, any time of day or night,” he said. But if the country didn’t threaten him, he did feel a little overwhelmed by the task of writing a film score all on his own.

“I had no idea what made me think I could do it,” says the seminal punker. “I knew I could do it.

“I tried to record it all in Nicaragua, but they only have two studios — and one of them was down. They sent me a note saying that I could record in the other one only between 7:30 p.m. and 5 a.m., otherwise the traffic noise is too heavy for recording.

“I started to freak out at that point — I thought, ‘I've bitten off more than I can chew!’”

The recording was completed, finally, at a San Francisco studio, and the music has been released under the Virgin Records imprimatur.

While it is Strummer’s first full soundtrack LP, he also did much of the music for the docudrama Sid and Nancy (1986) — some of it under an assumed name. Both movies were directed by cult favorite Alex Cox.

“I met Alex at the Sid and Nancy wrap party,” recalls Strummer. “When I went to the toilet, Alex followed me in and asked me to write the title music. That’s how I met him.”

After working with Cox on that music, Strummer took an acting role in the filmmaker’s next project, the free-for-all farce Straight to Hell (1987). Acting, however, didn’t turn out to be the singer’s cup of tea.

“One and a half movies, and I quit,” says Strummer, whose further acting efforts in Walker mainly ended up on the cutting-room floor. “It’s too difficult.

“If I was really going to be an actor, I'd have to smash my guitars, throw out my tape recorders and buy a photograph book of James Dean. You've got to be completely 100 percent dedicated.”

Although fans still long for a reconciliation between Strummer and Clash partner Mick Jones, Strummer says there's no impending reunion — although the two men are again friends.

Still, there's more to be heard musically from this man, whose Third World influences and street-fighter bravado helped shape today's sounds.

“I've been thinking about what I want to do when I grow up,” laughs 35-year-old Strummer. “Hopefully I can put it off for another couple of years. Then I’m going to become a rock 'n’ roller.”

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, MARCH 6, 1988 p.15

ARTS and BOOKS

Joe Strummer scores

VISIONS of cactus, tequila and sensuous sambus under a warm, scented South American sky, literally leap off the Walker movie soundtrack album.

This is Joe Strummer’s third film soundtrack for director Alex Cox (the others being Sid and Nancy and Straight to Hell), and it convincingly lays to rest the ghost of The Clash.

Walker marks the end of the struggle to follow the success of the seminal Seventies punk outfit which has dogged Strummer — especially in the light of fellow Clash member Mick Jones's success with BAD.

The film is based on a true story of an American adventurer in Nicaragua in the early 1900s, and Strummer’s soundtrack captures the colour and flavour of the Central American land, with a classy and vivid melange of Latin rhythms and country melodies.

From the jangling guitar of the opening samba, Filiburtero to the moody country feel of the closing number Trop of Pico, this album — which is instrumental except for two gruff, vocal tracks — is cheering material for a soggy Sunday afternoon.

Sombreros off to Strummer!

THE GUARDIAN Friday March 11 1988

24 RECORDS
Clash of values
Joe Strummer, former lead singer with The Clash is back from limbo with a soundtrack for Alex Cox's new film. Adam Sweeting reports

AFTER an intense period of recording movie soundtracks in California and touring America with The Pogues, Joe Strummer is back (briefly) in the West London neighbourhood which has been his home since the days of his early R & B band, The 101'ers, whose Elgin Avenue Breakdown album now fetches at least $50 per copy in Los Angeles. Strummer feels safe among friends, but he sees danger on all sides. Prophecy is coming easily to him this afternoon. The Eighties hasn't been his favourite decade.

"Ten years from now, when Thatcher's gone, we'll look back at this decade and we will have no respect for Sting, George Michael, whoever's big - Wacko Jackson. It'll be like a decade of nightmare, and their songs will be part of the soundtrack to it."

There was a time when Joe Strummer could have cashed in his Clash chips and bought all the rock'n'roll baubles available to mankind. But the way Strummer remembers it now, it was the spectre of middle age and stadium-rock that banged the final nail into The Clash's head. Just as they were reaching the lower slopes of the kind of American success which has just seen U2 trounce Michael Jackson at the Grammy Awards, The Clash supported The Who on one of their Sinatra-like 'farewell' tours of giant American auditoria. Joe Strummer saw rock'n'roll's future, and it was a lot of elderly gentlemen queueing up for the tuxedos and bow-ties of the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame.

"We did eight gigs with The Who in front of giant crowds of over 90,000 people, and we did the US Festival, which was about 250,000 people," Strummer fulminates, by now bubbling on a high-octane mixture of lager and grappa. *"And not one of those gigs did I enjoy. I only ever enjoyed it when we played in, like, a dilapidated old cinema in the bad part of town for 3,000 people - that's when The Clash made sense."*

"I used to think of Shakespeare - I wouldn't wanna go and see Shakespeare when I couldn't see the faces of the actors, and to me it was imperative. They can't tell if you mean it or not unless they're looking at your face. We didn't communicate in the stadiums. I sometimes stood on that stage and felt, 'Hey, there's no-one there.'"

