I am standing in a hotel bar Summer in Finland - land of the midnight sun - in 1999 where an all night drinking session is just beginning. Joe Strummer - Clash legend, now newly returned as Mescaleroes frontman - is clasping me tight and crying. “I really l do love to see those pillboxes, Gavin,” he sobs. We are both drunk and the party of Finnish rockers (many part of a Clash tribute band) that we have momentarily left at a table crowded with drinksare somewhat flummoxed. Joe has become enraged and left the table crying because The Finns seem to think its funny that the Great Punk Rock Icon is actually a patriot - moved to tears when he talks of those World War 2 Pillboxes that are symbols of his father’s generation fight to keep The Reich at bay. But, as anyone who has read Chris Salewicz’s Strummer biography Redemption Song or sees Julien temple’s new valiant documentary The Future Is Unwritten will know, Strummer - rebel, partriot, father, hippy, punk, gentleman, hothead - was a complex many sided character. And a defining event in shaping that character was his relationship with his brother David, who committed suicide in 1971, when Joe was 20. What I didn’t know back when Joe was blubbing in the Finnish hotel bar was the depth of the significance a pillbox had in Strummer’s psyche. Redemption Song reveals that, days before David’s body was discovered on a London Park Bench, Strummer instinctively knew his brother was gone when a search of the pillbox behind the childhood family home proved fruitless. In Temple’s documentary family home movies show David and Joe as young children, before their distinctive and very different lives parted. But of course Joe’s journey into music drugs, sex and revolution could never really be separated from David’s into sullen aloneness, the occult and the destructive hate of the National Front. Strummer’s likelong battle against fascism, his constant desire to be the last man standing at any social gathering, the pure sullen rage expressed in Straight To Hell, the clarion calls of Clash City Rockers and Yalla Yalla, the sad valediction of White Man in Hammersmith Palais - everywhere in his music the mark left by David is apparent. Temple’s documentary is a work of love for a dearly deaprted and, crucially, an attempt to preserve the warrior spirit that defined Joe’s life. And yet, of course, Joe’s intense private relationship with his brother and his brother’s memory remains just offscreen. In an uncanny fashion. I was one of many journalists who contributed old interviews to Temple’s movie so that, in the style of John Lennon in The Beatles Anthology, the man Strummer could tell his own story from beyond the grave. Punk Rock Warlord, the first track on the soundtrack album of The Future Is Unwritten, comes from a video interview I did with Joe, metaphorically beating his chest, to promote the first Mescaleroes album But the thing was this I have drawerfuls of tapes, I keep everything and my wife - also a journalist - does likewise. We had both spoken to Strummer on tape about David, a subject he rarely touched on. And , you guessed it, the tapes that simply couldnt be found, that inexplicably disappearred? The ones were Joe talked, albeit guardedly, about David. Some things remain private, even beyond the grave. Not that the absence of the tapes in anyway diminishes the movie far from it . In any case interviews with friends and family underline that such ties are often too deep NOT to affect a musician’s art. Songs like Noel Gallagher’s Live Forever, U2’s I Will Follow , Tupac’s beautiful Mama’s Just A Little Girl - all inspired by mothers. Or Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On inspired by his brother Frankie’s experience in Vietnam. And as Joe’s life and work shows often its real pain, the deep dark secrets that every man woman boy child girl holds in their heart, that create the richest deepest most long lasting living blues.
