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Sunday 15 May 2011

You Can't Pull A Hold Up With A Be-Bop Gun


X-Ray Style is one of the key tracks off Joe Strummer's 1999 comeback album, Rock, Art and The X-Ray Style, recorded with his band The Mescaleros. It's a stripped back song, just some low key guitar, some bongos and Joe's vocal. Piling on typical Joe imagery (CB radio, Sub Sahara, the Mississippi, murder mile, the financial district,the Nile, a rockabilly train) he then adds 'You can't pull a hold up with a be-bop gun' but couples this piece of wisdom with 'There's people living now who ain't got no heart and ain't never had one'. The lump-in-the-throat payoff comes with 'I wanna live and I wanna dance a while'. I'm not sure he ever sounded better.

1 comment:

drew said...

I was listening to Streetcore earlier in the week and thought to myself I should listen to this more often.