And The Who? Were they full of rock'n'roll bullshit by that time? "Well yes they were," Strummer allows, "but no personal slagging to any of them, because I found all four of them to be devoid of airs and graces."

"But what I didn't like was that I knew they were putting on an act when they hit the stage, because they arrived in four separate limos. They had nothing in common beyond this thing that they had been. The tour was supported by Schlitz. It was a cash-in. I looked at them and I thought, if that's the end of the road, I don't want to go there. That played a large part in The Clash's break-up, that Who tour."

After several years in semi-limbo, Joe Strummer has suddenly come wandering in from the cold to surprise us again. CBS are about to release The Story Of The Clash Volume 1, a 28-track double album which charts their career from Janie Jones and London's Burning to Radio Clash and Rock The Casbah.

The Clash's best songs still resonate with visionary clarity. The premonition of nuclear meltdown in London Calling seems more pertinent than ever, the ferocious original recording of Capitol Radio (given away as a flexi-disc with the NME) should be required listening in the Douglas Hurd household ("Now all the stations are silent cos they ain't got a government licence"), and Strummer must have known about Kurt Waldheim when he wrote the line "If Adolf Hitler flew in today, they'd send a limousine anyway" in White Man In Hammersmith Palais.

But Strummer hates to look back for too long. His soundtrack for Alex Cox's new film, Walker, is a ramshackle but hugely atmospheric collection of music which ranges from ragged folk and country tunes banged out on acoustic instruments to suave, hip-swaying pieces of samba and Latin swing.

Strummer had worked with Alex Cox on his earlier films, Sid And Nancy and Straight To Hell, and his rapport with the director clicked into sharp focus when he went on location in Nicaragua with the Walker production team.

Originally, Cox had pencilled Strummer in for a jokey acting part. Then he edited him out again and asked him to write the music instead. The project was an artistic success for Strummer, but has already been a commercial disaster in America. The film opened and closed within a week, while the soundtrack might never have existed at all.

Strummer perceives a political meaning in all this, and notes with expletive-spiced disgust that neither Rolling Stone nor Spin magazines have even acknowledged his Walker music. The news that Rolling Stone is now in earnest pursuit of advertising from the American armed forces is merely grist to his mill.

In earlier, more idealistic years, the Walker project could have proved something of a cause célèbre in the liberal media. Walker is the story of an adventurer from Tennessee who takes a small but well-armed mercenary army into Nicaragua in the 1850s, when the country happened to form part of the circuitous route between New York and San Francisco. Walker eventually declares himself President and comes to a sticky end.

"The reason Alex Cox was interested in the story was because it parallels what's happening now," Strummer explains. And Strummer, who once made the Sandinista album with The Clash, has long entertained a fascination with Latin America, culturally and politically. "I was heartened by the Sandinista revolution of '79," he reflects. "We all know America supports the most corrupt dictators, they don't care what they're up to as long as they ain't Commies. It was thanks to Jimmy Carter that Somoza was pushed out of there. To me, it was a victory of people over money."

*"I get really mad with people like P.J O'Rourke, who's a right-wing fascist writer for Rolling Stone understand that 30 per cent of Nicaraguan babies died because Somoza was ripping off all the money in the country for himself. And the illiteracy rate was extremely high."*

Despite his views of Reagan-ite foreign policy, he finds the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of Billy Bragg or Paul Weller idiotic. "We either stand with the Yanks or we sink. I think it's really puerile of Weller and Bragg to think that Reagan is America. It's like someone saying to me 'Thatcher is England.' I grab 'em by the throat and I say, 'Thatcher is not fuckin' England and never has been.'"

Strummer rants from strength. His father was a career diplomat, eventually reaching a Foreign Service grade called Second Secretary (Information), and young Joe was born in Turkey, then lived in Cairo, Mexico City and Bonn. He was sent to boarding school in Epsom while his father went to pre-Khomeini Tehran and then to Malawi. He ended up in the Records Office at Kew when Joe's mother grew too old for further globe-trotting.

Strummer's family background offers plenty of clues to his kinetic, unpredictable personality. Both his parents are dead now, while he's recently completed a further soundtrack for a movie called Permanent Record, *"which is about teenage suicide. Why I really wanted to do it was because my own brother, David, committed suicide when he was 18. That was in the summer of 1970 - July 19. That's a shock early in your life, y'know."*

Or at any time in your life, for that matter. But something in Strummer seems to feed off disillusion, and even to thrive on loss, whether it's of people or ideals. Stability would only bore him.

"The Clash only had meaning within its own time," he insists. "With Walker and stuff, I'm taking it on from there. I just want to do something useful, say something meaningful, because to me rock'n'roll still lives."

• Walker is out now on Virgin Records, CBS will release The Story Of The Clash Volume 1 on March 21.

Photo: Ranting from strength; Joe Strummer
PHOTOGRAPH: ALLAN TITMUSS

1,408 words 8,123 characters