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Narrator: 00:05

The Clash were probably the classic fruit produced by the punk era. Now drummer Topper Headon is imprisoned in Kent, Mick Jones and guitar enjoy his mixed fortunes with Big Audio Dynamite, and bassist Paul Simonon leads a new band in Los Angeles.

Until recently, Joe Strummer—for many the heart and soul of the group—seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. The past year, however, has seen Strummer playing live again with the Pogues and moving into writing film soundtracks. We found him in the West London neighborhood where I've lived for the past 14 years.

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Joe Strummer: 00:40 ...14 years ago, it was a rubbish tip, diminished Bullington, the local community. Most see squatters and hippies. At the time they modeled this garden themselves.

Tim Graham: This was all the rubbish,

Joe Strummer: yeah, and they built this skateboard, and there was a bike track going around here one time. But the initiative didn't come from the council, you know. It came from the local people. A lot of drug addicts, too, but it was still people trying something, you know. But we had a rock band, there was some few other bands there, you know. We had a contribution to make.01:15

Tim Graham: and that over there, that elevated motorway is the Westway for people who don't know, it's a sort of byword for The Clash almost.

Joe Strummer: That's right. We were called the Westway Wonders because, um, see those flats there? That's what Mick Jones lived. That's Willcote House on the 18th floor, and we still get a fine view from his balcony down to the Westway, you know. There wasn't a lot to do, so we'd sort of just hang around, you know. We had to make it better. In fact, we made something of our lives by ... just necessity being the mother of invention, and glamorising it was part of it, you know. We wanted to make ourselves feel good because the songs I listened to were all about Mississippi or Alabama or Lafayette, you know, all these exotic places. And what we had here was another world, and so, you know, we wanted to bring some mytholgy to our world.

Plays Londons Burning snippet at Victoria Park

Tim Graham: 02:29 What moment do you remember from The Clash from that whole period?

Joe Strummer: 02:40 May 7th '77, the Rainbow, that was the first night that punk really broke out of the clubs. You know, and the Rainbow at that time was a big venue. You know, kind of super groups go there, and we played there—The Clash, Jam, Subway Sect, Slits—and the audience came and filled it and trashed the place as well. But you really felt that night, you're in the right place—a combination of luck and effort, you know. In the right place, doing the right thing at the right time. And that kind of night happens once or twice in your life, you know.

Tim Graham: You never felt you topped that.

Joe Strummer: 03:16 Not really, because from then on, we took it to America. [I'm so Bored with USA snippet] then took it to Europe but, there's nothing quite like the place it was so designed for right. Sorry, I gobbed on you.

[Clash City Rockers snippet]

Joe Strummer: That thing that they talk about, chemistry between people, really does exist. And when there's four of you to make a pretty good row, you know, we just had to sit up in a room, and we could bash it out pretty good. That's fairly rare. I mean, shouldn't have been tampered with, you know.

Tim Graham: During the early eighties, you—you actually left 04:39 04:16 The Clash on the eve of a tour and went to .. Paris—well, absconded, not there—well, found out you went to Paris.

Joe Strummer: Yeah, the truth about this, ... [Tim Graham: What was that about?] ... the truth about this is that it was the eve of a tour, okay, and the tickets weren't selling, and it was practically three days before the tour was due to go. So Bernie Rhodes, who with Malcolm McLaren used to like the odd scam, he came to me at night and he said, "Look, you've got to disappear."

Okay, I said, "Well, Bernie, if you really think I should disappear, I will. Where do you want me to disappear to?" And he said, "Well, I don't. now, go to Austin, Texas, you know, that fellow there, Joe Ely, the country singer, go and stay with him," they said. "But ring me every morning at 10:00 a.m." "It's okay, Bernie, I'll be seeing you."

And so, um, I took the boat train to Paris instead. So I got to Paris, and I thought it'd be a good joke if I never phoned Bernie at all. So he was—he was gonna be thinking, he was gonna be acting, you know, always joke on, and really he was going after a few weeks, "Where has he gone?" And the six weeks went by, and I stayed with a bloke that I knew in Paris and I ran the Paris marathon too.

And eventually they hired a private detective to find me because they didn't know what continent I was on or anything.

But he never found me. It was Cosmo Vinyl who eventually tracked me down, and one day there was a knock at the flat and I opened the door and there was Cosmo Vinyl dressed head to foot like Rambo for some reason.

Tim Graham: You see, it's the God's honest truth... [Joe Strummer: Yes, it is!] .. I've never read this version before.

Joe Strummer: 06:17 No, I don't think I've told anyone...

Tim Graham: ...and that sounds to me, to be honest, like the beginning of the end...

Joe Strummer: Um, I suppose my ego is in rampant control, you know. Like getting rid of Mick must have been an ego decision, you know. I hesitate to say that, but it never been any good even when Topper left.

Tim Graham: Then you—you came up with a last version that could cut the crap. Clash, who—honestly, I didn't—you had a Mohican. I saw them at Brixton Academy and I've gotta admit it felt like the end. How did it feel to you?

Joe Strummer: It was the end.

[London Calling snippet]
[Pogues 1987: London Calling snippet]

Joe Strummer: 07:47 Pogues. It's almost exactly like the punk group in their physicality of the music. You're really physically connected. There's nothing like a mandolin or a guitar or even an accordion or a drum kit or a bass, something that you can—I love the sight of humans, like, struggling at their instruments, and you can get your personality or individuality over.

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Narrator: Joe Strummer first worked with The Pogues in the film Straight to Hell. Its director, Alex Cox, commissioned him to write the music for his next film, Walker.

[Walker snippet]

Walker is the first of two soundtrack releases for Strummer in 1988, and with the current Clash reissues and his planned Rock Against the Rich tour in the summer, Joe Strummer is back in business.

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Tim Graham: How did those couple of years feel? You know, it's around Live Aid time when Mick Jones was doing it with Big Audio Dynamite, and you were nowhere to be seen. 08:29

Joe Strummer: Well, really, I had to really restructure everything because, you know, I tried to flog a dead horse, you know. When the horse wouldn't get up, you know, I had to really disassemble myself and examine all the pieces and put myself back together and I really felt completely destroyed by that—that experience.

And also, um, my father had died while we were on the last tour, you know, and when I came home my mother started to sicken and she spent, you know, all year doing chemotherapy and radiation treatments because she had a form of cancer and I spent most of the next year visiting her, and then she died after the end of that year. And that was, you know, when you lose your parents, you know, I lost my parents, my guru, you know, ...

Tim Graham: .. you want some time off, you want...

Joe Strummer: 09:35 ...to think about things, you know. You've become a different person. It was like I had to realize that no more was I an adolescent. I'm a London parent now. And I used to walk around here like a lunatic, you know—I still do, but I've got kids now.

[Latin Romance snippet]

Joe Strummer: 10:00 I've always lived here because it's where I know, you know. I'd be lost in north, south, or east London; they'd be like going to another country for me, you know.

You know, I've stripped down my operation because I want to be highly mobile, and I want to keep it like that because you know —it's what we call punk mobility, you know, hit and run, duck and dive.

I think it's a question of being nimble in mind and accepting new things that come along and being open to new ideas. That's what I want to get to, you know, and stay at that level.

[Plays out with Latin Romance snippet]